DEARBORN — FBI surveillance of the sizable local Arab American community may not come as a shock to many people here. 

In 2014, a leaked federal report designated Dearborn as having the second highest concentration of links to “known or suspected terrorists” in the country. 

However, surveillance of Muslims and Arab Americans nationally goes deeper and is more comprehensive than Dearborn’s residents may perceive, filmmaker Assia Bounadoui said.

For many families, the eavesdropping ears and peering eyes of the federal government follow them to their homes. 

Bounadoui, daughter of Palestinian American immigrants living in Chicago, knows how that feels. Her stories exhibit striking relationships between Arab American households and the FBI.

When she was 14-years-old, a van pulled up at the home of the Bounadoui family; a company needed to install smoke detectors throughout the house, suggesting they complete installation to ensure they were working properly.

Her family began to notice that there were more smoke detectors in their house than they had ever seen before. A few months later, they began to take them apart. 

What they found changed Bounadoui’s life and her neighborhood, forever.

A camera was embedded in each smoke detector.

Now an award-winning journalist and former Al Jazeera America producer, Bounadoui has since taken what her family found in their home and turned their experiences into a documentary: “The Feeling of Being Watched.”

A clip from the film, the directorial debut for the journalist, was previewed at The Arab American National Museum last Friday. The full film will be released next summer.

An engaged audience listened to a discussion on the effects and history of surveillance and profiling of Arab and Muslim American communities. Bounadoui was joined by Dawud Walid, executive director of CAIR-MI; Khaled Beydoun, constitutional law and civil rights professor at the University of Detroit Mercy and Saeed Khan, professor of the history and politics of Islamic civilization at Wayne State University.

A screenshot from the documentary.

An unsuspecting family

Growing up in Bridgeview, home to a large Palestinian community southwest of Chicago, Bounadoui said it was common knowledge to everyone that residents were being watched — “it was a fact of life.”

She recalled the FBI visiting her father twice as a 12-year-old, asking about neighbors, friends and mosque-goers. 

A recent survey conducted by the Arab American Action Network found that a disproportionate 35 percent of families in her neighborhood have been visited by the Bureau.

It wasn’t until years later when she attended journalism school that she realized from her peers that such deeply rooted surveillance of communities was abnormal.

The journalist began an investigation and found that neighborhoods like hers have been spied on by the FBI since the early 90s. 

Although Bounadoui knew the level of intrusiveness was unconstitutional, she said immigrant families were initially largely unmoved because of their exposure in their homelands to the “mukhabarat”, Arab countries’ brutal intelligence agencies. As such, her family was indifferent to the spying.

“These kinds of investigations get a lot of their power from secrecy,” she said. “They count on people to be quiet about it to maintain the secrecy. I think this film is about saying, ‘We don’t want to be quiet about this any longer’ and that we should tell these stories out loud.”

Pushing federal agencies to provide information compels them to remove a name from the Terrorist Watch List or explain why someone has been placed on it, she said. 

Gathering information in plain sight

The FBI employs about 1,500 informants, aside from the numerous community members who share their neighbors’ activities, according to Bounadoui.

Walid, of CAIR-MI, said Countering Violent Extremism is a federal program that aims to gather intelligence by overtly recruiting members of the Arab American community, as well as educators, social workers, mental health professionals and religious leaders.

Walid added that in Boston, Minneapolis, Los Angeles and now Dearborn, Shared Responsibilities Committees, a program within the CVE, employs these individuals to act as de facto FBI agents involved in pooling information about residents.

As social workers and religious leaders are legally obligated to report potentially extremist views to law enforcement, Walid said civil rights concerns arise when Arabs and Muslims express unpopular grievances of failed American policies or political positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Once someone is reported, it then triggers a series of things where a person can end up being on a terrorist watch list,” he said. 

Demonstrated in a recent case involving a young Arab American man, this could lead to the use of FBI informants who provoke suspicious individuals to express extremist intentions, Walid added.

Walid told The AANews that the FBI attends religious gatherings that some imams meet with FBI agents for advice.

He said he is completely against having regular meetings with the FBI to not perpetuate the framework of a suspect community.

 “I think the relationship that many Arab and Muslim leadership have with the FBI is counterproductive and they’re doing a disservice to the community,” Walid said.

While some share Walid’s sentiments that initiatives like the CVE further a relationship based on suspicion, Bounadoui urged Arab and Muslim Americans to maintain a healthy cooperation with the FBI and especially to work together when hate crimes arise.

While doing so, she said the FBI’s history and policies toward the communities should dictate the relations, not halt them, and ensure continued transparency and accountability.

Mosques, however, are not the only place Muslims congregate.

“The university campus, of course, is certainly one of the epicenters for surveillance to occur,” Professor Khan told the audience.

Muslim student organizations are among those caught in the “crosshairs” of targeted spying, he added.

Effects of surveillance

Quoting African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, who posed a question to African Americans on how it feel to be a problem, Khan said Arab and Muslims feel similar sentiments.

“You have a community now that is essentially being problematized at the highest levels of the state,” he said. “And has started to internalize that conceit to feel they are not just marginalized, inferior or surveilled, but also that they are a problem.”

Professor Beydoun said Arabs endure surveillance differently, with racial, ethnic and socioeconomic identity in mind.

He said CVE has a disproportionate impact on working class and poor communities, with a focus on mosques, community centers and student organizations.

Beydoun added that 45 percent of Muslim Americans live at or beneath the nation’s poverty line.

Bounadoui said the effects of surveillance are not just personal, but cause a collective problem of alienation from an individual’s community, neighbors and his or her own identity. 

Neighbors begin to distrust each other, censor themselves and whisper things at home and are afraid to discuss politics and identify as a Muslim or Arab.

Spying on Muslims before 9/11

There is a notion, understood by most as fact, that surveillance and harsh scrutiny of Arab and Muslim Americans began shortly following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the PATRIOT Act. 

Throughout Bounadoui’s research for the film, however, she discovered that Arabs and Muslims have been surveilled since the end of the Cold War.

As the threat of Communism came to an end with the Cold War in the late 80s to the early 90s, the intelligence community shifted its focus to the threat of extremist terrorism, she said.

Throughout the Cold War, the FBI ordered agents to, “Expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate” the activities of certain political movements and leaders, like anti-Vietnam war activists and the Black Panther Party. The program was called COINTELPRO.

Bounadoui said since then, federal agencies have approached the Arab and Muslim American neighborhoods “through the back door” with the use of informants and covert tactics.

Nowadays, Bounadoui said the FBI seeks to openly partner with the community, through initiatives like the CVE.

Walid also referenced the historic spying, saying that with the rise of Black Islamic movements like the Nation of Islam, African American Muslim communities were also surveilled and incarcerated under then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s counterintelligence program.

“That type of surveillance against Muslims has been going on since the late 1950’s,” Walid said. “It has never stopped, it has been perpetual.”