Despite his conviction, Judge Juan Merchan him to an “unconditional discharge” with no consequences like prison, probation or even fines. The judge that this was the “only lawful sentence” that avoided infringing on the authority of the presidency. Had that been Trump’s first encounter with the law (which, of course, it wasn’t), it would have been a stark lesson in impunity.

It’s no surprise then that, in an last year with television journalist Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, when asked about his obligation to uphold the Constitution, Trump responded, “I don’t know.” He also defied a Supreme Court decision that ordered the return of immigrant Kilmar Armando Ábrego García from El Salvador, who had been deported thanks to what the Trump administration termed “an administrative error.” Blaming the deferral of that decision on Attorney General Pam Bondi, the president that he was “not involved in the legality or illegality” of the case.

Despite his seemingly ambivalent feelings in that interview, he has emphatically asserted his position with respect to the law elsewhere, especially when it came to him. For example, on February 16, 2025, he on X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Nonetheless, outright violations of the law have been a signature characteristic of his administration writ large.

For example, last March, when Chief Judge James Boasberg ordered the return of planes carrying migrants being deported from the United States to El Salvador’s CECOT prison — which is known for its brutality — Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem the two flights to continue in clear violation of the court order. The Justice Department would subsequently argue in a that the administration hadn’t violated the judge’s order because the flights carrying the migrants were no longer over US territory when the ruling was issued.

In short, although the attitudes of Trump and his administration toward legality have been guided by the belief that their power is in no way meaningfully constrained by the law, it would be a mistake to assume that they’ve governed through lawlessness alone. Focusing solely on lawlessness would minimize the way the president and his administration have simultaneously relied on and weaponized the law itself to legitimize their violence and their violations. They have pursued an America First that has centered on the expansion of executive power and the protection of narrowly defined national interests, while tossing aside human rights and international legal norms.

To fully grasp the depths of the Trump administration’s violence, lawlessness must be examined alongside the strategic use of the law to manufacture a sense of legality and a façade of legal legitimation.

Legalizing boat strikes to “save Americans”

On September 2, 2025, on Trump’s order, US military forces conducted an against a boat that the administration claimed belonged to the Latin American gang Tren de Aragua, which he had previously designated a terrorist organization and described as “narcoterrorists.” Since that first strike in the Caribbean Sea, the US has led 46 subsequent boat in both the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 147 people.

Despite legal experts’ view that such strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings, the Trump administration has insisted on their legality. In late November, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on X that “our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict — and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”

The approval Hegseth referred to came in the form of a memorandum from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Although that memo has not been made public, sources familiar with its contents report that it frames the strikes as acts of collective self-defense undertaken in the interests of the US and several Latin American countries. The memo also that, because the US is in an armed conflict with the drug cartels, the strikes don’t require Congressional approval, being both in the national interest and sufficiently limited in scope, nature and duration not to qualify as war-making. Experts have that memo in numerous ways; some insist that the legal arguments are not only flawed, but were put together to legitimize a political decision already made by the White House.

In the last quarter-century of the War on Terror, weaponizing the label of terrorism has been repeatedly invoked to justify repressive interventions. As law professor Sirine Sinnar , “Through invoking terrorism, the Trump administration targets its political enemies, pushes an openly racist and xenophobic agenda, and flouts international law more brazenly than its predecessors. But it can do all this so easily because the concept of terrorism has long been selective, political, and racialized, and because Congress and the Supreme Court have largely shielded counterterrorism from accountability.” The designation of individuals as “narcoterrorists” reflects the enduring currency of this post-September 11 framework, demonstrating how the language of terrorism can be redeployed in new contexts through strategically constructed threat narratives.

The spectacle of “American [In]Justice”

In a on January 3, 2026, Trump announced the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores de Maduro, via Operation Absolute Resolve. He accused them of conducting a “campaign of deadly narco-terrorism against the United States and its citizens,” and insisted that “hundreds of thousands — over the years — of Americans died because of him.” Further justifying his capture, Trump also the Venezuelan leader had been sending members of the Tren de Aragua gang to the US to spread drugs and terror.

