In One Year the U.S. Military Could Raid and Occupy U.S. Cities, Are You Ready?

The immigration crisis, its relationship to the crumbling capitalist world economy, and the pressing issue of what is to be done.

Donald Trump’s reactionary insurgency is building their case that the US border crisis requires a militarized response, not only at the border, but on the streets of US cities and towns all across the country. 

The narrative goes something like this: In 2016, Trump saved America from migrant caravans by building The Wall. In 2020, Joe Biden stole the election and “turned our country into one giant sanctuary for dangerous criminal aliens.” According to Colonel Douglas McGreggor, a hardened reactionary who will potentially take a role in the coming Trump administration, Biden’s immigration policy has precipitated “a full-scale invasion of illegal migrants like we’ve never seen in our history.” But now, Trump is back, and he will do whatever it takes to enact a program of mass deportation that will purify the “blood” of the nation. 

When staring down a “full-scale invasion,” is any exception too great, any power too extraordinary, for the leader who is prepared to resolve the crisis? The office of “dictator” in ancient Rome was limited to six months, and Donald Trump has promised that he will only be a dictator on his first day in office. He hopes to accomplish a lot. As reported in the Washington Post, Trump’s day of dictatorship will begin with “an executive order on his first day in office to withhold passports, Social Security numbers and other government benefits from children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States.” His presidency will culminate in mass deportations on a scale unprecedented in history. 

President Trump and Texas Gov. Abbot. Creator: Eric Gay. Credit: Associated Press.

Immigration has become one of the dividing line questions of the world. France, the UK, Germany, the United States, and even the social democratic states like Denmark and Sweden have for over a decade been increasingly defined by the immigration problem. Immigration is such an explosive paradigm because it exposes the fundamental political insanity of the capitalist world economy: the unity of production processes, but the separation of people. 

Alain Badiou summarizes the contradiction well in his 2007 book, The Meaning of Sarkozy. He writes:

“All the foreigners who arrive, live and work here are proof that the thesis of a democratic unity of the world realized by the market and the ‘international community’ is a complete sham. If it were true, we would have to welcome these ‘foreigners’ as people coming from the same world as ourselves. We would have to treat them as we treat someone from another region who stops over in our town, then finds work and settles there. But this is not at all what happens. The most widespread conviction, and that which government policies constantly seek to reinforce, is that these people come from a different world.”

The paradox is most striking in the United States. The United States is historically defined by discrimination against European Catholics/Jews, and of course the systematic exclusion of African-Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, and Indigenous peoples. However, unlike European countries, the United States was founded by multinational transatlantic settler-colonialism and often self-narrates as a nation of immigrants. Yet here we stand, one year out from a potential militarized occupation of U.S. cities, nation-wide anti-immigrant raids, and even the forced removal of U.S. citizens who are descendants of undocumented immigrants. 

The Trump campaign website promises that “In cooperative states, President Trump will deputize the National Guard and local law enforcement to assist with rapidly removing illegal alien gang members and criminals.” And if that seems radical, Stephen Miller has claimed that these deputized National Guardsmen could even be deployed to non-cooperative states. Miller’s promise is that a Trump presidency will mean the end of sanctuary cities. 

The entire plan is reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in which African-Americans were required by federal law to be returned to slavery, even if they were located in a free state. The Act compelled free states to allow the federal government to enforce slavery within their territories. 

If Trump’s plan goes forward, Mayors and Governors in Democrat controlled states will then face a serious choice: to submit to this campaign of mass detention and expulsion of millions of people who live and work in our communities, or to resist the federal government by force. They will not resist in principle. At most, they will call for the humanitarian border to externalize the issue to a more distant frontier in order to more efficiently conduct the brutal crackdown on the most vulnerable section of the world’s dispossessed people.  

We all must face this dilemma. Undocumented people are our classmates, neighbors, coworkers, caretakers, family members, and friends. They are us. Will we allow military force and armed gangs to kidnap our people with impunity?

Badiou implores us to defy this reactionary tide by declaring, there is only one world. 

“To inscribe a politics of emancipation in the context of places – countries, for example – the best method is to assert first of all that there is only one world… The ‘world’ of unleashed capitalism and the rich democracies is a false world. Recognizing only the unity of products and monetary signs, it casts the majority of humanity into the devalued world of the ‘other’, from which it separates itself by walls and war. In this sense, there is not a single world today. To assert therefore that ‘there is only one world’ is a principle of action, a political imperative.”

Trump is planning to assemble a force and march on the municipalities, cities, and states in which some 11 million undocumented immigrants reside. We have at best, one year to prepare. Should Trump somehow be defeated at the polls, that does not resolve the matter. Dispossessed people living in the shadows as a non-person is an unacceptable degradation no matter what regime holds power. 

Join us in the coming months as we explore the immigration crisis, its relationship to the crumbling capitalist world economy, and the pressing issue of what is to be done.