ICE Detention as Carceral Counterinsurgency Warfare
Theorizing the Racialized Latino Male Target Through the Racism-as-War Thesis
“‘Alligator Alcatraz’ opened in July 2025 with the capacity to detain around 3,000 people. Amnesty International’s research concludes that people arbitrarily detained in “Alligator Alcatraz” are being held in inhuman and unsanitary conditions, including overflowing toilets with fecal matter seeping into where people are sleeping, limited access to showers, exposure to insects without protective measures, lights on 24 hours a day, poor quality food and water, and lack of privacy.” – Amnesty International, 2025[1]
Introduction
The controversial opening of Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center and the murder of
Geraldo Lunas Campos have sparked discussion surrounding the exceedingly brutal conditions of ICE detention. Dr. Miron Clay-Gilmore’s racism-as-war thesis provides a theoretical basis for conceptualizing the racialized and gendered logics of ICE’s apparatus of detention. This comes into sharp relief in relation to longstanding hypersexual characterizations of Latino men in America. Using the racism-as-war thesis and understanding the carceral state and immigrant detention as a literal and conceptual locale conspicuously reflecting and reproducing racialized phobics and imaginaries, I understand ICE detention as a form of carceral counterinsurgency. I aim to illustrate how ICE’s detention apparatus functions as a technology which operationalizes gendered and racialized imaginaries: Wherein longstanding characterizations of the libidinous, sexually threatening Latino man help constitute the social imaginaries which render his subjection intelligible. I will first elucidate Clay-Gilmore’s racism-as-war thesis, its theoretical synthesis, and its insightful framing and empirical emphasis on counterinsurgency. Then, I will contextualize Latino male characterizations within the theory of phallicism before drawing historical parallels in framing ICE detention and operations as a form of carceral counterinsurgency. Ultimately, arguing that the case of ICE detention underscores the generalizability of the racism-as-war thesis and its insight into counterinsurgent forms of governing the racialized male target.
Theoretical Framing: Phallicism, Social Dominance Theory, and Racism-as-war thesis
In conceptualizing counterinsurgency, I draw from Clay-Gilmore, who understands counterinsurgency as essentially any actions governments take in suppressing or neutralizing targeted populations,[2] and as the endeavor of socially engineering racialized and formerly colonized populations.2 This definition is not limited to conceptualizing “insurgents” as direct political threats; rather, it emphasizes the theoretical and structural relationship between the state’s modes of social governance and those socially prefigured as threats that necessitate suppression. Latino/a people in America, especially immigrants, have historically been constructed as social threats who, as a result, remain systematically targeted; in this sense, they occupy a position analogous to those subjected to counterinsurgency. For this reason, I understand ICE’s apparatus of dominion as a form of counterinsurgency warfare. Clay-Gilmore’s racism-as-war thesis utilizes counterinsurgency as a framework and empirical anchor in illustrating how this social engineering comes to target specifically racialized males. Clay-Gilmore draws on social psychologist Jim Sidanius in utilizing Social Dominance Theory (SDT). SDT simply refers to how societies are organized based on group-based social hierarchies where dominant groups benefit, and subordinate groups suffer negative social effects.[3] SDT is an essential presupposition to understanding the Subordinate Male Target Hypothesis (SMTH). SDT posits that social hierarchies based on age, gender, and arbitrary-set groups,[4] where hierarchies based on age and gender generally remain similar and prevalent across cultures compared to those of race or sexuality.[5] From here, Sidanius posits the Subordinate Male Target Hypothesis, which understands arbitrary-set discrimination as a “form of low-level warfare directed against outgroup males.”[6] This theory is premised on the understanding that patriarchal dominance creates racism, or “arbitrary-set discrimination, is primarily a form of intrasexual competition perpetuated by males and directed against males,”7 and that outgroup females thus experience significant discrimination as a result of their associations with arbitrary-set outgroup males.[7]
Through the racism-as-war thesis, its framework, and its empirical emphasis on the apparatus of counterinsurgency, Clay-Gilmore extends the synthesis of Curry’s theory of phallicism and SDT/the SMTH in illustrating how counterinsurgency operationalizes particular social and sexual caricatures in targeting primarily the racialized male. This pattern of targeting is shown across histories of ‘savage warfare’, police violence, incarceration, and different forms of counterinsurgency warfare.[8] In his work, Killing Boogeymen: Phallicism and The Misandric Mischaracterizations of Black Males in Theory (2018), Africana philosopher and Black male studies scholar Tommy Curry argues that Black men are simultaneously seen as social-sexual threats as well as objects of desire and fetishization, and that the sexual threat the Black male ontologically poses against white social order is a core source of their misandric characterization as violent.[9] Curry writes,
