APRIL 21, 2018
In 2001, when Assia Boundaoui was sixteen years old, she woke up in the middle of the night, roused by lights shining outside her bedroom window. She looked out to find two men aloft fiddling with the wiring of the recently installed street lamps.
She ran to her mother’s room, afraid, telling her they should call the police. Her widowed mother tried to calm her down. “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “It’s probably just the FBI. Go back to sleep.”
By that year, the FBI had become such a ubiquitous presence in the small town of Bridgeview, Illinois—home to some 200 Muslim Arab-American families—that the residents attributed many extraordinary and unexplained occurrences to what the community suspected was the government’s surveillance of their every move. There were the unknown cars that sat for hours outside their houses; men who didn’t appear to be in need going through their trash cans; and odd clicking sounds and static on the line when residents spoke on the phone. [full story]