The traditions of the oppressed teach us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception, but the rule.
Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940)
Context
The new Trump administration’s weaponization of the ideological and material apparatuses of racism and xenophobia by targeting migrant workers, families, and communities poses a historic challenge for migrant communities and our allies on the left, both in the United States and globally. Our response must be as radical as the conditions that we confront.
This is especially crucial since the stigmatization and criminalization of migrants and migrant labor has become a central thread in MAGA’s rhetoric, policies, and practices in the United States. Moreover, it serves as a basis for the regeneration and projection of a new stage of neoimperial US hegemony on a regional and global scale. MAGA’s “America First” obsession with migrants and the fetishization of borders underlines its ultimate affinities with its white Christian, nationalist, and supremacist allies at home and in contexts such as Germany, Hungary, Italy, and in Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Along with authoritarian populism, racism and xenophobia have long been at the core of fascist and neofascist movements, but MAGA has explicitly brought this to the White House and its “foreign policy” with an intensity unprecedented in recent history. This includes Vice President J. D. Vance’s recent insistence at the Munich Security Conference that “mass migration” is the single greatest shared threat facing both the United States and its European allies.
It has become evident meanwhile that Marco Rubio’s role as Secretary of State is to be the global enforcer of MAGA’s overall agenda and its plenipotentiary “viceroy” for Latin America and the Caribbean (the United States’s traditional neoimperial “backyard”). This includes the renewed targeting and isolation of traditional adversaries such as Cuba and Venezuela, as well as the extension of hybrid forms of economic and political warfare against régimes in Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia, and Nicaragua that, for Rubio, represent intolerable obstructions to MAGA’s implementation of its version of the Monroe Doctrine.
The new administration’s immigration and border initiatives during its first month mark a deepening of longstanding historic trends that became the dominant framework in the wake of 9/11. Trump’s domestic—and increasingly regionalized and hemispheric—war against migrants is still in its initial stages, and has not yet matched the ferocity and suffering induced by the previous experiences it seeks to emulate, such as the Eisenhower administration’s mass deportations during 1953–54 (at the height of McCarthyist political terror) and those of the early- to mid-1930’s in the wake of the Great Depression during the first phase of FDR’s “New Deal.”
It is widely recognized among those of us in our movements who have helped lay the groundwork for the proliferation of community-based rapid response and immigrant defense and “Know Your Rights” training networks and initiatives around the country, that the worst is yet to come. But a tremendous amount of potentially irreparable damage has already been done through the psychological warfare and terror that have been sowed among migrant workers and in migrant and border communities and their families (often of mixed status including both legal permanent residents and citizens). This “permanent state of emergency” is inherent in the administration’s “Shock and Awe” rhetoric and its initial steps to implement measures along these lines within the United States and beyond.
Origins and Implications
Key features of the newly invigorated paradigm, which has characterized both Republican and Democratic administrations since the 1990’s, include the explicit subordination of migration policies to the purported imperatives of “national security” (“securitization”), together with the criminalization of migrants, the militarization of borders, and the extraterritorial extension (‘externalization” and “regionalization”) of these policies to Mexican soil, and eventually all the way to the borders of Panama and Colombia in the environs of the Panama Canal and the Darien Gap.
The Border Patrol has framed this in terms of the overall strategic objective of “prevention through deterrence” since 1994, which was launched initially through militarized blockades of the border in the environs of El Paso and San Diego in 1993. These and subsequent surges in targeted bipartisan enforcement throughout the US-Mexico border region have reconfigured undocumented migration flows by driving them into the most inaccessible and dangerous desert and mountainous regions on both sides of the border, resulting in approximately ten thousand migrant deaths en route since 1993, and countless others unidentified or uncounted. There is not even an estimated count available of additional thousands of migrant deaths and disappearances on Mexican territory during this same period, which are further compounded by a string of migrant massacres between 2010 and 2025, which linger in complete impunity regardless of the political formation in power there.