Phallicism refers to the condition by which males of a subordinated racialized or ethnicized group are simultaneously imagined to be a sexual threat and predatory, and libidinally constituted as sexually desirous by the fantasies or fetishes of the dominant racial group. This concept is meant to guide a seemingly inexplicable tension if not contradiction between the description of racialized males under repressive and murderous regimes and their hyper-sexualization as objects of desire, possession, and want.11
Elucidating the ways in which violence is inflicted upon racialized males, and amending the heteronormative faults of the SMTH, with a focus on counterinsurgency, Clay-Gilmore extends phallicism in conceptualizing how hyper-sexualized characterizations of racialized males constitutively function more broadly within repressive regimes. The insights of phallicism and its contribution to the racism-as-war thesis illuminate the relationship between specific characterizations of Latino masculinity/sexuality and the facets of harm that constitute their subjection.
Conceptualizing Characterizations of the Hypersexual Latino Male
Before illustrating the carceral counterinsurgency logics within ICE detention, given the racism-as-war framework and its utilization of phallicism, I first want to explore the longstanding racialized and gendered characterizations of specifically young Latino men in America—the primary targets of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) agents.[10]Roughly following the Mexican Cession, and during times of heightened Mexican-American political and racial tensions during the mid 19th century, Chicano/a studies scholar Tomás Almaguer writes,
Lower-class Mexican men generally were seen as libidinally uncontrolled and sexually threatening. The Anglo mind conjured an image of them as “rapacious” and “hot-blooded” creatures who wantonly lusted after innocent white women. The inferior class position and mestizo ancestry of these men contributed directly to these negative sexual representations, which were clearly the product of the way class and racial stratification lines in California shaped popular perceptions.13
The insights of phallicism and the racism-as-war thesis suggest that the libidinally uncontrollable threat of the Latino man is constructed as such because of how white America’s patriarchal social order feels threatened. This particular fearful characterization simultaneously reflects a desire or envy towards the racialized males perceived social-sexual capital. In conjunction with particular political, economic, or social notions, this specific gendered and racialized characterization provides a framework for rationalizing and justifying violence and oppression. While combining social perceptions surrounding class and race help constitute the lower-class Mexican man’s general threatening status, the particular ways in which sexuality emerges here as a conspicuous constitutive logic tied to the construction of the racialized male threat is shown to not be contingent and isolated but rather persistent and recurring.
Contemporary representations of Latino masculinities in popular culture, constituted through the colonially racialized discourses, are “consistently represented as either deviantly hypersexual or inhumanly desexual.”[11] Furthermore, “US narratives of ‘coyotes’---the colloquial term for smugglers in the United States and Latin America—depict them as violent and criminal Mexican men…Coyotes are also described as possessing an almost animalistic sexual prowess, a characterization that echoes that of Latinos as unable to control their sexual drive or as sexually promiscuous.”[12] One of the most notable instances of the deployment of this trope in recent memory is President Donald Trump’s infamous comment during his first presidential run, generalizing Mexican immigrant men, saying that Mexico is sending rapists to America—a comment that generated a lot of attention, screentime, and excited his supporters.[13] I understand Mexican racialization as historically relevant and deeply influential in informing general American understandings of Latino identity at large. Since Trump’s comment, amidst a sea of politically charged notions characterizing and constructing Latino/a ontology as economic or social threats to American well-being, I argue that, as supported through phallicism, the libidinal threat of the Latino male persists and, as elucidated through the framework of the racism-as-war thesis, is ultimately reflected in ICE operations and detention as a form of counterinsurgency warfare.
