As anti-immigrant sentiment gained a foothold within U.S. political discourse following the events of 9/11 amid a keen desire to ensure that such an atrocity could never happen again on U.S. soil, the government created the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement body, for whom sweeping powers were introduced to allow for the deportation of immigrants both documented and undocumented. The Transactional Records Access Clearing House notes that deportation cases increased sharply from 1.6 million in the decade before 9/11 to 2.3 million the decade that followed. As noted by ABC, many immigrants became liable for criminal deportation without ever being found guilty of a crime — they simply have to be charged, with deportation being the price for such minor offenses as drug possession or even cycling on the sidewalk.

As reported by HuffPost, those who gained the most from sweeping immigration reforms were private companies such as the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, operators of mass private immigration centers who have lobbied so successfully that they now process almost half of the 400,000 immigrant detainees the U.S. imprisons each year, making incredible profits as they do so.

Tellingly, however, deportations that were linked explicitly to terrorist activity dropped by more than half the decade after 9/11 to 37, down from 88 the decade previous, according to The Denver Post.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which carries the motto “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity” on its emblem, was looked to as the organization charged with identifying and neutralizing potential terror cells. The bureau was undoubtedly under incredible pressure in the early years of the 20th century to keep the nation they were there to protect safe from further harm, but evidence later emerged that in the years following 9/11 the FBI hadn’t quite been matching up to the standards of integrity that it claimed to maintain.

In 2011, The Guardian reported how the FBI, under pressure to demonstrate that they were active and productive during the ongoing “war on terror,” ran a widespread campaign of sting operations against hundreds of Americans — most of whom were vulnerable or desperate, as opposed to actively threatening — and entrapping them in phony terror plots orchestrated by the bureau itself. With the use of often unvetted informants in Muslim and other ethnic communities, the FBI would plan stings in which they themselves passed their targets weapons and equipment, leading to highly publicizable arrests. Many cases, including those of the Liberty City Seven, a small and eccentric cult whom most analysts have admitted were harmless, and the Newburgh Four, who were accused of plotting to bomb synagogues in Riverdale, New York, resulted in lengthy prison sentences for those involved, with judges required to hand down sentences of a minimum of 25 years in prison for cases related to terrorism, according to The Village Voice.

Back in December 2001, while the nation was still reeling from the tragic event of September 11 and the U.S. was preparing to commence what President George W. Bush was calling the “War on Terror,” an article published by the Brookings Institution argued that the new anti-terrorist military intervention in the Middle East was more likely to resemble the Cold War with the Soviet Union rather than any other conflict in living memory, warning that it seemed destined to be “nasty, brutish and long.” How right they were.

Since then, the U.S. has been continually at war in the Middle East, most notably in Afghanistan, where the initial objective was the defeat of the Taliban ruling faction that had allowed Al-Qaeda to flourish in the country, according to Britannica. While the U.S. officially ended their combat mission in the country in 2014, Voice of America notes that as of 2021, thousands of U.S. troops were still stationed in the country, while the Taliban remains active in the country, with negotiations still ongoing.

According to a report by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, more than 37 million people are estimated to have been forced to leave their homes as a direct result of post-9/11 U.S. military campaigns, contributing significantly to the refugee crisis of recent years.

The events of September 11, 2001, have remained sacrosanct in the American psyche not only due to the terrible loss that the nation witnessed that day but also because of the incredible bravery and self-sacrifice of those first responders who rushed to assist at the scene of the attack, with many losing their lives in the process.

Which made reports shared by ABC and others that more than 100 police officers, firefighters, and public servants had been charged with fraudulently soliciting millions of dollars in social security payments in the years after 9/11 especially shocking. “Many participants cynically manufactured claims of mental illness as a result of September 11, dishonoring the first responders who did serve their city at the expense of their own health and safety,” said Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, per Insider.

Some even more brazen fraud cases were reported in the press as early as 2002, per The New York Times, which reported the case of a woman who invented a fictional husband to collect $53,000 from a 9/11 relief fund.

“We’ve had fictitious victims, we’ve had victims who have been dead for years, we’ve had people in prison calling to say that they were dead,” Sgt. Daniel Heinz of the NYPD special fraud squad told The New York Times. “I used to have a lot of the names of the victims in my head from notifying so many families. Now I have the names of all the perps.”

The events of September 11, 2001, and their fallout over the months and years that followed were as world-changing as they were chaotic, as tragic as they were incomprehensible. And though it is possible to come to grips with what happened and why with the benefit of 20 years’ hindsight, at the time the events of 9/11 seemed almost inexplicable. And so, in those early days of the internet, rumors and conspiracy theories began to circulate that 9/11 was an “inside job,” orchestrated by the federal government, according to Popular Mechanics, which took it upon itself to debunk the many shaky theories and pieces of “evidence” used by 9/11 “truthers” to point to the existence of a government conspiracy and attempted cover-up.

Not since the assassination of John F. Kennedy and rumors of the faking of the moon landings had the U.S. found itself consumed by so pervasive a conspiracy theory. But as The Wall Street Journal recently explained, as the internet has come to permeate our lives and paranoia and distrust of mainstream media has continued to grow, conspiracy mindedness has become epidemic in the years since 9/11, with QAnon, anti-vax movements, and flat-earthers all being given the oxygen of publicity by the internet and our current collective inability to separate reputable claims from bogus ones.