Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem incorrectly defined habeas corpus during a recent congressional hearing, augmenting serious doubts that top White House administration officials understand and are willing to respect the rule of law and legal rights of civilians on U.S. soil.
Indeed, Noem oversees the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been “forcibly disappearing” undocumented immigrants, international students and permanent residents off the streets. ICE officers frequently wear masks, which could help them avoid accountability for tactics like warrantless arrests, “knock and arrests” and smashing car windows.
In practice, ICE operates with relatively little oversight, but in principle, it is accountable to the federal government and has been subject to extensive civil litigation in the courts.
Yes, ICE is deeply flawed, but there is a real risk of something far worse.
Over the past few months, Erik Prince, former head of the private military company Blackwater (now known by the name Constellis), has pitched multiple proposals to the White House to help with mass deportations. Prince has argued that achieving President Trump’s aggressive deportation goals will require the government to “supplement” ICE’s capabilities. According to one of his proposals, a new Prince company, 2USV, would train and deploy an army of as many as 100,000 armed and deputized citizens.
The administration has not yet decided to implement the plan, though Trump said he “wouldn’t be opposed to it, necessarily.” As academic experts on non-state armed groups like militias and on immigration, we are alarmed at this possibility.
This is because scholarly research on the type of group Prince would mobilize suggests three key patterns. First, these groups are often tasked with committing human rights violations in pursuit of the government’s political goals. Second, the current domestic political environment in the U.S. is conducive to their formation. Lastly, employing groups like this would allow federal government officials — including the president ◊ to evade accountability for illegal or inhumane tactics.
Prince’s proposed “army” would be a “pro-government militia,” which the academic literature defines as an organized, armed group that is government-sponsored and not part of regular security forces.
Because these groups can be kept at arms’ length from political elites, research shows that many governments around the world use these militias to “evade accountability for strategically useful violence.” Governments shift blame to such militias to retain deniability in the face of domestic pressures or international condemnation. For this reason, they are associated with significant reductions in a country’s respect for human rights, as seen in other countries throughout history, including Serbia, Argentina and Chile.
The Serbian nationalist “Tigers” committed numerous war crimes in Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s, but Serbian Security Service officials clearly linked to the group’s operations were acquitted on all charges by the International Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia. That was because it could not be “proven beyond a reasonable doubt” that they “planned or organized the crimes.”
Other militias have conducted disappearances, assassinations and torture so that the government could keep its hands “clean,” as during Operation Condor in the 1970s in Argentina and in connection with the Sept. 11, 1973, coup in Chile.
Paramilitaries are often thought of as characteristic of dictatorships, but research shows that informal pro-government militias tend to emerge in “weak” democracies where leaders are navigating fragile institutions of accountability. “Strong” democracies usually prevent these groups from emerging because they have more robust constraints on the executive branch and corruption is harder to hide from the public.
The troubling fact is that Trump’s attacks on American political institutions and independent media integrity have eroded U.S. democracy.
One metric used by political scientists to measure regime types is the Polity score, which ranges from -10 (very autocratic, such as North Korea) to 10 (very democratic, such as Sweden). As of 2020, the U.S. had been downgraded to a 5, putting it in the category of “weak democracy.”
What does this mean for the future of U.S. immigration enforcement?
Expanded efforts through shady paramilitary groups is becoming surprisingly possible in the U.S., and the conditions are ripe for this proposed army to commit human rights abuses. It’s worth remembering that Prince’s former company Blackwater was involved in human rights abuses in the past, including a massacre of at least 14 Iraqi civilians, whose perpetrators were pardoned by Trump in 2020.
The administration is already relying on dubious means to rush deportation processes while the courts try to slow them down. Consequently, the Department of Homeland Security is already choosing to ignore court rulings with some operations, like one recent deportation of migrants to South Sudan. Their willingness to violate the rule of law is captured by former acting ICE Director Tom Homan’s statement: “I don’t care what judges think.”
Skeptics may argue that the U.S. is unique, that these abuses couldn’t happen here, or that American electoral institutions and the free press can still hold policymakers accountable for deeds of private contractors.
But democratic institutions in the U.S. are undoubtedly disintegrating. The press can only hold leaders accountable if it is believed, and current trust in the press is at an all-time low.
It may be that Prince’s private army proposal will never be accepted. It may be that continued deportation efforts are challenged in courts and the administration will begin to abide by substantive rulings against it. It is possible future immigration policy will be more humane.
But for now, the political incentives exist for the unprecedented use of pro-government militias on American soil. Immigrants may be the current target of increasingly reckless enforcement efforts, but repressive action by domestic paramilitaries may not stop there.
This must be prevented while mechanisms of accountability still survive.
Brandon Bolte, P.h.D., is an assistant professor in the School of Politics and International Affairs at the University of Illinois Springfield and an expert in militias, rebellion, and armed conflict. Isabel Skinner, P.h.D., is an assistant professor in the School of Politics and International Affairs at the University of Illinois-Springfield.