Five Ways The War on Terror Empowered The ICE Assault

We got an advance look at a new analysis from the Costs of War Project about the heritage of the 9/11 era on current ICE operations

Edited by Sam Thielman 

OVER THE WEEKEND, Jose Oliveres revealed in The Guardian that ICE has contracted with a security firm called MVM to hunt for undocumented people who entered the United States as unaccompanied children. "ICE says it wants to confirm the children’s location, school enrollment and overall wellness, including checking for signs of abuse or trafficking, according to the contracting document," Oliveres reported. 

If you're thinking to yourself that MVM sounds familiar, perhaps you're remembering its earlier incarnation from the War on Terror. Back then, it provided force protection for CIA and NSA officers in Iraq. In 2018, I reported on an earlier ICE contract with MVM, this one to ferry unaccompanied migrant children across the ICE network of warehoused-sized cages. They did so "using unmarked vehicles, commercial airlines, and makeshift detention centers," according to a recent lawsuit Jose reports on. That lawsuit, which is ongoing, was brought by two Guatemalan fathers who allege MVM complicity in "torture, enforced disappearance and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment." 

If only there had been warning signs about the company's willingness to do the dirty work of empire. 

The MVM contract is one example among many—seriously, someone should write a book—of the heritage of the War on Terror manifesting within the operations of ICE, an institution that war literally created. Such examples are the subject of an excellent and insightful analysis published this morning by the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Written by Widener University Delaware Law School Professor Elizabeth Beavers, it provides a vivid, concise framework along five critical and listicle-ready areas for understanding that heritage. 

"In its wide-ranging abuse of the law to support its anti-immigration agenda, the Trump administration is in part utilizing rhetoric and legal precedent borrowed from the 'War on Terror,'" Beavers writes. She concludes: "Indisputably, administration officials are weaponizing the law in new and particularly indefensible ways to effectuate a widespread harassment and mass deportation campaign that is more akin to ethnic cleansing than routine immigration enforcement." 

I would put it slightly differently. "Routine immigration enforcement" always possessed the ethnic-cleansing gene in its DNA, though it hasn't always been the dominant one. A hard-and-fast distinction between, say, ICE in 2026 and ICE in 2006—or between ICE and its predecessor, Immigration and Naturalization Services—risks whitewashing pre-9/11 immigration enforcement. Dan Denvir wrote an excellent book about the violence that enforcement entailed. I don't think Beavers would disagree. And certainly, the War on Terror was the crucible for ICE's emergence as a domestic secret police. I just want to retain some skepticism about what a phrase like "routine immigration enforcement" conceals.

Beavers' report is out this morning. I don't mind saying I find it validating, and not only because of all the kind things it says about my work in citation. Given how perfect its overlap is with the central preoccupations of this newsletter, the Costs of War Project gave FOREVER WARS an early look. You should read Beavers' report on its own terms,  but I'll quickly run through her five areas of focus. 

CONFLATION OF IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AND COUNTERTERRORISM

Beyond simply the creation of ICE, Beavers identifies a foundation for what ICE eventually became in the FBI's wide-ranging investigation of the 9/11 attacks, known as PENTTBOM. PENTTBOM was the umbrella and the justification for an immigration detention dragnet that resulted in the detention of at least 1200 people and likely many more. You'll read in my forthcoming book about Majid Khan about how the FBI "investigated" the attack overseas, in places like Pakistan. Beavers insightfully notes that often the bureau didn't rely on powers granted post-9/11, but rather on existing immigration law, which was eminently weaponizable. 

"In the end," Beavers writes, "the program did not result in the conviction of anyone actually involved in 9/11 or any other act of terrorism but instead resulted in hundreds of arrests and closed-door trials for minor, technical immigration law violations such as taking too few academic credits under a student visa." 

EXPANDED AND POLITICIZED 'TERRORIST' DESIGNATION LISTS

Beavers notes how poorly defined "terrorism" is as a concept within U.S. law, making it a useful authoritarian tool. To designate a group as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), an administration "must find that the group engages in 'terrorist activity,' with a definition that is wide-ranging enough to be regarded by at least one scholar as allowing 'almost any group to be designated.'" Beavers focuses on the past 18 months' steady expansion of Venezuelan gangs and the Venezuelan military itself as FTOs. The purpose has been to accustom U.S. audiences for dozens of murders of fishermen in the southern Caribbean, and then a regime-change operation. I'd only add that we should also understand this point in reference to Trump's National Security Presidential Memo-7. A hunt for foreign connections to domestic left wing groups will unlock a whole lot of surveillance authorities, especially Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and they don't have to be plausible connections.