ICE Detention as Carceral Counterinsurgency Warfare
As shown in my previous newsletter, exploring how ICE’s AI-enhanced matrix of domination reflects a tactical logic of counterinsurgency warfare. Considering the racism-as-war thesis and extending that train of thought, I want to explore Latino male targeting through a widened frame of carceral counterinsurgency, from the literal initial act of detaining to the holding in detention centers, and to the forms of monitoring post-physical detention. Guantánamo Bay detention center (GITMO), the perpetual residue of the Bush administration’s acts of torture during the War on Terror, is widely and conventionally understood to be a paradigmatic symbol of 21st-century America’s disregard for the rule of law.[14]However, Laleh Khalili in her book Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (2012) argues that rather liberal empires actually “create ostensibly lawless places through a conscious and deliberate legal process of temporarily and functionally setting aside one body of law and adopting another, or in rarer and more extreme instances, replacing legal procedures with administrative procedures.”[15] Instead of conceptualizing ICE operations or GITMO as mere lawless recklessness, I argue that this framework is essential in how it understands the intentionality within America’s extended structural forces of racialized violence and repression, and how this violence is rationalized socially and legitimized legally. In conceptualizing incarceration and detention, I draw from Dylan Rodriguez. I understand the prison/detention center as being “inscribed as both a localization and a constitutive logic of the state’s production of judicial, spatial, and militarized dominion.”[16] Where the carceral regime is both an indispensable element of American statecraft, “a cornerstone of militarized ascendancy, and a spectacle of its extracted authority over targeted publics.”
As localized extensions of American dominion, similar to GITMO, the immigrant detention is an unconventional carceral regime where its inherent legal structure is purposefully liminal, and where the legal rights of detainees and their ability to communicate are severely weakened.[17] As Khalili notes with GITMO, part of this is done through excessive bureaucracy, where red tape not only introduces elements of arbitrary treatment but makes legal and civil communication with the outside world difficult.21 Recently, ICE tactics regarding detention have been named a “bureaucratic trap” which undermines civil liberties of due process in immigration courts.[18] In violations of federal standards, reports of ICE detention note inadequate means of communication.[19] In addition, detainees report rampant and senseless beatings, biohazardous contamination, threats of being sent to GITMO, inadequate or inedible meals[20]—a punishment also present in various War on Terror camps25—and ultimately, a per capita increase in the death of detainees.[21] Including the homicide of Geraldo Lunas Campos caused by excessive force.[22] This is all to say that the conditions and structure of ICE detention reflect the logic of carceral counterinsurgency warfare. As a paradigmatic locale of American statecraft, guided by and in support of the racism-as-war thesis, empirical evidence shows a disproportionate level of targeting against Latino/racialized males within this particular context.
Recent data on the sex-specific patterns of targeting of ICE operations and detention remains slim-to-none, but historical sources show a focus on male targets for detainment that is disproportionate to their representation among undocumented immigrants in America more generally. Specifically, males account for 55 percent of all undocumented immigrants,[23] but they account for 79 percent of detainees (which is mostly Latino and young).[24] As criminologist Mary Bosworth suggests, similar to how racialized Black men are more likely to be stopped by police officers and are thus incarcerated at higher rates, the logic of the modern criminal justice system contributes to that of immigration removal,[25] where Latino and racialized men are primary targets of detention.[26] Additionally, reports show that post detention, “women tended to be assigned to less restrictive forms of monitoring, including TR and SmartLINK, rather than GPS ankle monitors. In December 2020, just 21 percent of women were on ankle monitors compared to 45 percent for men.”[27] So not only are Latino men disproportionate targets of initial detention, but post-detention, their heightened threatening status remains accounted for.
