{"id":11271,"date":"2025-06-22T09:06:04","date_gmt":"2025-06-22T09:06:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=11271"},"modified":"2025-06-22T09:06:04","modified_gmt":"2025-06-22T09:06:04","slug":"trumps-war-on-the-undocumented","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/?p=11271","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s war on the undocumented"},"content":{"rendered":"
It begins in the dead of night \u2013 ICE agents raiding factories, restaurants and farms, while families sleep unaware as the state flexes its full disciplinary muscle, reviving the ghosts of America\u2019s exclusionary past with a vengeance that is unmistakably contemporary.<\/p>\n

What Donald Trump hails as \u201cthe largest deportation operation in American history\u201d is unfolding as a dark and sweeping expansion of state machinery \u2013 an iron-fisted blend of ICE raids, sprawling detention centres and legal shortcuts dug up from the dustiest corners of America\u2019s statute books to shore up both physical and social borders.<\/p>\n

Framed as the fulfilment of his campaign vows, Trump\u2019s vision for a \u201cnew America\u201d rests on what Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito terms \u2018immunitas\u2019: the sovereign\u2019s feverish attempt to insulate itself from perceived contamination.<\/p>\n

In the Trumpian worldview, the \u201cdisposable labour\u201d extracted from nations long ravaged by US foreign policy is now being cast aside like a used tool \u2013 mercilessly and by design.<\/p>\n

Even some of Trump\u2019s allies are starting to shift in their seats. Joe Rogan, one of his most prominent supporters, recently sounded an alarm: \u201cWe\u2019ve got to be careful that we don\u2019t become monsters while we\u2019re fighting monsters.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the warnings from the populist leader’s base remain steeped in the same obscene necropolitical logic that draws lines between the human and the subhuman \u2013 the \u201cmonsters\u201d.<\/p>\n

The protests now erupting across the US are not new but mark a renewed moment of convergence between immigration enforcement and a long, bloody history of racialised labour control. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to ICE\u2019s post-9\/11 rise, the American state has always policed its borders by criminalising racialised \u201cothers\u201d while exploiting their labour.<\/p>\n

The Trump-era raids echo the worksite crackdowns of the 1980s and Obama\u2019s courthouse arrests. However, with 80-strong factory raids, convoys blocking roads and National Guard troops deployed without state consent, this is a new escalation.<\/p>\n

There is no new crisis driving the ongoing assault but an old political trick: manufacture the spectacle of invasion to fuel nationalist panic and weaponise it against workers and dissent.<\/p>\n

Across the country, working-class communities \u2013 immigrant and non-immigrant alike \u2013 have taken to the streets. From handcuffed migrants to student walkouts, from union banners to handmade placards reading \u201cMi familia, no se separa,\u201d the resistance is multi-generational and deeply grounded.<\/p>\n

The border wars and the street wars have converged.<\/p>\n

For many, the raids are not just about immigration. They reject the logics of neoliberal \u201csecurity\u201d, challenging the premise that human life can be reduced to economic cost or to statistics in a detention ledger.<\/p>\n

In Washington, a different story is being told. The Trump administration, flanked by DHS officials and amplified by mainstream networks, insists this is a crackdown on \u201ccriminals\u201d. Protestors are dismissed as \u201clawless mobs\u201d.<\/p>\n

Trump, in his typical red meat rhetoric, even declared that Los Angeles had been \u201cinvaded and occupied\u201d and vowed to \u201cliberate\u201d it. Attorney General Ashley Bell pledged to prosecute protestors aggressively.<\/p>\n

However, immigrant communities, organisers and rights activists see through the smoke, contending that the real criminals are those tearing families apart to prop up a neoliberal system that depends on cheap, precarious and deportable labour.<\/p>\n

Undocumented migrants have long formed a surplus army for US capitalism, hyper-exploitable because their fear makes them compliant.<\/p>\n

Seen through this lens, border enforcement is a farce dressed as a national security issue. It\u2019s about preserving racial capitalism, disciplining people of colour and preserving profit margins. The \u201crule-of-law\u201d narrative is thus inverted: the deeper violence lies not in protest, but in decades of war, trade policy and austerity that drive migration.<\/p>\n

Colonial Legacies and Necropolitics<\/p>\n

The domestic clashes cannot be understood without their global and historical context. The US border is not a neutral line. It is a colonial scar. From Indigenous dispossession to wars in Mexico and the Caribbean, the very idea of the border was forged in empire.<\/p>\n

Migrants fleeing violence and poverty in Central America or the Caribbean are not \u201cinvaders\u201d, they are survivors of systems created, in part, by US policy. Their displacement is the aftershock of coups, land grabs and extractive economics.<\/p>\n

