Architecture of the National Security State
by Black Alliance for Peace / January 22nd, 2026
Dissident Voice
Introduction
What we are witnessing in the United States today is not a series of isolated policy excesses or unfortunate “overreaches,” but the maturation of a coherent architecture of repression — a national security state that fuses intelligence, policing, militarization, and ideological discipline into a single system of control. This system is not reactive; it is proactive. It is not defensive; it is anticipatory. And it is not primarily about safety — it is about managing populations, suppressing dissent, and maintaining imperial order in a moment of systemic crisis fueling the consolidation of fascism.
In this issue of our Bulletin on Domestic Repression we continue to cover those mechanisms of power and control – surveillance, militarization of police, community occupations, detention as commodity production with a continued special focus on the new paramilitary role of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE).
In our last issue we focused on the Department of Defense 1033 Program that transfers military equipment to local police departments but also the lesser known 1122 Program. We exposed how these programs collapse the boundary between civilian law enforcement and military occupation. Armored vehicles, battlefield weapons, tactical gear, and military training reconfigure police from public servants into domestic security forces oriented toward control rather than care. Protest becomes insurgency. Poverty becomes a threat. Blackness, Brownness, migration, and political dissent become objects of suspicion.
We provide further analysis in this issue of how into this already volatile mix comes the expansion of immigration enforcement as a central pillar of domestic repression. ICE raids in cities, mass arrests, workplace sweeps, and collaboration with local police transform immigration policy into a tool of terror — not simply to remove people, but to discipline communities. The goal is not only deportation, but deterrence, fear, fragmentation, and social paralysis. Migrant communities become laboratories of repression where techniques of control are tested before being generalized.
These mechanisms do not operate independently. Militarized police enforce intelligence through overwhelming force. ICE operationalizes it through raids and profit-based detentions. And all of it is ideologically legitimated through a permanent discourse of threat from the racialized “other” — terrorism, gangs, extremism, disorder, invasion — that recodes political opposition and social crisis as internal security problems.
This is what a repressive, fascist state looks like in a late-imperial moment. Not jackboots in the street, but databases. Not mass roundups announced in advance, but targeted removals justified by intelligence assessments no one can see or contest.
The training relationships between U.S. police and Israeli security forces fit seamlessly into this logic. Israeli policing is shaped by occupation, counterinsurgency, and population control. It is designed not to serve a public, but to manage an enemy population. When U.S. police import those models, they import not only tactics, but an entire political logic: that certain populations are not citizens but problems, not constituents but threats, not humans but risks.
What ties all this together is the collapse of the distinction between foreign and domestic repression. The techniques used to occupy, sanction, destabilize, and discipline abroad are now fully integrated into domestic governance. The empire has come home, not because it wants to, but because it must. A system built on exploitation, inequality, and endless expansion cannot govern through consent in moments of crisis. It must govern through coercion, control and violence.
This is why we should not be surprised that ICE behaves like a paramilitary force, and that political dissent is increasingly framed as extremism. This is not drift. It is design. ICE Director Todd Lyons’ comment last April that the administration should treat deportations “like a business … Like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings,” is the capitalist logic that is driving these moves toward a fully consolidated neofascism is clear.
The question is not whether this system will be used abusively. It already is. The question is whether it will be named for what it is: a repressive national security state emerging from the contradictions of empire, racial capitalism, and imperial decline that has now turned to the capitalist reform of fascism to uphold the dictatorship of capital.
And the task before us is not reform within that architecture, but confrontation with it. Not technocratic fixes, but political resistance. Not procedural objections, but principled opposition. Because once repression becomes normalized, legality becomes irrelevant — and freedom becomes a memory rather than a practice.
No Compromises, No Retreat
Ajamu Baraka
Director, North-South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights
Featured Articles
ICE Documents Expose Plan to Hold 80,000 People in Warehouses
Julia Conley, Common Dreams
Eight months after the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said at a border security conference that the Trump administration aims to carry out its mass deportation operation with the same efficiency as Amazon’s package deliveries, a draft document from ICE officials on Wednesday provided never-before-seen details of how the agency plans to do that using massive warehouses repurposed to hold tens of thousands of people.
The Washington Post reported on a draft solicitation document, a version of which ICE plans to send to private detention companies this week.
