The Infrastructure of Future Repression

What begins as immigration control is quickly becoming a national infrastructure of repression—one that can be turned inward on political dissent and public protest.

The detention centers being built today are not just about immigration enforcement. They are scaffolding for something more dangerous. Facilities designed to hold migrants without visas or individuals whose legal status has been revoked are already expanding. What few are asking is this: what happens when those same facilities are used for other groups—those redefined, not legally but politically, as threats?

This isn’t conjecture. It’s the logic of how authoritarian systems consolidate. What begins with one target—migrants, asylum seekers, overstayed visas—easily expands. The rationale changes. The machinery stays.

In every case, the justification starts with control. Border enforcement. Public safety. Rule of law. But once the infrastructure is in place, once legal categories are made flexible and enforcement becomes discretionary, it’s no longer about migration. It’s about power. The ability to detain, isolate, and disappear someone is no longer tied to what they’ve done, but to how they’re defined. And definitions, in this political climate, are shifting fast.

The language has already laid the groundwork. Trump doesn’t speak about migrants as people crossing a border—he speaks of “poisoned blood,” of “invaders,” of “animals.” The discursive frame is not administrative. It’s existential. And when other groups—journalists, teachers, activists, dissidents—are described as “vermin” or “enemies of the people,” the logic expands. The category of who can be excluded, confined, or stripped of rights is already being widened in public view.

Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration, proposes a massive expansion of deportation infrastructure: mobile courts, large-scale detention centers, executive power untethered from legal constraint. But deportation is only one function of that machinery. The real power lies in what the system enables: arrest without charge, confinement without transparency, expulsion without review. These aren’t hypothetical dangers. They’re logistical capabilities being built now.

What makes this more alarming is that none of it requires dramatic change. Repression doesn’t always arrive through coups or proclamations. It often enters through bureaucratic drift—when policies are redirected, routines reclassified, and infrastructure quietly repurposed. The forms remain. The functions shift.

Anthropologists of power have long warned about this. Repression doesn’t only happen through brute force. It happens through routinization, through paperwork, through the slow normalization of discretionary authority. It wears the mask of process. And it becomes most dangerous when no one notices it has already crossed the line.

What we’re seeing now is also a form of theater. Deportation raids, holding buses, heavily armed agents knocking on doors—these are not just tools of enforcement. They are acts of symbolic violence, meant to discipline others by showing what the state can do. The targets may be migrants, but the audience is much broader. These spectacles train citizens to look away, to stay quiet, to internalize the risk of speaking out.

History offers precedent. The U.S. has already used its immigration system to carry out ideological purges—against labor organizers, anarchists, Japanese Americans, and antiwar activists. What changes in an authoritarian turn is scale, speed, and scope. The very tools designed for border control—detainers, administrative courts, no-access zones, privately run facilities—become domestic instruments of political enforcement.

The machinery doesn’t have to be redesigned. It just has to be redirected.

That’s the deeper danger. Repression isn’t announced in new laws. It arrives through the repurposing of familiar systems. The camps don’t appear overnight. They begin as shelters, processing centers, enforcement hubs. Then the definitions shift, and so does their use.

By the time the targets expand, the system is already in place. And the public has already grown used to it.

That’s what makes this moment so critical. It’s not just policy we need to fight. It’s the normalization of the physical and bureaucratic architecture of repression. Every new detention facility, every bypassed court process, every warehouse turned holding site is not just a tool for immigration enforcement. It’s a test run.

The challenge now is not just to defend the rights of migrants. It’s to defend the idea that rights are not conditional. That no one should be confined because of how they are framed. Because once the power to detain is unmoored from due process, no one is safe from its expansion.

And once the system is running, all it takes is a redefinition of who counts as a threat.

Suggested Readings

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/07/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-takes-action-to-end-crime-and-disorder-on-americas-streets/

Aretxaga, Begoña. Shattering Silence: Women, Nationalism, and Political Subjectivity in Northern Ireland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.

Fassin, Didier. Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

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

Kapferer, Bruce. Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance, and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988.

Menjívar, Cecilia, and Leisy J. Abrego. “Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants.” American Journal of Sociology 117, no. 5 (2012): 1380–1421.

Ticktin, Miriam. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.