As the U.S. and Israeli governments flirt with peace with Iran while preparing to unleash Armageddon, the struggles within the American Mainland continue to percolate. In March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were deployed at major U.S airports as part of a strategy that is just as opaque as the Trump administration’s Middle East policy.
The ICE deployment is the latest plot twist in the great American immigration saga. The immigration issue has divided the nation. It has driven wedges among libertarians and between libertarians and our natural anti-war allies.
The maximalist opposing positions are:
- The federal government should have nothing to do with immigration at all.
- The federal government should deport millions of illegal immigrants, deport tens of millions of legal immigrants, and severely restrict immigration in line with post-World War I immigration policy.
According to an immigrant rights advocate who spoke to the present writer only on the condition of anonymity, despite the media focus on ICE sweeps and raids, most deportations are being handled “administratively” when immigrants voluntarily report to ICE offices for review of their immigration status.
ICE’s “kinetic activity” has followed a standard pattern. When ICE targets an area, it deploys thousands of investigative agents and deportation officers. Often, the ICE personnel outnumber the local police department’s officers. Citizens and legal immigrants have been ripped from home, work, and off the street by masked ICE agents, thrown in vans, and subjected to facial scans reminiscent of the 2014 Robocop film remake. And, of course, illegal immigrants have been successfully detained and deported.
ICE has shut down businesses throughout the nation with “massive workforce detentions,” sending corporate lobbyists scurrying. It has pulled over off duty police officers and treated them like common civilians, much to their horror and resentment. During its Minneapolis raids this past winter, ICE rolled its SUVs through the broad streets of wealthy suburbs and knocked on doors to inquire if residents were harboring illegal immigrants.
It was in Minneapolis that two high-profile shootings ratcheted up the national tension. On January 7, Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by an employee of ICE. On January 24, Alex Pretti was shot and killed by an employee of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. While ICE operates throughout the nation, BPC traditionally operates within one hundred miles of the border. ICE has become the central villain for the “there are no illegal people on stolen land” folk, but BPC has been right there with them as the Trump administration has deployed it deeper within the nation.
ICE and BPC have generated mass protests wherever they go, with the most extreme critics accusing them of “crimes against humanity” and “the potential to reach genocidal levels of violence.”
Meanwhile, proponents of mass deportations or “remigration” have bashed the Trump administration for not doing nearly enough. As Institute contributing writer Kyle Matovcik put it:
Imagine watching Biden traffic at minimum 10 million people into the country and then calling Trump’s at best 600k deportations “Mass deportation”. This is COPE. https://t.co/7o3DNsZuTU
— Kyle (@KyleMatovcik) January 27, 2026
Other immigration critics have described mass migration as an intentional project of ethnic replacement and genocide against white Americans. As “Red Hawk,” president of the Old Glory Club, put it:
In every single White country it’s all the same, White replacement above all else. Anyone who tells you that this isn’t deliberate is lying to you. https://t.co/hyMA5KX18X
— RedHawk (@redpilledhawk) May 16, 2026
What are Donald Trump and his team up to? What are their core beliefs, desires, and intentions? We don’t know, and quite possibly even they lack symbolic mastery of their own project. Libertarian Institute resident philosopher Tommy Salmons assessed our predicament during a recent podcast with the present writer. He said, “I have trouble getting into the psychology of those psychopaths who run the nation.”
Millions of Americans are upset about the current state of immigration and do support remigration. Business interests like immigration for its downward pressure on wages and for the leverage they have over non-citizens, especially those here illegally. And since politics is always about who does what to whom, sophisticated politicians and bureaucrats should be expected to be hyper-focused on managing demographics.
Given all this, the Trump administration’s immigration policies could be seen as an attempt to placate diverse interests. They theatrically beat up on immigrants to please enough heritage Americans. They spread fear throughout immigrant communities, leading to self-deportations and more compliance from the immigrant workforce. They continue to offset the rise of a cohesive American people that could reign in the state while safeguarding against a hot civil war or total social collapse.
Perhaps nothing symbolizes the paradoxes and antinomies at play in Washington DC better than the fact that White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller is known as Trump’s “mass deportation architect.”
Miller seems sincere about remigration and, to his credit, has earned the hatred of the notoriously anti-white hate broker, the Southern Poverty Law Center. At the same time, Miller is a Jewish Zionist. He is committed to an ideology that would send thousands of America’s children to their death in defense of Israel in war after war after war. Not the kind of guy you’d expect to care about preserving a free people, unless he’s made the calculation that Israel’s existence depends on it.
Whatever we might believe is behind the immigration crackdown; we must never lose sight of the fact that it is playing out within an imperial backdrop. Like it or not, the United States is a global military empire. Libertarian Institute editor Hunter DeRensis zeroed in on our imperial reality. He said:
An empire, fundamentally, cannot be “American.”
It can only be international in structure, multicultural in population, and, in today’s case, Zionist in ideology. https://t.co/3Uw9HomOd8
— Hunter DeRensis (@HunterDeRensis) March 18, 2026
Our nation’s immigration policy, whatever it is, will always be an imperial project so long as we remain an empire. As libertarians, we can empathize with those upset by ICE in our communities and those who regard mass immigration as a state-backed existential threat, but we must never lose sight of the imperial court at the center of it all.
