If spending on war is the politically easiest way to juice an economy, then the smoothest applications for this spending are wars at home, the easiest to begin and to control. This is why, at an accelerating rate since the 1990s, America’s government has waged wars against Americans—domestic pushes against real threats created from Washington policies that Washington then uses to expand its power. These wars range from the War on Crime to the Global War on Terror to a “War on Unauthorized Immigration,” one which will not break from past precedent but turbocharge it.
Familiar players created these scenarios. It was President Bill Clinton who made a growth industry from a war on crime begun three decades before off tensions of urban development. He did this even as he laid the groundwork for Islamist terrorism by embedding American troops in Saudi Arabia and responded to his financial backers’ demand for cheap labor by averting his eyes from crossings at the southern border. It was Kamala Harris who as San Francisco District Attorney and California Attorney General made her name fighting Clinton’s War on Crime and filling the federally-funded prisons that came with it. Then, after 2020, she helped Joe Biden’s administration turn a war on terror against Muslims into a war on terror against “white nationalists.”
But they were working off an even earlier template. “Crime is a national defense problem; you’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile,” said Harris’s future boss, then-Democratic Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 1984. The rolodex of scares may turn, but the politicians turning it stay the same. And even more lasting than the politicians are the industries and sub-industries which grow up around them: weapons contractors and security consultancies and private prisons and surveillance companies. Together they create a domestic version of our military industrial complex: an empire of Halliburtons at home not just abroad.
Some of this domestic complex has come about through militarized policing, and through comprehensive crime bills like those in 1984 and 1994. The former allowed local police forces to access information, air surveillance, equipment, and training from defense and intelligence agencies and the military, creating fields of “urban surveillance” and “social control.” The latter allowed them to expand their equipment and hiring sprees by allocating $10.8 billion for state and local law enforcement. This had real effects; for example, Rodney King’s violent arrest for evading a speeding stop at the hands of twenty-three Los Angeles police officers while an LAPD helicopter circled overhead. New York took longer to profit from federal funds, but from 1993 to 2000 its police budget went from $1.7 billion to $2.9 billion, marijuana arrests rose from under 10,000 to 60,000 in the same period, and summonses for illegal vending increased by 40% in a single year. The results, too, took longer to percolate than in Los Angeles, but they eventually did via the Black Lives Matter protests, which took their fuel from police brutality, of the 2010s.
Then there were prisons. In 1980, the prison population was 200,000; in 2010 it was 1.6 million; starting in 1995 $9.7 billion in federal money flowed to states across the country to build more prisons. In Texas, the state incarceration rate was 182 people for every 100,000 in 1978 and 710 people for every 100,000 in 2003. About 770,000 people worked nationwide in the corrections sector by 2008, even as there were 880,000 workers in the entire auto manufacturing sector. Then, as federal funding moved on after the financial crash, privatization occurred. According to the criminal legal reform nonprofit The Sentencing Project:
“Of the 1.5 million people in state and federal prisons in 2016, 8.5 percent, or 128,063, were incarcerated in private prisons…[which] faced controversy, including riots, deaths, and allegations of improper financial influence…”
The victims of this war were people de facto colonized in their own country. Between 1980 and 1997, the number of people serving prison time for non-violent drug offenses went from 50,000 to 400,000 people; between 1995 and 2005 the incarceration rate rose from 411 people per 100,000 to 491, with black inmates representing 40% of inmates with a sentence of more than one year. The “boom” also provided low-level employment as prison guards or service staff to black women, which served to both pacify potential resisters and break communal solidarities by making one part of the black community police the other.
The Global War on Terror only expanded the scope of these operations, so that militarization of government became the status quo. The Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, today employs 260,000 people: the third largest department in Washington. Between 2001 and 2013, the National Security Agency grew by 11,000 people, a 33% increase, “and the number of private companies it depend[ed] on…more than tripled, from 150 to close to 500.” It also added to its brief, via Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the ability to monitor without warrants the communications of some American citizens in collaboration with the country’s major wireless and internet providers.
