Homeland Empire | Under the Shadow S2E6

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Minneapolis has been on fire.

People in the streets against an onslaught from Trump’s ICE agents the likes of which the country has never seen. 

Homeland Security has deployed thousands of agents, unleashing an assault that has ripped apart families and neighborhoods. They’ve killed two people, under shocking circumstances. Both U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Federal agents have arrested 4,000 people in Minnesota alone since they launched Operation Metro Surge two months ago.

KRISTI NOEM [CLIP]:  But we’re surging operations because of the dangerous situation we see in this country and because we’re no longer going to allow illegal criminals to damage and harm, to kill, to sexually abuse, to proliferate drugs, and to steal American taxpayers dollars. 

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That’s Kristi Noem. The head of the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, none of it’s true. But that doesn’t stop her or president Donald Trump from repeating these lines. 

And Minneapolis, Minnesota, is just the latest city on Trump’s hit list.

SARAH LAZARE:  I mean, there are so many horrific stories.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Sarah Lazare is a labor journalist based in Chicago who’s traveled to Minneapolis in recent weeks to cover the ICE attack and the people’s response.

SARAH LAZARE:  And really, the federal assault is only growing more intense. Like Chicago was really bad. There were really terrible things that happened. And you don’t want to compare tragedies at all because it’s all horrible. But the federal occupation of Minnesota, just in terms of scale and numbers, is just so much more intense and escalated…. You know, people are being targeted in all sorts of ways. A lot of people are afraid to go to work.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  She says Trump has his sights on immigrants and the working class.

SARAH LAZARE:  “He’s not going after CEOs, people in his corporate milieu. He is targeting day laborers. He is targeting street vendors. He’s targeting construction workers. He’s targeting domestic workers. He’s targeting daycare workers. And these are harms that ripple throughout the working class.”

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  But people have responded. 

“We are not going to shop, we are not going to work. We are not going to school on Friday, January 23.”

Tens of thousands have taken to the streets. On January 23rd, people braved the extreme cold to reject ICE’s actions. Sarah Lazare was there.

SARAH LAZARE:  January 23rd was amazing. It was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I think it really surpassed my own expectations and the expectations of a lot of other people, including some of the organizers.

The goal was to disrupt business as usual, with the ultimate goal to be forcing federal agents to leave the state of Minnesota, where they’ve been just unleashing terror against communities, both against immigrants, suspected immigrants, but also people of color and also people who are just resisting and organizing.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  They protested at the airport, where deportation flights have been leaving daily. They picketed. People walked off their jobs or called in sick. 

SARAH LAZARE:  But then the other thing that happened that day was there was a huge protest march through downtown Minneapolis. The estimates from organizers that I’ve heard range from 50,000 to 100,000. All I know is that it felt like I was in this endless sea of people. So many creative signs, people chanting ice out, people passing around hand warmers, um people being really kind and helpful to each other. And again, it it was so cold. Like everyone out there was making a sacrifice. I know Minnesotans are tough, but no one’s that tough. It’s painful for anyone. It was really, really, really cold.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  And it is not by accident that Trump’s painful ICE onslaught has targeted cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, Portland and Los Angeles. 

Despite what administration officials say, it’s not actually about crime or even immigration. It’s about Trump wreaking havoc on his political opponents. It’s an attack on bastions of progressive organizing.

SARAH LAZARE:  I think that the Trump administration is making no secret of the fact that he has made political retribution a cornerstone of what he’s trying to do. And he has a special ire for anything that’s at all progressive, especially on economic measures.

I absolutely believe that this is partially about, you know, attacking things like progressive hard fought legislation won by unions and community groups in the various cities that come under attack. So I think there’s a way that the you know deportation apparatus has become um a paramilitary force that’s kind of like the Trump administration’s political attack dog to beat back anything progressive, whether it’s sanctuary policies or policies that are a little more economically redistributive downwards.

