‘Kinetic action’ in military terms is the application of force or motion to produce physical damage. Landing a Black Hawk helicopter filled with armed police agents on an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore, dropping stun grenades and zip-tying residents is kinetic action. Grabbing roofers off the top of a house in upstate New York at gunpoint is kinetic action. Blowing up a small boat loaded with people in the Caribbean Sea: kinetic action.

Kinetic action is the favoured mode of the latest Trump administration: we live in its aftershocks, racing to make sense of what just happened. Over the past year it has repeatedly violated the rights of citizens and foreign nationals – while also making a spectacle of these violent acts. Even when the “worst of the worst” turn out to be hairdressers, drywallers, fisherman or soccer moms, nothing will interrupt the imposition of serial brutality and accompanying slop-stream of ideological justification. In quick succession this month, US military forces kidnapped a sitting foreign president on the grounds that he is the elusive head of an imaginary drug cartel, and ICE agents executed a civilian inside her car, then retroactively slandered her as a dangerous radical.

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.

But a theory of violence is not a theory of power. Trump’s Homeland Empire is incapable of generating consensual order or lasting hegemony: it can only sustain itself through short-term clearing operations – smash and grab. Maybe this is what happens when the actual, functioning empire enters its terminal, attritional phase: construction, growth and visions of progress are replaced by pyrotechnic convulsions. Rather than banishing the spectres of deindustrialisation, stagnant wages and rising midlife morbidity, it creates new spectacles of deportation and extrajudicial killings, and prospective annexations of oil wealth and ice fields – in order to conjure a world in which dominance affirms its own necessity.

At the triumphal end of the Cold War, influential thinkers imagined liberal democracy, market society and the rules-based international order overseen by the US as “the final form of human government” and “the end of History”. Within a few years, Americans were sucked into the maw of the War on Terror and the financial ruin of the Great Recession. Barack Obama’s election promised cooperative diplomacy, healthcare reform and the overcoming of racial division; it seemed to reestablish the trendline of what he called “our better history”. We know what came next. Trump ascended by telling the people of the United States that the best days were behind them – that the liberal internationalist period was not only an exception, but a sucker’s game.

In one of his last interviews, the most cunning operative of postwar statecraft, Henry Kissinger, described Trump as the type of personage who emerges at the end of a dying age “to force it to give up its old pretenses”. Trump builds on long-term institutional arrangements – including the imperial presidency and the idea that the US is perpetually in semi-war – while turning these against an equally fundamental premise of the postwar period, that Homo liberalis would thrive in the protected space of US imperium. That is over.

The Homeland Empire is best understood as an experiment in despotic rule over a differentiated population of citizens and subjects. It embraces recently discredited practices such as racial profiling and drone assassination, and adds new ones such as masked and anonymous police agents. It involves a significant reinvestment in “tough on crime” policies from the past 40 years – but also a decidedly new effort to place federal police power on the same normative and legal plane as military authority.

The effort to construct a majoritarian-nativist constituency is now the centrepiece of right-wing politics in the US. It demands not only the removal of alien migrants, but also the enlargement of durable capacities for capture and detention, the foreclosure of legal pathways to citizenship, and the erosion of existing due-process rights for citizens and residents. “Remember who you are, American” … “Report Foreign Invaders” … “Pioneers, Not Illegals” … “Remigrate”: such white-supremacist graphics and slogans litter DHS social media, sharpening opposition between Americana and alienage. Immigration policing under this aegis is a domain of public terror. Any resident can, on the slenderest of pretexts and whims of street-level enforcers, be told: ‘Show your papers.’

DHS claims to have deported approximately 622,000 people from the US in 2025, and that more than 1.9 million have “voluntarily” left. Close to 70,000 people – a record number – are now being held in immigrant detention facilities. Heavily armed agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have conducted raids at farms, restaurants and factories, and have set up traffic stops, dragnets and checkpoints in neighbourhoods and public parks – using riot-control weapons like stun grenades and pepper spray against anyone who defies their writ. Tens of thousands have been taken from local prisons and jails, or ambushed outside courtrooms while attending mandated immigration status hearings. Border-area removals of recent migrants, long the focal point of deportation efforts, have been overtaken by enforcement operations in the interior.

The administration is repurposing state prisons and local jails, particularly those located near airfields, for immigration detention. It is also planning to retrofit logistics warehouses as makeshift prisons run by private corporations promising greater efficiency. As ICE director Todd Lyons explained, the deportation process should be “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings”.

