Immigration, Risk, and Security Under the Trump Administration: Keeping ‘Undesirables’ Out 9811923434, 9789811923432

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Immigration, Risk, and Security Under the Trump Administration Keeping ‘Undesirables’ Out

William Clapton

Immigration, Risk, and Security Under the Trump Administration

William Clapton

Immigration, Risk, and Security Under the Trump Administration Keeping ‘Undesirables’ Out

William Clapton School of Social Sciences UNSW Sydney Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISBN 978-981-19-2343-2    ISBN 978-981-19-2344-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2344-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Illustration: Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-­01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For Sophie and Jack

Acknowledgements

There are several people to whom I owe a great deal of thanks for their assistance, support, and belief during the writing of this book. First, special thanks to the marvellous Cait Hamilton, a dear friend and constant source of help and support. Cait wonderfully bookended this project, first providing excellent research assistance early on and then weaving her editorial and indexing magic at the end to clean the book up and prepare its index. Cait’s final comment on the book was that it was lovely and that she was very proud of my work. All the endorsement I need, really. There are so many colleagues who have helped, inspired, and taught me along the way. Chief amongst them is the inimitable Laura Shepherd, to whom I owe much. You will not find a finer colleague, scholar, or friend. Thank you also to some of the best people I know, both personally and professionally (in no particular order): Penny Griffin, Nick Apoifis, Liz Thurbon, Naama Carlin, Lana Tatour, Phil Wadds, Alyce McGovern, Katie Attwell, David Mickler, and Shahar Hameiri. It has been too long since I have seen some of you, but near or far, all of you are amazing people whom I am privileged to know. Thank you also to my family. Mum and Dad, I might have flown the coop long ago, but you and everything you do for me are always in my thoughts. To the Hall family, thanks for being the best bunch of in-laws one could ask for. A special thanks to Lucy Hall, sister-in-law and fellow academic. Watching you complete your PhD, commence your academic career, and then getting to write an article together(!) has been special indeed. Finally, to my beautiful wife, Sophie, and my son, Jack, this book vii

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and everything I do is for you. I love you both more than I could ever possibly express. You are constant delights. Certain sections of this book appeared in William Clapton (2021). The exceptionalism of risk: Trump’s wall and travel ban. European Journal of International Security, 6(2), 129–147. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Risk and Security 11 3 Risk and Security in the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations 35 4 Trump’s Travel Ban 67 5 A Big, Beautiful Wall101 6 Conclusion133 References141 Index161

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About the Author

William  Clapton is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. He is the author of Risk and Hierarchy in International Society: Liberal Interventionism in the Post-­ Cold Era (Palgrave, 2014) and has had his articles published in the European Journal of International Security, International Relations; International Politics, and Politics.

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Abstract  Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States in November 2016 on a platform of ‘making America great again’. One of the key themes of Trump’s election campaign was securing America’s borders. This book explores the immigration policies and practices of the Trump administration, with a specific focus on Trump’s travel ban and the wall along the southern border with Mexico. It examines how the Trump administration defined and represented immigration as an issue of national security and why it sought to address the perceived security challenges posed by immigration through the specific forms of a travel ban and a wall along the southern border. The main argument advanced is that a logic of risk underpinned the Trump administration’s approach to immigration and national security. Keywords  Trump • Wall • Travel ban • Risk • Risk management • Immigration Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States (hereafter, US) in November 2016 on a platform of ‘making America great again’. One of the key themes of Trump’s proposed policy agenda during the presidential election campaign was securing America’s borders, particularly against terrorists and undocumented immigrants. Trump (2015) © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 W. Clapton, Immigration, Risk, and Security Under the Trump Administration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2344-9_1

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infamously called for the construction of a wall along the southern border with Mexico during his campaign launch in June 2015, followed by a call for a ban on all Muslims entering the US in response to the San Bernardino terrorist attacks in December 2015 (Johnson, 2015). The security risks posed by immigration continued to be a strong theme throughout Trump’s presidency. Not only did immigration feature significantly in the Trump administration’s strategic calculus and conceptions of national security, but Trump made good on his campaign policy proposals and promises. Among the first Executive Orders that Trump signed after assuming office in late January 2017 were Executive Order 13767 Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements (White House, 2017a), and Executive Order 13769 Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States (White House, 2017b). The former directed the building of a wall; the latter implemented the first version of the travel ban (hereafter referred to as Travel Ban 1.0). Both the wall and the ban proved to be controversial within and beyond the US. Protests, disruption, and legal challenges took place in response to the implementation of Travel Ban 1.0. Debate between Trump and members of the Democratic Party, who were the majority party in the House of Representatives for the final two years of Trump’s presidency, regarding the funding and construction of the wall resulted in the longest government shutdown in US history and Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to secure wall funding. Such controversy is the product, at least in part, of the perception that both initiatives reflect problematic ideas and representations of immigration, security, and specific populations. Muslim and Latinx peoples have featured prominently in the rhetoric of the Trump administration as potentially problematic and ‘risky’. The Trump administration identified different categories of ‘undesirables’ that ostensibly reside within these populations, such as terrorists, drug smugglers, human traffickers, and other violent criminals that pose unacceptable security risks to the US. This othering of migrants as various types of undesirables in turn stokes imaginaries of the risk that these groups might engage in violent criminal behaviour following their entry into the US, playing on public fears and anxieties. It is notable, however, that neither the wall nor the travel ban involved direct action against undesirable migrants. Rather, the intent of both was to keep ‘undesirables’ out and prevent them from accessing American territory before they could engage in harmful or destructive acts.

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This book explores the immigration policies and practices of the Trump administration, with a specific focus on the travel ban and the wall. It asks two primary questions: How did the Trump administration define and represent immigration as an issue of national security, and why did it seek to address the perceived security challenges posed by immigration through the specific forms of a travel ban and a wall along the southern border? The main argument advanced is that a logic of risk underpinned the Trump administration’s approach to immigration and national security. That is, the Trump administration perceived and represented the challenges that immigration and porous borders pose as security risks that must be prevented. The wall and the travel ban both reflect a focus on futurity, on the prevention of possible adverse futures from eventuating by identifying and acting upon spaces and populations identified as problematic or risky. Terrorism and undocumented immigration across the US-Mexico border are security risks mired in uncertainty and ‘unknowability’. The difficulty associated with clearly identifying the spatial and temporal location of terrorists or potentially risky, undocumented migrants entering the US from Mexico is an important factor underpinning the relatively broad and sweeping measures of the wall and travel ban. It also informed the general desire of the Trump administration to engage in proactive, preventive, and precautionary immigration and security practices. In the absence of clear evidence or intelligence as to precisely where and when security risks might eventuate, emphasis falls on preventive and precautionary actions that focus on problematic environments or zones that are amenable to regulation and control (Rose, 1999: 237). This reflects an approach termed ‘situational risk management’ that is based on the concept of ‘situational crime prevention’ advanced by Clarke (1995, 1997). Rather than focus on criminals themselves, situational crime prevention focuses on reducing the opportunities for crime via specific and discrete measures that modify and reshape environments and reduce the incentives of engaging in criminal activity (Clarke, 1997: 2). The travel ban and the wall do just that. The wall attempts to reshape the risky southern borderlands through the erection of a physical barrier, while the travel ban involves the identification of environmental risk indicators in other countries and specific actions to mitigate the likelihood that adverse potential scenarios might arise because of them. This book therefore offers a contribution to the literature on risk and security that has emerged over the last 20 years. This literature identifies

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the centrality of risk to understanding the strategic outlook, policies, and praxis of Western societies since the end of the Cold War. The general claim is that the end of the Cold War heralded the emergence of new forms of dynamic, non-traditional security issues that represent a shift in previous Western conceptions of security based on threat to new understandings of security based on risk. A post-Cold War ‘age of risk’ has emerged as old strategic certainties and assumptions collapse in the face of a significantly more unpredictable and uncertain strategic environment in which Western societies perceive themselves to be vulnerable to potentially catastrophic risks. This literature has broadly been divided between those employing Ulrich Beck’s concept of the ‘risk society’ (see Heng, 2006a, 2006b; Rasmussen, 2006) and those employing governmental or post-structuralist approaches to risk (see Aradau & Van Munster, 2007; Amoore & de Goede, 2008a, 2008b)—what Trenta (2016: 21) terms the ‘risk society at war’ and ‘governmentality at war’ groups. Both groups within the risk and security literature have demonstrated how risk has informed the strategic doctrines and policies of successive US administrations, including those of Clinton, Bush, and Obama. This means that the logic of risk that informed the immigration and security practices of the Trump administration is not new and did not appear out of nowhere. Rather, it reflects the ongoing importance of risk to understanding US security, strategy, and its perceptions of its strategic environment. For example, the Bush administration infamously employed the explicitly preventive and precautionary doctrine of ‘anticipatory self-­ defence’, outlined in the 2002 National Security Strategy, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (White House, 2002). The result was the 2003 invasion of Iraq on the basis that there was an unacceptable risk that Saddam Hussein’s regime was attempting to acquire, or already possessed, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that could be passed on to terrorist groups intent on attacking the US. We can also understand the Obama administration’s use of drone strikes, as Heng (2018: 551–552) argues, as both an exercise in risk management and an attempt to reshape terrorists’ operational environment. While the specific forms that risk management has taken vary across the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, we can still trace a logic of risk across them. This is not to suggest that there is a causal connection between the logic of risk that informed the security policies of the Bush and Obama administrations and the logic that informed Trump’s immigration and security policies. In other words, it is not argued that one

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directly caused or made possible the other. Rather, it is to show that risk management, as a core component of US security policy and practice, extends across administrations. Indeed, Trenta (2016) argues that risk, uncertainty, and risk management are all traditional and enduring aspects of foreign policy decision-making more broadly. While many important works have been produced within the risk and security literature, one of its general weaknesses is that much of the focus has been on identifying a logic of risk within the strategic doctrines of Western governments. This is coupled with a focus on identifying the specific state actors that have sought to govern or manage security issues as risks and the practices that they have employed to do so. Resistance to invocations of risk or specific forms of risk management have received relatively less attention, leading to circumscribed accounts of the politics of risk, although Williamson (2014) and Trenta (2016) are important recent exceptions. To address this, the conceptual framework of ‘riskisation’ is employed in advancing the claim that the Trump administration has defined, represented, and responded to identified immigration issues as security risks. Riskisation is a framework that captures the ‘lifecycle’ of an invocation of risk, referring to the processes of risk identification, assessment, and management. It emphasises the socially constructed and contested nature of risk and its management, focusing on agency, discursive context, and social and political effects to explore ‘why particular forms of risk management emerge in particular situations and not others’ (Clapton, 2011: 281). Who is enabled to ‘talk risk’, who resists representations of risk, and who is excluded from this process? These are all important questions of agency. The discursive context includes the types and patterns of representation through which meaning and identity are constructed. This is important not only to understand what comes to be identified as a risk, but also which actors are constructed as risky and therefore subject to risk management practices. Finally, the social and political effects of riskisation, as the term suggests, look at the social and political impacts and outcomes of representations of risk and attempts at its management, something again not readily captured in the existing risk and securitisation literature. Riskisation more fully captures the politics of risk, the ways in which processes of resistance and contestation shape and inform invocations of risk and its management. Both the wall and the travel ban, as specific mechanisms of risk management, changed over time as a result of the contests, debates, and controversies that they generated. Both resulted in