As it happens, though, not only was there a lack of evidence of that, but the claim wasn’t even mentioned in the Justice Department’s indictment of the Venezuelan president. The Maduros, Trump asserted, would “soon face the full might of American justice and stand trial on American soil.” Despite such a projection of power and the assumed superiority of “American justice,” the Trump administration’s entire governing strategy has proven that just as legality is malleable, so too is justice.

have the Trump administration’s capture of the Maduros as simply lawless, but the administration’s officials didn’t act without considering the law (in their own lawless fashion). They even requested that the Office of Legal Counsel produce an opinion on whether the president could legally direct military forces to support law enforcement in seizing Maduro and bringing him to the US for prosecution — without, of course, any congressional action.

A heavily redacted version of the memo to that, dated December 23, 2025, released on January 13, 2026. It frames the sending of US special forces and air power into the Venezuelan capital of Caracas to capture the Maduros as a law-enforcement action to arrest a fugitive, not a military invasion (despite all the Venezuelans who died). It argues that, because of the limited duration and narrow scope of the operation, the action falls under the president’s constitutional authority and isn’t an act of war that would require congressional authorization. Although the memo did avoid making a definitive argument that the operation didn’t violate international law, it essentially tried to make that determination inconsequential by deeming the actions legal under domestic law.

Performing legality, producing impunity

While the contents of the memo are certainly important, it’s no less critical to understand the purpose and function of such memos to begin with. Like other such “legal” documents, memos from the Office of Legal Counsel are designed to offer a version of “legality” that minimizes scrutiny, enables repetition and contributes to normalizing state violence in its many forms.

Some have the boat strike memos to the torture memos drafted under the administration of former US President George W. Bush. John Yoo, one of the infamous authors of those memos, argued that, for abuse to rise to the level of torture, the result had to be nothing less than organ failure or death. So, consider it ironic that he actually criticized those boat strike memos, despite their similarity to the torture memos’ form of impunity. In fact, when asked if he regretted the decisions he had made, Yoo , “The only thing I regret was just the pressure of time that we had to act under.” But he also added that he “would probably do the same things again.”

Yoo nevertheless expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s rationale for the boat strikes, saying about those supposed drug boats: “They’re not attacking us because of our foreign policy and our political system…They’re just selling us something that people in America want. We’re just trying to stop them from selling it. That’s traditionally, to me, crime. It’s something that we could never eradicate or end.”

Yoo, of course, neglected to mention that, while justifying the most brutal forms of torture at the Bush administration’s prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in CIA “black sites” globally, the torture memos provided impunity for anyone involved in creating that torture regime in the wake of the September 11 attacks. And no court ever formally ruled those memos illegal, while Yoo, like all the other Bush administration officials involved in sanctioning the torture apparatus, never faced the slightest accountability.

Even when a report on those memos was released by the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility in 2009, recommending that Yoo and an associate of his be disciplined, it was by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis. He viewed the memos as resulting from poor decision-making rather than unethical behavior. Like the torture memos, then, the boat strike memos are meant to offer a façade of legality, while ensuring impunity.

Yoo’s critique also conveniently overlooks that legal memoranda like the torture memos don’t just interpret the law. Instead, they offer a threatening “legal” reality to justify certain all-too-grim interventions. Under the Bush administration, this included the denial of Geneva Convention protections based on the argument that the US was fighting a new kind of war with non-state actors who don’t abide by the laws of war. According to their logic, if the enemy does not follow the laws of war, the US is not required to extend full protection. This discursive was used to disregard the fact that adherence to Geneva protections is non-reciprocal.

Those memos also exploit perceived gaps in existing legal frameworks to manufacture ambiguity, while, above all, staging a performance of legality. Like the torture memos, the memo authorizing Maduro’s capture was designed to be a buffer against legal, political or diplomatic challenges, minimizing the vulnerability of the Trump administration to judicial scrutiny and congressional action.

In his Érudit , “Citizen in Exception: Omar Khadr and the Performative Gap in the Law,” author Matt Jones writes about the consequences of such performances of legality. He argues that “the law’s reliance on continual performance interventions means that gaps in the law may in fact become enshrined in law if a given authority, such as a judge, recognizes them as legitimate within the jurisprudential history of past performances.” In other words, challenging state actions as illegal, whether the conduct occurred as a result of sheer lawlessness or unsound legal rationales, can actually end up rendering the behavior legal.

