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border militarization
Immigrants Aren't Invaders; Often, They Are Fleeing US or European Invasions
The West has a long history of destabilizing countries the world over and then attacking the people who flee those wars.
Jan 31, 2026
After a year of gutting the United States government, deploying armed jackboots to American cities, and bombing at least seven countries, the Trump administration kicked off 2026 by invading Venezuela and kidnapping its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores. In the wake of that assault, President Donald Trump doubled down on his abandonment of the isolationist positions he once supposedly held, threatening military action against Colombia, Cuba, Iran, and Mexico. He then vowed that the US would come to “own” Greenland either “the easy way” or “the hard way.”
In truth, American imperialism defines much of this country’s history, but the latest escalation comes at a time when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have also been deployed around the nation to grab immigrants off the streets and whisk them to detention centers. Meanwhile, Trump has continued to preach the jingoistic gospel of stopping the arrival of new refugees and migrants, while blasting European governments over migration—even as he vows to launch military campaigns that will undoubtedly result in further mass displacements and fleeing people crossing borders in search of safety.
Destabilizing countries the world over and then attacking the people who flee those wars is, of course, nothing new. From the September 11 attacks in 2001 until September 2020, this country’s war on terror, according to one study, displaced an estimated 37 million people in eight countries. And that figure doesn’t even include several million displaced during smaller conflicts the US participated in from Chad to Tunisia, Mali to Saudi Arabia. Nor does it include the number of people displaced by Israel’s five wars since 2008 in and around the Gaza Strip; its land theft in the occupied West Bank; or its frequent airstrikes in Lebanon, Syria, and even Iran, all made possible thanks to Washington’s financial and military support.
When it comes to Washington demonizing the people displaced by its weapons, just ask the Palestinians. Millions of them live strewn across the map of the Middle East and beyond thanks to Israel’s ongoing military occupation and the American tax dollars that have enabled it.
“Eight Lives, Gone Just Like That”
In March 2015, I sat in the back of a taxi bound for Saida, a Lebanese coastal city a little less than an hour south of Beirut. The taxi hummed down the highway, the sea blurring through the windows to our right, and then swerved inland. Saida is more than 30 miles north of the country’s boundary with Israel and some 50 miles west of the border with Syria, but even that deep inside Lebanon, a de facto border appeared in the front windshield. The driver made a series of turns, braked, and inched toward a military checkpoint outside Ain al-Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp.
Lebanese soldiers appeared on either side of the vehicle. Their job was to decide who could—and could not—enter the camp. After reading over our documents and ensuring that we had the proper military permission to enter the camp, the soldiers motioned the driver to move forward. We eased in amid a sprawl of ramshackle homes, many built atop one another. It was a dusty, humid day, but people clogged the streets. Children punted a soccer ball back and forth in the road. Motorbikes trembled over potholes. Men stood around in knots, smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee, and some walked by with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders.
Along with an American photographer and a Lebanese reporter, I had gone to Ain al-Hilweh, the largest of Lebanon’s 12 Palestinian camps, to speak to people who had been doubly displaced by the war in neighboring Syria. As that civil war tore through the country—a war that drew interventions from the US, Great Britain, France, Israel, Russia, Iran, and several other places—Palestinian refugees from Syria found themselves fleeing to Lebanon. The population of Ain al-Hilweh alone had swelled by tens of thousands.
"For my whole life, I’ve seen Palestinians move from tragedy to tragedy, and from nakba to nakba.”
Of the Palestinians we met that day, the only ones who had ever set foot in their ancestral homeland were those who had been born before—and lived through—the 1948 war that led to Israel’s creation. What we’d soon learn, however, was that a term like double displacement failed to capture the extent to which borders had governed every aspect of their lives in permanent and repeated exile.
In a corner store with barren shelves, we found Afaf Dashe sitting in a small chair near the counter. At 70 years old, she had survived the Nakba—Arabic for catastrophe, the term Palestinians use to describe the ethnic cleansing of their country since 1948—as a three-year-old girl when her family fled to Syria. She had grown up in a suburb of Damascus, married, and raised children. When civil war started to rip through Syria in 2011, she and her family gritted it out through four years of barrel bombs, airstrikes, and shelling before they finally escaped.
While Ain al-Hilweh offered some respite, it offered neither true safety nor stability. In Lebanon, decades of state repression, lethal Israeli interventions, and failed Palestinian rebellions had left such refugees particularly vulnerable. Rather than setting down new roots in that dismal camp, Afaf explained, three of her daughters, along with five of her grandchildren, had decided to risk taking the long, often deadly journey to Europe. After crossing from Syria to Lebanon, they parted with Afaf and continued on by sea to Libya. They then paid smugglers to board a boat bound for Italy. As Afaf reached that point in her story, tears gathered in her eyes and she paused, for a long moment staring into the distance, seemingly at nothing, before turning back to us. The boat carrying her family, she said, had capsized in the Mediterranean Sea. “Eight lives, gone just like that. For my whole life, I’ve seen Palestinians move from tragedy to tragedy, and from nakba to nakba.”
More than once in her life, it occurred to me, wars had pushed her, her children, and her grandchildren across borders and, in a distinctly embattled world, borders decided where she and her loved ones could possibly move, where they could live, and where they could die. I thought about the US passport in my pocket, the relative ease with which I had crossed borders throughout my adult life, and the American tax dollars that helped doom Afaf to a life of permanent exile. She would be the first person I met who had lost loved ones simply looking to cross a border to find safety, but by no means the last.
Violent Borders
For tens of millions of people, borders are not merely places where the risk of violence is present. Borders are, by definition, violent. Borders are not merely crossed. Borders must be survived and endured. Borders are not only walls and razor wire. Borders are guards and police, surveillance cameras and drones, batons and bullets. For those tens of millions of people, borders don’t stop where one country ends and the next begins; they stalk and haunt across endless miles and years. Borders are both crime scenes and crimes, with nationalism the motive.
For people forced to flee, the violence doesn’t stop once they escape countries being bombed or economically strangled. The journey itself offers its own slate of dangers. The International Migration Organization has recorded more than 33,200 instances of refugees and migrants dying or going missing in the Mediterranean Sea alone since 2014. Between 1994 and 2024, rights groups estimate that more than 80,000 people died in the deserts or rivers on and around the US-Mexico border.
Perhaps more than anything else, the idea of strong borders has fueled the fascist-style surge that now grips the United States and significant parts of Europe.
Throughout the last decade, I’ve traveled along the European refugee trail, stopping off in countries across the Balkans and Central and Western Europe, while also reporting from American communities along the heavily militarized US-Mexico border. Wherever I’ve gone, the displaced have horror stories to tell—of people drowned at sea, of migrants shot along borders, and others who simply disappeared along “the refugee trail.” At a shelter in Belgrade, Serbia, Afghans who had fled the fallout of the US war in their country and walked the endless land route from Turkey spoke of the Bulgarian border police who had detained, threatened, or beaten them along the way. On the Serbian border with Hungary, Moroccans and Algerians told me of policemen who beat their feet with batons to deter them from ever trying to cross the border again. In Greece, young men from Sudan and Somalia—their countries no strangers to US intervention—described the tear gas and rubber bullets they faced on the country’s northern border with Macedonia. In Turkey, Syrians told me about the dogs that Bulgarian border police sicced on them. In Arizona, people recalled walking for so long in the Mexican desert that the soles of their shoes tore apart.
Perhaps more than anything else, the idea of strong borders has fueled the fascist-style surge that now grips the United States and significant parts of Europe. From the time Donald Trump first entered the Oval Office in January 2017, far-right and ultranationalist parties around Europe have also gained ground in ways that would once have been unimaginable—and where the far-right has yet to take power, center-left and liberal parties have often swung hard to the right on their immigration and border enforcement policies.
In one breath, even Democratic Party officials in the United States, still singing praises of liberal democracy, are also promising to crack down on immigration and strengthen border enforcement in a desperate bid to appear tougher in the age of Donald Trump. In the United Kingdom, the center-left Labour Party ousted the Conservatives in 2024, only to put into practice anti-immigrant policies that align with those even further to the right, like Nigel Farage and his UK Independence Party. In Greece, even after the violent neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party was banned, following years of anti-immigrant violence, the nominally center-right New Democracy Party adopted and repackaged its rhetoric in slightly modified form, while placing a former fascist in charge of its migration ministry. From the United States to Europe, immigration is ever less often discussed as a humanitarian issue and ever more often described in terms of an “invasion,” functionally recasting desperate civilians as armed soldiers.
Politically, the invasion story is more easily digestible than the grim actual stories of displaced people. Unsurprisingly, it has found ever larger audiences. And consider that a grim irony, since so many of the people crossing into the US and Europe, even before they faced deadly journeys at sea and militarized borders, were driven from their countries at least in part due to American and European involvement in mass violence and policies designed to foster economic collapse in their homelands.
Such invasion stories about immigrants are, of course, anything but new, after centuries in which a nationalistic desire for hard borders has undergirded so many claims that war and violence are necessary. In 1908, a decade before she herself was deported from the United States, the Lithuanian-American anarchist Emma Goldman pointed to the violence at the heart of such nationalism during a speech in San Francisco. “Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate,” she told her audience. “Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot consider themselves nobler, better, grander, more intelligent than those living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.”
