ICE repression and racialized state terror are ramping up. The Trump Administration's increased investment in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has made ICE the highest-funded law enforcement agency, as it continues to slash resources for public health, education, environmental protection and other crucial services for the people.
Anti-migrant policymaking continues to expand the global incarceration and surveillance apparatus, partnering with the world's most nefarious corporations, technofascists, and oligarchs, with deadly consequences for US communities.
In recent weeks, we collectively witnessed the murders of legal observer Renee Goode and VA hospital nurse Alex Pretti by ICE and Border Patrol agents carrying out federal raids in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They join at least nine others (at the time of this writing) who have died in ICE custody or during anti-immigrant raids in this year alone. ICE's violence isn't new, nor is it a partisan matter. And, as so many continue to diligently remind us, the names of victims of color like Keith Porter, Victor Manuel Diaz, and Geraldo Lunas Campos—whose deaths were not publicly witnessed or recorded on video—are so often left out of remembrances and public calls for accountability.
Fueled by the belief that those responsible for carrying out the 9/11 attacks legally entered the nation, the George W. Bush administration leveraged fear and the resurgence of American patriotism to justify creating the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. ICE, one of the department's flagship law enforcement agencies, was established the following year. It has since been expanded under every successive presidency, with the Obama and Biden administrations amassing record numbers of deportations. The widely held notion that US border policy might look different under a Kamala Harris regime is ostensibly a moot point. As Vice President Harris, was tasked with "securing the border," a record she proudly touted in her recent bestselling memoir and amplified in her presidential campaign strategy.
In the South, a region home to border states and states with large migrant populations, we are no stranger to heightened ICE aggression. Prior to Trump's second presidency, Southern states—including Texas, Louisiana, and Georgia—passed legislation preempting county and municipal law enforcement agencies and carceral institutions to collaborate with ICE and DHS.
What is unprecedented about this moment is the nature of this coalesced corporate-tech-state power, and the way it is rapidly raising the stakes of resistance to the global fascist arrangement. The BDS Movement's list of tech and securities firms complicit in the ongoing genocide in Palestine is an apt venn diagram for the same firms invested in ICE and global detention. These firms serve capital laundering fronts for the nations responsible for genocides and resource exploitation in Sudan and Congo, support US imperial aggression in Venezuela and Cuba, and have been given positions on Trump's Gaza Board of Peace.
There is nothing else left for the masses to do except escalate our resistance to this genocidal entanglement. In the face of ICE murders, detention center construction, ring cameras and social media surveillance, we must follow our comrades on the ground in Minneapolis, in Texas' Dilley detention center, and in Alabama prisons, and join the general strike now.
This list of essays speaks to the multifaceted nature of ICE aggression. Use it to educate and defend communities.
In solidarity.
"To confront this era of digitized captivity using the tools of abolitionist theories and praxis means recognizing that the surveillance industrial complex is no longer limited to overseeing physical walls, be they surrounding prisons or delineating borders. Today, our walls are fugitive; constantly shifting, slipping, and creeping through time and space."
"U.S. and Israeli officials have made comparisons between their respective walls, Israeli companies provide the same radar and surveillance services used by Israel to the U.S., or law enforcement exchange programs between the U.S. police and Israeli police continue to share suppression tactics. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League have encouraged several exchanges wherein law enforcement officials, including those from ICE, have exchanged 'best practices.'
Moreover, ICE and the IDF have similar modalities—operating through the use of militarized checkpoints, constant surveillance, and sometimes arbitrary detentions and arrests—making the connection between the two entities exceedingly clear."
"ICE and the private prison corporations it holds contracts with are not just collaborating with the U.S. military; they are adopting the military's recruitment playbook—exploiting low-income people in the process, subjecting them to moral injury, and sowing deeply entrenched divisions among communities—all while failing to deliver on their promises of benefits and economic liberation. Working people deserve better than the false choice of (a) living in poverty, or (b) taking a job incarcerating people or becoming a service member of the imperial war machine."
"Through analysis of politics, popular culture, the prison system, policing, and everyday life, this year's collection features work that connects the dots from one end of the world to the other. They tug at Empire's fraying edges and call attention to its crumbling foundations. Because like all empires before it, this one too will sound its death knell."
In 2025, Trump began deporting people captured by ICE to Guantanamo Bay, repurposing the Bush-era torture camp into an migration detention facility. Journalist Emily P. Russell confronts the specter of Guantánamo Bay and finds that the military installment has long acted as a test lab for the torture and exploitation at the heart of the American carceral system.
"Though it held almost 800 individuals at its height, today, the detention facility holds just 30. There are important and unignorable differences between the two systems, and yet, similarities abound across America's diverse carceral settings. The two systems' similarities reveal that ending carceral realities in the states has to involve ending them elsewhere, especially those places where the US props them up."
Campus reaction to the Student Intifada's encampments brought new censorship extremes to campuses nationwide. In this piece, UNC Chapel Hill student Jordyn Cooper details the way her campus did so through the expansion of AI surveillance technology, a containment tactic that harkens back to North Carolina's plantation roots and Gaza's open-air prison structure.
"The encampment, like the university, was a place of learning, as there were teach-ins on the injustices occurring in Gaza and on campus. It was also a place of inter-faith prayer and congregation, as Jews, Muslims, and Christians worshipped together in the space. It was a space of community, support, empathy, and care, the opposite of what UNC claimed it to be."