Legal rationales like those provided in the torture memos also offer an administration the opportunity to act as if its behavior were legal. As Jones , when it came to Guantanamo Bay, for example, “the Bush administration’s creative interpretation of the law allowed them to operate ‘as if’ their behavior were legal, knowing that, by the time the law’s reality caught up, the strategic tasks they wanted accomplished in Guantanamo would have long been completed.”

To this day, Guantanamo Bay remains open and there has never been the slightest accountability for anyone involved in past crimes there or the indefinite institutionalization of that infrastructure of state violence.

The architecture of hyper-legality and the law’s double-edged sword

To understand why the Trump administration has not always chosen to completely violate or disregard the law, it’s useful to consider the concept of hyper-legalism. In her , “International Refugee Law, ‘Hyper-Legalism’ and Migration Management: The Pacific Solution,” author Claire Inder, special assistant to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, suggests that hyper-legalism “implies a commitment to lawfulness and rule-following, with an underlying disingenuousness in the understanding of ‘legality.’ It suggests that the applicability of the rules themselves is infinitely malleable by the actor purporting to comply.”

Although Inder focuses on refugee law, hyper-legalism’s relevance to a broader spectrum of governing policies is clear when it comes to Trump and his administration, where a performance of legality has often been considered sufficient to allow them to pursue their ultimate objective of justifying whatever intervention they may deem necessary. However, that doesn’t mean that Trump and members of his administration don’t understand the limits of hyper-legalism.

As Daniel Ghezelbash, director of the Kaldor Center for International Refugee Law, has , some actions are so egregious under international law that no amount of formalistic sophistry can legitimize them. And when that’s the case, states can resort to obfuscation as a tactic. “Obfuscation,” as he puts it, “is achieved through secrecy about what actions the government is taking and deliberate silence as to the purported legal justifications.”

The Trump administration’s refusal to release the Office of Legal Counsel memo that has provided it with supposed legal cover for those boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific is emblematic of hyper-legalism and its limits. More broadly, the fact that its officials are using the law to justify egregious conduct while rejecting any semblance of transparency makes such legal arguments difficult, if not impossible, to challenge in the immediate moment. That, in turn, risks the further institutionalization of sanctioned violence, while, of course, providing legal rationales for future acts of state violence.

In his article, “,” legal scholar Nasser Hussain questions common assumptions about the operation of emergency laws and the idea that the measures implemented are temporary deviations from the norm. Although he focuses on the United Kingdom, his analysis is distinctly relevant to Trump’s America. He argues that antiterrorism legislation in Great Britain hasn’t just functioned as a short-term, reactive response to crisis, but has produced structural and enduring transformations in the legal order.

And that’s just what’s now happening in the US. The latest “emergency laws” and defenses of exceptional interventions are helping to create legal frameworks and blueprints that will, in the future, only strengthen and entrench the ability of the state to enact egregious violence. In short, while the violence of the Trump administration may seem exceptional, the historical trajectory of the War on Terror should be a reminder that what we are witnessing isn’t new and isn’t likely to disappear in the future.

In analyzing the Trump administration’s governing strategy, it’s important to remember that, as Hussain , “the rule of law is and has always been capable of accommodating a range of repressive but legal measures.” In other words, even as the Trump administration’s remarkable disregard for the law in so many cases poses urgent challenges, the malleability of the law, as demonstrated throughout the history of the US, should offer a warning against the seemingly commonsensical response of simply instituting more rules, regulations, conventions and laws. After all, the law’s primary function is to preserve the state, not deliver justice.

All too often, the law operates as a double-edged sword: It can secure rights and constrain power, but it can also legitimize repression, exclusion and harm. Our task, then, is to understand how to wield the law strategically to challenge the violence and power of the state, and to demand justice and accountability.

Whether the Trump administration cloaks its actions in legal rationales or disregards legality altogether, communities at home and abroad continue to resist. Recognizing that the law alone will not save us is not a call to despair but a call to organize and build our power. Because nothing has ever altered the course of injustice except the organized power of the people — and nothing else ever will.

