Land of Spies: Inside the FBI’s Informant Program Targeting Arab, Palestinian, SWANA & Muslim Migrants
04 Mar 2025
Announced by CERIS
Dr. Amir Aziz investigates the decades-long history of FBI informant programs in the U.S. that attempt to recruit Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, and South-West Asian and North African (SWANA) migrants to serve as counter-terrorism intelligence informants and spy on their communities. FBI agents ply migrants, all with vulnerable immigration status, with false promises of immigration relief and employ deportation threats to coax them into becoming ‘compliant’ informants.
Dr. Aziz focuses particularly on the often-overlooked stories of Arab, Palestinian, Muslim, and SWANA migrants who are women, trans, and genderqueer. In particular, transfeminine and genderqueer migrant informants find themselves further entrapped in a cis-heteronormative and gender-binary legal framework of inclusion that could only legitimize them as victims of Islamic patriarchy and misogyny. Islam, Arabs, and Muslims function as a racialized scapegoat for global transphobia and queerphobia – a rendering that exposes secular-liberal norms of gender, sexuality, and religion that suffuse modern social life.
Despite how cases like Hassan v. City of New York and FBI v. Fazaga have attempted to end the suspicionless surveillance and informant recruitment of migrants, such practices remain informally authorized outside the judicial purview, practically untraceable and whose existence is challenging to prove in a court of law. The barriers that informants face in seeking extrication and redress underline the limits of humanist protocols of liberal rights and representation, pointing to how such gendered-racialized practices of violability and containment are constitutive to secular-liberal modernity’s conception of the human subject.
Dr. Aziz argues further that frameworks characterizing ‘anti-Muslim’ and ‘anti-Arab’ as varying strands of racisms, though rendering legible those forms of violence, are tethered by a narrowed secular-liberal episteme that aims to create/recuperate a liberal sense of belonging and pride (in being/feeling Muslim and American, or Arab and American, etc.), while remaining subjected to biopolitical technologies of racialization and extractive capital.
Dr. Aziz’s research is rooted in over 7 years of in-depth interviews, archival work, and anti-migrant detention activism. Dr. Aziz aims to shed light on what the stories of SWANA migrants, refugees, and undocumented communities may tell us about the violences of the dominant secular-liberal episteme by which we live, amidst a time of genocide and permanent war against Arabs, Palestinians, and Muslims.
Dr. Aziz’s talk is a chapter in a broader book project that traces how informancy, one of the oldest forms of human surveillance, has older roots than the ‘War on Terror.’ Informancy as a racialized and gendered nexus of control stretches back to U.S. settler empire’s use of informancy to divide-and-conquer Native American movements to the FBI’s spying of Black Muslims and Palestinian Americans in the twentieth-century – pointing to the overlapping anti-Palestinian, anti-Black, and settler colonial roots of what is called ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘anti-Muslim racism’ today.
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