This is not just another crackdown. It’s not even just another culture war. It’s a full-spectrum economic and psychological operation, aimed not only at the undocumented population but also at America’s industrial stagnation, its working-class despair, and its hunger for purpose. With no global war to stimulate GDP and no appetite for new foreign interventions, the Trump administration has reverse-engineered the forever war—on American soil. Not to export democracy, but to deport illegals. And in doing so, it has built a bottomless pit of domestic war profiteering, wrapped in the language of law and order but fueled by the same contractors, consultants, and logistical profiteers that once gorged themselves in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Call it the Deportation Industrial Complex. But it’s not just complex—it’s beautiful in its simplicity. Thirty million people must go. That’s the mandate. That’s the scale. And in a country wired to believe that all problems can be solved with enough manpower, tech, and money, the answer is obvious: hire everyone. Equip everyone. Pay everyone. Give every red-state welder, ex-cop, off-duty Guardsman, and bored veteran a uniform, a badge, a contract, and a pension. Transform unemployed linemen into tactical apprehension specialists. Turn shuttered Walmarts into ICE logistics hubs. Repurpose municipal airports as detention corridors. America isn’t just making deportation possible. It’s making it profitable—deeply, addictively so.

What began as a promise to restore the rule of law has metastasized into an economic engine. Every dollar once earmarked for building democracies abroad is now funneled into controlling populations at home. But unlike Iraq or Kabul, there’s no need to ship gear across oceans or train interpreters in Dari. The war is local. The targets are domestic. And the contractors are finally working in their own time zone.

Trump understood something that few in the press corps ever grasped: wars don’t have to be fought to be funded. They just need to be declared. The war on terror taught a generation of federal agencies how to secure blank checks, build redundant infrastructure, and bill for metrics instead of results. That same playbook is now deployed along highways in New Mexico, suburbs in Georgia, and industrial parks in Ohio. Detention centers don’t have to be full to be funded. Drones don’t have to fly to be leased. Uniforms don’t have to be worn to be paid for. This is the genius of the domestic security economy: the appearance of effort is sufficient. And with every raid filmed for Facebook and every Alcatraz revival whispered in policy memos, the appearance becomes self-sustaining.

What the Pentagon did to the Middle East, ICE is now doing to middle America. The economy is no longer post-industrial. It’s para-industrial—anchored not in goods but in bodies: processing, moving, containing, intimidating. And just like every imperial project before it, this one needs both elite buy-in and grassroots sweat. So while the consultants rake in six-figure retainers, the MAGA base gets something better: dignity. Work. Uniforms. Authority. Meaning.

And that’s the real brilliance. This isn’t just a boondoggle. It’s a buffet. A Golden Corral of enforcement where everyone eats. From the billion-dollar contractor to the $23/hour transport tech, there is room at the table. The goal is not deportation efficiency. The goal is economic resuscitation, social stabilization, and narrative control—all wrapped in the spectacle of taking America back. It’s not clean. It’s not moral. But it is working.

The Gold Rush of Deportation is here. And for those who missed out on the last war, this one’s paying in cash, no passport required.