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political and legal challenges for the Trump administration. The travel ban went through three iterations and several legal challenges before the Supreme Court upheld the third version in June 2018 (Liptak & Shear, 2018), while the wall resulted in intense political wrangling between Trump and Congress. Further, as opposed to the existing literature on risk and security, which largely views the ‘rise of risk’ as a response to a radically altered strategic environment after the end of the Cold War, riskisation highlights the specific contexts within which risk and specific forms of risk management emerge. That is, it focuses less on macro-level shifts within international society or the global strategic environment and instead emphasises national- and local-level factors influencing the emergence, shape, and evolution of discourses of risk and practices of risk management.

structure The book proceeds as follows. Chapter 2 provides an outline of the theoretical and conceptual framework. It firstly asks: What are the general features of a logic of risk, and how it can be distinguished from other logics of security? Here, the chapter focuses on key criteria that can be employed to identify and highlight different security or strategic logics, drawing on the typologies of security logics offered by van Munster (2005, 2010) and Corry (2012). These criteria include representation of security issues, measures and effects, and objectives. As is argued, in the case of a logic of risk, one would expect, that the representation of security issues would be couched in terms of possible future harms, uncertainty, and the need for prevention and precaution; measures and effects would involve managing the populations, environments, and conditions within which risks might arise or be embodied; and finally, the objective would be preventing future harm. The chapter then provides a brief discussion of Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ thesis and governmental or post-structuralist approaches to risk, and how they have been applied to the study of security. The final two sections of the chapter outline the conceptual framework that is applied to the analysis of Trump’s travel ban and wall. The first of these sections outlines the framework of riskisation; the second considers the concept of situational risk management. Chapter 3 asks whether Trump’s attempts at risk management are entirely novel, or instead reflect important continuities in US foreign and security policies. The argument advanced in response to this question is that a logic of risk is not a new feature of US foreign and security policy;

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rather, risk can be identified as a significant element of the strategic doctrines and outlooks of each of the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. That is, risk has been a core feature of US approaches to security and defence for most of the twenty-first century to date. While the specific focus, forms, and targets of risk management have changed across the different strategic contexts within which the three administrations have operated, an emphasis on security risks and preventive and precautionary mechanisms of addressing them has been a consistent feature of them all. As argued in this chapter, Trump’s wall and travel ban reflect continuing trends regarding how the US and other Western states address and govern security issues. As Hameiri and Jones (2015: 24) highlight, risk and security have merged in practice and a risk management approach has become a core aspect of the security praxis of Western governments. Chapters 4 and 5 cover the travel ban and the wall respectively. Both Chaps. 4 and 5 ask four main questions: What rationale has the Trump administration advanced for the wall and travel ban? What is the discursive and representational context within which it has done so? What forms of resistance and contestation have been generated by these initiatives? Finally, what are their effects and consequences? As is argued, gender, race, and the embodiment of risk are central to the rationale offered by Trump and other members of his administration for the wall and the travel ban, the discursive context within which they have been advanced, and the marginalisation and othering of specific groups and populations. Trump has reinforced an understanding of American security and sovereignty as being predicated on strong borders. While Trump has not totally eschewed overseas military actions to prevent risks to US security, he has placed greater emphasis on managing risks by strengthening American borders, improving resilience, and protecting the homeland by keeping potential risks out of the US.

References Amoore, L., & de Goede, M. (2008a). Introduction: Governing by risk in the war on terror. In L.  Amoore & M. de Goede (Eds.), Risk and the war on terror (pp. 5–20). Routledge. Amoore, L., & de Goede, M. (Eds.). (2008b). Risk and the war on terror. Routledge. Aradau, C., & Van Munster, R. (2007). Governing terrorism through risk: Taking precautions, (un)knowing the future. European Journal of International Relations, 13(1), 89–115.

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Clapton, W. (2011). Risk in international relations. International Relations, 25(3), 280–295. Clarke, R. V. (1995). Situational crime prevention. Crime and Justice, 19, 91–150. Clarke, R. V. (1997). Introduction. In R. V. Clarke (Ed.), Situational crime prevention: Successful case studies (2nd ed., pp. 1–43). Harrow and Heston. Corry, O. (2012). Securitisation and ‘riskification’: Second-order security and the politics of climate change. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40(2), 235–258. Hameiri, S., & Jones, L. (2015). Governing borderless threats: Non-traditional security and the politics of state transformation. Cambridge University Press. Heng, Y.-K. (2006a). The ‘transformation of war’ debate: Through the looking glass of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society. International Relations, 20(1), 69–91. Heng, Y.-K. (2006b). War as risk management: Strategy and conflict in an Age of globalised risks. Routledge. Heng, Y.-K. (2018). The continuing resonance of understanding the war as risk management perspective for understanding military interventions. Contemporary Security Policy, 39(4), 544–558. Johnson, J. (2015, December 7). Trump calls for ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/07/donald-trump-callsfor-total-and-complete-shutdown-of-muslims-entering-the-unitedstates/? utm_term=.1865533b17ee Liptak, A., & Shear, M.  D. (2018, June 26). Trump’s travel ban is upheld by Supreme Court. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/ 26/us/politics/supreme-­court-­trump-­travel-­ban.html Van Munster, R. (2005). Logics of security: The Copenhagen School, risk management and the war on terror (University of Southern Denmark, Political Science Publications 10/2005). Van Munster, R. (2010). Securitizing immigration: The politics of risk in the EU. Palgrave Macmillan. Rasmussen, M. V. (2006). The risk Society at war: Terror, technology and strategy in the twenty-first century. Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge University Press. Trenta, L. (2016). Risk and presidential decision-making: The emergence of foreign policy crises. Routledge. Trump, D. (2015, June 16). Full text: Donald Trump announces a presidential bid. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-­politics/ wp//2015/06/16/full-­t ext-­d onald-­t rump-­a nnounces-­a -presidential-­ bid/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.054af746605b

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White House. (2002). The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Retrieved June 9, 2021, from https://georgewbush-­whitehouse. archives.gov/nsc/nss/2002/ White House. (2017a, January 25). Executive order: Border security and immigration enforcement improvements (Executive Order 13767). Retrieved August 1, 2021, from https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/30/ 2017-­02095/border-­security-­and-­immigration-­enforcement-­improvements White House. (2017b, January 27). Executive order protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States (Executive Order 13769). Retrieved August 9, 2021, from https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/ 02/01/2017-02281/protecting-the-nation-from-foreign-terrorist-entryinto-the-united-states Williamson, P. R. (2014). Risk and securitization in Japan 1945–60. Routledge.

CHAPTER 2

Risk and Security

Abstract  This chapter outlines the general features of a logic of risk and how it can be distinguished from other logics of security. Here, the chapter focuses on key criteria that can be employed to identify and highlight different security or strategic logics. These criteria include representation of security issues, measures and effects, and objectives. The chapter then provides a brief discussion of Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ thesis and governmental or post-structuralist approaches to risk, and how they have been applied to the study of security. The final two sections of the chapter outline the conceptual framework that is applied to the analysis of Trump’s travel ban and wall. The first outlines the framework of riskisation; the second considers the concept of situational risk management. Keywords  Riskisation • Situational risk management • Risk society • Post-structuralist • Embodied • Gender • Race Risk has become one of the ‘buzzwords’ of the last 25 years. Those working in the area of risk and security have argued that it has become a core feature of the strategic assessments and planning of Western governments (see Heng, 2006a, 2006b; Rasmussen, 2006). This follows the work of sociologists such as Ulrich Beck (1992, 1999) and Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991; also see Garland, 2003), who have highlighted the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 W. Clapton, Immigration, Risk, and Security Under the Trump Administration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2344-9_2

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increasing ubiquity of risk in late-modern Western societies. In his analysis of Beck’s work, Jarvis (2007: 24) argues that ‘[r]isk, fear, an increasing distrust of science and technology and its profit-driven outcomes, a common perception that there are now limits to scientific progress and further economic growth and industrialisation, have become salient features of late modern culture’. While some have questioned just how new or novel the current ‘age of risk’ is (Williamson, 2014; Trenta, 2016), the point remains that risk is a significant concept in understanding contemporary security, strategy, and foreign policymaking. This chapter considers different approaches to understanding the relationship between risk and security and outlines the theoretical and conceptual framework employed in the analysis of Trump’s immigration policies and practices. It begins by providing a brief consideration of Ulrich Beck’s ‘risk society’ thesis and governmental or post-structuralist approaches to risk, and how they have been applied to the study of security. It then highlights the core features of a security logic of risk. The next two substantive sections of the chapter outline the theoretical and conceptual framework that is applied to the analysis of Trump’s travel ban and wall. The first of these sections outlines the framework of riskisation, which emphasises the socially constructed and politically contested nature of risk identification, assessment, and management via a focus on agency, discursive context, and social and political effects. The chapter argues that the literature on risk and international relations (IR) has generally paid insufficient attention to the politically contested nature of processes of risk identification, assessment, and management, instead focusing predominantly on identifying the actors that operate according to a logic of risk and the actions that result from this. However, less has been said regarding the ways in which invocations of risk or attempts at risk management are resisted and how risk management shifts and changes over time and varies across different regions. The chapter concludes with an outline of the concept of situational risk management that, while assuming different guises in different contexts and periods, has been a key element of US foreign and defence policies since at least the Bush administration (discussed further in the following chapter). This approach focuses on manipulating problematic zones or environments that are amenable to regulation and control in the face of uncertainty regarding the specific spatial and temporal location of the risks that actors seek to prevent.

