“The CIA’s old planes may no longer be circling Macedonia, but the SUV without plates outside the Home Depot in Los Angeles performs the same function.”
Not all ghosts wear orange jumpsuits. Some wear high-vis vests, hard hats, or school rucksacks. Some speak K’iche’, or Tagalog, or Arabic. Some are just hungry. This is the logic of disappearance. A logic developed in the shadowlands of empire, from the salt pits of Afghanistan to the dark cells of Djibouti. It has finally made it home. Under President Trump and his chief ideologue Stephen Miller, extraordinary rendition has been retooled not as counterterrorism but as racialised domestic policy. The CIA’s old planes may no longer be circling Macedonia, but the SUV without plates outside the Home Depot in Los Angeles performs the same function.
In the Trumpian formulation of statecraft, legality is beside the point. The premise is much older: that certain people are outside the law by virtue of their origin. During the early years of the so-called War on Terror, this meant Afghans, Pakistanis, North Africans—Muslims. Now, under the auspices of “immigration enforcement,” it means Central Americans, undocumented Filipinos, Black migrants, Palestinian schoolchildren. The infrastructure is eerily familiar. Secret transfers. Unmarked vehicles. Detention without charge. Torture by proxy. Legal process suspended or circumvented. The whole monstrous edifice of the post-9/11 state, refitted and aimed inward.
The Boomerang Comes Home
Spencer Ackerman has a name for this: the Imperial Boomerang. Writing in Zeteo, he traced the way the tactics and technologies of empire return to the metropole. What was once inflicted on the periphery becomes domestic policy. The logic of Guantánamo animates the federalisation of the California National Guard. This is the Israeli playbook. Build the wall, surveil the slum, blame the persecuted for dying. Now seamlessly imported into LA. Ackerman’s piece opens with an ICE raid: “officers in bulletproof vests snatching unarmed labourers from a Home Depot parking lot.” Home Depot becomes a totem in this new theatre of enforcement: a hardware store, a labour site, and now a hunting ground. It’s an image freighted with symbolic weight: brown men, kidnapped in daylight by men with guns, while America shops for drywall and kettle grills.
But Ackerman doesn’t stop at symbolism. He notes that these raids are no longer even pretending to be deportations in the traditional sense. Migrants, particularly Venezuelans, are being sent not to their home countries but to third-party states like El Salvador. There they are housed (if that’s the word) in counterterrorism prisons built to US spec. Ackerman references CECOT, the Salvadoran mega-prison, where detainees are held indefinitely in a manner indistinguishable from CIA black sites. The same logic, the same architecture, the same shadow. And who was it, one wonders, who laid the foundations?
In Torture Taxi, Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson charted the early geography of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme. Private planes filed false flight plans to airstrips like Desert Rock, then vanished into the Nellis Range or landed in countries where torture was not merely tolerated but systematised. The bodies they carried were nameless, stateless, reduced to tail numbers and seatbelts. Civilian contractors ran the show. The paper trail was murky, the accountability non-existent. This, they observed, was a kind of logistical sorcery: war by FedEx, torture by Gulfstream. The genius of the system lay in its plausibility deniability and bureaucratic opacity. No uniforms. No trials. No jurisdiction.
Now compare that to how ICE operates in 2025. Agents wear no badges. Detainees are held in facilities whose locations are often kept secret from lawyers and family. In some cases, they are shipped across state lines without documentation. A student named Rümeysa Öztürk was taken from her school car park in Los Angeles by masked men who refused to identify themselves. The destination? Unknown. Crime? None. Affiliation? Palestinian solidarity. This is not deportation. This is disappearance disguised in red, white and blue.