All of this is thrown into sharper relief as the Trump administration insists that uncontrolled migration flows at the US-Mexico border constitute an “invasion” that justifies the deployment of thousands of troops to the border, the activation for the first time of military deportation flights, and the transformation of military bases in the United States (and at sites such as Guántanamo in Cuba) into sites for the potentially indefinite detention of migrants without due process. This echoes previous experiences such as the imprisonment in the 1940’s of over one hundred thousand people of Japanese origin—most of them US citizens—in what were officially described as “concentration camps,” pursuant to executive orders and policies promoted by one of the United States’s most “progressive” presidents, FDR.
This includes the activation of Fort Bliss in El Paso—the largest military base in the US Army Forces Command—as a “deportation hub” intended to hold up to ten thousand detainees, and as a model for similar detention camps that the administration intends to develop at other military sites throughout the country.1Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Hamed Aleaziz, and Eric Schmitt, “Trump Plans to Use Military Sites Across the Country to Detain Undocumented Immigrants,” New York Times, February 21, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/2.1/us/politics/migrants-military-sites.html. This ramps up the previous use of Ft. Bliss to detain five thousand migrant youth in inhumane conditions during both the first Trump and Biden administrations. It also echoes the base’s role over one hundred years ago as an open air barbed wire tent camp holding five thousand “Mexican refugees” during the Mexican Revolution. The administration has also reportedly been considering an even more sweeping proposal to privatize these military detention camps in association with former Blackwater executive Eric Prince and other contractors experienced in “black sites,” along with an “army” of deputized prívate agents and mass detention proceedings.2Dasha Burns and Mya Ward, “Trump allies circulate mass deportation plan calling for ‘processing camps’ and a private citizen ‘army,’” Politico, February 25, 2025, https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/25/documents-military-contractors-mass-deportations-022648?nname=playbook&nid=0000014f-1646-d88f-a1cf-5f46b7bd0000&nrid=00000162-0697-dd74-ad6a-17ffaa630000.
The US government’s detention of Japanese-Americans during World War Two was upheld in the Korematsu case, one of the US Supreme Court’s most notorious decisions, which affirmed the validity of such detentions—based on explicit racial discrimination—in light of the supposed imperatives of “national security.” These policies were grounded in laws that are still extant such as the Alien Enemies Act (of 1798), which the new Trump administration has invoked in support of its mass detention and mass deportation policies.
This dovetails with systematic policies of “family separation” during the first Trump administration that included recurrent practices equivalent to torture and forced disappearances, both of which are categorized as among the most serious crimes recognized by international law, that is “crimes against humanity.” Charges against such practices were the basis for the Nuremberg Tribunals, and later for the Russell Tribunal and its successors (such as the Permanent Peoples Tribunal).
Initiatives such as these sought to hold the United States and others accountable for crimes of this kind during the Vietnam War, and equivalent practices promoted and supported by the United States through military dictatorships in contexts such as Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, and through one-party regimes such as Mexico’s PRI throughout the Latin American phase of the “Cold War.” Similar mechanisms will soon be necessary to document and demand justice for the mounting crimes of the Trump Era.
Systematic criminalization and stigmatization of migrants and of migrant and border communities is coupled with the new administration’s highly touted attempt to erase (through executive decree) the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of “birthright citizenship” that was adopted as part of the recognition of black citizenship during the Reconstruction Era in the wake of the abolition of slavery and as a result of the Civil War.
Through networks such as Tsuru for Solidarity, Japanese-American activists have long insisted on the parallels between abusive practices of migrant detention during the first Trump administration (in some cases, located in sites devised for the imprisonment of people of Japanese origin in the 1940’s such as Ft. Sill) and similar, improvised sites in contexts such as the massive Tornillo, Texas tent camp for migrant youth (mostly from indigenous communities in Guatemala that were also targets of US-backed genocide in the 1980’s) in the desert east of El Paso.3“Homepage,” Tsuru for Solidarity, accessed February 23, 2025, https://tsuruforsolidarity.org/; Democracy Now, “Japanese Americans Were Jailed at Ft. Sill During WWII. Now Trump Wants to Cage Migrant Kids there,” democracynow.org, June 28, 2019, https://www.democracynow.org/2019/6/28/japanese_americans_were_jailed_at_ft; Edwin Delgado, “Tornillo: detention site for migrants to close amid safety fears,” Guardian, January 12, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/11/immigration-migrant-children-tornillo-camp-closing.