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Approaches to Risk As Trenta (2016: 20–21) notes, a variety of different sociological theories of risk have been identified, but only two have been used to advance specific claims about the impacts and significance of risk to IR, security, and foreign policy—Beck’s risk society thesis and post-structuralist approaches to risk. Several treatments of these two approaches have been offered (see, e.g., Trenta, 2016; Clapton, 2011) and therefore the intent here is to provide only an overview, rather than a comprehensive analysis (although a brief critique is offered below). While the focus below is predominantly on ‘Beckian’ and post-structuralist approaches to risk, it is important to begin by acknowledging the wider literature on sociological and cultural approaches to risk. These have generally had less impact within the Security Studies literature in IR, but nevertheless represent significant contributions to understanding risk. Douglas and Wildavsky’s (1983) cultural approach to risk, for example, suggests that risks are social constructions, always a question of ‘purity and danger’ (Lash 2000: 57). Focusing on environmental movements that have highlighted pollution and other risks that technology poses for the environment and nature, Douglas and Wildavsky (1983: 8) ask how particular types of danger come to be selected for attention. Their response is that which risks we worry about and which we do not depends on the social forms selected; that is, ‘The choice of risks and the choice of how to live are taken together’ (Douglas & Wildavsky, 1983: 8). Their contention is that only a cultural approach can capture both moral judgements about how we should live and empirical assessments of what the external world is like. Identifying three risk cultures—the hierarchical-­ institutionalist, market individualist, and sectarian, Douglas and Wildavsky categorise the first two as the ‘centre’ and the third the ‘border. Each focuses on different risks, of which Douglas and Wildavsky (1983: 2) identify four groupings: foreign affairs (war, foreign attack etc.), crime, pollution, and economic failure. The sectarians on the border are the risk culture that have most forcefully highlighted environmental and pollution risks and sit on the fringe of society due largely to the failure of institutions to integrate them into the centre, or mainstream social order (Lash 2000: 54). For Douglas and Wildavsky, risk cultures do not look first for risks and then who to blame; they start first with those they want to blame and from this then decide on which risks they wish to focus on (Lash 2000: 57). Of

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most relevance here are the hierarchical-institutionalists at the centre, focused predominantly on risks or dangers related to foreign affairs and crime. For them, blame resides with Others, foreigners, and criminals, for example, who ‘pollute’ and ‘corrupt’ the purity of the social order. This clearly has affinities with the argument to be developed below, that the understanding of risk is always racialised and gendered, which informs who is deemed to be risky and who is not. Douglas and Wildavsky’s approach to risk and risk cultures can capture the distinction between the white, male, Christian purity of Trump’s politics and brand of populism and the untrustworthy, risky, polluted, and impure Other. Luhmann’s work represents another significant sociological approach to understanding risk. Luhmann (1993) focuses on systems—human societies are designed as sets of self-referential systems that define reality for those within them and visions or images of the outside world (also see Rosa et al. 2013: 102). To provide for the internal order of each system and interactions between systems, communication media such as money or power are required (Rosa et al. 2013: 102). Like Beck and Giddens (see below), Luhmann (1990, 1993) argues that risk is new feature that has arisen in a period of advanced or late modernity. Risks are not real in any sense, however, contra Beck, but instead are constructions produced by different systems. Luhmann (1990: 225) defined risk as the ‘possibility of future damage, exceeding all reasonable costs, that is attributable to a decision’. He distinguishes between risk and danger, the possibility of future damage due to external events. In an age of late modernity, systems become more aware of not only internal risks, but also external dangers. Further, what are seen as external dangers in one system might be unacceptable risks in another. This creates tension between risk takers or creators and bearers, leading to systemic dilemmas in which risk creators try to justify and render risk acceptable while bearers use fear or differing expert judgements to reject unacceptable risks and dangers (Rosa et  al. 2013: 105). Beyond Douglas and Wildavsky and Luhmann has arisen a large literature exploring risk in a variety of ways across many different issues or areas. This is a significant literature, including war, law and justice, crime, insurance, terrorism, environmental politics and climate change, and social theory (e.g. see Heng, 2006a, 2006b; Rasmussen, 2001, 2006; Ericson, 2007; Kemshall 2003; Rosa et al., 2012; Urry, 2011). Many, although not all, of these works have been inspired by Beck’s concept of risk society and post-structuralist accounts of risk. Indeed, the sociological work on risk

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that has the most impact in IR is Beck’s risk society. Beck (1992, 1999) argues that risk is the defining feature of late modernity, a consequence of the development and success of industrial society. Beck’s original work, Risk Society, was a critique of the production of spatially and temporally debounded risks that escaped established mechanisms of management, insurance, and control (Mythen, 2018: 3). As Beck et al. (1994: 27) note, risk society represents a ‘phase of development of modern society in which the social, political, ecological and individual risks created by the momentum of innovation increasingly elude the control and protective institutions of industrial society’. The globalised, and uncontrollable nature of contemporary risk is central to Beck’s work—as he notes, risk society is not about the increase of risk, but its debounding (Beck, 2002: 41). This meant that risk society, by its very definition, was a world risk society that does not adhere to established boundaries or borders. Initially focused on the environmental and health risks associated with advanced industrialisation, Beck’s later works post-9/11 also focused on terrorist and financial risks (see Beck, 2002, 2003). Beck’s work has been hugely influential not only in the field of sociology, but across the social sciences in Western societies (Mythen, 2018: 533). It has been the subject of work in a variety of disciplines, including Criminology, Politics, and International Relations (IR). In IR, scholars such as Heng (2006b), Rasmussen (2006) and Coker (2009) have all applied concepts featured in Beck’s work on the risk society to understanding contemporary international security. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent War on Terror (WoT) and invasion of Iraq were explained as responses to the sorts of debounded risks that Beck warned of years earlier. Crucial here is democracy promotion as an aim of the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq—as Rasmussen (2006: 206) notes: ‘Even the promise of democracy as a recipe for peace and human freedom is today rather a way to manage risk than to realise a liberal utopia.’ One of the effects of this, as Kühn (2011: 376) argues, is the paradox of increasing Western risk awareness and its associated politics and the transformation of risk for local populations subjected to Western intervention. For Kühn (2011: 376): ‘Western politics puts the responsibility for Western security onto the states subject to intervention.’ To this we might add the bodies perceived or identified as risky and therefore also subject to intervention—as will be discussed below, risk and its management is inherently embodied. It is generally argued that the advent of risk within international security marks

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a significant divide between a more certain Cold War era of threats versus the radically uncertain post-Cold War era of risks (see Trenta, 2016 for a more detailed discussion of the application of Beck’s work to security). In contrast, the post-structuralist approach to risk focuses on risk as a technology or tool through which to exert governmental power and manage populations. In this sense, as Ewald (1991: 199) argues, nothing in itself is a risk; that is, risks are not real, but depend on perception and understanding of dangers, events, or bodies that come to be understood as risky. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, this approach explores ‘the way particular phenomena come to be understood as risks, the political and ideological nature of risk definition and assessment, and the way in which governing through risk has changed over time in response to shifting rationalities, knowledges and technologies’ (Clapton, 2011: 283). Generally, risk is taken to be a key technology of contemporary neoliberal rationality, one of the primary ways in which society is controlled and ordered. Writers such as Castel (1991), Dean (1999) and O’Malley (2002) have all explored the way in which neoliberal institutions construct specific representations and meanings of security that serve to discipline populations. Risk is crucial to neoliberal governmentality—discourses and representations of risk are produced and disseminated by dominant institutions, leading to specific understandings of risk and ways of identifying it (Mythen & Walklate, 2008: 229) and, consequently, forms of regulation, disciplining, and governing. For Aradau and Van Munster (2007, 2008: 24), risk is a ‘dispositif’, ‘a heterogeneous assemblage of discursive and material elements for governing social problems’. Likewise, Rose (2001: 7) suggests that risk constitutes a ‘family of ways of thinking and acting, involving calculations about probable futures in the present followed by interventions into the present in order to control that potential future’ Unlike Beck, who suggests that new forms of risk render redundant traditional forms of calculation, insurance, and control, post-structuralist treatments of risk suggest that the advent of ‘precautionary risk’ is grafted on to already existing technologies and rationalities of risk, including existing mechanisms of insurance and calculation (Aradau & Van Munster, 2008: 29). In other words, while a new dispositif of risk has emerged, it does not supplant existing risk management mechanisms or technologies, but rather reconfigures them (Aradau & Van Munster, 2008: 29). The post-structuralist literature generally focuses on the expansion of governmental power in the post-Cold War era and especially in the

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context of the WoT following the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This expansion encapsulates everything from the ‘quite prosaic and everyday domains where action is taken on the basis of anticipation’ (Amoore & de Goede, 2008: 14) to exceptional actions such as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike Beck, post-structuralist accounts of risk and security also focus on the ways in which risk and riskiness is assigned and ascribed to specific groups and specific bodies, furthering structural disadvantage and marginalisation. A clear example of this is the discrimination and marginalisation that continues to be experienced by Muslims within the context of Western management of the risks associated with Islamic-­inspired terrorism. As will be discussed in subsequent chapters, the criminalisation of immigration and the marginalisation of specific groups and populations based on their perceived riskiness reflects the embodied nature of risk and its management. Post-structuralists argue that what we have seen over the past 20 years is the ‘categorization of safe and risky kinds of people under conditions of high anxiety’ (Mythen & Walklate, 2008: 229). Despite the differences between the risk society and post-structuralist approaches to risk, both have been applied to security and share a common focus on specific issues such as terrorism, although the post-­ structuralist literature has generally been more focused on domestic practices and policies related to managing the risk of terrorism. As Trenta (2016: 12) notes, both depict a radically altered post-Cold War strategic environment, although for post-structuralists this is understood in terms of the expansion of security concerns and governmental actions designed to address them, rather than the emergence of debounded risks. Both also share significant limitations. As will be discussed in the next section, the first is a lack of clarity when it comes to defining and understanding risk. As will be shown, there is considerable variance with both the risk society and post-structuralist literatures regarding how risk is defined and understood. Further limitations will be discussed in the subsequent section on riskisation.

Defining Risk: Threat- and Risk-Based Logics of Security The emergence of risk within the Security Studies literature has prompted considerations not only of the applicability of the risk society or governmental treatments of risk to security, but also how risk itself is defined and

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what a security logic of risk entails. Here, the concept of risk itself is first considered before exploring security logics and what a security logic of risk entails. One of the limitations of both the risk society and post-­structuralist literatures on risk is that they are generally unclear when it comes to defining risk. This problem is particularly apparent in Beck’s work. Beck himself was somewhat uncertain as to how to define risk, oscillating between what might be termed realist and constructivist approaches to risk. This is what Lupton (2013: 50) refers to as a ‘weak constructionist/critical realism’ approach (risk is objective; responses are socially and culturally mediated) As Beck argued, Risk society theory … argues that there is both the immateriality of meditated and contested definitions of risk and the materiality of risk as manufactured by experts and industries world-wide … Risk science without the sociological imagination of contested and constructed risk is blind. Risk science that is not informed about the technologically manufactured nature of risk is naïve. (Beck, 1999: 4)

In other words, for Beck (2000: 219), risks were both real and constructed. In this view, risks were empirical realities, but the selection of which risks to manage and how was socially and culturally mediated (Clapton, 2011: 282–283). In later work, however, Beck turned to a more decidedly constructionist definition of risk: Risks do not have any abstract existence in themselves. They acquire reality in the contradictory judgements of groups and populations. The notion of an objective yardstick against which degrees of risk can be measured overlooks the fact that risks count as urgent, threatening and real or as negligible and unreal only as a result of particular cultural perceptions and evaluations. (Beck, 2009: 13)

This inconsistency in Beck’s understanding and definitions of risk also permeates the risk and security literature. Some have employed more constructionist definitions of risk. Eriksson (2001: 9) argues that risks, threats, and dangers are all social constructions, and Coker (2002) suggests that values inform the definition of risk. A considerable portion of the literature on risk and security has also attempted to define risk in comparison to threat. Heng (2006a, 2006b) and Williams (2008: 65–66) distinguish between capabilities and intentions (threat) versus probabilities and

