This piece puts the US Supreme Court’s upholding of the travel ban in an historical context. Supporters argued that the ban was about national security rather than racism; opponents that it was about racism rather than national security. But both sides separated logics that haven’t been separable: ideas of national security–of who belonged to the U. S. and who threatened it, from the outside and inside–have long been racialized, even as idioms of “national security” came to provide these racialized exclusions a legally sustainable, “facially neutral” cover.
