WASHINGTON - When President Joe Biden ran for office in 2020, he promised the American Muslim community that he would respond to their concerns about the harmful impact of the federal terrorism watchlist and the no-fly list by reviewing both databases and changing the processes to remove names. Three years later, nothing has been done, write Robert Mccaw and Justin Sadowsky in Common Dreams.

And American Muslims are suffering the consequences. Created by the Bush administration in the aftermath of September 11, the watchlist—then officially the “Terrorist Screening Database,” now the “Terrorist Screening Dataset”—is a list of more than a 1.5 million names of people known or suspected to be terrorists maintained by an organization the FBI made up, called the TSC, though the FBI cannot decide if that is short for “Terrorist Screening Center” or “Threat Screening Center.”

The men and women on the list are all accused by the government of being “reasonably suspected” of having some association with terrorism, but there are no meaningful standards for what qualifies.

Thanks to a recent leak of a 2019 version of part of the list to a Swiss hacker, we now also know what everyone has long suspected—that the so-called terrorist watchlist is essentially a list of Muslim names.

CAIR had statistical experts perform a study of the leaked names on the list, and that study concluded that over 98% of the people on the list are Muslim. In contrast, government reports make clear that the largest terrorist threat to the United States comes from white supremacists.

Life for the Muslims on the list is a nightmare. Those on the list cannot fly without coming to the airport, waiting potentially hours to be cleared by desk agents to fly, and then going through invasive secondary screening.