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Opinion
Will We Choose Endless War or a UN-Centered Global Peace System?
Within five years, peace on Earth—"mission impossible"—could become not just desirable, but widely supported, then possible. Millions of lives and trillions of dollars saved.
Feb 15, 2026
Insecurity is spreading. The world is experiencing unprecedented armed conflict. Sixty-one state-based armed conflicts have been recorded across 36 countries. Eleven of these escalated into full-scale wars. Instead of “never again,” genocide is ongoing—again and again—without a response to prevent more.
Unfortunately, those leading have little understanding of the problem as they are part of the problem. A solution will have to come from elsewhere.
Rather than encourage peace or progress, US Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, recently advised his generals that the Pentagon will be guided by the 4th century Roman dictum, "Sis vis pacem, para bellum"—"If you want peace, prepare for war." Despite mutual vulnerability in an interconnected world, Hegseth stressed that“the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: warfighting… We have to be prepared for war, not for defense. We're training warriors, not defenders. We fight wars to win, not to defend.”
Military spending is skyrocketing—tripling for some NATO allies—like Canada, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania.
So, what might be done? Is there a way to encourage cooperative, win-win approaches for people and the planet? Possibly.
The US Department of War already has a trillion-dollar budget and it’s projected to be 50% larger—$1.5 trillion—by 2027. Such a surge is only required when a government plans to fight multiple wars abroad and stifle dissent at home. Stephen Miller, (President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff), already claims that “we are back to a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
Overall, the cost of preparing for more war is almost $3 trillion annually. Worse, if current trends persist, the United Nations warns that “global military spending could reach $4.7 to $6.6 trillion by 2035.”
Yet even that huge cost is dwarfed by the damage caused, with the Global Peace Index reporting, “the economic impact of violence on the global economy in 2024 was $19.97 trillion in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms.” As they note: “This figure is equivalent to 11.6% of the world’s economic activity (gross world product), or $2,446 per person. Military and internal security expenditure accounts for over 74% of the figure, with the impact of military spending alone accounting for $9 trillion in PPP terms the past year.”
Of course, most governments understand that no amount of military spending can guarantee a reliable defense or provide security in the nuclear era. Wars have seldom been winnable over the past 80 years, even for the most powerful. President Trump was correct to note the US has not won a major war since 1947. But that stops neither the current wars nor the extravagant investment to get ready for more.
Clearly, higher military spending leaves less for social security, climate action, healthcare, education, and poverty reduction. Precarious conditions spread, giving rise to extremes that generate further insecurity, with new risks of race, class, and civil conflict. Trust in government erodes when funds are available for weapons but not for human needs. Militarism follows, deepening a culture of violence, poverty, and extremes.
As President and General Dwight D. Eisenhower said: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies... a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed... Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."
With ever-higher costs, there are ever-higher risks. All the great powers are modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenals. They still rely on nuclear deterrence, with a threat of total destruction held in check by rational leaders who are supposed to maintain a system of mutually-assured destruction (MAD) in a "balance of terror." Oh, oh! Even a limited use of nuclear weapons is understood to risk "nuclear winter," with starvation for those who remain. Just last month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset the hands of their Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest the world has ever been to catastrophe.
"Caveat emptor"—countries, like people, eventually get what they plan, invest in, and prepare for. Many are already suffering from the violence and militarism they fund, support, and share with others (e.g. foreigners that someone, somewhere labelled as progressives, terrorists, protesters, or activists).
Among the recent targets were Yemen, Nigeria, Syria, Iran, Venezuela, Somalia, Minnesota, Los Angeles, and Portland. Does anyone really think this violence is for peace and security?
Who knows who is next? Will it be Cuba, Columbia, Canada, China, Iceland, Mexico, New York, Maine, or Iran again?
People heard of the deeper, "complex" problem when President Dwight Eisenhower warned:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
With globalization and generous funding, this complex expanded worldwide into finance, banking, and insurance sectors; big oil and gas; telecommunications; logistics; media; surveillance; big data; robotics; and AI.
Eisenhower’s warning wasn’t enough to stem the appeal of profits, power, and control. The unwarranted influence is now everywhere, diminishing political autonomy to the point where government leaders believe they can’t say, “No.” And, this complex depends on violent conflict to "keep the old game alive."
In short, endless war continues in a dysfunctional, war-prone system. And, this system is the primary impediment to progress on a shared climate emergency and sustainable development.
