The Architecture of Fear: How Detention Becomes a Template for Control

How infrastructure built for deportation becomes a tool for political repression.

There’s something fishy about the new detention centers being built that doesn’t smell right. The numbers just don’t add up, which leads me to suspect they aren’t just about deportation. They’re about building out the infrastructure of repression. They signal what the state can do and whom it can act upon.

Trump has promised to deport millions. To make that seem plausible, he’s ordering new facilities, converting military bases, and expanding enforcement budgets. But the numbers defy the narrative. With roughly 11 million undocumented residents in the U.S., even deporting a million people a year—a pace no administration has achieved—would take over a decade, assuming no new arrivals and no legal setbacks. This isn’t policy. It’s theater.

But that theater leaves a real infrastructure behind.

Facilities built for mass deportation won’t disappear if the plan falters. They’ll remain: beds, fences, biometric systems, mobile courts, transport fleets. These aren’t temporary fixes. They’re material investments in a model of governance built on threat classification and population control. Once in place, the system doesn’t sit idle. It seeks new uses.

And immigration law offers the perfect entry point. Unlike criminal law, it allows detention without trial, removal without a public hearing, and surveillance without probable cause. It operates in a legal gray zone, nominally administrative and functionally punitive, where due process is thinner and discretion broader. That flexibility makes it a powerful tool—not just for immigration enforcement, but for political containment.

Recent purges of immigration judges under the Trump administration make this shift unmistakable. Dozens have been dismissed, forced into early retirement, or replaced with political loyalists. Some were let go without cause, including judges who had ruled independently or resisted pressure to accelerate deportations. The courts themselves are being hollowed out—less a venue for legal review than a formality. When adjudication is subordinated to executive preference, detention becomes not the outcome of law but its substitute.

This isn’t new. The U.S. has repeatedly used immigration law to police ideology and loyalty. Labor organizers, anarchists, and Japanese Americans were all detained or deported not for crimes, but for who they were and what they represented. The machinery doesn’t need to change. It only needs to be turned inward.

Other countries offer a warning. In Turkey, Hungary, and India, detention infrastructure built for terrorists or border control now targets journalists, NGOs, and political opponents. The logic is consistent: first define an external threat, then redefine the internal enemy. The architecture stays the same. The categories shift.

Meanwhile, a growing share of that architecture is privately run. Corporations like CoreCivic, GEO Group, and Palantir aren’t just contractors. They’re stakeholders in a detention economy that profits from expanded enforcement. Surveillance platforms, transport services, biometric databases, and mobile courts operate through public-private partnerships designed for scale and discretion. In this political economy, authoritarianism isn’t just a threat to democracy. It’s a business model.

The economic reality only sharpens the contradiction. The U.S. needs between one and two million new workers annually to replace retirees and meet labor demand. Yet legal immigration pathways cover barely half that. Instead of expanding them, the state pours money into walls and cells. The same system that depends on migrant labor criminalizes the people who provide it. That’s not economic planning. It’s narrative control.

The danger lies not only in what’s being built, but in what it normalizes. Detention centers, mobile tribunals, and enforcement zones don’t just mark the border. They blur the line between legal procedure and executive power. They prepare the state to act not according to law, but according to loyalty.

This isn’t a warning about a distant future. It’s a description of what’s already underway. The infrastructure is operational. The legal framework is pliable. The political incentive to expand it grows with every manufactured crisis.

Daily life may feel untouched. Stores stay open. Screens glow. But the architecture of fear works quietly, adjusting the space in which people move, speak, and imagine what’s possible. Its first targets are vulnerable. Its ultimate targets are anyone who resists.

Every new site, every court bypass, every data-sharing contract is more than a tool of immigration enforcement. It’s a test of capacity, and of consent. Once the system is in place, all it takes is a redefinition of who counts as a threat.

We must not accept this as necessary or normal, it’s not.

Suggested Readings

Hernández, Kelly Lytle. 2010. Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Heyman, Josiah McC. 2020. “Constructing the U.S.–Mexico Border: Discourses, Organizations, and History.” In The U.S.–Mexico Transborder Region: Cultural Dynamics and Historical Interactions, edited by Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez and Josiah McC. Heyman, 31–52. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. (and selected essays on fear-limited mobility and administrative enforcement)

Miller, Todd. 2019. Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border Around the World.London: Verso.

Ngai, Mae M. 2004. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. 2025. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Graham, Stephen. 2010. Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London: Verso.