As we mark 20 years of the attacks on U.S. soil on September 11th and the escalation of state sanctioned racial profilings and detentions in the years that followed, it becomes more and more necessary to situate the attacks on working class South Asian, Muslim, Arab, and Indo-Caribbean communities as a part of a much longer history of how the U.S. has and continues to wage wars both internationally and domestically. As many who organized and fought back in this period observed, police collaboration with INS and indefinite detentions were not anomalous tactics that the government suddenly developed and deployed. At the time, the disappearing of hundreds of boys and men from our communities recalled Japanese internment camps set up during the Second World War. Organizers and activists drew parallels between the prison industrial complex’s impact on Black and Latinx communities and immigrant detentions, highlighting the profit motive for jails to take on more detainees. The so-called “war on terror” became another name on a list of U.S. domestic wars alongside the “war on drugs” that targeted poor Black and Brown folks and the numerous genocidal wars first waged against the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island to steal their ancestral lands. And, as is the history with U.S. war, the domestic is inseparable from the international—tactics used on detainees at county jails were later seen with prisoners in the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many working class immigrant communities lived the realities of the tightening grip the U.S. had on the world. Economic, political and imperial. wars in homelands triggered crises which forced people to leave for the U.S. where they were subjected to continued systemic violence. And if not war and overt violence, then it was the force of U.S. global capitalism that drove people to have no option but to leave for the belly of the empire. Towards the end of the first period of this timeline, it becomes clear that these post 9/11 immigration policies were not just limited to South Asian, Arab, and Muslim communities but had lasting impacts on immigrants from all over Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia. Despite surviving conditions of perpetual war within the U.S. and their homelands, working class immigrants embody both the destructive impact of state violence and tremendous possibilities for organizing solidarity that transforms and builds the world that we want to see.

In 2001, DRUM was one year old. Working class South Asian communities—street vendors, domestic workers, youth, recent immigrants—had identified the racial targeting of their community by the NYPD and INS as a critical issue to address. As a result, DRUM began the INS De-Detention Program to educate community members on their rights and launched a project to visit INS detainees at New Jersey detention centers in order to connect them to resources. Meanwhile, South Asian youth organized workshops at community gatherings, schools, and other organizations to bring attention to the issues in the community like the unequal treatment of women, harassment and abuse from the NYPD, and wage discrimination based on documentation status. 

While the attacks on September 11, 2001 drastically increased xenophobia in the U.S., DRUM continued to focus on racial and class violence as a key issue for working class South Asians in New York City. Days after the attacks, DRUM organized a hotline for community members to report hate crimes. Not only did community members call the hotline for its intended purpose, but they also shared stories of how law enforcement officers smashed in the front doors and kidnapped the men in the house; or children reporting their father left for work 3 days ago but never came home; how they were being followed around town by men they didn’t know; or how Muslim-appearing men in the neighborhood were shoved into black vans and taken away. Similar to the violence against Black and indigenous people in the United States, the American government, through the police and immigration authorities, worked effectively to wage war on South Asian, Arab, and Muslim communities in the post-9/11 period through surveillance, family separations, and detention and deportations.

The Stop The Disappearances Campaign was a response to these situations—a way to offer resources for community self-defense, while building a working class movement to challenge the institutionalized racial violence in Black and brown communities in the United States. To prepare community members for increased contact with police and immigration authorities, DRUM offered legal clinics, Know Your Rights workshops, and other resources at mosques, community centers, and schools in South Asian, Arab, and Muslim communities. At the same time, community members came together to protest in solidarity with INS (and later ICE) detainees on hunger strikes in New Jersey and New York; they contributed to the anti-war struggle, recognizing the war on communities in NYC is intricately tied to the wars the US perpetrates in their homelands; and organized with Latinx and Black communities for safer and better work conditions. The campaign ultimately deepened the commitment to working class organizing in the South Asian community, particularly by cultivating the leadership of working class immigrant women and youth.

A critical element of DRUM’s work after 9/11 was organizing families impacted by the government’s targeting of Arab and South Asian men. The networks of connections, interdependence, and support cultivated by immigrants after migration were torn apart amidst the paranoia and confusion caused by racist state violence and surveillance. Many women found themselves in unimaginable situations — they had no way of knowing what had happened to their husbands and sons who were kidnapped and detained, and many were left without any financial support to sustain themselves or their children. It was under these conditions that women and young people led the fight to demand the release of their loved ones. 

It was women and young people like Uzma Naheed, Zaida Parveen, Moni Alam, Shahina, and others who attended family gatherings hosted by DRUM where they would learn and share the details of what happened to their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers. At these gatherings, families also learned that they weren’t alone. They saw the ways that the government’s anti terrorism policies were tearing through the fabric of the community and they were determined to fight back. 

Throughout this timeline you will see women speaking out at rallies and protests about what happened to their husbands and brothers. You will also see the ways that young people strengthened their communities against racist attacks and confronted widespread fear. What will be harder to see—but you are encouraged to keep in mind—are all the ways that women sustained this work. Not only did they fight deportations and family separations, but women also took the lead in building networks of resistance and care, supporting their own and other families devastated by NYPD, FBI, and INS. It was by no means an easy task which these women faced—the pressures of organizing with the harsh reality of sexism and capitalism bearing down upon them. However, they did not give in to the repression and fear that rippled through the fabric of their communities. The efforts of these women and young people laid the groundwork for DRUM’s police accountability and gender justice work in the present. They imagined and modeled new ways of relating with one another that built community while mobilizing others to march for justice for not just their husbands and sons, but all who are impacted by the forces of state violence.

Our communities have seen immense growth of advocacy and service organizations. Ideas that were difficult to address 20 years ago, and especially in the years after 9/11 (like U.S. exceptionalism, imperialism, militarism and patriotism, community and law enforcement collaboration), are now much more openly challenged. And approaches towards abolition, ending capitalism, or the need for racial justice through deep and transformative solidarity with other communities, are much more widespread.

But the number of organizations doing mass-based organizing in our working-class communities has grown only a little, and not in proportion to the size or demands of surviving in a collapsing society. We need the full range of approaches (advocacy, education, services, legal, communication, and more) to meet all of our current needs and fight to create some breathing room from our current realities. But getting to the root of the crises and winning transformative change can only be achieved if we have fighting forces that only come through mass-based organizing.

The challenges we face are immense. The massive devastation in the Global South caused by the U.S. through ongoing wars, environmental destruction and the climate emergency, foreign interventions, and expropriative economic policies, keep creating an increasing number of migrants within and beyond our homelands. There's rampant militarization and criminalization of our people at borders, in the seas, and within borders on streets, our homes, our schools, our workplaces, and our faith institutions.

The challenges are also not only external to us. Internally, we also face immense challenges. Sectarianism. Professionalism and careerism within nonprofits. Individualism. Alternating between the two extremes of short-sighted pragmatism or ungrounded idealism. All driven by intersecting oppressions and cultivated by capitalism. Replaying the violence, harm, and abuse we have suffered onto each other within our communities and our movements.

The only place we can resolve these internal challenges, and confront the external challenges, at the scale that we need, is within and across our mass-based organizing and movement building. Only such organized forces can go beyond reforms or trying to reconcile ourselves with unjust systems, and instead lead efforts for genuine transformative change. It is within organized mass bases that we build and expand our capacities for how we treat each other, care for one another, test new forms of being and relationships, and model the different world we are trying to build. 

The choices we make today, especially in how we want to take action, will determine what will be possible for us to do tomorrow.