A Blueprint for Disappearance
The mechanism has changed only in scale. In Ghost Plane, Stephen Grey detailed the journey of Maher Arar, a Canadian abducted at JFK and rendered to Syria. There, in the notorious Palestine Branch, he was tortured with electric cables and left in a coffin-sized cell. No evidence was ever produced. His case was later ruled a gross miscarriage of justice. The lesson was absorbed: bureaucratic complexity can make a disappearance functionally invisible. ICE, like the CIA before it, has understood that the best way to disappear someone is not through secrecy, but through procedural excess—a paper trail that leads nowhere, databases that don’t talk to each other, court dates that never come.
Stephen Miller understood something else: that fear of power is as potent as its use. He didn’t invent the rendition apparatus, but he became its domestic architect. Where Cheney saw terrorists, Miller saw demographics. The logic was the same: exceptional powers to confront an existential threat. Only now the threat was not in Hamburg but Bakersfield.
There are no warrants. No court dates. No Miranda rights. No legal counsel. This isn’t arrest and deportation. This is extraordinary rendition: the repurposing of national security infrastructure to disappear people without charge or trace.
In 2019, Miller proposed embedding ICE agents in the Office of Refugee Resettlement—not to protect unaccompanied children but to use them as bait. Biometric data from parents seeking their children would be used to deport them. Officials admitted it: the goal was deterrence, not safety. It was, in effect, a hostage policy.
Fear, Not Law
This was not about law; it was about fear. The logic was imported wholesale from the black sites of the early War on Terror: exploit vulnerability, sever kinship ties, and use the threat of indefinite detention to suppress resistance. That this was done under the colour of refugee care speaks volumes about the moral inversion of the Trump administration’s immigration strategy. Miller saw children, not as people but as leverage.
Following public rebuke by Miller in May 2025, ICE tripled its daily detention quota. The result: volleyball players detained at traffic stops, legal immigrants arrested at courthouse hearings, people lured to check-ins and disappeared. Emerson Colindres, a 19-year-old from Ohio, went to a standard ICE appointment and was handcuffed onto a plane. His crime? None. He’d lived in the US since he was eight.
To get numbers, tactics changed. Agents no longer targeted “priority removals.” They swept day labourer sites, garment factories, even 7-Elevens. One former ICE official described the new approach: “you go to day labourer sites and arrest every illegal alien.” There is no discretion, no pretence of proportionality. The message isn’t “you’re a criminal.” It’s “you’re disposable.”
This is not logistics—it’s spectacle. When Kristi Noem floats sending migrants to Guantánamo, she isn’t proposing policy. She’s staging provocation. The aesthetics of the black site. Those steel doors, vanished bodies, impunity—are being repurposed for domestic effect.
According to internal sources, Miller told ICE to drop all prioritisation: immigration status alone was grounds for arrest. Supermarkets. Schools. Courts. Even those with pending visas were targets. DHS officials responded bluntly: “That is precisely what will happen.” Arrest without suspicion. Removal without warning. Disappearance without cause.
Miller and Noem don’t want a system. They want an atmosphere—immigration as theatre. Rage as policy. A state in which no one is safe. This isn’t new. It’s the logic of CIA black sites, translated into everyday American life. Visibility without identification. Force without charge. Presence without accountability.
“This is not bureaucracy gone awry. This is state violence by design.”
People should stop calling this immigration enforcement. It is extraordinary rendition in the domestic sphere, designed not only to deport but to destabilise—to make life unlivable for entire communities, to ensure that fear, not law, becomes the organising principle of American migration policy.
Bipartisan Architecture
Miller didn’t need to build the system. He inherited it. Biden may have promised reform, but he governed as willing steward, not saboteur. Deportation flights to countries under active travel advisories continued. Title 42—Trump’s blunt instrument of exclusion—was kept in place, defended in court, and only rolled back when it became politically untenable. While Democrats publicly decried family separation, they quietly expanded surveilance and AI tracking tools, handed fresh contracts to the detention industry, and criminalised border crossings through a policy of attrition.
The liberal state’s genius was in laundering the spectacle. There were no tweets, no photo ops with cages—but the machinery thrived and would have expanded under Biden. By the time Trump returned to office in 2025, the infrastructure was already fortified. The legal architecture was intact. Surveillance systems had been upgraded. ICE had new headquarters. The databases talked to each other.