Hope in the Pushback
In the decade since I started covering migration and borders, I have also witnessed what resistance to the anti-immigrant far-right might look like. In Greece, activists and volunteers, anarchists, socialists, and everyday people worked together to do what they could to offer an alternative to the grim realities displaced people were experiencing. On Greek islands like Lesbos, humanitarians gathered by the shore to help the displaced disembark from boats. Others headed out to sea to rescue people from sinking vessels. In Athens, anarchists and other leftists occupied abandoned buildings, refashioning them into squats that displaced immigrants could inhabit without the overcrowding and decrepit living conditions of the official camps. In Germany, everyday people opened their homes to newly arrived refugees. In Austin, Texas, the congregants of a church told me about how they had taken in asylum-seekers facing deportation.
And today, Americans in cities from Chicago to Los Angeles have rallied to push back against the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Ever since an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis in January, ever more protesters have taken to the streets in growing numbers to voice their opposition to state-sanctioned murder and the Trump administration’s drive to carry out mass deportations fueled more by cruelty than any concern for the country’s safety. As the president deepens federal deployments and threatens to use the military against what he calls the “invasion from within,” those demonstrators undoubtedly understand that their own fates are wrapped up with those of immigrants and refugees. Squats, humanitarian aid, and mass protests may not stop the cruel wheels of the anti-immigrant political machine, but they do offer glimmers of hope at a time when hope is in short supply.
You can buy into the claim that the most powerful countries on the planet are the victims of invasions or remember that actual invasions and the military campaigns that create lethal cycles of mass displacement are happening in all too many places on this planet.
In the early months of 2026, that hope may be needed more than ever, in part because all too many Americans and Europeans continue to empower politicians who recycle the tired argument that, if there were fewer immigrants, life in their countries would be more prosperous and peaceful. In the lead-up to the 2024 election, Donald Trump bluntly assured Americans that immigrants were invaders who were “poisoning the blood of our country.” During the first year of his second term, his administration snatched international students off the streets, separated families, and shipped immigrants off to foreign prisons. Meanwhile, he continued to repeatedly tell Americans that they were being “invaded,” a story that comes with a painful body count, while courting what inevitably loiters behind nationalism and nativism: fear.
In her novel White Teeth, Zadie Smith put all of that in perspective this way: “But it makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist, scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears—dissolution, disappearance.”
Last year, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimated that more than 122 million people across the world had been displaced as a result of war, violence, or persecution, a number that marked a decade-long high and was also the 10th consecutive year that the total number of people displaced across the globe had increased. Worse yet, war and military campaigns are still driving people from their homes globally.
Sooner than later, such wars and other disasters will result in yet more people seeking safety in Europe and the United States. When that happens, there is little doubt that far-right leaders, hoping to offload the blame for their own failures, will once again stand in front of us and claim that state violence is necessary to protect our country from an “invasion.” Then, you’ll have to make a choice: You can buy into the claim that the most powerful countries on the planet are the victims of invasions or remember that actual invasions and the military campaigns that create lethal cycles of mass displacement are happening in all too many places on this planet. That choice will determine just how much hope there is for a world where desperate people escaping disasters they had no hand in creating don’t have to consider crossing a manmade line a matter of negotiating their very survival.
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ICE Raids Against Farmworkers Expose the Pretense of Border Security
When the state hunts its most essential—and most exploited—workers to meet deportation quotas, the myth of border security collapses.
Dec 14, 2025
The targeting of farmworkers by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement lays bare the true intent and interests motivating the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy agenda. It also exposes the fundamental contradictions that shape the US political economy. The nature of the state’s abductions, caging, and deportations of those doing the backbreaking work of harvesting fields, is not only revealed by the fact that those detained are not “criminals.” It is the paradox, in which farm sustainers—pillars of the food system whose livelihoods feed communities within and beyond our borders—are being systematically expelled.
While ICE raids rage on in neighborhoods across the country, they are also notably taking place in the very heart of the food system: in labor camps and homes, fields and orchards, packing sheds, outside of schools and labor centers, and across small towns whose economies depend entirely on the people the state targets. ICE is taking advantage of the fact that farmworker communities are often rural and structurally marginalized.
A state that capitalizes against workers it labels as essential in times of crisis yet simultaneously categorizes as “illegal”—especially the moment deportation quotas prove profitable—shows how racial capitalism depends on legal precarity to function. In the agrifood system in particular, the precarity of farmworkers has underpinned how corporations and landowners increase their margins, while keeping the cost of food artificially low.
As activist and award-winning author, Harsha Walia, argues in Border and Rule, borders function not merely to exclude, but to produce a workforce that can be exploited precisely because its existence has been criminalized. The US government, whose imperialist record of consequential trade policies and debt agreements, exporting dumping under in the name of trade or "aid," imposition of sanctions, and military interventions in or with foreign nations, has made significant contributions to producing crises of migration. At the same time, the state determines the rights and protections those same migrants might have—migrants it requires as a key labor force. For migrant farmworkers in particular, this vulnerability and legal precarity is even more stark given the historical double standards within agriculture. Farmworkers are routinely carved out of basic labor protections, including being denied overtime rights and robust health and safety regulations. Their disposability is not accidental; it is legislated and maintained with the underlying political and economic assumption that those who are forced to look for work across borders can, or even should, remain unprotected and exploited.
To criminalize those who feed you is more than a contradiction. It is an indictment, revealing a society willing to squeeze labor while kidnapping and expelling the people who provide it.
So, even as US farmworkers are those whose skill and sweat stabilizes and maintains US agriculture—a foundation of public health and our economy—under President Donald Trump’s deportation siege, they find themselves under regular threat because of their supposed legal status.
According to US Department of Agriculture data, over 40% of US farmworkers are undocumented migrants. In California, that percentage is even higher, with estimates ranging from nearly half to upwards of 70%. This means that the state that grows approximately half of the US vegetables and over 75% of the country’s fruits and nuts is an easy target for ICE raids. Residents of Kern County, which has the highest concentration of agricultural workers in the state, recently witnessed the opening of California’s newest and largest migrant detention facility this fall. This facility is another signal to farmworkers that the state’s surveillance and criminalization of their community is becoming an inescapable part of daily life.
Additionally, in early October, the Department of Labor announced a new rule that slashes the wages of H-2A workers between $5 to $7 per hour, thereby transferring $2.46 billion dollars in wages from workers to employers each year. Crucially, US agriculture has become increasingly dependent on the H-2A program to address chronic labor shortages, as it permits eligible employers to recruit foreign workers for temporary agricultural jobs. The administration’s decision therefore not only undermines the wage protections intended to make the H-2A program a lawful and regulated alternative to undocumented labor, but also exposes its willingness to undercut the very workforce the program is purported to support. A coalition of California attorneys general led a letter noting the various consequences of the new rule, which they claim “abandons reliable farm-specific data,” and exacerbates "the roots of farmworker poverty for both H-2A workers and domestic farmworkers alike." United Farm Workers (UFW) has also launched a lawsuit intended to reverse the administration’s decision, which they claim reflects, “one of the largest wealth transfers from workers to employers in US agricultural history.”
In essence, the administration’s pursuit of farmworker communities serves no legitimate economic or social goal. Instead, it enacts government scapegoating: the creation of a rhetorical problem (“illegal workers”) and the violent pursuit of that manufactured threat in order to justify the ever-expanding profitability of the border-security apparatus. It is an exercise of racialized state theater, and a manifestation of a food system left to the logic of deregulation and cheap, disposable labor—labor the border itself ensures under the guise of protecting national security or state sovereignty. Reports from the federal Department of Labor indicate that ICE’s siege is already contributing to labor shortages and supply consequences, as farmworkers are too afraid to leave their homes. Farmer organizations have also expressed solidarity with farmworkers, noting their importance in keeping the food economy afloat.
The fear and suffering imposed on farmworkers should neither be reduced to the specter of a labor shortage. It is a fear that fractures community life, determines whether someone seeks medical care, and dictates whether a child goes to school. In the aftermath of raids, it leaves mothers, fathers, children, and their families terrorized and often unaccounted for. It also compounds the daily struggles of working in systems that maintain unsafe labor conditions and unfair wages, such as mounting food insecurity and chronic health issues.
These communities are not peripheral cogs in some vast, anonymous agricultural machine. They are the harvesters of our food. To criminalize those who feed you is more than a contradiction. It is an indictment, revealing a society willing to squeeze labor while kidnapping and expelling the people who provide it. It does not reflect lawfulness or the interests of "public safety."
While the going after farmworker communities in such a concentrated manner might be relatively new to the Trump administration, farmworkers’ long-standing legal precarity and fight for basic protections—while holding up such a huge portion of the food economy—is not. If targeting workers whose status is defined not by the role they play in feeding the nation or sustaining the economy, but by their documentation, does not underscore the structural flaws inherent in our entire economic system, it at least reveals the insincerity of Trump’s war on im/migrants and the choreography of the militarized border project. As ICE raids against farmworkers continue nationwide, the entire pretense of border security reveals itself as utterly transparent.
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Trump’s Venezuela Drug War Gambit and the Militarization Playbook at Home
Whether it’s a wall in the desert or barricades in front of the White House, the message is the same: Perceived threats, real or manufactured, are met with troops, not talks.
Aug 15, 2025
US President Donald Trump has quietly authorized the Pentagon to carry out military operations against what his administration calls “narco-terrorist” networks in Latin America. On paper, it’s a counter-narcotics policy. In practice, it serves as a green light for open-ended US military action abroad, bypassing congressional approval, sidestepping international law, and stretching the definition of “national security” until it becomes a catchall justification for the use of force.
