The Trump Administration Wants to Turn US Cities Into Occupied Territory

By any rational measure, the Trump administration’s internal Department of Homeland Security memo—obtained by The New Republic—reads less like a briefing on immigration enforcement and more like a blueprint for domestic occupation.

Strip away the bureaucratic throat clearing and what you find is blunt language: “homeland defense,” “personnel detailed within ICE and CBP,” “Al Qaeda or ISIS cells operating freely inside America.” The lines are being drawn. The administration is preparing to turn American cities into zones of military containment.

Los Angeles, it turns out, was the test run. National Guard and Marines were deployed there under the excuse of protests, and the memo declares it a “good indicator of the type of operations (and resistance) we’re going to be working through for years to come.” Note the calm normalization of “resistance.” That word is doing a lot of work. It doesn’t mean gang violence. It doesn’t mean cartel shootouts. It means Americans. It means Angelenos, New Yorkers, Chicagoans, Houstonians—anyone who finds themselves in the path of a bloated, paranoid state looking inward for its next war.

This is the West Bank model imported home. Use the military, not as a last resort but as a daily presence. Coordinate the Pentagon with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection. Have Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s brother, a barely vetted MAGA functionary, walk into meetings with the Joint Chiefs and demand “urgency” and “lockstep” planning. Sell the public on the fiction that MS-13 and child smugglers are the same as jihadist cells, then treat American neighborhoods like insurgent terrain. What Israel perfected in Gaza and the West Bank—constant surveillance, movement checkpoints, raids, mass detentions—will be replicated block by block in South Central and East New York under the same justification: security.

The machinery of repression is humming—but many of the engineers are morons.

The logic is imperial, and familiar. Invent an enemy. Inflate the threat. Justify the war. Except this time, the war zone is your own backyard. The memo doesn’t describe law enforcement. It describes counterinsurgency doctrine. It imagines Department of Defense personnel “embedded” within immigration agencies, not for support, but for command and control. It uses the language of terrorism to override constitutional limits. And it pretends that dragging immigrants onto military aircraft for public spectacle is ordinary governance.

What’s most chilling isn’t the language. It’s the preparation. There is no longer an attempt to hide the playbook. DHS knows it is “skirting the line”—Carrie Lee from the German Marshall Fund said it plainly. They just do not care. In fact, they are proud of it. The document’s authors are pushing the Pentagon to discard even the pretense of legal restraint. They are testing the limits of the Posse Comitatus Act the way they once tested court orders blocking the first Muslim ban. Every limit is a speed bump. Every failure is a rehearsal.

This is how military occupations work. They start with “urgent meetings.” They escalate through “coordination” and “information sharing.” They grow bureaucratic vines until no one is accountable for anything and everyone has a mission statement. Pretty soon, you live in a city where helicopters buzz overhead at midnight and soldiers in camo check your bags at subway stops. You do not remember when it started. You just know it never ends.

And yet, there’s one bleak source of hope. The Trump administration is profoundly, deeply incompetent. This is a regime that leaks its own illegal memos to the press. That puts family members in senior policy roles not because they are clever Machiavellians, but because they are available and loyal. That spends billions building walls no one maintains and writing executive orders that collapse on contact with any judge not wearing a MAGA hat. The machinery of repression is humming—but many of the engineers are morons.

That might save us. Not rule of law. Not institutional bravery. Just a consistent failure to execute. The danger isn’t that President Donald Trump’s people are masterminds. It’s that they’re learning. And this time, they’re not planning a weekend spectacle of troops on the border. They’re planning a daily occupation of the interior. Of where we live.

They’ve already told us what they’re going to do. The only question is how long we pretend not to believe them.