Militant Immigration Policies are Republican Climate Change Policies

The Trump/GOP spending bill allocates a total of $75 billion to ICE for enforcement and deportation operations, including detention and hiring of additional personnel. This includes $45 billion for expanding detention facilities and $29.9 billion for enforcement and deportation. 

The far right knows that global climate change will lead to much more mass migration from climate refugees, survivors of blight, famine, asylum seekers from corrupt, dictatorial governments and drug cartels, etc. Their solution is to criminalize, deport, detain, and ultimately starve millions and millions of people - potentially billions of potential migrants by 2050.

Just read a summary of Steve Bannon's favorite book "The Camp of the Saints" for insight into how the far right regards immigrants from the global south. No doubt Stephen Miller has read it, also. But rest assured Donald Trump hasn't read it because, well, he doesn't read.

Anyway, it's important to understand that the near future will see much more militarized borders and more intrusive immigration enforcement goon squads. That's the Republican solution not just to immigration, but also to global climate change: more fossil fuel pollution, a total disregard for sustainable energy, and a standing army approach to a militant war on illegal immigration while also completely banning many forms of previously legal immigration.

Photo: Agents from ICE and Homeland Security brace for confrontation with immigration rights supporters in Los Angeles on June 8, 2025. Taurat Hossain/Anadolu/Getty

The War is Coming Home

A police officer, surrounded by several others, restrains a struggling, unarmed man in a choke hold as he gasps “I can't breathe” 11 times.  Moments later, he is dead on the streets of Staten Island.  A 2 year old child in Atlanta is asleep in his crib at 3 a.m. when a SWAT team's flash grenade blows a hole in his face and chest during a no-knock raid, leaving the child in critical condition and requiring extended hospitalization.  In Ferguson, a heavily-armed police officer sweeps his assault rifle across a crowd of demonstrators, announcing “I will fucking kill you.”  When asked to identify himself, the officer declines and instead says “go fuck yourself.”  Earlier, journalists are confronted by militarized police units in a nearby McDonald's and ordered to disperse as they attempt to cover the protest.  Elsewhere, a news crew has a police teargas canister thrown directly at their production van.

A typical afternoon in "the land of the free?"  The police and the military are merging into a single force of aggression.

The war is coming home. After decades of zealous U.S. government (deficit) spending (much to the delight of private weapons manufacturers), Americans are seeing more military weapons and tactics from Iraq and Afghanistan on their own streets.  All that surplus military equipment produced for that “War on Terror?”  National Safety Council stats reveal that Americans are now 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist (source).  Americans are not interested in being lectured on why maximum force by their own government is necessary to obtain their “compliance.”  They recognize the difference between paying for an organization to “serve and protect” neighborhoods and a trigger-happy, weaponized force more interested in serving and protecting itself.  Which is why Ferguson residents alleging police abuse are now lining up to file a $40 million lawsuit against the Ferguson and St. Louis PD.

More Americans are finally realizing what the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly asserted: police have “no obligation to protect” citizens.  Increasingly, that seems to be of mere incidental consideration.  The American Civil Liberties Union found of 800 SWAT team deployments between 2011 and 2012, only 7% of SWAT team raids were genuine emergencies (the purpose for which a militarized police force was intended) (source).  Nearly 80% were used for ordinary law enforcement purposes like serving search warrants on people’s homes.  Police apologists will give lengthy rationalizations as to why any possible scenario contains an element of potential danger and therefore justifies aggressive tactics and maximum armament as a matter of standard operating procedure.  Prepare to be unconvinced; it's hard to assure people they are under military-style occupation for their own good.

In the line of duty, U.S. police discharge their firearms more often in a single day than German police do in an entire year; Der Spiegel reports that in 2011, the entire German police force fired 85 shots, most of which were not aimed at anyone (source).  More dramatically, a recent article in The Economist reported, “Last year, in total, British police officers actually fired their weapons three times. The number of people fatally shot was zero. In 2012 the figure was just one” (source).  Meanwhile, U.S. police shots fired is not even a number that is tracked; single U.S. police incidents include more weapon discharges than other countries' police fire in a year.

And when they are not being shot at, the American people are also the most imprisoned in the world.  The ACLU found that with only 5% of the world's population, the U.S. has 25% of the world's prison population, which has grown 700% since 1970 (source).  This is a historical record for the U.S. and the world.

Check out the recruiting commercial, “Newport Beach Police Dept - Are You Qualified?”  In 85 seconds (starring only white males), you will see a variety of assault-style weaponry, aggressive close quarter combat, pursuit and confrontation.  Not a single frame of “community policing,” – walking the beat of a familiar neighborhood, establishing trust with residents.  If these 85 seconds are any indication of the “qualifications” necessary for NBPD, the job appears to be one of constant urban warfare.

