Why ICE Raids Are A Climate Issue

It is time that the dominant environmental movement begin to make the interconnections between immigration, border & surveillance, and looking at immigrants as bodies of ecology than economic outputs.

I am disgusted by the recent ICE raids happening in my hometown in Los Angeles. As a proud immigrant kid, my parents raised me on the principles of compassion, diversity, and resilience. But in recent years, the subject of immigration has continued to worsen, with people seeing immigrants as the issue rather than the system designed to serve a select few individuals.

The palatero man, the woman who sells roses on the corner of the freeway, the cleaners, the people who pick and make our food will constantly be labeled as criminals. Yet, they contribute to the economy for low wages and are disrespected by the average American. These people to me are environmentalists. They are what made my experience of environmentalism holistic and intersectional by watching over me, humanizing me, and their daily “buenos dias” as I took the LA Metro to school.

Growing up in extreme poverty shaped my relationship and love for the world. Immigrants were the ones who kept me safe from the cruel world that tried to make me assimilate into a culture of uniformity, whiteness, and individualism. It reminded me that humanity is within all of us, but can easily be misappropriated when people redirect their hatred from a system that is failing to a group of hard-working people wanting a better life.

Just this past week, I have been in tears from extended family members and friends from my community texting me from London, sharing with me how scared they are and why extremists have taken such an obsession over their livelihoods when they are simply trying to live a safe and prosperous life. I don’t know how we are supposed to handle these heavy emotions during these times when we are living in a state of loss, anger, and institutional distrust from our governments and elected officials. I feel broken inside.

The truth is that I am pissed myself. I feel helpless. I get angry when my ally friends text me, “I’m so sorry,” or “What can I do to help?”, when the reality is that they could have been helping for decades to contribute to a society filled with less hate and more diversity. I have seen videos of families being broken. I love them, but yet it’s not enough to hold a sign or apologize, it’s time we reckon with our moral compass of humanity.

Working-class people at Home Depot are being ripped away and hunted by ICE agents as if it’s a playground for their insidious behavior when they are only gardeners, landscapers, and designers helping beautify homes around LA. These gardeners look like my father. From a pregnant mom feeling helpless about the trauma she just experienced with ICE agents, to even undocumented youth in foster care being chained after being human trafficked.

Understanding the interconnections between the border and surveillance industries is crucial for achieving climate justice. Immigration and climate change are inextricably linked; they are not separate. The ICE raids did not occur overnight; the immigration industrial complex has been in place for decades. Without understanding the behemoth of the system that we are up against, we may risk being unprepared for future attacks on our communities. We must realize these connections now.

The border and surveillance industry and the climate crisis

The Border and Surveillance Industry is a term that encompasses a vast sector comprising the border, military, detention, technology, and finance sectors.

The border and surveillance industry is busy at work every day, profiting from a web that spans the world. It’s all around us, and it gets easier to see once you know where to look. Borders can often seem obvious, as seen in the walls and fences along the Southern Border here in the US. Surveillance technology helps to expand these borders, and that is not always so obvious. Think about thermal imaging cameras, fleets of drones, and biometric databases. That is huge collections of fingerprints and iris-scans, as well as AI, phone, and social media tracking.

Image provided by Unsplash.

This industry is already huge and predicted to grow faster and bigger than ever before. The largest expansion is set to be in Biometrics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Markets and Markets research reports forecast the biometric systems market to double from $33 billion in 2019 to $65.3 billion by 2024—of which biometrics for migration purposes will be a significant sector. It says that the AI market will equal US $190.61 billion by 2025.

In the US alone, the detention and deportation machine is already huge. There are a few times and places we can trace its origins back to. One of them is October 1994, when ‘Operation Gatekeeper’ began to roll out across the Southern border. Bill Clinton was President and CBP was known as INS, Immigration and Naturalization Service. They militarized the region, with increased numbers of Border Patrol agents, new interior Border Patrol checkpoints, more beds in detention, border walls and other infrastructure where there had been none, as well as installing technology like seismic sensors to detect people crossing.

