Critics endlessly debate whether these events are shocking violations of US values and norms, or an apotheosis of America’s history of domestic and global violence. But analytical frameworks, which rely on the distinction between foreign and domestic realms, normality and legality, policing and war, cannot provide the ‘world picture’ we need to grasp what’s happening here.
Trump has dispensed with the old legitimation strategies that were characterised by a dual commitment to rule-bound international order (with exceptions) and equal protection inside US national boundaries. Instead, he conflates immigrants, drugs and free trade as sources of weakness coming from outside, “poisoning the blood of our country”. At the same time, he inverts settled conceptions of external and internal: if we have Venezuela’s people (which we shouldn’t have), they have our oil (which they shouldn’t have). In turn, his administration invokes emergency war powers at home, to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants – and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.
Trump’s real innovation has been to marry the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors. What distinguishes his latest regime is its effort to reimagine and remake the borders of American state power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic in a single domain of impunity: call it ‘Homeland Empire’.
The Trump administration envisions “reshoring” national security in a lasting way, drawing on the dubious norms and legalities of the War on Terror and the rancid infrastructures and policing capacities of America’s domestic penal complex. If George W. Bush helped invent the concept of ‘homeland security’ in order to “fight the terrorists over there” rather than here, Trump seeks to bring the war to “OUR hemisphere”. From Caracas to Minneapolis, legal authority and institutional power are being redirected toward an overriding end: governing populations as subjects rather than citizens.
With a goal of processing more than one million annual removals (and as many as 10 million in the coming years), ‘mass deportation’ effectively recasts swathes of the country, and particularly major cities, as ideologically and racially alien, enemy territory to be ruled by force. Meanwhile, from Greenland to the “Gulf of America”, fantasies of lucrative resource wars and land grabs beckon. Like a latent image formed after harsh exposure, the Homeland Empire is what comes into view after the dissolution of America’s fading liberal imperium.