Most Americans strongly condemn rioting, looting, and other violence.  Yet community outrage such as in Ferguson doesn't occur in a vacuum and it isn't created overnight.  While there is the incendiary incident such as the fatal police shooting of 18 year old Michael Brown, behind the headlines are many residents of color who tell stories of their own sustained, antagonistic relationship with Ferguson police officers—who are almost all white, increasingly living elsewhere, and apparently bringing with them a war-zone mentality to the job.  In training and in practice, police officers are becoming soldiers deployed for combat.

In terms of spending alone, no nation prioritizes warfare like the United States – not even close (source).  And now the war is coming home.  So it is of no surprise that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  But in Ferguson and elsewhere, the American people are becoming less tolerant of paying their government to be hammered and nailed.

Fight to Protect the System

Troops March on White House for Ron Paul

Ron Paul is the only anti-war 2012 presidential candidate, receiving twice as many donations from active duty military personnel as Barack Obama and ten times more than GOP front-runner Mitt Romney.

Today's demonstration by American soldiers should remind all Americans the heavy price this country is paying - in dollars and in lives - for continual military empire. To my mind, the largest area of government spending should also be the number one issue for voters - particularly as foreign policy dramatically affects the people of the entire globe and not merely the US.

A variety of divisive social issues have and will continue to be raised by campaign strategists in both parties to herd voters into predictable groups. Abortion, gay marriage, and government welfare programs. Yet until the US government gets its fiscal house in order and is no longer beholden to corporatism and the military industrial complex, these passionate debates about social issues will be meaningless in the face of crushing debt and immoral militarism.

Armed Chinese Troops in Texas!

TURN THE TABLES, WORK FOR PEACE AND PROSPERITY. What if America was occupied by a foreign military power? What should you do about it? And what should the people of the occupying country do...? A valuable thought exercise.

The American Terminator

Tom Engelhardt has written a sobering yet terrifying article on the development and demand for UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle) by the U.S. Defense Department.  Often called "Predator Drones" or "Reapers," these mammon machines are becoming all the rage for waging war from above.  Remotely controlled and increasingly networked with information-sharing technology to create a single "hive mind," these aptly-named drones will likely become the killing force of the future (source).  Engelhardt writes of their growing appeal: 

They are relatively cheap. When they “hunt,” no one dies (at least on our side).  They are capable of roaming the world.  Someday, they will land on the decks of aircraft carriers or, tiny as hummingbirds, drop onto a windowsill, maybe even yours, or in their hundreds, the size of bees, swarm to targets and, if all goes well, coordinate their actions using the artificial intelligence version of “hive minds.”

A "Hunter-Killer Drone" from the Terminator film series (L) and a U.S. military "Predator Drone" (R).

This is all wonderful news, of course, if you are a deeply indebted, crumbing empire with 1 in 4 children living in poverty (source).  Rather than conscripting or back-door drafting soldiers to face down gunfire and improvised explosive devices to take out insurgents in up to 80 countries (source), the Bush and Obama Administrations have increasingly outsourced their military force to machines.   No more military funerals, no more burning draft cards, no more public outcry over the human cost of war.  Well, at least not on the side of the "good guys."  But geopolitics and nationalism aside, Engelhardt understands the woeful ghost in the machine of mechanized warfare:

Just think about the last time you went to a Terminator film: Who did you identify with?  John and Sarah Connor, or the implacable Terminators chasing them?  And you don’t need artificial intelligence to grasp why in a nanosecond.

With their growing economy, particularly in the tech sector, it might be worth asking how U.S. citizens would react to China flying UAVs over the United States.  Or any country, for that matter.  While the doomsday scenario of Technological Singularity - in which machines gain self-awareness and promptly decide humans must be eradicated (source)- is still a few decades away, the grim realities of dehumanized warfare are already upon us.

Beneath the slick action sequences and Hollywood plot line, the Terminator film series is a cautionary tale of how much military might to entrust in machines; the main antagonist in the series is the faceless, calculated computer brain of Skynet - which controls a vast network of sophisticated, weaponized robots that patrol the ground, sea, and air.  Developed by Cyberdyne Systems for the U.S. Armed Forces, Skynet was hailed as the first "Global Digital Defense Network" (source).  This is not dissimilar from the terminology and tactics currently underway by the CIA.  Engelhardt reports:

As journalist Ron Suskind reported in his book The One Percent Doctrine, in a “Presidential Finding” on September 17, 2011, only six days after the World Trade Center towers went down, Bush granted the CIA an unprecedented license to wage war globally. By then, the CIA had presented him with a plan whose name was worthy of a sci-fi film: the “Worldwide Attack Matrix.”