After the 9/11 attacks, this was ramped up again. The Migration Policy Institute points out that following the 9/11 attacks, immigration policy was viewed principally through the lens of national security. There were heightened visa controls and screening of international travelers and would-be immigrants, as well as the collection and storage of information in vast new databases used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and the use of state and local law enforcement as ‘force multipliers’ in immigration enforcement.

It’s easy to forget sometimes that migration is not a crime and migrants are not criminals, they are just a convenient excuse to militarize borders further. Here in the US, for years now, the border has steadily been fed money, resources and staff. Meanwhile, detaining immigrants began becoming a lucrative business when surging inmate populations in the 1980s led to a boom in for-profit prisons. Today, privately run prisons have become the government’s default detention centers for undocumented migrants. That is all just here in the US - let’s remember that the border and surveillance industry is a global one and as an industry, it is booming.

I want to take a beat here to point out that migration is often framed as a national security threat. This is inaccurate and it’s often xenophobic. Moving is a direct adaptation strategy to global warming. People have always moved. Migration is a natural phenomenon observed in a huge number of species, from butterflies to antelopes to giant blue whales.

Preventing people from migrating is dangerous, and it can even be deadly. We know that the border and surveillance industry is set to make more money than the annual GDP of most countries - so perhaps we can understand why so many corporations, asset management firms, military companies, consultancy firms, and tech companies are hustling hard to get a slice of this pie.

But what has this got to do with climate? A lot!

In 2003, a Pentagon-commissioned report warned that in a worst-case climate scenario, the US would need to erect ‘defensive fortresses’ to stop ‘unwanted starving migrants’ from countries. Today, the Transnational Institute reports that the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are spending, on average, 2.3 times as much on arming their borders as they are on climate finance. Countries like the United States, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Australia are financing and building their ‘fortresses’ - a “Global Climate Wall” to keep migrants out, rather than facing the crisis that forces people to leave their homes in search of safety in the first place.

Link to video HERE

Rich countries—the ones that have emitted the most carbon and caused the most global warming—promised to provide climate finance that could help countries mitigate and adapt to climate change. At a United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, developed nations pledged to provide US$100 billion annually to developing nations by 2020, to help them adapt to climate change and mitigate further temperature increases. That promise was broken. They never delivered.

Instead, they are militarizing their response to migration and expanding border and surveillance infrastructure. Earlier this year, Statewatch and the Transnational Institute provided a guide on the EU's security, military, and border budgets for the 2021-27 period. They show a massive increase in funding - a total of €43.9bn compared to €19.7bn from 2014–2020 - this will fuel a huge increase in military spending, the further externalization of the EU's borders, and underpin the expansion of EU border agency ‘Frontex’.

This provides booming profits for a border security industry but unacceptable suffering for refugees and migrants who make increasingly dangerous – and frequently deadly – journeys to seek safety in a climate-changed world. When nations militarize their borders, that does not stop people from needing to move. It simply forces people to make longer and more dangerous journeys. This leads to the horror we saw in Texas in July of this year where 53 people were killed when they suffocated in the trailer of a truck. And the UNHCR reports that more than 3,000 people died or went missing while attempting to cross the Mediterranean and the Atlantic last year, hoping to reach Europe.

Border militarisation has intensified due to COVID-19, leading to increased troops and technology deployed on many borders worldwide. There has been an increase in violent pushbacks of refugees on borders as well as the closure of ports, including to rescue vessels, which has led to increased deaths in already deadly regions such as the Mediterranean, which we just mentioned. And the travel bans that came down super quickly - remember that an abrupt closing of borders is almost always done with no concern for the well being of people on the move.

We will continue to discuss the terrible impact this border part of the industry has on migrants. Later, I want to share with you how this industry targets and endangers people on the move. These are people like my own family - people like your own family - you know - we are all impacted somehow - even if we are not the ones moving right now. Because surveillance is a massive part of it too. Surveillance technologies like drones, centralised biometric databases and even facial recognition smartwatches are often tested out on vulnerable migrant populations before moving on to everybody else.

How are investors using their money to fuel the climate crisis, and profiting from it too?