"Endless war" is the risk in following the dubious Roman claim from the 4th century: "If you want peace, prepare for war." Notably, the Roman Empire didn’t survive with its massive military spending and constant civil wars. Instead, let’s remember, "Peace is possible, if we prepare for it."
For now, it is crucial to redirect the current trajectory away from more war and a climate crisis—a lose-lose outcome for all.
So, what might be done? Is there a way to encourage cooperative, win-win approaches for people and the planet? Possibly.
UN-Prepared
Over 80 years ago—in the aftermath of two World Wars—the universal challenge was how to confine the institution of war, preferably before it kills more, possibly everyone.
The United Nations was founded in response, primarily as a state-centric, international peace system. "Saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war" is at the forefront of the UN Charter. To its credit, the UN works daily on all the shared global challenges—sustainable development, human rights, climate change, international law, encouraging multilateral cooperation for peace, nuclear disarmament, culture and education, food and water, even more.
Yet the UN remains a work in progress—underfunded, unprepared, and poorly equipped—constrained by its 193 member states, and hamstrung by the Security Council’s veto power. As it stands, the UN cannot prevent violent conflict, enforce international law, or protect people and the planet effectively. These limits reflect the interests and political priorities of the UN’s member states. Global military spending ($3 trillion) is approximately 780 times higher than the UN’s regular budget ($3.45 billion), which is considerably less than the budget of the New York City Police Department.
Yet these priorities and limits are not fixed in stone. The UN still has the advantage of an exceptional charter, universal membership, 80 years of experience, with established programs, operations, and offices worldwide. Notably, people have not experienced another world war in 80 years. It is also widely acknowledged that UN peace operations—in deadly, remote conflicts—have saved millions of lives and billions of dollars.
In short, the UN foundation is sufficiently solid to expand upon. And, this isn’t a radical or original idea either.
Shortly after President Eisenhower’s warning, President John F. Kennedy’s State Department outlined several of the key steps required in "Freedom From War, The United States Program For General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World." As officials noted:
There is an inseparable relationship between the scaling down of national armaments on the one hand and the building up of international peace-keeping machinery and institutions on the other. Nations are unlikely to shed their means of self-protection in the absence of alternative ways to safeguard their legitimate interests. This can only be achieved through the progressive strengthening of international institutions under the United Nations and by creating a United Nations Peace Force to enforce the peace as the disarmament process proceeds.
The Alternative
A new Guide to a UN-Centred Global Peace System outlines 20 steps to strengthen the UN’s capacity to prevent war, uphold human rights, enforce international law, protect the environment, and promote disarmament. Included is a UN Charter review conference (to agree on an option to the P-5 veto), a financial transaction tax, another decade focused on a global culture of peace, a UN Parliamentary Assembly, defense transformation, development of a UN Emergency Peace Service (a more sophisticated option than a UN Peace Force), economic conversion, and a boost for the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Thankfully, work on most of these steps is already underway, supported by committed individuals and organizations. And, those who struggle to make the UN more effective understand that our scattered, siloed, and specialized approaches seldom combine to make a big difference.
What’s been missing is a compelling vision—"Peace on Earth is possible”—along with a coherent plan outlining a sequence of viable policy options. A shared vision should help to encourage the unity of effort and purpose required to mobilize diverse social movements and governments. And, once these steps for a more effective UN are implemented and combined, the result would be a UN-centered global peace system.
Paradigm shifts happen when prevailing systems are deemed inadequate or failing and when another option is widely viewed as better.
This guide is primarily a call to aim higher, pull together, and prepare now for that moment when new possibilities emerge. Cooperation is crucial to building the bridge between diverse sectors of civil society. With modest coordination and support, an inter-sectoral movement becomes possible.
Of course, this idea will be promptly dismissed as naive, wishful thinking, as "mission-impossible" for now. But as the political pendulum swings toward worse, the corrective swing back is likely to open the space and generate support for substantive shifts, even a safer system.
Just consider what’s distinctly different in 2026? Numerous governments are deeply worried and desperate to both avoid and constrain the new predatory hegemon. They know of safety in numbers and most realize that the one promising alternative is in an established multilateral counterweight, a more effective UN.
Within five years, peace on Earth—"mission impossible"—could become not just desirable, but widely supported, then possible. Millions of lives and trillions of dollars saved.
Paradigm shifts happen when prevailing systems are deemed inadequate or failing and when another option is widely viewed as better.
