Twenty-four of the twenty-five countries of interest listed in the NSEERS legislation were Muslim-majority nations, which was a clear manifestation of the structural Islamophobic presumption that Muslim identity was correlative with terrorism. NSEERS was predominantly concerned with tracking the activity of Muslim immigrants, particularly while they were within the United States, as evidenced by the nations it honed in on and the arrests made after its enactment. Immediately after it went into force, 80,000 men were entered into the NSEERS registry, the vast majority of them Muslims, “2,870 of whom were detained and 13,799 placed in deportation proceedings within two years after 9/11.”

QUESTION: The specific numbers on detentions and deportation proceedings raise questions about what happened to the roughly 63,000 registrants not detained or deported.

Khaled A. Beydoun, American Islamophobia_ Unde…, loc. 286