The war brought home: domestic irregular warfare and the architecture of disappearance

This article examines how the second Trump administration (Trump II) has repurposed U.S. foreign irregular warfare efforts for domestic governance. It argues that immigration enforcement has evolved into a distributed, non-kinetic battlespace that leverages predictive surveillance, privatized detention infrastructure, and civil-military integration to suppress internal dissent and facilitate population-level erasure. Drawing on Department of Defense doctrine, public records, procurement data, and NGO reporting, the study reveals a functional parallel between current U.S. removal practices and previous American foreign counterinsurgency models such as the Phoenix Program, Camp Cropper, and drone metadata-based targeting. The operational regime operates without judicial oversight or public debate, relying instead on administrative opacity, geographical isolation, and structural velocity to erase targeted populations. By framing this as the domestic iteration of irregular warfare, the article highlights the systemic risks this strategy poses to democratic legitimacy, rule of law, and civic norms. By November 2025, with military deployments to major cities, court orders defied, and third-country detention facilities operational, the system described here has moved beyond theoretical concern to operational reality. It concludes by calling for formal acknowledgement of this architectural shift and exploring potential mechanisms for accountability and restoration.