At the turn of the twentieth century, nativists and eugenics movements were anxious about the influx of immigrants to the United States. White supremacists succeeded in weaponizing immigration laws by constituting a definition of who can become an American on a racial/biological basis and through the invention of the national origins quota system (Fahrenthold 2019; Ngai, 2004). Racial restrictions on immigration remained in place until 1965 when the Congress abolished the national origin system and the Asiatic Barred Zone (Lopez 2006). However, discriminatory policies and laws regulating immigration and asylum in the United States have been utilized systematically to target specific nationalities under the disguise of national security and the indefinite “war on terror,” as evidenced in Donald Trump’s travel ban (2018). In this paper, I analyze the effects of legal violence on the lives of Syrian asylum seekers and immigrants from the Middle East who have been held in legal limbo and permanent status of precarity. Building on ethnographic fieldwork in North America between 2014-2021 and more than 80 interviews with Syrian asylum seekers and immigration attorneys, I examine the invisible, harmful effect of surveillance programs and discriminatory regulations —such as the Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program (CARRP), and Terrorism-Related Inadmissibility Grounds (TRIG)—that constructed Arab and Muslim communities as a threat since the 9/11 attacks. I conclude by arguing that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) operates as an authoritarian agency marked by a lack of accountability and transparency and sustains white supremacy by implementing Kafkaesque policies and shadow programs that include racialized Others through exclusion (Agamben 1998).