Los Angeles was not only ground zero for a range of xenophobic policies targeting undocumented (and documented) Latinx communities, but also a pilot city where, in 2014, the Department of Homeland Security launched its counter-radicalization program, Countering Violent Extremism, in partnership with the Los Angeles Police Department. This new counterterror program, which effectively supplanted the federal surveillance model ushered in by the USA PATRIOT Act, deputized LAPD members to function as national security officers tasked with identifying, detaining, prosecuting, and even deporting “homegrown radicals.” Suspicion was disproportionately assigned to recent Muslim converts, particularly young men like Juan, keen on expressing their newfound Muslim identity by wearing a beard, attending Friday prayers, and demonstrating fluency in Arabic—the language tied to Islam, and in line with Islamophobia, terrorism.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on securitization and the merging of domestic policing with counterterrorism, and to critiques of post-9/11 surveillance expansion. DEFINE: Explains how DHS's Countering Violent Extremism program functionally replaced the federal USA PATRIOT Act surveillance model with localized deputization.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 66