Current concerns include not only the threatened intensification of migrant detention sites both at (or adjacent to) Guántanamo’s torture cells and in El Salvador, but also further outsourcing at a site littered with improvised fenced cages in a remote corner of the Darien jungle. Moreover, a hotel in Panama has been transformed into a temporary holding site for hundreds of migrants (primarily from third countries in Asia) that were deported on US flights. Amid threats of US economic warfare and potential direct intervention, both Panama and Costa Rica have agreed to receive these flights as part of their backroom deals with the new administration.
Indigenous people’s movements in both Latin America and the United States have long insisted on recognition of their ancestral exercise of the right to freedom of movement— which precedes the existence of the colonial empires and settler colonial states that have sought to dispossess them—as an inherent attribute of their longstanding struggles for self-determination and autonomy. This framework converges powerfully with the widespread demand of migrant movements throughout this hemisphere and the world for recognition of their right to migrate, which includes the right not to be forcibly displaced.
Other groups such as Witness at the Border, have launched a “Blue Triangle” campaign in the spirit of “Never Again is Now” and “We Are All Migrants,” which highlights how the stigmatization of migrants (especially persecuted leftists, either fleeing Franco’s Spain or with origins in the Soviet Union or Nazi-occupied territories) was an integral part of the political terror which led to the establishment of the first Nazi forced-labor (and eventually, death) camps.4Lee Goodman, “Are you Spartacus?” Witness at the Border, February 4, 2025, https://witnessattheborder.org/posts/br544qtt70atkw953yvfonxsx3i4pk.
This builds on Toni Morrison’s admonition that “before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”Antifascist activists such as Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi similarly warned, when asked about the lessons of Nazi terror: “If it happened once, it can happen again.”
Regional and political dimensions
Today’s machinery of migrant targeting and exclusion lays the basis for the violent repression of unauthorized migration flows at the same time as it stimulates the intensified commodification of migrant bodies through transnational networks of human smuggling and trafficking. It also spurs the increased exploitation of undocumented migrant labor (including various forms of indentured servitude and slave labor), together with routinized sexual violence, as part of the inherent costs of traversing Mexican territory.
Mexico itself has come to embody the ”wall” conjured by MAGA’s most illusory pretensions amid its government’s increasingly explicit collusion with the most regressive elements of US immigration and border policy. The Mexican government’s complicity in practice contrasts sharply with its supposedly nationalist posturing and rhetoric. Mexico’s compliance converges with that of key US allies in the region—ranging, most notably, from Argentina, Guatemala and El Salvador to Costa Rica, Panama (despite, or more likely because, of US saber-rattling regarding the Canal), the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Perú, and even supposedly center-left Chile.
Our challenge includes the urgent need to act in solidarity with, and in defense of, those who are under attack while building broad-based critical consciousness about the implications of these normalized forms of capitalist state violence. We must also urgently connect our resistance to antimigrant politics with a coherent anti-imperialist perspective focused on the regional and global origins (that is, the root causes) of these policies. Our responses must be correspondingly radical and deeply grounded, both theoretically and historically.
This is key since Trump’s victory reflects the failure of the neoliberalism that has long dominated its supposed Democratic adversaries. Leading sectors of the party have both facilitated and embraced the essence of the Trumpian narratives of immigration and border “control” that have become so pervasive. Liberals have long been willing to trade the militarization and securitization of the US-Mexico border for limited measures of legalization (DACA, restricted “paths to citizenship,” and so on), and to embrace the criminalization of migrants by voting for initiatives such as the Laken Riley bill. This bill extends the criminalization—and thus vulnerability to deportation—of migrants.
These and other equivalent concessions legitimize measures that include the potentially indefinite detention of “criminal” migrants in settings that include the US military base at Guántanamo (on illegally occupied Cuban territory) and El Salvador’s outsourcing of its most notorious prison for supposed gang members. Both of these are sites characterized by what have been extensively documented carceral practices and conditions that are tantamount to torture.
