Trump’s FBI Pick Backed Mass Detentions after 9/11

Donald Trump’s pick to be FBI director was at the center of a controversial immigrant detentions in the immediate wake of 9/11, when dozens of people were spirited away to maximum security prisons and kept from communicating with their families and lawyers––sometimes for weeks.

A government watchdog report shows Christopher Wray and an associate at the Justice Department directed the Bureau of Prisons to keep detainees from having access to lawyers for as long as possible––a move civil liberties advocates find worrisome, and which casts light on how the man who may soon helm the FBI views the relationship between Constitutional rights and national security.

On September 11, 2001, Wray was working in the Deputy Attorney General’s office in downtown Washington DC. After the attacks, government lawyers rushed to find what steps they could take to try to forestall any other potential attacks. One of the most controversial moves was by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (a now-defunct agency whose responsibilities were passed on to the Department of Homeland Security). The INS detained more than 700 people who the FBI suspected could have been linked to the 9/11 attacks. According to the watchdog report, issued by the Justice Department’s inspector general in April 2003, almost all were men, mostly from Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, India, and Yemen. They had all committed some sort of immigration violation, either staying longer than their visas allowed or entering the U.S. illegally.