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consequences (risk). Griner (2002: 157) suggests that both risk and threat involve danger, but risk relates to the dangers associated with one’s own activities whereas threats are dangers imposed by external actors and events. Corry (2012: 248) refers to a security logic of risk as ‘second-order’, highlighting the indirect nature of risks—the conditions that might lead to harm—as opposed to threats, which are the direct causes of harm. Finally, Williamson (2014: 32–36) questions the distinctions between risk and threat drawn in the literatures on risk and securitisation, concluding that threats refer to enemies while risks refer to events. Others have adopted different approaches that do not explicitly seek to define risks in distinction to threat. Trenta (2016: 59), for example, defines risk similarly to Heng—as the probability of a negative occurrence combined with its magnitude—but also adds that risks ‘depend on the contingency of the decision’. In the post-structuralist literature, as noted above, risks are generally understood as emerging within discourse, and therefore are not ‘real’ in that they do not exist within the physical world outside of our own imaginations, representation, and discourse. They have been defined as a dispositif in some works; in others, risks are regarded as mediated, leading Trenta (2016: 39) to conclude that both risk society and post-­ structuralist accounts of risk suffer from a lack of clarity regarding how they define risk. This then begs the question of what does risk entail? Perhaps the most specific responses offered to this question have been advanced by Corry (2012) and van Munster (2005, 2010), who provide typologies of security logics that outline both what a logic of risk entails, and also how it differs from the threat-based logic of security that informs securitisation theory. Van Munster (2005: 8, 2010: 10) suggests that security logics can be distinguished according to the criteria of representation of threat, measures/ strategy, and objective. Corry (2012: 249) outlines the criteria of grammar, political imperative, and performative effects. These two different sets of criteria are, for the most part, similar. Both grammar and representation of threats focus on the construction of hazards and dangers and how they are represented and conveyed to audiences. Likewise, measures and political imperative both refer to the actions and practices employed to address an identified danger. Finally, objective and performative effects both refer to the specific goals and outcomes that those who are addressing a security challenge seek to achieve. In identifying the core features of a security logic of risk according to their respective criteria, both Corry (2012: 249) and van Munster (2010:10) again highlight similar aspects.

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These include calculation of risk factors or conditions of harm, measures for managing risk and increasing the resilience of referent objects, and preventive and precautionary doctrines and approaches. More broadly, these specific features relate to how dangers that are described as ‘risks’ are framed and the sorts of actions that are expected to be pursued in response to them. This is compared with Corry and van Munster’s definitions of threat, or a threat-based security logic. Again, according to the criteria above, Corry (2012: 249) argues that threats involve the construction of a situation in which direct harm can occur, plan for action against external enemies, and, in line with securitisation theory, legitimation of exceptional measures. Van Munster (2010: 10) similarly notes that threats involve a friend-enemy opposition, exceptional measures, and elimination of threats. Two key themes emerge from the definitions of threat and risk offered above. First, only threats can legitimate exceptional actions. The second is the division between external enemies (threat) versus internal conditions and actions (risk), one that is made by both Corry and Griner. Corry (2012: 247) arguing that internal governance focused upon the referent object is the key feature of risk and its management. This may occur in some instances, but not all. Managing vulnerability and building resilience are indeed key aspects of risk management; both are articulated in the discourses of risk advanced by the Trump administration in its approach to immigration. Often, the practices associated with internal risk management are mundane and everyday. Heng and McDonagh (2009), for example, highlight the everyday practices of risk management in the context of the ‘War on Terror’ which occur alongside more exceptional actions such as the use of military force. Amoore (2009: 56) also highlights the everyday, less visible practices of risk management in the context of what she terms ‘algorithmic war’: the use of algorithmic calculations in surveillance networks and border control that embed a logic of pre-emption in mundane spaces. However, Amoore also argues that representations of risky others are located both inside and outside the spaces of daily life in Western societies. Indeed, if we consider the record of Western governments in managing security risks, we would note that it is not exclusively focused on internal governance or mundane, ‘normal’ measures. Surveillance and detection, target hardening, resilience, and the management of internal vulnerabilities co-exist with both representations of external enemy Others (especially in the context of terrorism and immigration) and practices aimed at engaging and defeating

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them. From external interventions aimed at promoting or consolidating democratic government (e.g. the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq or the Australian-led intervention in Solomon Islands) to Trump’s identification of external undesirables that must be prevented from accessing US territory, the record of recent Western risk management demonstrates both an internal and external focus and a predilection for exceptional and routine measures. In short, risk-based security logics can result in a wide variety of internal and external practices that include both the exceptional and the routine. While there are some issues with the specific typologies of risk- and threat-based security logics as outlined by Corry and van Munster, the broad criteria that each employs for identifying and distinguishing security logics more generally are useful. Therefore, I follow both in outlining the criteria of representation of security issues, measures and effects, and objectives. A security logic of risk would entail the following features when considered against these criteria. First, the representation of security issues would be framed in terms of possible future harms. This need not specifically involve the term ‘risk’—various political leaders in the US, Europe, and Australia have conflated ‘risk’ with ‘threat’ in outlining particular issues, hazards, or dangers. However, in doing so they have spoken not of imminent threats, but ‘emerging’, ‘gathering’, or ‘possible’ threats. In other words, they are essentially speaking of risks. President Bush (2002), for example, often employed the term ‘threat’ in making the case for war against Iraq in 2002 and 2003 but spoke in terms of ‘gathering’ threats ‘on the horizon’. Along with futurity, uncertainty is another key characteristic of the framing and representation of security risks. Lobo-Guerro (2019: 606) follows Bodie et al. (1999: 206) in defining risk as ‘uncertainty that matters’, arguing that deciding what uncertainty matters relates to determining who are the subjects of and risk, the objects of risk, and the risk environment. This uncertainty or ‘unknowing’, as Aradau and Van Munster (2007) put it, results from the fact that risks are not ‘real’; they only exist in our imaginations of possible futures and events that may or may not come to pass. Risks cannot be clearly defined or identified. This claim of the discursive and social construction of risk follows similar claims advanced in the works of Douglas and Wildavsky (1983) and Luhmann (1993), whose respective cultural theory and autopoietic systems theory suggest that risks are not real, but only constructed (also see Rosa et al., 2013). This is in contrast to threats, which are usually framed in terms of

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imminence and the reaction to a clearly identified danger. As Clapton (2014: 30) notes, ‘threats constitute an action-reaction relationship … In order to react to something, we need to know what it is that we are reacting to.’ It is precisely this lack of clarity that produces Beck’s anxious risk societies, grappling with debounded risks that cannot be readily identified in terms of time and space. It also, as will be discussed below, produces risk management techniques and practices that focus less on tackling specific risks themselves and more on manipulating environments within which risks might be produced or materialise. We would also expect that discourses of security risk will be framed in terms of the need for prevention and precaution. That is, the need to be ‘safe not sorry’ and to act to prevent catastrophes before they can occur, even in the face of uncertainty as to where or when a security risk might materialise into actual harm. The Bush administration’s doctrine of ‘anticipatory self-defence’, laid out in the 2002 National Security Strategy, is a clear example (The White House, 2002), but it has also been reflected in the representation of security issues by subsequent US administrations and other Western governments. The EU’s recent Security Union Strategy, for example, outlines the need for developing early detection, surveillance, and prevention capabilities to prevent future shocks and address a rapidly changing and risky strategic environment (2020: 5). Indeed, the prevention of several security risks, such as terrorism, cyberattacks, cybercrime, and online hate speech, is a central aspect of the document. Measures and effects will focus on the prevention of risks through the management of populations, environments, and conditions within which risks might occur or be embodied. This last point is significant—risks are embodied, as suggested above, and representations of risk or riskiness can be expressed through specific populations and demographic groups or communities. Risks are not neutral or objective—as they exist in human minds, they are informed by the same subjectivities that inform other social, political, cultural, and economic phenomena. Although not an exclusive list, race, gender, and class are key categories of identity here. As Aradau and Van Munster (2009: 694) suggest, the cultural and racial distinctions upon which othering is predicated are not eliminated, but rather re-inscribed upon processes and technologies of risk management. As will be discussed in subsequent chapters, the identification of enemy Others, be they terrorists or migrants attempting to enter the US irregularly, is inherently racialised, as is demonstrated by the justifications and operationalisation of both the wall and the travel ban. Finally, the objective of

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any risk management activity is the prevention of future harm or negative consequences. In sum, risk is defined here as a discursive representation of possible future events mired in uncertainty, which can legitimate a wide range of risk management measures, from the routine to the exceptional. Borrowing from both the risk society and post-structuralist literatures, contemporary security risks are brought into being or constructed within discourse and representation. Importantly, they are discursively constructed as debounded. The spatial and temporal debounding of risk in Beck’s work is indeed significant. Where this account differs from Beck (or at least some of Beck’s work, given the varying definitions of risk he provides) is the locating of such a debounding in discourse, not in objective material realities. It is the representation of contemporary security risks as debounded that is important. Debounding is not an intrinsic aspect of risk, even if actors’ perceptions of their physical or material environment influence the ways in which they understand and define risk. Security risks are also fundamentally embodied, shaped by gender, race, and other identity categories. We cannot understand contemporary security risks or their management without an appreciation of the way in which riskiness is ascribed to certain bodies and not to others. The following section builds on the definition of risk offered here by outlining a framework via which we can understand the specific processes through which risks are identified, represented, and managed. As will be highlighted, the lack of a clear definition of risk is not the only limitation of existing approaches to risk. Other key weaknesses of both the post-­ structuralist and risk society approaches include a lack of sufficient attention to the politics of risk identification, representation, and management, including questions of agency, resistance, and the opportunities and constraints within which risk ‘actors’ operate.

Riskisation One of the main aims of the riskisation framework is to capture context and offer a more contextually sensitive framework for analysing and understanding contemporary security risks and their management. Ciuta (2009) has argued that context is important to understanding security, the issues that are defined and addressed as matters of security, and the actions taken to manage or respond to them. Although writing about securitisation theory, Ciuta’s (2009: 317–318) breakdown of a contextually sensitive

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approach to security is relevant here. It highlights the importance of carefully exploring the construction of threats (or risks), referent objects, the agency of securitising actors, security measures, and security meaning. However, as Ciuta (2009: 321) notes, concepts are not necessarily unbounded in their meaning—in practice, there will be boundaries, horizons that limit and inform the ways in which actors define concepts like security, risk, and threat, and address identified security issues. As he suggests, ‘security does not mean “everything” because all actors always have a limited practical baggage, sedimented in contextually legitimate narratives and logics of action’ (Ciuta, 2009: 321). Furthermore, as analysts, we do not approach the empirical study of security or risk absent some sort of conceptualisation of them (Ciuta, 2009: 321–22)—we apply prior understandings of security or risk in ways that, again, limit the scope of what is taken to be security. Hence the definition of risk offered above. We therefore need a framework that points to the specific ways in which context influences riskisation, while leaving space to capture these contexts in our analyses. In terms of the contextual parameters to be considered here, riskisation focuses on agency (who is involved, who is enabled to act as risk takers or managers, who is identified as risky, how people resist or accept riskisation processes etc.), discursive or normative context (following on from the definition of risks as constructed as above), and social and political effects. Important questions such as how a process of riskisation unfolds, under what conditions a process of riskisation is successful, and the actors or coalitions of actors involved will differ from case to case and is therefore contextually specific rather than something that should be theoretically prescribed.1 Riskisation instead focuses more broadly on key aspects of the risk lifecycle, leaving space to answer questions such as who is involved and what facilitates or hinders a process of riskisation via deductive analysis. This enhances the framework’s applicability and flexibility, allowing it to be applied to a wide range of different cases in which actors have sought to identity and management particular security risks. It addresses Hameiri’s (2011: 382) criticism that neither Beckian or post-structuralist approaches to risk can explain the variation in depictions of risk or modes of governance to address risks in different functional areas and geographic regions. It is precisely such variation that riskisation is designed to capture. 1  I am grateful to the reviewer for prompting me to think further about these questions and my response to them.

