Before the Trump Administration used the Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador's Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo in March 2025, extraterritorial detention had been a tactic reserved for the highest risks to national security. Taking Guantánamo Bay as a point of departure, this thesis considers how migrants have become treated as criminal threats to public safety and security through policy and language. By using a dual methods approach with discourse analysis and text-as-data pattern recognition to analyze the text of Executive Proclamations regarding immigration, I hope to develop the understanding of implications of the construction of the migrant as a securitized subject in the years since 9/11. I posit that increasingly securitized language has played on American memories of terrorism and established the migrant as a threat to national security in popular political imagination, and that this discourse is activated by Executives seeking to pass restrictive and exceptional policy.
Ruby Velez (Fri,) studied this question.
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