Thread by @HMAesq

It's good to see the @JoeBiden administration taking the threat of white supremacist-fueled extremism seriously.

But how to define it? Where is the line between extremism and free speech?

nytimes.com/live/2021/04/2…

Terrorism and extremism are not the same. It would be shortsighted to focus only on one while ignoring the role the other plays on it.

9/11 vastly expanded the categories and scope of terrorism and extremism, and we saw it reflected in not only law & policy, but discourse.

Surveillance, prolonged civil detention, and deportation were but a few of the reactions. In a recent call with our Virginia Senator, we called for a 20-year post mortem of the Patriot Act.

What lessons from post-9/11 will we use to address domestic extremism? Are we safer?

The elephant in the room, ofc, is that 9/11 dealt with The Other. Domestic will be different: it can't just be deported.

Will this mean we actually reckon with the causes of extremism and radicalization instead of just trying to deport it?

It would be really easy for me, as a Muslim lawyer who saw the effects of post 9/11 policy on my clients, to call for greater governmental oversight into rooting out extremism in communities.

But I saw what that did to my community, too. Civil liberties are fragile things.

So, unpopular as this opinion may be, I cannot in good conscience support government entanglement in community deradicalization for (white Christian) extremists while opposing it for (brown/black Muslim) ones.

I am worried about what it will mean for civil liberties for us all.

But extremism inside government agencies is a different matter. These are officials entrusted to enforce the law.

We can't have immigration judges who've gone on record making disparaging comments about the very populations that appear before them.

So extremism has to be defined. And at least inside government agencies, free speech has its limits. See, e.g. Garcetti v. Ceballos, 547 U.S. 410 (2006). So there is some degree of scrutiny warranted.

Let's take an example, shall we?

Last July, a new immigration judge was sworn in to the Arlington Immigration Court. Right before he was sworn in, he spent 4 years as "director of research" for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, founded by John Tanton, a white nationalist.

Let's look at this judge's statements.

3/20/18: "Hondurans broke their own country, now they're headed here," in response to the CenAm refugee caravan. He called it a "mini-invasion," complaining this is how "American sovereignty dies."

4/14/20: "Quarantine: Good for Americans, Good for Detained Aliens."

Here, the Judge said "The vast majority of foreign nationals locked up by ICE unnecessarily prolong their own detention by pursuing baseless claims to relief from removal."

The animus isn't just vs noncitizens the judge now presides over, it extends to the lawyers who represent them:

3/7/17: "In the current war on immigration enforcement, ethnic grievance lawyers are more than willing to kill the truth..."

What about the organization he worked at, FAIR?

It's an @splcenter and @ADL designated hate group. John Tanton, its founder, was a eugenicist whose opposition to immigration stemmed from a racist, white supremacist perspective:

nytimes.com/2011/04/17/us/…

FAIR's longterm president Dan Stein, described immigrant birth rates in 1991 as "competitive breeding that would increase their political power."

In 1994 he said 20C immigration policy was a liberal plot orchestrated as a "great way to retaliate against Anglo-Saxon dominance."

Old news? In 2010, Stein lied on national TV about FAIR's support of ethnic separatist and unapologetic white nationalist Virginia Abernathy, courtesy @maddow:

msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-…

In 2017, while Judge O'Brien was in his employ, Stein reaffirmed that immigration was a demographic plot against whites, railing against @SEIU and George Soros "they see immigration...as helping the party long-term by re-engineering the demographics."

splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017…

If the Biden admin is serious about rooting out extremism inside federal agencies, it perhaps needs to pay attention to the groups that have mainstreamed white nationalism.