With the peace system proposed, there would be no further need for offensive weapon systems. National armed forces would shrink. Threats and tensions would fade. And, this new global system might cost $15-20 billion, freeing up trillions to help with climate adaptation and sustainable development. Imagine: We prepare for war no more!
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The Trump Administration Is Waging a Global War on Children
By cutting aid abroad and the social safety net at home, while spreading vaccine skepticism, the administration is ensuring that more children will suffer and die.
Feb 15, 2026
Most of us understand that children are vulnerable, innocent, and must be protected and nourished. But too often in our country, and the world, that doesn’t happen—and now the US government is waging a global war on children.
It started with the closing of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), thus removing US humanitarian and development aid to people in the worst situations in the world. The cruel closure of USAID denied and continues to deny more than 95 million people access to basic healthcare and nutrition, leading to an estimated 1.6 million additional deaths in 2025, many of which were children.
The current administration also significantly weakened the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). These cuts, plus the closing of USAID, severely limit the international efforts of humanitarian organizations which work to control mother-to-child transmission of HIV. If funding for HIV prevention and treatment continues to fall, by 2040, an estimated 3 million children will contract HIV and nearly 1.8 million will die of AIDS-related causes.
As if that were not enough, the administration pulled out of the vaccine alliance Gavi, an international organization that has paid for more than 1 billion children to be vaccinated worldwide. This allows vaccine-preventable diseases to flourish among unvaccinated and vulnerable children. Many will be permanently disabled or die.
The administration turning its back on the “sh** hole” countries will come back and bite America in the ass, with innocents suffering the most.
The administration has directed these closings of international programs overwhelmingly against Black and brown people who, according to the president, live in “sh** hole” countries. This is his program of “America First,” where “those” people don’t matter—where their children don’t matter.
Moral judgement aside, helping those suffering in other countries is actually in our best interest. Not only would this show some badly needed humanity and compassion, it is also the best public health approach to protect all of us from contagious diseases.
But too many in the United States live in a right-wing news bubble where they aren’t aware of the suffering in the “sh** hole” countries or simply don’t care. And so many don’t realize that the diseases that foreign aid was working to control (AIDS, tuberculosis, polio, Ebola, and vaccine-preventable diseases) endanger us all. They are not just “their problem,” they are also “our problem.” As these diseases spread and multiply in other countries, the nature of the US economy and international trade will bring them here. The administration turning its back on the “sh** hole” countries will come back and bite America in the ass, with innocents suffering the most. Outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases are not “the cost of doing business,” as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Deputy Director, Ralph Abraham, MD, callously stated. The US has managed to “do business” while controlling vaccine-preventable disease for decades.
But the administration’s war on children does not stop with the “sh** hole” countries. Here in the US, the “Big Beautiful Bill” made draconian funding cuts to safety-net programs. This intentionally endangers children in millions of US families because it ends access to healthcare and adequate nutrition.
Even that was not enough. Robert F Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, has promoted an anti-science, anti-vaccine agenda by weaponizing the CDC to reduce the availability of vaccines in the US and to keep up a constant drumbeat of anti-vaccine disinformation. The CDC is no longer a trusted source of science-based public health information; it is now a clearinghouse for Kennedy’s anti-science, anti-vaccine misinformation, conspiracies, and lies. Many parents are rightfully confused by the barrage of anti-vaccine propaganda coming from Kennedy; vaccine hesitance is rising, resulting in soaring cases of measles, whooping cough, influenza and tetanus among children. And more will come as Kennedy’s flood of misinformation and fear-mongering about vaccines continues, supported by the highest levels of the administration.
Among this group dangerous beliefs are developing, exemplified by the comments of the Kennedy-appointed Chair of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, Kirk Milhoan. He recently voiced the belief that the individual freedom to refuse vaccines is greater than the freedom to choose not to be infected by contagious diseases. He questions requirements for childhood vaccines, and believes that declining vaccination rates are an opportunity to see what happens when vaccine-preventable diseases run rampant, rather than the tragedy that it is. This is not a sane or ethical experiment; history tells us the answer: The viruses and bacteria will win, and children will suffer.
Kennedy and the administration recently began this unethical experiment when they cut the number of vaccines in the childhood vaccine schedule, guaranteed to reduce vaccine use. Kennedy removed recommendations for rotavirus, Covid-19, influenza, RSV, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and meningococcal vaccines. These are serious diseases that cause children to suffer and die.