[MUSIC]

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  This is the exact same thing Trump is doing abroad. Choosing carefully who to embrace and leave alone, and who to threaten and attack…. Like Venezuela, Cuba, Colombia, Mexico…. As I’ve mentioned before in this podcast. 

We are seeing an unprecedented reorganization of domestic and foreign policy in the United States. Both of them deployed to achieve the same goal — punish the opposition to Trump. Punish his political opponents. As the old line goes… Either you are with us or against us. And if you are against Trump… he will try to make you pay.

Today’s episode turns the lens back on the United States. Because the shadow of the United States itself is hanging dangerously over U.S. cities and communities…. Like never before.

That in a minute. 

[THEME MUSIC]

This is Under the Shadow — an investigative narrative podcast series that looks at the role of the United States abroad, in the past and the very present.

This podcast is a co-production in partnership with The Real News and NACLA.

I’m your host, Michael Fox — longtime radio reporter, editor, journalist. The producer and host of the podcasts Brazil on Fire and Stories of Resistance. I’ve spent the better part of the last 20 years in Latin America.

I’ve seen firsthand the role of the US government abroad. And most often, sadly, it is not for the better: Invasions, coups, sanctions. Support for authoritarian regimes. Politically and economically, the United States has cast a long shadow over Latin America for the past 200 years. It still does.

This is Season 2 of Under the Shadow: Trump’s Attack.

Episode 6 — Homeland Empire

[MUSIC]

So… as you know, this podcast is very much focused on the impact of U.S. intervention abroad.

I’ve dug into the US invasion of Venezuela and Trump’s recent threats against Colombia and Mexico. And in an upcoming episode, I’ll get into how the U.S. has also ratcheted up its blockade of Cuba.

All of these countries have something in common. And it’s not only strategic and natural resources. Beyond that, these countries are run by left governments who are antagonistic to Trump and his “Donroe Doctrine” vision for the hemisphere. 

I’ve detailed this at length in the past in this series. But I realized something the other day. Trump is using the exact same strategy to choose where to deploy officers and unleash violence within the United States.

This might be a no-brainer for people who are following this closely, but it was an ah ha moment for me. I went back and analyzed the locations where Trump has deployed the National Guard and ICE over the last year… Los Angeles, Washington, DC, Memphis, Chicago, New Orleans, Portland, Minneapolis. 

All of them are controlled by his political adversaries, be it in local office or at the state-level. That’s also the case with the places Trump has so far only threatened to deploy officers… New York City, Baltimore and Oakland.

Trump, of course, finds excuses for the deployments. He talks about rising violence or crime rates, or so-called out-of-control illegal immigration. Most of this is fabricated. They’re just excuses for Trump to show that he’s boss and crack down on cities that he doesn’t have firmly under his control. It’s also a useful tool when the next elections come around. Vote for my people, he’s saying, or you’ll pay… 

I saw this first-hand in the Nation’s Capital last summer. 

NEWS REPORT:  “Hundreds of national guardsmen are expected to be in deployment on the streets of Washington DC this morning, on orders from president Trump.”

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  In August 2025, Trump sent 2,000 guard troops to occupy DC streets. 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse. This is liberation day in DC and we’re gonna take our capital back.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The problem with that story was… crime rates were actually down — way down. The DC mayor said violent crime was actually at a 30-year low. Many of the troops deployed to DC came from Republican states — states that are home to at least 10 cities with higher crime rates than Washington DC.

I covered this march in Washington against the federal troops in September last year. It was huge. Tens of thousands of people in the streets. People were outraged. They carried signs: “Free DC. Resist. We are not afraid. Abolish ICE.” 80% of city residents opposed the National Guard deployment.

PROTESTER:  The current government is trying to bamboozle people into thinking that there is terrible crime everywhere when there’s not. They will tell you up is down and down is up and people need to fight against it.

We’re all made better by our immigrant neighbors. And I’m here to show people that immigrants in DC are my community and I need to stand up for them.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  The real reason for Trump’s National Guard deployment to the Nation’s Capital?