The directive allows the US to target groups unilaterally labeled as both criminal and terrorist. Once that designation is made, the military can operate without the consent of the targeted country, a move that violates international law. In a region with a long history of US-backed coups, covert wars, and destabilization campaigns, the risk of abuse isn’t hypothetical; it’s inevitable.
While the order applies across Latin America, Venezuela stands at the top of the list. The Trump administration has accused President Nicolás Maduro’s government of working with transnational cartels, and has doubled the bounty on him to $50 million (double the bounty for Osama bin Laden). It’s a lawfare tactic designed to criminalize a head of state and invite mercenaries and covert operatives to participate in regime change. The accusations fueling this escalation have grown increasingly far-fetched casting Maduro in turn as a partner of Colombia’s FARC, the head of the “Cartel de los Soles,” a patron of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, and now, as an ally of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. a charge even Mexico’s own president says has no evidence, revealing how politicized and unfounded this allegation is.
The core premise of the accusation is that Maduro is involved in a cocaine trafficking network of Venezuelan military and political figures called Cartel de los Soles. The Venezuelan government denies the cartel’s existence, calling it a fabrication to justify sanctions and regime change efforts. Multiple independent investigations have shown no hard evidence exists and that this narrative thrives in a media-intelligence echo chamber. Reports from outlets like Insight Crime cite anonymous US sources; those media stories are then cited by policymakers and think tanks, and the cycle repeats until speculation becomes policy.
The communities in Caracas and Los Angeles, in the Venezuelan plains, and in the US-Mexico border may seem worlds apart, but they are facing the same war machine.
Fulton Armstrong, a professor at American University and a former longtime US intelligence officer, has stated that he knows no one in the intelligence community, apart from those currently in government, who believes in the existence of the Cartel de los Soles.
Drug monitoring data also contradict this narrative. The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) reports that only about 7% of US-bound cocaine transits through the Eastern Caribbean via Venezuela, while approximately 90% takes Western Caribbean and Eastern Pacific routes. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2025 World Drug Report likewise confirms that trafficking remains concentrated in major Andean corridors, not through Venezuela. Yet Venezuela is targeted anyway, not for its actual role in the drug trade, but because neutralizing its government has become a pillar of US foreign policy, seen in Washington as a step toward reshaping the country’s political system and prying open its economy to foreign control.
The “narco-terror” label put on Venezuela also attempts to rope Venezuela into the US fentanyl crisis, despite the absence of evidence that the country plays any role in fentanyl trafficking. Even US drug enforcement assessments make no mention of Venezuela as a source or transit point.
This link exists only in political rhetoric, a way to fold Venezuela into a domestic public health crisis and recycle the same logic used to brand it a “national security threat.” That accusation dates back to 2015 when then-President Barack Obama created the legal and political scaffolding for an open-ended campaign of coercion. Once the “narco-terror” framework is in place, Washington can sustain and escalate military measures over time, regardless of the immediate pretext.
This framing turns a political standoff into a declared security imperative. It broadens the range of permissible military tools, from ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) to direct action.
The pattern is familiar. In Panama (1989), Colombia (2000s), and Honduras (2010s), US militarized antidrug campaigns failed to dismantle supply chains or reduce trafficking volumes. What they did accomplish was shifting routes, militarizing criminal actors, and destabilizing governments, and left societies more fragile—costing lives and destroying communities in the process.
The Mirror at Home: Militarization and Communities of Color
The same militarized logic driving US policy in Venezuela is being applied inside the United States. In August 2025, President Trump signed an executive order placing the DC Metropolitan Police Department under federal control and deployed the National Guard, citing a public safety “emergency,” despite official data showing violent crime at multiyear lows. Even US law enforcement statistics contradict the White House narrative, but the administration dismissed them, casting the city as overrun by “roving mobs,” “wild youth,” and “drugged-out maniacs.”
DC is only one example. The same militarized logic has sent thousands of troops to the US-Mexico border, converted military bases into detention centers from Texas to New Jersey, and stationed soldiers inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities in over 20 states. In Los Angeles, Marines and National Guard units patrolled immigrant neighborhoods in a show of force, a deployment beaten back only by mass community resistance and the threat of labor action.
Whether it’s a wall in the desert or barricades in front of the White House, the message is the same: Perceived threats, real or manufactured, are met with troops, not talks. The playbook never changes: In Venezuela, the “threat” is cast as narco-terrorism; in the US, it’s a “border surge” or a manufactured public safety emergency built on racially coded depictions of Black and brown communities. In both cases, the logic is identical: Treat political disputes and social crises as security emergencies, sideline diplomacy and community solutions, usurp greater executive powers, and make military force a routine tool of governance.
The Real Threat
Trump’s “narco-terror” authorization uses the language of fighting drugs and crime to mask a deeper project: expanding the military’s role in governance and normalizing its use as a tool of political control both at home and abroad.
In Latin America, that means more interventions against governments the US wants to topple. At home, it means embedding the military deeper into civilian life, particularly in Black and brown neighborhoods.
The communities in Caracas and Los Angeles, in the Venezuelan plains, and in the US-Mexico border may seem worlds apart, but they are facing the same war machine. Until we reject militarization in all its forms, the targets will keep shifting, but the people under the gun will look the same.
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The Dystopia of the Border Security Expo Is Trump’s Response to the Climate Emergency
U.S. climate policy now boils down to this: Reducing fossil fuel extraction and consumption are far less important (if important at all) than the creation of a profitable border and immigration apparatus.
Jun 02, 2025
Believe it or not, I had a transcendent experience at this year’s Border Security Expo, the annual event that brings Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement together with private industry. I hesitate to describe it that way, though, because I was on the exhibition hall floor and instantly found myself in the very heart of the U.S. border-industrial complex. It was early April, and I was surrounded by the latest surveillance equipment—camera systems, drones, robodogs—from about 225 companies (a record number for such an event) displaying their wares at that Phoenix Convention Center. Many of the people there seemed all too excited that Donald Trump was once again president.
You might wonder how it’s even possible to have a mystical experience while visiting this country’s largest annual border surveillance fair, and I would agree, especially since my moment came just after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gave the keynote speech to a packed convention center ballroom. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Noem, who had infamously worn a $50,000 Rolex watch to a Salvadoran “terrorism” prison photo shoot just weeks before, received rousing ovation after ovation, as she claimed that the Trump administration had almost achieved “operational control” of the U.S.-Mexican border. (Only a little more to go, she insisted!) The same point had been made by “border czar” Thomas Homan earlier that day. Both asked the audience to give standing ovations to all border law enforcement officials in the room for, as Noem put it, enduring the “train wreck and poor leadership of Joe Biden leading this country.” And like those who preceded her, she used words like “invasion” abundantly, suggesting that an all-too-fragile United States was battling a siege of unknown proportions.
The late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano had a name for just such an experience: an “upside-down world,” he called it. In such a world, we’re presented not with the facts but their very opposite. For the border-industrial complex, however, it’s just such an inverted world that sells their product.
For the United States—increasingly so in the age of Donald Trump—the only answer to the climate crisis and its mass displacement of people is yet more border enforcement.
Then it happened. I was walking down a corridor lined with drone companies, including one from India called ideaForge, whose medium-sized drone was “built like a bird” and “tested like a tank.” There were also sophisticated artificial intelligence camera systems mounted on masts atop armored ground drones, which might be considered the perfect combination of today’s modern border technology. There was also the company Fat Truck, whose vehicles had tires taller than my car. X-ray and biometric systems surrounded me, along with green-uniformed Border Patrol agents, sheriffs from border counties, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents checking the equipment. As always, you could practically smell the cash in the air. Of my 13 years covering the Border Security Expo, this was clearly the largest and most enthusiastic one ever.
I was walking through it all on one of those worn blue carpets found in convention centers and then, suddenly, I wasn’t walking there at all. Instead, I was in the Sierra Tarahumara in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, with a Rarámuri man named Mario Quiroz. I had been there with him the previous week, so it was indeed a memory, but so vivid it essentially overcame me. I could smell the forest near the Copper Canyon, one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I could see Quiroz showing me the drying yellowish trees cracking everywhere amid a mega-drought of staggering proportions. I could even catch a glimpse of the fractured Río Conchos, the Mexican river that, at the border, would become the Rio Grande. It was drying up and the trees along it were dying, while many local people were finding that they had little choice but to migrate elsewhere to make ends meet.
I had to sit down. When I did, I suddenly found myself back at the expo in that stale air-conditioned environment that only promises yet more surveillance towers and drones on that very border. Then came the realization that gave me pause: Although that devastated Sierra Tarahumara terrain and the Border Security Expo couldn’t be more different, they are, in fact, also intimately connected. After all, Sierra Tarahumara represents the all too palpable and devastating reality of climate change and the way it’s already beginning to displace people, while the Expo represented my country’s most prominent response to that displacement (and the Global North’s more generally). For the United States—increasingly so in the age of Donald Trump—the only answer to the climate crisis and its mass displacement of people is yet more border enforcement.
“Unwanted Starving Immigrants”
Consider the 2003 Pentagon-commissioned report entitled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security. It stated, “The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries because they have the resources and reserves to achieve self-sufficiency.” It also predicted that “borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America.” Twenty-two years later, that prophecy—if the Border Security Expo is any indication—is coming true.