They claim that the new recommendations allow parents the “freedom of choice” about these vaccines, after “shared decision-making,” but this has always been the case for childhood vaccines. What they say is freedom has a tragic cost, and this version of freedom effectively declares that the death of children by vaccine-preventable diseases is an acceptable cost, the cost of doing business, with that cost paid in kids’ lives.
Some may call this freedom. We call it a war on children.
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The Trump Admin Is Building a Mass Detention System—What Will You Do About It?
What they have not told you is that the immigration detention system is not processing people, it is accumulating them. The math shows how fast; the history shows what comes next.
Feb 15, 2026
They told you.
Not once. Not quietly. Not in some obscure corner of the internet where plausible deniability can hide. They told you in court filings and local hearings, in affidavits and field reports, in newsroom investigations and academic papers. They told you in the patient language of law and the blunt language of organizing. And for years, the country found ways to argue with the messengers, or litigate the metaphors, or change the subject.
Now the evidence is arriving from so many directions at once that warning has become record, and record demands a response. The question is no longer whether someone warned you. The question is what you do when the warnings stop coming as claims and start coming as records.
In two weeks, the machinery of American immigration detention has been more thoroughly exposed than at any point in this country's history, not because the government opened the door, but because enough people forced it. Analysts at Syracuse have tracked the population shifts, reporters at Bloomberg and the Washington Post have mapped the warehouses, the American Immigration Council has documented the deadliest year in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention on record, Austin Kocher has shown that 92% of detention growth this fiscal year comes from people with no criminal convictions. Ninety-two percent. The Deportation Data Project at UC Berkeley Law has shown that release within 60 days of arrest fell from 16% to 3%. Hundreds of journalists, researchers, lawyers, and organizers have built a shared factual floor while the ground itself is being shaken. They deserve recognition, not rivalry. Amplification, not a race for credit.
The historical record offers no example of a detention system with these structural features that reversed course without public rupture, legal compulsion, or political defeat.
And still, the rest of the story has not been told.
Everything published so far answers the first-phase questions. How big is the system. How fast is it growing. Who is inside it. History asks a harder one. Not how big the system is, but where it is going. Not how fast it is growing, but when growth changes what the system is. Not who is inside it today, but what happens to the people inside it when intake keeps running, court capacity keeps shrinking, and the exits keep narrowing until the word "exit" becomes an administrative fiction. Answering that question requires a lens most of the current analysis does not use. The missing lens is not moral outrage. It is structural diagnosis, how systems change character when inputs outrun exits.
That is the lens I study. I study irregular warfare and state detention systems. That is not the career I started with. I am a West Point graduate, trained in the ethics of command and the obligations of the oath I took. I came to this work because the patterns I had studied from a distance were no longer distant, and because the oath does not expire. I have published that work in peer-reviewed journals. And I am telling you plainly: I have seen this structure before. Not in identical form, and not with identical ends, but with the same mechanics.
It appeared in the early Nazi concentration camp system before administrative pressure transformed improvised holding into something durable and escalating. It appeared in US counterinsurgency detention abroad, from the Phoenix Program in Vietnam to Camp Bucca in Iraq, where intake outpaced processing and produced the same result every time. Populations accumulated. Confinement lengthened. Exits never caught up. The vocabulary lagged behind the math. It always does.
Until the math catches up to you. That is why the spreadsheet matters. ICE publishes a detention statistics spreadsheet on its own website not out of transparency, but because a previous Congress wrote a disclosure mandate into law. ICE has complied reluctantly, delayed updates, and published selectively. Kocher has warned that the window is closing. But while it remains cracked, what you can see through it is damning. The crossing from processing to warehousing has already begun.
Start with scale, because scale amplifies every friction point downstream. More than 70,000 people are in ICE detention right now, across 225 facilities. The population has grown 75% in 12 months. That is not a surge passing through. It is a system swelling in place.
Then look at who is being held, because composition tells you what kind of force the system is applying. Nearly half, 48.4%, have no criminal conviction and no pending charges. They are held for the civil offense of being present without authorization. That is the government's own classification for the people in its own custody. Now look at the direction, because direction tells you what tomorrow will resemble. This year's detention growth comes almost entirely from people with no criminal convictions. The system is not detaining more criminals. It is detaining more people who have committed no crime, faster than at any point in its history. When that is the composition and that is the trajectory, the word "enforcement" stops describing what the system does. The word that fits is control.