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Riskisation offers a response to weaknesses identified in existing approaches to risk and security. A significant weakness here relates to agency. Although more recent works (see Williamson, 2014; Trenta, 2016) have attempted to provide a more detailed account of the agency of actors involved in instances of riskisation, the literature has generally not considered agency in great depth. Trenta (2016: 33) notes that both risk society and post-structuralist work tend to focus their attention at the structural level. There are two issues here. First, while work employing each approach has broadly identified the actors involved in managing or governing through risk, there has been less consideration of specifically what they actually do. A particular limitation here is how each approach deals with decision-makers. As Trenta (2016: 31) highlights, Beck’s risk society framework suggests that decision-makers have little to no control at all in the face of radically debounded risks, while post-structuralists argue that decision-makers are ascribed a level of quasi-omnipotence, exerting and exercising wide, deep control over societies, down to individuals’ bodies. Trenta (2016: 33) notes that decision-makers themselves are rarely identified beyond relatively vague references to government or decision-­ makers. In other words, the literatures on the risk society and post-­ structuralism and risk generally do not fully account for the agency and the specific roles of decision-makers in processes of riskisation (Clapton, 2011: 284). Decision-making regarding risk and its management is more complex than it has been represented in both literatures. One of the aims of the present volume is to address this issue below by identifying who the key decision-makers are in the context of Trump’s wall and travel ban and demonstrating how decision-makers were both enabled and constrained in advancing specific articulations of risk and mechanisms of risk management. Constraint here is important and leads to the second issue—the lack of attention paid to actors beyond decision-makers, particularly those who resist, contest, or otherwise problematise invocations of risk or attempts at risk management. Neither risk society or post-structuralist accounts of risk fully capture resistance and the ways in which this shapes processes of riskisation (Clapton, 2011: 285). Neither offer much space for exploring the ways in which representations of risk and mechanisms of risk management are contested and resisted, both among state leaders and officials and by everyday people in everyday spaces. Instead, we are presented with relatively partial accounts in which the broad risk management actions and

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representations of those seeking to address or govern through risk are explored without much consideration of how risk representations and management actions are shaped by contest, debate, and resistance. In other words, we are presented with the outcome of a political process without a strong focus on the process itself. For example, if we take the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a good example of a shift towards a risk management mode of warfare, as Heng (2006b) and Rasmussen (2006) both argue, then as Clapton (2011: 285) argues, we need to account for all of the actors involved in this instance of riskisation. Both Heng (2006b: 60–86) and Rasmussen (2006) highlight the key actors who have advanced a security logic of risk and made the case for both managing security issues as risks and engaging in preventive and precautionary actions such as the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As I suggest elsewhere (2011: 286), the well-documented controversy in several countries in the lead-up to the invasion in March 2003, as well as the discord between the Pentagon and the State Department in the US, suggest that there was a substantial level of resistance to the depictions of risk and the particular methods of risk management advocated by the proponents of military action against Iraq.

Hence, what is missing from the accounts of Heng and Rasmussen is the agency and role of actors who resisted these risk management efforts, both within the governments of the US and other members of the so-­ called Coalition of the Willing, and more popularly among everyday publics in these countries. Resistance, debate, conflict, and compromise—or, simply, politics—are crucial to any process of riskisation, shaping how risks are defined and represented and both enabling and constraining the possibilities of policy responses designed to manage risks. It is therefore necessary to more fully account for the agency of both ‘risk actors’, those advancing representations of risk and mechanisms of risk management, and the audiences that risk actors try to convince of the significance of a given security risk and the necessity of managing it in particular ways. Discursive context is a broad term designed to capture the ways in which norms, values, and identity informs and shapes the ways in which risk, riskiness, and their regulation and management are defined and understood. As risks are discursively constituted, they are inherently subjective and shaped by the prevailing discursive context. As noted above, risk and riskiness, especially in the security realm, are significantly informed

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by identity and they are embodied. For example, drone strikes, a major component of the Obama administration’s strategy for managing terrorist risks, depend on gendered and racialised understandings of risk and threat to justify and legitimise the violence enacted against bodies that are constituted as risky so that they might be destroyed (Wilcox, 2017: 21). As Wilcox (2017: 21) argues, ‘[t]he construction of certain bodies as threatening is thus less a matter of what is known about them than a desire to make bodies into what we already know they must be’. Puar (2007: 185) likewise suggests that ‘[w]hat is being preempted is not the danger of the known subject but the danger of not-knowing’. This is because the true nature of risky subjects is predetermined—we know who is potentially dangerous and who is not, because certain bodies are taken to represent risk and danger, while others are not. The identification of security risks can therefore involve a process of embodied othering and subjectification, bringing into being risky subjects, bodies, upon which state authority and violence is exercised on the basis of potential. This has been particularly marked in immigration. Riskiness has been inherently associated not only with particular categories of migrants, such as asylum seekers or refugees, but also specific bodies. Intensified processes of surveillance, calculation, and data gathering, including biometric data and the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems, are used to profile populations and identify and separate risky travellers from non-­ risky travellers. Work in this area has emphasised forms of ‘profiling and normalisation that produce categories of “undesirables” and risky selves to be monitored, corrected, or excluded based on the anticipation of future behaviour, while “normal” citizens are integrated within the flows of capital’ (Aradau & Blanke, 2018: 6). Despite the supposedly objective nature of advanced surveillance and AI technologies, the literature on the use of both in the area of security has highlighted the gendered and racialised biases built into AI (Stachowitsch & Sachseder, 2019; Sanchez-Mondedero & Dencik, 2020; Learned-Miller et  al., 2020) and the gendered and racialised nature of surveillance and profiling more generally. As will be seen below, constructions and representations of specific groups has been obviously central to Trump’s pursuit of the wall and travel ban; Muslims and Central/South Americans—in other words ‘brown bodies’—have been associated with a variety of risks and dangers to the American people that justifies their exclusion from American territory. Again, this demonstrates that risk and its management cannot be understood without exploring the broader discursive and social context within which it occurs.

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The importance of norms, values, and identity to risk and riskiness extends to the particular forms of risk management that actors might pursue. For example, a notable feature of the Bush administration’s risk management approach was the spread of liberalism and democracy abroad. This was an approach inherently informed by ideology and a specific set of values. For Bush, ‘[t]he political systems of the established democracies are taken to display a “clear moral and practical superiority”, thus, occupying the highest level of development and providing the model all other states are expected to follow’ (Jahn, 2007: 213). More liberalism and democracy were therefore equated with less risk. Again, identity is important—the identity of a state directly informed the risks that it might pose to the security of the US. Bush’s approach drew on the long-established ‘democratic peace theory’, which suggests that two democracies will not engage in armed conflict with one another (see Doyle, 1986; Russett, 1993). The social and political effects is the element of the riskisation framework that focuses on both the question of whether a process of riskisation is successful or not and, if it is, what impacts and consequences this has had. The issue of impacts and consequences is broader than simply asking whether the risk was successfully managed or not. Indeed, when dealing with risks, the success of risk management activities can never be conclusively known. The success of risk management is defined in terms of things that do not occur. When dealing with hypothetical scenarios—possible things that have not come to pass—we cannot know whether they did not occur because of risk management efforts, other factors, or simply because the anticipation and representation of risk that justified attempts at risk management was incorrect. Therefore, the question of impacts and consequences focuses more widely on the impacts on the peoples, groups, institutions, and structures affected by both the risk and attempts at risk management. The post-structuralist literature has generally provided greater insight into the wider impacts of risk and its management on affected populations than has the work employing Beck’s risk society framework. Beck’s macro-social account of the risk society, however, has inspired similar macro-level analyses that have focused on the impacts of recent Western risk management efforts and security praxis on international society’s constitutive norms and rules (see Clapton, 2014). Finally, one important point to note here, however, is that both Beckian and post-structuralist accounts of risk are generally Western-centric and deal with perceptions of risk and forms of risk management within a broadly specific social, political, economic, cultural, and institutional

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context. Certainly, this is the case with the present volume too. Both approaches to risk arguably work well within a Western context, but do not necessarily do so as well in others, particularly within the Global South. The Global South is generally viewed as the source of risk and riskiness, and while post-structuralist accounts have, as above, examined the impacts of risk and its management on affected populations in the Global South and the West, there has been little discussion regarding the ways in which political communities and societies beyond the West understand, assess, and manage risk.

Conclusion The existing literature on risk and security features many important works that have demonstrated the salience of risk to the strategic outlook and security policies of several Western states over the last 20 years. There is much to recommend in both Beck’s risk society and post-structuralist approaches to risk. Beck’s emphasis on the temporal and spatial debounding of risk is important, as is the post-structuralist focus on risk as a discursively constructed technology associated with governmentality. However, as argued above, both exhibit important weaknesses, including unclear definitions of risk and a relative lack of attention to the specific contexts and the political processes of risk identification, representation, and management. The framework of riskisation is advanced above as a way of building on the existing risk and security literature by offering a more contextually sensitive means through which to capture particular processes of riskisation. The next chapter shifts from theoretical and conceptual concerns to an examination of the importance of risk to the security policies and behaviours of the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. Risk has been a core part of each administration’s understanding of its strategic environment and the doctrines and practices that they have employed to manage it. While each administration has differed in the specific mechanisms of risk management that it has employed, a security logic of risk is identifiable across all three. That is, each has represented and framed security issues such as terrorism in terms of uncertainty, possible future catastrophe or harm, and the consequent need for preventive action; legitimated and implemented preventive measures via the governing and regulation of environments and populations perceived as risky; and sought to prevent and avoid future harm.

