In December 2025 alone, 68,440 people were incarcerated in Ice institutions and six of them died (Photo: Flickr)
Donald Trump is heading an armed invasion force. But his target is not Venezuela, Iran or Greenland—it’s Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington DC and Minneapolis.
Trump is intensifying a process which writer Stephen Graham has described as “urban militarisation”.
He argues, “As our planet urbanises more rapidly than ever before, a new and insidious set of boomerang effects are permeating the fabric of cities and urban life.”
This boomerang effect means violent tactics developed and used by imperial powers will inevitably be used against domestic populations.
So Israeli drones designed to target Palestinians are now routinely deployed by police forces in North America, Europe and East Asia.
Israeli expertise in population control is regularly sought by those planning security operations for major summits and sporting events. Guided missiles, private armies and drones police key events, from the World Cup to the Davos Summit.
“Shoot to kill” policies developed to confront suicide bombers in Tel Aviv and Haifa were adopted by the Metropolitan police during the “War on Terror”.
This led to the state murder of Jean Charles De Menezes in a Tube station in July 2005.
Warfare and security concerns intrude on the everyday spaces and relationships of urban life.
This military urbanism is sustained by a rapidly growing economy of sprawling, transnational industrial complexes that suffuse with technology, surveillance and entertainment.
The imperial boomerang theory was first used by Aimé Césaire, an anti-colonial theorist and poet. Césaire wanted to describe how the deaths of millions of colonised and enslaved people exploded back into Europe in the form of the Nazis and concentration camps.
Fascist ideology drew on ideas of racial superiority used to justify imperial conquest and celebrated colonial genocides.
But fascism in Germany grew out of the social crisis and threat of the working class revolution after the First World War in 1918. It mobilised the insecure middle classes into a street movement, and was handed power by ruling classes because the usual methods of capitalist rule weren’t enough to maintain order.
Fascism promised to “restore greatness” through imperial conquest, but it was more than an import of colonial violence back to Europe.
The imperial boomerang theory would develop into looking at how techniques of repression developed abroad would be used to suppress resistance at home.
In a 1976 lecture, French political theorist Michel Foucault argued, “A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonisation, or an internal colonialism, on itself.”
The idea of the imperial boomerang captures some important truths.
Imperial powers have developed vicious methods of counter-insurgency and social control in colonies and countries they invade. And they import those methods back home and deploy them against those who resist.
Imperialism has caused millions of deaths and generated hideous racism.
But imperialism is not driven by an interest in developing techniques of suppression. It is a global system of competing capitalist states which vie for resources, markets and strategic influence.
The relationship between the colonised and the imperial heartlands is more complex than supporters of the boomerang model can imply.
It’s a common misconception that the Metropolitan Police in London was the first police force set up by the British state in 1829.
In reality, it was the Royal Irish Constabulary—set up in 1822 to maintain control of Britain’s oldest colony.
But the rise of the Met also came after the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 where troops murdered people fighting for democratic rights.
After that, sections of the British ruling class began to see the need for a force that maintained order more effectively than the army used to massacres.
And, the Met’s establishment came at a time when the working class was growing as a social force. It’s off their backs, not just plunder abroad, that Britain was becoming a major capitalist power.
The chains of colonial violence, economic coercion and immigration do not boomerang from the imperialist heartlands and back again.
Rather, the ruling class constantly develops ways to impose its authority and to exploit workers and the poor at home and abroad.
Karl Marx wrote in March 1870, “Ireland is the only pretext the English government has for retaining a big standing army, which, if need be, as has happened before, can be used against the English workers after having done its military training in Ireland.
“Any nation that oppresses another forges its own chains.”
The capitalist states that established their power in the 19th century suppressed their domestic populations with executions, transportations and mass incarceration.
The United States, like the major European powers, was constructed through internal dispossession, genocide and colonial conquest.
According to historian Laleh Khalili, the “Indian Wars” provided the “unwritten manual” for genocidal warfare abroad in Hawaii, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Violence developed in the theft of land within the US was exported to colonies abroad.
The constant interaction between colonial and domestic violence can be seen in the history of the US border with Mexico. The border “is one of nearly unimaginable terror and grief, land theft, ethnic cleansing, forced marches, concentrated resettlement, war, torture and rape”, writes US historian Greg Grandin.
The decade long Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910, terrified US settlers in Texas. President Woodrow Wilson deployed 130,000 national guardsman and 30,000 troops to the border.
Vigilantes and Texas rangers murdered thousands of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in what became known as the La Matanza—the massacres.
The first US border patrol formed in 1924 recruited from the Texas Rangers and Ku Klux Klansmen. Today they recruit ex-soldiers who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The border between “foreign” and “domestic” security has never been static and fixed.
The 1960s US troops committed counter-insurgency violence and massacres in the Vietnam War. At the same time, national guards were sent into US cities to repress, assassinate, and bomb anti-racist activists.
The urban uprisings and mass protests of the 1960s embedded a sense that US power was threatened by both Communism abroad and subversion at home.
In The Rise of the Warrior Cop, Radley Balko writes, “Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs, Ronald Reagan’s War on Poverty, Bill Clinton’s Community Oriented Policing program, the post-9/11 security state under George W Bush and Barack Obama.
“By degrees, each of these innovations expanded and empowered police forces, always at the expense of civil liberties.
“The police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as an other —an enemy”.
When the National Guard was sent into New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, officers bragged about “taking back” the city from Iraqi-style “insurgents.”
The militarised response to an “enemy within” is being intensified by the Maga lobby as a response to mass immigration.
In a recent address to top US military figures, Trump claimed the US was “under invasion from within”.
US cities are now the site of colonial-style repression. The US-Mexico “border” now runs through Chicago and Los Angeles. Minneapolis has a “border” with Somalia.
The far right conflates terrorism and migration, so migrating is classified as an act of warfare.
The weaponisation of migration relies on the idea that immigrant districts within cities in the global North are “backward” zones where the presence of Mexican, Arab, Turkish or South Asian migrants threatens “Western civilisation”.
Gregory Bovino, the border security commander who loves cosplaying a Vietnam veteran, learnt his tactics in California, not Iraq.
In Operation Return to Sender, Bovino sent masked border guards up from the border to raid cities, arrest and racially profile targets.
His stated aim was to “save Americans from bad people and bad things”. In Los Angeles, he led “roving patrols” on horseback.
But when Operation Metro Surge met the organised resistance of Minneapolis, Bovino was sent packing.
Governments which lack legitimacy turn to military power. But that power can provoke resistance and—and it can be defeated.
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