Now follow the arithmetic, because the arithmetic tells you whether the system is clearing cases or accumulating bodies. Every month of this fiscal year, more people have entered that system than have left it. Every month. Net growth averages 3,000 per month. There is no month in which the system shrank.
Net growth matters because it proves the system is accumulating, not cycling. And once a system accumulates, the only question becomes which exits still function. Bond-posted releases account for 3-6% of all exits. For every 1 person released pending a hearing, 14.3 are deported. The system removes. It does not release. Read that ratio again. The system was built to take people in. It was never built to let them out. That is not a flaw in the design. It is the design.
That ratio points to the choke point. The court is what seals the system closed. Seven in ten detainees are tethered to a court system with 3.38 million pending cases and a bench that has lost more than 100 judges in the past year. Intake feeds backlog. Backlog extends detention. Extended detention drives growth. One loop. Self-reinforcing. Average bond wait times climbed 32% in four months. The door is not just narrow. It is closing while you watch.
Now here is the number that should end the argument. There are 7,252 people detained for more than six months. Among them are asylum-seekers who passed the government's own credible-fear screening. The government itself determined they have a legitimate claim to protection. Their average detention stands at 183 days and climbed 25% in three months. When the people with the strongest legal claims are held longer and longer, the paperwork may still say "processing." The calendar says captivity.
The calendar also tells you what captivity does when it becomes a baseline. Captivity at that scale does not hold still. It builds. If current conditions hold, the detained population will approach or exceed 100,000 by the end of 2026. The $45 billion appropriated through the One Big Beautiful Bill Act funds 135,000 beds through fiscal year 2029. Enacted law. Signed contracts. Revenue streams with lobbyists already defending them. Concrete does not dissolve because a press office changes its language. When a system starts building for those numbers, it is not preparing for a temporary spike. It is constructing a new baseline. The only question is what the system becomes once it reaches that capacity, and for that you have to look past the spreadsheet, because the spreadsheet was built to make sure you never see what comes next.
And when a system builds for long-term capacity, its failures stop being episodic. They become routine, and routine produces a record.
What remains is whether the rest of us decide that what is happening behind those walls is our problem. Not someone else's. Ours.
Here is what comes next.
Victor Manuel Diaz was arrested in Minneapolis. Eight days later he was found dead in ICE detention, hanging from a bed sheet. ICE sent his body not to the county medical examiner but to a military facility that does not release autopsy reports. When a government routes its dead to institutions it controls, the aim is not truth. It is the containment of the story.
Geraldo Lunas Campos died at Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss, asphyxiated while being restrained by five guards. He had asked for his medication. He was 55, Cuban, legally admitted to this country in 1996. The El Paso County medical examiner classified his death as a homicide. Two detainees who told the Washington Post what they witnessed received deportation notices days later. And it was not only the adults.
At Dilley, the South Texas Family Residential Center, the detained population tripled in three months. An estimated 800 children are inside. A measles outbreak was confirmed February 1. Members of Congress who visited described a 5-year-old as lethargic and depressed. A 5-year-old. In a facility the spreadsheet records as a line of numbers.
In the spreadsheet's categories, every one of these people occupies the same column. A man restrained until he stopped breathing is recorded the same way as a man who posted bail. A lethargic child is a digit in a headcount. An exit is an exit. A death is a departure. The system was not built to distinguish. It was built to count, and counting is not seeing.
What you see when you look past the count is containment masquerading as adjudication. A slow lengthening of stays. A piling up of people the system cannot move and will not release. A conversion of law into force so gradual that each day looks like the day before it, until you look back and realize the thing you are living inside has no name you are willing to say out loud.
Say it. The historical record offers no example of a detention system with these structural features that reversed course without public rupture, legal compulsion, or political defeat. None. Not one. The comparison is structural, not identical, and that is what makes it diagnostic. Structure determines what becomes possible and what becomes routine, long before anyone names the destination.
That is why the convergence matters. Every credible voice that has examined this system is arriving at the same conclusion from different directions. The analysts, the historians, the reporters, and the lawyers are standing in the same light for the first time. We were right. It is here.
One of those voices was not a professor or a journalist or a lawyer. He was a resident of Surprise, Arizona, and he stood at a city council microphone and invoked Ohrdruf. He was not performing history. He was reading the structure being built in his community and recognizing it in his bones. A windowless warehouse. A population detained for administrative reasons. A legal system too slow to process them. A government that builds faster than accountability can follow. He spoke because he understood the timing. You establish the record while the building is still going up, not after the concrete has set and the system has learned to call itself normal.
