How 9/11 Remade American Immigration
Twenty-five years after the attacks, control and distrust rule the institutions that process foreigners who travel or immigrate to the United States.
Rahinah Ibrahim was on her way to a conference in Hawaii when her world was thrown into chaos.
The Malaysian citizen was a doctoral candidate on a student visa at Stanford University, and her 14-year-old daughter was in tow as she traveled to San Francisco International Airport in January 2005. Ibrahim, still recovering from an emergency hysterectomy, requested wheelchair assistance when she got to the ticket counter. The agent instead called the police. "Ibrahim's name had flashed up on the federal no-fly list, a consolidated database of thousands of known or suspected terrorists created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks," Stanford Magazine reported in 2013.
By Ibrahim's account, she was searched beneath her hijab and denied pain medications. A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent eventually told her that her name had been scrubbed from the no-fly list. "The next day," Stanford Magazine explained, "she flew to Hawaii, unaware that the time spent there would be her final days in America."
Ibrahim continued from Hawaii to her native Malaysia. Two months later, as she prepared to return to school, U.S. Embassy staff in Kuala Lumpur informed her that her student visa had been canceled because of her suspected terror ties.
It eventually emerged that she had been added to the no-fly list in 2004 when an FBI agent "checked the wrong box on some paperwork," Reason's C.J. Ciaramella reported in 2021. "At the time, the government had a policy of refusing to confirm or deny a person's watch-list status, putting Ibrahim in the position of trying to challenge a program that she could not prove affected her."
Only after nearly eight years of court battles did the government finally give in. In 2014, Ibrahim became the first person to successfully sue to be taken off the no-fly list. "I want my children not to hate America because of what happened," she stressed.
The no-fly list became what it is today in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Like many other policies that emerged in that era, it has been a civil liberties nightmare, operating in secrecy and on a large scale. And it has focused the government's suspicious eye on foreigners who travel to or reside in the United States.
Free movement across America's borders did not end when the Twin Towers fell—by then there already was no such thing. But today, from entry to naturalization, little about the ways that foreigners move and act within the U.S. goes unscrutinized and untracked. Countless peaceful individuals have been made worse off by the mundane and monumental ways the government has wielded the immigration system since the attacks.
'The Dangers of a New Era'
The government's responses to the September 11 attacks quickly reshaped migration.
"The immigration system was implicated from the get-go because of the people themselves and the fact that they had gotten onto those planes with visas to come to the United States," says Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) who served as commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) from 1993 to 2000. The 19 hijackers all entered the U.S. legally on nonimmigrant visas. They repeatedly engaged with consular officers and border inspectors without receiving heightened scrutiny or questioning.
The government started to sharpen its immigration policy tools almost immediately. Just nine days after the attacks, the Department of Justice (DOJ) adopted a rule that let the government detain noncitizens for more than 48 hours without charges if there is "an emergency or other extraordinary circumstances." That October, President George W. Bush announced that the government was "going to tighten up the visa policy"—among other things, by "asking a lot of questions that heretofore have not been asked."
October also saw the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. Now synonymous with the government's endless appetite for spying, the legislation also took aim at immigration and foreign travelers. The law updated and expanded definitions related to terrorism, including what kind of support for—and association with—designated terrorist groups could be classified as a deportable offense. It provided for the "mandatory detention of suspected terrorists" and allowed officials to detain those suspects for up to seven days before bringing charges.
By 2002, lawmakers were engaged in what the MPI calls "the biggest restructuring of the federal bureaucracy since World War II": creating the DHS. Up to that point, the INS had overseen both the adjudication and the enforcement functions of the U.S. immigration system. Now immigration powers were spread across three new DHS subagencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which polices the country's interior and oversees immigrant detention; Customs and Border Protection, which handles enforcement along the country's borders and at other ports of entry; and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which processes legal immigrants' paperwork for benefits, employment authorization, and so on.
