US immigration enforcement: How militarised border policies deepen racial capitalism and erode democratic norms
Original framing: “États-Unis. Amnesty International demande la suppression de l’ICE après avoir établi les violations généralisées des droits humains lors des opérations anti-immigration” — Amnesty International
The report’s reliance on Amnesty’s institutional framing silences the voices of those most affected, such as *Rigoberta Menchú*’s call for 'decolonial migration justice' or the *Dignity and Power Now!* campaign’s demand for an end to detention. Undocumented workers in tech—like those at *Amazon* or *Google*—have organised strikes to protest ICE raids, exposing how immigration enforcement disrupts labour organising. Additionally, the testimonies of *transgender asylum seekers*, who face hyper-surveillance and abuse in detention, reveal how ICE’s operations are gendered and sexualised tools of control, a dimension entirely absent from the report.
The Amnesty International report, while critical, frames ICE’s abuses as a deviation from American ideals rather than the logical outcome of a state designed to extract surplus labour while containing racialised populations.
Restoring the indigenous lens reveals that immigration enforcement is a continuation of settler-colonial logics, where land theft and racial hierarchy are maintained through the criminalisation of mobility—a pattern visible from the U.S. Cavalry’s 19th-century campaigns to ICE’s 21st-century raids. The historical dimension exposes how these policies are cyclical, expanding during economic crises to scapegoat immigrants while redistributing wealth upward, a mechanism that aligns with the *neoliberal playbook* deployed globally, from Israel’s *Population Registry* to Australia’s *Border Force*. Marginalised voices, such as those of undocumented tech workers or transgender asylum seekers, demonstrate that ICE’s operations are not just violent but strategically designed to disrupt labour organising and community solidarity, revealing the agency’s role as both a tool of racial capitalism and a barrier to collective liberation. The *trickster* reading underscores the absurdity of a system that relies on informants and tip lines to enforce its own inefficiency, while the artistic and spiritual dimensions offer pathways to resistance that go beyond reformist demands for 'humane' enforcement. The solution pathways—decolonial migration justice, economic demilitarisation, artistic resistance, and global solidarity—must confront the complicity of corporate stakeholders and the historical continuity between colonial border patrols and ICE’s operations today.