(Photo by Nitish Meena via Wikimedia Commons/CC0 1.0 DEED)
Note: This article discusses state violence and human rights abuses, including immigration detention and deportation, enforced disappearances/missing persons, torture, and deaths.
Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump made it clear that he would double down on what he did during his first presidency without any regard for the law. He promised to deport millions of immigrants from day one of his return to office, boasting that it would be the “largest deportation operation in American history.” This included plans to deploy local law enforcement, immigration enforcement, the National Guard, and even the military to carry out his plan.
The U.S. Constitution establishes that immigrants have an “opportunity to be heard” concerning their right to remain in the United States before deportation, regardless of legal status. The Fourth Amendment specifically protects against unreasonable search and seizure, and the Fifth Amendment guarantees no person can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.” Despite these protections, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have routinely violated these rights by arresting immigrants without warrants and conducting secret searches.
These inhumane arrests have led to a disturbing surge in the number of detainees disappearing from official records and vanishing from public view. As of last August, the Miami Herald reported that about two-thirds of the 1,800 immigrants held in Florida’s new immigration detention centre vanished from ICE’s online database.
As I witness the Trump administration further escalate its attacks on immigrants, I can’t help but hear a chilling echo in history. As someone whose family was directly impacted by the U.S.’s support of Operation Condor, which led to the disappearance of many people across Latin America, this is not the first time in U.S. history that the state has participated in “erasing” populations before. For many of us from Latin America, the images today of many immigrants from Latin America detained and missing feel painfully and hauntingly familiar. These scenes remind us of the legacy we have yet to escape—the ongoing reality that is the U.S. Regime of Disappearance.
U.S. Operates as a Regime of Disappearance
A regime of disappearance refers to a system where state authorities and agents intentionally use enforced disappearance as a tool of repression and control. Under such a regime, state authorities and agents systematically abduct people, often for political reasons, deprive them of their liberty through unlawful or secret means, and detain them in secret sites. Victims frequently endure torture and face execution.
One of the most important aspects of enforced disappearance is the almost complete denial of information to families and loved ones about the whereabouts of the disappeared person. It is precisely the uncertainty over whether an individual remains alive or is deceased that distinguishes enforced disappearance as an important form of state repression worldwide.
The U.S. state has developed a series of institutions that effectively exclude people from public and political life to protect state interests. This system traces back to the nation’s founding, beginning with the erasure of Indigenous peoples, and expanded dramatically after the “War on Terror” and attacks on immigrants. Ultimately, the system is also part of a longer legacy that builds on past abuses like the U.S.’s support for regimes of disappearance in Latin America.
Supporting Regimes of Disappearance in Latin America
Operation Condor was a covert campaign of political repression and state terror coordinated by right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s. The operation aimed at violently overthrowing democratically elected left-wing leaders and eliminating political dissidents. State authorities and agents directly orchestrated disappearances by kidnapping, torturing, killing, and making political organizers and their family members vanish without a trace. This frequently took place through secret detention centers and “death flights” where victims were thrown into the sea or remote areas. State violence served as the primary means through which the regimes sought to silence and intimidate opposition across the region.
The U.S. played a significant role in supporting the operation by providing intelligence, training, and financial backing to right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America. For instance, the U.S. army trained many Latin American state armed forces in counterinsurgency tactics focused on identifying, isolating, and “neutralizing” suspected dissidents, which fueled even more disappearances.
Unsurprisingly, the U.S. also blocked many attempts at diplomatic intervention (may Henry Kissinger never rest in peace). The U.S. government viewed left-wing movements in Latin America as communist threats during the Cold War and worked to limit the spread of communism to protect U.S. interests in the region.
The operation resulted in an estimated 50,000 people killed and 30,000 people disappeared. Despite the enduring trauma faced by many families of the disappeared who are still searching for the truth about their loved ones, the U.S. later used comparable practices after the attacks of 9/11.
Continuing Practices of Disappearance in the “War on Terror”
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. government declared a national emergency and established a legal framework that treated the threat of terrorism as an exception to ordinary law and constitutional protections. Under this framework, the government viewed terrorism as an existential threat that required “exceptional” responses, justifying secret prisons, indefinite detention without trial, and widespread disappearances.
State authorities detained many Muslim men they suspected of ties to “terrorism,” often without any charges, and sometimes held them in secret prisons indefinitely at sites such as Guantánamo Bay. The intent was clear: to render these men effectively disappeared from both their communities and the protections of law. This left families in distress about their fate, as communication was restricted and legal access limited or denied altogether.
A “hold until cleared” policy, an agreement between the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, further kept detainees in custody without bond until officials completely cleared them of any connection to terrorism.
Covert transfers to secret sites, indefinite detention, and policies facilitated disappearances, making state violence invisible and unaccountable, and outside the reach of international law.
