The militarization of American cities by ICE is being addressed, or not addressed, around constitutional, moral, and practical questions familiar to Americans from sixty years of debates over “law and order.” Does ICE’s deployment follow the law? What kind of deference is law enforcement due? Is the force deployed by ICE proportional to the threat? And, in general, is it appropriate to oppose the fact that a duly-elected president who was put into office on a promise of deporting illegal immigrants is actually fulfilling that promise? All of these are worthy questions on which reasonable people can disagree. But they are not the most relevant questions, and their relative irrelevance is why they have been embraced so enthusiastically by both political parties and their corporate media outlets. These questions keep the conversation on safely ahistoric ground, distracting from the question of what ICE’s expansion represents structurally. Namely, the accelerating growth of unconstitutional arrangements, institutions, laws, and precedents that create our Founders’ ultimate fear: a domestic military force and its concomitant institutional supports.
The growth of this domestic security complex flows from the “unholy trinity” that’s underpinned our policies since 1945: oil, drugs, and labor, all on the cheap. These are the three variables of an economy of consumer spending built on government-backed suburbs. This is an economy which requires cars and highways and household goods and encourages the leisure consumption of illicit drugs—and so also requires mass infusions of cheap oil and cheap labor and cheap narcotics to keep costs down and purchasing up. The eventual perverse incentives created by this system were illegal flows of labor and drugs from Latin American countries the United States had destabilized off its need for oil—illegal flows de facto enabled by Donald Trump’s six predecessors including Joe Biden. Containing this rise of migrants and drugs and inner city crime has required, since at least the 1970s, military commitments via federally-funded policing, which gave work as policemen and prison guards and border patrol agents to Americans who had been supplanted in factories by illegal immigrants. It has also required, since the 2010s, expanding the remit of national security organizations—most obviously the Department of Homeland Security, originally created primarily to protect from blowback from the Middle East caused by us taking the oil there.
In Trump’s second term, America has doubled down on empire in a bigger and meaner way. Missions to Venezuela and Iran explicitly or implicitly for cheap oil are paired with a security dragnet at home that purports to deal with issues of illegal labor and drug-based crime. The acceleration of the domestic end of this operation via the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agency ICE, has been the most dramatic part of Trump’s project. It amounts to the repurposing of structures used in the Wars on Crime and Terror I reported on for the Libertarian Institute last July: corporate media, surveillance companies, private and public prisons, and the Justice Department now in tandem with ICE and Border Patrol operating out of DHS. The new immigration enforcement machine that’s resulted from this repurposing is a sprawling but centralized apparatus that operates on its own internal and inertial logic. In the process it empowers all kinds of players we don’t think of it empowering with all sorts of outsized effects. Over the past year, the government “supersizing” funding for ICE and its support systems in the media, training, technology, and prison industries has created a machine that needs to be used for the sake of political legitimacy and corporate backing. This need has led to the escalating enforcement of the last seven months and to the spread of targets beyond violent illegal immigrants to nonviolent illegals and American citizens—with more to come.
The escalation began in January 2025 and gathered pace throughout the year with the Trump administration’s drive to recruit ICE agents, a process which expanded the links between government on one hand and media companies, weapons contractors and surveillance providers on the other. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem and her top aide Corey Lewandowski began the DHS’s new $100 million ICE recruiting drive seeking bids from companies for “precise audience targeting, performance media management, and results-driven creative strategies” to “accelerate the achievement of [its] recruiting goals.” The campaign itself targeted “platforms such as Hulu, HBO Max, Snapchat, Spotify, and YouTube.” According to The Latin Times, “DHS/ICE has spent roughly $2.8 million on ads across Meta platforms (Facebook & Instagram) since March 2025. An additional $3 million has gone into…Google and YouTube, for a combined total of around US $5 million in digital ad spending.” It also used “geofencing, a technology that allows the agency to send ads to the phones of people in specific locations, such as college campuses, gun and trade shows, military bases, and Nascar races.”
The ads themselves took visuals of ICE arrests and “amped-up” their effect:
“’Want to deport illegals with your absolute boys?’ one graphic posted to X and Instagram reads…In one video posted to Instagram, the song ‘all-american bitch,’ by Olivia Rodrigo, provides a soundtrack to a montage of deportees being forced onto buses and planes; in another, Sabrina Carpenter’s ‘Juno’ plays as ICE agents accost people in the streets, the lyric ‘Have you ever tried this one?’ repeating each time a new person is detained. Another video uses the satirical song ‘Big Boys’…as agents handcuff people in parking lots. A line from the song—’It’s cuffing season’—flashes in all caps across the screen.”