In 2007, Leon Fuerth, former national security adviser to Vice President Al Gore, wrote that “border problems” will overwhelm American capabilities “beyond the possibility of control, except by drastic measures and perhaps not even then.” His thoughts were a response to a request from the House of Representatives for scientists and military practitioners to offer serious projections connecting climate change and national security. The result would be the book Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change. Since, according to its editor Kurt Campbell, it would take 30 years for a major military platform to go from the “drawing board to the battlefield,” that volume was, indeed, a book of preparation for a bordered future that only now is beginning to truly envelop us.
One booth for the company QinteQ displayed a ground robot resembling a multilegged insect. I wondered how this could help with the Chihuahuan drought. A vendor told me it could be used for bomb disposal.
In March, I stood on a hill in the town of Sisoguichi in Chihuahua, Mexico with the local priest, Héctor Fernando Martínez, who told me people there wouldn’t be planting corn, beans, and squash at all this year because of the drought. They feared it would never again rain. And it was true that the drought in Chihuahua was the worst I had ever seen, affecting not only the mountains but also the valleys where drying lakes and reservoirs had left farmers without water for the 2025 agricultural cycle.
“What do people do instead?” I asked the priest. “Migrate,” he told me. Many people already migrate for half the year to supplement their incomes, picking apples near Cuauhtémoc or chiles near Camargo. Others end up in the city of Ciudad Juárez, working in maquiladoras (factories) to produce goods for Walmart, Target, and warplane manufacturers, among other places. Some, of course, also try to cross into the United States, only to encounter the same technology and weaponry that was before my eyes that day at the Border Security Expo.
Those displacements, anticipated in assessments from the early 2000s, are already happening in an ever more unnerving fashion. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center reports that each year now about 22.4 million people are forcibly displaced by “weather-related hazards.” And projections for future migration are startling. The World Bank estimates that, by 2050, 216 million people could be on the move globally, while another report speculates that the number could even hit 1.2 billion. Multiple factors influence people’s decisions to migrate, of course, but climate change is rapidly becoming a (if not the) most prominent one.
Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to banish climate change from all government documents and discourse and quite literally wipe it out as a subject of any interest at all, the DHS’s 2025 Homeland Threat Assessment describes what’s going on in Chihuahua and elsewhere all too well: “Natural disasters or extreme weather events abroad that disrupt local economies or result in food insecurity have the potential to exacerbate migration flows to the United States.” The 2021 DHS Climate Action Plan stated that the department would “conduct integrated, scalable, agile, and synchronized steady-state operations… to secure the Southern Border and Approaches.” It turns out that the “operational control” Kristi Noem mentioned at the Border Security Expo includes preparations for potential climate-induced mass migration. That hellish dystopic world (envisioned in movies like Mad Max) is coming to you directly from Trump’s Department of Homeland Security along the U.S.-Mexican border.
The Border-Industrial Complex in Action
As I continued through that expo hall, I recalled walking in drought-stricken Chihuahua and thought about what’s now happening on our border to face the human nightmare of climate change in an all-too-military fashion. Ominously enough, the company Akima, which operates the ICE detention center in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, was a prime sponsor of the Expo and I saw its name prominently displayed. Its website indicates that it is “now hiring to support ICE efforts,” effectively framing the mass deportations promised by Trump as a good opportunity for volunteers.
One booth for the company QinteQ displayed a ground robot resembling a multilegged insect. I wondered how this could help with the Chihuahuan drought. A vendor told me it could be used for bomb disposal. When I gave him a look of disbelief, he mentioned that he’d heard of a couple of cases of bombs found at the border. At another company, UI Path, an enthusiastic vendor claimed their software was focused on administrative “efficiency” and, he assured me, was well “aligned with DOGE” (Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency), allowing Border Patrol agents to not have to handle the “tedious tasks,” so that they could “go out in the field.” I then asked about their success with the Border Patrol and he replied, “They already have our program. They are already using it.”
When I approached the Matthews Environmental Solutions booth, the vendors weren’t there. But behind a lone green chair, a large placard stated that the company was one of the “global leaders in waste incineration,” with over 5,000 installations worldwide. A photo of a large metal waste incinerator caught my eye, somewhat morbidly, because the website also said that the company offered “cremation systems.” Though they weren’t selling that service at the Border Security Expo, there was certainly a macabre symbolism to such an expo where human ashes could be converted into profit and suffering into revenue.
When it comes to this country, whatever Donald Trump may want to believe, no border wall can actually stop climate change itself.
Forecasters at the global management consulting firm IMARC Group cheerily project an even more robust global homeland security market to come. “The growing number and severity of natural disasters and public health emergencies,” they write, “is offering a favorable homeland security market outlook.” By IMARC’s calculations, the industry will grow from $635.90 billion this year to $997.82 billion by 2033, a nearly 5% growth rate. The company Market and Markets, however, predicts a far quicker ascent, estimating that the market will reach $905 billion by next year. The consensus, in short, is that, in the age of climate change, homeland security will soon be on the verge of becoming a trillion-dollar industry—and just imagine what future Border Security Expos will be like then!
Certainly, the Trump administration, eager to toss out anything related to climate change funding while also working hard to increase the production of fossil fuels, has ambitious plans to contribute to that very reality. Since January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE have already put out about $2.5 billion in contracts. It’s still early, but that number is actually lower than Joe Biden’s pace a year ago; his spending reached $9 billion at the end of fiscal year 2024. Despite constant accusations from Trump and others that Joe Biden maintained “open borders,” he finished his term as the top contractor of any president when it came to border and immigration enforcement and so set a high bar for Trump.
In 2025, Trump is operating with a CBP and ICE budget of $29.4 billion, slightly lower than Biden’s 2024 one, but historically high (approximately $10 billion more than when he started his first term as president in 2017). The change, however, will come next year, as the administration is asking for $175 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, an increase of $43.8 billion “to fully implement the president’s mass removal campaign, finish construction of the border wall on the Southwest border, procure advanced border security technology, modernize the fleet and facilities of the Coast Guard, and enhance Secret Service protective operations.”
On top of that on May 22, the House of Representatives passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that, among other things, would infuse $160 billion more in funding into the CBP and ICE budgets over the next four and a half years. As Adam Isaacson from the Washington Office on Latin America stated, “We have never seen anything come close to the level of border hardening and massive deportation enforcement resources foreseen in this bill” that will now go to a vote in the Senate. This may explain the industry’s optimism; they sense a potential bonanza to come.
Despite Trump’s deep urge to erase global warming from consideration, climate displacement and border protection—two dynamics trending distinctly upward—are on a collision course. The United States, the world’s largest historic carbon emitter, had already been spending 11 times more on border and immigration enforcement than on climate finance and, under President Trump, those proportions are set to become even more stunningly abysmal. U.S. climate policy now boils down to this: Reducing fossil fuel extraction and consumption are far less important (if important at all) than the creation of a profitable border and immigration apparatus. In fact, the dystopia of the Border Security Expo I saw that day is the U.S. response to the drought in Chihuahua and so much else involving the overheating of this planet. And yet, when it comes to this country, whatever Donald Trump may want to believe, no border wall can actually stop climate change itself.
As I listened to Kristi Noem and Thomas Homan discuss what they considered to be a besieged country, I thought of Galeano’s provocative analysis of that inverted world where the oppressor becomes the oppressed and the oppressed the oppressor. That world now includes fires, floods, increasingly devastating storms, and encroaching seas, all to be met with high-tech cameras, biometrics, robotic dogs, and formidable walls.
I still can’t shake my vision of those yellowish hues on the dying trees in the Sierra Tarahumara. I walked with Quiroz down that canyon to the Río Conchos River and out onto its bed of dried stones that crunched like bones underfoot. Quiroz told me he came to that then-flowing river every day as a kid to tend to his family’s goats. I asked how he felt about it now that it looked like a bunch of disconnected puddles stretching before us to the horizon. “Tristeza,” he told me.
Walking the halls of the expo, I felt the weight of that word: sadness. Sadness, indeed, in this thoroughly upside-down borderworld of ours.
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Trump’s Border Militarization Scheme Threatens the Rule of Law
As presidential overreaches pile up, they underscore the urgent need for Congress and the courts to reassert their roles as checks on executive authority.
May 03, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump has turned a 60-foot-wide strip of federal land that spans three states on the southern border into a “military installation” to “address the emergency” he previously declared over unlawful immigration and drug trafficking. Trump’s memo authorizing this action seems designed to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, which normally bars federal armed forces from conducting domestic law enforcement. The apparent plan is to let the military act as a de facto border police force, with soldiers apprehending, searching, and detaining people who cross the border unlawfully.
This move could have alarming implications for democratic freedoms. Moreover, it continues a pattern of the president stretching his emergency powers past their limits to usurp the role of Congress and bypass legal rights. He has misused a law meant to address economic emergencies to set tariffs on every country in the world. He declared a fake “energy emergency” to promote fossil fuel production. And he dusted off a centuries-old wartime authority to deport Venezuelan immigrants, without due process, to a Salvadoran prison notorious for human rights violations.
As presidential overreaches pile up, they underscore the urgent need for Congress and the courts to reassert their roles as checks on executive authority.
