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It’s been 25 years since suicide attackers hijacked commercial airplanes and crashed them into key sites around the U.S., killing nearly 3,000 people. While the September 11, 2001 attacks reshaped countless aspects of life in this country, one of the most consequential changes has been in how the nation thinks about and polices immigration.
President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which led to the arrest of more than 40,000 people in June and July, is unprecedented. But experts told me that it represents the outgrowth of a transformation that first began in the aftermath of 9/11, when the lens of immigration shifted from civilian law enforcement to one of anti-terrorism and national security.
Before the attacks, neither the Department of Homeland Security nor its Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency even existed. Instead, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), then part of the Justice Department, was responsible for enforcing immigration laws, patrolling the border, and processing applications for legal status and citizenship.
Doris Meissner was the commissioner of INS from 1993 to 2000. Despite high-profile acts of terror during her tenure, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York, she said national security was never the primary mission of INS. “I’ve always wondered where this term ‘homeland security’ even came from because we never even used that term in INS in the 1990s,” she said. “It just does not roll off your tongue.”
While INS did participate in some task forces with other federal law enforcement agencies, Meissner remembers a lack of trust and communication between intelligence agencies like the FBI and the CIA and agencies like INS. She says that this was by design: “Prior to Sept. 11th, those silos were explicitly considered a plus. If information was shared across government agencies, that represented ‘Big Brother.’ Protections for the American people revolved around information not being shared.”
Those barriers reflected real concerns about government surveillance and the concentration of federal power. But the 9/11 attacks also exposed the costs of keeping information compartmentalized, and failures of coordination quickly became a central focus of the government’s response.
Journalist Garrett M. Graff wrote the first comprehensive oral history on 9/11. For him, the change in the framing of immigration to a focus on national security was especially triggered by the fact that the perpetrators of the attacks had obtained legal visas from INS. “INS okayed paperwork [for] two of the hijackers and notified a Florida flight school six months after the attacks that they were approved for flight training. That was INS’s death knell,” Graff said.
In the wake of Sept. 11, instead of the silos Meissner was familiar with, there was a call to centralize intelligence and planning. Congress passed the Homeland Security Act in 2002, which split INS into three separate agencies: ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. They were placed under the control of the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS), embedding immigration enforcement more firmly within the national security apparatus, where it commanded a much larger budget.
In 2000, the year before the attack, INS had a budget of $4.3 billion. By 2006, immigration enforcement agencies within DHS totalled a budget of $12.5 billion. This increase in funds and focus on national security changed the nature of immigration enforcement.
“Border Patrol was so small before Sept. 11th, that it was only really able to have very modest enforcement efforts in very specifically targeted places,” Graff said. The agency was also less militarized. "It’s not that they didn’t have weapons, but it was not an agency where agents routinely carried long guns on routine patrols,” Graff added.
The new money and the reimagined mission coincided with a rise in deportations. In the decade before Sept. 11th, the U.S. deported 1.6 million people. In the decade after, deportations rose to 2.3 million.
But not everyone was happy with the change. Soon after Sept. 11th, critics worried that “homeland security” and the new federal institutions created to enforce it were “amorphous.” Chris Edwards, a writer at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, called for the termination of DHS in 2014, writing that it “was born out of a fear of terrorism, but policymakers and DHS have used that fear to build a vastly bloated budget and to extend federal police power into many areas where it does not belong.”
That broad concern over the scope of federal policing power has renewed relevance as ICE has become the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency during the second Trump administration and taken on a central role in the president’s mass-deportation campaign. And the post-9/11 shift to treating immigration as a homeland security issue has remained strong: Trump has repeatedly invoked terrorism and other national security threats in making the case for his immigration policies.
To Jorge Loweree, the managing director of programs and strategy at the American Immigration Council, the significance of the post 9/11 framework today lies not just in the power of immigration agencies themselves. He said those entities can also draw resources from other parts of the federal law-enforcement apparatus and from local policing agencies too.
“It's an enormous dragnet,” Loweree said, “and the ultimate goal is to try to rope as many people into it as possible.”
