Border securocracy: Global expansion of the U.S. Department of homeland security bureaucratic apparatus before, during and beyond covid-19

Abstract

The U.S. border security apparatus is moving around the globe as climate change, the coronavirus pandemic and corporatization create political and economic chaos. Global north governments seek to keep out migrants and refugees from the global south while corporations in the global north want protection to maintain their wealth. U.S. government bureaucratic agencies such as Custom and Border Protection’s Border Patrol Tactical Unit are sent abroad to expand U.S. influence in an empire of borders to train receptive government security and border forces and to regulate, detain and prevent migrants and refugees well beyond the U.S. border. Governments are waging war against the people, creating a “securocracy” comprised of profit seeking military arms corporations and allied government agents to quell resistance and border crossers. Examined are the effects and impacts of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on global border securocracy beginning with an analysis of the Mexico-U.S. border, moving to international borders in Latin America and beyond. The theoretical concept of border securocracy is expanded from the securocracy literature in the context of the north versus south globalization conflict.

Keywords:

• Border securocracy; state of exception
• globalization

Notes

1 See also Brown (2019) for more on practices of the U.S. and other global north states’ neoliberalism and the implementation of the security state at the expense of democracy, equality, and society (pp. 116–118).

2 As a complementary concept to the U.S. border migration media spectacle, Sandoval (2013) notes that “mechanisms of Shadow Transnationalism exist as hidden complementary integral parts of immigrant networks within global labor markets in the transnational cultural and spatial spheres. They complement and at times support the more formal networks of transnational migration as they are intentionally constructed and function (or are perceived or permitted to function) ‘under the radar’ of regulation. They exist ‘within’ immigration channels, yet remain ‘hidden’ from regulated spaces and often ostensibly outside the governments’ gaze” (p. 177). Additionally, previous work on media spectacle affecting the Mexico-U.S. border by Correa-Cabrera, Garrett, and Keck (2014) (on Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche, [2006]) note “…Arendt (1958) who extensively examines the utilitarian cycle created by the media spectacle’s tendency to simplify politics and economics and the notion of ‘means/ends’ (based on the work of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power) whereby ‘…in a strictly utilitarian world, all ends are bound to be of short duration and to be transformed into means for some further ends” (p. 154).

3 Duncan’s work is described by Bond (2017) as “way ahead of her time in linking the crony-capitalist state to the growing security apparatus” and her theoretical contribution on securocracy is used in this article.

4 Neocleous (2007), a primary influence on Duncan’s (2014) work, theorizes that liberty and security are essentially incompatible and “… emergency powers are the highpoint of security politics. The intensified demand for security results in ever more draconian legislation, ever less space for the exercise of everyday liberties expected in a liberal democracy, and further entrenches the permanent state of emergency in which more and more security measures are then enacted. Hence the inclusion in every known liberal democratic constitution and international convention of the possible suspension of basic rights and liberties, a suspension always conducted on security grounds but often legitimized in liberal terms “(p. 144).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Terence Michael Garrett

Terence Michael Garrett (PhD University of Oklahoma) is professor of political science at UT RGV. Terry is an associate editor for the International Journal of Social Economics. His research interests most recently are in critical theory applied to international borders and bureaucratic behavior.