From Encampments to Union Halls

The Anti-Terror Framework Is Being Used to Break Dissent Across the U.S.

Photo by Austin on Unsplash

A dispatch tracing how the anti-protest apparatus built for BLM has now migrated into labor organizing, immigration solidarity, and Palestine-related dissent, allowing cities and states to frame nearly any disruptive action as a threat to national security.

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What began as a counterterrorist war on foreign enemies has become a blueprint for policing Americans. Namely, the contentious yet sophisticated anti-terror framework that was largely expanded post-9/11, which continued to broaden until its own mechanisms began to undermine it. How do you diagnose a system designed to protect U.S. civilians from security threats, to defend civil liberties in the event of extremism, and prioritize human rights whilst under fire, when its own citizens are the targets?

For two decades, the United States quietly constructed a counterterror architecture hidden from most Americans. This included databases capable of tracking entire populations, fusion centers linking federal and local police, and legal categories broad enough to turn dissent into “extremism.” As the Center for Constitutional Rights notes, “core features of U.S. antiterrorism law were developed after 9/11 to expand federal surveillance and policing powers, creating a legal infrastructure broad enough to encompass entire communities.” Moreover, the Brennan Center found in their research that these expansions disproportionately impacted communities of color, with surveillance and policing practices focused overwhelmingly on Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and immigrant communities—despite little evidence that these measures improve public safety.

During 2020, following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, this architecture folded inward. Federal agencies deployed counterterror tools on protestors that had previously been used almost exclusively against Muslims, Arabs, and immigrants. Department of Homeland Security fusion centers circulated intelligence reports on demonstrators, local police tapped federal watchlisting technologies, and states began passing “anti-riot” and “critical infrastructure” laws modeled on national-security language. According to a report by the Center for Constitutional Rights, this period marked the moment when “core features of U.S. antiterrorism law were expanded and ‘brought home’ to repress domestic protest movements,” collapsing the legal distinction between foreign terrorism and U.S. civil disobedience.

DHS and FBI documents released by the FOIA indicate that Black Lives Matter demonstrations were surveilled throughout the summer of 2020 by counterterrorism teams who categorized racial-justice organizers as “extremists.” Typical protest behavior was considered “pre-incident mobilization,” suggesting no known margins between what authorities would consider peaceful protest and terrorist conspiracy. At the state level, legislators accelerated the trend. Dozens of bills introduced between 2020 and 2022 blurred the lines between protest, disorderly conduct, and terrorism, imposing felony charges for blocking traffic and expanding the definition of “critical infrastructure” to encompass areas near pipelines, ports, railroads, and government buildings. 

By 2024, post-Biden to Trump shift of power, the counter-terror paradigm was equipped to weaponize student protest speech as violent extremism. The student encampments were regarded by major news outlets as a radical security crisis, not as a civil demonstration of the First Amendment. Al Jazeera’s Rami Khouri observed that mainstream outlets “weaponized” their coverage of campus protests, echoing official rhetoric that cast students as “terrorists in training,” while essentially evading any reckoning of Israel’s bombardment in Gaza. In the Guardian, Arielle Angel argued that accusations of antisemitism were being used as “the tip of the spear in a frightening illiberal project,” providing cover for a broader right-wing effort to restrict protest, DEI programs, and academic freedom.

Under the second Trump administration, this framework had new, unforgiving consequences. On the criminal side, The New York Times reported that a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters at Stanford were charged with felony vandalism and felony conspiracy to trespass after a three-hour building occupation — a level of charging traditionally reserved for serious property damage or violent crime. On the immigration side, the federal government escalated dramatically. According to Reuters, Trump signed an executive order in January 2025 pledging to deport non-citizen students and residents who joined “pro-jihadist protests,” promising to “cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.” Legal experts at the Knight First Amendment Institute warned that deporting non-citizens for their political speech would be flatly unconstitutional, but the order signaled how fully the “terrorist sympathizer” frame had been grafted onto campus protest.

The backlash did not stop on campuses. Labor organizations and civil-liberties groups have long documented how employers use surveillance — from digital monitoring to internal “risk” assessments — to track and deter union organizing. In 2024 Amazon workers in Missouri filed an NLRB charge over the use of AI-powered surveillance systems to monitor and suppress union organizing, arguing that constant algorithmic tracking makes communication between workers impossible. According to The American Prospect, retail’s rapid embrace of AI surveillance has become so invasive that one in four workers say they are considering quitting—and the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which would block state regulation of AI for a decade, could lock these monitoring systems in place with virtually no oversight. What the current moment revealed was not a new practice, but how easily counterterror and extremism language can be layered onto surveillance systems already designed to discipline collective action.

Amnesty International’s research shows that the State Department’s “Catch and Revoke” initiative now uses AI tools like Babel Street’s Babel X and Palantir’s Immigration OS to monitor social media, cross-reference visa records, and generate automated “threat assessments” of foreign nationals, including international students. Babel X performs sentiment and intent analysis of online posts and continuously scrapes new data, effectively rendering flagged individuals “suspicious by default.” At the same time, Palantir’s upgraded Immigration OS streamlines the selection, tracking, and removal of people deemed enforcement priorities. “These technologies enable authorities to swiftly track and target international students and other marginalized migrant groups at an unprecedented scale,” Erika Guevara-Rosas, the Senior Director for Research, Advocacy, Policy and Campaigns at Amnesty Innternational explained. Amnesty documented cases in which students from Muslim-majority countries had their visas revoked or were detained after speaking out about Gaza, underscoring how easily pro-Palestine expression is collapsed into “terrorism-related content” by elusive algorithms. 

At the same time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is moving to expand human-led social media surveillance. Reporting by WIRED shows that ICE plans to staff its targeting centers in Vermont and California with nearly 30 contractors tasked with scanning platforms like X, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook around the clock, feeding “open-source intelligence” into enforcement leads. These analysts will be armed with commercial databases such as LexisNexis Accurint and Thomson Reuters CLEAR, which combine property records, phone data, vehicles, and other personal details into detailed dossiers. Brookings scholars have warned that these tools, layered on top of Palantir’s case management systems and DHS data lakes, create an enforcement environment where immigration status, political speech, and digital traces blur together. 

The same counter-terror infrastructure built after 9/11 and domestically tested on Black Lives Matter is now being openly used to discipline students, workers, and migrants under the banner of “fighting extremism.” What changes from movement to movement is not the toolkit, but the justification. The core is a security framework that treats dissent itself as a form of risk, and that increasingly reserves its harshest tools, like AI surveillance and visa revocations, for those most politically vulnerable.