Michael Macher on the role of immigration agents and their unions in driving authoritarianism.

From one perspective, the current [immigration] enforcement regime reflects longstanding methods of US statecraft, accentuated by the Global War on Terror, including the interiorization of the border into the US mainland, racialized policing, the use of deportation against ideological enemies, and the frequent invocations of ill-defined emergencies or states of exception. Yet these same methods have been transformed in recent decades by far-right organizational cultures operating within the state [specifically, the officers of ICE and Border Patrol and their unions]. The second Trump administration has harnessed them to build a domestic policing omniforce, based within DHS and given enormous resources by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. By reconfiguring lines of authority and warping agency functions, it is mounting an existential challenge to the existing terms of order that govern the rights of noncitizens, while turning citizenship itself into a more flexible category….

[ICE and Border Patrol] themselves laid the groundwork for this project over the previous decades, as they morphed into rogue actors with increasingly radicalized unions—aiding the advance of the far right at the national level…. [E]ven as ICE racks up formal arrest numbers in the US interior, it is Border Patrol that is set to become the dominant force within the expanded enforcement regime. ICE’s numerical expansion will serve as the vehicle for extending CBP’s paramilitary mentality across the interior….

While the reality of the immigration system has long been hidden from swaths of the US population, shifts in public opinion suggest that many are now seeing how radical the existing framework really is. Recent events in Minneapolis and elsewhere reflect its wild extrajudicial excesses, with tactics that exceed the demands of the mission and punishments meted out for their own sake. Trump’s immigration agenda—lawlessness achieved through the [extreme expansion] of law enforcement—has been laid bare. As ICE and CBP continue to grow in strength and autonomy, various groups (legal residents, federal workers, activists) have come to resemble the traditional targets of immigration clampdowns, unable to rely on rules that might constrain the hard power of the state….

The unconditional flow of money, equipment, and resources to DHS and its immigration sub-agencies—overseen by multiple previous administrations—had already allowed them to operate with minimal accountability for decades. This, in turn, nourished an increasingly assertive anti-migrant politics among the agency’s rank-and-file, whose militant unions fought to override resistance from employers and policymakers alike. Both Democrats and Republicans, following this bipartisan logic, spent years lurching rightward on immigration. Unconstrained resources have thus enabled the growth of the far-right enforcement regime; reckoning with its budgetary and institutional foundations will be necessary to stop it.

Source: Michael Macher, “Enforcement Regime,” Phenomenal World, 2026.