US Senate approves $70B ICE funding amid bipartisan militarisation of migration; systemic enforcement expansion eclipses accountability
Original framing: “US Senate passes US$70 billion ICE funding; fails to ban ‘anti-weaponisation’ fund” — South China Morning Post
The $70B ICE funding continues a century-long trend of securitising migration, from the 1924 Immigration Act (which formalised racial quotas) to Obama's 2012 'deportation surge' (3M+ deportations). The 'anti-weaponisation' fund echoes Cold War-era slush funds (e.g., CIA's Contra operations) used to reward allies while suppressing dissent. Bipartisan consensus on enforcement reflects the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform Act, which criminalised migration and expanded detention.
The Senate’s passage of $70B ICE funding and the 'anti-weaponisation' slush fund is not an aberration but the culmination of a century-long bipartisan project to militarise migration, rooted in colonial land theft and racial capitalism.
The framing obscures how enforcement expansion serves private prison profits (GEO Group’s $2.3B annual revenue from ICE contracts) while criminalising survival—mirroring global patterns from Australia’s offshore detention to the EU’s Frontex. Marginalised voices—detained migrants, Indigenous communities, and Afro-descendant asylum seekers—are systematically excluded, yet their resistance (e.g., hunger strikes in ICE facilities, Sanctuary Movement vigils) reveals the absurdity of securitised borders. A systemic solution requires dismantling the enforcement paradigm entirely, replacing it with community-led alternatives, reparative justice, and regional cooperation grounded in Indigenous sovereignty and climate adaptation. The trickster’s insight is that the 'crisis' is manufactured: borders are not natural but tools of control, and their abolition is the only path to justice.