Report: More Residents in Dearborn on Federal Terrorist Watch List Than Any U.S. City Except New York

posted on: Aug 6, 2014

The Detroit suburb of Dearborn, with a population of 96,000 people, has more residents on the federal government’s terrorist watch list than any city in the United States other than New York, according to a report released Tuesday.

The Intercept, an online news site that investigates national security issues, reported Dearborn’s unique standing based on leaked intelligence documents. The Associated Press reported on the same documents last week, but did not include the Dearborn information.

The Intercept reports Dearborn’s large Muslim population likely accounts for the city’s high number of residents on the terrorist watch list. The Top 5 cities on the list, according to the leaked documents, include:

1. New York City
2. Dearborn
3. Houston
4. San Diego
5. Chicago

The Intercept reports:
At 96,000 residents, Dearborn is much smaller than the other cities in the top five, suggesting that its significant Muslim population—40 percent of its population is of Arab descent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau—has been disproportionately targeted for watchlisting.
Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is quoted in the Intercept story. In an interview with MLive on Tuesday, Walid said he wasn’t surprised by the information.

“We never had access to specific numbers, but we always knew our community in Metro Detroit, especially in Dearborn, is under intense scrutiny by the Obama administration based up on our demographics,” Walid said.

“The bigger question is, if you look at terrorism incidents that have taken place, where is the empirical data that shows people in Dearborn, Mich. are committing terrorism?”

Walid said The Intercept story corroborates information obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union showing the FBI uses an ethnic and racial mapping program to monitor Dearborn.

“This is no revelation to us,” Walid said.

The Intercept story included a second angle involving Detroit. Reporters Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereux said the federal government had pared down its terrorist watch list to about 4,000 names before the so-called “underwear bomber” attempted to blow up a plane flying to Detroit in 2009. Since 2010, the Obama administration’s national security agencies have created more than 430,000 terrorism-related persons records and now processes 240 nominations per day.

Dustin Block
MLive