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References Amoore, L. (2009). Algorithmic security: Everyday geographies of the war on terror. Antipode, 41(1), 49–69. Amoore, L., & de Goede, M. (2008). Introduction: Governing by risk in the war on terror. In L.  Amoore & M. de Goede (Eds.), Risk and the war on terror (pp. 5–20). Routledge. Aradau, C., & Blanke, T. (2018). Governing others: Anomaly and the algorithmic subject of security. European Journal of International Security, 3(1), 1–21. Aradau, C., & Van Munster, R. (2007). Governing terrorism through risk: Taking precautions, (un)knowing the future. European Journal of International Relations, 13(1), 89–115. Aradau, C., & Van Munster, R.(2008). Taming the future: The dispositif of risk in the war on terror. In L. Amoore & M. de Geode (Eds.), Risk and the war on terror (pp. 23–40). Routledge. Aradau, C., & Van Munster, R. (2009). Exceptionalism and the war on terror: Criminology meets international relations. British Journal of Criminology, 49(5), 686–701. Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. Sage. Beck, U. (1999). World risk society. Polity. Beck, U. (2000). Risk society revisited: Theory, politics, and research programmes. In B. Adams, U. Beck, & J. van Loon (Eds.), The risk society and beyond: Critical issues for social theory (pp. 211–229). Sage. Beck, U. (2002). The terrorist threat: World risk society revisited. Theory, Culture and Society, 19(4), 39–55. Beck, U. (2003). The silence of words: On war and terror. Security Dialogue, 34(3), 255–267. Beck, U. (2009). World at risk. Polity Press. Beck, U., Giddens, A., & Lash, S. (1994). Reflexive modernization: Politics, tradition and aesthetics in the modern social order. Stanford University Press. Bodie, Z., Merton, R., & Cleeton, D. (1999). Financial Economics. Pearson. Bush, G.  W. (2002, December 3). Excerpts from remarks in Louisiana welcome. Retrieved May 10, 2020, from https://georgewbush-­whitehouse.archives. gov/news/releases/2002/12/20021203-­4.html Castel, R. (1991). From dangerousness to risk. In G.  Burchell, C.  Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp. 281–298). Harvester Wheatsheaf. Ciuta, F. (2009). Security and the problem of context: A hermeneutical critique of securitization theory. Review of International Studies, 35(2), 301–326. Clapton, W. (2011). Risk in international relations. International Relations, 25(3), 280–295.

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Clapton, W. (2014). Risk and hierarchy within international society: Liberal interventionism in the post-cold war era. Palgrave. Coker, C. (2002). Risk management goes global. Retrieved July 12, 2021, from https://www.spiked-­o nline.com/2002/04/29/risk-­m anagement-­g oes­global/ Coker, C. (2009). War in an age of risk. Cambridge. Corry, O. (2012). Securitisation and ‘riskification’: Second-order security and the politics of climate change. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 40(2), 235–258. Dean, M. (1999). Governmentality: Power and rule in modern society. Sage. Douglas, M. & Wildavsky, A.B. (1983). Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers. University of California Press. Doyle, M. (1986). Liberalism and world politics. The American Political Science Review, 80(4), 1151–1169. Ericson, R. V. (2007). Crime in an insecure world. Polity. Eriksson, J. (2001). Introduction. In J. Eriksson (Ed.), Threat politics: New perspectives on security, risk and crisis management (pp. 1–20). Ashgate. Ewald, F. (1991). Insurance and risk. In G.  Burchell, C.  Gordon, & P.  Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality (pp.  197–210). Harvester-Wheatsheaf. Garland, D. (2003). The rise of risk. In R. V. Ericson & A. Doyle (Eds.), Risk and morality (pp. 48–86). University of Toronto Press. Giddens, A. (1990). The consequences of modernity. Polity Press. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity. Polity Press. Griner, S. (2002). Living in a world risk society: A reply to Mikkel V. Rasmussen. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 31(1), 149–160. Hameiri, S. (2011). State transformation, territorial politics and the management of transnational risk. International Relations, 25(3), 381–397. Heng, Y.-K. (2006a). The ‘transformation of war’ debate: Through the looking glass of Ulrich Beck’s world risk society. International Relations, 20(1), 69–91. Heng, Y.-K. (2006b). War as risk management: Strategy and conflict in an Age of globalised risks. Routledge. Heng, Y.-K., & McDonagh, K. (2009). Risk, global governance and security: The other war on terror. Routledge. Jahn, B. (2007). The tragedy of liberal diplomacy: Democratization, intervention, statebuilding (part two). Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 1(2), 211–229. Jarvis, D.  S. L. (2007). Risk, globalisation and the state: A critical appraisal of Ulrich Beck and the world risk society thesis. Global Society, 21(1), 23–46. Kemshall, H. (2003). Understanding Risk in Criminal Justice. Open University Press.

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Kühn, F. P. (2011). Securing uncertainty: Sub-state security dilemma and the risk of intervention. International Relations, 25(3), 363–380. Lash, S. (2000). Risk culture. In B. Adam, U. Beck & J. van Loon (Eds.), The risk society and beyond: Critical issues for social theory (pp. 53–67). Sage. Learned-Miller, E., Ordóñez, V., Morgenstern, J., & Buolamwini, J. (2020). Facial recognition technologies in the wild: A call for a federal office. Algorithmic Justice League. Retrieved July 12, 2021, from https://global-­uploads.webflow. com/5e027ca188c99e3515b404b7/5ed145952bc185203f3d009_ FRTsFederalOfficeMay2020.pdf Lobo-Guerro, L. (2019). Insurance, subjectivity and governance. International Relations, 33(4), 605–609. Luhmann, N. (1993). Risk: A sociological theory (R. Barrett, Trans.). New York: Aldine de Gruyter. Luhmann, N. (1990). Technology, environment and social risk: A systems perspective. Industrial Crisis Quarterly, 4(3), 223–231. Lupton, D. (2013). Risk (2nd ed.). Routledge. Van Munster, R. (2005). Logics of security: The Copenhagen School, risk management and the war on terror (University of Southern Denmark, Political Science Publications 10/2005). Van Munster, R. (2010). Securitizing immigration: The politics of risk in the EU. Palgrave Macmillan. Mythen, G. (2018). The critical theory of world risk society: A retrospective analysis. Risk Analysis, 41(3), 533–543. Mythen, G., & Walklate, S. (2008). Terrorism, risk and international security: The perils of asking ‘what if?’. Security Dialogue, 39(2–3), 221–242. O’Malley, P. (2002). Risk and uncertainty. Glasshouse. Puar, J. K. (2007). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Duke University Press. Rasmussen, M. V. (2001). Reflexive security: NATO and international risk society. Millennium, 30(2), 285–309. Rasmussen, M. V. (2006). The risk Society at war: Terror, technology and strategy in the twenty-first century. Cambridge University Press. Rosa, E. A., Dietz, T., Moss, R. H., Atran, S., & Moser, S. (2012). Managing the risks of climate change and terrorism. Solutions, 3(2), 59–65. Rosa, E. A., Renn, O., & McCright, A. M. (2013). The risk society revisited: Social theory and governance. Temple University Press. Rose, N. (2001). The politics of life itself. Theory, Culture & Society, 28(6), 1–30. Russett, B. (1993). Grasping the democratic peace: Principles for a post-Cold War world. Princeton University Press. Sanchez-Mondedero, J., & Dencik, L. (2020). The politics of deceptive borders: ‘Biomarkers of deceit’ and the case of iBorderCtrl. Information, Communication & Society. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1792530

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Stachowitsch, S., & Sachseder, J. (2019). The gendered and racialized politics of risk analysis: The case of Frontex. Critical Studies on Security, 7(2), 107–123. Trenta, L. (2016). Risk and presidential decision-making: The emergence of foreign policy crises. Routledge. Urry, J. (2011). Climate change and society. Polity. White House. (2002). The National Security Strategy of the United States of America. Retrieved June 9, 2021, from https://georgewbush-­whitehouse. archives.gov/nsc/nss/2002/ Wilcox, L. (2017). Embodying algorithmic war: Gender, race, and the posthuman in drone warfare. Security Dialogue, 48(1), 11–28. Williams, M. J. (2008). (In)security studies, reflexive modernization and the risk society. Cooperation and Conflict, 43(1), 57–79. Williamson, P. R. (2014). Risk and securitization in Japan 1945–60. Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

Risk and Security in the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations

Abstract  This chapter situates Trump’s attempts at risk management via the wall and travel ban within the broader context of US foreign and defence policy in the twenty-first century by tracing a logic of risk across the strategic doctrines and outlooks of the Obama, Bush, and Trump administrations. While the specific focus, forms, and targets of risk management have changed across the different strategic contexts within which the three administrations have operated, an emphasis on security risks and preventive and precautionary mechanisms of addressing them has been a consistent feature of them all. As argued in this chapter, Trump’s wall and travel ban reflect continuing trends regarding how the US and other Western states address and govern security issues. Keywords  Bush • Obama • Trump • Drones • Iraq Risk has been a notable preoccupation of successive US administrations over at least the last 20 years. That is, security issues have been conceived in terms of risk, uncertainty, future catastrophe, and therefore a need for preventive and precautionary action. This was most clearly exhibited by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks but has carried though the subsequent Obama and Trump administrations (as of writing, it is too early to tell whether risk will also be a key feature of the

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national security and strategic outlook of the Biden administration). Not only has risk been a feature of the security outlook and policies of each administration; they have each also employed a broadly similar approach to managing risk, even if the specific practices that have emerged from this approach differ quite markedly. In the face of risks represented and understood as amorphous and temporally and spatially debounded, each administration has focused on managing environments and populations within which risks might arise. Known as situational risk management, this broad approach has been applied to both US borders and overseas, culminating in a range of risk management practices that extend from the routine and normal through to the exceptional. One of the key contributions of this chapter is therefore to situate Trump’s attempts at risk management via the wall and travel ban within the broader context of US foreign and defence policy in the twenty-first century. It should be noted that risk and its management are not only features of the US’ strategic approach and outlook; rather risk is a significant feature of the strategic outlook and security policies of several Western states. The EU, for example, recently published a security strategy that notes that ‘[g]lobalisation, free movement and the digital transformation continue to bring prosperity, make our lives easier, and spur innovation and growth. But alongside these benefits come inherent risks and costs’ (European Commission, 2020, p. 1). It also suggests that ‘future-proofing’ is a key strategic priority, and that the EU needs to maintain pace with evolving risks (European Commission, 2020, p. 6). In Australia, a similar focus on managing risks was apparent in the legitimation and justification for the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands, designed to manage the risks posed by potential state failure in Solomon Islands, a Pacific Islands state within geographical proximity to Australia (see Clapton, 2009). The same trends in immigration in the US regarding surveillance and profiling as a way of managing risk are apparent elsewhere, but the Trump administration stood alone in its travel ban and wall. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, it briefly considers situational risk management. It then explores the ways in which a security logic of risk has manifested in the strategic outlook of each administration and the different ways in which they have sought to engage in situational risk management. The Bush administration focused on external wars and the reshaping of risky environments within which risks might originate— namely illiberal, undemocratic, and so-called failed or rogue states. The Obama administration, while less enthusiastic about engaging in

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large-­scale wars and invasions than Bush, still pursued a limited military solution of a large number of drone strikes against ‘risky’ populations in ‘risky’ territories as a way of managing terrorist risks. Finally, the Trump administration demonstrated even less enthusiasm for overseas military engagements than Bush or Obama, focusing instead on borders and border zones as key environments that needed to be subjected to regulation and control as a way of managing risk.