An anonymous writer reflects on the heightened stakes of their participation in the Student Intifada as an undocumented person in Texas following the passage of Senate Bill 4, the most repressive anti-immigration law in the country.
"These policies collectively create an even more hostile environment for undocumented individuals, increasing their ever-present risk of deportation. This increased risk translates to the self-policing of undocumented people. We must consider that if we participate in a protest or escalated action (such as encampments), being arrested may likely lead to being deported."
"Among those who have reported being harassed: a ride-share driver stopped for not wearing a seat belt despite having one on as she drove a passenger to the airport; a pastor pulled over for looking lost as she left a church gathering; and, in a case of mistaken identity, a 72-year-old man roused from bed and marched out of his apartment while clad in only his robe and underwear…
When the Memphis police returned Williams' wallet, the officer cautioned him: Don't do anything bad and keep your ID on you. That warning, said Williams, who posted about the stop on Facebook, echoes a slavery-era requirement that free African Americans carry "freedom papers," official court documents to prove they weren't enslaved lest they be returned to bondage by slave patrols or law enforcement."
"Imprisoned Justice," details inhumane conditions inside two immigration detention centers in Georgia—Stewart Detention Center—the largest in the country—and Irwin County Detention Center.
The report paints a grim picture. Detainees reported hunger and malnutrition due to insufficient meals, extremely meager payment for work (as low as 13 cents an hour), lack of access to legal help, solitary confinement, and deeply inadequate medical and mental health treatment. Altogether, detention in these Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities bears far too much resemblance to criminal incarceration, and sometimes worse, despite its non-punitive purpose. And because immigration detainees usually don't know how long they'll be detained, the indefinite nature of the confinement adds a layer of psychological torment."
"As part of a New York Times investigation published last month, five gynecologists reviewed medical records from Amin's patients who were detained at ICDC, finding that the OB-GYN "consistently overstated the size or risks associated with cysts or masses attached to his patients' reproductive organs." The investigation noted that "in some cases the medical files might not have been complete and that additional information could potentially shift their analyses," but based on the records the doctors reviewed, "Amin seemed to consistently recommend surgical intervention, even when it did not seem medically necessary at the time and nonsurgical treatment options were available."
This appears to be a pattern Amin replicated on Georgia residents who were his patients, inevitably funneling them to the Irwin County Hospital for gynecological procedures that appear to have been wholly unnecessary."
"Such abuses are common at Stewart, which is operated by CoreCivic, formerly Corrections Corporation of America, a for-profit prison company with a long history of mismanagement and abuse. A 2017 Department of Homeland Security report found that many detainees were forced to wait days to receive medical care. Many complained about being served moldy or spoiled food and lacking basic hygiene supplies. DHS's findings added to a pile of evidence collected by advocacy groups showing that inhumane conditions have plagued Stewart for years.
These conditions aren't the result of understaffing or lack of funding. Beckie Moriello, an immigration attorney based in Raleigh, says ICE locks people up in prisons like Stewart to get them to drop what might otherwise be winnable cases."
"Across the country, detained migrants have urged officials to release them from ICE custody amid the worsening pandemic. The situation looks particularly dire in the South, where ICE has rapidly expanded its capacity at for-profit facilities in recent months.
In late March, migrants detained at the South Texas Processing Center clashed with guards over lack of safe conditions at the complex; in response, guards pepper-sprayed nearly 60 detainees. The next day, seven detained migrants were pepper-sprayed at a detention center in Pine Prairie, Louisiana. Since then, a detainee at Pine Prairie tested positive for COVID-19. Both facilities are run by Florida-based Geo-Group, under a contract with ICE. Meanwhile, migrants held at Richwood Detention Center in Louisiana—operated by the private group LaSalle Corrections—staged a hunger strike to protest conditions at the facility and inaction by ICE in the face of the novel coronavirus pandemic."
"In February, Sheriff Terry Johnson, known for his anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric, stood in front of the Board of Commissioners of Alamance County, North Carolina and requested nearly $3 million for a jail expansion. The county needed a bigger jail, he said, in order to lock up more people on behalf of the U.S. Marshals and ICE."
"Public housing residents, along with other poor, disabled, elderly, and vulnerable people, are becoming a first wave of climate migrants in the U.S.—people selectively displaced by increasingly frequent storms and floods, moved because they can't afford to stay. Their forced removal also marks the sputtering end of a long effort to close down the project of government-subsidized housing in this country, leaving affordable housing to the so-called free market."
"According to the Center for Immigration Studies, New Orleans is the only sanctuary city in the South (though there are some sanctuary counties).
Sanctuary cities are generally designated as such when local police do not work with federal agencies to enforce immigration laws. Atlanta police, however, work closely with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to apprehend and detain undocumented immigrants."
"Last Tuesday, the North Carolina legislature approved H.B. 318. Dubbed the 'Protect North Carolina Workers Act' by its supporters, this bill constitutes an immediate and grave threat to immigrant communities and the working poor in North Carolina. Since the bill's late-night passage, advocates against the law have been calling on North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory to veto the law to prevent its enactment. I want to name that bill for what it is: another step in the North Carolina legislature's war not just on immigrants, but on the working poor and communities of color in general."