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That’s what a young Pakistani boy named Zubair members of Congress at a hearing on drones in October 2013. The hearing was during the Obama years at a time when the government had barely even acknowledged that an American drone warfare program existed.

Two years earlier, Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim cleric, and Abdulrahman, his 16-year-old son — both American citizens — were killed by U.S. drone strikes in Yemen just weeks apart. Asked to comment on Abdulrahman’s killing, Obama campaign senior adviser Robert Gibbs : “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don’t think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”

Those are two of all too many grim tales of the brutality with which the United States has carried out its drone warfare program. Post-9/11 government rhetoric has made the collective blaming of Muslims for terrorism and the callous dismissal of their deaths in drone strikes a regular occurrence.

The United States’ drone warfare program is now entering its third decade, with no end in sight. Despite the fact that the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 is approaching, policymakers have demonstrated no evidence of reflecting on the failures of drone warfare or how to stop it. Instead, they continue to focus on simply shifting drone policy in minor ways within an ongoing, violent system.

The dehumanization inherent in drone warfare

In February 2013, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney drone strikes as a key tool of American foreign policy this way: 

“We have acknowledged, the United States, that sometimes we use remotely piloted aircraft to conduct targeted strikes against specific al-Qaeda terrorists in order to prevent attacks on the United States and to save American lives. We conduct those strikes because they are necessary to mitigate ongoing actual threats, to stop plots, prevent future attacks, and, again, save American lives… The US government takes great care in deciding to pursue an al-Qaeda terrorist, to ensure precision and to avoid loss of innocent life.

More aggressively endorsing the use of such drones, Georgetown Professor Daniel Byman, who on the 9/11 Commission, the necessity of such warfare to protect American lives. “Drones,” he wrote, “have done their job remarkably well … And they have done so at little financial cost, at no risk to U.S. forces, and with fewer civilian casualties than many alternative methods would have caused.”

In reality, however, Washington’s War on Terror has inflicted disproportionate violence on communities across the globe, while using this form of asymmetrical warfare to further expand the space between the value placed on American lives and those of Muslims. As the rhetoric on drone warfare suggests, the value of life and the need to protect it are, as far as Washington is concerned, reserved for Americans and their allies.

Consequences of the War on Terror and the Iraq War

The London-based watchdog group has estimated that American air strikes killed at least 22,679 civilians and possibly as many as 48,308 since the War on Terror began. Such killings have been carried out for the most part by desensitized killers who have been primed towards the dehumanization of the targets of those murderous machines. In the words of critic , “The detached nature of drone warfare has anonymized and dehumanized the enemy, greatly diminishing the necessary psychological barriers of killing.” 

In his On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, retired Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman focuses on the “mechanical distancing” of modern warfare, thanks to “the sterile Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical bugger that permits the killer to deny the humanity of his victim.”

Scholar Grégoire Chamayou in even starker terms. Thanks to the distance between the drone operator and the victim, “one is never spattered by the adversary’s blood. No doubt the absence of any physical soiling corresponds to less of a sense of moral soiling … Above all, it ensures that the operator will never see his victim seeing him doing what he does to him.”

Needless to say, drone technology has rendered those in distant lands so much more disposable in the name of American national security. This is because long-range techno-targeting has brought dehumanization to the point that, ironically enough, killing, or (not to mince words) slaughter, has become remarkably banal.

In these years of the War on Terror, the legalities of drone warfare, coupled with the way that the technology capitalizes on this unfortunate aspect of human psychology, has made the dehumanization of Muslims and violence against them that much easier to carry out. It’s taken for granted that Muslims in “target sites” or conflict zones must be terrorists whose removal should be beyond questioning — even after a posthumous determination of their civilian status.

Responsibility, but not accountability

At a 2016 press conference, President Barack Obama finally responded to a question about the by admitting: “There’s no doubt that civilians were killed that shouldn’t have been.” Then he added, “In situations of war, you know, we have to take responsibility when we’re not acting appropriately.”

Rare as such admissions of “responsibility” have been, however, they remain quite different from accountability. In Obama’s case, all that was offered to the survivors among those who “shouldn’t have been” killed in such drone strikes was an utterly minimal acknowledgment that it was even happening.