These ads hit their targets: men denied physical or manual labor jobs stuck in service work and eager for action. As of September, ICE has received more than 130,000 applications from people, most of them men and most though not all of them white. Many, as I reported for the Libertarian Institute in July, are motivated by “wanderlust: to escape from dead-end jobs in an economy which since 2008 has given them neither dignity nor mobility” or by an “insatiable desire for conflict.” These are people like Aaron Ely, “a former bantamweight MMA fighter who went by the ring name ‘The Cyborg’” but “settled on an IT career after his hip gave out.” Ely told The Washington Post:
“…he felt he was no longer able to advance in the private sector because the market is crowded with candidates from India willing to do the work for less…’So I said, ‘Oh yeah? Well I’m going to work with these guys that are going to arrest you, slam your face on the pavement and send you home.’”
But in fact it’s Indians, specifically Hindutva defense-tech executives along with Jewish Zionists who together increasingly arbiter Silicon Valley, who are benefiting from people like Ely slamming Latinos’ faces into pavement. This is because training and equipping ICE’s recruits and locating ICE’s targets takes technology, the kind supplied out of California. According to a 2026 report in Forbes, the tech and analytics software provider Palantir has a $139.3 million contract with ICE to assist “investigative case management operations.” AT&T has a $90.7 million contract “to provide ICE with IT, network products and support in a contract…[with] a potential end date of 2032 that could push the deal’s value to $165.2 million.” General Dynamics, one of the “Big Five” weapons contractors, and the weapons contractor L3 Harris hold $9.6 and $4.4 million contracts with ICE for equipment to “to investigate crimes and threats” and “background investigative services.” Deloitte has a $24 million ICE contract for “data modernization support.” Dell has a $18.8 million ICE contract, Motorola Solutions a $15.6 million ICE contract, and FedEx a $2.3 million delivery services contract. ICE not only contracts with these organizations but seems to aspire to become them: in the words of ICE’s director in 2025, the organization is turning into “a logistics juggernaut, like Amazon or FedEx, ‘but with human beings.’”
Other contractors like GEO Group and Core Civic score even bigger contracts operating detention facilities for the migrants that the tech and communications companies help ICE locate and obtain. At the end of 2024, GEO Group had 80,000 beds in ninety-nine facilities. In 2025, it opened a 1,000-bed Newark facility called Delaney Hall off an ICE contract valued at $1 billion; an 1,800-bed facility in Baldwin Michigan; and a 1,200-bed former prison in Hudson Colorado “that operated for a span of just five years after its 2009 opening.” That same year, Core Civic, second to GEO Group in operations with ICE, “inked multiple contracts to house detained immigrants in facilities in over half a dozen states.”
These private prison facilities are serviced by another link in the deportation apparatus’s chain: temporary holding centers of local jails and public prisons. According to the leftist journal n+1, public jails like Kenton County’s in Kentucky and the Clay County Jail in Indiana have been repurposed as ICE holding centers, with the agencies paying the jails several hundred dollars a night to house each detainee. According to The New York Times, in Louisiana, “a cluster of…jails and prisons” that had succeeded the “mills or factories” of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries as “the backbone of rural towns” were now being “reborn as low-cost detention centers for ICE.” According to another Times’ report, jails in Nassau County New York and Butler County Ohio and Grayson County Kentucky and at least two hundred others held “10 percent of all detainees, or 7,100 people, on average, each day in July.”
One problem with creating a government-corporate deportation apparatus for profit is that its functioning depends on publicly justifying its necessity while minimizing attention to its harms. But with the ramp-up of enforcement in the first half of 2025, a problem arose along exactly these lines: “some fifty-six thousand people” were being held by July “in more than a hundred and thirty facilities that, together, were designed to hold forty-one thousand people.” The resulting “deteriorating conditions” (overcrowding, underfeeding, uncleanliness) presented a public relations issue because legislation in Trump’s first term allowed congresspeople to inspect ICE detainment centers without notice. DHS’s de jure solution to the possibility of sudden and unwanted eyes was to refuse to release information about whether the facilities were operational to congresspeople or mayors, and to outright refuse them access to certain facilities if they did show up.
DHS’s de facto solution to deter visitors, in conjunction with the Justice Department, was to create pretexts for arresting officials who stopped by. Among them was Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who after being allowed to enter Geo Group’s Delaney Hall facility to confer with three U.S. congresspeople on an inspection before he joined a protest outside, was ordered arrested for trespassing by the Deputy Attorney General of the United States via phone. In the ensuing confusion a fracas broke out during which one of the congresswomen, LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), elbowed an ICE agent in the stomach as she was elbowed by him in the head. The Justice Department is now pursuing charges of assault against McIver that carry a prison sentence of seventeen years.
