DHS expanded state power while 9/11 rituals mask the cost
By Imani Sutton · Reporting from Atlanta ·
Twenty-five years after nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers flew four airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the ritual of American…
The Ritual of the Memorial and the Architecture of Permanent Fear
Twenty-five years after nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers flew four airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the ritual of American grief has hardened into a permanent administrative state. As KDBC and The Guardian both report, the anniversary ceremonies brought out the familiar choreography: the reading of 2,983 names at Ground Zero—including victims of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—a massive American flag unfurled down the side of the Pentagon, and a new seventh moment of silence added for those who died of 9/11-related illnesses and injuries. Yet beneath the blue beams of the Tribute in Light, the numbers tell the real story of what this anniversary actually purchases. The Department of Homeland Security, an agency born from that September morning, now employs 270,000 people and has formally commissioned "Resilience Plaza" using World Trade Center steel and Pentagon stone. Meanwhile, ICE boasts of arresting more than 2,150 known or suspected terrorists and deporting 2,015 between January 20, 2025, and September 9, 2026. Daily Sabah notes the solemn remembrances stretching from New York to Mount Washington, but the machinery grinding behind the podiums has long since detached from the day it purports to honor.
We have been here before, down to the exact mechanics of how a nation processes a blast on its own soil. The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 killed 168 people when Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols detonated a rental truck outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, shattering an Oklahoma morning and instantly summoning a national vow that we would never let the administrative apparatus of the state sleep again. That earlier domestic tragedy gave us the blueprint for what followed: the immediate rush to expand federal surveillance, the erection of concrete barriers around public life, and the implicit bargain that if we just surrendered enough constitutional breathing room to the security state, we could buy immunity from history. Like the solemn remembrance of the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, today's quarter-century milestone asks us to confuse the expansion of state power with the preservation of human life. But the state does not dismantle its barricades when the emergency recedes; it simply finds new populations to point them at.
When the War on Terror Comes Home to the Domestic Borderlands
The core betrayal of the post-9/11 era is not merely that trillions of dollars were squandered on foreign quagmires while our water systems corroded and our housing markets went algorithmic, but that the surveillance state built to hunt al-Qaeda abroad was always destined to migrate inward. As Daily Sabah and The Guardian record, the political ascent of Donald Trump—currently attending the Pentagon commemoration alongside Vice President JD Vance—did not materialize out of thin air. It stepped directly into the slipstream of xenophobia and nationalism that the Bush administration unleashed forty-five days after the attacks with the Patriot Act. When legal scholars like Jameel Jaffer point out that the material support laws and executive deference forged a quarter-century ago are now being weaponized against anti-ICE protesters in Texas, university student demonstrators, and journalists threatened under the Espionage Act, they are describing a closed loop. The mechanisms designed to secure the empire against external enemies have become the primary tools for managing domestic dissent.
The strongest opposing case for this security apparatus rests on the raw, unyielding imperative of prevention. As Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin bluntly put it during the ceremonies, "We can’t afford to miss one opportunity to prevent it from happening again." The advocates of this permanent posture argue that we live in a dangerous world populated by actors who wish us harm, and that any rollback of DHS authorities, ICE detentions, or intelligence-sharing frameworks is an invitation to another catastrophic failure on the scale of September 11. It is a powerful, emotionally airtight argument that relies on the genuine terror of that Tuesday morning, insisting that the state's primary duty is absolute physical survival, and that freedom is a secondary luxury that can only be doled out when security is guaranteed.
The Generation That Inherited the Surveillance State Without Remembering the Spark
That defense collapses when you look at who is actually bearing the cost of this perpetual state of exception. Approximately 100 million Americans are now too young to remember the attacks, according to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, meaning a plurality of the country has lived its entire life inside a security theater that treats every citizen as a latent threat and every immigrant as an invading army. The grief of families like Jenna Jacobs McPartland—whose husband Ariel perished at Windows on the World—has been hijacked to justify a politics of "othering" that has simply swapped out the targets. As Jeremy Varon notes, the Arabs and Muslims placed under suspicion in the early 2000s have been seamlessly replaced by brown-skinned migrants from the Global South, subjected to the same willful infliction of suffering and denial of basic hygiene and legal access in detention facilities. Even at the memorial services themselves, the cracks in the official narrative showed when 9/11 widow Terry Strada stepped to the microphone and delivered a blistering rebuke, declaring it "one betrayal after another" and demanding that President Trump tell the Saudis to stop lying about their role in the carnage.
We are paying for a quarter-century of misgovernment that traded our constitutional order for the comforting illusion of absolute control, leaving a nation that is heavily policed, deeply divided, and thoroughly unequipped to handle the actual crises of our time. The billions poured into detention squads and border walls will not stop a warming planet, will not fix a broken grid, and will not lower a rent check set by a corporate algorithm. By treating every domestic social conflict as a counterterrorism problem, the American state has ensured that its own decline is self-inflicted.