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In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft authorized
the detention of foreign citizens indefinitely and without congressional or judicial oversight
“in the event of an emergency or other extraordinary circumstance.” Soon thereafter the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was empowered to override an immigration
judge’s order allowing an individual’s release.81 By early November 2001, some 1,147
primarily Arab and Muslim noncitizens had been arrested, 60 percent of them on
immigration charges.82 Many were held for long periods and in solitary confinement
before they were charged. The Justice Department conducted closed immigration
proceedings for many detainees and would not disclose their identities or whereabouts.
A task force report published in August 2007 by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs
notes that since 9/11 “more than 80,000 Arab and Muslim nonnational residents of the
U.S. have been required to undergo fingerprinting and registration, 8,000 have been
identified for questioning, approximately 5,000 have been arrested or detained, and at
least 400 have been criminally charged in terrorism-related investigations,” although the
report also says these estimates are considered low by many in the Muslim American
community.83 The inspector general of the Justice Department has reported that between
2001 and 2005, many cases that had been attributed to antiterrorism efforts in fact
involved crimes such as drug trafficking or marriage fraud.84
The 9/11 attacks have not fundamentally changed who may enter the United States, nor
have they fundamentally altered U.S. immigration law. They have, however, made the visa
process much more security conscious and led to new, mandatory procedures for
applicants from Muslim-majority countries.85 The State Department slowed the process for
granting visas to men aged 16 to 45 from specific Arab and Muslim countries by roughly
20 days.86 Heightened security procedures in the first two years after 9/11 caused a
greater number of visa applications to be rejected. The Department of Agriculture in
February 2002 abruptly discontinued its sponsorship of the J-1 visa waiver program,
which had allowed citizens of certain countries to come to the United States for limited
tourism or business stays without obtaining a visa. The number of Muslims granted
permission to live in the United States through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program—a
congressionally mandated program that allocates a certain number of resident visas to
eligible persons from countries with low immigration rates—decreased by almost 14
percent by April 2002 as a result of prolonged security checks. The issuance of student
visas became particularly complicated with the establishment of the Student and Exchange
Visitor Information System in 2003. This system requires colleges and universities to
provide consular officers overseas with electronic notification of all nonimmigrant visa
applicants’ acceptance as students.
Because some of the 9/11 terrorists were in the United States on expired visas, the
government is also paying closer attention to visa overstays. In November 2001, the INS
began an initiative in San Diego to arrest students who had violated the terms of their
student visas. The program was geared particularly toward nationals of Iran, Iraq, Sudan,
Pakistan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Yemen.87 The Alien Absconder Initiative—
launched at the end of 2001 by the INS and the Justice Department and now operated by
the Homeland Security Department—had by 2003 provided local law enforcement
agencies with the names of 314,000 immigrants with orders for deportation or removal;
the initiative allows law enforcement to enter information about civil immigration violations
into the National Crime Information Center database. Thousands of men from “countries in

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