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."