In his first month in office, President Trump issued a vast array of executive orders, decrees, and assorted pronouncements. The strategic function of this uninterrupted succession of commands (often of questionable legality), as well as threats, both general and specific, has not escaped commentators. Several observers have referred to Trump’s strategy as the discursive equivalent of “shock and awe” (also known as rapid dominance). This strategy, as employed in the early days of the Iraq War, was designed not so much to destroy the enemy as to demoralize and paralyze its forces by creating a sense of the aggressor’s invulnerability and the futility of resistance. The example of the Iraq War, which might be understood as a test of this strategy’s effectiveness, showed that the exaggeration of the aggressor’s power, which is essential to creating “awe,” produced a double reaction: while it helped persuade a segment of the Iraqi leadership to surrender, and led military forces to retreat (though they would later mount a powerful insurgency), it showed from the outset that the U.S. military and the Bush administration had fallen victim to their own illusions.
The initial bombing campaign, whose ferocity and destructiveness are beyond question, failed to “paralyze” the Iraqi people. Not only that, it helped mobilize opposition to the U.S. occupation, creating a vacuum that both allowed the proliferation of militias and made arms available to them. The war, which we were assured would last only weeks, dragged on for years and destabilized the entire region in ways that continue to produce disastrous consequences for tens of millions of people.
Trump’s version of shock and awe (if indeed the analogy holds) seems to have paralyzed or, perhaps more precisely, disoriented and bewildered the Democratic Party with far greater success than that enjoyed by the U.S. military in Iraq. In reality, however, the Democratic Party had already been paralyzed by its own contradictions, with a substantial number of elected officials and party leaders either supporting some version of Trump’s initiatives or failing to oppose them. They explained the 2024 defeat by blaming “wokeism” and the party’s supposed softness on immigration, its climate “extremism,” and opposition to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza (which continues to enjoy widespread bipartisan support in Congress). Other Democrats place their hopes in legal action to stop at least the most flagrantly illegal, and in certain cases unconstitutional, executive orders, despite the Supreme Court’s clear allegiance to Trump in defiance of established precedent and even the text of the Constitution. Democrats cannot seem to grasp that Trump intends to impose his program without regard to legal rulings against him or even direct court orders to halt his actions. It is Trump and his allies who understand the extent to which a favorable relation of forces and the ability to project real, physical power energizes his base and immobilizes the opposition.
For what remains of the Left, and the progressive movement more broadly, the tendential effect, if not the intent, of Trump’s flurry of orders is distraction and diversion, weakening the opposition’s capacity to identify both opportunities for mobilizing mass resistance and the forces arrayed to prevent such mobilization. Among the opportunities, none is perhaps as immediate in every sense of the term as the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants now underway. The stakes of this campaign are very high: even if the number of people deported falls well below the projected 10 million, it will represent a historic defeat for both immigrant communities in the U.S. and the working class and organized labor more broadly. In addition, the success of this campaign will embolden white supremacist tendencies and help transform the racist sentiments of MAGA supporters into violent action. And this allows us to understand the significance of Trump’s release of 1,500 far-right activists, many of whom spent their imprisonment together, deepening their commitment to white nationalism, exploring the possibilities of post incarceration cooperation, and plotting their revenge against the forces of “degeneracy”: BLM, Antifa, and immigrants, that is, African Americans, the Left, and all people of Latin American and Caribbean descent, and so on. These are the future leaders of a paramilitary force or coalition of forces whose devotion to Trump is beyond question. They might someday be used to supplement, or substitute for, action by the state.
To a certain extent, such a coalition already exists and is well established along the southern border. The use of private citizens to police the border without any oversight or accountability has gone on for decades, tolerated and often encouraged by the Border Patrol. These extralegal militias are armed with military-grade weapons and possess sophisticated surveillance equipment. They regularly detain suspected undocumented border-crossers for hours, and their informal status relieves them of any responsibility for the health and welfare of the men, women, and children they detain (often at gunpoint). Now, the Far Right, from neo-Nazis to the Proud Boys, have announced their intention to take the struggle beyond the border region to pursue the undocumented throughout the U.S. These groups hope to identify the locations and industries outside the major cities with high concentrations of undocumented workers, in some cases merely reporting their findings to ICE or sympathetic local law enforcement agencies, and in others, apprehending immigrants themselves.