"Homeland security—that was not a term that was ever something that we used prior to 9/11," says Meissner. The attacks provoked a shift in mindset: an impulse "to define immigration as a national security issue" as opposed to the pre-9/11 notion of immigration "as a civilian law enforcement issue."
The DHS was explicitly created to "prevent terrorist attacks within the United States" while still "carry[ing] out all functions of entities transferred to the Department." In other words, various aspects of the U.S. immigration system—including the mundane adjudication of benefits—were now cloaked in the language of averting another great national catastrophe.
"We've learned that vast oceans no longer protect us from the dangers of a new era," said Bush as he swore in Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, in 2003. "This government has a responsibility to confront the threat of terror wherever it is found."
Caught in the Machine
These bureaucratic reorganizations and mindset shifts had disastrous consequences for individuals and for specific communities.
In 2001 and 2002, the DOJ detained more than 700 noncitizens in connection with its investigation of the September 11 attacks. "We found significant problems in the way the Department handled the September 11 detainees," Glenn A. Fine, inspector general for the DOJ, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in June 2003. Many detainees "did not receive notice of the charges against them in a timely manner," and many "did not receive their charging documents for weeks, and some for more than a month, after being arrested." What's more, the FBI managed to clear "less than 3 percent" of the detainees within three weeks of their arrest.
Noncitizen residents endured surveillance and government secrecy in the immediate wake of September 11. A September 2001 memorandum by former Chief Immigration Judge Michael Creppy led to immigration judges "clos[ing] selected immigration cases to the public, family members, and the media," according to Human Rights Magazine. "More than 600 secret immigration hearings were held by May 2009." In March 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft directed federal prosecutors to interview thousands of individuals holding passports from countries in the Islamic world who "fit the criteria of people who might have information regarding terrorism."
Newcomers came under new scrutiny too. In 2002 and 2003, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) "required noncitizen males ages 16 and older from 25 countries, 24 of which were Muslim-majority, to submit biometrics upon their arrival in the United States, with subsequent check-ins with immigration officials once inside the country," notes the MPI. During its lifespan, The Washington Post reports, more than 83,500 men voluntarily complied with NSEERS and more than 13,700 of them were placed in deportation proceedings as a result. NSEERS eventually gave way to the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology, or US-VISIT, which in turn was succeeded by the Office of Biometric Identity Management. By 2017, per the MPI, that office was "the largest law enforcement biometric database in the world."
Universities and government agencies scrambled to conform to the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, whose compliance deadline was moved from 2005 to 2003. New regulations caused "severe backlogs, delays, denials," and "hindered attendance at international conferences," Rep. Jerry Costello (D–Ill.) noted in a February 2004 congressional hearing. The government also began to run stricter checks on students in fields of national security importance.
The cellist Yo-Yo Ma testified before Congress in 2006 that two Iranian musicians involved in his Silk Road–focused musical group "who have visited the United States almost 10 times" were forced to "wait months before getting their visas." Because there is no U.S. embassy in Iran, "they must fly to Dubai in order to sit for an in-person interview and then fly back a second time to get the visas." The process cost a total of $5,000 and took three months. A Mongolian singer and a Chinese musician "often cannot even get through the gates to [the] U.S. embassy."
"Trust is fundamentally at the center of this discussion," Ma continued. "Do we trust people to come into this country to do good, or not?"
The Persistence of Enforcement
Distrust has been a strong force in America's post-9/11 immigration policy. Even when lawmakers and presidents have relaxed their grip on the nation's borders, the long shadow of the attacks has made them think twice.
Before 9/11, H-1B workers could renew their visas on American soil. That stopped in 2004 due to security changes mandated by the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act. For nearly 20 years, in order to renew their visas, the vast majority of foreign nationals working in the U.S. were required to return to their home countries and obtain visa stamps at U.S. embassies or consulates. The State Department claimed it was "not feasible" to collect biometric information domestically. Then, in 2024, the Biden administration launched a targeted pilot program reviving domestic visa renewal. Despite a successful run, there has been no further movement to bring the program back for good.