The Posse Comitatus Act and the Military Purpose Doctrine
Last week, the military announced that soldiers deployed on the New Mexico-Mexico border will have “enhanced authorities” because they are on land that has now been designated part of Fort Huachuca, Arizona—a military installation located more than 100 miles away. The new authorities include the power to “temporarily detain trespassers” on the “military installation” and “conduct cursory searches of trespassers... to ensure the safety of U.S. service members and Department of Defense (DOD) property.”
Searching and apprehending migrants would ordinarily run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal armed forces from directly participating in civilian law enforcement activities unless doing so is expressly authorized by Congress or the Constitution. The law stems from an Anglo-American tradition, centuries older than the Constitution, of restraining military interference in civilian affairs. It serves as a critical check on presidential power and a vital safeguard for both personal liberty and democracy.
Having turned much of the southern border into a “military installation,” the administration now takes the position that anyone crossing the border without authorization in those areas is not just violating immigration law but also trespassing on a military installation.
Nonetheless, several exceptions exist. The most significant is the Insurrection Act—a law that Trump floated using to address unlawful migration (although for now, his secretaries of defense and homeland security are reportedly recommending against such a move). In authorizing soldiers to conduct apprehensions and detentions on lands that have been newly designated as a “military installation,” the president is relying on a lesser-known loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act known as the “military purpose doctrine.”
The doctrine, conceived by the executive branch and endorsed by the courts, holds that an action taken primarily to further a military purpose does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act even if it provides an incidental benefit to civilian law enforcement. A textbook example is the circumstance in which a person has driven drunk onto a military base. Soldiers may legally detain the intruder until civilian law enforcement arrives to take them into custody. This does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act because the primary purpose of the military’s activity is not to enforce the laws against driving while impaired, but to maintain order on the base and protect military assets and personnel.
Having turned much of the southern border into a “military installation,” the administration now takes the position that anyone crossing the border without authorization in those areas is not just violating immigration law but also trespassing on a military installation. Federal troops thus have a legitimate military reason, the argument goes, to apprehend, search, and detain migrants without violating the Posse Comitatus Act and without the president needing to invoke the Insurrection Act at all.
Evaluating the Legality of the Order
Using the military purpose doctrine to justify direct military involvement in immigration enforcement is a transparent ruse to evade the Posse Comitatus Act without congressional authorization. The doctrine is meant to apply only in cases where any law enforcement benefit is purely incidental. Here, the situation is the opposite.
The nominal justification for apprehending and detaining migrants who cross the border is protecting the installation. But the installation itself was created to apprehend and detain migrants, as well as to secure their removal. In the memo, this is described as “sealing the border” and “repelling the invasion” at the border. No matter how the Trump administration frames those activities, however, they are civilian law enforcement functions. He cannot turn them into military operations by misusing the language of war. These civilian law enforcement activities are not “incidental”—they are the reason for creating the installation. And apprehending migrants who “trespass” on the installation is the primary way in which this law enforcement mission will be furthered.
If emergency powers can be invoked for border security at a time when unlawful border crossings have reached a historic low, there is little to prevent a president from declaring fake emergencies to invoke these alarming powers.
This use of the military is fundamentally different from the border deployments that have occurred in recent presidential administrations, from George W. Bush to Joe Biden. The military’s role until now has been limited to logistical support, such as assisting border agents with surveillance, infrastructure construction, and transportation. Providing such support does not constitute direct participation in law enforcement, so it does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act. Having soldiers perform core law enforcement duties like apprehending or detaining people, however, steps over the legal boundary.
The move also skirts a separate statute requiring congressional approval of any Pentagon takeover of more than 5,000 acres of federal lands except “in time of war or national emergency.” Here, in order to transfer control of land from the Interior Department, Trump is relying on a declaration of national emergency he issued on January 20 to address the “invasion” at the southern border, in which he asserted that “our southern border is overrun.” But on March 2, Trump triumphantly posted on social media that “the Invasion of our Country is OVER,” adding that in the preceding month, “very few people came.” His administration continues to tout the fact that unlawful border crossings are now at their lowest level in decades. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data from March confirms a 95% decline in monthly unauthorized crossings.
Leaving aside the question of whether an emergency, properly defined, existed on January 20 (it didn’t), the Trump administration has made a powerful case that there is no emergency now. Trump should be revoking the emergency declaration, not relying on it to transfer federal lands to the Department of Defense.
Why It Matters
Aside from legal concerns, there are practical reasons why the U.S. armed forces shouldn’t be enforcing immigration law. Federal troops are trained to fight and destroy an enemy; they’re generally not trained for domestic law enforcement. Asking them to do law enforcement’s job creates risks to migrants, U.S. citizens who may inadvertently trespass on federal lands at the border, and the soldiers themselves. And it pulls our armed forces away from their core mission of protecting the United States from foreign adversaries at a time when the military is already stretched thin.
Using the military for border enforcement is also a slippery slope. If soldiers are allowed to take on domestic policing roles at the border, it may become easier to justify uses of the military in the U.S. interior in the future. Our nation’s founders warned against the dangers of an army turned inward, which can all too easily be turned into an instrument of tyranny.
Trump’s misuse of emergency powers similarly has larger implications. Emergency declarations unlock enhanced powers contained in 150 different provisions of law. Many of these are far more potent than the ability to transfer federal lands to the Department of Defense. They include the authority to take over or shut down communications facilities, freeze Americans’ assets, and control domestic transportation. If emergency powers can be invoked for border security at a time when unlawful border crossings have reached a historic low, there is little to prevent a president from declaring fake emergencies to invoke these alarming powers.
The Role of the Courts and Congress
Unfortunately, the president’s abuses could be difficult to check. The Posse Comitatus Act is a criminal statute, and those who violate it may be prosecuted. But it’s unclear whether violations may serve as a basis for migrants to challenge their detention. As for Trump’s misuse of emergency powers, courts generally are reluctant to probe a president’s decision that an emergency exists (although in this case, the administration’s own statements might be sufficient to overcome the presumption of deference). And as the law currently stands, it is very difficult for Congress to terminate a national emergency declaration or undo actions that presidents take using their emergency powers.
These challenges highlight the urgent need for Congress to establish meaningful checks on the use of emergency powers and domestic deployment authorities. Last year, legislation that would have made it much easier for Congress to terminate emergency declarations passed out of committees in the House and Senate with near-unanimous support from both Democrats and Republicans. Similar legislation was introduced in January by Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona. The Brennan Center has also proposed several key changes to the Posse Comitatus Act that would close the loopholes that threaten to swallow the law.
It may not be possible to pass these reforms soon, but the fight against executive overreach is not just a short-term one. Understanding the ways in which Trump’s actions threaten the rule of law today can help build support for enacting reforms in the future.
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Joe Biden and the Dems Helped Build up Trump’s Border-and-Deportation Arsenal
Donald Trump is inheriting the most fortified border in American history, increasingly run by private corporations, and he’s about to use all the power at his disposal to make it more so.
Feb 06, 2025
It didn’t take long for the border and immigration enforcement industry to react to U.S. President Donald Trump’s reelection. On November 6, as Bloomberg News reported, stock prices shot up for two private prison companies, GEO Group and CoreCivic. “We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement,” explained the GEO Group’s executive chair, George Zoley, “and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” In other words, the “largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history” was going to be a moneymaker.
As it happens, that Bloomberg piece was a rarity, offering a glimpse of immigration enforcement that doesn’t normally get the attention it deserves by focusing on the border-industrial complex. The article’s tone, however, suggested that there will be a sharp break between the border policies of Donald Trump and former President Joe Biden. Its essential assumption: that Biden adored open borders, while Trump, the demagogue, is on his way to executing a profitable clampdown on them.
In a recent article, “The Progressive Case against Immigration,” journalist Lee Fang caricatured just such a spectrum, ranging from people with “Refugees Welcome” yard signs to staunch supporters of mass deportation. He argued that Democrats should embrace border enforcement and “make a case for border security and less tolerance for migrant rule-breaking.” This, he suggested, would allow the party to “reconnect with its blue-collar roots.” Fang’s was one of many post-election articles making similar points—namely, that the Democrats’ stance on free movement across the border cost them the election.
Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign.
But what if the Biden administration, instead of opposing mass deportation, had proactively helped construct its very infrastructure? What if, in reality, there weren’t two distinctly opposed and bickering visions of border security, but two allied versions of it? What if we started paying attention to the budgets where the money is spent on the border-industrial complex, which tell quite a different story than the one we’ve come to expect?
In fact, during President Biden’s four years in office, he gave 40 contracts worth more than $2 billion to the same GEO Group (and its associated companies) whose stocks spiked with Trump’s election. Under those contracts, the company was to maintain and expand the U.S. immigrant detention system, while providing ankle bracelets for monitoring people on house arrest.
And that, in fact, offers but a glimpse of Biden’s tenure as—yes!—the biggest contractor (so far) for border and immigration enforcement in U.S. history. During his four years in office, Biden’s administration issued and administered 21,713 border enforcement contracts, worth $32.3 billion, far more than any previous president, including his predecessor Donald Trump, who had spent a mere—and that, of course, is a joke—$20.9 billion from 2017 to 2020 on the same issue.
In other words, Biden left office as the king of border contracts, which shouldn’t have been a surprise, since he received three times more campaign contributions than Trump from top border-industry companies during the 2020 election campaign. And in addition to such contributions, the companies of that complex wield power by lobbying for ever bigger border budgets, while maintaining perennial public-private revolving doors.
