January 2026 / Lauren Morales / Committee Opposed to Militarism & the Draft (COMD) - For decades the United States has been a hypermilitarized country. The public is force fed the notion that we must respect the armed forces who are forever fighting to keep U.S. Americans safe at home and abroad. Yet there has always been a small part of society that challenges this indoctrination, recognizing that worshiping imperialist ideology is irreconcilable to national and global justice.
But what happens when the empire’s Department of Defense becomes the Department of War, and the war is being waged on our own cities and on our own people? Will members of mainstream U.S. confront their blind glorification of militarism when they see soldiers in the streets facilitating inhuman immigration policies and enforcing the criminalization of dissent?
Those who follow U.S. militarism have noted significant new developments over the past year. As The Intercept recently reported, as of mid-September Trump had deployed “roughly 35,000 troops within the United States this year,” even though the true number could actually be “markedly higher.” Military members have been drawn from the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines and National Guard “in service of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant” and tough-on-crime agenda. Experts contend these intensifying efforts violate the Posse Comitatus Act, a 19th century federal law that generally prohibits the armed forces from carrying out domestic law enforcement. Adherence to the Posse Comitatus Act has been widely understood as fundamental to maintaining democracy and a safeguard from slipping into a full-blown police state.
Currently, 10,000 troops are deployed (or deploying) to assist Customs and Border Protection at the U.S./Mexico border -- a dramatic increase over the approximately 2,500 troops who were deployed to the region when Trump took office in January. In April, a presidential memorandum ordered the military to take control of a 60-foot-wide federal land buffer along some parts of the border that are called the Roosevelt Reservation. Trump said in the memorandum that “our southern border is under attack from a variety of threats” and that “the complexity of the situation requires that our military take a more direct role” in security and enforcement than in the past. Allowing the Department of War to control this land has given troops the green light to “detain any trespassers, including migrants” and asylum seekers. According to analysts at the Brennan Center for Justice, the plan seems to be to “let the military act as a de facto border police force, with soldiers apprehending, searching, and detaining people.”
The escalating use of the military to assist in immigration and law enforcement is something that should give pause to potential enlistees who are often people from racialized and disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. While enlistment is voluntary, enlistees are often funneled into the armed forces for a variety of reasons related to their lived experiences and working-class realities. Young people who sign their lives over to the Department of War must realize they will be increasingly utilized to enact terror in their own communities and support federal agencies accused of human rights abuses here on our own soil.
It’s been widely reported that Trump’s goal is to deport one million people within his first year in office. On August 25th, Newsweek reported that National Guard troops could “soon be deployed in 19 states . . . to help U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)” meet this quota. Just this summer we witnessed the chaos and fear unleashed on Los Angeles when thousands of military members were ordered to effectively occupy the city against the wishes of state and local governments. We've seen similar scenes unfold in such places as Washington, D.C. and Chicago, as well. The dystopian visions of military vehicles cruising the streets in full tactical gear and with the weapons to match make it obvious that this administration knows no bounds when it comes to instilling fear among “enemy” communities. Threats to enact similar military occupations of other U.S. cities continue to make headlines.
On September 27th, Trump posted on his official social media accounts that he was directing Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to send troops to “war ravaged” Portland, Oregon, to protect “ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa” and that he was “authorizing full force, if necessary.” This tweet came just days after it was reported by the Miami Herald that hundreds of people who were formerly detained at the scandal-ridden immigration jail in the Florida Everglades, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” have vanished from ICE’s online database, their families left in the dark as to their whereabouts. Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst at the Florida Immigrant Coalition explained that “what we’re seeing at Alligator Alcatraz is basically a new model of immigration detention, where a state-run facility is operating as an extrajudicial black site, completely outside of the previous models of immigration detention in this country. And it’s making what was already a terrible system somehow even worse.”
The Trump administration’s agenda to militarize immigration enforcement and deploy troops on American cities to crush dissent is snowballing at an alarming rate. Every person of conscience who cares to fight against our country’s rapid descent into fascism ought to prioritize counter-recruitment organizing as a key part of this struggle. It's high time to realize that the U.S. military is not only a tool of imperialism abroad but also crucial to domestic repression. As new, darker days surely lay ahead, we must creatively strategize ways to protect U.S. American youth from being seduced into the very forces that threaten human rights here at home.
Lauren Morales is a professional educator who teaches high school Ethnic Studies and United States history. She views education as key to liberation for oppressed peoples and communities.
This article is from the October-December 2025 issue of COMD’s newsletter, Draft Notices, https://draftnotices.org/
Information Sources:
Terse, Nick. “Trump Deployment in U.S. climbs to 35,000 boots on the groundTrump Deployment in U.S. climbs to 35,000 boots on the ground.” The Intercept, Sept. 17, 2025.
Lopez Todd, C. “Interagency Land Agreement Strengthens Military Border Mission.” U.S. Department of War, April 17, 2025.
Baldor, Lolita & Copp, Tara. “Us Army to control land on Mexico border as part of base, migrants could be detained, officials say.” Associated Press, Apr 14, 2025.
Goitein, Elizabeth & Nunn, Joseph. “How Turning the Border into a Military Zone Evades Congress and Threatens Rights.” Brennan Center For Justice, Apr 28, 2025.
Rahman, Khaleda. “National Guard Mobilization Plans Across States: What We Know.” Newsweek, Aug 25, 2025.
Dasgupta, Shirsho & Kennedy, Thomas. Interview by Amy Goodman. “Where Are the Detainees? Hundreds of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Prisoners Disappear from ICE Database.” Democracy Now, Sept. 25, 2025.