The far-right anti-immigrant mobilization has succeeded in moving state legislatures (mainly in the South) to consider offering bounties of up to $1,000 per immigrant as a “cheap and easy” alternative to a massive expansion of ICE; this will allow ordinary citizens, whether informally or deputized, to carry out the work of mass deportation. This cost-saving measure will be made more effective if the state defines being undocumented as itself a crime punishable by fines and imprisonment. Further, Trump’s declaration that student visa-holders active in the Palestine solidarity movement are subject to deportation was hailed by far-right Zionist groups, such as the neofascist Betar, whose members are now collecting video footage from demonstrations and encampments and using the most advanced facial recognition technology to identify suspected foreign students and report them to ICE. In addition, an organization known as the Shirion Collective, which previously doxxed and harassed pro-Palestine activists, now offers cash bounties of up to $1,500 for such information.
More recently, there has come to light a 26-page proposal from Erik Prince, the former CEO of Blackwater (a military contractor known for massacring Iraqi civilians in 2007), apparently submitted to Trump sometime before his inauguration. The document offers a plan for an entirely privatized force capable of deporting 12 million people (at a rate of 500,000 per month) before the 2026 midterm elections. Arguing that the federal government lacks the means to assemble a force large enough to accomplish Trump’s goals, the proposal suggests using military bases as detention facilities and hiring 4,000 attorneys and paralegals to process the detainees. Much of the work of apprehending those marked for deportation will fall to a force of 10,000 civilians (preferably with military or law enforcement backgrounds), who, after brief training, will be deputized and given the same enforcement powers as government agents to capture and detain suspected undocumented immigrants, but without the oversight and accountability that supposedly ties the hands of federal agents. There is no question that many of the proposal’s elements are illegal, but neither should we assume that mere illegality will prevent them from being implemented.
Moreover, the very success of the resistance to Trump’s mass deportation may make the privatization of immigration enforcement a more attractive option. It is clear that Trump and his “border czar,” Tom Homan, significantly overestimated the power of ICE to identify, locate, and apprehend undocumented people, and that they vastly underestimated the resistance the mass deportation campaign would engender. The initial claim that ICE would focus primarily on apprehending “criminal aliens” (including those who had been charged with but not convicted of criminal offenses) has turned out to be false. ICE cannot focus on “criminal aliens” for whom a warrant has already been issued but who are more difficult to apprehend. To meet their quotas, ICE agents have increasingly resorted to sweeping immigrant enclaves, detaining anyone who “fits the profile” of an undocumented immigrant. These raids, in turn, carried out like military operations, with armored vehicles, have certainly encouraged the residents of such neighborhoods to develop strategies for avoiding capture, but they have also led to outrage.
While the resistance has not stopped deportations altogether, its power has nevertheless frustrated Homan, who has said that in places like Chicago, “people are very well educated” and know how to avoid being arrested by ICE. Indeed, know-your-rights leafleting, which so irritates Homan, has become a daily activity in places like Chicago and Los Angeles. In addition, a dedicated number of activists in both cities have organized ICE watches and have been able to warn neighborhoods and workplaces of imminent raids. Photos of the make and models of the vehicles used by ICE agents have been widely disseminated over social media. It is clear that the fight against mass deportations has led many people to think more deeply about organization, strategy, and what type of movement is adequate to the current situation.
Trump’s deportation campaign cannot achieve anything close to the exorbitant promises he made to his supporters unless the means of repression are exponentially expanded. While many on the Left were anticipating — correctly — that the initial resistance to Trump the second time around would be, or at least appear to be, much weaker or smaller than in late 2016 and early 2017, we should nevertheless recognize that those dedicated to fighting Trump’s policies since the time of his first administration have gained an immense political education, from the confrontation with the Far Right in the street, the George Floyd uprising, and, most recently, the encampments against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Indeed, the organizing — and we want to stress this word — that has gone into fighting mass deportations bears the traces and memory of these movements. But it is above all the legacy of immigrant communities’ self-organization, in neighborhoods, workplaces, and transportation hubs, that has thwarted ICE’s best efforts so far.
We should not be deceived by Trump’s shock-and-awe campaign. It is important as the first test of his administration’s actual, as opposed to symbolic or formal, power. ICE’s ability to carry out mass deportation is not unlimited. The greater the resistance it faces, the more unpopular mass deportations will become. If we can assemble the forces necessary to stop one of Trump’s most important initiatives and act effectively before the window of opportunity closes, our success can open the way to new and potentially larger mobilizations to halt his authoritarian neoliberal program. If we fail, and Trump succeeds in imposing a de facto state of exception that allows him to rule without regard to law or constitutionally established procedures, we can expect both repression and destitution on a scale never before seen in the U.S.