Immigrant rights movements and our allies in the United States must not only fully incorporate anti-imperialist politics, but learn to position themselves from a hemispheric and Latin American perspective. The new administration has said that it intends to possibly hold as many as thirty thousand migrants at the sites being activated at Guántanamo. This far exceeds the number of previous waves of migrant detention there, which primarily targeted Cubans and Haitians in the 1980’s and 1990’s
Now these deportations are being conducted through recurrent waves of military flights, with the forced transfer of multiple nationalities. It must be understood what this implies from a Cuban perspective, at this time when Trump has restored previous forms of US economic and political warfare against the Cuban people, including the suspension of remittances from Cuban migrants in the United States.
Military deportation flights are in themselves intended to send a powerful signal that exhibits those being deported as dangerous supposed “criminals.” Manacled and chained in submission while being held mostly on cargo planes, these deportation flights seek to humiliate the deported. Military flights of this kind were frequently used by US-backed dictatorships as “death flights” in hundreds of documented cases in contexts such as Argentina, Chile, and Mexico during the “Latin American Cold War.” Center-left governments such as that led by Gustavo Petro in Colombia—himself a former leader of a guerrilla insurgent movement in the 1980’s known as the M-19—have drawn a red line, refusing to receive military deportation flights and insisting on civilian flights that provide humane treatment and respect the dignity of those being deported.
Other reformist governments such as those of Brazil and Honduras have echoed these concerns. Mexico’s government has been more cautious in terms of its public pronouncements, but has thus far apparently accepted only civilian flights and may have refused the use of its airspace for military flights heading elsewhere. But no concrete steps have yet been taken towards regional unity in defiance of Trump—much less any truly articulated overall resistance—given the kinds of combined economic and political pressures that the administration has threatened including the imposition of the equivalent of crippling sanctions through tariffs. Petro may soon provide an additional basis for regional unity and leadership in his new role as the voice of the Conference of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), but this will not be enough on its own to shift the negative correlation of forces between Trump and Rubio’s recharged neoimperialism and the peoples of the region.
In Latin America, as in the United States, it is popular movements that will have to take the lead. No established government in the region, nor mainstream political party, can effectively fill the vacuum that must be occupied by revolutionary weaves of deeply rooted and visionary resistance.
Indigenous people’s movements in both Latin America and the United States have long insisted on recognition of their ancestral exercise of the right to freedom of movement— which precedes the existence of the colonial empires and settler colonial states that have sought to dispossess them—as an inherent attribute of their longstanding struggles for self-determination and autonomy. This framework converges powerfully with the widespread demand of migrant movements throughout this hemisphere and the world for recognition of their right to migrate, which includes the right not to be forcibly displaced. This is part of a broader recognition of the need to decolonize and revolutionize the conception of human rights that traps them within the outmoded frameworks of neoliberal nation-states.
From this perspective, it is the negation of all people’s rights to a dignified life (as reflected in economic and social rights to work, housing, health, and education, among others plus political rights of autonomous self-governance) that triggers the freedom to move (or, as necessary, our resistance to forced displacement) and to return to lands and territories from which we have been dispossessed (as in contexts such as Palestine and Gaza).
Thus, the individual and collective exercise of our rights to freedom of movement, or to migrate under circumstances of this kind, has an inherently anticolonial and anti-imperial content as a form of reparations for neoimperial and settler-colonial exploitation, which pervades all of the “root causes” of our migration processes. This includes the concrete histories of recurrent and systematic US interventions throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, and in the Global South more generally, from the genocidal variants of the Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, and “Dollar Diplomacy” to the Cold War, “drug wars,” and “antiterror” wars, and the environmental devastation wrought by extractivist policies. These political and extractivist interventions have together produced the conditions that have driven us from our lands and territories and dispossessed us of our resources and livelihoods.
Our responses include both a demand for “open borders,” as a first step, and, ultimately, for the abolition of borders as a necessary part of the reconfiguration of carceral nation-states, within a broader shift from a global system grounded in the sovereign rights of states to one centered around the rights of peoples.
As migrants we thus conceive ourselves as the collective subjects of transnational rights of self-determination and liberation, grounded in our demand for a world that embraces and implements this vision: “All Rights for All, Without Borders.” This is what socialism and communism mean to us, in practice, from below, throughout the world—with or without Trump, and beyond his and his movement’s perverse, stunted horizons, and those of the US empire’s increasingly accelerated decline and destruction.