Image by Levi Meir Clancy.

While Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) faces growing scrutiny for its role in brutally carrying out Trump’s mass-deportation agenda, another institution’s involvement has received less attention: the U.S. military.

Trump’s use of the military in the war on immigrants garnered some mainstream backlash when he provocatively deployed thousands of National Guard soldiers and Marines to the streets of Los Angeles. Now, people are again becoming aware of domestic militarization as Trump threatens to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops and other federal forces to DC. But these headline-grabbing moves in LA and DC must be understood in the context of a larger, growing domestic use of the military against immigrant communities, which has largely developed without mainstream scrutiny.

Even before troops were sent to Los Angeles to terrorize immigrants and their allies, Trump had begun expanding the military’s role along the U.S.-Mexico border by transferring public land from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Defense. Through massive land seizures along the border, Trump has already managed to give the military jurisdiction over one-third of all land along the southern border. Along with this, Trump is deploying the National Guard to handle paperwork at ICE detention centers in 20 different states and is preparing to use military bases in New Jersey, Indiana, and Texas for immigrant detention. In Texas, the Army base Fort Bliss is set to become the country’s largest immigrant detention center.

Nick Turse reports for the Intercept that according to the Pentagon’s own data, the number of troops deployed in partnership with ICE is 20,000, but that number could be much higher. Greg Sargent reports in the New Republic that a leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security indicates that there is an effort by the administration to persuade top Pentagon officials to ramp up domestic military use for anti-immigrant efforts for years to come. Simply put, Trump is pursuing an unprecedented expansion of the U.S. military’s involvement in the bipartisan war on immigrants, and there has been little opposition.

The U.S. Regime Is Divided over Domestic Militarization

Even before returning to the presidency, Trump made no secret of his desire to increase the military’s domestic use. This aligns with the Far Right’s larger goal,........

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