The record is being built. The full analysis is published as "The War Brought Home: The Recalibration" on my Substack. Kocher's biweekly analyses are at austinkocher.substack.com. The facility-level tool built by Kocher and Sawyer is at detentionreports.com. The AIC report is at americanimmigrationcouncil.org. Read them. Share them. They are what you hand to the person at your table who still thinks this is temporary.
But proof without witness is just a filing cabinet, and the witness is already underway. Lawyers have filed more than 18,000 habeas petitions and won nearly every case that reached a decision. Members of Congress have sued to inspect facilities their own government sealed from view. Communities in Surprise, Kansas City, and Shakopee have stood at microphones and said, "No." These people are not waiting for permission. They are building the record in real time.
They are also still the few. The system does not survive on the cruelty of its architects alone. It survives on three kinds of silence. Those who see it and approve. Those who see enough to be uncomfortable but have decided that discomfort is not obligation. And the rest of us, reading this right now, feeling the weight of it, not yet decided what that weight requires.
That middle is where every mass detention system in history found its operating room. Not in the enthusiasm of supporters, but in the silence of people who could see the wall going up from their kitchen window and chose to close the blinds. Every historical account includes the same figure. Never the architect or the guard. Always the neighbor who knew, who had every means to see, and who later claimed they did not.
The math is done. The facilities are mapped. The petitions are filed. The communities have shown what resistance looks like. What remains is whether the rest of us decide that what is happening behind those walls is our problem. Not someone else's. Ours.
No one else is coming. There is no cavalry over the hill. There is only the public, and the public is us. We are standing here, today, right now, in whatever light we have, with whatever we know, and it is enough to begin. Because when this is over, the record will not be in doubt. Only the witness will be.
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Trump's Cruelty Is the Point: Making America Vicious and Unwelcoming Whether You Live Here or Not
In the first year of Trump’s second term as president, it’s become clear that, for those seeking, or even granted, asylum, the United States is no longer a safe place.
Feb 15, 2026
Today, during my slog through the Substack messages, newspaper headline notices, and podcast reminders that hit my inbox every morning, two stories drew my attention. Both had to do with the fact that human beings have always moved around this planet, beginning long before there were any countries or maps to display the borders where one nation ends and another begins. I was reminded of a decades-old song by the Venezuelan singer Soledad Bravo, “Punto y Raya”—“The Dot and the Dash”:
Entre tu pueblo y mi pueblo hay un punto y una raya,
la raya dice no hay paso el punto vía cerrada
“Between your people and mine,” says the song, “there’s a dot and a dash. The dash says, ‘No entrance,’ and the dot, ‘The road is closed.'” Bravo goes on to say that, with all those dots and dashes outlining the borders of nations, a map looks like a telegram. If you walk through the actual world, though, what you see are mountains and rivers, forests and deserts, but no dots or dashes at all.
Porque esas cosas no existen, sino que fueron creadas
para que mi hambre y la tuya estén siempre separadas.
And she adds, “Because those things aren’t real, they were created so your hunger and mine would remain separated.”
Two Immigration Stories
Two morning news stories brought that song back into my mind, along with the human reality it expresses. Both appeared in the New York Times (and no doubt elsewhere). The first reported that the “United States population grew last year [between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025] at one of the slowest rates in its history.” Such a reduction in growth was in large part due to the Trump administration’s immigration policies. In 2025, immigration rates to the United States dropped by 50% compared to the previous year. Perhaps surprisingly, Trump’s vicious and deadly deportation efforts accounted for only about 235,000 of the 1.5 million-person net decline in immigration.
Much more significant were the barriers to entry created under Trump, largely through the influence of Stephen Miller, the man Steve Bannon has labelled the president’s “prime minister.” Those include the effective closing of our southern border to undocumented arrivals. The administration has also made legal entry to the US much more difficult in a variety of ways, including:
- Instituting a $100,000 fee to be paid by employers seeking to hire professional workers under an H1-B visa;
- Erecting barriers to foreign students, leading to a 17% drop in new ones enrolling in American universities;
- Fully or partially restricting entry by the citizens (including refugees) of 19 nations: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen (full restrictions) and Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela (partial restrictions);
- Pausing all asylum applications by citizens of any nation in the world, leaving a backlog of 1.4 million cases;
- Capping all refugee admissions at 7,500 per year, a reduction of 94% from previous limits (with the exception, of course, of white South African farmers).