The other problem with building a deportation apparatus for profit is that, once you (the government) build it, “they” (the detainees) have to come—because government funding has to be justified to the public and corporate dependents have to be fed. This presented a problem for the Trump administration starting in the summer, after the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill in July secured unprecedented funding for ICE: $168 billion for a period through 2029 on top of the $33.93 billion ICE already receives yearly via congressional appropriations, which is already more than twice as much granted to all other enforcement agencies (FBI, ATF, Secret Service, DOJ, DHS, DEA) combined. But by that same summer of 2025, despite ramped-up enforcement, traditional targeted deportations of violent illegal aliens carried out by ICE were not deporting the numbers of people promised by the administration to justify the federal funding. They also weren’t giving the rapidly expanding number of ICE employees enough to do. And private prison companies like Geo Group and Core Civic, which had aggressively lobbied Trump’s incoming administration and benefited from his legislative largesse, were seeing stocks fall and facilities sit idle.
The administration’s solution was to supplement ICE’s ranks with border patrol officers, whose brief is aggressive foreign policing of America’s border spaces, and adopt their tactics: broad sweeps which catch large numbers of nonviolent and violent illegals alike in “nets.” This is the sort of thing that stops migrants crossing desert but, in American cities, also sweeps up law-abiding non-citizens and citizens and inflicts violence on passersby and property. Much as the War on Crime was justified thirty years ago during Bill Clinton’s administration by the existence of super-predators (a small minority of black youths who committed violent crimes) so too have these sweeps been justified during the Trump administration by the existence of a minority of illegal immigrants who commit violent crimes. But, again, these sweeps do not target violent criminals. And they have swept up increasing numbers of illegal immigrants without criminal records as well as American citizens even as the number of illegal immigrants with criminal convictions or citations who are detained has proportionally declined.
It was in Chicago that this new policy first took effect, via “Operation Midway Blitz”—a $59 million and counting operation that, as one observer has noted of Trump’s second administration generally, merged policy with spectacle. The operation’s commander, Gregory Bovino, was an almost uncanny fit for his role, especially when it came to commanding recruits who’d joined ICE off Noem’s and Lewandowski’s videos of amped-up aggression. Bovino, who is described by Donald Trump of all people as a “pretty out there kind of guy,” is a 55-year-old ICE lifer. He was inspired to join ICE by the 1982 vigilante movie The Border starring Jack Nicholson and Harvey Keitel. He was nicknamed “the Liberace of the border patrol” and he turned a stalled career around in early 2025 by mounting the dragnets that Trump administration formally adopted in summer. He was selected to lead the operation in Chicago by Noem and Lewandowski, by all accounts pretty “out there” people themselves. And he reported to Noem directly, well outside the normal chain of command. According to The Chicago Tribune, Bovino arrived in the city in September in grand fashion: sailing down the East River in “a convoy of government boats…his men held rifles as videographers filmed the stunt later posted to their social media.” Eventually “Homeland Security used the footage for a music video set to Alice in Chains’ [song] ‘Rooster’ ending with Bovino smiling into the distance…”
The scene, in turn, predicted much of what was to come in Chicago and its suburbs: “Masked Border Patrol agents…[roaming]…with the mission of arresting as many undocumented immigrants as possible, often while camera operators film[ed] for future government promotional videos.” Bovino, like Noem and Lewandowski and Trump himself, was serious about spectacle. His glosses on law enforcement included promo videos; photo-ops in Millennium Park; X attacks on critics; and a provocative daily ensemble of a green greatcoat, black boots, and cropped hair that observers said resembled Third Reich attire. In actual practice, many of Bovino’s raids in Chicago and its suburbs ranged from public relations fiascos to violations of the law.
In Elgin, in September, agents forcibly entered the house of an American citizen in a pre-dawn raid, destroying his front door and handcuffing and questioning him before releasing him. (“I’m just blessed that I’m still alive,” Joe Botello, 37, said.) In October, helicopters, snipers, ICE, and the FBI executed a warrantless raid on a low-income apartment building whose residents were both U.S. citizens and illegal immigrants in a mostly black community. They “broke down doors and smashed windows…forced residents [some of them U.S. citizens] outside and bound some of their hands with zip-ties…[and] corralled [detainees] into rented box trucks.” On Halloween night in Albany Park, as ICE agents detained five Mexican citizens without violent criminal histories, the agents “fired pepper-spray balls to disperse an angry crowd and arrested two U.S. citizens” while one agent “knelt on a man’s back and punched him in the head.” In early November, outside of a Sam’s Club in Cicero where ICE began executing an operation, agents drive-by-pepper-sprayed a family of U.S. citizens in their car including a one-year old girl.
