Mass Deportation’s War-on-Terror DNA

Get ready for the deportation task forces, the expansion of for-profit cages, and Muslim Ban 3.0. PLUS! RIP to whatever remained of the Anti-Defamation League's credibility! 

Edited by Sam Thielman

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IT'S THE FIRST FULL DAY OF THE SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION, and the joined machinery of mass deportation and border militarization is revving up. From the executive orders Trump issued yesterday, we can see the influence of the War on Terror over what's coming. Hate to say I told you so. [This is not true. He loves it.—Sam.]

The Department of Homeland Security, that premier institutional legacy of the War on Terror, will move much further in the direction of treating migration as terrorism. One new executive order says that "many of these aliens unlawfully in the United States present significant threats to national security," including "preparations for terror-related activities." I don't need to tell FOREVER WARS readers that the absurd vagueness of the "terror-related" construction is a neon sign pointing upward, where the jig is. 

Another border-relevant executive order is explicitly predicated on "Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists." It reads to me like the 2025 version of the Muslim Ban. Unlike the last time, it won't happen in the first days of the administration. Sixty days from now, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard (what a time to be alive), and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are to identify "countries throughout the world for which vetting and screening information is so deficient as to warrant a partial or full suspension on the admission of nationals from those countries." I wonder which ones they'll be. There's a line in here authorizing additional screening to any "refugee or stateless individual" in case you wanted a hint.   

Along with the attorney general, the secretary of homeland security will "fulfill the requirements of the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005," according to the "Securing Our Borders" executive order. In other words, DHS and the Justice Department will create and manage a migrant DNA database. We'll see how this develops in practice, but for now, the measure seems reminiscent of the biometrics database created under the Bush administration for Muslim travelers known as NSEERS—and for that matter, similar biometrics databases the U.S. military created in Iraq and Afghanistan—now scaled up. These orders recreate the DHS migrant-propaganda office from Trump's first term, too. 

DHS is empowered to use "any available technologies and procedures" to adjudicate migrants' "claimed familiar relationships" with people in the United States, so this is designed to be not only vastly intrusive beyond the border, but a windfall opportunity for, say, artificial-intelligence and biometrics firms. Meanwhile, here's a recent update from DHS about its use of facial-capture technologies under Biden.

Then, in a different executive order called "Protecting The American People Against Invasion" (my emphasis), DHS, the Justice Department, and state and local law enforcement are to create "Homeland Security Task Forces." These task forces are to be the integrated federal/state/local mechanisms of mass deportation. They appear modeled upon the Joint Terrorism Task Forces led by the FBI. JTTFs marry federal resources and priorities with local knowledge and manpower. 

A separate section, one not explicitly tied to the HSTFs, gives the gist. Local cops, in states with cooperative governors and mayors ("as appropriate," the order caveats), will be deputized to raid and apprehend people perceived to be migrants: 

…to authorize State and local law enforcement officials, as the Secretary of Homeland Security determines are qualified and appropriate, to perform the functions of immigration officers in relation to the investigation, apprehension, or detention of aliens in the United States under the direction and the supervision of the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Much as the mechanisms of the War on Terror gave local police a counterterrorism mandate and access to counterterrorism funding, so too for mass deportation. And there is a related section in that executive order to pressure the compliance of Sanctuary jurisdictions by withholding unrelated federal funding. That's probably for Sanctuary Cities that don't have mayors under indictment with something to trade for a pardon or a dropped prosecution. 

Then come provisions for DHS to expand its cages. Here the War on Terror and the long history of anti-immigrant nativism are in a symbiotic, iterative relationship—check out Daniel Denvir's All-American Nativism for more on that, as well as REIGN OF TERROR—so I don't want to make it out like the War on Terror was either sui generis, or the only prism through which to view what Trump is constructing and expanding. Think of how Guantanamo Bay housed migrant cages before it housed wartime cages and now, once again, houses migrant cages. The War on Terror normalized stuff like this provision:  

The Secretary of Homeland Security shall promptly take all appropriate action and allocate all legally available resources or establish contracts to construct, operate, control, or use facilities to detain removable aliens. The Secretary of Homeland Security, further, shall take all appropriate actions to ensure the detention of aliens apprehended for violations of immigration law pending the outcome of their removal proceedings or their removal from the country, to the extent permitted by law.