Why does it matter that the US population is growing more slowly while also aging? As the Times points out, this country “needs a large enough population of young workers and taxpayers to finance care for the nation’s older residents, whose numbers are swelling as the Baby Boom generation retires.” As any good Marxist will tell you, labor creates all wealth. In other words, a nation’s wealth (including that of its millionaires and billionaires) represents the accumulated value of work done by actual human beings. And that means an economy lacking enough workers will not be able to satisfy the grow-or-die logic of capitalism. Nor, if a reduction of the workforce is concentrated in jobs traditionally performed by immigrants, will that economy be able to feed its people. In other words, the stubbornly high price of groceries is not unconnected to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terror campaign around the country.
Immigration reductions are part of the story of slowing population growth, but there’s another piece of the puzzle. During the Great Recession that began with a mortgage meltdown in 2008, Americans began having fewer children. In my world of higher education, we’ve known about this precipitous drop for a while. It’s been described as a “demographic cliff” that would become a (predictable) emergency for college enrollment 18-20 years later—that is, now. The entire higher education sector, which has grown steadily since the institution of the GI Bill at the end of World War II, now faces layoffs, retrenchment, and the closing of institutions.
What of the second story I read this morning? It concerned Spain, a country taking an entirely different approach to immigration. I’ve been lucky enough to spend time in Spain, meeting there, in addition, of course, to Spaniards, farmworkers from Mali and other parts of francophone Africa, and Central American waiters and taxi drivers, who could use their native language in a new land. (I wonder if they sound to the Spanish much the way I do—like a hick from the faraway sticks.)
Like that of the United States, Spain’s population is aging, but its response is the opposite of the Trump administration’s. Our president and his minions have made it clear in word and deed not just that they want almost no new immigrants, but also which few they would consider accepting. “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right?” the president asked last December. “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few from Denmark,” he added. (Of course, that was before his spat with that country over his urge to take possession of Greenland.)
Unlike Trump’s crew, the Spanish government has issued a decree permitting undocumented migrants already in the country to apply for temporary residency, with permission to work legally there. Recognizing their contributions to fueling the major engines of the Spanish economy—agriculture, tourism, and construction—Spain has bucked a European and American tide of anti-migrant sentiment, the very one Trump sought to stoke with his remarks at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. Because of mass migration, he opined, “certain places in Europe are not even recognizable.” Critics of Spain’s new policy on the left argue that the country has been less welcoming to African migrants, but the socialist government of President Pedro Sánchez denies this (at least publicly).
Homesickness
All of this has left me thinking about the sacrifices people make when they choose, or are forced, to find a new home nation. Those of us in the US, even many who support immigrants, documented and otherwise, can fall into a trap of believing that, given the choice, everyone would rather live here. But it’s not that simple.
I spent some time in the Nicaraguan war zone in the mid-1980s. In spite of everything I loved about the early days of that country’s revolution, and how angry I became at the campaign of sabotage and torture my country unleashed to support the anti-government “contras,” there were days when I ached for the familiarity of home. The Greek roots of the word nostalgia refer to the literal pain of not being in one’s home, which describes just what I felt. I missed the everyday ease of knowing how to act without giving offense. I missed automatically understanding what was happening around me as well as, in a war zone, being able to distinguish the difference between people’s ordinary behavior and preparing for a possible attack. Most of all, I missed the feel of my native tongue in my mouth and its sound in my ears.
I knew that I would be going home in a few months, which set a limit to my homesickness. But I remember wondering then what it would be like to be a refugee, to know I’d never truly be home again. I thought about my friend Tiana, a Brazilian emigre with many years in the US, who used to talk about how she ached to hear Brazilian Portuguese. “Everything we say sounds so much more affectionate in Portuguese,” she told me. “We don’t just ask someone to pass ‘the butter’; we call it ‘the little butter,’ like a pet name.”
My grandfather must have felt that same nostalgic ache. The story my father told me was this: In 1910, after the Cossacks came to my grandfather’s village in what is now Ukraine and killed his youngest brother, the family hid him under the hay in a horse-drawn wooden wagon and had him driven out of town. He then made his way across Europe to Antwerp in Belgium, where he boarded a ship for New York City with nothing more than the name and address of a distant cousin in Norfolk, Virginia, who’d paid for his passage. He was just 18. He would then work for that cousin, almost like an indentured servant, until he eventually saved up enough money to bring the rest of his family to this country. I found evidence to support this tale when I visited the Ellis Island website and found his name and the cousin’s address in Norfolk listed in the manifest of the ship he took from Antwerp.
