Aziza Ahmed [*]
[This essay is available in PDF at this link]
Throughout his campaign for presidency, Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States. As President, he kept his word. Only days after he took office, the new administration released the first version of the Executive Order: Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.1
The first Executive Order, however, did not say the word Muslim. Instead, it listed only Muslim-majority countries as necessary for restrictions on entry. The Executive Order also trafficked in stereotypes about Muslims, such as the need to ban people who engage in acts of “bigotry or hatred,” including honor killings.2 As scholars note, honor killings are often popularly understood as being linked to the “Middle East and South Asia.”3
Lawyers and civil rights advocates objected to the ban. Protests at airports drew significant attention as droves of lawyers and activists stepped up to help people arriving into the United States. Recognizing this new form of hostility towards Muslims, signs went up in stores and restaurants around the United States, often featuring a woman wearing a hijab: “Everyone is Welcome Here.”
Eventually, litigation challenging the Executive Order made it to the Supreme Court. Plaintiffs, including the Muslim Association of Hawaii and individual Muslims, challenged the constitutionality of the law.4 In Trump v. Hawaii, the Supreme Court found the Executive Order constitutional. Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion dismisses the claims by the Plaintiffs that the Executive Orders were driven by anti-Muslim animus. The justices separate Trump’s comments about Muslims from the Executive Order itself. They “look behind” the Executive Order and use rational basis review to uphold the order on the grounds that vetting immigrants could be “plausibly related to the Government’s stated objective to protect the country and improve vetting processes” as an “independent justification” for its legality.5 For progressives, the unwillingness to read religious (and racial) animus into the law was a form of constitutional “gaslighting.”6 In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor (writing for herself and Justice Ginsburg) concludes: “Based on the evidence in the record, a reasonable observer would conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by anti-Muslim animus.”7
The invocation of security by the Administration made it possible for the administration to achieve its objectives.8 The obscuring of race and religion served an important purpose: it allowed the Executive Order to take on the veneer of legitimate, “rational” lawmaking and evade accusations of racism or religious bias, masking the longstanding project of using race and religion to cast some as outsiders to American culture and society.
How does one disrupt a notion of national security that maintains the status quo racial order? Matiagai Sirleaf’s volume, Race and National Security, bravely intervenes to answer this question. The volume forces readers to acknowledge the histories and assumptions of national security law that are structured by a belief in racial hierarchy. As the example of the Muslim ban shows, and as Sirleaf notes, “race and racial justice is hidden in plain sight.”9 In this review, I highlight what I see as two of the volume’s main contributions: institutional erasure of race and racial harm in the discourse on national security and a redefinition of national security. Focusing on these two aspects of the volume help to illuminate how contributors see race is a primary lens through which to read the formation of the field of national security, its current operation, and its impact.
[*] Aziza Ahmed is Professor of Law and N. Neal Pike Scholar at Boston University School of Law. Many thanks to the student editors at the Harvard National Security Journal for their careful and thorough edits. The title of this essay is taken from the introduction to the volume. Matiangai Sirleaf, Introduction: Confronting the Color Line in National Security, in RACE AND NATIONAL SECURITY 3, 3 (Matiangai Sirleaf, ed., 2023).
Aziza Ahmed
Aziza Ahmed is Professor of Law and N. Neal Pike Scholar at Boston University School of Law.