A group of protesters has been blocking access to an ICE facility in Florida, the so-called Alligator Alcatraz. The protesters are not shy about explaining their motivations. Without prompting, they openly declare that ICE is “kidnapping people” and “separating families,” all in service to “fascist billionaires.”
Their action and rhetoric raise intriguing questions, especially when viewed against the broader ideological stance often held by such activists. One might reasonably expect that many of these same protesters also advocate defunding the police or even prison abolition. Yet they are not seen blocking jails and prisons across the United States. Nor are they interfering with routine law enforcement interactions involving US citizens. Their actions appear highly selective—segregated across domains—focusing intensely on the treatment of immigrants, to the point of putting their own bodies on the line, while showing far less urgency toward the treatment of citizens.
The protesters’ claim that ICE is engaged in “kidnapping” is fundamentally misleading. Kidnapping is the act of taking someone captive illegally by force for nefarious purposes (perversion, ransom, sex trafficking). ICE, by contrast, operates as a branch of law enforcement, enforcing immigration laws in much the same way that other agencies enforce criminal laws. This involves detaining and arresting individuals, delivering them to the justice system for processing and adjudication, and, in many cases, deporting them. In the case of citizens, in other law enforcement domains, this process may involve jailing or imprisoning them. Comparatively, many more US citizens are sent to jails and prisons each year than immigrants are deported. Family separation frequently occurs in both contexts, although on a much vaster scale for citizens. Yet these protests consistently overlook the vast disparity in scale between the two systems. Why?
I will come to that. But before I do, it must also be noted that the accusation that ICE’s actions serve the interests of “fascist billionaires” is specious at best. Many of these same billionaires and large corporations favor increased immigration, as it tends to drive down wages for native-born workers and legal residents by introducing a labor force willing, or at least compelled by circumstance, to accept lower pay. On the political side, immigration also shifts partisan power dynamics, overwhelmingly benefiting Democrats, particularly progressive Democrats, who align with the transnational agendas of these corporate powers. Thus, the protestors are advancing the interests of the billionaires they describe as “fascist.”
In contrast, the populist-nationalist faction within the Republican Party—exemplified by supporters of Donald Trump—pushes for stricter immigration controls, which directly opposes the interests of many of these so-called fascist billionaires. This contradiction suggests that the protesters’ framing does not align with the complex economic and political realities at play with leftwing interests in mind. If they were truly on the left, their commitment should prioritize worker interests over corporate ones. Instead, they defend developments that undermine American workers and superexploit foreign ones—all for the sake of corporate power and profit.
There is an apparent irony here. These activists—who chain themselves to gates and lie down in front of federal vehicles to block the enforcement of immigration law—are unwittingly (or perhaps wittingly, but let’s be charitable) doing the bidding of the very “fascist billionaires” they claim to oppose. The billionaires in question are not the caricatured nationalists of progressive imagination; they are the architects of a post-national order who seek to erode the sovereignty of the United States and other Western nation-states in service of a globalization project led by transnational corporations. These entities envision a future in which populations, especially labor, are managed not by democratic nation-states but by a corporate-administrative regime exercising control through bureaucratic rule, digital surveillance, and technocratic systems of credit and compliance.
The Florida protest is hardly an isolated incident; it fits a recurring pattern we have witnessed across the country for months. A clear parallel can be drawn with Antifa and similar movements (in fact, many of those engaged in anti-ICE protests are Antifa). Far from resisting the corporate-led denationalization project, the protestors seek to accelerate it—by disrupting borders, undermining the legitimacy of republican institutions (in the small-r, classical sense of a self-governing polity), and eroding the very concept of civic cohesion and national integrity that serves as a counterweight to unaccountable elite power.
The irony can be explained by acknowledging sentiments of commonality found among the protestors: their routine condemnation of the United States as a white-supremacist settler state built on stolen land—an indictment they extend to the entire Western nation-state tradition. Far from being contradictory, their selective outrage and tactical choices reveal a deeper coherence rooted in an explicitly anti-American and anti-Western politics. Immigrants, in this worldview, are not defended primarily out of universal humanitarian concern (what about the people of America and other advanced Western countries?), but because mass immigration is seen as a solvent that erodes the cultural continuity, demographic cohesion, and historical legitimacy of the very nations these activists consider irredeemably illegitimate.
In other words, the protestors champion open borders for the same reason many ordinary citizens demand immigration enforcement: both camps recognize—whether they admit it or not—that large-scale, unassimilated immigration fundamentally disrupts the continuity of the modern nation-state, which is precisely what the transnational corporate agenda seeks. The difference lies in valuation: where one side sees dissolution as justice, the other sees an existential threat. Yet, only one side has worker solidarity in mind. The protester and the border hawk agree on the transformative power of demographic change—one rationalizes it as justice and celebrates it as retribution, the other resists it as self-preservation. Self-reservation is the rational instinct.
The question for Americans in choosing comrades is whether they wish the nation-state to go away and transnational corporations to control mankind’s future, or whether the West remains a system of free nation-states where the respective countries shape their own destinies according to republican principles enshrining individual liberty and collective self-determination in the spirit of mutual interests and respecting differences. The latter requires borders.
It is not a hard choice to make. Those protesting ICE facilities advance the transnational corporate project. That project seeks to establish global corporate statism. This is the New Fascism. Either we stop it, or the world will be what Orwell asked us to imagine in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
freedom and reason 