In one of many echoes of the War on Terror, hundreds of individuals have been renditioned to prison and torture camps in distant third countries, including El Salvador, South Sudan, Uganda and Eswatini. Abuse of the kind that once scandalised the public is cropping up across the immigration detention archipelago, including tactics that qualify as torture: 24-hour lighting, shackling in stress positions and caging in 4ft by 4ft boxes. At least 32 people are known to have died in detention in 2025.

DHS agencies are the vanguard of far-right ideology and organisational culture within the US government. Officials like Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino travel with their own film crews, generating a stream of propagandistic slop, movie trailers and “meme” videos, styling themselves as action heroes battling in migrant criminal underworlds. New recruits are hailed via slogans such as “America Needs You”, “Liberty Is Calling” and “Defend the Homeland” – and offered banal trappings of middle-class life: signing bonuses, student loan forgiveness, retirement benefits and overtime pay. Official ‘homeland’ imagery in turn oscillates between prelapsarian settler kitsch – covered wagons on an errand into the savage wilderness – and nostalgic renditions of an industrial golden age in the style of socialist and fascist realism – blue-eyed men beside pulsing smokestacks.

It is worth noting that manufacturing as a percentage of employment in the US has steadily fallen throughout the time Trump has been in office. America’s shrinking industrial base increasingly depends on foreign companies that expect a certain deference – including being allowed to employ trained staff, sometimes from overseas. The backbone of the farm economy remains low-wage, seasonal, undocumented workers who perform jobs that Americans eschew.

Although white nationalists are targeted as both its audience and workforce, even DHS’s own hiring efforts illustrate how deeply migration is embedded in American life. ICE has received more than 220,000 applications for employment, far in excess of available positions. A recent DHS jobs fair in Texas drew African Americans, immigrants from Bangladesh, Bulgaria and Nigeria, and even some whose parents came from Mexico and Central America, reflecting the real labour situation. Under Trump, hastily conceived extractivist gambits might be the only game in town. What were once factory towns became prison towns, and now deportation hubs – revealing the most archaic and retrograde layer of American business enterprise: removing and trafficking people.

In rejecting the myth of America as ‘a universal nation’, the Trump administration has aggressively destabilised the idea that the US’s own racial and colonial history is – for the most part – internally settled, and beyond Constitutional adjudication. ‘Mass deportation’ in this sense serves a range of purposes beyond its ostensible aims: it cultivates a constituency that elevates ancestral primacy, creates a paramilitary policing layer incentivised to assert despotic authority, and justifies governing via broad emergency decree. The Trump administration envisions not only high numbers of migrant removals, but the authority to revoke citizenship by the sovereign-executive. Deportation, in short, is the watchword for a sweeping ideological attack on the consensus and institutions of postwar liberalism.

At its founding, migration to the US was lightly restricted; there were obviously no American-born, ‘heritage’ colonists. A slender statutory precept, issued in 1790, decreed that only “free white persons” could become naturalised citizens. The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in 1798, amid warnings in Congress against the importation of “hordes of wild Irish-men”; the new laws did not yet restrict arrivals, but increased the probationary period for naturalisation. In doing so, they added a lasting figure – the ‘enemy alien’ – to a security lexicon that was primarily focused on indigenous people and slaves.

The first restrictive immigration legislation came in 1882, targeting Chinese migrants, on grounds of racial difference – in the very period that African Americans were formally enfranchised as citizens, albeit still subject to extralegal terror and legal racial segregation. What followed was a sustained period of exceptionally high immigration: more than 12 million labourers from southern and eastern Europe, including many Catholics and Jews, arrived to meet the demands of burgeoning industry. Rising nativist agitation linked these new arrivals to racial, civilisational and biological decline. In 1924, the government established further legal restrictions on immigration, including national origins quotas that limited immigration to 2% of a given country’s population in the US at the time of the 1890 census (to restrict migration from Europe’s peripheries), and broad bars on non-white immigration, including any from a specific “Asiatic barred zone”.

Throughout this period, public agitation for immigration restrictions, morbid fears about the closing of the frontier and the loss of economic vitality, and new imperial annexations went hand in hand. Maps of that time referred to ‘Greater America’, and to populations held as subjects from the Philippine Islands to the Caribbean Sea. Adjudicating the status of the new colonies, the Supreme Court, in a series of legal rulings known as the Insular Cases, allowed the US government to rule “unincorporated” territory and its “savage” inhabitants outside of Constitutional frameworks.

