Today, CVE policing ranks among the most destructive forms of structural Islamophobia. Its strategy and enforcement, while framed in a facially neutral fashion, is “cloaked in expertise about the process by which Muslims become terrorists.” Individuals who maximize their Muslim identity, or “Muslimness,” by freely expressing their faith and exercising their First Amendment rights, expose themselves to being profiled by the state as refusing to assimilate, as religiously conservative, as extreme or subversive, to name just some of the “bad Muslim” tropes that open the door to CVE suspicion. In short, the more Muslim one is, the more likely one will be pegged as a subject of CVE interest.

XREF: Connects to broader literature on racialized surveillance and the paradox where protected rights themselves ground suspicion.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 380