In other words, Joe Biden helped build up Trump’s border-and-deportation arsenal. His administration’s top contract, worth $1.2 billion, went to Deployed Resources, a company based in Rome, New York. It’s constructing processing and detention centers in the borderlands from California to Texas. Those included “soft-sided facilities,” or tent detention camps, where unauthorized foreigners might be incarcerated when Trump conducts his promised roundups.
The second company on the list, with a more than $800 million contract (issued under Trump in 2018, but maintained in the Biden years), was Classic Air Charter, an outfit that facilitates deportation flights for the human-rights-violating ICE Air. Now that Trump has declared a national emergency on the border and has called for military deployment to establish, as he puts it, “operational control of the border,” his people will discover that there are already many tools in his proverbial enforcement box. Far from a stark cutoff and change, the present power transition will undoubtedly prove to be more of a handoff—and to put that in context, just note that such a bipartisan relay race at the border has been going on for decades.
The Bipartisan Border Consensus
In early 2024, I was waiting in a car at the DeConcini Port of Entry in Nogales, Arizona, when a white, nondescript bus pulled up in the lane next to me. We were at the beginning of the fourth year of Biden’s presidency. Even though he had come into office promising more humane border policies, the enforcement apparatus hadn’t changed much, if at all. On either side of that port of entry were rust-colored, 20-foot-high border walls made of bollards and draped with coiling razor wire, which stretched to the horizon in both directions, about 700 miles in total along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In Nogales, the wall itself was a distinctly bipartisan effort, built during the administrations of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Here, Trump’s legacy was adding concertina wire that, in 2021, the city’s mayor pleaded with Biden to take down (to no avail).
There were also sturdy surveillance posts along the border, courtesy of a contract with military monolith General Dynamics. In them, cameras stared over the border wall into Mexico like dozens of voyeurs. Border Patrol agents in green-striped trucks were also stationed at various points along the wall, constantly eyeing Mexico. And mind you, this represented just the first layer of a surveillance infrastructure that extended up to 100 miles into the U.S. interior and included yet more towers with sophisticated camera systems (like the 50 integrated fixed towers in southern Arizona constructed by the Israeli company Elbit Systems), underground motion sensors, immigration checkpoints with license-plate readers, and sometimes even facial recognition cameras. And don’t forget the regular inspection overflights by drones, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft.
Since 2008, ICE and CBP have issued 118,457 contracts, or about 14 a day.
The command-and-control centers, which follow the feeds of that digital, virtual, expansive border wall in a room full of monitors, gave the appropriate Hollywood war-movie feel to the scene, one that makes the Trump “invasion” rhetoric seem almost real.
From my idling car, I watched several disheveled families get off that bus. Clearly disoriented, they lined up in front of a large steel gate with thick bars, where two blue-uniformed Mexican officials waited. The children looked especially scared. A young one—maybe three years old—jumped into her mother’s arms and hugged her tightly. The scene was emotional. Just because I happened to be there at that moment, I witnessed one of many deportations that would happen that day. Those families were among the more than 4 million deported and expelled during the Biden years, a mass expulsion that has largely gone undiscussed.
About a year later, on January 20, Donald Trump stood in the U.S. Capitol building giving his inaugural speech and assuring that crowded room full of officials, politicians, and billionaires that he had a “mandate” and that “America’s decline” was over. He received a standing ovation for saying that he would “declare a national emergency at our southern border,” adding, “All illegal entry will be halted. And we’ll begin the process of sending millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.” He would, he insisted, “repel the disastrous invasion of our country.”
Implied, as in 2016 when he declared that he was going to build a border wall that already existed, was that Trump would take charge of a supposedly “open border” and finally deal with it. Of course, he gave no credence to the massive border infrastructure he was inheriting.
Back in Nogales, a year earlier, I watched Mexican officials open up that heavy gate and formally finish the deportation process on those families. I was already surrounded by decades of infrastructure, part of more than $400 billion of investment since 1994, when border deterrence began under the Border Patrol’s Operation Gatekeeper. Those 30 years had seen the most massive expansion of the border and immigration apparatus the United States had ever experienced.
The border budget, $1.5 billion in 1994 under the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has risen incrementally every year since then. It was turbocharged after 9/11 by the creation of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (or CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE), whose combined budget in 2024 exceeded $30 billion for the first time. Not only were the Biden administration’s contracts larger than those of its predecessors, but its budget power grew, too. The 2024 budget was more than $5 billion higher than the 2020 budget, the last year of Trump’s first term in office. Since 2008, ICE and CBP have issued 118,457 contracts, or about 14 a day.
As I watched that family somberly walk back into Mexico, the child still in her mother’s embrace, it was yet another reminder of just how farcical the open-borders narrative has been. In reality, Donald Trump is inheriting the most fortified border in American history, increasingly run by private corporations, and he’s about to use all the power at his disposal to make it more so.
“Is He Going to Be Like Obama?”
Fisherman Gerardo Delgado’s blue boat is rocking as we talk on a drying-up, possibly dying lake in central Chihuahua, Mexico. He shows me his meager catch that day in a single orange, plastic container. He shelled out far more money for gas than those fish would ever earn him at the market.
“You’re losing money?” I ask.
“Every day,” he replies.
It wasn’t always like this. He points to his community, El Toro, that’s now on a hill overlooking the lake—except that hill wasn’t supposed to be there. Once upon a time, El Toro had been right on the lakeshore. Now, the lake has receded so much that the shore is remarkably far away.
According to forecasts for the homeland and border-control markets, climate change is a factor spurring the industry’s rapid growth.
Two years earlier, Delgado told me, his town ran out of water and his sisters, experiencing the beginning of what was about to be a full-on catastrophe, left for the United States. Now, more than half of the families in El Toro have departed as well.
Another fisherman, Alonso Montañes tells me they are witnessing an “ecocide.” As we travel along the lake, you can see how far the water has receded. It hasn’t rained for months, not even during the summer rainy season. And no rain is forecast again until July or August, if at all.
On shore, the farmers are in crisis and I realize I’m in the middle of a climate disaster, a moment in which—for me—climate change went from the abstract and futuristic to something raw, real, and now. There hasn’t been a megadrought of this intensity for decades. While I’m there, the sun continues to burn, scorchingly, and it’s far hotter than it should be in December.
The lake is also a reservoir from which farmers would normally receive irrigation water. I asked every farmer I met what he or she was going to do. Their responses, though different, were tinged with fear. Many were clearly considering migrating north.
“But what about Trump?” asked a farmer named Miguel under the drying up pecan trees in the orchard where he worked. At the inauguration, Trump said, “As commander and chief I have no other choice but to protect our country from threats and invasions, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. We are going to do it at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”
What came to mind when I saw that inauguration was a 2003 Pentagon climate assessment in which the authors claimed that the United States would have to build “defensive fortresses” to stop “unwanted, starving migrants” from all over Latin America and the Caribbean. The Pentagon begins planning for future battlefields 25 years in advance, and its assessments now invariably include the worst scenarios for climate change (even if Donald Trump doesn’t admit that the phenomenon exists). One non-Pentagon assessment states that the lack of water in places like Chihuahua in northern Mexico is a potential “threat multiplier.” The threat to the United States, however, is not the drought but what people will do because of it.
“Is he going to be like Obama?” Miguel asked about Trump. Indeed, Barack Obama was president when Miguel was in the United States, working in agriculture in northern New Mexico. Though he wasn’t deported, he remembers living in fear of a ramping-up deportation machine under the 44th president. As I listened to Miguel talk about the drought and the border, that 2003 Pentagon assessment seemed far less hyperbolic and far more like a prophecy.
Now, according to forecasts for the homeland and border-control markets, climate change is a factor spurring the industry’s rapid growth. After all, future projections for people on the move, thanks to an increasingly overheating planet, are quite astronomical and the homeland security market, whoever may be president, is now poised to reach nearly $1 trillion by the 2030s.
It’s now an open secret that Trump’s invasion and deportation spiels, as well as his plans to move thousands of U.S. military personnel to the border, have not only proved popular with his large constituency but also with private prison companies like GEO Group and others building the present and future nightmarish infrastructure for a world of deportation. They have proven no less popular with the Democrats themselves.
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How to Argue With the Deportation Advocates in Your Family This Holiday Season
I work with Latino migrants every day—here’s the history to help you stand up for people like my students during Christmas dinner.
Dec 23, 2024
Once again, the holiday season is upon us. Whether we choose to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa—or simply participate in ongoing festivities—we can all agree that it’s a special time of the year, graced by extended time with family and friends, good food, and merrymaking. For obvious reasons already enumerated in countless media outlets, it can also be a stressful time, a lonely time, and a sad time. This year, but a few weeks after the 2024 Presidential Elections, the stakes are even higher. The probability of uncomfortable dinners has grown, perhaps exponentially, as we take stock of how deeply divided our nation truly is.
2025 will bring us Trump Show 2.0, with the president-elect promising mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, many from Latin America. Indeed, immigration was THE issue of the 2024 presidential election, so conditions should be ideal for Christmas dinners, family get-togethers, and champagne toasts to be riven by divergent opinions on the influx of newcomers to the U.S., whose growth over the past years was significant enough to be labelled, at least by some news outlets, a “surge.”
How can we talk productively about our historical moment and ourselves as we sip eggnog beside the yule log and under the mistletoe? How can we gift our interlocutors with arguments wrapped not in vitriol but rather, history? How can we look beyond the ill-willed gaslighting particular to once-a-year family reunions? For some of us talking more cogently about these delicate topics may lessen the pressures of the holiday season. For others, a more humane and reasoned public discourse may be a matter of life and death. After all, nothing less than the weight of history itself has brought them here.
