Immigration Article of the Day: Drones, Drugs, and Deportations: The New War On Terror by Elizabeth Beavers

Drones, Drugs, and Deportations: The New War On Terror by Elizabeth Beavers, (forthcoming) West Virginia Law Review Vol. 129

Abstract
In its second non-consecutive term, the Trump administration has posited that the United States is engaged in a new war against the forces it perceives to be responsible for an unauthorized influx of people and drugs into the United States. Relying on this war paradigm, the administration has bolstered its domestic mass detention and deportation agenda and has conducted military strikes against alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean Sea. Administration officials' claims that unauthorized border crossings constitute "terrorism" and "irregular warfare" lean on familiar post-9/11 rhetoric and legal rationale but apply it in a peculiar new context. Scholars of diverse perspectives have decried the administration's actions as a misapplication of the law. This Article will agree with and echo those criticisms, and will seek to build upon them by arguing that the original War on Terror was also a misapplication of the law that produced still further misguided counterterrorism laws and policies that have enjoyed bipartisan normalization across all branches of government for more than two decades, setting the stage for the Trump administration's current illegalities. Further, the Article will argue that absent interventions, this and future administrations will likely continue to stretch the law in the name of counterterrorism against other targets in a spiral of ever-compounding illegalities.