As protesters take to the streets with Mexican and Black flags, slogans like \u201cHere we stay\u201d invoke historical truth: these cities were built by the very people now being hunted.<\/p>\n

Through the lens of Frantz Fanon, one sees how the immigrant becomes a \u201czone of non-being\u201d, excluded from rights so the state can justify violence and deprived of the \u2018right to have all rights\u2019.<\/p>\n

Fanon\u2019s psychology of the oppressed reveals that the migrant is demonised in discourse precisely to justify state violence. Indeed, as Fanon noted, the social order locks \u201cwhite people into whiteness, Black people into blackness\u201d.<\/p>\n

The point is both theoretical and practical: immigrants exist outside the democratic community in the state\u2019s eyes, made \u2018other\u2019 so their rights are negotiable.<\/p>\n

Under such logic, US immigration policy embodies what Achille Mbembe has called necropolitics: the power to define who may live and who must die or suffer. Migrants in detention centres are literally at the mercy of a system designed to wear them down psychologically and physically.<\/p>\n

Reports of children in cages, or men packed into vans with little water, reveal a state\u2019s willingness to inflict slow violence. One organiser reported that \u201cintimidation and terror\u201d \u2013 the kind seen in San Diego\u2019s restaurant raids \u2013 is now routine.<\/p>\n

The state is not just locking people up to fight crime. It is managing poverty while disciplining surplus lives. That\u2019s the essence of what Lo\u00efc Wacquant calls \u2018prisonfare\u2019. Immigration raids slot neatly into this logic: not just law enforcement, but a pipeline into the detention-industrial complex.<\/p>\n

While the discourse on criminal justice reform grows louder, migrants remain outside its moral perimeter \u2013 detained without charges, deported without explanation, excluded from rights others are beginning to reclaim.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

By the Numbers<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s ambition is staggering: one million deportations in his first year. The US currently houses around 13 million undocumented immigrants\u2014roughly 4% of its population. Nearly 80% have lived in the US for over a decade, many with US-born children. In 2022, undocumented immigrants contributed $69 billion in taxes.<\/p>\n

And yet, they are being targeted en masse. ICE has just 6,000 officers, but Trump has expanded its powers, enlisted other federal agencies like the IRS, and reopened detention facilities. He has even floated reactivating Alcatraz.<\/p>\n

Legal protections are being stripped. Trump has fired immigration judges, expanded expedited removals and invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans without hearings.<\/p>\n

Some were sent not to Venezuela, but to a supermax prison in El Salvador. Justifications included tattoos, nationality and assumed gang affiliation \u2013 no due process, no evidence.<\/p>\n

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for migrants from Venezuela, Haiti and Afghanistan is also on the chopping block. Collateral arrests and raids in schools, churches, and hospitals are back.<\/p>\n

Even programs like Project Homecoming, which offer $1,000 to \u201cvoluntarily\u201d return, function as soft coercion.<\/p>\n

One calculation found that 72,000 people were deported in Trump\u2019s first 98 days, roughly 737 per day, nearly double the daily average under Biden.<\/p>\n

What remains, then, is a moral and political question: who belongs, and on what terms? If the answer depends on citizenship, productivity or compliance, then millions will remain outside the circle of rights.<\/p>\n

In the mainstream imagination, human rights are often tethered to the sanctity of citizenship. However, as Hannah Arendt famously warned, the stateless are those who have lost the \u201cright to have rights\u201d.<\/p>\n

If rights are contingent upon national membership, then what remains for the undocumented, the displaced, the \u201cothers\u201d at the border of recognition?<\/p>\n

What happens next is uncertain. The administration has vowed to intensify its programme of detentions and deportations. But activists report that every raid is now met with instant organising by union halls, churches and community centres.<\/p>\n

Grassroots patrols spot ICE vehicles in advance, legal teams mobilise at courthouses and protest waves continue. Even as the White House drums up images of chaos, those on the ground insist their cause is orderly and just.<\/p>\n

In the words of a young organiser at a Philly vigil, this is more than crisis management \u2013 it is a moment of international morality: \u201cWe\u2019re fighting for the working class, for immigrants, for our freedom. We won\u2019t back down.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It begins in the dead of night \u2013 ICE agents raiding factories, restaurants and farms, while families sleep unaware as the state flexes its full disciplinary muscle, reviving the ghosts of America\u2019s exclusionary past with a vengeance that is unmistakably contemporary. What Donald Trump hails as \u201cthe largest deportation operation in American history\u201d is unfolding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11271\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ipp-news.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}