While the use of drones in the War on Terror began under President George W. Bush, it escalated dramatically under Obama. Then, in the Trump years, it rose yet again. Halfway through , drone strikes had already exceeded the total number in the Obama era. Though the in Joe Biden’s first year in office was lower than Trump’s, what has remained consistent is the lack of the slightest accountability for the slaughter of civilians.

In 2021, as the US was withdrawing chaotically from its 20-year disaster in Afghanistan, its military surveilled a white car driving around Kabul. Believing it to be carrying explosives, they launched the of that conflict, slaughtering 10 Afghans. Two weeks later, after reporting by The New York Times revealed what really happened, the Pentagon that only civilians had been killed, seven of them children. No one was penalized.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin later apologized to the families of those killed and offered compensation — one of the few times American officials had even bothered to acknowledge wrongdoing in Afghanistan in the last 20 years. True to form, however, the government’s pledge to compensate the impacted families has .

A few weeks ago, , the Biden administration was forced to release a redacted version of a presidential policy memorandum, signed in October 2022, that detailed the administration’s latest approach to drone warfare globally. At least some details about it were known prior to its release, however, thanks to an anonymous senior administration . 

The Washington Post’s editorial board, among others, , arguing that the restrictions in place are “smart rules of engagement” and a significant improvement over the Trump years when it comes to limiting civilian damage from drones. In reality, however, Biden’s memo is likely to do little to stem future drone warfare nightmares. In essence, the memo represents a return to Obama-era rules, including the supposed need to have “near-certainty” that the target of a drone strike is a terrorist and “near-certainty” that non-combatants won’t be injured or killed. The memo also includes other criteria that (at least theoretically) must be met before an individual is targeted, including an assessment that capture is not feasible.

In the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US claimed his capture wasn’t possible, but members of his family dispute this. In an with Democracy Now, al-Awlaki’s uncle Saleh bin Fareed stated, “I am sure I could have handed him over — me and my family — but they never, ever asked us to do that.” Needless to say, the lack of transparency has made it impossible to know if such standards are being met before a strike takes place and, worse yet, there’s no method of accountability if they aren’t.

That Biden administration does ban signature strikes that target individuals whose identities are unknown based on behavior suggesting they might be involved in terrorist activity. Still, we shouldn’t mistake a modestly better policy for a truly lawful, moral or ethical one, especially since the drone strike “mistakes” of the past haven’t led to any genuinely meaningful overhauls of the program.

Minimizing civilian deaths?

On September 20, 2001, nine days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush delivered a speech to a joint session of Congress in which he first used the phrase “War on Terror,” while announcing a domestic and global campaign to be fought without borders or time constraints. Previewing what, years later, would become known as this country’s “forever wars,” he that they “should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success.”

Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe’s definition of necropolitics — the politics of death — catches the essence of the War on Terror Bush launched as a way of life (and death): “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.”

With the invasion of Afghanistan and the designation of entire largely Muslim parts of the planet as the enemy, the Bush administration began a “war” in which Muslim deaths were necessary for the protection and preservation of American ones. This set a precedent for the value of Muslim life when the act of killing them could be equated with the security of Americans and the protection of “the homeland.”

22 years later, drones continue to be instruments of civilian slaughter and the language deployed by successive administrations to describe such slaughter has served to sanitize that fact. Whether it’s the use of “target” or “collateral damage,” both minimize the reality that human beings are being murdered. Taken together with a larger War-on-Terror narrative in which Muslims have been demonized and criminalized, the result has been the production of killable bodies whose deaths elicit no guilt, remorse or accountability.

In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama why he put “prudent limits” on drone warfare, pointing out that Americans “will not be safer if people abroad believe we strike within their countries without regard for the consequence.” And how right he was.

As yet, however, there have been zero consequences for the air-strike deaths of tens of thousands of civilians globally and, as Obama’s statement suggests, the only real concern this caused American officials was the fear that too many such killings might, in the end, harm Americans.

