Upside-Down World: Climate Change and the Border-Industrial Complex in the Trump Era
Climate displacement and border enforcement--two dynamics trending distinctly upward--are on a collision course.
This article is a collaboration between The Border Chronicle and TomDispatch, a great outlet which has been looking at U.S. foreign policy, the military industrial complex, the “forever wars,” climate change, and many other topics since 2001.
Upside-Down World: Climate Change and the Border-Industrial Complex in the Trump Era
Climate displacement and border enforcement--two dynamics trending distinctly upward--are on a collision course.
Believe it or not, I had a transcendent experience at this year’s Border Security Expo, the annual event that brings Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) together with private industry. I hesitate to describe it that way, though, because I was on the exhibition hall floor and instantly found myself in the very heart of the U.S. border-industrial complex. It was early April and I was surrounded by the latest surveillance equipment — camera systems, drones, robodogs — from about 225 companies (a record number for such an event) displaying their wares at that Phoenix Convention Center. Many of the people there seemed all too excited that Donald Trump was once again president.
You might wonder how it’s even possible to have a mystical experience while visiting this country’s largest annual border surveillance fair and I would agree, especially since my moment came just after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gave the keynote speech to a packed convention center ballroom. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Noem, who had infamously worn a $50,000 Rolex watch to a Salvadoran “terrorism” prison photo shoot just weeks before, received rousing ovation after ovation, as she claimed that the Trump administration had almost achieved “operational control” of the U.S.-Mexican border. (Only a little more to go, she insisted!) The same point had been made by “border czar” Thomas Homan earlier that day. Both asked the audience to give standing ovations to all border law enforcement officials in the room for, as Noem put it, enduring the “train wreck and poor leadership of Joe Biden leading this country.” And like those who preceded her, she used words like “invasion” abundantly, suggesting that an all-too-fragile United States was battling a siege of unknown proportions.
The late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano had a name for just such an experience: an “upside-down world,” he called it. In such a world, we’re presented not with the facts but their very opposite. For the border-industrial complex, however, it’s just such an inverted world that sells their product.
Then it happened. I was walking down a corridor lined with drone companies, including one from India called ideaForge, whose medium-sized drone was “built like a bird” and “tested like a tank.” There were also sophisticated artificial intelligence camera systems mounted on masts atop armored ground drones, which might be considered the perfect combination of today’s modern border technology. There was also the company Fat Truck, whose vehicles had tires taller than my car. X-ray and biometric systems surrounded me, along with green-uniformed Border Patrol agents, sheriffs from border counties, and ICE agents checking the equipment. As always, you could practically smell the cash in the air. Of my 13 years covering the Border Security Expo, this was clearly the largest and most enthusiastic one ever.
I was walking through it all on one of those worn blue carpets found in convention centers and then, suddenly, I wasn’t walking there at all. Instead, I was in the Sierra Tarahumara in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, with a Rarámuri man named Mario Quiroz. I had been there with him the previous week, so it was indeed a memory, but so vivid it essentially overcame me. I could smell the forest near the Copper Canyon, one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I could see Quiroz showing me the drying yellowish trees cracking everywhere amid a mega-drought of staggering proportions. I could even catch a glimpse of the fractured Río Conchos, the Mexican river that, at the border, would become the Rio Grande. It was drying up and the trees along it were dying, while many local people were finding that they had little choice but to migrate elsewhere to make ends meet
I had to sit down. When I did, I suddenly found myself back at the expo in that stale air-conditioned environment that only promises yet more surveillance towers and drones on that very border. Then came the realization that gave me pause: although that devastated Sierra Tarahumara terrain and the Border Security Expo couldn’t be more different, they are, in fact, also intimately connected. After all, Sierra Tarahumara represents the all too palpable and devastating reality of climate change and the way it’s already beginning to displace people, while the Expo represented my country’s most prominent response to that displacement (and the Global North’s more generally). For the United States — increasingly so in the age of Donald Trump — the only answer to the climate crisis and its mass displacement of people is yet more border enforcement.
“Unwanted Starving Immigrants”
Consider the 2003 Pentagon-commissioned report entitled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security. It stated, “The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries because they have the resources and reserves to achieve self-sufficiency.” It also predicted that “borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America.” Twenty-two years later, that prophecy — if the Border Security Expo is any indication — is coming true.