Other Chicago area encounters predicted encounters in Minneapolis, where Bovino moved after Chicago and suicided his career. In Hoffman Estates in October, six agents in four unmarked cars pulled an American teenager “out of the car by her arm…[spun] the teen to the ground, and…[knelt] on her upper back near her neck” despite her screams that she wasn’t resisting. Agents did this after she honked her horn repeatedly to alert the neighborhood to their presence. That same month, Marimar Martinez, an American citizen, was honking her horn for the same purpose when ICE agents’ SUV “rammed” into her car. When she began driving away agents fired five shots into her arm and thigh, alleging that she was trying to ram them back. They followed her to a nearby Auto shop where she went for help; and, once she was in the hospital, they arrested and charged her with assault and DHS labeled her a domestic terrorist. She was found not guilty at a trial which featured both video of the incident and a text message to fellow ICE officers from the agent who shot her: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” These instances are context for the killing in Minneapolis of Renee Goode, who was alleged like Martinez to have attempted to ram her car into agents, though video suggested she (like Martinez) was trying to exit the scene. They are also context for the killing of Alex Pretti: an ICU nurse at Veterans’ Affairs who video showed was filming ICE agents before agents confronted him, subdued and disarmed him, and shot him ten times.
The public attention flowing from the deaths of two American citizens is the sand in the gears that beneficiaries of a rising security apparatus try to avoid at all costs. Indeed, Forbes released an expose on companies holding top contracts with ICE in response to the killings in Minneapolis; and Geo Group, which had seen its stock rise in the second half of 2025 off expanded enforcement, saw it fall sharply after the deaths. A shift in policy soon came from the White House: the theatrical Bovino was removed and the more bureaucratic Tom Homan replaced him in Minneapolis. But the underlying point of the policy stayed the same. Homan’s early request was for direct access to the state’s prisons, which might mitigate the need for as many sweeps in the short term. The administration is also boosting detainee numbers by continuing its “unusual strategy of arresting refugees in the state, who were vetted abroad and handpicked by the U.S. government to move to America.” This operation “[doesn’t] require street operations, since the government knows where refugees live.” And, a few days later, a report in The New York Times indicated that DHS was working to sweep up more detainees by new methods:
“Federal agents were told…that they have broader power to arrest people without a warrant, according to an internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo reviewed by The New York Times. The change expands the ability of lower-level ICE agents to carry out sweeps rounding up people they encounter and suspect are undocumented immigrants, rather than targeted enforcement operations in which they set out, warrant in hand, to arrest a specific person.”
There will be ample room for the people swept up in the coming arrests to stay: four of Geo Group’s facilities, with a total of 4,700 beds, are “idle,” and Core Civic needs to fill 7,000 beds.
As these facts suggest, the profit motive of powerful players in this domestic security apparatus is, of course, a driver of its growth. As I have reported for the Libertarian Institute, this has explained the turning-of-the-wheel from the War on Crime to the Global War on Terror (both foreign and “white nationalist”) to the War on Illegal Immigration. But there is also a political motivation for growing the apparatus and hyping identity politics, which has been adopted by Republicans from the Democrats who preceded them. After 2010, President Barack Obama used executive orders to bolster voter turnout among Democrats, including orders promising amnesty for illegal immigrants and their children, incentivizing more border crossings and ensuring the continued flow of cheap labor to keep corporations in clover and consumer costs down. By 2019, Democrats were predicting that Obama’s new coalition of women, LGBTQ+ Americans, illegal immigrants, and people of color would affect the inevitable “death” of the GOP.
After January 6, 2021, the Biden administration acted in what is said was the name of this coalition to use the Department of Justice to target nonviolent Trump supporters on the grounds of fighting “white nationalism” and “domestic terrorism.” Since his return to office in 2025, Trump has reengineered government to target these communities Democrats said they served. The actions in Chicago and Minnesota are justified on the basis of policies and problems but they are also justified as sending “low-IQ” migrants back to “shithole” countries; fighting Muslims who “breed their way through our society”; and standing by DHS against “radical Left lunatics” bent on disturbing the peace. Chicago is “something out of a third world country,” Gregory Bovino told Fox News during his stint there, “It’s a war zone out there.”
But the identity wheel will turn again once Democrats are in the White House as they weaponize government for their own ends. Which raises the question of where the process of domestic security growth that started with the War on Crime and Drugs then accelerated with the Global War on Terror and is now turbocharged with the War on Illegal Immigrants will go next. In a way this is a trick question for defenders of liberty to answer. It requires sounding a sharp, clear alarm about aggrandizements of empire without making claims about martial law or concentration camps or totalitarian government which have not yet come to pass and which tarnish the credibility of the alarm sounders. What can be said, both believably and alarmingly, about our present moment is that America is constructing a domestic security apparatus that rotates marginalized groups and ordinary citizens in and out of its confinement complexes based on identity, alleged criminality, and the profit motive. And, as George Kennan, the architect of the Cold War which began the construction of this complex in the first place, put it in 2002 at the start of the Global War on Terror:
“You know where you begin. You never know where you are going to end.”
