The neighborhood functioned as an ecosystem of community and care. In a state of government abandonment, these community ecosystems showed up. The local mosque was where people solved problems together, welcomed newly arrived immigrants, raised money for families in crisis, and helped neighbors navigate unfamiliar institutions. The grocery store owner wasn't simply selling food. He helped refugee and immigrant families find work, connected them with food assistance, lent money when parents came up short before payday, and introduced newcomers to the mosque down the street. Taxi drivers gathered outside exchanging news from home. Women on the block watched over kids who weren't their own.

Even with all of the imperfections and challenges that come with community, these community members represented institutional pillars. They formed a community ecosystem that made survival and belonging possible.

That ecosystem was dismantled in front of me post - 9/11.

The same mosque that had served as a refuge became a site of surveillance. The same stores where neighbors once gathered were now watched by law enforcement. Ordinary conversations suddenly carried political risk. Precisely when community was needed most, the state sought to dismantle connection through a strategic campaign of surveillance, policing, and othering. 

These policies stretched from the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which required thousands of nationals from 25 countries—predominantly Muslim countries—to register with the federal government under the presumption of suspicion, to aggressive immigration enforcement that relied on racial and religious profiling. In New York City, the NYPD Intelligence Division  mapped Muslim neighborhoods, monitored mosques, restaurants, businesses, and student organizations, and treated the routines of everyday life as objects of intelligence gathering despite no evidence of criminal wrongdoing. At the same time, hundreds of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men were swept into immigration detention, held for months after their immigration cases had been resolved, and, in many cases, confined in the Administrative Maximum Special Housing Unit (ADMAX SHU), where they endured prolonged solitary confinement with the lights left on twenty-four hours a day. 

It took me years to understand that I had not simply witnessed the disruption of one neighborhood. It was not until college, as a student at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice, that I had the opportunity to study the policies that had reshaped my childhood and reverberated across the globe. My classmates and I belonged to what scholars have called the "9/11 generation," whose political consciousness was forged in the shadow of the surveillance, policing, and state violence that followed September 11. That realization transformed me into a student organizer, only to discover that the same surveillance apparatus that had dismantled my community after 9/11 had also reached my own campus. 

While post 9/11,  Islamophobia was a common experience on college campuses for Muslim students all across the country, in 2012, the Associated Press revealed that NYPD had sent an informant, Shamiur Rahman, who had been assigned to infiltrate the Muslim Student Association at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. For many of us from working-class backgrounds, John Jay was a pathway out of poverty and a place where we made sense of the structural violence that had shaped our childhoods. We found others who carried similar stories and built the relationships and political imagination necessary to organize for a different future. Yet the very institution where we sought education, belonging, and economic mobility had itself become a conduit for state surveillance.

While many rightly understood these revelations as a chilling assault on free speech and political association, that framing captures only part of the harm. The deeper injury was that some of the most marginalized working-class Muslim students, many of whom had already come of age under the shadow of the War on Terror, witnessed state violence against their families and communities, or fled it altogether, were subjected once again to state surveillance in the very institution where they sought safety, opportunity, and even pathways to justice. The effect was not simply to chill speech, but to retraumatize a generation whose lives had already been shaped by the very apparatus they had come to college hoping to understand and transform.

Moving through the weight of these experiences, I understood that the state's project was never simply to police individuals: it was to consistently fracture the spaces where marginalized communities gathered to learn, belong, build power, and imagine different futures.

That realization became the foundation of my own organizing. What began as an effort to understand the dismantling of my own community ultimately changed how I understood the War on Terror itself. I came to see that the surveillance of neighborhoods in the Bronx and the destruction of ecosystems abroad were not separate consequences of the same war. They were manifestations of the same governing logic. 

It is a global blueprint of disposability in which national security becomes the justification for rendering children, families, communities, students, and even the air and water that sustain life as acceptable collateral.