9/11's harmful legacy of Latino criminalization

U.S. Latinos were increasingly targeted by the federal government following the 9/11 terror attacks — an expert explains why it matters today.

Sept. 11, 2026 9:12 AM PT

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Exactly 25 years ago today, my parents were getting me ready to go to kindergarten, when I looked up at the TV in our living room and saw the World Trade Center on fire.

Even at such a young age, I understood the gravity of the situation — but even now, the scale of the damage is hard to wrap my mind around.

While nearly 3,000 people died as a direct result of the Sept. 11 attacks, thousands more died due to the toxic fumes spread across New York City after the towers crumbled. A myriad of others are still dealing with cancers linked to the noxious air produced by the event.

But the scale of disaster from the attacks reached far beyond the tragedy of the day.

Politicians leveraged the situation to justify a “war on terror” internationally and expand mass surveillance within U.S. borders. With the plane hijackers hailing from countries predominantly populated by Arabs and Muslims, 9/11 also became a launching point for a strengthened wave of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment.

According to FBI data, hate crimes against Muslims skyrocketed in 2001 and have remained at levels much higher than they ever were pre-9/11. Even now, 42% of Americans still believe Muslims have a negative impact on the country, a 2026 Pew Research Center survey found.

The attacks also led to a general rise in suspicion of non-white populations and immigrants within the U.S., which had a severe downstream effect on the Latino community.

As a direct result of 9/11, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created the Department of Homeland Security, then subsequently the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — both of which continue to terrorize Latino communities a quarter-century after their conception.

9/11 didn’t create these sentiments against the “other” in the U.S. — those ideas were ingrained into the country long ago — but it did provide an avenue for political opportunists to further their ambitions.

“This broad building of a security state that’s manifested in things like [the DHS], go into hyperdrive after 9/11,” said Anna Sampaio, a professor of ethnic studies and political science at Santa Clara University.

Sampaio literally wrote the book — “Terrorizing Latina/o Immigrants: Race, Gender, and Immigration Politics in the Age of Security” — on how Latinos have been affected by the campaign known as the “war on terror.”

One major shift in discourse that happened after 9/11, according to Sampaio, was a rise in the racialization of security that labeled non-white, non-Christians and non-citizens as foreign threats.

“Latinos who are undocumented, longtime permanent residents and even citizens are constituted as this racialized, demonized, foreign element,” she said. “So this term ‘terrorism’ increasingly creeps in to describe Latinos and is then used to justify this aggressive expansion of state authority in legislation — as well as [to execute] large-scale raids and roundups. That’s a key feature of what happens after 9/11 that we didn’t see happening really before 9/11.”

Along with the Homeland Security Act, Congress also pushed forward the Patriot Act in 2001, which sought to enhance the nation’s ability to fight terrorism through an expansion of surveillance capabilities and an increase in penalties for crimes deemed as terrorism.

Immigration, in turn, was viewed as a particularly strong method by which “terrorists” could enter the U.S. — and immigrants were more heavily policed.

“There’s a whole host of legislation that’s [been] passed by Congress that increases the scrutiny of immigrants: including access to things like work authorization, policing and scrutiny of immigrants’ daily lives, that expands the possibilities for detention, arrest and deportation,” Sampaio said.

The 297(g) agreements, which allowed for local law enforcement officers to carry out the duties of federal immigration enforcement agents, helped to further amplify the ability for raids and arrests.

After largely dying out by the ’80s and ’90s, large-scale immigration raids became the primary vehicle for immigration implementation post-9/11, Sampaio noted.

Latinos became particularly susceptible to being detained at airports and federally secured facilities.

“These raids were often presented in racially neutral language, claiming to go after persons of unknown origin. What that really means is scrutinizing the I-9 records of employees in airports, and businesses around airports, and disproportionately apprehending Latinos,” she said. “They’re picked up not because they’re undocumented, but because they’re readily described as potential terrorists, because they’re working here with unknown documents in a secure facility. So we have thousands of Latinos across the country that are apprehended in these operations.”