Under the guise of national security, the government also rapidly expanded mass state surveillance with unprecedented technological reach and scale. The government established and reorganized major institutions to “manage” national security and counterterrorism, including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).
These agencies massively expanded state surveillance and policing powers, letting the government collect sensitive data from citizens and target individuals without suspicion of wrongdoing. While officials claimed these measures targeted terrorism, the state also intensified policing and ethnic profiling, especially in Muslim, Black, and Brown communities.
What began as counterterrorism soon swept up immigrants, racialized communities, and political activists, making it easier for the state to disappear individuals under the banner of national security. Today, this same system enables authorities to detain immigrants in secret, isolate them from their families and legal counsel, and erase them from public records.
State-Sanctioned Disappearances in the U.S. Immigration System
The U.S. state has embedded post-9/11 tactics of disappearance within the immigration system, where immigrants are similarly surveilled, detained, and disappeared under obscure conditions.
Researchers describe the contemporary U.S. immigration system as an “immigration industrial complex,” an extensive network of policies and institutions functioning as a project of social control. This system encourages the disappearance of immigrant bodies from public life, producing categories such as “illegal” and “alien” to justify constant surveillance and detention.
Deportation itself can also constitute a form of disappearance, as authorities often drop individuals at border zones or unfamiliar locations with little means of contact or return. Over the past year, the U.S. has deported migrants to El Salvador without keeping adequate records of their transfers or destination, making many untraceable. Some deportees have been sent directly into El Salvador’s overcrowded and violent “Terrorism Confinement Center” (CECOT), where human rights abuses are well-documented.
This system of disappearance continues in part because detentions serve as a source of profit for U.S. companies that build and operate prisons and detention centres. Private prison companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group dominate the U.S. immigration detention system, running most facilities and generating billions in annual revenue from government contracts. Their financial interests depend on policies that increase detention and deportation. These companies spend millions lobbying to influence immigration enforcement policies that expand detainee populations, ensuring continued profits, which in turn support the state’s power and control.
Founded on the Disappearance of Indigenous People
It is unsurprising that the U.S. Regime of Disappearance persists today, because the creation of the U.S. relied on the use of disappearance. Since the founding of the colonial U.S. state, the U.S. has used disappearance as a tactic of colonial dispossession. Historian Patrick Wolfe refers to this as the “logic of elimination.” It is the idea that settler colonialism is not a singular historical event but an ongoing structure that depends on erasing Indigenous peoples to seize land and resources.
The crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) in the U.S. stems from this colonial logic of erasure and disappearance. Colonizers saw Indigenous women as a direct threat to their authority and control. As Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains in her book Not Murdered, Not Missing: Rebelling Against Colonial Gender Violence, “the disappearing and erasing of Indigenous women is necessary for colonial powers to secure and legitimize their sovereignty because they house and reproduce Indigenous political orders.”
Colonial practices continue to target Indigenous women for removal from their lands, tear Indigenous children from their families, and use disappearance as a means of control. Reports show that thousands of Indigenous women and girls have gone missing, yet only a small fraction are ever entered into federal databases or properly investigated.
When Indigenous women began disappearing at alarming rates, local police departments, state authorities, and the FBI routinely failed to investigate cases, benefiting from legal loopholes that allowed extractive industries, such as oil, mining, and pipeline construction companies, to operate with minimal accountability. As a result, these loopholes have enabled continued U.S. encroachment on Indigenous land and resources.
This invisibility is not coincidental, but a direct result of the U.S. Regime of Disappearance, where law enforcement and government institutions have disregarded the lives and safety of Indigenous women for generations, making violence against them inconsequential to the state and allowing the U.S. colonial system to continue benefiting from their dispossession and disappearance.
Mobilizing Against Disappearance
In her book The Knowing: How the Oppression of Indigenous Peoples Continues to Echo Today, Anishinaabe journalist Tanya Talaga explores “the knowing”: an intergenerational awareness held within many Indigenous communities about the disappearance of loved ones in residential and boarding schools in the United States and Canada, where state authorities took generations of Indigenous children away from their families and often never returned.
Despite the absence of official recognition or records of many of the disappearances, families hold onto this truth. Every Indigenous family, Talaga writes, is marked by this absence, with entire branches of family trees erased. But the persistence of “knowing” the truth, despite the deliberate lack of documentation and investigation into the disappearances, reflects the endurance of memory that continues to hold onto the reality of disappearance even when official records are falsified, absent, or suppressed.
This is why many organizations like Disappeared in America, Human Rights First, and Sanctuary of the South are fighting to document immigrant disappearances, expose injustices, and reconnect families with their loved ones. We have also seen mothers and family members around the world leading the fight against enforced disappearances, demanding answers.
Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to push back against regimes of disappearance and demand transparency from agencies that hide behind secrecy. Mobilizing awareness can help break the silence surrounding these practices and protect vulnerable immigrant communities.
Edited by Gustavo Villela
.jpg){kind=link}