Speaking of: I'll be part of an online panel on Monday, May 11 at 7 p.m. talking about NSPM-7 that Defending Rights and Dissent is holding. Check their website for more information, since we're unlikely to publish another edition before then—Sam has a reporting trip coming up—and I don't have more details at present. 

I also have to note that just yesterday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent actually said that China's purchases of Iranian oil represent material support for terrorism. 

DEPORTING PEOPLE AS TERRORISTS WITHOUT PROVING ACTUAL VIOLENT CONDUCT

This is the maturation phase of what's called "material support for terrorism," a dragnet category designed to grow like a spider's web, expanding through threads of association. Before the 1990s, prosecuting someone for a connection to an act of terrorism required a defendant to affirmatively participate in or knowingly contribute to a specific act of violence. That's ancient history. Only now, Beavers notes, the logic of the post-9/11 expansion of the material-support-for-terrorism now applies to deportations. Beavers highlights ICE accusing someone of links to MS-13 because they once gave up money to MS-13 gang members threatening them. She rightfully points to the ICE detentions of people who engaged in pro-Palestine speech, particularly that of Yaa'kub Ira Vijandre, who has spent nearly seven months in prison for his Instagram activity. 

INDEFINITE DETENTION, TORTURE AND RENDITION OF NONCITIZENS

I'm grateful to Beavers for invoking post-9/11 renditions as a template for ICE deportations to countries, like South Sudan, far from migrants' homes. To her, the entire unpunished legacy of CIA and military torture not only normalized such treatment but ensured it would expand to new cohorts. As you can read from yesterday's devastating Washington Post report on 1,460 incidents of ICE force inside its cages—documents with the chilling name "Daily Detainee Assault Reports" and leaked by a whistleblower—or in my own reporting going back years, this is a proper context in which to understand the brutality of ICE. 

Naturally, Beavers also traces the twin uses of Guantanamo for both counterterrorism and countermigration operations. As she notes, Camp 6 of the wartime prison has now been repurposed for "high-risk" migrants—a term that needs more journalistic attention. "As of the time of this writing, more than 700 migrants have been sent to and from Guantánamo in President Trump’s second term, detained there by ICE with support from the military," she writes. That number is eye-opening. There have been 779 men detained as terrorists at Guantanamo in total; and now almost as many migrants. 

Also, speaking of that Post report, it says without elaboration that ICE uses "restraint chairs." That really needs urgent additional investigation. You will read in my forthcoming book about CIA black site/Guantanamo survivor Majid Khan about such a chair. The term itself is reminiscent of an infamous torture technique Israelis used on Palestinians that the Israeli Supreme Court banned in 1999. 

ANTIDEMOCRATIC CONCENTRATION OF EXECUTIVE NATIONAL SECURITY POWERS

This one is bound to get the lawyers animated. It's also one of the most underappreciated aspects of Constitutional collapse. Throughout the War on Terror, the courts, nine times out of ten, simply allow the executive branch to do as it likes, using the language and culture of judicial restraint to stop themselves from redressing abuses of power and usurpations of authority. Now the Trump administration can push even further—certainly after Trump v. United States—"without fear they will be meaningfully held accountable in court," Beavers writes. 

I wrote in REIGN OF TERROR that we should not let ourselves think we have seen the War on Terror's final form. The use of the War on Terror for "a widespread harassment and mass deportation campaign… akin to ethnic cleansing" is a reminder that nothing short of its total abolition is a tolerable redress.

"SUPERPOWERS DON'T DO WINDOWS." Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth showed this morning how adrift the United States is in the Iran War he insists isn't a forever war. Over the weekend, President Trump decided that he was going to order the U.S. Navy to break the Iranian throttling of the Strait of Hormuz through cross-strait escorts. That's a very dangerous mission, one that will put the U.S. fleet in range of Iranian missiles, fast-boats—hey, I thought they didn't have a navy anymore, Pete?—and drones. Two U.S. destroyers came under Iranian fire on Monday, as did, more substantially, an Emirati petroleum-refinery complex. 