Raids also took place at commercial sites, as was most famously seen in 2006, when federal officials raided six meatpacking plants across the country, alleging that illegal immigrants were using the stolen identities of U.S. citizens. Over 1,300 mostly Latino workers were accused of violating immigration rules; most were deported.

“So there’s all this justification of rooting out these ‘foreign’ and ‘threatening’ elements because they are potential terrorists and engaging all these operations,” said Sampaio. “But not one shred of evidence linking Latinos to terrorism is ever found.”

These raids and policies naturally led to Latinos feeling distressed about their own standing in the country in the wake of 9/11. Sampaio pointed to a 2002 Pew Research Center poll that reported that more than half of all Latino adults felt a sense of fear for themselves and their families.

Support for such extreme policies grew popular among Americans, as politicians preyed on the general public’s fears of violence and modeled themselves as protectors of the people.

“The state absolutely capitalized on this trauma to grow its power, its authority and to really infringe on civic liberties and all the kinds of shields and protections that are supposed to be in place,” Sampaio said. “It was this massive power grab that happened and we’ve never come back from it.”

These oppressive immigration stances have persisted at the executive level, regardless of which political party has been helming the country.

“President Obama extended many of the same security measures that were created under President George W. Bush,” Sampaio said. “He reauthorized them. He tried to buy Republican support by fortifying the border and increasing tensions and deportations. He then oversaw this massive escalation of detentions and deportations until the last two years, then he shifted.”

This decades-long legacy of criminalizing Latinos helped bring the U.S. to the point at which ICE arrests are at an all-time high and politicians like President Trump can point to Latinos as straw-men for the economic woes of the country.

“People pretend like [Trump] created this problem, and he himself is the author of all of these issues — when in fact, the seeds of it are 30 years old, if not older,” Sampaio said. “There’s this long history of racializing Latino immigrants as foreign and threatening throughout the entire 20th century. It simply turned on after 9/11 and [now] Trump capitalizes on that.”

(Jackie Rivera / For The Times; Martina Ibáñez-Baldor / Los Angeles Times)

Woman accuses César Chávez of sexual assault, sues nonprofits with tie to labor leader

(Larry Bessel/Los Angeles Times)

A woman who formerly worked for labor leader César Chávez and with the United Farm Workers movement filed a lawsuit in California this week against UFW Foundation and the César Chávez Foundation.

Identified as Jane Doe, the 86-year-old woman is suing the organizations on allegations of negligence, sexual harassment and civil rights violations, claiming they facilitated her abuse and did nothing to protect her and others from Chávez’s unwanted sexual advances.

She claimed that Chávez raped her in 1973, as his bodyguard stood watch outside. The lawsuit alleged that he sexually assaulted her again years after the initial incident.

“Employees and others there within UFW were aware of the abuse but failed to respond to this knowledge in any manner,” the suit alleged. “Instead, despite this knowledge, the UFW employees ensured that any abuse was done in closed quarters, outside of visibility of others.”

The two nonprofits have not officially commented on the lawsuit.

News of the lawsuit comes nearly six months after The New York Times reported that Chávez’s former acolytes Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas were groomed and sexually assaulted by the former labor leader while they were still in junior high. Fellow farmworker advocate Dolores Huerta revealed that she gave away two daughters conceived when Chavéz raped her in the 1960s.

California Latinos and Latinas aren’t seeing eye to eye politically

(Chris Pizzello / Associated Press)

A new UCLA- UC Berkeley poll found that Latinos and Latinas in California have radically different political leanings.

Overall, Latinas were more likely to support Democratic candidates and back policies aimed at helping immigrants compared to their male counterparts.

While 69% of Latinas mentioned that protecting immigrant communities was very important to them, whereas only 52% of Latinos felt it was very important.

The gap in ideologies was more prevalent among those under the age of 30. Of Latinas in that age group, 88% said protecting immigrant communities is very important, compared with 60% of Latinos. Over 80% of under-30 Latinas placed a premium on fighting the policies of President Trump, while around 50% of Latinos in that demographic felt similarly.

The survey also found that while the ideological gap remained prevalent among Latinas and Latinos without college education, those with bachelor’s degrees tended to be more politically aligned.

