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The Imperial Boomerang Lands in Los Angeles
As police and the National Guard escalate against anti-ICE protesters, the Department of Homeland Security bridges US violence abroad and US violence at home.
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The best analysis of the anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles comes from a poet and politician who died in 2008.
Aimé Césaire's seminal 1950 Discourse on Colonialism sought to make sense of a West emerging from the spectacular violence of Nazi Germany with certain convenient amnesias. Hailing from the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, Césaire found it risible that a shattered Europe did not – or, more accurately, would not – connect Nazi atrocities to those that the great European powers committed against the native populations of their claimed overseas possessions.
"[B]efore they were [Nazism's] victims, they were its accomplices," Césaire wrote. “[T]hey tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them… they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples." Césaire called this a "terrific boomerang effect." With some refinement, his concept is now known as the "Imperial Boomerang."
Césaire would definitely have recognized the Imperial Boomerang landing on the streets of Los Angeles. In the viral videos of chipped concrete raining on police cars from overpasses, Césaire would have seen the lineage of Palestinian stones thrown at Western-backed Israeli occupying forces, or even trash thrown by Kurds in Syria furious at the retreating US forces that left them to their fate from Turkish invaders in 2019. In the arrival of Black Hawk helicopters, mass surveillance tools, and the federalized California National Guard to LA, Césaire would have seen the fingerprints of the so-called US ‘War on Terror.’ As this piece was being edited, CNN reported that a battalion-sized force of 700 Marines would soon arrive in Los Angeles as if it was Fallujah.
And in the inciting event of ICE officers in bulletproof vests snatching unarmed laborers from a Home Depot parking lot – strange how their employers tend not to get arrested, huh? – Césaire would have seen not only the arbitrary detentions that are central features of military occupations, but the vengeful persecution of Western governments against the arrival of migrants from the countries those Western militaries destabilize.
Were Césaire alive to conduct a structural analysis of the advancing militarization of American law enforcement since 9/11, I suspect he would have understood the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a template for how Imperial Boomerangs operate in the 21st century.
Created by President George W. Bush under now-forgotten pressure from the Democratic Party in 2002, DHS did more than combine immigration enforcement, border militarization, and counterterrorism.
As the ‘War on Terror’ innovated powerful surveillance tools for battlefield usage in Iraq and Afghanistan, from astonishingly powerful camera suites to drones, DHS began acquiring them for its border operations. DHS was also a money funnel for police departments to buy military-grade equipment regardless of need. Police only had to spend "not less than 25 percent" of their counterterrorism grants, per a 2007 law, on "law enforcement terrorism prevention activities," with the rest being entirely at the cops' discretion. By 2014, this money pool totaled three times larger than the Pentagon's infamous 1033 program that also made military gear available to police. While I contend that the ‘War on Terror’ always simultaneously happened at home and abroad, DHS was a direct mechanism for bringing the tools of the war home.
As went the tools, so too went the culture and the operations of overseas occupation. Two decades of ICE raids at workplaces like slaughterhouses, restaurants, and farms that exploit undocumented labor have so thoroughly normalized treating unarmed migrants as people with no rights that DHS is bound to respect have now led to ICE arresting a high school student on his way to volleyball practice. In April, DHS agents tried to enter a Los Angeles elementary school. Those agents did not identify themselves, as is now routine: masked people allegedly employed by DHS are shoving students like Rümeysa Öztürk into unmarked cars for speaking out on behalf of Palestine. Provocations like these have created opportunities for an administration bent on escalation to arrest opposition political figures like Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and a staffer for Rep. Jerry Nadler, and now they’re threatening to arrest California Governor Gavin Newsom for calling the federalization of the California National Guard illegal. ICE director Todd Lyons was outraged when Boston Mayor Michelle Wu correctly observed that his agents act like secret police. Somewhere in the afterlife, Césaire must have suppressed an eye-roll and a smirk.
These are the frightening, escalating conditions that have caused regular people … to resist. They understand that what is done to the undocumented today will be done to US citizens tomorrow, much as it was done to Iraqis, Afghans, and many others yesterday.
What DHS and Trump call "mass deportation" is a lie. In practice, it is the Imperial Boomerang of the US extraordinary rendition from the first decade of the ‘War on Terror.’ Many captured migrants are not being sent to their country of origin, as the word "deportation" entails. DHS is sending them instead to completely different countries. In the case of those Venezuelans that it sent to the Salvadoran counterterror prison CECOT, DHS is sending people it dubiously calls criminals not to face prosecution, but for indefinite detention in conditions of brutality. These are the wages of US officials from both parties, particularly during the Obama administration, imposing zero accountability on the CIA officials who conducted extraordinary renditions on people it claimed and never had to prove were "terrorists." (It should come as a lesson that countries where such kidnappings occurred were the ones to impose criminal penalties on CIA officers.)
These are the frightening, escalating conditions that have caused regular people from Boston to Minneapolis to Los Angeles to resist. They understand that what is done to the undocumented today will be done to US citizens tomorrow, much as it was done to Iraqis, Afghans, and many others yesterday, and indeed to Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans the day before. Their keffiyehs signal that they see the connections between what the US does abroad and what the US does at home, something Palestinians showed in 2014 when they tweeted advice to Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, about avoiding tear gas. Now they face the terrifying prospect of US Marines turning their weapons on US citizens, as Trump wanted to do to Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020. Back then, he had a defense secretary who balked at that Rubicon-crossing move. Now, he has one who seems eager for it.
Americans in LA and beyond are correctly seeing the cynical rhetoric of counterterrorism – used by Trump because it worked for Bush and his successors – as bullshit meant to justify fascism. "It's really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armor comes to take him away is somehow the good guy," a Pennsylvania man said after witnessing ICE raid a pizzeria last month.
It seems that the last people to realize this are the Democratic politicians and commentators calling Trump's suppression of the protests a "distraction" and who criticize the protesters as playing “directly into the hands" of Trump. They should own what is unfolding on the streets of LA as their failure – their failure for not mobilizing effectively against more than four months of Trump and ICE escalations. Such fecklessness indicates they consider undocumented people expendable, much as they earlier considered Muslims in the US and abroad expendable throughout the ‘War on Terror.’ Had they not rolled their eyes at the abolition of ICE, had Democratic presidents not outcompeted Republicans in deporting the undocumented – and had their predecessors a generation ago not proposed the Department of Homeland Security in the first place – ordinary people in LA would not feel they have no choice but to be the resistance their politicians cannot summon.
Césaire understood these eminently respectable people, too. "[O]ne fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect," he observed in Discourse on Colonialism, "the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: 'How strange! But never mind—it's Nazism, it will pass!'" They are the ones who Césaire said "hide the truth from themselves": that the barbarism unfolding on their streets is the same barbarism from the ‘War on Terror’ and the 1980s Dirty Wars that they acquiesced to, accepted or even cheered.
Spencer Ackerman is a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award-winning reporter and the author of Reign of Terror: How The 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump. He is also the author of the FOREVER WARS newsletter on Ghost.