This is an attempt to solve the Strait problem militarily, a spasm of frustration over not possessing the leverage to open the Strait, and a tacit admission that the U.S. counter-blockade isn't producing the leverage Trump hoped, at least not on his desired timeframe. With the risks to U.S. naval forces unmistakable, Hegseth announced Tuesday morning that the escort mission, titled "Project Freedom" because you're not getting out of this war with your intelligence uninsulted, will be temporary—that is, off-loaded at some point to unspecified allies. That's doubly a signal of defeat: First, as conservatives like Hegseth loved observing throughout the Iraq War, the administration is imposing an announced time-based limit on its mission, signalling to the Iranians that they can wait the U.S. out and that there is a limit to U.S. willingness to escalate, both terms that favor the Iranians. Secondly, there is no ally that will perform this escort mission. This was a fantasy of Jim Mattis when he was Central Command commander, and it's a fantasy of Hegseth's. 

Back when Donald Rumsfeld was defense secretary—the height of U.S. unipolar power—there was a saying that "superpowers don't do windows," meaning there were certain inglorious petty-ante tasks of empire that the superpower should outsource to its vassals. Only the vassals didn't act like vassals, and the U.S. was left sputtering with indignation. 

This is a very dangerous moment. The guns have been mostly silent in this war since April 8 until yesterday. Hegseth this morning Hegseth this morning said the ceasefire holds despite the shots at the destroyers. Such Iranian fires, including sporadic ones since April 8, are "all below the threshold of restarting major combat operations, at this point." That may no longer hold—especially since Hegseth's comment is bound to lead the Iranians to think that there remains a threshold of violence that won't trigger American reprisal. We have an escalatory spiral floating in the water. 

FROM SAM: I’ve written a few times for FOREVER WARS about the depravity of the big bloc of politically conservative Christian denominations we used to call fundamentalists and then started calling evangelicals. I suppose I will now have to come up with a new descriptor to cover this group, since they don’t like that term, either. These are the people who get bent out of shape at the idea of neopronouns. 

You can read my pieces about the weird fixation on pedophiles, and about the alliance with the New Atheists in their war on Muslims, which I hope helps inform the way FOREVER WARS covers the War on Terror, but I’ve also been very interested in the reform movement within the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). In 2021, that movement, amazingly, bullied the SBC’s executive committee into forgoing attorney-client privilege so that a third-party investigator called Guidepost Solutions could investigate and produce a public report on what turned out to be decades of protecting pedophiles and rapists at all levels of the denomination. (I wrote about that report here.)

Yesterday Robert Downen, a reporter for Texas Monthly, published a 12,000-word investigation of the Guidepost Solutions report and its fallout and the muted consequences enjoyed by the the perpetrators and protectors of decades of child abuse and other forms of sexual assault, thanks to Donald Trump, their patron saint. It’s an incredible piece, not least for the way it takes as its hero Duane Rollins, the man repeatedly raped by SBC president Paul Pressler. Downen's opening tells how Rollins, on one of his many releases from prison, parked outside Pressler’s house one night with a loaded gun. Instead of killing Pressler, Rollins resolved to do something much braver: He would devote the rest of his life to exposing clerical abuse and defending its victims, including himself. I think you should read this piece.

To the extent that I have anything to add to Downen’s incredible work, it’s merely the observation that I think he makes the case, deliberately or no, that the reason Pressler was able to get away with so much for so long was his function as a committed racist who could act as an intermediary to the Republican Party, which of course was the political engine of the state's disenfranchisement of Black people, and that's who the people who gave the most money to Baptist churches wanted to see in power. Pressler's hobby of ruining children’s lives was simply the cost of doing that particular business. The SBC has been through periods where it tries to reckon with its foundational crime—the schism with Northern Baptists over the financial contributions of their donor class, which is to say slaveholders—but it never quite manages to redesign its structure so there’s no longer a place at the highest levels of seniority for a neoconfederate power-broker to carry out the whims of the elite laity.

And to Spencer’s earlier point about total abolition: You can get rid of a particular craftsman because you don’t like what he makes. But if you leave his workshop and tools lying around, eventually someone is going to decide to pick them up again.

TWO PUBLIC APPEARANCES OF MINE are coming up! On May 14, come to the Brooklyn Institute for a discussion I'll be part of about the Jewish anti-Zionist past and future, hinging on Molly Crabapple's bestselling (!!!) book Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of The Jewish Bund. Tickets are available here. I hear it's sold out, though. 

Then, on June 30, I'll be speaking with my brother from another mother, Colin Asher, about his hopefully-bestselling book The Midnight Special, the best book about American music and the carceral state you'll ever read. It's going to be the first time Colin and I have been onstage since our teenage punk band 30 years ago. RSVP here. Hope to see you at both!