A pivot point, not a retreat

on the vulnerability of the immigration enforcement regime

We’re at a potential inflection point, not a slowdown. The government has been forced to tap — not slam — the brakes on immigration enforcement. (Emphasis on forced, and more on that below.) DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was exiled to a sinecure at the “Shield of the Americas.” Schutzstaffel-cosplayer Greg Bovino has been sidelined. Stephen Miller is getting flak from both sides. And DHS isn’t currently announcing violent surge operations with asinine names. They’re not murdering more citizens in the streets — at this precise moment.

BUT: don’t be fooled into thinking immigration enforcement is scaling down. Border Patrol and ICE have financial and infrastructural momentum. They’re both in a growth period. But while enforcement operations continue (somewhat more discreetly), community organizing and resistance — communities especially in Minneapolis, LA, and Chicago — have changed the conversation and opened people’s eyes. They’re the ones doing the forcing referenced above. And so it is at least possible to change (and actually scale back) the anti-immigration regime as well, though that hasn’t substantively happened yet.

The Landscape of Immigration Enforcement Now

Just over a year ago: there were less than 40,000 people detained in immigration camps. Today that number is hovering around 70,000, and the administration is aiming to detain over 100,000 by late this year.

A year ago there were about 10,000 ICE agents. Today, according to ICE figures, there are 22,000.

A year ago, the biggest immigration detention camp had a capacity of around 2,000. Some of the camps they’re building now (or warehouses they’re buying and retrofitting) will be able to lock up 10,000 people.

And people are dying in those detention camps at a higher rate than ever. (Last year saw the highest death toll in immigration camps, with at least 32 people dying. So far this year, already eleven people have died in the camps.)

Congress gave ICE over $75 billion to play with last summer, as part of the “Big Beautiful Bill.” And that is in addition to another hunk of billions that was already allocated. ICE is using that money to not only build out the archipelago of detention camps and hire more agents, but heavily arm those agents. They have spent an unprecedented amount on war materiel over the last year, dishing out about $150 million on guns and ammo.

a Geissele Border Patrol SBR (Short Barrel Rifle): https://www.schiff.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/ARMED-FOR-VIOLENCE-REPORT2.18.26.pdf

ICE is also now hiring bounty hunters to track down migrants. And Border Patrol is not only arresting people in the country without papers, but has started ticketing immigrants with legal status simply for not carrying their papers, as Ally Markovitch recently reported for AZCIR. (In one such case, a Border Patrol agent ticketed a Canadian citizen with a U.S. green card as he was walking from his hotel in Yuma to get breakfast. Green cards can cost $465 to replace.)

Senate Dems have blocked DHS funding multiple times, forcing a partial government shutdown and asking for more guardrails, but even if they win the showdown (I’m skeptical they will) nametags or bodycams are not the solution. Police killings have actually gone up since bodycams were widely rolled out to local law enforcement agencies. And even when bodycam footage exists, that doesn’t mean the public gets to see it. ProPublica found that in a single month, June 2022, there were 79 police killings recorded by bodycams. Over a year later, in less than half of those incidents was any footage released.

All to say, hopes for a tranquil, pluralistic, justice-filled semiquincentennial summer are — sorry — delusional.

BUT: we are at an inflection point. A departmental head has rolled, radical community defense and instances of NIMBYism have thrown sand into DHS’s gears and blocked multiple new camps from being built, and the resistance is having a moment.

Three takeaways from that resistance:

1. Community mobilizing and actions have ripped the mask off, revealing the pervasive and inherent violence of immigration enforcement.

2. Communities are up for the fight. They are leaning on decades of organizing, widening coalitions, mobilizing new people, taking incredible stands in the streets and blanketing mutual aid work throughout neighborhoods.

3. It is valorous and inspiring, yes — but not enough.

We need to take the spirit of Minneapolis (community defense, mutual aid, general strikes) learn from it, build on it, and permanitize it.

Meanwhile, to not lose focus, here are four excellent publications I recommend to track the trends and understand the vast infrastructural growth of the border industrial complex.

Reading

Two books by two wonderful Tucson folks: Caroline Tracey’s Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, and Logan Phillips’ Reckon. They are both beautifully written, surprising, queer books — queer in all of its valences.

Salt Lakes is about salt lakes and Tracey’s coming of age. Reckon is about Tombstone, Arizona, where Phillips came of age. I’ve finished Salt Lakes, but have only so far cracked Reckon. I’m doing interviews with each author for LOOKOUT, so I’ll report more then.

In Tracey’s book, what ties the threads of salt lakes and her coming of age together — and provides a beautifully prismatic lens for the reader to follow her nuanced, often esoteric, and sometimes exquisite observations of the world — is “queer ecology.”

“Just as queer ecology teaches us to celebrate the ugly and the unruly of the world, the scorned and the sacred, it also prepares us for these losses,” Tracey writes. She references “biological exuberance” — a concept from biologist Bruce Bagemihl — and captures such exuberance in both her sweet coming-of-age story and how she and her partner viven bonito, or live beautifully.