By Eli Cahan

This piece was produced in partnership with Rolling Stone.

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As a boy, Rabih Darwiche would sprint for cover when the monthly test sirens ripped through his quiet suburban Detroit neighborhood.

Darwiche’s terror was about more than the ear-splitting roar alone: The tornado alarms took him back from Dearborn, Michigan, to his early childhood in 1980s Lebanon. There, similar sirens warned of imminent bombings by Israeli jets soaring overhead. It’s safe, his parents would say to soothe their 6-year-old boy, we’re in America now.

But after 9/11, escaping the war in Beirut did not mean finding peace in the U.S. The Israel-Gaza confict has in recent months reinforced that reality as it spurred soaring anti-Muslim sentiment that continues to imperil the well-being of people like Darwiche.
 

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Community members, faith leaders and mental health specialists in greater Dearborn say that the legacy of post-9/11 counterterrorism measures — digital dragnets, informants in schools and mosques — has placed a generation of young Muslim Americans in the crosshairs of law enforcement.

In more than two decades since the United States kicked its Patriot Act-era counterterror programs into full gear, over 500 high-profile court cases have illustrated the ongoing burden of discriminatory policing on Muslim and Arab Americans. In September, Department of Justice and FBI officials were sued over surveillance practices in alleged violation of targets’ constitutional rights. Persistent discriminatory policing has coincided with record-setting rates of hate crimes reflecting anti-Arab sentiment and Islamophobia — patterns that have been further aggravated since the start of the Israel-Hamas conflict, as the FBI amped up surveillance, and as anti-Muslim sentiment has spiked. In recognition of troubling trends, the White House announced in November the first-ever national strategy to combat Islamophobia.

Darwiche, who moved to Dearborn in 1989 when he was 6 years old, came of age as a young Arab American man in a country that moved quickly from mourning nearly 3,000 killed on 9/11 to retribution: “A society that sees you as the enemy,” he said.

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