This paper is based on an ethnographic study of Yemeni Americans in the Bay Area that focuses on the impact of the war in Yemen, the Muslim/Arab/African travel bans, and the COVID-19 “emergency.” Since 2019, I have been doing research with Yemeni Americans in Oakland, who occupy a niche in ownership of corner stores and have been essential workers in small businesses where transnational issues of racial capitalism, imperial warfare, policing, and surveillance converge. Yemeni Americans have also struggled to support families in Yemen during the US-backed war since 2015 that has destroyed the country, creating the world’s worst humanitarian crisis (at least since the US withdrawal from Afghanistan). Trump’s travel bans and other US immigration restrictions targeting Yemenis have compounded the devastating effects of the US-backed siege of Yemen, separating Yemeni families across global borders and undermining transnational survival strategies. However, these stories have been missing in public discussions, despite the centrality of Yemen to the US-led War on Terror. This research is part of a community-engaged project which included digital storytelling in order to create a counter-archive based on collective memory work by Yemeni community members of different generations. This paper highlights the perspectives of Yemeni Americans engaged in community organizing and antiwar activism, some of whom have participated in protests and produced spoken word poetry to create awareness about the “forgotten war” in Yemen or challenged the conflation of Yemen with a war zone. Among Yemeni Americans, the war is a complex and divisive issue as for all exilic communities that have endured decades of war, Western colonization, and foreign intervention in Yemen’s internal struggles and experiments with sovereignty, Marxism, separation, and unification of North and South Yemen. The erasure of the war on Yemen is intrinsic to imperial amnesia and the strategy of deliberate forgetting of US imperial violence. Yemeni Americans have also been targets of ongoing surveillance and counterterrorism projects, which have (by design) contained public political expression and created a climate of fear and divisiveness due to “surveillance effects.” I argue that counterterrorism and surveillance represent a model of counter-insurgency that rests on cultural and social re-engineering by the military-spy state and regulation, as well as self-disciplining, of the community. I will discuss how the often covert forms of policing of Yemeni Americans, as for SWANA and Muslim Americans generally, expands and deepens the debate in the US about policing, antiblack violence, and abolitionism.