Posted on June 22, 2025
Karachi:
It starts outdoors – ice agents serves factories, restaurants and farms, while families sleep ignorant while the state is flexing its full disciplinary muscle, relaunch the ghosts of the exclusive past of America with a revenge which is undoubtedly contemporary.
What Donald Trump is praised as “the biggest deportation operation in American history” takes place as a dark and radical expansion of state machines – a mixture of raids of iron fist ice cream, tentacular detention centers and legal shortcuts that explained the most dusty corners of American status books to consolidate physical and social borders.
Supervised as the fulfillment of his country wishes, Trump’s vision for a “new America” is based on what the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito calls “immunitas”: the sovereign’s feverish attempt to isolate himself from perceived contamination.
In the vision of the Trumpian world, “disposable work” extracted from the nations long ravaged by American foreign policy is now rejected as a second -hand tool – merciless and by design.
Even some of Trump’s allies are starting to move in their seats. Joe Rogan, one of his most eminent supporters, recently sounded an alarm: “We have to be careful not to become monsters while we fight monsters.”
However, the warnings of the base of the populist leader remain imbued with the same obscene necropolitical logic which draws lines between humans and sub -human – the “monsters”.
The demonstrations which now break out in the United States are not new but mark a renewed moment of convergence between the application of immigration and a long and bloody story of control of racialized work. From the law on Chinese exclusion on the post-September 11 increase in the ICE, the American state has always watched its borders by criminalizing the “other” racialized while exploiting their work.
The Raids of the Trump era echoes repression on the work site of the 1980s and the arrests of the Obama courthouse. However, with 80 factory raids, convoys blocking the roads and troops of the National Guard deployed without state consent, it is a new escalation.
There is no new crisis that leads to the undergoing assault but an old political trick: to make the show of the invasion to fuel nationalist panic and armament against workers and dissent.
Throughout the country, workers’ communities – immigrants and non -immigrants – have descended into the street. From handcuffed migrants to debraying of students, union banners with hand-made signs reading “mi familia, no separa”, the resistance is multi-generational and deeply rooted.
Border wars and street wars have converged.
For many, raids do not only concern immigration. They reject the logics of neoliberal “security”, which calls into question the premise that human life can be reduced to economic cost or statistics in a large book of detention.
In Washington, another story is told. The Trump administration, flanked by DHS officials and amplified by consumer networks, insists that it is a repression against “criminals”. The demonstrators are rejected as “crowds without law”.
Trump, in his typical red meat rhetoric, even said that Los Angeles had been “invaded and busy” and swore to “release” her. The attorney general Ashley Bell undertook to continue the demonstrators aggressively.
However, immigrant communities, the organizers and rights activists see through smoke, saying that real criminals are those that tear families to support a neoliberal system that depends on cheap, precarious and expensive workforce.
Migrants undocumented has long formed an excess army for American capitalism, hyper-exploitable because their fear makes them conforming.
Seen through this objective, the application of borders is a disguised farce in question of national security. It is a question of preserving racial capitalism, of discipline people of color and to preserve the beneficiary margins. The account of the “rule of law” is therefore reversed: deeper violence does not reside in protest, but in decades of war, commercial policy and austerity which stimulate migration.
Colonial and necropolitical heritage
Interior clashes cannot be understood without their global and historical context. The American border is not a neutral line. It is a colonial scar. From native dispossession to wars in Mexico and the Caribbean, the very idea of the border was forged to the Empire.
Migrants fleeing violence and poverty in Central America or the Caribbean are not “invaders”, they are survivors of the systems created, in part, by American politics. Their movement is the replica of coups, seizures of land and the extractive economy.
While the demonstrators descend into the streets with Mexican and black flags, slogans like “Here we remain” invoke the historical truth: these cities were built by the very hunted people.
Through the objective of Frantz Fanon, we see how the immigrant becomes an “zone of non-being”, excluded from the rights so that the state can justify the violence and deprived of “the right to have all rights”.
The psychology of the oppressed by Fanon reveals that the migrant is precisely demonized to justify the violence of the state. Indeed, as Fanon noted, the social order locks “whites in whiteness, blacks in darkness”.
The fact is both theoretical and practical: immigrants exist outside the democratic community in the eyes of the state, “others”, therefore their rights are negotiable.
According to such a logic, American immigration policy embodies what Achille Mbembe called necropolitics: the power to define who can live and who must die or suffer. Migrants in detention centers are literally at the mercy of a system designed to carry them psychologically and physically.
Children’s relationships in cages, or men wrapped in vans with little water, reveal the will of a state to inflict slow violence. An organizer reported that “intimidation and terror” – the type seen in the Raids of the restaurants of San Diego – is now routine.
The state is not only locked people to fight crime. It manages poverty while disciplining its excess life. This is the essence of what Loïc Wacquant calls “prison”. Immigration raids are perfectly put in this logic: not only the application of the law, but a pipeline in the detention-industrial complex.
While the discourse on the reform of criminal justice becomes stronger, the migrants remain outside its moral perimeter – detained without accusations, expelled without explanation, excluded from the rights that others begin to recover.
By figures
Trump’s ambition is amazing: one million deportations during his first year. The United States is currently hosting around 13 million undocumented immigrants, or 4% of its population. Almost 80% have lived in the United States for more than a decade, many of whom were born in the United States. In 2022, undocumented immigrants contributed $ 69 billion in taxes.
And yet, they are targeted in mass. Ice has only 6,000 officers, but Trump has expanded his powers, enlisted from other federal agencies such as IRS and reopened the detention facilities. He even floated reactivating Alcatraz.
Legal protections are being deposited. Trump dismissed immigration judges, expanded accelerated moves and invoked the law on extraterrestrial enemies of 1798 to expel the Venezuelans without audiences.
Some were sent no to Venezuela, but in a Supermax prison in Salvador. The justifications included tattoos, nationality and affiliation of supposed gangs – no regular procedure, no evidence.
Temporary protected status (TPS) for migrants from Venezuela, Haiti and Afghanistan is also on the cutting block. Collateral arrests and raids in schools, churches and hospitals are back.
Even programs like Project Homecoming, which offer $ 1,000 on “voluntarily” return, operate as gentle coercion.
A calculation revealed that 72,000 people were expelled during the first 98 days of Trump, around 737 per day, almost double the daily average under Biden.
What remains a moral and political question: which belongs and in what terms? If the answer depends on citizenship, productivity or compliance, millions will remain outside the circle of rights.
In traditional imagination, human rights are often attached to the sacred character of citizenship. However, as Hannah Arendt warned, the statelessness are those who have lost the “right to have rights”.
If the rights depend on national membership, then what remains for undocumented migrants, displaced, the “others” at the border of recognition?
What is happening then is uncertain. The administration has promised to intensify its detention and deportation program. But activists report that each raid is now welcomed by an instant organization by union rooms, churches and community centers.
The basic patrols have pushed ice vehicles in advance, the legal teams are mobilizing in the courthouses and the protest waves continue. Even if the White House reduces the images of chaos, people on the ground insist that their cause is ordered and fair.
In the words of a young organizer in a vigil in Philly, it is more than the management of the crisis – it is a moment of international morality: “We are fighting for the working class, for immigrants, for our freedom. We will not back up. “
