Anti-Militarism: News & Updates

‘Hondurasgate’ exposed a plan to boost far-right American puppets across the Western Hemisphere. Under the auspices of fighting international cartels and combating Chinese influence, Trump has sought to revive authoritarianism in the region.

U.S. interference in Latin Ameican politics is hardly novel. Since the very founding of the United States, its governments have tended to assert that the entire Western Hemisphere is America’s neocolonial possession. If anything, the recent Pink Tide—the period of left-wing populism in Central and South America that came about at the beginning of the 21st century—is a historical anomaly. From the Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century; the counterinsurgency doctrines created after World War II; the brutal, CIA-trained death squads that terrorized opposition parties in the 1970s and ’80s during Operation Condor; and the hard austerity politics of the neoliberal era at the end of the millennium, right-wing, US-backed governance has been the overwhelming Latin American status quo since the excising of the Spanish Empire.

On July 6, Honduran police violently evicted members of the Garífuna community of San Juan, using tear gas and live ammunition and arresting five human rights defenders. The incident occurred after a new law gave security forces more power to carry out evictions in areas that were more involved in economic projects. Garífuna and campesino organizations argue that the law protects economic interests while threatening ancestral and rural communities. The communities talk about the long history of land conflicts and state violence. Since then, other communities have faced evictions, arrests, and violence. Grassroots organizations have now been organizing protests and appealed to international organizations, asking for the revoking of the law, as well as the protection of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and campesino land rights.

A new interactive tool from Relevant Research tracks the growing number of deaths inside ICE's civil immigrant detention system, with links to source material and downloadable data. https://www.detentionmortality.com/

Detention was sold as both a law-and-order necessity and an economic opportunity, welding together the rac­ist politics of the drug war with the rise of private prisons.

A bill intended to halt the supposed threat of “organized retail crime” would put ICE in charge of the federal response. The Combating Organized Retail Crime Act, or CORCA, which was introduced by Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa last year with wide bipartisan support, would give Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority to coordinate federal efforts against large-scale shoplifting. Civil libertarian groups are disturbed by legislation they say constitutes a major expansion of domestic surveillance and policing by DHS.  “This would formalize a mechanism for retailers to share data about consumers with DHS.”

DHS deploys AI in immigration enforcement largely untested, undisclosed, and unreviewed, a preview of how AI could reshape executive power. 

In a recent article, Cullen O’Keefe, Alan Rozenshtein, and Christoph Winter introduced the concept of “ExecAI:” the use of advanced AI systems within the executive branch and the ways those systems could erode the separation of powers. They ask what happens when presidential directives can be executed without the institutional friction that human decision-makers often provide: opportunities for dissent, whistleblowing, meaningful attribution when errors occur, and enough time for courts to intervene.

The piece presents these as emerging challenges, but the immigration system offers a concrete case study because it already combines broad executive discretion, limited constitutional protections, and the rapid adoption of AI-enabled decision-making.

But the federal government has not needed frontier AI to begin reshaping executive power. It has done so through ordinary procurement and existing immigration authorities.ImmigrationOS, ICE’s operational platform, combines government records and commercial data into a single picture that helps prioritize enforcement targets. Hurricane Score, an algorithm previously used in ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program, estimated the likelihood that participants would abscond based in part on demographic and case-related information, including characteristics that raise significant equal protection concerns. And the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Asylum Text Analytics tool flags asylum applications for additional scrutiny and monitors attorneys and preparers as a network rather than reviewing cases in isolation.

From Austin Kocher: Welcome to the weekly segment called This Week by the {Immigration} Numbers. I’ll highlight some of the main takeaways from the week’s news that you might have missed, but do it in a unique way. Rather than try to summarize everything, I’ll pick a handful of figures each week that best capture where things are moving, explain why they matter, and provide a source where you can learn more. If you have a number to add to the mix or have a question about any of the numbers here, let me know in the comments.