Because Washington DC votes Democrat. And because even though the federal government is based there, Trump doesn’t control the city. 

In the Midwest…

Only two cities have been targets of Trump’s ICE or National Guard deployments: Minneapolis and Chicago. 

And those states, Minnesota and Illinois, are the only two Midwest states that didn’t vote for Trump in 2024. 

GOV. TIM WALZ [CLIP]:  My fellow Minnesotans, what’s happening in Minnesota right now defies belief.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Minneapolis, for instance, is the capital of the home state of progressive Governor Tim Walz, the Vice Presidential Democrat candidate who ran against Trump in the 2024 election. 

GOV. TIM WALZ [CLIP]:  We are under assault, because of a petty, vile administration, that doesn’t care about the well being of Minnesotans.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is a member of the Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party.

[MUSIC]

None of this is by accident. 

ALEX AVINA:  This is not about migrant enforcement. This is about targeting states, politicians, political parties, locales that have been identified as political enemies.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That’s historian Alexander Aviña. We’ll hear more from him later in this episode.

ALEX AVINA:  And they’re sending in ICE and Border Patrol, right? To do the bidding of Trump, right? 

[MUSIC]

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Trump actually said this outright during a press conference last year. 

REPORTER [CLIP]:  On immigration, why do you want ICE to target democratic inner cities?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  I don’t know what you’re saying.

REPORTER [CLIP]:  You did a post last night where you said you want ICE to really target democratic cities..

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  Yeah, I want them to focus on the cities, because the cities is where you have what’s called sanctuary cities, that’s where the people are. You look at New York. You look at Chicago… you look at how this city has just been overrun by criminals… Biden allowed 21 million people to come into our country. Of that vast numbers of those people were murderers, killers, people from gangs, people from jails, they emptied their jails out into the U.S. Most of those people are in the cities. All Blue cities. All Democrat run cities and they think they’re gonna use them to vote. Not gonna happen. 

[MUSIC]

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  All of that is untrue. But it doesn’t matter. Trump is using the same pretext and fabricated lies to invade U.S. cities that he has been using to target unfriendly countries abroad. Many of the same lies he used to justify the January 3rd invasion of Venezuela.

Here was Trump the morning after the U.S. attacked.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  As I’ve said many times, the Maduro regime emptied out their prisons, sent their worst and most violent monsters into the United States to steal American lives. And they came from mental institutions and insane asylums. They came from prisons and jails… They were drug dealers. They were drug kingpins. They sent everybody bad into the United States, but no longer. And we have now a border where nobody gets through.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  There’s an old joke in Latin America. It goes something like this…. 

“Why are there never coup d’etats in the United States? Because there is no U.S. embassy there.”

The idea is that the United States has been the greatest purveyor, perpetrator and backer of coup after coup across Latin America over the last two centuries.

That’s abroad, of course — foreign coups. 

But inside the United States, it was supposed to be a different story — kind of. Authoritarian, maybe. Racist. Patriarchal. But with a façade of democracy. Like… U.S. security forces would never do inside the United States what they have done elsewhere.

Abroad, the U.S. can wield a heavy hand, be it through coercion, coups, economic sanctions, outright invasion, or support for authoritarian regimes. But inside is supposed to be different. For those of us inside the US, there is supposed to be at least a façade of democratic protection.

At least, that was the idea, or the myth… until now. 

Now… since the beginning of 2026, US forces have killed people inCaracas, Venezuela, on boat strikes in the Pacific, and in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP [CLIP]:  She was an agitator. Probably a paid agitator. But in my opinion, she was an agitator. A very high-level agitator. So professional. I said this isn’t a normal situation. This is a professional trouble-maker…. You have agitators and we will always be protecting ICE and we’re always gonna be protecting our border patrol and our law enforcement.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  This is a new era. Where U.S. law enforcement kill people in plain sight… and then blame it on the victims, accusing them of being agitators or terrorists — domestic or foreign… whether they are in fishing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific or protesting on the streets of Minneapolis.

