Noah Feldman, Columnist

Detention of Innocent Muslims Is a Horror We Can't Forget

But it's unlikely they will get any recourse from the Supreme Court.

January 18, 2017 at 8:42 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Protest outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in 2002.
Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

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Innocent men detained for months or years after the Sept. 11 attacks on suspicion of being Muslim got their day in the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday. The odds don’t look good. The court will probably dismiss their constitutional suit against the government officials who implemented the policies that arrested immigrants who had overstayed their visas and held them in abusive conditions until after they had been affirmatively proved innocent, and sometimes beyond.

Yet this is one of those cases that deserves attention because it casts a harsh light on real-world facts that we’d rather forget. Call it the “It Can’t Happen Here” case. And remember: It can. And in 2001, it did.