Situational Risk Management As argued above, uncertainty and the representation of contemporary security risks as spatially and temporally debounded means that risks such as terrorism are perceived as nebulous, difficult to precisely locate in time and space. Therefore, US and Western risk management efforts have focused on manipulating and regulating risky environments or territories. As Coker (2002) argues: In this world of uncertainties and risks, the only option open to governments is to police the world. And in a globalised age we see the emergence of a new concept of policing which takes its cue from the domestic model, where people have moved from ‘community policing’ to ‘policing communities of risk’.

This has been characterised as a form of situational risk management, a concept first introduced in Criminology. Criminological studies of risk have been highlighted as important to understanding Western approaches to managing security risks (see Heng, 2006; Clapton, 2014). Essentially, situational risk management is the result of a shift in policing from responding to crime via rehabilitation of offenders to preventing offences from being perpetrated (Hughes 1998: 141). It involves ‘a pre-emptive approach that relies, not on improving society or its institutions, but simply on reducing the opportunities for crime’ (Clarke, 1992: 4). This approach was outlined as follows by the US National Crime Prevention Institute (1986: 18): Prevention (and not rehabilitation) should be the major concern of criminologists; no one is sure how to rehabilitate offenders; punishment and/or imprisonment may be relevant in controlling certain offenders; criminal behaviour can be controlled primarily through the direct alteration of the

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environment of potential victims; crime control programs must focus on crime before it occurs rather than afterward; and as criminal opportunity is reduced, so too will be the number of criminals.

As Rose (1999: 237) argues, the aim of situational crime prevention is to ‘act pre-emptively upon potentially problematic zones, to structure them in such a way as to reduce the likelihood of undesirable events or conduct occurring’. As will be discussed below, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have all focused on preventing risk via the regulation of identified risky or problematic zones. These have involved undemocratic, illiberal or fragile states, borders, and also US society itself.

‘Anticipatory Self-defence’: Risk and the Bush Administration The importance of a security logic of risk to the strategic outlook and security policies of Western states is generally argued to extend from the end of the Cold War onwards. Scholars such as Williams (2008: 57–58) have pointed to the United Kingdom’s 1998 Strategic Defence Review or NATO’s, 1999 Strategic Concept, both have which noted that management and prevention of risks was a key challenge to be addressed. Others, such as Barrinha and da Vinha (2014: 20), argue that the Clinton administration’s response to the bombing of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 was another example of a security logic of risk in action. Here, the use of precision strikes in response to the bombings was seen as a way of managing the risks posed by terrorist groups and preventing further attacks. Still, many works exploring risk and security focus on case studies from the post-9/11 era, namely the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the implementation of a range of surveillance and profiling technologies and practices, and the extension of state power and control into a wider sphere of social activity (see Heng, 2006; Rasmussen, 2006; Amoore & de Goede, 2008). Much attention here, of course, has fallen on the risk management efforts of the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11. A security logic of risk and focus on risk management was apparent in the justifications and the approach to both the invasion of Afghanistan and the wider WoT, both of which demonstrated an emphasis on proactive anticipation and management of risks (Heng, 2006: 98). While the invasion of Afghanistan was, of course, a response to the 9/11 attacks, the stated aim was not simply to bring the perpetrators to justice. It was also

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to prevent further terrorist attacks from occurring (Heng, 2006: 97). Further, Bush noted at the signing of an anti-terrorism bill in October 2001 that ‘[t]he bill before me takes account of the new realities and dangers posed by modern terrorists. It will help law enforcement to identify, to dismantle, to disrupt, and to punish terrorists before they strike’ (Bush, 2001, emphasis mine). In September 2002, Bush (2002a) noted that both al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were risks and therefore dangerous. As Heng (2006: 93) concludes, the invasion of Afghanistan and overthrow of the Taliban was an exercise in risk management, an attempt to prevent further terrorist attacks around the world. The specific means of risk management that Bush pursued in both Afghanistan and Iraq was, as noted above, democracy promotion. A purely military solution via the disruption and defeat of terrorist groups, the Taliban, and the Iraqi armed forces, would not be enough. Rather, military force was a means to an end, an important part of the ultimate objective of regime change and the installation of liberal democratic government. The ‘wars’ in Afghanistan and Iraq were/are both long, open-ended, and ill-defined precisely because they were not (in the case of Iraq) and are not (in the case of Afghanistan, which as of writing is ongoing) traditional wars; instead, they are exercises in state-building, counter-terrorism, and counter-insurgency. They are also exercises in a specific form of situational risk management, based on the notion that liberal democracies are safer and less risky environments, stable political communities that do not pose the same risks as ‘rogue’, ‘fragile’, or ‘failed’ states. This emphasis on prevention, precaution, and risk management via democracy promotion would only intensify in 2002 and early 2003 in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. Perhaps the classic statement of the preventive intent associated with a security logic of risk was provided in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States (NSS): The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction  – and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively. (White House, 2002: 15, emphasis added)

Also known as the ‘Bush Doctrine’, this doctrine of anticipatory self-­ defence essentially did away with imminence as a justification for the defensive use of force against an enemy that has not yet actually attacked.

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Even in the face of imperfect intelligence, uncertainty, and unknowing, action needed to be taken to safeguard the US against possible future catastrophes. In this sense, the doctrine was preventive rather than pre-­ emptive, despite the statement above. Pre-emption usually requires imminence—it is an action designed to thwart an enemy attack of which there is clear and obvious evidence. Prevention, on the other hand, involves ‘military operations undertaken to avert a plausible but hypothetical future risk’ (Yost, 2007: 41). This preventive intent was coupled with a desire to promote liberalism and democracy, itself seen as the ultimate preventer of terrorist attacks. While military action to harass and disrupt terrorist networks had its place, the risk of terrorism could ultimately only be adequately prevented by denying terrorists safe havens, risky environments in which they could establish bases and flourish. As the 2002 NSS states: The events of September 11, 2001, taught us that weak states, like Afghanistan, can pose as great a danger to our national interests as strong states. Poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers. Yet poverty, weak institutions, and corruption can make weak states vulnerable to terrorist networks and drug cartels within their borders. (White House, 2002: v)

State fragility and lack of democracy became regarded as risky to US national security. This would continue to be a theme throughout the remainder of the Bush administration. In his second inaugural address, Bush (2005) stated: We have seen our vulnerability – and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny  – prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder  – violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat.

Bush (2005) continued, arguing that ‘[w]e are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.’ Critics would later note that Bush’s zeal for democracy promotion was actually about promoting democracy, and that the administration’s record in this

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regard is poor. Beinart (2014), for example, notes that the Bush administration continued to engage with authoritarian regimes when it suited its interests; demonstrated a dislike for state-building efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq (consequently making grave mistakes in both); and was not actually motivated by promoting democracy, but rather by expanding US military reach. Of course, this is because promoting democracy was not the end, but the means. It was not positive ideological outcomes that Bush sought in Afghanistan and Iraq, but rather the negative prevention of risk (Clapton, 2014: 56). Hence, it is not surprising that the administration’s record on democracy promotion was inconsistent—it was a tool to be used as part of attempts to regulate risky environments. Authoritarian regimes that supported US efforts in the WoT were therefore ‘with’ the US and, by definition, not risky. Again, this reflects the constructed nature of risk and the ways in which risk identification and representation are subjective exercises. It also reflects the politics of riskisation—the idea of ‘objective’ risk is undermined, especially in the area of security, but the obvious inconsistencies and contradictions that characterise US risk management efforts across three administrations since 9/11. The significance of risk to the security outlook of the Bush administration is evident when one explores the justifications for the invasion of Iraq offered by Bush and the leaders of other members of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’. Indeed, much has been written regarding the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. Several scholars have explored the invasion from a risk management perspective, arguing that a logic of risk informed the invasion and the intent of the Bush administration to replace Saddam Hussein’s regime with a liberal democratic government (Heng, 2006; Rasmussen, 2006; Stern & Wiener, 2008; Clapton, 2014). While a risk or risk management perspective can also be usefully employed to understand the US invasion of Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, it was also a response to an attack that had already been carried out. The invasion of Iraq was more purely motivated by a precautionary and preventive doctrine, based on a highly uncertain image of the potential possession of WMD by Hussein’s regime and possible links with terrorist groups (Stern & Wiener, 2008: 123). Potential catastrophe predicated on Iraq’s possible possession, attainment, and/or supply of WMD to terrorist groups was the driving catalyst of the case for war. The dangers facing the United States and its allies were framed exclusively in terms of imagined future scenarios that might occur

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at an undetermined time and location. The transnational nature of these risks, the fundamentally altered strategic environment that Western societies found themselves in, and consequently the need for proactive, anticipatory intervention, was clearly articulated by Bush: But September the 11th brought home a new reality, and it’s important for all our citizens to understand that reality … We all believed that two oceans would forever separate us from harm’s way, and that if there was a threat gathering overseas, we could pick and choose whether or not we wanted to be involved in dealing with that threat. September the 11th delivered a chilling message to our country, and that is oceans no longer protect us. And therefore, it is my obligation to make sure that we address gathering threats overseas before they could do harm to the American people. (Bush, 2002c)

Blair (2002) likewise suggested: [T]hese are new and different dangers. It’s not like the old Soviet bloc versus NATO. There, defensive alliances were formed; crises occurred, often serious; but in a funny way, the world knew where it was. The year 2002 is different. These dangers can strike at any time, across any national boundary and in pursuit of a cause with which there can be little or no rational negotiation.

As Australian Prime Minister John Howard (2003) said in outlining his government’s case for military action against Iraq, the costs of inaction, of waiting for clear evidence of an existential threat, were higher than taking action immediately to prevent a catastrophic occurrence. A clear and consistent logic of risk, precaution, and prevention pervaded the justifications for war outlined by Bush, Blair, and Howard. This was further underscored in the way they articulated the dangers that their countries ostensibly faced and the supposed ‘riskiness’ of Hussein’s regime. Again, in stark contrast to a readily identifiable, existential threat, advocates of war and regime change in Iraq pointed instead to imagined scenarios of future catastrophe. Indeed, the reason that the Iraq War was so contentious, from early 2002 when Bush started speaking openly of the need for action against Hussein until the present day, was precisely because of differing perceptions of the risks involved. Without clear evidence of Iraq’s possession or attempted development of WMD, Bush, Blair and others were entirely reliant on a discourse of catastrophic potential future, of things that might come to pass. In short, they were reliant on a

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discourse and logic of risk. While there are many quotes from Bush, Blair, Howard, and others that one could employ to demonstrate this point, two quotes here in particular should suffice. First, Bush (2002a, 2002b) argued: The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. And when they have fully materialized it may be too late to protect ourselves and our friends and our allies … Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX – nerve gas – or some day a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally. We refuse to live in this future of fear.