The focus of Trump’s domestic and foreign policies have become blurred, blended and intertwined.

SPEAKER [CLIP]:  Why are you taking my information? 

ICE AGENT [CLIP]:  Because we have a nice little database and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.

SPEAKER [CLIP]:  For Videotaping you? Are you serious?

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  In other words,  Trump’s goals inside and outside the U.S. are increasingly becoming one and the same — an all out attack against his opponents, both foreign and domestic.

The same policies aimed at forcing unfriendly governments of the U.S. to bend to Trump’s will are also used to pressure his domestic opponents to their knees. 

[MUSIC]

Nikhil Singh  is a professor at New York University who has been analyzing the complexities of this moment. 

NIKIL SINGH:  I teach history and political thinking and a bunch of other things.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  He wrote an excellent article, published in January 2026, for the journal Equator entitled “Homeland Empire.” I borrowed Nikhil’s term for the title of this episode because it really underscores what’s happening.

In his article, Nikhil writes that quote… “From Venezuela to Minnesota, Trump is creating a borderless American power, collapsing the foreign and the domestic into a single domain of impunity.”

He writes that Trump’s “administration invokes emergency war powers at home, to arrest and remove unauthorised immigrants – and discretionary police powers abroad, to arrest foreign leaders (and seize foreign assets) under US law.”

MICHAEL FOX:  What is the most important thing that people need to understand to like comprehend this moment where we are right now with government attacks across so many fronts, domestic and foreign?

NIKIL SINGH:  I think we’re undergoing a kind of experiment in despotism. You know, the Trump administration is using immigration policing enforcement, budgeting. developing infrastructure, everything that surrounds it to essentially remake the way we are going to be governed inside the United States. And they obviously have, you know, kind of a set of precedents and patterns for that in the way in which the American military is operated in other parts of the world. 

MICHAEL FOX:  Nikhil, for a US public that is trying to grapple with this moment, how would you describe Homeland Empire?

NIKIL SINGH:  I think in the simplest way, I would say Homeland Empire is an expanding domain of rightlessness in which the U.S. executive arrogates to itself the power to act as if it is not beholden to a body politic and its representatives….  Okay. That’s a kind of maybe a little abstract, but it suggests really what the Homeland Empire is the advent of something like an executive branch dictatorship in the United States. The judiciary is being overridden and and ignored for the most part and when they make decisions and rulings against the Trump administration. Obviously, that has been tacitly and sometimes explicitly ratified at the Supreme Court.

So the judiciary is sidelined. And of course, up to now, we’ve seen Congress um supinely basically either pushing forward the administration’s agenda.

But also then essentially doing nothing as Trump issues executive order after executive order, has the money to build up CPB, Homeland Security, their personnel, their detention capacities, and to launch this kind of basically police action on the American public with very, very little pushback and oversight.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  In his article for Equator magazine, Nikhil sums it up like this….  “If George W. Bush helped invent the concept of ‘homeland security’ in order to “fight the terrorists over there” rather than here,” he writes. “Trump seeks to bring the war to “OUR hemisphere”. From Caracas to Minneapolis, legal authority and institutional power are being redirected toward an overriding end: governing populations as subjects rather than citizens.”

Nikhil says that creeping authoritarianism under previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat, set the foundation on which Trump has now built his amped up police state. 

NIKIL SINGH:  So Trump actually takes some of what is enabled by the global war on terror, by the ways in which the open-ended authorizations to use military force, the ways assassination by drone, the ways in which the United States is going to act unilaterally, the blurring of police power, with military power and the bringing of it inside the country through you know warrantless surveillance.

