While U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appoints a new “government efficiency” committee and threatens to unleash the military in American cities, he is simultaneously pushing policies that will see billions poured into private security and surveillance companies—including those owned by his biggest campaign benefactors, with little or no accountability.
Armed drones, facial recognition, and robot dogs have become a part of popular culture over the past 20 years, with little attention to the violent impacts they have on both the militarization of communities and in all our daily lives. These dangerous products and technologies have served two functions: They are fear-based marketing tools that helped seed the rhetorical ground for the authoritarian backlash that came to full fruition in this election and they actually make the U.S. southern border region exponentially more dangerous for people living, working, and crossing there.
As veterans, we put our lives on the line so that our communities back home can live safe and secure lives. Trump’s cruel deportation plans and suggestion that the U.S. military be used to carry them out for the benefit of his billionaire friends is not what we signed up for.
We cannot let Trump-supporting tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel define what it means to be safe and secure.
Since at least 2001, when the U.S. entered its post-9/11 forever war period and established the “Department of Homeland Security,” a handful of journalists, activists, and migrants have been warning us about the all-too-cozy relationship between weapons manufacturers, tech companies, and the government agencies tasked with immigration enforcement. By 2022, this sprawling border and surveillance industry (BSI) had become a $500 billion business. The U.S. border and immigration enforcement budget under Democratic President Joe Biden exceeded $30 billion this year.
But Americans ain’t seen nothing yet. While this industry, which has used vulnerable populations as a testing ground for over a decade, has been slowly making its way into everyday life, the incoming Trump administration is about to fast track the reach of this violent industry in very intrusive ways into the lives of all Americans as the surveillance industry goes into overdrive.
Trump’s planned enforcement spending will hand billions to his friends in big business. Private prison stocks like Geo Group and CoreCivic nearly doubled in value after he was declared the winner of the November 5 election. This also happened in 2017, when, within a month of Trump taking office, CoreCivic and Geo Group doubled their stocks. The American Immigration Council has put the cost of Trump’s deportation proposals at an estimated $315 billion of taxpayer money, much of which would involve subsidies to industry.
To have the best chance at protecting immigrant communities in the coming months and years, we need to address the real threat to our communities: the billionaires and politicians who use anti-immigrant hate in order to increase their wealth and power.
These billionaires, who thrive on spreading fear, have learned to use the government as a personal piggy bank, while continuing to win delays for things like healthcare reform, poverty elimination, and climate action—endangering us all in the process.
Safety and community security are universal human values. As veterans, we understand how important it is to protect our loved ones from danger. We also believe that fighting for the rights of all our communities, and making climate justice a priority, is what will keep us safe and secure through the coming century. But Trumpism has warped our view of security so badly that many Americans now see billionaires as the answer, rather than the diverse working class people who build our factories, plow our fields, and serve our country so nobly, including in the military.
We cannot let Trump-supporting tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel define what it means to be safe and secure.
Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and far-right political donor, controls companies like Palantir, a data company which sells our personal information to militaries around the world, and Anduril, which builds AI-powered surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border and sells weaponized drones. Google Thiel’s name and you will see a litany of government contracts in the hundreds of millions and billions just in the past year alone, including to the Israeli military for automated targeting of Palestinians in Gaza.
Elon Musk currently holds $3 billion in U.S. government contracts, the bulk of them with NASA and the Department of Defense. Musk took more than $15 billion taxpayer dollars in contracts over the past decade.
We are not going to stand idly by as Trump deportation forces tear our communities apart. The border and surveillance industry, aligned with the dying fossil fuel industry, is intentionally creating a more hostile, insecure environment for all of us just to line their own pockets.
We are going to do what we did in 2016: Roll up our sleeves and get to work. We will rebuild safety and security within our communities by relying on each other to resist the coming federal incursions into our cities and states. We will organize with the migrant justice movement, with climate activists, and with defenders of democracy to protect our neighbors. And we will expose the hell out of the profiteering billionaire enablers of hate in our country.