Currently, I would like to share another crucial aspect to consider regarding the border and surveillance industry: investors are using their money to fuel the climate crisis and profiting from it as well. In fact, they profit from the climate crisis in multiple ways.

Number one: this industry’s investors play a pivotal role in the climate crisis by financing fossil fuels and agribusiness. And we all know those are responsible for increasing greenhouse gas emissions, widespread environmental destruction, and gross human rights abuses. Unfortunately, despite being so demonstrably bad, these industries remain profitable. One analysis of World Bank data shows that the oil and gas industry has generated $2.8 billion per day in pure profit over the last 50 years.

Agribusiness is second only to fossil fuels in driving the climate crisis. The management consultants at McKinsey report that the food and agribusiness industry forms a $5 trillion global sector that is only growing larger. The cost of that, to the people, animals and land, is even bigger. Every year, fires ignited to clear forests for industrial agriculture destroy millions of hectares of land customarily owned and managed by Indigenous Peoples and local communities.

Global Witness reports that extractive industries drive protracted land conflicts and systematic human rights abuses by forcibly grabbing land from Indigenous Peoples and local communities, razing cultural and sacred sites, destroying livelihoods, and unleashing violence and criminalization against those who resist. In 2020, at least 227 land defenders were killed worldwide for seeking to protect their traditional lands. But still, the profits are there, and Friends of the Earth reports that large asset managers such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street all help to bankroll the climate emergency and literally fuel, no pun intended, increasing global instability.

There are plenty of receipts:

• Collectively, three of the biggest asset management companies - BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street hold more than $650 billion worth of shares in the 15 fossil fuel, agribusiness, and border and surveillance companies surveyed by Friends of the Earth.

• Collectively, those companies - again lets name them - BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street hold almost one third of all shares in these very familiar fossil fuels giants - Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips - if we were giving out prizes for top global greenhouse gas emissions - they would be up right there - top twenty. We’re not giving out prizes, though, nope.

That leads us to number 2: The same global instability also leads to the second way those investors make money. They are deeply invested in militarized borders and surveillance. It’s gross.

The border and surveillance industry receives significant levels of financial support from institutional investors and governments. A 2019 forecast by ResearchAndMarkets.com predicted that the Global Homeland Security and Public Safety Market would grow from US$ $431 billion in 2018 to US$ $606 billion in 2024, at a 5.8% annual growth rate. According to the report, one factor driving this is “[climate] warming-related natural disasters growth”.

These big asset management companies not only help to cause the crisis, but they also facilitate human rights violations through their support of the border and surveillance industry. That’s the industry we’re talking about today - an industry heavily in the business of separating families, eroding civil liberties, and promoting systemic racism and ethnonationalism around the world.

Those same asset management companies make money on the other side too, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street - hold around 32% of shares in CoreCivic and 38% of shares in GEO Group – those are companies that operate private prisons and migrant detention centers linked to widespread human rights abuses.

ICE, surveillance and climate-linked migration

AI, big data and biometrics are technologies that will substantially shape the future of border policing. For example, the EU is funding a project to develop drones capable of autonomously patrolling Europe’s borders. And many of the same surveillance companies used to expand borders and surveil migrants are also hired by fossil fuel companies to protect pipelines and other interests.

The Latinx and Chicanx organizers at Mijente have been calling out this technology and the willing participation of companies like Amazon Web Services, Palantir, Microsoft, and many others in selling their data to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, also known as ICE. Amazon and Palantir are considered the backbone of the federal government’s immigration and law enforcement.

The Tech giant Amazon has a multi-billion-dollar contract with ICE providing the servers needed to profile, track, and detain migrants. While Palantir Technologies, the tech company co-founded and chaired by the Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel, was paid $189m, as reported by The Guardian. to create custom-built programs to allow ICE agents to link public and private databases. So that they could quote,“visualise an interconnected web of data pulled from nearly every part of an individual’s life”. Scary stuff.

Mijente points out that the border and security industry isn’t limited to feeding the detention and deportation machinery but also to policing and military operations, endangering the safety and security of communities already vulnerable to criminalization, from the Bronx to Compton to the southern border.