Trump takes all of that that entire apparatus, right including the the massive penal complex that has been unprecedented in many ways in in in Western history. And he’s sort of ratcheted it up to another level, right? He’s used it and funneled it into the development of immigration policing as a domain that the that the right now sees as something that it can grow and develop… right into almost a kind of kind of a federal sort of paramilitary kind of police apparatus, which actually has not existed in the United States throughout the country at that scale before.

Now, it’s not there yet. And that is actually one of the reasons why this juncture is so absolutely crucial about whether we’re going to be able to shut down ICE funding, whether we’re going to be able to send the Customs and Border Patrol agents back to the border, where they’re already a problem, let’s admit, where they already act as a kind of death squad. I mean, that agency is notoriously racist and brutal agency, as you well know, Mike, and they need to be investigated. But that agency has now been basically unleashed on the country, right? And it’s been unleashed on American cities in particular, and of course, in particular cities that are seen as politically oppositional to the GOP and to the Trump project.

I’m an immigration attorney and the people who are being detained are being denied access to their lawyers. And we said memorize our numbers so you can call us. They don’t even get phone calls. Half the time people can’t even determine where their loved ones is. And they’re sending most people to Camp East Montana, in El Paso, Fort Bliss. It’s disgusting. Multiple people have died there.

So in all of these ways, you know, Trump extends kind of dubious norms, legalities, legal apparatuses, and police infrastructures that were developed on the watch of liberals and sort of has turned them to his own ends. And now that they’ve been turned to his own ends to this degree, I think people are beginning to see how rotten and rancid and anti-democratic they in fact are.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Homeland Empire… 

Labor writer Sarah Lazare told me something pretty shocking when I spoke with her in early February.

SARAH LAZARE:  So, okay. So um I’m just pulling up my article to make sure that I don’t mess up any numbers. So Lindsay Kosherian, a really excellent researcher with the National Priorities Project. And she and I worked on an article together for In These Times that was published in October of 2025. And basically we found that with the funding increases that the Trump administration won through the so-called Big Beautiful Bill… it means that if the US deportation machine were a national army, it would be the 13th largest in the world.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Let me repeat that…  If ICE, Border Patrol, and the U.S. deportation apparatus were a military force… it would be the 13th largest national army on the planet. 

SARAH LAZARE:  So this places it above Poland, Italy, Australia, Canada, Turkey, and Spain, and just below Israel. Basically. Yeah, so the bill allocates $178 billion total in new funding for immigration enforcement. And that’s over the course of a few years. So the funds are available through September, 2029. So we averaged out, you know, and we made that determination. But also that’s just new funding. Like that’s all we’re talking about. So basically we are looking at a very, very large fund armed force and it has the ability to do this for a really long time. And I think that’s something that movements on the ground are really grappling with. I mean, people are being very heroic in an ordinary, unseen, day-to-day sort of way. All sorts of people are taking risks and putting in a lot of work to try to keep their communities and their neighbors safe.

And it’s amazing. And also, they are up against such a well-funded force that it’s a really tough, really challenging situation.

ALEX AVINA:  We’re in a really dangerous moment.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Alexander Aviña.

ALEX AVINA:  I think the seeming inexistence of a border between domestic policy and foreign policy, that’s always been a constant in US history. It’s just with Trump, he’s very clear about that border not existing, right? It’s fundamental to his political project or imaginary.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Alex says metaphors can help us understand where we are now. 

ALEX AVINA:  So a lot of people have been using, and I think we’ve talked about it before, the metaphor, the imperial boomerang, right.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  That’s the idea that U.S. intervention or actions abroad boomerang back to hit the United States in unexpected ways. 

ALEX AVINA:  Recently, I heard my comrade Nick Estes talk about, well, the boomerang as a metaphor might not be as accurate. Let’s talk about an imperial slingshot, right? Because if you consider the origins of U.S. empire as beginning against native peoples, then it began here, right? And then it got shot out. But as we know, if we if we think about, I think some combination of the two metaphors, and as unwieldy as it might be, might help us understand how U.S. settler colonialism historically has been shot outwards, interfaces with foreign policy and other quote-unquote frontiers of U.S. foreign policy, and it comes back in modified form. And I think that’s something we’re witnessing now.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  I think this slingshot analogy is really powerful. I mean, we can’t forget that all of this… the United States, Western Expansion, all began with violence and mass displacement  against Native Americans and then the stealing of more than half of Mexico’s land, as I’ll look at more deeply in a future episode.