Territories like Alaska and Hawaii, with sufficient white settler populations, were viewed as “incorporated” and on a pathway to statehood. Others, particularly the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam, were described as “foreign in a domestic sense”, “belonging to, but not part of the United States”. They could be taxed, tariffed and effectively controlled, but their peoples could at that time only ever be subjects within the American realm. Some imperial anomalies remain today, including the US control of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the status of the US Virgin Islands as “unincorporated territory”, the existence of Puerto Rico as a “commonwealth”, and the possession of Guam as a military outpost. The Caribbean Sea is broadly treated as a semi-sovereign playground for US tourists, military incursions and off-shore havens for tax cheats and sex traffickers.

The final element was the establishment of the first US Border Patrol in 1924, focused on policing the push and pull of seasonal farm labourers from Mexico, who were simultaneously encouraged to migrate by large growers while also being abjured in periodic deportation panics. Most of these labourers – the antecedents of today’s farm workers – had traversed these lands freely before they were annexed by the US in the 1840s and 50s. The Border Patrol, the precursor of today’s CBP, was created to enforce the line, and was notorious from its inception for its paramilitary ethos and racist brutality. With an institutional culture built on exercising violence against unauthorised migrants, it has become the cornerstone of today’s DHS principle that ‘every town is a border town’.

The Second World War brought liberal naturalisation laws for some Asians, and a commitment to grant independence to the Philippines. For the first time, government propaganda began to affirm that the US was a country formed out of diverse immigrant origins: a “nation of nations”. The war, however, was also marked by the mass internment of 120,000 Japanese, most of them living on the west coast. They were classed as enemy aliens, as were their US-born children, who were birthright citizens. This decision was upheld by the US Supreme Court in Korematsu v United States (1944) as a necessary wartime measure, but condemned, in a dissenting opinion issued by Justice Frank Murphy, as tantamount to “the legalisation of racism”.

This dissenting view eventually won out. The most consequential modern transformation of the US immigration system dates back to the fully fledged legislative assault on Jim Crow in the 1960s. The civil rights reforms were followed in 1965 by the Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended national origins quotas and introduced new family unification provisions. A steady rise in legal immigration was followed by higher levels of unauthorised migration. The number of foreign-born residents was further augmented by surges in refugee and asylum petitions, including from regions roiled by US wars, such as south-east and south-west Asia and the Middle East. Today, 15% of the population of the US – a country of more than 340 million people – is foreign-born, including 26 million naturalised citizens. It was approximately 5% in 1965.

Immigration into the US has, for virtually all of its history, been driven by powerful structural regional and global forces. It is central to the American project: 13-15 million long-term undocumented migrants now work in key industries like construction, agriculture, food service, hospitality and maintenance, and pay taxes to the tune of $100 billion per year. The Trump administration is thus unlikely to achieve deportation on the scale it in envisions. But this mistakes the policy’s actual purpose.

American statecraft in the postwar period, and particularly during the Cold War, viewed the internal adjudication of racial equality and civil rights as the measure of national and global legitimacy. But fears about ‘black crime’ in the 1970s and 80s marked the opening salvo in a right-wing offensive against the inclusive predicates of the ‘Cold War-civil rights’ framework. Today’s attack on immigration recapitulates and wildly exaggerates many elements of the earlier offensive. Immigrants are accused of abusing liberal legal protections, practising welfare fraud and committing violent crime. The Trump administration, however, has gone further to propose a radical implementation of a rightless condition as the formal counterpoint to citizenship. In this way, it reverts to the racial constitution of the US empire-state that the postwar compact sought to transcend.

Trump’s former consigliere Steve Bannon once promised to “deconstruct the administrative state”. Like most right-wing, anti-state discourse, this statement should be turned on its head. The Trump administration is in fact advancing a ‘whole-government approach’ to immigration enforcement, which widens and integrates the state’s coercive ambit. DHS’s mission, spread across areas like border control, counter-terrorism, transportation security and child exploitation, is now focused on detaining and deporting migrants. Thousands of staffers at federal policing agencies like the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and the ATF (the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) – as well as in government departments such as Housing and Urban Development, Social Security Administration, and Health and Human Services – have been diverted to the task of policing migration locations. DHS has deputised local police across 1,200 local jurisdictions as immigration enforcers, and has spent millions of dollars on data analytics, licence plate readers and hacking and surveillance tools.

