article: The Terrorist Watchlist— Growing at a Rate Terrorism Itself Can Only Dream Of

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Why Not Just Get It Over With And Put Everyone On It?

A Machine That Only Grows
Twenty years on, the terrorist watchlist has swelled from 120,000 names in 2003 to nearly 2 million today — a population that, if gathered in one place, would rival the sixth-largest city in America. Officials describe the system as “extremely opaque.” No one really knows how people get on, and once added, names are rarely removed. The list grows, but transparency does not.

Nervous Defenses
Even insiders reveal the contradictions. Monty Hawkins — a career official who has overseen the Terrorist Screening Database under every president since George W. Bush — gave his first-ever TV interview this year. He admitted the list ballooned because the government had become “better” at its job, a word he tied to artificial intelligence. His nervous, evasive phrasing felt less like a celebration of accuracy than a bureaucrat stammering that the net simply got wider. As in a scene from Spies Like Us, it was word salad at a podium, meant to obscure what couldn’t be comfortably admitted.

“We became better at our job, essentially, of finding the information.”
“[That is not something really on [the] list that we ever deleted from very quickly.”
— Monty Hawkins, CBS, 2025

Imtiaz Tyab, the CBS reporter, called the list “extremely opaque,” noting the 2 million names equaled “the sixth-largest city in the U.S.” and that the government threshold was only “reasonable suspicion.”

“Reasonable Suspicion”
The government insists it only needs “reasonable suspicion” to place a person on the watchlist. But what does that mean in practice? Courts have struggled with it. Federal judges have at times declared the list unconstitutional for violating due process — as in Latif v. Holder (2014) and Elhady v. Kable (2019) — only to see appeals courts uphold it in the name of “national security.” The standard remains elastic, undefined, and ripe for abuse.

One might be forgiven for thinking that “reasonable suspicion” means whatever the agencies want it to mean on a given day.

The Numbers Don’t Add Up
There have been fewer than a thousand terrorist incidents on U.S. soil in the past three decades, yet nearly two million people are now flagged as “suspects.” Using a conservative assumption — that even half the list represents innocent Americans — that is one million citizens treated as latent terrorists. By the math, that’s over a thousand Americans flagged for every actual incident. We are told most on the list are foreign nationals, but if that is the case, why is the government permitting such numbers of supposed terrorists to enter and remain in the country at all? The contradiction is hard to ignore: either the list is padded with dubious names, or U.S. policy itself tolerates what it claims to be fighting.

Scuttlebutt has it the expansion is less about genuine threats than about padding databases, a way to make the machinery look indispensable.

Border Paradoxes
Former ICE Director Tom Homan claims there has been a “3,500% increase” in people on terrorist watchlists arrested at the border under Biden. He offered no raw numbers or definitions, but the figure itself is staggering. Whether or not the math holds, the rhetoric reinforces the paradox: the list keeps ballooning while those it supposedly targets continue to cross into the U.S.

There are those who believe this mismatch is no accident — that the real focus was never the border at all.

The Inversion
Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX), a Trump 47 ally, framed the inversion bluntly:

“We live in an upside down world where Americans are vetted and surveilled more than illegal aliens… It’s my opinion that this administration views patriots, or as the Biden administration calls them, MAGA Republicans, as national security threats, while viewing illegal aliens on the terrorist watch list as asylum seekers.”

He pressed DHS on its inability to track migrants encountered on the list while citizens — particularly “MAGA Republicans” — are cast as security threats. His words put into the open what others only hint at: the government’s harshest gaze is aimed inward, not outward.

Cases That Prove the Point
Ahmad Chebli: A U.S. citizen wrongly placed on the No Fly List after refusing to be an FBI informant; removed only after the ACLU sued.
Gill v. DOJ: Citizens placed into counterterrorism databases for lawful conduct.
James Robinson: A U.S. Attorney with security clearance, still harassed by bloated watchlists.
Mark Daniel Lyttle: A U.S. citizen wrongly deported, left wandering homeless in Central America.
The Demir Family: Humanitarians repeatedly flagged, searched, and stranded at airports with no explanation.
Critics argue these cases are not accidents but the natural outcome of a system designed to keep its own people under suspicion. What can be shown is that the bureaucracy expands by default, often with little oversight. Anything beyond that — that it is deliberately weaponized — remains an open question.

Manufactured Optics
The 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer became a headline symbol of domestic extremism — proof, we were told, of how dangerous American citizens can be. Yet much of the plan was incubated by FBI informants and undercover agents, so much so that some defendants were acquitted on entrapment grounds. BuzzFeed reporting found FBI assets played “outsize roles,” sometimes steering logistics.

One might be forgiven for thinking the danger mattered less than the optics: a spectacle of citizen extremism that could then be used to justify the expansion of watchlists and surveillance powers.

Citizens vs. Immigrants
January 6th offers the sharpest contrast. A chaotic protest was reframed as insurrection, with citizens sentenced more harshly than many violent offenders. By contrast, immigrants — even when disruptive — are not branded with the same existential vilification. They are tolerated, categorized, even used as political currency. The implication is clear: the citizen is the greater threat in the eyes of the state.

It has been suggested that immigrant flows are treated as manageable variables, while citizens are treated as potential enemies of the system itself.

The Machinery From Different Angles
On paper, the watchlist is a counter-terrorism tool. In practice, it appears to sit in an uneasy triangle: intelligence agencies that seem to answer more to transnational networks than to voters, global actors whose expectations stretch beyond party lines, and a White House that resents being managed but can never quite escape it. To observers, the lists grow while oversight fades. The Right is an obvious target, but the Left often seems not radical enough for the appetite behind the system. Presidents push back, agencies jockey, private interests lean in — and from the outside it looks less like order than a machine misbehaving under the weight of too many masters.

To the citizen, it looks like blatant intimidation by a bully — names appear, few ever disappear, and the reasons are locked away, leaving the impression of a list that swells on its own, a shadow archive without accountability. To the president, it looks mysterious: a stack of documents he is urged to sign or ignore, reassured not to trouble his pretty head — a reminder that the system remembers more than any one administration. To the agencies, it looks like inevitability: the steady growth of unchecked power, the slow putrefaction of American ideals. And to the global networks and private actors, it looks like opportunity — an under-the-radar mission that, in lieu of oversight, permits every manner of sin from top to bottom. They likely have themselves convinced even God isn’t watching. However you stand, the same shape emerges: a system that appears less like a safeguard than a machine that feeds itself.

Drawing the Line Within the Story
What can be documented is clear enough: the watchlist outlasts presidents, is fed by private contractors and foreign partnerships, and often seems to operate at a distance from elected authority. Anything stronger than that — that a coordinated global network commands the machinery outright, or that its purpose is to target citizens by design — remains conjecture. The architecture leaves the door wide open, but the record has not yet walked through it.

The Cover Story
The narrative says the list is about keeping dangerous outsiders at bay. But the numbers, the opacity, and the testimonies point in another direction. It is the American citizen who is surveilled, harassed, prosecuted, and vilified — while the border remains porous. The watchlist becomes not a shield against foreign terror, but a cover story for domestic control.


https://kasspert.wordpress.com/2025/...only-dream-of/