In 2007, Leon Fuerth, former national security adviser to Vice President Al Gore, wrote that “border problems” will overwhelm American capabilities “beyond the possibility of control, except by drastic measures and perhaps not even then.” His thoughts were a response to a request from the House of Representatives for scientists and military practitioners to offer serious projections connecting climate change and national security. The result would be the book Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change. Since, according to its editor Kurt Campbell, it would take 30 years for a major military platform to go from the “drawing board to the battlefield,” that volume was, indeed, a book of preparation for a bordered future that only now is beginning to truly envelop us.
In March, I stood on a hill in the town of Sisoguichi in Chihuahua, Mexico, with the local priest, Héctor Fernando Martínez, who told me people there wouldn’t be planting corn, beans, and squash at all this year because of the drought. They feared it would never again rain. And it was true that the drought in Chihuahua was the worst I had ever seen, affecting not only the mountains but also the valleys where drying lakes and reservoirs had left farmers without water for the 2025 agricultural cycle.
“What do people do instead?” I asked the priest. “Migrate,” he told me. Many people already migrate for half the year to supplement their incomes, picking apples near Cuauhtémoc or chiles near Camargo. Others end up in the city of Ciudad Juárez, working in maquiladoras (factories) to produce goods for Walmart, Target, and warplane manufacturers, among other places. Some, of course, also try to cross into the United States, only to encounter the same technology and weaponry that was before my eyes that day at the Border Security Expo.
Those displacements, anticipated in assessments from the early 2000s, are already happening in an ever more unnerving fashion. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center reports that each year now about 22.4 million people are forcibly displaced by “weather-related hazards.” And projections for future migration are startling. The World Bank estimates that, by 2050, 216 million people could be on the move globally, while another report speculates that the number could even hit 1.2 billion. Multiple factors influence people’s decisions to migrate, of course, but climate change is rapidly becoming a (if not the) most prominent one.
Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to banish climate change from all government documents and discourse and quite literally wipe it out as a subject of any interest at all, the DHS’s 2025 Homeland Threat Assessment describes what’s going on in Chihuahua and elsewhere all too well: “Natural disasters or extreme weather events abroad that disrupt local economies or result in food insecurity have the potential to exacerbate migration flows to the United States.” The 2021 DHS Climate Action Plan stated that the department would “conduct integrated, scalable, agile, and synchronized steady-state operations… to secure the Southern Border and Approaches.” It turns out that the “operational control” Kristi Noem mentioned at the Border Security Expo includes preparations for potential climate-induced mass migration. That hellish dystopic world (envisioned in movies like Mad Max) is coming to you directly from Trump’s Department of Homeland Security along the U.S.-Mexican border.
The Border-Industrial Complex in Action
As I continued through that expo hall, I recalled walking in drought-stricken Chihuahua and thought about what’s now happening on our border to face the human nightmare of climate change in an all-too-military fashion. Ominously enough, the company Akima, which operates the ICE detention center in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, was a prime sponsor of the Expo and I saw its name prominently displayed. Its website indicates that it is “now hiring to support ICE efforts,” effectively framing the mass deportations promised by Trump as a good opportunity for volunteers.
One booth for the company QinteQ displayed a ground robot resembling a multilegged insect. I wondered how this could help with the Chihuahuan drought. A vendor told me it could be used for bomb disposal. When I gave him a look of disbelief, he mentioned that he’d heard of a couple of cases of bombs found at the border. At another company, UI Path, an enthusiastic vendor claimed their software was focused on administrative “efficiency” and, he assured me, was well “aligned with DOGE” (Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency), allowing Border Patrol agents to not have to handle the “tedious tasks,” so that they could “go out in the field.” I then asked about their success with the Border Patrol and he replied, “They already have our program. They are already using it.”
When I approached the Matthews Environmental Solutions booth, the vendors weren’t there. But behind a lone green chair, a large placard stated that the company was one of the “global leaders in waste incineration,” with over 5,000 installations worldwide. A photo of a large metal waste incinerator caught my eye, somewhat morbidly, because the website also said that the company offered “cremation systems.” Though they weren’t selling that service at the Border Security Expo, there was certainly a macabre symbolism to such an expo where human ashes could be converted into profit and suffering into revenue.
