Where will this violent force appear next? Military veterans of the Middle East and the racialized policing of migration in the American midwest

Against a backdrop of anti-immigration state violence in the American Midwest (e.g., in Chicago and Minneapolis), this article examines the transfer of racialized violence from sites of war to internal policing. The growing recruitment of military veterans into federal law enforcement—particularly The U.S. Department for Homeland Security (DHS) forces: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)—facilitates the spread of practices and ideologies from war zones to the civilian policing of US cities. Drawing on the concept of coloniality, the article explores how racialized cultures of military othering in wars in the Middle East take form in the logics of immigration enforcement ‘at home’, following a boomerang trajectory. Going beyond this and adopting an approach of ‘relational comparison’, the article turns focus on the historical example of British veterans of the First World War in the Royal Irish Constabulary during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1922) who became notorious as the ‘Black-and-Tans’ for their practices of militarized and racialized violence in Ireland. After 1922, this culture and capacity for violence moved on to British Mandate Palestine and beyond (e.g., Kenya, Malaysia, and Hong Kong). The article formulates and responds to the erotema ‘where will this violent force appear next?’ to learn from this precedent and to remain alert to the foreboding inevitability that the carceral and lethal capacities of the DHS are poised for future violent interventions in the US and elsewhere.