ALEX AVINA:  The other way to understand this is to think about a tripartite war that Trump is waging. And in this war, there is no separation between the domestic and the foreign. That’s a war on drugs, a war on migrants and a war on terror.

SPEAKER:  We Somalis have many faces. We contribute to this community. We are taxi drivers. We are Uber drivers. We are Senators. We are somebody. We have had enough of this ICE. They want to inflict fear into our communities and our families.

ALEX AVINA:  So if we think about what ICE has been doing in Minneapolis, right, they’ve quite explicitly gone after migrants and refugees, even though the Somali population in Minnesota who they are targeting, I think it’s above 90% in terms of legal status. But of course, it doesn’t matter anymore, right? We’re in the era where international law and domestic law doesn’t matter. And then people, Minnesotans who protest, um like Renee Good, like Alex Pretti, who at the risk of their own lives to defend their communities and their neighbors, they get tagged as domestic terrorists and then they get executed. So that becomes part of like that, the war on terror. And then the war on drugs is is another way to kind of have that permeable connection between the domestic and the foreign, and that’s what we’ve seen in U.S. operations against Venezuela.

Justifying a blatant violation of Venezuelan national sovereignty and self-determination through this abduction operation of President Nicolás Maduro and and his wife, Celia Flores. So I think those of us who have been trying to figure out and understand what Trump’s been doing have been talking about how these three war logics have come come together and they’ve become politically productive for him, both in the domestic and in the foreign, particularly in Latin America.”

[MUSIC]

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  There is something particularly cruel  about Trump’s so-called immigration crackdown in the United States. It’s that many people who are in the cross hairs of Trump, ICE and Border Patrol in the U.S. right now, came to the United States fleeing the effects of U.S. intervention abroad, be it through war, intervention, coup or sanctions.

ALEX AVINA:  The Puerto Rican journalist Juan González has a great book on the history of Latino migration to the U.S. and the title of it is Harvest of Empire. And that’s the thesis of his of his book, right? That Latino migration to the U.S. from all of Latin America and the Caribbean are are a direct or indirect consequence of U.S. empire since the early 19th century.

I think that thesis remains viable today when we see for decades the U.S. strangling nations like Cuba and Venezuela. And of course, that then creates certain conditions on the ground in those countries that rob people of the right to stay home. And they are forced to flee to other countries to seek a better life for themselves, for their families. If they make it to the United States, Once they make it to the United States, then they become a really useful political enemy for Trump’s domestic politics.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Alex says that U.S. officials like Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller must know that the policies applied to Cuba and Venezuela today, and in decades past, are going to cause migration. 

ALEX AVINA:  They know that a lot of those migrants are going to try to come to the U.S. I think the way they think about this is, one, they try to enlist the continued support of countries like Mexico to essentially serve as the colonial gendarme of the U.S. empire against migrants and refugees. And if that doesn’t work, if people make it to the U.S., particularly in this context when there is no more asylum, essentially, right thanks to Biden, these people become useful political targets. And they also become economic targets as well because we know that these people, once they get detained, they’re going to end up in for-profit private detention centers. So you have this circularity that benefits companies that are aligned with Trump, and then it also benefits them politically to a certain extent with their base.

The immigration officer just said, ‘No matter what we’re going to arrest him.’ He is a very sweet guy who just works and doesn’t do anything and he doesn’t have any arrest warrants or anything in his record for them to do this.

MUSIC

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  In other words, you cannot disentangle the foreign from the domestic, particularly when it has to do with immigration to the United States.

