Trump’s “Weapons of Mass Migration” Explains Targeting of DC, LA, Mexico, Venezuela
Government takes a page out of Iraq WMD
What explains the preparations for American military attacks in Mexico, troop deployments at the southern border, National Guard on the streets of D.C. plus other major cities, and most recently, American warships off the coast of Venezuela?
It’s the invasion of America.
That’s what Donald Trump has been alleging for a decade, and the latest weapon in his crusade against it is “weaponized migration.” This is the WMD of our era, a misreading of the facts and the embrace of some unknown unknown that incorporates Russia and China, terrorist groups, cartels, and even American friends as all being behind the secretly orchestrated migrant invasion.
It’s “a national security crisis, perhaps the greatest in our lifetime…,” says Joseph Humire, the newly installed counter-invasion czar at the Pentagon. “Far from a problem of ‘root causes’ derived from socio-economic hardship, natural disasters, or high-levels of insecurity, the center of gravity of the U.S. border and immigration crisis … is Weaponized Migration.”
In other words, people are not coming to America to escape poverty or repression or for opportunity, they are foot soldiers of an orchestrated attack on the country.
Weaponized migration is key to understanding Trump’s ham-fisted crusade against illegal immigration and even crime in America. The 1983 movie, Scarface, portrayed a wave of Cuban prisoners during the “Mariel boatlift” — including many criminals —as intentionally launched by Fidel Castro, setting the stage for protagonist Tony Montana’s rise from refugee to ruthless drug lord.
Evidently, this thinking influenced Donald Trump, who couldn’t resist criticizing Mexico in June 2015, on the very day he announced his candidacy to be president. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us: they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists.”
Mexico is doing it, he thinks, actively and intentionally. In that, it is no longer a human, sociological, or economic problem. It’s National Security.
The idea of weaponized migration has its origins in the academic literature, first as “coercive engineered migration” to describe how population movements are manipulated by states and non-state actors to achieve political goals. The Mariel boatlift, Serbian actions in the 1990s, Syria in the 2010s; the national security establishment tied all of these together as indicative of a new form of “hybrid warfare.” Then NATO commander Gen. Philip Breedlove said in 2015 that Russia and the Damascus regime were “deliberately weaponizing migration in an attempt to overwhelm European structures.”
Humire, recently appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs, told Congress in March that weaponized migration at the southern border “goes beyond simply a law enforcement challenge” and represents “a national security crisis” demanding a national security response.
“Weaponized migration is when state and non-state actors catalyze, manipulate, and/or induce mass migration to achieve political and geopolitical objectives. In the current context, these objectives go beyond coercion and focus on eroding sovereign borders and expanding territorial capture and control. Weaponized migration suggests that America’s border and immigration crisis goes beyond simply a law enforcement challenge. It is a national security crisis, perhaps the greatest in our lifetime, causing an alarming threat to U.S. sovereignty and a humanitarian catastrophe for both Americans and migrants alike.”
Humire’s testimony included a recommendation that the military play “an important force multiplier role” in assisting local law enforcement with immigration matters.
Much of the rest of his testimony is a corkboard-style mapping of links between hostile governments, cartels and migration flows that echoes President Trump’s portrayal of the invasion. At one point, Humire cites what he calls a “Migrant Invasion Map” peppered with dots that also include sanctuary cities and Chinese government land purchases.
Humire casts migration as establishing a “beachhead” from which to launch attacks on America.
“The objective of weaponized migration is to destabilize U.S. social and government structures by increasing the cost of social burdens; expanding crime and violence and establishing a ‘beachhead’ of subversive personnel available for directed attacks inside the U.S. and against critical infrastructure and high value targets to create fear and paralysis. As well as degrade deployment and replenishment of U.S. forces to military operations abroad.”
All of this, in Humire’s view, is being carried out by cartels, which act not just to make billions, but are political tools of America’s enemies.