Forecasters at the global management consulting firm IMARC Group cheerily project an even more robust global homeland security market to come. “The growing number and severity of natural disasters and public health emergencies,” they write, “is offering a favorable homeland security market outlook.” By IMARC’s calculations, the industry will grow from $635.90 billion this year to $997.82 billion by 2033, a nearly 5% growth rate. The company Market and Markets, however, predicts a far quicker ascent, estimating that the market will reach $905 billion by next year. The consensus, in short, is that, in the age of climate change, homeland security will soon be on the verge of becoming a trillion-dollar industry — and just imagine what future Border Security Expos will be like then!
Certainly, the Trump administration, eager to toss out anything related to climate change funding while also working hard to increase the production of fossil fuels, has ambitious plans to contribute to that very reality. Since January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE have already put out about $2.5 billion in contracts. It’s still early, but that number is actually lower than Joe Biden’s pace a year ago; his spending reached $9 billion at the end of fiscal year 2024. Despite constant accusations from Trump and others that Joe Biden maintained “open borders,” he finished his term as the top contractor of any president when it came to border and immigration enforcement and so set a high bar for Trump.
In 2025, Trump is operating with a CBP and ICE budget of $29.4 billion, slightly lower than Biden’s 2024 one, but historically high (approximately $10 billion more than when he started his first term as president in 2017). The change, however, will come next year, as the administration is asking for $175 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, an increase of $43.8 billion “to fully implement the President’s mass removal campaign, finish construction of the border wall on the Southwest border, procure advanced border security technology, modernize the fleet and facilities of the Coast Guard, and enhance Secret Service protective operations.”
On top of that on May 22nd, the House of Representatives passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that, among other things, would infuse $160 billion more in funding into the CBP and ICE budgets over the next four and a half years. As Adam Isaacson from the Washington Office on Latin America stated, “We have never seen anything come close to the level of border hardening and massive deportation enforcement resources foreseen in this bill” that will now go to a vote in the Senate. This may explain the industry’s optimism; they sense a potential bonanza to come.
Despite Trump’s deep urge to erase global warming from consideration, climate displacement and border protection — two dynamics trending distinctly upward — are on a collision course. The United States, the world’s largest historic carbon emitter, had already been spending 11 times more on border and immigration enforcement than on climate finance and, under President Trump, those proportions are set to become even more stunningly abysmal. U.S. climate policy now boils down to this: reducing fossil fuel extraction and consumption are far less important (if important at all) than the creation of a profitable border and immigration apparatus. In fact, the dystopia of the Border Security Expo I saw that day is the U.S. response to the drought in Chihuahua and so much else involving the overheating of this planet. And yet, when it comes to this country, whatever Donald Trump may want to believe, no border wall can actually stop climate change itself.
As I listened to Kristi Noem and Thomas Homan discuss what they considered to be a besieged country, I thought of Galeano’s provocative analysis of that inverted world where the oppressor becomes the oppressed and the oppressed the oppressor. That world now includes fires, floods, increasingly devastating storms, and encroaching seas, all to be met with high-tech cameras, biometrics, robotic dogs, and formidable walls.
I still can’t shake my vision of those yellowish hues on the dying trees in the Sierra Tarahumara. I walked with Quiroz down that canyon to the Río Conchos River and out onto its bed of dried stones that crunched like bones underfoot. Quiroz told me he came to that then-flowing river every day as a kid to tend to his family’s goats. I asked how he felt about it now that it looked like a bunch of disconnected puddles stretching before us to the horizon. “Tristeza,” he told me.
Walking the halls of the expo, I felt the weight of that word: sadness. Sadness, indeed, in this thoroughly upside-down borderworld of ours.
Article translated into Spanish: https://havanatimesenespanol.org/reportajes/cambio-climatico-y-el-complejo-industrial-fronterizo-con-trump/
Great reporting with a point! Thanks for this one. I'm trying to unpack lessons/stories about small town Oracle to the larger world...including the role of immigration/migration: frankpierson.substack.com. Big Media doesn't get it.