How the Global War on Terror Became a War at Home
Editor’s Note: Roberto J. González is an anthropologist who helped build the Network of Concerned Anthropologists in 2007 in response to the US government’s “Human Terrain System” that embedded social scientists in military units. Prickly Paradigm Press is proud to have published his American Counterinsurgency (2009) alongside other pamphlets responding critically to the Iraq War. Here, 25 years on, González reflects on the ways in which American counterinsurgency then shapes the targeting of immigrants and activists today.
The morning of September 11 is still seared into my mind, a quarter-century after the attacks. After a brisk morning jog, I returned to my Oakland studio apartment for coffee. The doorman barely noticed us at the entrance—his eyes were glued to a small TV screen in the front office. He stared vacantly.
“We’re being attacked,” he said. “The World Trade Center is gone.”
When I got to my tenth-floor apartment, I turned on the TV and saw the unspeakable horror of airplanes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, billowing plumes of black smoke rising from the buildings. News programs replayed the cataclysmic collapse of first one skyscraper, then another.
These images became part of the collective conscience of millions of Americans. For some, it was a day of reckoning, a time to come to terms with the history of the United States’ complicated and often fraught relationship with the rest of the world. For many more, it was the beginning of a war—what President George W. Bush would soon call a global war on terror.
Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the United States and a so-called coalition of the willing launched wars in Afghanistan and, in 2003, Iraq. These military campaigns, dubbed Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, resulted in the deployment of nearly two million US military personnel. Over the next twenty years, the post-9/11 wars killed nearly one million people, mostly civilians.
But the war on terror was also a war at home, on American soil. Within the US, elected officials implemented measures domestically that linked counterterrorism to civil immigration enforcement. Just days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush established an Office of Homeland Security under the executive branch.
Weeks later, the US Congress passed the Homeland Security Act, a sweeping law that consolidated twenty-two departments and agencies into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Among other things, the law was explicitly designed to prevent domestic terrorist attacks, but the primary focus of DHS would quickly become routine immigration enforcement. In the words of legal scholar Elizabeth Beavers, “By moving immigration enforcement away from other departments. . .DHS legally formalized the framing of foreign nationals entering the United States as inherently suspicious potential terrorists. . .The new agency immediately went to work conducting raids ‘not on suspected terror cells, but on businesses employing undocumented immigrants’.”
In the years following 9/11, US policymakers increasingly defined immigrants from many parts of the Global South—not just the Middle East, but also Latin America, the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa—as threats to national security. For many of those swept along by the jingoism of the post 9/11 period, the American melting pot had become a pressure cooker. The popularity of cable news, and later social media, fueled xenophobic attitudes about immigrants, and would eventually accelerate political polarization in the United States.
They also set the stage for the war at home.
Now, the global war on terror has come home to roost. Officials from the Trump administration, and President Trump himself, have implicitly and explicitly described immigrants as terrorists for the past decade. For example, in August 2016, Trump stated that the “common thread linking the major Islamic terrorist attacks that have recently occurred on our soil. . .is that they have involved immigrants or the children of immigrants.” In an interview in December 2023, he described immigrants as “criminals” and “terrorists,” and claimed, “they’re poisoning the blood of our country.” Even earlier, he had referred to Mexican immigrants as drug dealers and “rapists.”
But just as importantly, the Trump administration has invoked wartime and national security laws such as the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and the 1940 Alien Registration Act to facilitate mass immigrant deportations. What has emerged as the result of these transformations is a war at home—a war conducted on American soil, against immigrant communities. Much of the legal infrastructure for the war at home was built in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but its scale and intensity have grown rapidly since January 2025—as have its costs.
Apart from the legal and institutional transformations that created a new immigration enforcement regime in the post-9/11 period, there were other signs that domestic law enforcement agencies were preparing for war. The Department of Homeland Security began naming its immigration sweeps in military fashion, as if federal agents’ raids in American cities were foreign wars—Operation Metro Surge, Operation Midway, Operation Catch of the Day, Operation Charlotte’s Web. ICE agents began wearing masks, tactical gear, and combat helmets, and typically wore no name tags or badges. Consequently, they have been unidentifiable—and therefore, largely unaccountable. The message from federal government agencies was clear: the war on terror would now be fought on domestic soil. DHS has engaged in a protracted campaign of low-intensity warfare, targeting cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis, to name but a few.
Today, the US Department of Homeland Security and its constituent organizations—namely, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO)—have built a vast technological apparatus. These agencies, which grew steadily throughout both Democratic and Republican administrations, are a secret police force in the making, accountable only to the President, without meaningful civilian or congressional oversight.
Federal law enforcement agencies have adopted a wide range of AI-driven technologies, some adapted from policing tools designed for local law enforcement agencies, and some adapted from military applications. Agents have used these tools—including automated license plate readers, facial recognition apps, surveillance drones, social media monitoring programs, and data integration platforms—to target immigrants, activists, and ordinary Americans. Many of these platforms and programs have been created by surveillance tech companies funded by Silicon Valley venture capital firms, including some whose executives espouse far-right anti-democratic political views. Small wonder that some analysts are warning about the rise of American technofascism.
When I wrote American Counterinsurgency nearly twenty years ago—a critical analysis of the US Army’s ill-fated Human Terrain System—I learned that the term “human terrain” originated in the 1960s, at a time when domestic law enforcement agencies viewed dissident groups such as the Black Panthers as existential threats to US national security. The earliest use of the term was in a 1968 report by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which in the 1950s became notorious for launching anti-communist witch hunts. At this time, counterinsurgency techniques developed for colonial policing were applied to American cities.
Today, something similar is happening. Computational counterinsurgency methods and tools deployed by American troops in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now routinely used against immigrants and activists on US soil. Wars in foreign lands can, over time, morph into wars at home—and that is precisely what has happened over the past two decades.
The ghosts of 9/11 still haunt the streets of America.