By Yumna Rizvi and Elizabeth Beavers
On June 21, the U.S. military struck a speedboat in the Caribbean, killing at least two people in the attack. In a statement posted to X with black-and-white video of the strike, U.S. Southern Command described the killing as “a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations,” and declared the dead to be “narco-terrorists.”
The death toll from the United States’ killing spree in international waters has now surpassed more than 200 people, and at least one international law expert is calling for criminal accountability. As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 quickly approaches, it is critical to recognize that the legal structures, tactics and rhetoric with which the Trump administration is purportedly combating these “threats” come straight from the grim collection of unlawful, immoral, and counterproductive choices that make up the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’ playbook.
The loaded gun left behind
Three days after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) which granted broad powers that all post-9/11 presidents have used to justify U.S. military operations against groups they designate as “terrorist” in a total of 22 countries. While the Obama and Biden administrations retreated from “global war on terror” rhetorical framing, they maintained its core premise by asserting the authority to lethally target those they deemed to be associated with terror groups outside of actual on-the-ground armed conflict, including against U.S. citizens and groups that didn’t even exist in 2001.
The post-9/11 era also ushered in a more explicit framing by the U.S. government that immigrants are inherently suspicious potential “terrorists,” particularly those from Muslim-majority countries or people of color. This frame was used to justify and enable a host of rights-violating programs and practices, aimed especially at Muslim and South Asian noncitizen men. More than 1,000 were detained domestically by the FBI without charge immediately after 9/11. Close to 800 were seized abroad and held at Guantanamo, where 15 still remain in indefinite detention.
The abuses also included an openly discriminatory Muslim registry during the Bush administration, renditions to torture (like that of Canadian citizen Maher Arar), and the CIA’s own black-site torture program. On a structural level, Congress enshrined the notion that immigration law and policy was, first and foremost, a matter of counter-terrorism in the eyes of the U.S. government, by creating the Department of Homeland Security and its sub-agencies, including Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Both courts and Congress have declined to meaningfully check any of these blatant illegalities, leaving in place a dangerous legacy as Donald Trump was elected for president a second time.
The Trump administration’s new war on terror
Since coming to office last year, President Trump and his administration have framed immigration as an “invasion,” cartels as complicit “terrorist organizations,” and dissent as “domestic terrorism” requiring extraordinary measures.
In its first show of performative cruelty, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority from the 1700s to send over 200 Venezuelan men to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador without due process on the theory their migration was an “invasion.” Former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posed for cameras in front of detained men, celebrating their detention and torture. Next, the administration began transferring immigrants from the U.S. to Guantanamo Bay, and became the first to transfer individuals from the continental U.S. to the base, including holding some in one of the military detention facilities. In parallel, they sent people to South Sudan, Libya, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and other third countries where the government’s own reports document human rights violations like torture, extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances. This violated the principle of non-refoulement, enshrined in international and domestic law, and echoed earlier “war on terror” renditions.
Inside the United States, immigrants the administration claims are undocumented are also subjected to secretive detention and possible torture. A person who was formerly detained at the now-defunct “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention facility in Florida calls the place “a copy of Guantanamo.” Of the administration’s strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth repeatedly described the individuals and groups as “al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere.” The comparison is not incidental, it is the point. The administration has underscored these actions by designating transnational drug cartels as “terrorist” in part because of their alleged role in facilitating U.S. border crossings. Each of these actions are part of the administration’s unified theory that migration is warfare, immigrants and cartels are terrorists, and so the war on terror continues.
What’s next
The counter-terrorism language and rationale are increasingly coming closer to home. The administration has unleashed militarized enforcement deployments to target immigrants throughout American cities and in response to protests. National Security Presidential Memorandum – 7 blurred the lines between counter-terrorism, immigration enforcement, and domestic dissent by directing federal agencies to expand investigations and surveillance against groups who oppose Trump’s vision of America. The White House’s Counterterrorism Strategy made this official in May by identifying “narcoterrorists” and transnational gangs, and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists” alongside groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS as threats.
We saw it in practice earlier this year when Renee Good and Alex Pretti of Minnesota were killed and labeled “domestic terrorists” before their bodies went cold. We continue to see it as the administration “designates” “antifa” as a terrorist group (despite there being no such thing legally as a domestic terrorist designation), and prosecutes left-leaning activists as “antifa terrorists.”
Until the U.S. meaningfully reckons with the legal and moral wreckage of the post 9/11 era, this cycle will not end. A real end to post-9/11 abuses means, at a minimum, eliminating mechanisms that allow for discretionary “terrorist” designations and repealing laws that punish peaceful speech and associations rather than actual violent conduct as “terrorism.” It means repealing legal authorities that have enabled presidents to wage open-ended military campaigns around the world, ending the use of force outside actual armed conflicts, responsibly ending military detention at Guantanamo Bay, and ensuring the base is never again used to house any groups. It means declassifying and releasing the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s “torture report,” providing redress to victims, and holding those responsible accountable. It also means abolishing all programs that militarize local law enforcement agencies and deputize them in the service of a system that treats migration like terrorism.
The idea that the U.S. president gets to decide who is and is not a “terrorist” and unleash the full power of the U.S. security state on those so labeled was wrongheaded from the outset and only becomes more so as it morphs and grows over time. Unless this framework is dismantled, the targets may change with the political winds, but the harms will remain the same.
Yumna Rizvi is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Victims of Torture. Elizabeth Beavers is an assistant professor of law at Widener University Delaware Law School.