On the moral spectrum of behavior, humans killing one another is bad enough.  But humans programming machines to remotely kill other humans seems to me far worse in terms of ethical approaches to problem-solving.  Simply, sending machines to kill on one's behalf is not something "the good guys" do.  Imagine any action or science fiction film in which the hero sits at a computer terminal and annihilates his enemies halfway around the world as they flee from a hovering drone's machine gun fire.  There is no nobility in warfare without sacrifice, without even a pretense of putting the courage of one's convictions on the line.  And yet, despite the obvious physical safety of piloting robots 7,000 miles away, the psychological cost of operating a Predator Drone may be far greater than conventional aerial warfare.  Written on the Military.com news website in 2008 (source):

In a fighter jet, "when you come in at 500-600 mph, drop a 500-pound bomb and then fly away, you don't see what happens," said Col. Albert K. Aimar, who is commander of the 163rd Reconnaissance Wing here and has a bachelor's degree in psychology.  But when a Predator fires a missile, "you watch it all the way to impact, and I mean it's very vivid, it's right there and personal. So it does stay in people's minds for a long time."  He said the stresses are "causing some family issues, some relationship issues."  He and other Predator officers would not elaborate. 

Often, the military also directs Predators to linger over a target after an attack so that the damage can be assessed.  "You do stick around and see the aftermath of what you did, and that does personalize the fight," said Col. Chris Chambliss, commander of the active-duty 432nd Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nev.  "You have a pretty good optical picture of the individuals on the ground.  The images can be pretty graphic, pretty vivid, and those are the things we try to offset.  We know that some folks have, in some cases, problems."

The ethical dimensions of mechanized warfare are vast.  Can a machine be held legally responsible for the death of a civilian?  Who is put on trial - in military or civilian courts - when a UAV mistakenly identifies a  fruit stand in a bustling village as a terrorist munitions bunker and kills a dozen innocents?  The manufacturer of the weapon?  The programmer?  The drone operator?  The commanding officer who ordered the strike?  More importantly, would any machine hesitate - even for a second - to shoot down a mother clutching her baby if programmed to do so?  Can empathy and humanity be programmed into a machine?  If it is designed to kill, would that even be a useful design goal?

The American Terminator - coming to a battlefield near you.

Indeed, we must now add "remote mechanized warfare" to the list of reasons as to "Why They Hate Us."

U.S. Military Action Makes Americans Less Safe?

I came across a rather unsurprising headline today:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration says Osama bin Laden's death has raised the risk of anti-American violence worldwide.  The State Department said in a global travel warning Tuesday that Americans should take precaution and maintain vigilance about terrorist threats, demonstrations and the possibility of violence against U.S. citizens.  (source)

Of course, "death" is a sanitized term.  Bin Laden did not die.  He was assassinated, while unarmed.  But I digress.

This State Department memo confirms a suspicion I have long held: far from "keeping Americans safe," U.S. military aggression around the globe has actually made being an American more dangerous.  While one can argue about the legal justification of the Osama Bin Laden kill/capture mission, the "blow back" from this and many other U.S. military actions will be fierce and longstanding.  It only stands to reason that American journalists, tourists, and other travelers have and will continue to be targeted and subjected to undue dangers due to their nationality.  This implicit support for the world's largest military superpower - one that has regularly chosen force over diplomacy for over sixty years - has led many American journalists to pose as Australians, Brits, Canadians... anyone except for Team America, World Police.  One begins to wonder if, on balance, Americans would be safer at home and abroad (as well as more fiscally sound) if the military literally did nothing other than lay off 80% of its personnel and patrol the border.

"FUCK YEAH!" - it's no accident that
Team America consists of puppets.

Realize, of course, that any act of retaliation from Islamic terrorist cells from the Bill Laden assassination will merely serve as further justification by U.S. officials for prolonged militarism in the Middle East (as promised in the Project for the New American Century - source), perpetuating an ongoing cycle of violence which assuredly started long before September 11th, 2001.  I do not claim to be an expert on U.S. foreign policy or the political history of Northern Africa or Central Asia, but it seems clear to me that the assassination of Osama Bin Laden (as well as the bizarre and barbaric act of throwing his body into the ocean), predator drone strikes in Pakistan, kill/capture missions in Afghanistan, the continued occupation of Iraq, and the new military misadventures in Yemen and Libya are draining the resources of Americans at home and making them less safe abroad.  So long as the last act of aggression serves as justification for the next, peace and prosperity will remain distant notions playing in the background while the military industrial complex continues to aggress pre-emptively against any who would seek oppose it.

Unfortunately, drastic reduction to U.S. military operations may prove to be too little, too late; vendettas have been claimed on all sides and asymmetric violence will remain appealing to military strategists for the foreseeable future.  When the only tool one has is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.  To U.S. military power, the hearts and minds of Afghans have been lost.  As Molly Ivins once observed, "it's hard to convince people that you're killing them for their own good."