“People should stop calling this immigration enforcement. It is extraordinary rendition in the domestic sphere, designed not only to deport but to destabilise—to make life unlivable for entire communities, to ensure that fear, not law, becomes the organising principle of American migration policy.”
Homeland Security’s budget went up under Biden. The raids didn’t stop; they just changed their tone.
This isn’t just a shift in policy. It’s the maturation of what William I. Robinson calls the global police state: a fusion of tech surveillance, racialised enforcement, and border militarism designed to manage the surplus population. Trump may operate with more malice, but the underlying logic—contain, deter, disappear—was never his alone.
If this sounds insane, it’s because it is. But insanity has always been a useful cover for policy. As Mark Fallon notes in Unjustifiable Means, the post-9/11 interrogation programme was not just legally dubious; it was strategically incoherent. It failed even on its own terms. Torture produced noise, not intelligence. The CIA knew this. So did the Pentagon. But the spectacle was the point. What mattered was the demonstration of impunity. The pain was policy.
Fallon, who worked inside the system, now sees what others missed. That extraordinary rendition was not an aberration but a blueprint. That the framework for what Trump and Miller are doing was laid down by bipartisan consent, with complicity from Democrats who now bleat about “distractions” and “overreach.” This includes those who helped create the Department of Homeland Security in 2002, a structure Ackerman rightly describes as “a money funnel for militarising the police.” What began as counterterrorism became counter-migration. What was called national security became national purity.
In America’s Covert War in East Africa, Clara Usiskin documents the detentions of black Muslim men in the Horn of Africa, kidnapped by Somali warlords, flown out of Nairobi, and dropped into US black sites. Suleiman Abdallah, abducted while helping someone fix a car, found himself in Djibouti, then COBALT. He was never charged. His captors spoke English and wore masks. His crime was to know someone who knew someone who knew someone. Usiskin shows how this system relied on plausible deniability and racialised assumptions. The rendition programme did not need evidence. It needed only proximity, and melanin.
Now, ICE raids restaurants and pizzerias with the same logic. Ackerman recounts the words of a witness in Pennsylvania: “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.” What the public is beginning to understand—what it has taken two decades of war to learn—is that the language of security is not neutral. It is a weapon. It is used not to describe threats, but to create them.
The term “mass deportation” is now functionally meaningless. This is not deportation but removal. Not enforcement but erasure. The goal is not to return people to somewhere legal, but to nowhere. To deny them location, documentation, existence. And like all imperial systems, it feeds off the idea that it cannot happen here. But it can. It is. When masked men in body armour can take your child from a school for being too vocal about Palestine, you no longer live in a democracy. You live in an empire that has turned inward, in a republic that has eaten itself.
And while this spectacle is ongoing in the American heartlands, who is guarding the wall? Less than you think. In May, whistleblowers revealed that hundreds of National Guard troops assigned to the southern border had been quietly redeployed to support ICE operations inland. The wall, always more theatre than barrier, now functions as a backdrop while the real action unfolds in courthouses, schools, and car parks. Border enforcement has been internalised—migrants don’t have to cross the wall to be hunted by it. The message is clear: the border is everywhere.
“The goal is not to return people to somewhere legal, but to nowhere.”
This Is Not Deportation
We need to be exact about what this is not. It is not due process. It is not lawful arrest followed by adjudication and deportation. It is not enforcement. It is rendition. People are being seized by masked agents, sent into legal voids. Not to their countries—but into black-site systems of indefinite detention. What the CIA once did abroad is now being done at home. That it happens to migrants, students, and labour organisers makes it no less illegal. No less obscene.
The fantasy of control that once drove the CIA’s rendition programme is now embedded in Trump’s state. The planes still fly. The surveillance still hums. Only the targets have changed.
The War on Terror is not over. It’s just changed address.
