The Profits of Fear

Now, less than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, the threats against municipal or state officials willing to extend ​“sanctuary” have only grown more explicit, as when Homan recently vowed to prosecute Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson if he continues to ​“harbor and conceal” asylum seekers.

Trump’s mass deportation plans are alarming but they are also a conscious (if turbocharged) recap of the United States’ long history of anti-migrant state racism, as well as the product of a very profitable system of detention and surveillance supported by successive administrations of both major parties. 

Whether they take the ​“spectacular” form Miller seeks, they will pay dividends in multiple ways: enabling further profiteering by private prison and other carceral corporations tapped to manage the coming crackdown, while permitting Trump to profit politically from the claim that migrants are the prime culprits of ​“American carnage.” That this strategy knows no moral or factual limits was evident in the MAGA response to the recent violence in New Orleans and Las Vegas — declaring ​“We need to secure that border” even as both attacks were perpetrated by native-born U.S. citizens with lengthy military backgrounds. 

To challenge the violent scapegoating of migrants that is coming will require mobilizing against the Trump administration’s claim to be the champion of the ​“American worker.”

150 years of anti-migrant lawfare

The rhetoric surrounding the MAGA movement’s headline policy is like a greatest hits compilation from 150 years of nativist anti-migrant lawfare. Trump’s Sinophobic rants against Chinese fentanyl coming over the border recall how Chinese workers were the first target of repressive and racist U.S. immigration laws, beginning with the Page Act of 1875, as well as of a nativist labor movement that fought to keep labor white.

But that’s just the beginning. In 2015, Trump invoked Dwight Eisenhower’s infamous 1954 ​“Operation Wetback” deportation drive as a possible model for his own administration to follow. The lies Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance spread this fall about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, echo how crucial anti-Black and anti-Latino racism have been, ever since the 1980 Mariel boatlift of Cuban and Haitian immigrants, in framing migration as a national security crisis. Republicans’ 2024 platform promise to ​“deport pro-Hamas radicals” from college campuses reminds us of how frequently anti-migrant policies have been tied to political panics about foreign subversives, from the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, which classed communists and anarchists as ​“deportable aliens,” all the way back to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, used to justify the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II (and now also cited by Trump and his cronies as a means to sidestep legal hurdles to rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants). Now Congress is poised to pass the Laken Riley Act with considerable Democratic support, further expanding mandatory detention, including of documented immigrants, under the pretext of a nonexistent wave of ​“migrant crime.”

If MAGA’s xenophobic ideology has hardly innovated on its forebears — standing out primarily for its unalloyed crudeness — its efforts to turn nativist racism into a core policy platform also find precedents in the recent history of immigration law and its enforcement. 

Bill Clinton’s administration, and especially his support for bills such as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that criminalized migration, were a watershed moment for the United States’ ​“deportation machine.” As Silky Shah, executive director of Detention Watch Network, has argued, the punitive shift during the Clinton years facilitated the merger of immigration enforcement and the prison industrial complex into a single carceral landscape. 

It was in 2014, during the presidency of Barack Obama — nicknamed the ​“Deporter-in-Chief” long before Trump took office — that the same Tom Homan, then a senior figure in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), first began promoting the idea of using ​“family separation” to deter immigration. While Obama balked at implementing the idea, he nonetheless honored Homan with a Presidential Rank Award the next year. And as Shah notes, the Obama’s administration’s work to connect the detention/​deportation system with law enforcement ​“expanded and set up a powerful machinery” that Trump would later exploit.

Private profit, public propaganda

An important dimension of these entwined systems was privatization. Under the cover of benevolent ​“reforms,” the Obama administration oversaw both the increased federal prosecution of immigration offenses like unlawful re-entry and the increased use of private prisons and corporate ​“alternatives to detention” for migrants, including various forms of surveillance and ​“e-carceration.”

For its part, and up to its dying days, the Biden administration extended lucrative contracts with the corporations that run the private facilities that warehouse the majority of detained undocumented migrants—more than 90% of ICE detainees were in private detention centers as of July 2023 — despite documented cases of ​“medical neglect, preventable deaths, punitive use of solitary confinement, lack of due process, and discriminatory and racist treatment,” as The Guardianreported. Even detention centers the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General explicitly demanded be shut down still remain open. 

Human rights groups have protested the brutalities that have resulted from the Biden administration’s reliance on the multi-billion-dollar detention industry, led by companies like GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America). Meanwhile, as The Lever reported, private equity firms have made sizeable investments in federal immigration detention facilities, ​“meaning opaque, unaccountable, and profit-gouging Wall Street interests are set to make hundreds of millions of dollars detaining and surveilling the country’s immigrants.” 

Now the private prison industry, which already saw its stocks boosted by news of Trump’s electoral victory, anticipates a windfall under his second administration. As the executive chairman of the GEO Group declared on a post-election earnings call: ​“We expect the incoming Trump administration to take a much more aggressive approach regarding border security as well as interior enforcement, and to request additional funding from Congress to achieve these goals.” That increased aggressiveness against migrants translates directly into increased revenues for GEO and its ilk.

The profit to be made from the racialized punishment of undocumented migrants doesn’t stop with detention and deportation, but also very much includes the electronic monitoring and surveillance of migrants. ICE’s Intensive Supervision Appearance Program includes ankle monitors, surveillance ​“watches” and facial-recognition smartphone apps—all of which, alongside data mining, are the object of lucrative government contracts. Given some skepticism that the Trump administration will be able to carry out all of its draconian plans — Evan Benz, an attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, notes there is ​“no cost-effective or practical way for ICE to lawfully detain and remove all three-plus million migrants on the non-detained docket, despite what Trump and his fascist minions may be dreaming of for next year” — even a failure of the mass deportation campaign would still prove profitable to private prison interests, while spreading misery and terror among migrants.

An economy of fear

To look at the machinery of detention and deportation that Trump and his cabinet of moneyed bigots are revving up is to behold a whole political economy of fear and punishment, generating private profit out of the fuel of demagogic propaganda, paying the psychological wages of nativism while lining the coffers of corporations. 

For migrant workers, fear has always been an economic factor: forcing them into lower- wage jobs, hindering unionization, enabling despotic employers. As critical immigration scholar Nicholas De Genova explains, the principal function of deportation in capitalist economies dependent on immigrant and undocumented labor is not actually expelling such workers, but subordinating them, rendering their labor cheap and controllable because of the workers’ deportability.

Homan himself has called for expanding temporary visas for seasonal workers to year-round migrant workers in the dairy industry, which is so reliant on undocumented workers that their absence would double the price of milk. When they’re not monstered as threats to national security, undocumented workers are reduced to factors of production, less important than the animals they tend to, the commodities they produce.

It’s clear that the primary target of Trump’s mass deportation plans is not ​“migrant crime” but that vast part of the U.S. working class composed of undocumented workers and all of those who fall under the fearsome shadow of deportability — not least student activists mobilizing against genocide. That makes the defense of migrant lives not just a priority of any movement for social justice, but a political and labor struggle as well. For that struggle to gain momentum, it will be necessary to break the reactionary equation of the working class with whiteness and national citizenship that has lingered ever since the late 19^th Century.

In 2018, thousands rallied against ICE’s family separation programme — including Democratic politicians like Kamala Harris who later pivoted to a ​“tough-on-migration” message. In a promising development, Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, declared this week that fighting back against workplace raids and mass deportations is a ​“top priority” for the labor movement. Countering Trump’s attack on migrants will require a movement, with migrant workers at its center, that goes beyond humanitarian concern and takes on the forbidding but necessary task of dismantling the deportation machine.