The Pentagon added 76,000 people between 2001 and 2014, among them employees of the Office of Total Information Awareness, which began in 2002 and continues in different forms today. The focus of the office and its successors is combating terrorism using “computers, cameras, location-sensors, wireless communication, biometrics, and other technologies…to track, store, and analyze information about individuals’ activities.” Observers of both Total Information Awareness and its manifestations today have called it “the closest thing to a true ‘Big Brother’ program that has ever been seriously contemplated in the United States.”
States and cities, too, were the beneficiaries of counter-terrorism spending, which amounted to $2.8 trillion at home and abroad between 2002 and 2017. Worryingly, the one comprehensive report on this spending by the Stimson Center opens by warning that “the United States currently lacks an accurate accounting of how much it has spent on the fight against terrorism” because “the transparency of current data [provided by the government is eroding.” Another opaque beneficiary was the corporate apparatus. Private security consultancies sprang up to help cities apply “lessons” from the War on Crime to the Global War on Terror; not coincidentally, two of the most successful were the Bratton Group L.L.C. and Giuliani Partners, run by the New York police commissioner and mayor credited with using federal funding to “turn around” the city.
Part of the terror threat came from covert passages into the United States of Islamists via the unauthorized immigration encouraged by multinationals. It was fighting back against this corporate tactic that brought Donald Trump to the presidency, twice. But Trump is no longer casting the blame for our present situation on the corporate complex; he is making the problem solely about unauthorized immigrants. And, in contrast to a first term in which he signed landmark legislation unwinding the War on Crime and spoke often about the abuses of the national security state via FISA 702, Trump is using the immigration issue to boost our domestic war economy.
This project culminates, for now, with Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. $168 billion in this bill for a period through 2029 goes to ICE, on top of the $33.93 billion ICE already receives 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. $46 billion of this $168 billion goes to “border wall operations in the U.S.-Mexico border.” $45 billion goes to detention centers—a 365% increase from the current sum allocated of $3.4 billion, “and a figure that outstrips the combined funding of all 50 federal prisons.” $29.9 billion “goes toward ICE’s enforcement and deportation operations.” The employment opportunities here—from staff to construction to policing to transportation—are astronomical, and considerably easier to create than bringing back manufacturing jobs with complex negotiations over tariffs.
Even before the Big Beautiful Bill, and as with the Wars on Crime and Terror, states are already benefiting from government largesse. The most prominent example is Florida, which, on July 1, celebrated the opening of “Alligator Alcatraz.” This is the “tent city-type facility” in the heart of the Everglades with “28,000 feet of barbed wire…200 security cameras…staffed by 1,000 and guarded by 400 more.” Costing $450 million to operate each year, Alligator Alcatraz will be paid for by the federal government, a boon to Florida—but state-run holding facilities will not be the main beneficiary of the deportation boom. In the Sentencing Project’s report on the privatization of prisons, it notes that, from 2000 to 2016, “the proportion of people detained in private immigration facilities increased by 442 percent.” According to Greg J. Stoker, drawing from a report by Gabriel Eskandari:
“[I]n 2005, 25% of immigration detention occurred in for-profit detention centers, and this increased to 62% in 2014. In January of 2020, 81% of ICE detention occurred in private prison facilities, and in July 2023 the number was 90.8%.”
Current trends suggest that this pattern will continue. This year so far, ICE has “modified a contract for an existing detention center in southeastern Georgia so that Geogroup, [the largest private prisoner operator in America], could reopen an idle prison on adjacent land to hold 1,868 migrants—and earn $66 million in annual revenue.” Another winner is the private prison firm CoreCivic Corp., which the Administration paid an undisclosed amount “to reopen a 1,033-bed prison in Leavenworth as part of a surge of contracts U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has issued without seeking competitive bids.” A third is Deployed Resources, a tent company which began by serving music festivals like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza in the 2000s and since 2016 “has been awarded more than $4 billion in government contracts building and operating border tents,” not including another contract worth up to $3.8 building just signed with ICE.
And it’s not just private immigrant detention centers; private surveillance has been another area of growth. Perhaps not surprisingly, the government’s most helpful partner this year so far has been Geo Group, which:
“…over the past decade…has also built a lucrative side business of digital tools—including ankle monitors, smart watches and tracking apps—to surveil immigrants on behalf of the federal government…Geo Group, which has about 18,000 employees…[has] no real competition…[and could] generate nearly $700 million in revenue cumulatively through 2026. Its biggest shareholders include BlackRock and Vanguard.”