"Or establish contracts" will ensure that for-profit prison companies flourish under mass deportation. And this is a labor exploitation issue as well as a migration-rights issue, as we saw the last time Trump was in office. 

Then comes the Pentagon's role. The "Securing Our Borders" order instructs the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to "deploy sufficient personnel along the southern border of the United States to ensure complete operational control." That is a construction clearly written to justify continued escalation. "Complete operational control" is inherently subjective, vague and conceivably violated by any unauthorized entry. Part of that "complete operational control" is for both departments to collaborate on "deploy[ing] and construct[ing] temporary and permanent physical barriers," i.e., the Wall. U.S. Northern Command, another post-9/11 restructuring, will now "provide steady-state southern border security," per yet another executive order, this one giving military direction to the rhetoric that migration is an act of invasion. 

I'm so old that I remember when then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis agreed to deploy an initial 5800 U.S. troops to the southern border while musing about Pancho Villa. Rather than revoke the deployment, the Biden administration chose to build on it. It was the classic liberal gamble of giving reactionaries some of their agenda in an attempt to mollify them, only to watch in horror as it stokes the reactionary appetite instead.

And then, as I wrote about for ZETEO months ago, Trump has designated the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists. There is no attempt made in the order to demonstrate cartel behavior is intermingled with or even akin to terrorist organizations' operations, it's just pure subtext taking over, the wages of many years of "El Qaeda" bullshit—which is to say, nativists understanding the opportunities the War on Terror affords. 

What starts as temporary, emergency measures tends to become fixed in the firmament of American governance and normalized. Remember that as climate change prompts ever-greater human migration in search of safety and prosperity, within the United States as well as into the United States.

ELON MUSK SEIG HEIL'D, with his entire chest, at the Trump inaugural. Twice. Once while biting his lip! Read Eddie Huang on this. I'd add only that Musk is issuing a challenge to news organizations to report this for what it very obviously is — but which the executives who own and operate those organizations will be wary of, for fear of defamation lawsuits. This is a man who has called Jew-engineered white displacement "the actual truth," who promotes the Neo-Nazi AfD party in Germany, and who, as Eddie writes, engages in the bitchmade practice of claiming plausible deniability to intimidate you into disbelieving the evidence of your senses. Or at least not vocalizing them in public. 

Once again, the Anti-Defamation League rides to Musk's defense. As FOREVER WARS wrote in 2023, the ADL is making a straightforward calculation that Musk's antisemitism is trivial compared to his ability to throttle and censor speech on X that supports Palestinians. Anti-Zionism, not antisemitism, is what the ADL confronts. The growth of actual antisemitism is apparently an acceptable price to pay to defend the apartheid state of Israel, which is now trading the (40-day, in phase one) Gaza ceasefire for an intensification of violence in the West Bank. 

Kosherizing a Nazi salute is the epitaph for the ADL's credibility as a civil-rights organization. There isn't any coming back from this. Even Abe Foxman, the former longtime ADL chief who I can't believe I'm holding up as an example of sanity, recognizes that what Musk did was appalling. 

WALLER VS. WILDSTORM, the superhero spy thriller I co-wrote with my friend Evan Narcisse and which the masterful Jesús Merino illustrated, is available for purchase in a hardcover edition! If you don't have single issues of WVW and you want a four-issue set signed by me, they're going fast at Bulletproof Comics! Bulletproof is also selling signed copies of my IRON MAN run with Julius Ohta, so if you want those, buy them from Flatbush's finest! 

No one is prouder of WVW than her older sibling, REIGN OF TERROR: HOW THE 9/11 ERA DESTABILIZED AMERICA AND PRODUCED TRUMP, which is available now in hardcover, softcover, audiobook and Kindle edition. And on the way is a new addition to the family: THE TORTURE AND DELIVERANCE OF MAJID KHAN.