Grieving Muslim lives

In Sana’a, Yemen, a shows a US drone under which someone has written in blood-red paint, “Why did you kill my family?” in English and Arabic. The relentless American drone campaign has indeed left all too many civilians in Muslim-majority countries asking the same question. The only answer offered in Washington over all these years is that such killings were unavoidable collateral damage.

But imagine, for a moment, what Americans might do if their family members were regularly being killed by drones because another government claimed “near certainty” that they were terrorists? You know the answer, of course, given the response to the 9/11 attacks: this country would undoubtedly launch a catastrophic war of epic proportions with no conceivable end in sight. In contrast, Muslims targeted by American drones have been left to pick up the all-too-literal pieces of their loved ones, while risking the possibility of also being killed in a double- or triple-tap — a level of violence that could never be justified.  

We should all reject a War on Terror committed to the disposability of Muslims, because no one should have to mourn the killing of civilians the US has targeted for far too long. Muslim lives have inherent value and their deaths are worth grieving, mourning and above all valuing. Drone warfare will never change that fact.

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I’m a US citizen. I’m also Muslim. And the Supreme Court decision on the Trump administration’s Muslim travel ban scares me.

In a June 26 ruling, the  decided to leave in place parts of the Muslim ban while the merits of the case are debated, effectively barring individuals from six Muslim-majority countries without a “bona fide” relationship in the US — say, with family members, an employer or an educational institution — into the country. This decision may also prevent entry to all refugees for 120 days.

The ruling has been hailed as a victory for the Trump administration — not just on the legal end, but also in the degree to which it instills fear in Muslims. The fear is real, and not just for those who may be directly impacted, but for the larger community, too. After all, what the travel ban is ultimately meant to do is to hold all Muslims collectively responsible for the actions of a (miniscule) few.

As a Muslim American of Egyptian descent, will I be legally impacted by the decision? In theory, no. But will I think twice about leaving the country, knowing that I could return to the possibility of being harassed, interrogated and/or denied entry back into the US? Absolutely! Because after almost 16 years of the War on Terror, you come to learn — or become conditioned to fear — that one day you could be next.

The distinction between citizen and non-citizen becomes ever more perilous when you “look Muslim,” have a Muslim sounding name or work on issues relating to Muslims. This doesn’t mean I’ll experience the same consequences as Muslim non-citizens, but neither does my citizenship reassure me that my fellow Muslim Americans and I will be protected, especially in light of this administration’s history over the last few months alone.

And that’s exactly the intent of policies like these: They target some while causing others to reel back in fear that they too will be impacted. They generate enough fear to make anyone with any relationship with a targeted group censor themselves and modify their behavior. The government wins not only because of whom it targets directly, but because of who else becomes an indirect target.

These are precarious times for Muslims. And while we’re told to trust in our democracy and our judicial system, decisions like these — which come on the heels of a long history of discriminatory, racist and Islamophobic policies under several administrations — magnify the legitimate fear that one will either be targeted by state violence or become a target of societal violence.

Worryingly, not a single judge dissented from the unsigned Supreme Court ruling — and in fact, , including the newly seated Neil Gorsuch, concurred that they would have gone even further and implemented the ban in full. So we know to expect that yet again, the highest law of the land is in favor of institutionalizing Islamophobia. Where then do Muslims turn for reprieve?

As a Muslim American, I’m tired of explaining my fear. I’m tired of pointing out how negatively the War on Terror has impacted the community, and I’m tired of being treated as a means to a security end.

I’m tired of explaining the legacy of the War on Terror and the fact that under the Bush administration, security policies that began by targeting non-citizens ended up, through a long and thoroughly calculated process, targeting citizens as well — something that also continued under Barack Obama, who spied broadly on ordinary people’s communications and even ordered lethal drone strikes on US citizens.

I’m tired because I know this isn’t the end, but the beginning of a new War on Terror — one whose thinly veiled racist manifestations have become explicit.

The Muslim ban means that Muslims will be in the spotlight even more and viewed almost exclusively as national security pawns. Non-citizens, of course, stand to lose the most. But let’s remember what the War on Terror has always been designed to do: demonize all Muslims — citizens or not — to justify the most egregious, abusive, and racist laws and policies.

I don’t know what’s yet to come, and I’m afraid to find out.

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