The capture and warehousing of humans is now at the centre of an institutional transformation of federal police power. It is not an exaggeration to say that ICE and CBP are together being refashioned into a superordinate federal policing authority. In addition to plugging into the capillary networks and resources of state and local police, they have been allocated, under the Big Beautiful Bill, $30 billion for direct enforcement operations, and a total of $170 billion over the next four years for expansion. In short order, ICE and CBP have become the largest policing agency, with budgets larger than all state and local law enforcement agencies combined. They operate alongside a rapidly growing, privately subcontracted migrant-detention service industry operating without public oversight.

Coordinating with DHS, the US military has proposed integrating its northern command, USNORTHCOM – created after 9/11 to address terrorist threats ‘to the homeland’ – with ICE and CBP. One of the new administration’s first acts was to surge military force to the southern border, while simultaneously using tariff threats to induce Mexico to deploy its national guard to patrol the other side. (These operations have been partially credited with reducing cross-border arrivals.)

The term “criminal alien” can now be applied to all undocumented persons. Administrative and executive orders have peremptorily changed or bypassed immigration law. In violation of due process rights, ICE and CBP agents can stop anyone anywhere in the country and demand proof that they have been in the US for at least two years. Failure to do so can lead to detention and deportation without official proceedings. New ICE guidelines effectively treat all undocumented immigrants as “arriving aliens,” making them subject to immediate arrest and mandatory detention pending removal. DHS administrators have further stripped residency rights from hundreds of thousands of migrants who entered the country lawfully, by cancelling temporary protected statuses granted during the Biden administration and voiding asylum petitions (other than for a small group of white Afrikaners).

Federal and district courts, acting with traditional diligence, continue to be a line of resistance, or at least of drag. In more than 1,600 cases, over 300 lower-court judges – including some two dozen appointed by Trump – have issued reasoned opinions against the Constitutionality of nearly every aspect of his immigration policy. The Supreme Court, by contrast, has given his administration wide latitude. It paused some high-profile removals pending litigation, and belatedly ruled against the deployment of the National Guard to Chicago, but stayed the majority of lower-court rulings in deference to the authority of the Executive Branch and the President.

Using what has been called a “shadow” or emergency docket, it has also far green-lit various new practices, with scant legal reasoning. A short assessment by Justice Brent Kavanaugh, for example, sufficed to approve ICE’s “roving stops” in Los Angeles, which explicitly target Spanish-speaking, low-wage, Latino-presenting workers on the “reasonable suspicion” that they are here unlawfully. (These are now colloquially referred to as “Kavanaugh stops”.) To put it into perspective: this is the same Supreme Court that recently ruled that you cannot use race as a criteria in college admissions, voting rights or desegregation. As the roving stops find new targets – including, most recently, Somali community in Minneapolis – it becomes clearer that ethno-racial targeting has simply been legalised.

During the first Trump administration, far-right ideologues floated what at that time seemed a fringe idea – that birthright citizenship does not apply to unauthorised immigrants. Aspects of the late-19th century jurisidction are being redeployed today to suggest that the children of unauthorised non-citizens inherit their parents’ status as malign agents of foreign powers. On day one of his new term, Trump declared, via executive order, “birthright citizenship” (jus solis in English common law) to be null and void for anyone born to a mother in the US “unlawfully” if their father is not a citizen. It suggests that citizenship rights in general are now as contingent on the whims of the president as they are on the whims of the police.

One question we cannot seem to leave behind is whether Donald Trump has perversely realised longstanding trends in American history and culture, or fundamentally overturned basic US values and norms. The reason this has been unsatisfying is that it was never a binary choice. To the extent to which aggression can be used to engender public submission – and it is not at all clear that it will work – it is linked to plausible accounts of the US past. And yet, despite this, Trump has gone a long way towards dismantling the legitimating framework for postwar US power.

The liberal imagination that developed in this period was informed by what the American statesman Henry Stimson called “the necessary government of the whole”. In opposition to the Nazi ideal voiced by Alfred Rosenberg – “one soul is not equal to another” – it declared a categorical universalism: non-racialism, anti-colonialism and egalitarianism along a developmental horizon. The fact that such predicates were frequently violated and only observed in the breach attests to their weakness and many consequential failures. Nonetheless, we are forced now to consider what it means to lose these conceptions once and for all.

