Fahd Ahmed, executive director of the immigrant advocacy group Desis Rising Up and Moving, said after the attacks, his group “started getting calls from women saying, ‘Last night, law enforcement busted into our apartment and took my husband and my brother.’ Children calling us and saying, ‘My father left for work four days ago and he hasn’t come home, and we haven’t heard anything.’”

“There were people who were just disappearing from our communities,” he says, “and nobody knew what was happening to them.”

They were, according to the 9/11 Commission report, arrested as “special interest” detainees. Immigration hearings were closed, detainee communication was limited, and bond was denied until the detainees were cleared of terrorist connections.

A review conducted by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General said its policy meant a significant percentage of the detainees stayed for months despite immigration officials questioning the legality of the prolonged detentions and even though there were no indications they were connected to terrorism.

The “blunderbuss approach” of rounding up Muslims and presuming there would be terrorists among them was “pure racism and xenophobia in operation,” says Rachel Meeropol, senior staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Yasser Ebrahim, an original plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the Center in 2002, was at a shop in his Brooklyn neighborhood and noticed people intently watching the television. “I saw these images on the screen, and for a moment there was like some kind of a movie or something,” he says. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

He had been in the United States since 1992 and enjoyed his life. “I loved everything about America,” he said by Zoom from Egypt.

On Sept. 30, 2001, federal agents showed up at his door. Ebrahim thought the immigration matter would be straightened out quickly, or he would be deported. He remained in custody until June.

For three months, his family did not know what happened to him or his brother. Even then, there was little outside communication. And some officers at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park were physically and verbally abusive.

When Ebrahim was finally allowed to leave, he was given clothes several sizes too big and placed on a plane but without being told the destination. The plane went to Greece and after spending a night in the custody of Greek authorities, he boarded a flight for Cairo.

In 2009 he and four others, including his brother, reached a $1.26 million settlement on the lawsuit. Though not an apology, he says, “we thought it was sort of admitting that something wrong was done to us.”

Umair Anser was 14 and living in Bayonne, New Jersey, when he and classmates watched the twin towers fall on television.

Less than a month later, he came from school and found a nearly catatonic mom and a ransacked home. His father, Anser Mehmood, was gone, along with the family’s computers.

“We didn’t know where our father was for the next three months,” Anser said.

When the family did see him again, it was a different man. “He was so weak … I couldn’t see my dad like that,” Anser said.

With their father gone, there was no financial support for the family. Anser and his brothers were bullied at school; neighbors harassed them at home. It became untenable and the family returned to Pakistan, leaving Mehmood behind, in jail.

Joshua Dratel, co-chair of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ national security committee, says the detentions are a foundational piece of something troubling — an acceptance of more invasive law enforcement for protection from terrorists.

Searches at airports, in buildings, even on subways: “These are things that were once exceptional and extraordinary, and now the exception has become the norm.”

Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford University, says the extreme measures taken after 9/11 have been normalized to the point that “now we don’t even talk about them. They’ve just become part of the kinds of surveillance and deprivation of rights and profiling that we expect to see.”

A recent poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that a majority of Americans, 54%, still believe it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice rights and freedom to fight terrorism.

The lawsuit, in which additional plaintiffs were added after the first five were awarded a settlement, has continued. It has ricocheted through the court system with mixed results, including a 2017 stop at the Supreme Court.

Ebrahim, now owner of a company that provides outsource service, including coding, to other companies, said now, he would consider bringing his teenage son to New York City to see sights and sounds that he found “charming.”

But, he has advice for U.S. citizens: “Never twist the Constitution again. What makes America is the freedom.”

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