Migrants and residents, undocumented and documented individuals, are living the same neoliberal moment, in which wages are pushed down, the informal economy grows, and workers experience a new flexibility as precariousness.
While I teach Spanish and Latin American culture at the collegiate level during the day, I teach both ESL and a Spanish-language version of the GED during the evening hours. These two roles inform how I think through our present moment. Let’s give ourselves the gift of both history and experience for Christmas—headlines and heartbeats, doubt and decisions.
First is the formidable list of number ones we enjoy in the United States. We are both number one in terms of consumption and, less joyfully, prisons. We are simultaneously the biggest mall and the biggest jail the world has ever known. We are a nation defined by emphatic commerce on one hand and, on the other hand, consequences for those who don’t follow along.
Our bounties are especially notable in terms of foodstuffs and, perhaps even more notable in terms of who produces our food. Latinos make up roughly one-third of those employed in the poultry industry—a major economic force for documented and undocumented workers alike in places like rural Missouri, Virginia’s Eastern Shore, and Mississippi. Slaughtering chickens is no easy task, but catching chickens may be even more difficult. Latinos also have a foothold in the dairy industry; cows can, in fact, be milked three times a day, so those working will have to be available during the early morning hours. Gardening, construction, and drywall are also significant employers of Latino labor in the United States.
Beyond what newspapers and anthropologists tell us, I know that my ESL and GED students—some of them documented, some of them not—often work in these sectors. They also work in places that are closer to home for most of us: restaurants, hotels, and even Walmart. Indeed, the behemoth retailer Walmart was sued once some 20 years for abusing undocumented workers. If I am listening to my students correctly, it may be time again to examine the chain’s labor practices. Staffing agencies seem to be crucial in allowing the continued employment of undocumented labor: They provide a means to muddle up paperwork, intake non-English speakers, and forge employer-employee connections.
In both of my evening classes, my Latino students come and go. Their enthusiasm is palpable, but so is their exhaustion. Almost no one enjoys perfect attendance given the heinous flexibility of their jobs. Roofers can’t lay shingles in the rain. Housekeepers don’t clean rooms where guests haven’t slept. But when they are called in, they seemingly can’t afford to say no. Their education, naturally, is pushed on the proverbial backburner. It’s no fun being fungible.
In my GED class, we have studied how to develop arguments for the expository essay section. When asked to justify their claims in writing, my Latino students inevitably signal financial concerns as paramount. No matter the prompt and no matter what issue students are asked to weigh in on—junk food in high schools, obligatory military service, the humaneness of zoos, etc.—students consistently turn to personal finances to back their arguments. Maybe junk food is a low-cost alternative to cooking? Does the army pay well? Can zoos be self-funded? For my students, personal financial matters are preternaturally totalizing and give me a glimpse as to what they are really thinking about on a daily basis.
But again: the specter of deportation and possibility of changing hearts at the dinner table.
What the current debate misses is the deep history of these contemporary phenomena. Few Americans are aware of the Bracero Program or Operation Bootstrap, two accords (one between the U.S. and Mexico, another between the U.S. and Puerto Rico) that first brought thousands of workers to the lower 48. As American servicemen and women fought in two theaters overseas during World War II, workers were still needed to operate wood lathes, pull weeds, and lay railroad tracks. The briefest survey of amazing photographs culled from this mid-century moment make plain how we should think about that time. For Latino workers, it was a story of both commerce and control, opportunity and degradation, pride and poverty. Above all, what we should remember at the dinner table was that it was an invitation—an offer to enter the world’s largest mall and its biggest prison. During downturns—or, after soldiers returned to the U.S.—these actions were reversed.
The next bit of history that helps to explain our present moment takes us to 1994.
The late 1990s and early 2000s were a pivotal time in the southwestern United States borderlands. The passage of NAFTA in 1994 marked a new era of trade between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, aimed at boosting the flow of goods by loosening trade restrictions. This shift allowed the U.S. economy to dominate the Mexican market, leading to instability in Mexico’s labor force and driving many to seek opportunities in the U.S., resulting in a surge in undocumented crossings at the Southern border.
While NAFTA was intended to open borders for trade and close them for people, the increased migration highlighted the human impact of market policies. These changes coincided with a shift in U.S. border policy under President Bill Clinton, focusing on prevention through deterrence. This strategy involved concentrating surveillance forces in urban areas like El Paso and San Diego, pushing undocumented migrants into the harsh terrain of Arizona.
As immigration from Latin America has risen, anti-immigrant sentiment has also grown. You may see some of this at Christmas dinner. It has also led to stricter laws, a more controlled border, and U.S. pressure on Mexico to militarize. Discussion of building a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border may arise during your merrymaking, too. Most of us don’t realize that even in places with the roughest terrain, where building a fence would be amazingly difficult, individuals find ways to cross. Conversation may then turn to ideas about the “sovereignty” of a nation. But defining what a nation is has—and continues to be—a rather difficult task. Others gathered for the festivities may put forth that immigrants sap social services. The fact is, however, a great many undocumented workers pay taxes. Finally, others that are present at your Christmas gatherings may claim that migrants are stealing away jobs from other Americans. The truth may be, however, that migrants and residents, undocumented and documented individuals, are living the same neoliberal moment, in which wages are pushed down, the informal economy grows, and workers experience a new flexibility as precariousness.
Perhaps around the time that dessert comes out, you may introduce a bit of theory to your guests—the Foucauldian notion that workers, within capital, whether documented or undocumented, have been increasingly rendered “docile bodies” over the past 50 or so years: powerless, susceptible, and constantly in movement. This is not to say we should forever characterize migrants as passive agents, thrown to the wind, capable of little more than provoking liberal guilt. Rather, we should interrogate what about our present moment created the most flexible, most fungible, most vulnerable—and perhaps, most usable—population in the history of humanity.
I, for one, will raise a glass at the end of my Christmas meal, toasting my students, their work ethic, and their hopes for a better life. I hope they can return to my classroom in the New Year, not dragged off by the promise of another siding job, another garden gig, another chicken coop in the next state over.
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What is the Progressive Working-Class Policy on Immigration?
That we don't know the answer to this question is the first problem that must be addressed.
Dec 10, 2024
So what is the progressive working-class policy when it comes to immigration?
I don’t know the answer and neither does anyone else, because there isn’t one. Why is that?
To date there has been no serious effort to bring together the leaders of labor unions and immigrant workers centers to discuss common approaches to immigration that speak to the needs of all working people.
Further, and perhaps even more importantly, there has been no sustained educational dialogue at the local level that brings together immigrant and non-immigrant workers to discuss their hopes, fears, and desires.
To be sure there are widely shared negative positions: Opposition to separating immigrant families; opposition to creating mass detention centers; and opposition to forcibly expelling undocumented workers who are working hard and obeying the law. But there is no broad-based discussion, let alone agreement, on what a progressive working-class policy should include.
This is a disaster for progressive politics. For without addressing what is perceived widely as an immigration crisis, the field is left open to demagogues who want to divide and exploit workers for political gain.
Elements of a Progressive Working-Class Policy
There are several proactive and positive avenues to developing new progressive immigration policies. The first is the need to rebuild Latin American economies so that residents of those countries can find secure and sustainable employment near home. As one labor leader told me last week, we need an immediate multibillion-dollar Marshall Plan for these countries so that their people do not need to risk life and limb to come to the U.S. for incredibly low-wage jobs.
Unless a working-class approach to immigration is developed, progressive politics will become increasingly alienated from working people, and the right will make greater and greater inroads into the working class by promoting a politics of fear and resentment.
Making these changes is a tall order, but the root cause of the migrant crisis needs to be identified and discussed again and again. People are fleeing violence, dictatorships, and collapsing economies that U.S. financial assistance can help to rectify, and one could argue, that Wall Street’s wealth extraction and U.S. foreign policy maneuvers helped to create.
There is also reason to believe that non-immigrant workers increasingly support a path to citizenship for undocumented workers. In researching my book, Wall Street’s War on Workers, we uncovered a remarkable change in the attitudes of white members of the working class.
The Cooperative Elections Study, which has over one-half million respondents, asked the following highly charged question on immigration in 2010 and again in 2020:
“Do you favor or oppose granting legal status to all illegal immigrants who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years, and not been convicted of any felony crimes?”
In 2010, only 32.1 percent supported granting such legal status. By 2020, those who favored a pathway to legal status jumped to a remarkable 61.8 percent.
These working-class respondents, however, also want more enforcement on the border. In 2020, 72.6 percent were in favor of “increasing the number of border patrols on the U.S.- Mexican border.” This is a 5 percent increase compared to those who supported this statement in 2010.
Working people who are citizens want to see a fair and just path forward for the millions of law-abiding undocumented immigrants who are already here. But they don’t want open borders or mass unauthorized immigration.
This is not just a white worker phenomenon. Hispanic voters also seem to support a firmly policed border. That can be deduced from the enormous change in voting patterns in South Texas. Among 14 mostly Hispanic counties, Trump won 12. In 2016 he won only five. And Trump, to be sure, in the last campaign increased his focus on stopping the flow of immigrants even while threatening to deport all undocumented workers.