“Within the concept of Strategic Engineered Migration, TCOs [Transnational Criminal Organizations] function as proxies of adversarial nation-states aiming for territorial expansion. The erosion of sovereign borders is a pretext for expanding illicit economies to capture new territories and blur the boundaries of state and non-state control.”
Humire is unusual in how public he is about all of this, but the intelligence community has quietly adopted the weaponized migration framework since the European migrant crisis of the mid-2010s. Last year, the National Intelligence Council included weaponized migration in its new glossary of “common terms” related to hybrid warfare. It’s the same as Humire’s: “The intentional manipulation of migrant flows to coerce another state.”
No less than Biden’s CIA Director William Burns told the Financial Times last year that the intelligence community was “very sharply focused on” weaponized migration.
FT: So the head of the U.S. Army’s Northern Command said recently that there are more Russian military intelligence agents in Mexico than in any foreign country. Is there any sign that Russia's facilitating illegal immigration into the U.S. across the Mexican border?
DIRECTOR BURNS: That’s something we’re very sharply focused on. I mean, along with our domestic law enforcement counterparts, as well.
Part of this is a function of the fact that so many Russian intelligence officers have been kicked out of, you know, Europe over the course of the two and a half years after the war [in Ukraine]. So they’re looking for places to go and looking for places in which they can operate. But we’re very sharply focused on that.
Gen. Gregory Guillot, who leads the military’s Northern Command responsible for “homeland defense” affirmed his belief in weaponized migration in his own statement to Congress in February. “Separately, transnational criminal organizations based in Mexico continue to threaten U.S. sovereignty and territorial integrity through the production and trafficking of fentanyl and other illicit drugs and the facilitation of unlawful mass migration toward the U.S. southern border [emphasis added],” Guillot said.
Trump in his March executive order invoking the Alien Enemies act repeatedly accuses the Tren de Aragua cartel of engaging in “irregular warfare” against the U.S. and accusing the Venezuelan government of sponsoring it, including by “infiltrating” America and “engag[ing] in mass illegal migration” to the U.S.
Tren de Aragua (TdA) …has engaged in and continues to engage in mass illegal migration to the United States to further its objectives of harming United States citizens, undermining public safety, and supporting the Maduro regime’s goal of destabilizing democratic nations in the Americas, including the United States.
At this point, Weapons of Mass Migration has become an ideology that no amount of fact is going to unwind. Congress has barely mentioned the adoption to apply to the United States or Trump’s multi-faceted anti-immigration campaign. The major media has not done a single article about the adoption of weaponized migration by the intelligence world and the Trump administration.
But there is evidence to the contrary.
Most prominent is the recently declassified intelligence community report “Maduro Regime Probably Not Directing TDA Activities” from April (pried loose by a FOIA request). The report explicitly addresses the question of foreign state sponsorship of migration, concluding that “most of the IC [intelligence community] judges that intelligence indicating that regime leaders are directing or enabling TDA migration to the United States is not credible” and calls it “highly highly unlikely” that even TDA alone coordinates significant migrant smuggling.
After the first Gulf War and years of U.N. disarmament, Saddam Hussein wasn’t then seen as a problem that justified a second war. But once the Bush administration latched onto WMD — "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” — all other options went out the window, with war and regime change becoming the only option. Weapons of Mass Migration are the same: in the eyes of the national security state, no amount of aid, diplomacy, law enforcement, or societal change is going to bring about a solution. The enemies, foreign and domestic, must be obliterated; and like Iraq, there is no end in sight.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
Thank you for bringing WMM to our attention. No one else has and is. Counting on you, Ken to keep revealing what TPTB are concealing!
I've been predicting the manufacture of a "national emergency" since Trump's inauguration (which hardly makes me a soothsayer) but not because Trump envisioned it but because his handlers did and do (Miller, Vought, other sycophant puppet masters) want a suspension of elections for the installation of an oligarchic autocrat. The jettisoning of military leaders who would potentially oppose a counter-invasion is not coincidental. The question will be do the actual boots-on-the-ground soldiers buy it.