Applying Phallicism in Understanding Same-Sex Sexual Violence
Ultimately, this is to strengthen the racism-as-war thesis. In framing ICE operations through carceral counterinsurgency, it becomes conspicuous as to how this system reflects a counterinsurgency logic and specifically targets racialized men, as well as how this targeting can be theoretically interpreted as reflecting and reifying white social fears of the sexually threatening racialized male. Particularly, phallicism’s inclusion in the racism-as-warfare thesis not only refines and elucidates the social-sexual dynamics of racial hierarchy, but unlike the SMTH, it can provide a theoretical understanding of the social logics behind same-sex sexual violence against racialized subordinate men. Less than half a year ago, it was reported that two men detained at a Texas detention center were sexually abused by guards at the camp. The Guardian writes…
“Isaac”, a Cuban national who adopted a pseudonym for the purposes of the letter, stated in a sworn declaration, according to the coalition, that after refusing to sign a voluntary deportation form, guards at the camp slammed his head against a wall several times, before an officer “grabbed and crushed my testicles between their fingers, which was very painful and humiliating”, according to the letter. In another incident, a teenager identified as “Samuel” described how one officer “grabbed my testicles and firmly crushed them”, while another “forced his fingers deep into my ears”, before he was reportedly beaten unconscious by guards for turning off an overhead light in his housing unit, the letter says.[28]
Drawing from the work of anthropologist and historian Orsanmi Burton and his analysis of the sexual torture of incarcerated insurgents during the long Attica revolt of 1971, I conceptualize these acts of sexualized violence, given the Western Liberal Humanism’s (MAN’s) persistent effort of maintaining racial and gender dominance, as a “collective act of sexual revenge aimed to punish the rebels and defend the racial breach within normative masculinity.”[29] With the assistance of overt narratives of the libidinous Latino, the racialized Latino male genitalia may be conceptualized as a weapon wielded against white social and patriarchal dominance. As phallicism suggests, such narratives and social forces help create the conditions which render the brutalities experienced by Samuel and Isaac as conceivable, permissible, and intelligible: transforming and ontologizing their racialized body into a malleable fetish of stereotype. This same-sex sexual violence can thereby then be understood as representing not conventional desirous physical erotica but a social-sexual envy of the Latino males imagined social sexual capital, and a subsequent desire to maintain white social order, and neutralize the imagined sexual threat attributed to the racialized male body.
Conclusion
In summary, the racism-as-war thesis uses SDT and the SMTH to theorize how subordinated racialized men are primary targets of counterinsurgency. Through phallicism and counterinsurgency, this hypothesis becomes theoretically elucidated and evidentially supported. In utilizing the racism-as-war thesis, I focus on ICE detention as a form of carceral counterinsurgency. Contextualized through social and sexual caricatures of the Latino male as a threat to American stability, I frame ICE operations and particularly ICE detention as a form of carceral counterinsurgency which reflects the insights of the racism-as-war thesis. ICE detention, being a purposefully structured liminal space fostering violent conditions of detention while restricting civil liberties, shares a similar structural logic to other carceral counterinsurgent regimes such as GITMO.
As the racism-as-war thesis suggests, ICE’s apparatus of detention disproportionately targets Latino males who are monitored post detention at stricter rates and account for almost 80% of those detained. Additionally, phallicism conceptually contextualizes not only gendered violence but same-sex sexual violence within white societies’ paradoxically envious and fearful conceptions of the racialized male’s sexual capital. Phallicism and the racism-as-war thesis provide the theoretical insight necessary to constitutively connect evidence of gender discrimination to social sexual logics of domination. In framing ICE in this way, I aim to demonstrate the generalizability of Clay-Gilmore’s explanation of how dominance over racialized groups is maintained, and how gender-based social and sexual caricatures contribute to the construction of the racialized male target and the legibility of his subjection.