My own extended family has been targeted by ICE in the past, like so many immigrant families here. This is not by accident. Mijente has uncovered ample evidence of wildly lucrative contracts, invasive technologies at the local, federal, and international levels, and a revolving door of tech executives and government officials driving and making profits off of human rights abuses and widespread trauma and suffering. Ever since the inception of the agency in 2002, ICE has had information technology (IT) contracts with large defense contractors and IT services companies. But with the Trump administration, came unprecedented levels of surveillance, detention and deportation, which heightened the importance of new technologies and companies.

This dragnet of data built up by ICE goes way beyond migrants. ICE has a vast reach, with its intelligence weaponised through algorithmic tools for searching and analysing data. Earlier this year, researchers from Georgetown University released a report that took them two years. In it, they revealed that ICE has been operating largely in secret and with minimal public oversight, to put together a formidable arsenal of digital capabilities that allows its agents to - and I’m quoting the researchers now “pull detailed dossiers on nearly anyone, seemingly at any time”.

Some of the data gathered by ICE includes:

• Driver’s license data for three of every four adults living in the US.

• Data drawn from the utility records of 75% of adults, covering more than 218 million unique utility consumers in all 50 states.

• Facial recognition technology drawn from the driver’s license photos of at least a third of all adults.

The Georgetown researchers base their report on hundreds of freedom of information requests and a review of more than 100,000 previously unseen Ice spending transactions. They suggest the motivation was partly to increase the number of deportations of undocumented people and partly as part of the US government’s - and I’m quoting again - “larger push to amass as much information as possible about all of our lives”.

ICE has spent more than $1.3bn on geolocation technology, including contracts with private companies that own license plate scanning databases, and a further $96m was spent on biometrics, largely face recognition databases; $97m on private data brokers that gather data on individuals from a range of different sources including more than 80 utility companies; and with all of that data they needed even more data analysis tools, and they spent $569m on those.

Why climate justice is migrant justice

Climate change is often referred to as a threat multiplier, as it exacerbates other forces, vulnerabilities, and inequities. When you consider this, it highlights the importance of forming alliances and mutual commitments across movements. The ideal and effective response to these compounding factors needs the engagement and alignment of multiple movements, including climate and environmental justice; immigrant and Indigenous justice; racial, LGBTQ+ and gender justice and economic justice.

And on the subject of money, border violence profiteering is climate change profiteering. The latest IPCC reports are clear - the climate crisis does not care about lines drawn on maps. Creating safe pathways for people to move and live in dignity is essential. You know how, in the environmental movement, we reject the idea of 'sacrifice zones' resulting from ecological destruction? That is so important. We also need to reject the border and surveillance industry that encourages governments and investors to see borders as sacrifice zones for migrants.

Migration has been caused and complicated by war, enslavement and persecution. Today, migrants and refugees must not be stigmatized - if anything needs to be stigmatized it is corporate profiteering from refugee and migration abuse. Migrants are not a problem to be solved, safe migration is and always has been part of the solution.

The climate crisis and the impact of environmental degradation fall disproportionately on people of color and on communities in the Global South. This is patently unfair, considering that the wealthiest 1% of the world’s population causes twice as much carbon dioxide as the poorest 50% of people, and they are the ones who live overwhelmingly in countries most vulnerable to climate change, meaning they are bearing the brunt of a crisis they did not cause.

Now, a vast industry and its investors are preventing those same people from moving to find safety. Without climate justice, there can be no migrant justice.

The climate justice movement and the migrant justice movement have a common oppressor. And common oppressors are evil, but dismantling this oppression is also a beautiful way to build resistance.

It’s also vital that we do that, because our common oppressor is the border and surveillance industry-system that values profits, whether from carbon extraction or border violence, above human life. That industry is connected, organized, and powerful right now - the climate justice movement and the migrant justice movement must be just as connected and organized - that is how we will win. Rather than cashing in on the climate crisis, it is time for the world’s most prominent financiers to divest from the industries that fuel and profit from it.

Protecting immigrants from ICE raids begins with educating ourselves about the history of these horrific industries.