An Educational Model
In the 1990s, the Labor Institute—which I direct—conducted dozens of workshops that brought together environmentalists and oil and chemical workers to discuss climate change and the regulatory elimination of toxic substances. The workshops created an educational base in both groups for the idea of Just Transition, a set of policies to help workers and communities deal with the job dislocation that was likely to result from efforts to reduce toxic chemical production and the use of fossil fuels. It also led to new organizations that brought together workers and community members, such as the Just Transition Alliance and the BlueGreen Alliance.
A similar model should be created today bringing together immigrant and non-immigrant workers in joint workshops to share with each other their concerns and hopes, and to discuss joint policies on immigrant reform.
If ever there was a time to start an on-going dialogue, this is it.
There’s no guarantee that such an educational model will, on its own, produce progressive working-class immigration policies. But it is highly doubtful that a new common direction can be built without listening to rank-and-file immigrant and non-immigrant workers. Workshops can provide a safe and productive space to frankly consider and evaluate alternatives.
One thing is certain. Unless a working-class approach to immigration is developed, progressive politics will become increasingly alienated from working people, and the right will make greater and greater inroads into the working class by promoting a politics of fear and resentment.
If ever there was a time to start an on-going dialogue, this is it. Not doing so would be just another sign that progressives are writing off the working class.
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Walls of Fear Create a World of War
How do we connect with one another, especially those we fear?
Dec 08, 2024
War, war and more war.
It’s only possible for one reason: the belief that only some people are fully human. Those who aren’t . . . well, they can be killed when necessary. My inner scream at this false reality we feed ourselves — via the media, via mainstream politics — keeps getting louder and louder. Is there a way to get things to change?
To put it another way: Is there a way to transcend the abstract view of Planet Earth in which global politics operates? We have religion. We have values: Be kind, be loving, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” — but they don’t seem to manifest collectively. At the collective, that is to say, the political, level, only so much kindness can be tolerated. In terms of security, kindness is weakness.
I quoted these words of Kamala Harris, delivered last August at the DNC as she accepted her nomination to be the Dems’ presidential candidate, in a previous column, but they still strike me as relevant, even though she lost the election:
“So, fellow Americans. Fellow Americans. I — I love our country with all my heart. Everywhere I go — everywhere I go, in everyone I meet, I see a nation that is ready to move forward. Ready for the next step in the incredible journey that is America.”
She added that this is “an America where we care for one another, look out for one another and recognize that we have so much more in common than what separates us. That none of us — none of us has to fail for all of us to succeed.”
Wow, sounds great. Unfortunately, as I noted at the time, the love and empathy of which she spoke stopped at the border. In essence, she was expressing love for an abstraction, a swath of land defined by random lines on a map, created via several centuries of brutal land theft.
Nonetheless, I understand that love is specific. It has limits. We love our partner. We love our surroundings, our community. The problem, as Harris quickly went on to illustrate, is that “love” at the national level — a.k.a., nationalism — doesn’t actually exist unless there’s also an enemy: someone to fear. Our empathy stops at the border. And beyond the border . . .
Harris continued: “And America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and values abroad. As vice president, I have confronted threats to our security, negotiated with foreign leaders, strengthened our alliances and engaged with our brave troops overseas. As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
Oh, how wonderful! The great lie manifests: We need that trillion-dollar annual military budget, America! How else can we remain secure? And our allies also have to remain secure: Israel has the right to defend itself (some love, apparently, does not stop at the border). And it’s not as though Harris’s opponent — what was his name again? — in any way challenged this basic context, nor did the prevailing media: There’s always a “them” out there, who hates us, who wants to steal what we have (what goes around comes around, I guess) . . . who wants to kill us.
So we’ve got to be prepared to kill him first — which means, dehumanize! And here’s where my internal — and, at least in this moment, external — scream begins. I don’t want to be led by a “commander in chief.” I want humanity’s understanding of itself to begin with the awareness of our collective, and planetary, unity. The time for this is now, for an endless number of reasons, all of which are related to the “security” our leaders claim to be so obsessed with.
The most obvious reason, I guess, is that nobody wants nuclear war — yet Russia and the West are playing with this possibility now, as the good guys and the bad guys fight it out in Ukraine. War is the only answer — defeat the enemy, bomb Russia! And Russia responds with “inflammatory nuclear rhetoric,” denounced by the West as, gosh, inappropriate. At some point this game could blow up in everyone’s face. Yet in the current political dialogue, our security requires playing with global suicide. Any questions?
And, of course, even if “mutually assured destruction” holds tight and humanity avoids nuclear Armageddon, the unaddressed climate crisis is something else that could explode in our faces. Shockingly, “climate” doesn’t recognize the borders we’ve worked so hard to create.
What I’m trying to say is that we — all of us — need to turn evolution into a conscious process. How do we connect with one another, especially those we fear? How do we expand our sense of community and shatter the hatred we now allow to swell unabated toward our declared enemies, especially those beyond our borders? How do we shatter the divide between spiritual and political values? How do we bring, let us say, the wisdom of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin into the political realm?
One of his most well-known quotes is this; “Some day, after mastering the wind, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we will harness for God the energies of Love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
How do we explain — to the ones in power, to the ones who write about and bow to power — that, by “discovering fire for the second time,” Teilhard didn’t mean developing nuclear weapons? How do we explain it to ourselves?
Perhaps the place to begin is by removing the “national” border from our minds and hearts.
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Trump’s Deportation Plans Benefit Billionaires at the Cost of Our Communities
To have the best chance at protecting immigrants in the coming months and years, we need to address the real threat: the billionaires and politicians who use anti-immigrant hate in order to increase their wealth and power.
Dec 05, 2024
While U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appoints a new “government efficiency” committee and threatens to unleash the military in American cities, he is simultaneously pushing policies that will see billions poured into private security and surveillance companies—including those owned by his biggest campaign benefactors, with little or no accountability.
Armed drones, facial recognition, and robot dogs have become a part of popular culture over the past 20 years, with little attention to the violent impacts they have on both the militarization of communities and in all our daily lives. These dangerous products and technologies have served two functions: They are fear-based marketing tools that helped seed the rhetorical ground for the authoritarian backlash that came to full fruition in this election and they actually make the U.S. southern border region exponentially more dangerous for people living, working, and crossing there.
As veterans, we put our lives on the line so that our communities back home can live safe and secure lives. Trump’s cruel deportation plans and suggestion that the U.S. military be used to carry them out for the benefit of his billionaire friends is not what we signed up for.
We cannot let Trump-supporting tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel define what it means to be safe and secure.
Since at least 2001, when the U.S. entered its post-9/11 forever war period and established the “Department of Homeland Security,” a handful of journalists, activists, and migrants have been warning us about the all-too-cozy relationship between weapons manufacturers, tech companies, and the government agencies tasked with immigration enforcement. By 2022, this sprawling border and surveillance industry (BSI) had become a $500 billion business. The U.S. border and immigration enforcement budget under Democratic President Joe Biden exceeded $30 billion this year.
But Americans ain’t seen nothing yet. While this industry, which has used vulnerable populations as a testing ground for over a decade, has been slowly making its way into everyday life, the incoming Trump administration is about to fast track the reach of this violent industry in very intrusive ways into the lives of all Americans as the surveillance industry goes into overdrive.
Trump’s planned enforcement spending will hand billions to his friends in big business. Private prison stocks like Geo Group and CoreCivic nearly doubled in value after he was declared the winner of the November 5 election. This also happened in 2017, when, within a month of Trump taking office, CoreCivic and Geo Group doubled their stocks. The American Immigration Council has put the cost of Trump’s deportation proposals at an estimated $315 billion of taxpayer money, much of which would involve subsidies to industry.
To have the best chance at protecting immigrant communities in the coming months and years, we need to address the real threat to our communities: the billionaires and politicians who use anti-immigrant hate in order to increase their wealth and power.
These billionaires, who thrive on spreading fear, have learned to use the government as a personal piggy bank, while continuing to win delays for things like healthcare reform, poverty elimination, and climate action—endangering us all in the process.
Safety and community security are universal human values. As veterans, we understand how important it is to protect our loved ones from danger. We also believe that fighting for the rights of all our communities, and making climate justice a priority, is what will keep us safe and secure through the coming century. But Trumpism has warped our view of security so badly that many Americans now see billionaires as the answer, rather than the diverse working class people who build our factories, plow our fields, and serve our country so nobly, including in the military.
We cannot let Trump-supporting tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel define what it means to be safe and secure.
Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and far-right political donor, controls companies like Palantir, a data company which sells our personal information to militaries around the world, and Anduril, which builds AI-powered surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border and sells weaponized drones. Google Thiel’s name and you will see a litany of government contracts in the hundreds of millions and billions just in the past year alone, including to the Israeli military for automated targeting of Palestinians in Gaza.
Elon Musk currently holds $3 billion in U.S. government contracts, the bulk of them with NASA and the Department of Defense. Musk took more than $15 billion taxpayer dollars in contracts over the past decade.
We are not going to stand idly by as Trump deportation forces tear our communities apart. The border and surveillance industry, aligned with the dying fossil fuel industry, is intentionally creating a more hostile, insecure environment for all of us just to line their own pockets.
We are going to do what we did in 2016: Roll up our sleeves and get to work. We will rebuild safety and security within our communities by relying on each other to resist the coming federal incursions into our cities and states. We will organize with the migrant justice movement, with climate activists, and with defenders of democracy to protect our neighbors. And we will expose the hell out of the profiteering billionaire enablers of hate in our country.
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