[2] Clay-Gilmore, Miron. “Notes from Inside the Killing Machine – On Racism, Non-Being, and (Counter-Insurgency) Warfare.” Philosophy and Global Affairs. 17. 2 Clay-Gilmore, Notes from Inside the Killing Machine, 20.
[3] Sidanius, Jim & Veniegas, Rosemary, “Gender and Race Discrimination: The Interactive Nature of Disadvantage,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2000): 12-21, 2
[4] Ibid.
[5] Sidanius, Gender and Race Discrimination: The Interactive Nature of Disadvantage, 4.
[6] Sidanius, Gender and Race Discrimination: The Interactive Nature of Disadvantage, 13. 7 Sidanius, Gender and Race Discrimination: The Interactive Nature of Disadvantage, 13.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Clay-Gilmore, Notes from Inside the Killing Machine
[9] Curry, Tommy J. 2018. “Killing Boogeymen: Phallicism and the Misandric Mischaracterizations of Black Males in Theory.” Res Philosophica 95 (2): 235–72. 32 11 Curry, Killing Boogeymen, 31.
[10] American Immigration Council, The Landscape of Immigration Detention in the United States (Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, n.d.), accessed May 27, 2026, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/landscape-immigration-detention-united-states/ 13 Tomas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 62.
[11] Marysol Asencio, ed., Latina/o Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 119.
[12] Asencio, ed., Latina/o Sexualities, 31.
[13] Victor Ray, “Trump’s Repeated Use of the ‘Mexican Rapist’ Trope Is Old Racist Colonialism in New Packaging,” NBC News Think, April 12, 2018,
[14] Hina Shamsi, “20 Years Later, Guantánamo Remains a Disgraceful Stain on Our Nation. It Needs to End,” American Civil Liberties Union, January 11, 2022,
[15] Laleh Khalili, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2012), 67
[16] Dylan Rodríguez, Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 41.
[17] Atinuke Lardner Et al., “The Legal Labyrinth of Immigrant Detention,” The Regulatory Review, August 23, 2025, https://www.theregreview.org/2025/08/23/seminar-the-legal-labyrinth-of-immigrant-detention/ 21 Khalili, Time in the Shadows, 151.
[18] “City Bar Condemns ‘Bureaucratic Trap’ of ICE Tactics That Undermine Due Process in Immigration Courts,” New York City Bar Association, July 7, 2025,
[19] “Exposing Horrific Conditions of I.C.E. Detention Centers - 5CAST (#17),” Youtube, Channel 5 with Andrew
Callaghan, March 6, 2026, 12:45.
[20] Elizabeth Findell Et al., “How ICE’s Largest Detention Facility Unraveled,” Wall Street Journal, accessed May 27, 2026,https://www.wsj.com/us-news/how-ices-largest-detention-facility-unraveled-faa8d264 25 Khalili, Time in the Shadows, 155.
[21] “Exposing Horrific Conditions of I.C.E. Detention Centers - 5CAST (#17),” Youtube, Channel 5 with Andrew
Callaghan, March 6, 2026, 15:45.
[22] Elizabeth Findell Et al., “How ICE’s Largest Detention Facility Unraveled.”
[23] Kathleen Bush-Joseph and Robert Warren, “The Experiences of Undocumented Women in the United States,”
Center for Migration Studies, March 23, 2022, https://cmsny.org/undocumented-women-032322/
[24] American Immigration Council, The Landscape of Immigration Detention in the United States (Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, n.d.), accessed May 27, 2026,
https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/landscape-immigration-detention-united-states/
[25] Mary Bosworth Et al., “Race, Criminal Justice, and Migration Control: Enforcing the Boundaries of Belonging,” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 231.
[26] Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), “Immigration Detention Quick Facts,” accessed May 27, 2026, https://tracreports.org/reports/726/
[27] Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), “Immigration Detention Report,” accessed May 27, 2026, https://tracreports.org/reports/698/
[28] Lorena Figueroa “Texas ICE Camp Abuse,” The Guardian, December 9, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/09/texas-ice-camp-abuse-immigration
[29] Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), 120.
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