Labor reporter Sarah Lazare.

SARAH LAZARE:  You know, the US has the most heavily funded military in the world by a long shot. And it uses that military plus a sanctions regime to enact policies that lead to mass displacement, and now is using the heavily funded militarized force to unleash brutal policies on people who have been displaced, possibly in part because of the US and are just seeking sanctuary.

[MUSIC]

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Historian Nikhil Singh says the example of Minneapolis really connects all the dots. 

NIKIL SINGH:  You’ve had a period, that’s a hundred years, a period in which the idea that immigrants are kind of part of the fabric of the United States, you know has become very, very normal to to most people and a part of everyday life…. And Minneapolis is a really, really, really great example of all of this because Minneapolis has been one of the cities that’s been the most hospitable to immigration.

And it’s been hospitable to a very particular kind of immigration. And this gets back to a point you made earlier about the ways in which U.S. foreign policy has destroyed entire societies in Latin America, but not just Latin America, in some ways giving rise to the immigration, the very immigration that it that the right now now rejects. So the Hmong population of of Minneapolis is came to the came to to that city after the Vietnam War, when the Hmongs, many of whom fought on the side of the Americans, were essentially like destroyed by that war. So the societies destroyed by that war… Vietnamese and Southeast Asians came to Minneapolis. Somalians came to Minneapolis, where the United States was also involved in military intervention.

So much of the immigration to the United States can actually be connected to the histories of American military and intervention overseas. And it’s one of the real ironies of the of the Right in the United States that it became hostile to military intervention, but then now also hostile to the immigrants, who in some sense were the main casualties of that military intervention. So we have a job to do in sort of trying to tell a different kind of story.

Nikhil and Alex Aviña say it’s not all Trump’s doing. Previous administrations laid the ground work. Talk about the insecurity of the Southern border began to pick up under president Bill Clinton.

ALEX AVINA:  I’ve been talking shit about Democrats for a good portion of my life because I’ve seen how they’ve contributed to this moment, right? Like they’re, they are partly responsible for the political moment that we are in, whether it’s foreign policy, whether it’s anti anti migrant policies, whether it’s war on drugs, war on terrible shit, they prepared the terrain for someone like Trump in addition to losing to him twice.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  But the Trump administration has taken it all to a whole new level. It’s left far behind discussion and debate about immigration and unleashed an immigration crackdown as a means to push its agenda and vision for the United States.

Historian Nikhil Singh.

NIKIL SINGH:  It’s used that to launch its own much larger project of trying to remake American citizenship, trying to expand domains of rightlessness and to try to institute kind of new police forces that if they’re allowed to stand, we’ll be with us for the next generation and really make life in this country, in the United States, less and less bearable for the great majority of people.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Call it what you will: Imperial boomerang. Slingshot. Homeland empire. Trump is bringing the war home, to attack his political opponents, scapegoat those fleeing the violence unleashed by U.S. imperialism abroad, and govern people quote “as subjects rather than citizens,” as professor Nikhil Singh writes.

There’s another metaphor that I think is helpful in understanding Trump and his administration.

GREG WILPERT:  Yeah, I mean, I think the best way to understand Trump is really as a mafia boss.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  Greg Wilpert is the founder of the independent news site Venezuelanalysis and an expert on Venezuela and U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. We spoke in late January. 

GREG WILPERT:  I mean, if you don’t do what the boss says, then you are going to suffer the immediate consequences. Whether it is legal or illegal, it plays absolutely no role in those contexts.

And combined with this idea that I have to punish anybody who opposes me and reward anyone who supports me. And that is the way the mafia works….  So, in that sense, there is no difference really between his domestic policy and his international policy. It is all the same kind of mafia outlook on the whole world, whether it is the US or any other place.

MICHAEL FOX [NARRATION]:  But as I’ve mentioned often in this series, there has been pushback and boy was that on display on Sunday, February 9th.