The proposal calls for contractors to help renovate industrial warehouses across the country, setting each up to hold up to 10,000 people detained by immigration agents at a time — albeit in facilities that will likely have poor ventilation, climate control, plumbing, and sanitation systems.
Warehouses, said physician and journalist Dr. Carolyn Barber, “are built for boxes, not humans.”
Renee Good, Keith Ward and the Normalization of Police Violence
Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report
The fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has ignited a firestorm of condemnation and protest across the country. The Trump administration unleashed ICE not just on undocumented immigrants, but on anyone who opposes their actions in any way, or, like Good, may be in the line of fire because they attempted to protest. ICE officers have assaulted not just the people they seek to capture, but also people trying to defend them, and charged them criminally with obstruction. The scenes of assaults and violent kidnappings are shocking to the conscience of millions of people and have become a focal point for protest in the U.S.
Despite the righteous outrage evoked by Nicole Good’s killing, however, it is important to remember that her experience was not at all singular. The Mapping Police Violence project reports that at least 1,182 people were killed by police in the United States in 2025, an average of at least three people every day. There were only seven days in 2025 during which there were no documented instances of police killing anyone.
It is inevitable that the shooting raises discussions on racism and state violence, as well it should. But white people like Ms. Good can also be found on this awful list. Of the 1,182 people killed by police in 2025, 397 were white. It is still true that Black people are the most likely to be killed by police, but the level of carnage itself is striking, with the U.S. once again being an outlier nation in a terrible metric.
Periodically, a police killing will electrify public attention, as happened with George Floyd, also in Minneapolis, in 2020. The video footage of his murder galvanized masses of people around the country in numbers that had not been seen for decades. Yet the focus on highly publicized cases obscures a disturbing fact. State violence is normalized to such an extent that what is a common occurrence is treated as though it is a rarity.
Supreme Court said ICE can stop you based on race, accent, job and location. What we know.
Erin Mansfield, USA TODAY
A Sept. 8 Supreme Court decision gives permission to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to continue sweeps in the Los Angeles area that critics and federal judges said amounted to racial profiling.
The limited-scope decision came down in an unsigned, emergency action that did not disclose which justices voted to side with President Donald Trump’s administration and offered no reasoning. But it nonetheless temporarily overturned decisions from the lower courts that blocked ICE from making stops based only on race, language, location and occupation.
All that is known about the justices’ views is that conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh largely agreed with the decision, and three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Kentanji Brown Jackson — disagreed.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act as the Architecture of Domestic Repression: A People(s)-Centered Human Rights Critique
Ajamu Baraka
The so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill ” (OBBBA), the first major signature piece of legislation of the Trump administration, was signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025. Marketed with the usual populist bravado, the bill was in fact a sweeping and reactionary package that advanced tax cuts for capital while imposing draconian changes to healthcare funding, including rollbacks of Affordable Care Act subsidies and deep cuts to Medicaid.
Beyond healthcare, however, the OBBBA codified a broader and more dangerous trajectory: the continued erosion of state obligations to uphold fundamental human rights norms rooted in both domestic and international law. Nowhere is this retreat more evident than in the provisions targeting migrant workers and their families. These measures reflect an intensification of the racialized logic of exclusion that has long structured U.S. governance—transforming immigration enforcement into an openly punitive regime that treats migrants not as rights-bearing human beings but as disposable labor and permanent threats to the settler state’s political imagination.
From a people(s)-centered human rights perspective, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) should not be understood primarily as a fiscal or administrative reform. It should be understood as a repressive restructuring of state power that subordinates human needs to security logics, criminalizes survival, and weaponizes precarity — particularly against migrants and their families.
ICE plans $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ push targeting gun shows, military fans for hires
Drew Harwell, Joyce Lee
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are planning to spend $100 million over a one-year period to recruit gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts through online influencers and a geo-targeted advertising campaign, part of what the agency called a “wartime recruitment” strategy it said was critical to hiring thousands of new deportation officers nationwide, according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post.
The spending would help President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation agenda dominate media networks and recruitment channels, including through ads targeting people who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear, according to a 30-page document distributed among officials this summer detailing ICE’s “surge hiring marketing strategy.”