The actual deportation results of this boom so far are mixed. 97,000 unauthorized immigrants have been detained, of whom “only 8.4 percent had convictions for violent crimes,” according to CBS News. Exemptions have been issued for unauthorized immigrants working on farms and in restaurants and hotels (at least an estimated 1.5 million people in total) and Republicans in Texas have refused to force companies to use E-Verify to assist with deportations (taking another estimated 1.5 million off the table). The question is, once those migrants who the government and corporations want to find are rounded up, what will become of this profitable and powerful deportation enterprise? Will Alligator Alcatraz be shut down and its 1,400 employees laid off? Will the dozens of other Alligator Alcatrazes that will have sprung up around the country be finished, too? Or will another threat be found to keep the profits rolling and the apparatus intact?
One reason the rolodex will likely turn again is that federal agencies like ICE only receive more money by spending it, and they’ll look for reasons to spend and ask for more. The other is the opportunity that turning the rolodex gives the federal government to quickly and easily co-opt social discontent by allowing some Americans to police others. In the Big Beautiful Bill, ICE, “which currently has about 6,000 deportation officers, would also receive billions of dollars more to hire an additional 10,000 new agents.” But even before the bill passed ICE was already recruiting. At one recruitment event, according to a reporter from the left-wing journal n+1, there were “women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color.” One applicant was sick of “collecting child support payments from delinquent payments”; another “churn[ed] out Yahoo Finance content for twenty dollars an hour” and was “tired and bored.” A third “was sick of installing office furniture,” a fourth of being a batting cage manager. A fifth wanted to “parla[y] his wages as a deportation officer into buying Airbnbs.”
A “motivating force” for their interest in ICE was “wanderlust”: to escape from dead-end jobs in an economy which since 2008 had given them neither dignity nor mobility. Another motivation was an “insatiable desire for conflict”: an abstraction which took on more meaning after the release of a video in which ICE officers aggressively misidentified an indigenous American, a citizen, as an illegal immigrant; reports that they had urinated in public next to a pre- school blacktop; and allegations that they had used excessive force on protestors in Los Angeles while masking themselves to avoid becoming the subjects of formal complaints. The multiculturalism of the new ICE recruits also suggests harassment will not be limited to people of color. Identity wars of the past thirty years have given every group in America some reason to dislike each other and as part of a strengthened domestic police force they can act out their disdain. Expect harassment to multiply; and harassment suits; and protests against ICE violence that resemble the protests against police violence from 2013 to 2020; and crackdowns in response as in the 2020s.
But of course discontented Americans policing other Americans is not a Trumpian idea: it has an earlier precedent. In 1992, Bill Clinton released a campaign proposal to gather “unemployed veterans and active military personnel” into a “National Police Corps.” The strategy then, like the strategy now, was to solve discontent created by decades of bad policies (the neglect of veterans; the atrophying of dignified work and our industrial base) by amping up military spending to vacuum up the discontented. Clinton never ended up creating his National Police Corps, but he did create a fifteen year War on Crime employment boom. Now Trump is using ICE as a similar short-term solution, accompanied, like Clinton’s “targeted interventions” in Kosovo and Bosnia, by strikes on Yemen and Iran that juice the military corporate complex abroad. These are not the breaks into structural reform indicated by Trump’s repeated attacks on the deep state. They are continuities of American empire.
But this may not be as surprising as it might seem. Trump’s career was made, as journalist Daniel Denvir has pointed out, by New York’s 1980s building and finance boom. This boom was created by government-backed financiers, who took over city government in the late Seventies and began implementing the policies that within a decade would begin creating America’s domestic wars, including New York’s own wars on crime and terror. These players were practitioners of what we know today as neoliberalism: the so-called “privatization” of government that was anything but, since government simply stepped up subsidizing corporate vendors for services while increasing spending on security. Despite superficial differences from the Clintons and Harris, Trump comes from their world, and now he’s turbocharged it. Once again, in 2025, the state begins healing when politicians “bring the war home.”