I could not end this episode, without mentioning Bad Bunny’s incredible performance during the Halftime Show of the Super Bowl. While Trump has tried to divide the United States, the Puerto Rican Reggaeton artist shot right back, honoring Puerto Rico, Latin America and immigrants in the United States. His was the first halftime Super Bowl performance mostly in Spanish. He sang of everything from love and unity to the rolling blackouts on his Caribbean island. He danced through a set of sugar cane, to represent the fields where enslaved peoples and later farmworkers toiled first under Spanish colonial rule and then under the exploitation of U.S. sugar corporations.  A huge sign in the background read, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.”

He closed his performance by naming each country in Latin America, while walking alongside the flags of each nation. He then said…. “Seguimos aquí” — ”we are still here”, before spiking a football with the words “Together, we are America” written on the side. 

I watched the performance in pleasant shock, while my family cheered.

In the United States, you don’t get a much bigger stage than the Super Bowl Halftime show, and Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio — otherwise known as Bad Bunny — did not disappoint. 

It’s a sign that while Trump may be building a so-called Homeland Empire… and attacking his enemies, both foreign and domestic… many of the people standing up to his onslaught also understand that their resistance is international, too. Breaking borders and standing united, across not just the United States, but the entire hemisphere. .

Together, we are America. Not just the United States. But all of America. From Canada, down to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina.

Bad Bunny has a new fan. 

[MUSIC]

That is all for this episode of Under the Shadow… 

Next time, we go to the location where Trump is taking aim at more than any other place, right now….  Cuba.

That’s where we are going next time…  To a nearly 800-mile long island in the Caribbean, where Trump has turned up the volume of the already disastrous 6-decade-long US blockade to deafening levels. 

SPEAKER:  U.S. sanctions on Cuba is a kind of umbrella that is is so big that don’t allow you to focus in the small things that are under that umbrella because it’s impacted all the aspects of people in Cuba’s life.

But Cubans are hanging on. 

That’s next time on Under the Shadow. 

I’m your host Michael Fox. 

I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. As I mentioned, the title, Homeland Empire, comes from an article by professor Nikhil Singh with the same name in the journal, Equator. If you haven’t already seen it, I recommend you check it out. I’ll add a link in the show notes. I’ll also add a link to some relevant recent articles by both Sarah Lazare and Alexander Aviña, and if you have not seen Bad Bunny’s Halftime performance, please go watch it right now. There’s a link in the show notes.

A couple of other things to mention.

First… except for the footage of the protest in Washington DC, which I covered last year… most of the ambient sound and clips of the ICE raids and protests are from social media videos posted online or from local news reports. Some local journalists are providing incredible on-the-ground reporting. Please follow them, support them, and share their coverage. I’m adding links to these resources and videos in the show notes.

If you are looking for more information, news and reporting on Trump’s onslaught, both on communities within the United States and abroad… please check out The Real News and NACLA. Both of them are publishing daily indispensable reporting. In fact, NACLA has created a Curated Guide to the US Invasion of Venezuela. That includes this podcast. I’ll add links to it all in the show notes.

If you are new to this podcast series, you might want to consider checking out the first season of Under the Shadow. It looks at US intervention in Central America, in particular throughout the 1980s. I highly recommend you go back and give it a listen. It’s still super relevant today. I’ll add links in the show notes or you can find that by searching for Under the Shadow wherever you get your podcasts. 

The theme music is by my band Monte Perdido. You can find us on Spotify or wherever you stream music. This closing music playing right now is off our 2024 album Ofrenda. I hope you check it out. I’ll add links in the show notes.

Finally, if you like what you hear, please head over to my Patreon page: Patreon.com/mfox. There you can support my work, become a monthly sustainer, or sign up to stay abreast of the latest on this podcast and my other reporting across Latin America. This really helps me to continue to do this important work.

Under the Shadow is a co-production of The Real News and NACLA.

This episode script was edited by Heather Gies.

Thanks for listening. See you next time.