The Department of Homeland Security has spoken publicly about its fast-tracked effort to significantly increase ICE’s workforce by hiring more than 10,000 new employees, a surge promoted on social media with calls for recruits willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders.” The agency currently employs more than 20,000 people, according to ICE’s website.
Occupation Forces Upheld by Federal Judiciary Demonstrates DCs Need for Community Control
Pan African Community Center
The partisan battle between the federal and local government over whether to keep National Guard forces in DC is a bipartisan legitimization of structural violence against non-white working-class communities.
On December 17, 2025, a Federal Court of Appeals ruled unanimously to overturn a decision that would have expelled over 2,000 National Guard troops stationed in D.C. The National Guard’s occupation in D.C., which began with Trump’s executive order in August, will remain in place until the judiciary panel determines if the president is “improperly exercising federal control.” But, in the meantime, residents are forced to exist under conditions of war; no panel decision will fix elected officials’ ability to deploy soldiers to DC neighborhoods. The fact that African communities in DC, and across urban centers of the U.S., are politically, economically, and culturally dominated territories defines them as internal or domestic colonies. Nearly six months into the occupation, the courts continue to debate legality while residents endure the consequences of domestic colonialism through heightened militarization.
The ruling is part of a growing number of legal disputes over National Guard deployments across the country. Yet these debates share a dangerous assumption: that a military presence in civilian communities is acceptable, and that the only issue is how it is administered. Across party lines, officials argue over procedure while agreeing on occupation. That consensus exposes the real contradiction—true safety and security for our communities is treated as secondary to maintaining control and occupation.
As political leadership in D.C. shifts, the public is being misdirected. Instead of addressing the urgent needs of long-time residents, elected officials lean on slogans like “law and order,” “states’ rights,” and bureaucratic process. The false choice presented—support or oppose presidential intervention—hides the reality that working-class African communities are facing a coordinated assault from both local and federal power.
New York state sends police chiefs to Israel for ‘counterterrorism’ training
Israeli-Palestinian News
Reposted from Middle East Eye
More than a dozen police officers from the state of New York are on a training trip to Israel despite human rights experts saying that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza.
Police officers have already been accused of being heavy-handed against pro-Palestine protestors both on student campuses in the state and in New York City.
The 13 officials are said to be learning about security issues facing Israel, undertaking counterterrorism training to protect Jewish communities, and learning about antisemitism.
The training comes the same week Israel launched unprovoked air strikes on the sovereign territory of Qatar on Tuesday in violation of international law, killing five Palestinians and one Qatari. Israel then killed 46 people and wounded 165 people in an ongoing exchange of strikes on Wednesday in Yemen.
No Justice, No Peace,
No Compromise, No Retreat
Resources
Biddle, S. (January 3, 2026). “Blackwater Successor Constellis Hunts Immigrants for ICE.” The Intercept.
Conley, J. (December 24, 2025). “ICE Documents Expose Plan to Hold 80,000 People in Warehouses,” Truthout.
Harwell, D. & Lee, J. (December 31, 2025). “ICE plans $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ push targeting gun shows, military fans for hires.” Washington Post.
Hurowitz, N. (January 2, 2026). “License Plates of Unmarked ICE Cars Tracked in Public Database.” The Intercept.
Kimberley, M. (January 14, 2026). “Renee Good, Keith Porter and the Normalization of Police Violence.” Black Agenda Report.
Kolhatar, S. (December 29, 2025). “Anti-ICE Resistance Sprang Up Across Red States in 2025” Truthout.
Lennard, N. (January 6, 2026). “Three cheers for Hilton workers who banned ICE—Until their corporate bosses stomped them out.” The Intercept. Hilton Stomps Out Workers Who Banned ICE From Hotel
Mansfield, E. (September 10. 2025). “Supreme Court said ICE can stop you based on race, accent, job, and location. What we know.” USA Today. ICE can now stop people due to race, language and job. What we know.
Pan-African Community Action. (January 14, 2026). “Occupation forces upheld by federal judiciary demonstrates DC’s need for community control.” Black Agenda Report.
Staff. (September 12, 2025). “New York state sends police chiefs to Israel for counterterrorism training.” Israel-Palestine News.
Winograd, M. (October 5, 2025). “ICE and the Israeli Military Are 2 Sides of the Same Coin — We Must Resist Both,” Truthout.
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