The quest to maintain border security justifies unrestrained violence against the racialized other. The sovereign authority of unchecked power at the border is founded upon the initial extermination of Native (non)-citizens

De Genova (2007) observes that the production of the “enemy alien” serves the production of “heightened insecurity,” which may be the Homeland Security State’s “most politically valuable end” (p. 436). While border security measures seem to protect the nation from foreign threat, de Genova observes, such defense projects in fact generate ideological sites of “radical insecurity” (Kaplan, 2003, p. 90). Kaplan (2003) notes that homeland security blurs the inside and outside and reproduces itself through the repeated production of a nation that is insufficiently protected from – and cannot escape – internal and external threat. The production of border insecurity does not hinge simply on the delineation of deserving and undeserving, but rather a set of flexible technologies by which the (greatest) “threat” or “enemy” is constantly recreated. As de Genova writes, undocumented migrants and “terrorists” have been differently imagined by U.S security regimes; while the former is characterized by deportability, the latter is defined in relation to detainability. With the “War on Terror,” however, the “deportable alien” and the “enemy/terrorist” have converged. This merging was enacted, in part, through a strategy of targeted policing, which conceptualized “fugitive apprehension” as the precursor to the official “Endgame” of “remov[ing] all removable aliens” (USDHS-ICE, 2003, p. ii, quoted in de Genova, 2007). Although targeted enforcement – manifest in ICE raids and localized border militarization –cannot (and does not aspire to) achieve the putative goal of mass deportation, it does provide the rationale for an ever-growing Homeland Security apparatus (de Genova, 2007). Detention of those targeted for removal enhances the equation of detention with “illegality,” which enables the immigration regime’s even more targeted use of “preemptive” surveillance and detection for those produced as potential “terrorists.” Now employed by the Department of Homeland Security, border patrol officers are charged with the detection, containment, and detainment of immigrant, criminal, and terrorist threat. Thus, the border operates as a site of convergence for crime and immigration regulation, and overlapping carceral regimes (Bohrman & Murakawa, 2005; Hannabach, 2013). Razack (2010) conceptualizes the border as a “space of exception,” where neither domestic nor foreign law check the authority of the sovereign state and non-citizens are constituted as “extraterritorial” – neither inside nor outside the nation-state and therefore unprotected by human rights principles. Spaces of exception are structured through race, as the production of undeserving racialized subjects naturalizes the suspension of rights in the name of national security. Individuals may be detained indefinitely based on mere suspicion of membership in a “terrorist group,” as the “special” nature of national security provides a cloak of immunity in treating those who “threaten” the nation-state. Rhetorical appeal to colorblind logics of protection and “rule of law” – i.e., punishment of those who crossed the border without papers – naturalize violence and obscure the ways in which “citizen” and citizenship have been produced through colonization and racism (Garcia, 1995; Razack, 2010). When the racialized figure of the “illegal” migrant is created through the law and made into a spectacle at the “theater of the border” (Oliviero, 2011), the constitutive racialization of the law and “democracy” itself becomes invisible. Consequently, the “rule of law” and protection of national “sovereignty” become floating signifiers available to operate in service of immigration “reform” and “national security” (de Genova, 2004). The relationship between Indigenous peoples and the United States can also be understood through Agamben’s conceptualization of the state of exception, wherein biopolitical strategies cohere with and support sovereign violence in the (re)production of the nation-state. Rifkin (2009) argues that national sovereignty is not foundational to US law and policy, but rather the consequence of an exception “that rests on nothing more than the absoluteness with which it is articulated and enforced” (Rifkin 98). Reiteration of Indigenous peoples’ exceptionality legitimates their governance by seemingly limitless federal authority.