‘We cannot separate imperialism from domestic militarization’: Understanding the links between ICE, Gaza, and U.S. foreign policy

This week, over 1,000 advocacy organizations sent a letter to Congress demanding that lawmakers stop funding United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol.

The call comes amid widespread protests over the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

“How many more people have to die, how many more lies have to be told, and how many more children must be used as bait and abducted before Congress fulfills its responsibilities and stops these out-of-control agencies from continuing to violently attack our immigrant communities and communities of color, as well as their many allies and supporters?” asks the letter.

Does Trump’s ICE represent a shift in U.S. immigration policy, or is it merely a continuation of the existing strategy? How do these tactics connect to U.S. policy abroad and the country’s wider imperial designs?

Mondoweiss U.S. correspondent Michael Arria spoke with Canadian activist and writer Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism and Undoing Border Imperialism, about the current moment.

Mondoweiss: I am wondering if you see ICE under Trump as a specific development within the history of U.S. immigration policy, or merely a continuation of existing policies?

Harsha Walia: It’s good question. I do think both are true. I don’t think it’s an either-or.

I think it’s important to note that the infrastructure of border enforcement certainly predates Trump. Border enforcement is a bipartisan practice. The groundwork for ICE, for DHS [Department of Homeland Security], for CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection], and this entire infrastructure of border policing is not new.

However, it is also the case that it has escalated in very particular ways under the current administration, particularly because the current administration really relies on, as all fascists do, the spectacle of overt dehumanizing violence.

So I do think that is different because explicitly right-wing rhetoric relies on a particular kind of racial terror in order to keep reproducing itself.

The last thing I’ll say is that it’s also important to know that what’s happening in the U.S. can’t be isolated from attacks on migrants around the world. I think it’s a bit of a mistake to only read what’s happening in the U.S. in relation to the U.S.

The war on migrants is intensifying around the world, whether that is in the Mediterranean, which is. the deadliest border on the planet, or in Eastern Europe, India, Bangladesh, New Zealand, Australia, etc.

This is all happening in the context of climate catastrophe and growing inequality due to capitalism and colonialism. Border policing and enforcement are now increasingly maintained through warfare technologies, and it’s escalating around the world.

So, I think ICE has to be looked at in this wider global context.

People often talk about ICE as if it had existed for many decades, but of course, it was founded under the Bush administration during the “War on Terror.”

Can you talk about ICE’s history and the political climate it emerged from?

I think it’s critical to understand that ICE emerges from the post-9/11 so-called “War on Terror “context. The post-9/11 policies were a continuation of the war at home and the war abroad.

So in the 90s and the 80s, we kind of saw that the war on migrants was deeply connected to U.S. foreign policy and coups and interventions in South and Central America. In the post-9/11 climate, we saw that the war at home was a war on migrants through “anti-terror” arrests, security detentions, and Guantanamo Bay.

All of that was completely connected to imperialism in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia. the expansion of AFRICOM [United States Africa Command], etc. The war at home and the war abroad were completely merged together.

ICE was, in fact, the domestic arm of this imperial warfare. I think, as we look at ICE’s expansion over the past 20-plus years, it’s important to note similar reverberations. Right now, we see U.S. imperialism in Gaza, in Palestine, in support of the Zionist entity. Also, in the recent U.S. interventions in Venezuela.

These different moments remind us that we cannot separate imperialism from domestic militarization, whether that’s the militarization at the border, whether it’s the militarization inland through carceral systems and all forms of policing, or it’s immigration enforcement. These are completely connected to U.S. foreign imperial policy.

I wanted to stay on your point about Gaza. People are making connections between what’s happening now in places like Minnesota and what’s happened in Gaza for decades. Most people know about the military and economic connections between the U.S. and Israel, but they are also connected through settler colonialism, which you have written about.

Can you talk about those parallels?

I think the connections are that these are settler-colonial societies. So these are societies that are intrinsically based on expanding the frontier and intrinsically based on the logic of genocidal elimination, on supremacy, on ethno-nationalism. These are ideologies that are baked in. These are not about singular regimes, even though singular regimes are particularly violent and genocidal. These are about structures that are baked into the foundation of the so-called United States and the Zionist entity.

I think those are the deeper similarities that allow us to unearth, particularly for those of us doing movement organizing and committed to justice and liberation, that we need to dismantle settler colonial structures and social ways of being. That’s incredibly important.

This is connected to immigration enforcement in several ways. The same technologies are used. Even some of the same companies are complicit, whether it’s Palantir or Elbit. There are many more. Many of these technologies are shared across agencies. Training is shared between the IOF and various policing agencies, as well as with ICE and border policing. Some of the same companies that literally built the apartheid wall in Palestine were building the border wall on the southern US-Mexico border, Elbit in particular.

Some of that is looking at how transnational capital accumulation moves across these geographies of occupation and settler colonialism, but I do think it is important not to lose sight of the fact that it is not just companies that are invested in genocide and occupation. It is also entire state structures that are built on genocide and occupation.

We often see ICE framed as an issue specific to Trump, in the same way that people refer to Israel as specific to the Netanyahu government. However, ICE existed under Democratic administrations, and these kinds of policies have been supported by many Democrats. Can you talk about how this has been a bipartisan project?

It’s crucial to recognize that ICE, border enforcement, and border policing in general have always been bipartisan in practice. While there are calls to abolish ICE, it is important to know that movements rooted in migrant justice and immigrant rights have long called for the abolition of this entire structure.

We don’t want to let the Democrats off the hook when it comes to their role in building up ICE specifically. But also more generally, this is not only about ICE. This is about border enforcement, which is carried out by a number of agencies. In a few years, the Democrats could ride the coattails of the Abolish ICE movement, co-opt it, and say, We’re abolishing ICE, but actually transform it and give all of those functions to a different agency.

So it is important to recognize that the calls to abolish ICE have to be located and placed within a broader call for the abolition of border enforcement and for the abolition of the harms of the border, because the issue is actually the ideology of the border, the material structure of the border that even creates the category of migrant. That creates this idea of a non-citizen who does not belong, who is racialized.

That is the deeper bipartisan commitment to border enforcement that must be dismantled. In different moments, it looks like different things. Right now, the most spectacular violence of border enforcement looks like the horrors of ICE raids, and at other times, it has looked like the horror of border deaths and the building of the border wall. At other times, it has looked like the detention and incarceration at the maritime border with the Caribbean.

All of these systems are part of the same structure of border enforcement that every regime, every government, and every administration in the United States has been committed to. So our task as social movements is to uproot the system of immigration enforcement, whether it’s ICE or CBP or DHS or the border itself.