The same policy stickiness has affected humanitarian initiatives. The U.S. accepted over 72,000 refugees in FY 2000. Immediately following the attacks, Bush suspended refugee intake for several months on national security grounds. "As many as 20,000 refugees from across the world, cleared to come to the United States to escape persecution in their homelands, have had their arrival here delayed indefinitely," reported The New York Times in October 2001. Admissions plummeted to 26,839 in FY 2002. By FY 2008, they were still only half of pre-9/11 levels. Admissions began to recover as the Bush and Obama administrations kept annual caps between 70,000 and 85,000, but President Donald Trump reversed that trend in his first term. President Joe Biden increased caps and intake, but Trump changed course on his first day back in office, invoking national security. The 1980 intake of 207,116 individuals is a distant memory.
The 1996 Immigration and Nationality Act provided for state and local officials to assist the federal government with immigration enforcement through so-called 287(g) partnerships, but the first 287(g) agreement wasn't signed until 2002. The initial contracts "were narrowly tailored to target security threats," the MPI points out, but "the focus of some local programs had broadened by the mid-2000s to include potentially all unauthorized immigrants." The "number of agreements and the number of noncitizens swept up through them increased in following years" before declining during the Obama administration and then rebounding under Trump. The second Trump administration has drastically expanded the scope of 287(g) in order to carry out its mass deportation effort.
Other relics of the 9/11 response have become so entrenched that their reversal or revision seem politically unthinkable. The proposed 2026 budget for the three immigration-focused DHS subagencies was $41.2 billion—more than six times bigger than the INS budget at its peak of $6.3 billion. With very few exceptions, the government is able to dodge accountability for mistakenly placing people on the no-fly list and refusing to justify certain placements. U.S. immigration law bars the entry of people who have provided "material support" for terrorism, and—despite testimony from lawmakers—the government has not developed an adequate exception for individuals who provided such support under duress.
Lost Liberty
It may seem like an alternate universe now, but just before September 11, 2001, the U.S. and Mexico were on the verge of finalizing a major migration agreement. "It would've created a temporary visa program for Mexico" and provided for Mexico "to cooperate to the fullest extent possible on immigration enforcement on its side of the border," says National Foundation for American Policy Executive Director Stuart Anderson, who was part of the American delegation during his work with the INS.
"At the time, 98 percent of illegal entry apprehensions were from Mexico, so it would've fundamentally transformed the border," he continues. Delegations from the two nations met "roughly a week before the September 11 attacks" and were "very close to having an agreement." But when the attacks happened, any conversations about reform were made moot. "It was clear nothing was going to happen at that point," Anderson says.
Many lawmakers now reject big-picture immigration reform legislation unless it includes heavy security concessions. The MPI blames the "near single-minded focus on immigration as a national security issue" for killing reform bills in 2006, 2007, and 2013.
"The vast majority of things that go on in the immigration system have very little to do with anti-terrorism," Meissner observes. "They are basic operational functions in the way that [the Department of] Veterans Affairs or the Social Security Administration manage just huge numbers of transactions of one sort or another."
These days, that conception of immigration is not politically popular. The Trump administration recognizes the enduring usefulness of the term national security, invoking it even as its immigration actions undermine it. That phrase is a pair of "magic words that may help them win a case in court," says Anderson. "But I don't think anyone can look at the arrests of" workers in "construction and car washes and landscaping and view that as national security."
The administration's mass deportation plan prioritizes detaining and deporting as many undocumented immigrants as possible. That comes at the expense of targeting "the worst of the worst," as the administration frequently claims it is doing. Still, the influence of 9/11-era immigration policy on the Trump administration's proposals and practices is undeniable: NSEERS-adjacent registration requirements for noncitizens, travel bans for individuals from Muslim-majority countries, ever-expanding biometric collection.
Twenty-five years after the attacks, ease of mobility is a clear casualty of the post-9/11 freedom-for-safety swap. The notion that strangers come to us in peace died that day, and politicians have been piling dirt on the grave ever since.