Cruelty Is the Point (of the Spear)
All of this is on my mind a lot these days, because most weeks I spend some time accompanying people to immigration court hearings or to their appointments with ICE. Each time I do so, I’m struck by the courage it takes to leave your familiar home, however dangerous it may have become, carrying that ache of nostalgia with you, maybe for the rest of your life. Last week, I waited outside an imposing building in downtown San Francisco, while a woman I’ll call Celia entered for an ICE check-in. The last time she’d done that, in October 2025, she hadn’t come out. Instead, she was sent to one of California’s privately-run ICE centers, the California City Detention Facility (CCDF), where she was imprisoned for the next two months.
California Sen. Alex Padilla visited that detention center recently. Having been to many jails and prisons over the years, he reported that, among other things, he expected complaints about issues like the quality of the food. “But I was shocked,” he said, “at the amount and intensity of the complaints about lack of medical care. Like, even in prisons, even under conditions of war, there [are] basic standards that we are supposed to hold and maintain. That is not happening.”
A New Yorker story by Oren Peleg about the CCDF supports Padilla’s claims. Detainees with gastric ulcers, prostate cancer, bloody urine, heart failure, and other serious medical problems told Peleg that they couldn’t get the medications or treatment they needed. It seems that CoreCivic, the company that runs CCDF, may be withholding medical treatment to encourage people to leave the country “voluntarily.” That may help explain why eight medical positions, including those of a physician and a psychiatrist, have gone unfilled for months. As Peleg writes:
But staffing issues do not fully explain the lack of basic medical care at California City. "They do it so you give up," Julio Cesar Santos Avalos, who was a detainee at California City from September to November, told me. When he arrived at CCDF, Santos Avalos recalls a consistent push by staff for detainees to sign away their rights and self-deport. Instructions for how to self-deport are displayed prominently near phones where detainees communicate with their lawyers. Santos Avalos and many of the detainees and attorneys I spoke to believe the lack of medical care is part of that push.
Peleg concludes that the “detention center is aiming to make conditions so terrible that detainees stop fighting and decide to leave.” The case of Santos Avalos is particularly searing. He lives with “chronic pain owing to a foot deformity caused by childhood cases of polio and Guillain-Barré syndrome,” but he was denied pain medication and forced to sleep in a top bunk at the detention center. He eventually chose to return to El Salvador, a country he’d left at the age of seven. As is true for many immigrants who came here as children, the home he now aches for is one in the United States.
Imagine the courage it took for Celia to smile, give herself a shake, and walk through those doors, knowing that she could very well end up back at CCDF. That day, however, we were lucky. After about 30 minutes, she emerged through the large bronze doors free—at least until her next appointment in a few months (and assuming there’s no Bay Area ICE surge in the meantime). I say “we” were lucky, because, while my fears are minor compared to hers and those of other immigrants like her, I’m always afraid that someone I’m accompanying will be taken away, leaving me angry and helpless.
Seeking Refuge
Like nostalgia, the word asylum has Greek roots. It suggests being free from someone else’s right of seizure, and so, by extension, “refuge.” When people come to this country seeking asylum, they are looking for refuge from horrors of all kinds: political oppression, familial or institutional violence, war, torture, you name it. An asylum is, by definition, a refuge, a safe place. That’s why institutions for people with mental illness used to be called “insane asylums.” (It’s been suggested that Donald Trump confuses the legal concept of seeking asylum with the term insane asylum, which is why he thinks that other countries are sending their mental patients here.)
An asylum should be a safe place, even if it may never feel like home. But in the first year of Trump’s second term as president, it’s become clear that, for those seeking, or even granted, asylum, the United States is no longer a safe place. Increasingly, as those two recent ICE murders in Minneapolis have shown, it’s not even a safe place for the rest of us.
In his poem “The Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost wrote:
Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
That’s what asylum is supposed to be in international law: the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
In these dark and frightening days, I often find a short sentence bubbling to the top of my mind: “I just want to go home.” I’m not quite sure what it means, but I think that, like so many people in Donald Trump’s America, I’m looking for a place that doesn’t yet exist, a refuge we will have to build with our own hands.
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