It is notable that the architect of ‘mass deportation’, Stephen Miller, and one of its principal executioners, CBP Commander Gregory Bovino, share family histories rooted in mass migrations. Hailing from the Belarusian shtetl, Wolf-Leib Glosser, Miller’s great-grandfather, fled anti-Jewish pogroms in Czarist Russia to work as a fruit peddler on the Lower East Side of New York City, hoping to earn enough to bring over his family members. Bovino’s great-grandfather travelled from the hardscrabble farmlands of Calabria in southern Italy to Pennsylvania’s coal country; his son, Bovino’s grandfather, followed, arriving at the age of 12, whereupon he was simply granted citizenship. The nativists of that time were, like today’s, given to extolling a “pioneer breed” of white, northern Europeans, while fighting to keep anyone else out. It is safe to say that neither Miller’s nor Bovino’s ancestors would have passed their test.

Echoing Trump, Miller recently asserted that the US ran an “empire in reverse” during the postwar era, squandering its blood and treasure to protect the first world and let in the “third world”. To make it right-facing, the empire needs to be turned inward, toward the homeland, and its enemies within. Supporters like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen similarly describe Trump as an FDR-like figure but “in reverse” – someone prepared to roll back what’s left of the New Deal order, its administrative state and inclusive predicates.

Trump is certainly not assured of success. He is unpopular, presides over a hollow party, is subject to volatile public opinion and relies on coalitions that dissolve as quickly as they form. One of the paradoxes of contemporary fascism – if we want to call it that – is that it shares characteristics Susan Sontag once ascribed to Americans in general: it is both apocalyptic and timorous. It can initiate a new round of small wars and damage the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, but it cannot successfully govern the country, let alone adjust the gears or switch the tracks of capitalist economies in the so-called developed world.

We have a tendency to keep asking whether a threshold of no return has finally been crossed. The answer is yes – but not because Trump is operating outside of historical precedents for US racism and imperialism, which are not hard to find. In 1950 – tellingly, in musings about Venezuela’s oil riches – George Kennan, a key architect of Cold War strategy, lamented what he viewed as the main compromise of America’s postwar liberal imperium: that unprepared, “debauched” people had been allowed to cast “the delicate fiction of sovereignty” over the resources of the Earth. The Homeland Empire marks a kind of reemergence of Kennan’s morbid disquiet – with mass deportation at its core. What is being put into question now is the ‘delicate fiction’ that the sovereignty of people living within the US affords them inviolable civil and political rights.

The irony to national conservatism, or populist nationalism, is that it actually represents the further hollowing out of the theory of popular sovereignty as the basis of the modern nation-state. In a 1989 interview, Trump described his business philosophy thus: “When you’re doing business, you take people to the brink of breaking them without having them break, to the maximum point their heads can handle – without breaking them.” Seen through the eyes of its CEO president, the US is little more than a heavily armed hedge fund rewriting an investment prospectus and rebalancing its portfolio; the vast majority of its people are not recognised shareholders – including many whose heads are now being broken.

Part of what has given Trumpism the elan and frisson of conspiratorial revelation is that it excavated legacies and remnants of the postwar right that never converted to liberal-democracy – the hidden transcripts of fascist fealty have been brought out into the open. Unlike the first time, Trump 2.0 has a fully staffed-up government, and the support of a segment of the billionaire class and the surveillance tech elite. This formation now presides over the most distinctive product of America’s postwar liberal empire, its national security state, which continues to be reconsecrated on a bipartisan basis, year after year, to the tune of $1 trillion in discretionary spending. It never occurs to the architects and propagandists of American power, even those that now oppose Trump, that its violence is anything less than virtuous, or that the empire’s kinetic actions could eventually rebound back.

Trump has styled himself as the hideously exemplary figure for the end of American exemplarity – a descent from an idea of creedal Americanism in a world of formally equal nation states into the vulgar, predatory, racist, great-power conflicts of old. He does not transcend history, but affirms what Miller calls its “iron laws”. Reversing this will require something more than a return to normalcy, particularly as the American security state tends to be accretive – recent history suggests that it only metastasises. A more profound and comprehensive democratic renewal and reconstruction is needed.

The good news is that the US is a large, diverse, energetic country, filled with people who do not like to be bullied and coerced, who still possess significant degrees of autonomy, and who are beginning to stir and fight back. The culture of fascism and authoritarianism now spewed from government social media, and amplified by paid right-wing influencers and bot farms, reflects neither popular sentiment nor the ordinary conviviality of daily life, particularly in cities.

Violence is not power. Dominance without hegemony is dangerous, but fragile. Democratic ferment, unlike kinetic action, tends to be slow, until it isn’t. The political opposition desperately needs trustworthy leadership and organisation, but it is anything but timorous. As we already see, it will take many people willing to risk being on the other side of terrible violence. But in a waning American age, the struggle to defeat the Homeland Empire can also teach us to finally see the horizons of a world shared in common.