“Although this survey represents California registered voters, the patterns it identifies deserve national attention,” said Nicholas Vargas, a co-author of the report and professor of Chicanx/Latinx studies at UC Berkeley.

“As both parties compete for Latino voters in races that will determine control of Congress, they should not assume that Latinas and Latino men — or voters of the same age and educational background — are responding to the political environment in the same way,” he added.

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Ideas expressed in the piece

The article argues that the 9/11 attacks became a catalyst for an expanded U.S. “security state,” in which immigration enforcement was folded into national security and immigrants, especially Latinos, were increasingly treated as potential threats rather than workers or neighbors.^[4]^[7]
It contends that the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement after 9/11 placed immigration control directly inside an anti-terrorism framework, effectively criminalizing many noncitizens and blurring the line between immigration violations and terrorism-related offenses.^[4]^[7]
The piece suggests that laws such as the Patriot Act and subsequent security legislation intensified surveillance and policing of immigrants’ daily lives, increasing detention, arrest and deportation powers in ways that disproportionately affected Latinos regardless of legal status.^[4]^[7]^[8]
It highlights expert analysis that describes a “racialization of security,” in which non-white, non-Christian and non-citizen populations were redefined as foreign threats, leading Latinos—undocumented, permanent residents and citizens alike—to be cast as demonized outsiders within U.S. communities.^[4]^[7]^[8]
The article argues that local–federal enforcement programs, including 287(g) and similar agreements, enabled local police to act as immigration agents, amplifying raids and roundups that disrupted Latino neighborhoods and slowed integration by reinforcing segregation and fear.^[8]^[7]
It emphasizes that workplace and community raids became a primary enforcement tool in the post‑9/11 era, pointing to the 2006 Swift meatpacking plant raids as emblematic of large-scale operations that detained more than 1,200 workers, most of them Latino, and spread panic across entire towns.^[1]^[2]^[5]^[10]
The piece suggests that these raids were justified publicly as neutral crackdowns on identity theft or unauthorized hiring but, in practice, swept up thousands of workers and community members, prompting unions and advocates to argue that worksite raids terrorize workers, destroy families and are ineffective as immigration reform.^[1]^[2]^[6]^[10]
It underscores reporting and research that describe how such enforcement actions and the broader “Homeland Security state” leave Latino communities with heightened fear of deportation, psychological stress and economic disruption, affecting undocumented migrants, permanent residents and U.S. citizens in mixed‑status families.^[6]^[7]^[8]
The article argues that this decades‑long pattern of criminalizing Latino immigrants laid the groundwork for later political rhetoric that uses Latinos as scapegoats for economic and social problems, showing how contemporary mass deportation campaigns and record‑high ICE arrests fall disproportionately on Latino communities.^[3]^[7]^[11]

Different views on the topic

At the same time, federal officials and security agencies maintain that immigration enforcement after 9/11 is driven by legal status and national security concerns, not race or ethnicity, rejecting allegations of racial profiling as “reckless” and insisting that enforcement targets those unlawfully present in the country.^[3]
Government statements emphasize that workplace raids, such as the 2006 Swift operations, were launched to dismantle large identity‑theft schemes and send a clear deterrent message to employers that hiring unauthorized workers is unacceptable, framing these actions as necessary to uphold the rule of law and protect U.S. citizens’ documents.^[1]^[2]^[9]^[10]^[12]
Security officials further argue that agents rely on reasonable suspicion and probable cause standards in conducting immigration investigations and arrests, asserting that these procedures are consistent with constitutional protections and focused on document fraud and immigration violations rather than ethnic background.^[3]^[9]^[12]
Some policy and enforcement perspectives contend that placing immigration under the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11 was a logical response to global terrorism, integrating border and interior controls with counterterrorism efforts to prevent potential threats from exploiting immigration systems.^[7]^[9]
Additionally, employer‑sanctions advocates and certain legal commentators view high‑profile workplace raids as part of a broader strategy to curb unauthorized employment, arguing that vigorous enforcement at job sites is an essential complement to any immigration reform and can pressure companies to improve verification practices.^[1]^[2]^[12]