The US Congress (2002) was even more explicit in its authorisation for military action against Iraq, which stated that the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its Armed Forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so, and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself.

This emphasis on possible futures and catastrophes was matched by a consistent narrative of the riskiness of Hussein and his regime. One of the key justifications for war offered by proponents of regime change in Iraq was the dangerous nature of Hussein’s regime itself. Howard (2003), for example, stressed the grave human rights abuses perpetrated by the regime against the Iraqi people, along with its history of aggression against Iraq’s neighbours and previous attempts at attaining WMD. Blair (2002; also see Roe 2008) likewise highlighted Hussein’s appalling human rights record and the ‘brutal and aggressive’ nature of his regime. Finally, Bush frequently remarked—both before and after the invasion—that the spread of liberty and democracy was the ‘antidote’ to the riskiness of authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and beyond. For example, he suggested that ‘[t]he world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values, because stable and free nations do not breed the ideologies of murder. They encourage the peaceful pursuit of a better life’ (Bush, 2003). This is a key point—faced with the inherent uncertainty of risk as something that could potentially occur, risk management efforts in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks were focused on identifying risky actors and environments that were more amenable to regulation and

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control. The key message within these remarks was clear: Hussein and his regime were too risky and too dangerous to be left alone. A precautionary approach mandated that action be taken before riskiness could turn into actual disaster. What we see, here therefore, is the clear operation of a security logic of risk. Employing the criteria of this logic outlined in the previous chapter, we can see that the security issue at hand was represented as catastrophic and uncertain, which in turn legitimated the preventive use of force. Again, the clear logic of the invasion of Iraq was precautionary and preventive. At no point in the lead up to war did Bush, Blair, Howard, or any others point to a specific, readily identifiable and spatially and temporally locatable threat (Clapton, 2014: 127). Regarding measures and effects, the invasion was an exceptional action motivated by a desire to prevent perceived security risks and an exercise in situational risk management—remove a risky regime and install a liberal democracy in its place to prevent risks. Its effects were wide reaching, significantly more so than the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. While the latter had international support, such support was significantly less forthcoming when it came to Iraq. In fact, there was significant opposition to the war, including from some traditional US allies in Europe. This prompted, among other things, the renaming of ‘French fries’ to ‘Freedom fries’ in the US Congress cafeteria in protest at the French government’s refusal to support or participate in the invasion (Fischer, 2012). More importantly, the use of military force against Iraq without Security Council authorisation was not only widely condemned, but also prompted concerns about the viability of a liberal or rules-based international order in the face of US unilateralism. Tim Dunne (2003), for example, argues that the invasion of Iraq and the hierarchy that it represented, were incompatible with international society and endangered its existence. Simpson (2005: 22) similarly concluded that the invasion of Iraq was a blow to international society, although not necessarily a fatal one. A large volume of work also considered what the invasion meant for international law and international order. Debates here went beyond simply questioning whether or not the invasion was illegal (although there was a lot said and written on that; see, for example, Simpson, 2005); they also went to the questions of how it had affected the norms and rules by which international society and the existing international order was constituted. Without delving too deeply into this topic, the effects of the invasion, as a specific instance of risk management, went beyond Iraq or the US itself. It brought into question the very

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existence and viability of international society and an international order that was ironically constructed by the US and its major allies in the aftermath of World War Two. Invasion and regime change were coupled with targeted killings of terrorists and militants via drone strikes. The use of drones, which will be discussed further below, intensified and markedly expanded in both frequency and geographical scope under the Obama and Trump administrations. However, it was also a feature of the Bush administration’s attempts to manage the risk of terrorism. Consistent with the Bush Doctrine, targeted killings of terrorists was justified as an act of ‘anticipatory self-­ defence’. This caused significant concerns regarding extrajudicial killings and the legality of targeted killings—concerns that have informed debates on US drone strikes to the present. The Bush administration dismissed such concerns, describing al Qaeda as at war with the US and therefore justifying US attacks against al Qaeda operatives anywhere and at any time. The debounded nature of the terrorist risk meant that the US likewise needed to be ready and able strike at any time and at any location (Trenta, 2018: 82; Powell, 2003). Of course, for all the focus on the Bush administration’s attempt at situational risk management overseas via intervening in risky territories to promote liberalism and democracy, there were also significant domestic initiatives within the US that continue to this day. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the passing of the Patriot Act are both well-known examples of the domestic changes that occurred in the aftermath of 9/11. Both continue to this day. While there is an extensive literature on the Patriot Act in particular, domestic initiatives are often overlooked in much of the work of the work on risk and security, which has instead focused more heavily on external interventions when considering the risk management practices of the Bush administration. Neither Heng (2006) nor Rasmussen (2006), for example, focuses much on the domestic risk management practices employed as part of the WoT. However, these are important, because managing the domestic environment in the US via increasing surveillance and data gathering was a key aspect of US counter-terrorism efforts. Increasing and strengthening surveillance capabilities is a core part of the Patriot Act’s provisions and was seen as an important means to preventing risk. Congress moved quickly after the 911 attacks to provide the federal government with extensive new powers to prevent future terrorist attacks—the Patriot Act was signed into law on 26 October, only six weeks

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after 9/11 (McCarthy, 2002: 435). Initially, there was widespread support for the Act, demonstrated by the lack of deliberation over, or opposition to, the bill in either Congress or the wider public. Soon though, various activist groups and NGOs, including civil rights advocates, privacy advocates, and immigrant organisations, expressed concerns regarding the Act (McCarthy, 2002: 435). The Act itself covered a lot of ground, including provisions relating to disrupting terrorist financing, providing the Attorney General greater authority to detain and deport aliens that were suspected of links with terrorist groups, and removing barriers between law enforcement and intelligence agencies to enable them to share information more freely and efficiently (McCarthy, 2002: 435; Lind, 2015). The Patriot Act was a particular source of controversy within the US.  This was recognised by Congress during its debates about the bill before it was passed, despite the relative lack of deliberation overall. Democratic Senator Ron Wyden was concerned enough about specific provisions of the bill to add sunset clauses to them (Lind, 2015). These provisions would expire if not renewed by Congress at the end of a five-­ year period. They were renewed in 2006 and again in 2011. Some of the most notorious provisions included sections 206, 207, and 215. The last here, section 215, was regarded as especially problematic. As detailed in the 2013 Snowden leaks, the National Security Agency (NSA) relied upon this provision to secretly collect the telephone metadata of almost every American citizen. The metadata provides call records which the US government argued was crucial to find patterns and connections that would enable it to prevent terrorist operations and attacks (McGowan, 2014: 2399). This was enabled by section 215 permitting data collection where it was relevant to an authorised investigation designed to protect against international terrorism or clandestine activities (McGowan, 2014: 2399). Sections 206 and 207 respectively are referred to as the ‘roving wiretap’ and ‘lone-wolf’ provisions. The former allows the government to tap and collect intelligence from every device that a person possesses just with approval from what some regard as the rather permissive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Lind, 2015). This court allows the government to conduct surveillance on someone who they suspect might be a terrorist, even if there is no evidence of an established connection to a terrorist group or organisation (Lind, 2015). These sorts of wide-ranging, large-scale surveillance provisions are consistent with a security logic of risk, especially one in which the specific risk of terrorism is regarded as debounded. That terrorists could be anyone, anywhere, and strike at any

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time necessitates risk management measures like extensive surveillance. It is seen by law enforcement and intelligence agencies as the antidote to the uncertainty that is inherently associated with the terrorist risk. The more data that is collected, the greater the chance that terrorists can be identified and detained before they are able to launch attacks. However, it is precisely this that also makes measures such as the Patriot Act so controversial. Critics argued that these provisions provided extensive and intrusive forms of government surveillance and oversight that violate civil rights and individual privacy. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2015 that the NSA’s bulk collection of phone records was illegal and based on a misreading of section 215 (Savage & Weisman, 2015). While it is beyond the scope here to explore the controversies and debates regarding the Patriot Act in detail, it is important to note that it provides a useful example of a process of riskisation in that it demonstrates the politics of risk management and the role of a large variety of actors, including Presidents, members of Congress, and significant coalitions of civil society actors that have resisted the Act and the practices that it has enabled. The politics of risk management has resulted in shifts and changes in provisions of the Patriot Act deemed especially problematic. Minor amendments were made to the provisions to which a sunset clause was attached in the 2006, but after the Snowden leaks, opposition to government surveillance and specific sections of the Patriot Act became more entrenched. Sections 206, 207, and 215 expired in 2015 after the Senate failed to pass a bill renewing them due to strong opposition from certain Senators, such as Rand Paul (Lee, 2015). This expiration was short-lived—on 2 June, the Senate passed the USA Freedom Act, which was signed into law by President Obama the same day. This Act renewed the expired provisions of the Patriot Act, but placed limits on the bulk collection of telephone metadata by intelligence and law enforcement agencies (Siddiqui, 2015). Since then, the issue of government surveillance and the appropriate balance between the need to prevent risk and protect the civil and constitutional rights of American citizens, has remained a significant political issue in the US. Again, the debates that have occurred since the passing of the Patriot Act in 2001 demonstrate the politics of risk management and the ways in which specific risk management practices are both contested and shaped or modified by these contests. Again, the contentious provisions of the Patriot Act have been modified over time in response to concerns raised by both government officials and civil society. As will be

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seen in the next section, this is also the case with one of the key mechanisms of risk management employed by the Obama administration: drone strikes.

Risk, Drones, and the Obama Administration A general preoccupation with risk continued in the US after Obama was inaugurated in January 2009. A focus on situational risk management continued too, although it would take a different form to that of the Bush administration. Here, more limited operations in the form of drone strikes conducted by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) of the US military would be used to manage the risk of terrorism. The continuing preoccupation with risk and regulating risky environments was evident in several documents produced by the administration and executive departments. The 2010 National Security Strategy, for example, identifies denying safe havens to terrorists and strengthening ‘at-risk states’ as a key part of managing the risk of terrorism (White House, 2010: 21). As the document states: We also will strengthen our own network of partners to disable al-Qa’ida’s financial, human, and planning networks; disrupt terrorist operations before they mature; and address potential safe-havens before al-Qa’ida and its terrorist affiliates can take root … We will also help states avoid becoming terrorist safe havens by helping them build their capacity for responsible governance and security through development and security sector assistance. (White House, 2010: 21)

The 2015 National Security Strategy continued with the ‘risk theme’ of its predecessor. Its very first sentence states: ‘Today, the United States is stronger and better positioned to seize the opportunities of a still new century and safeguard our interests against the risks of an insecure world’ (White House, 2015: ii). It goes on to identify a set of key strategic risks that the US faces, including catastrophic attack on the US homeland or critical infrastructure, proliferation of WMD, and the security consequences associated with weak or failing states (White House, 2015: 2). It acknowledges that risk is key to addressing terrorism, stating that ‘[t]hrough risk-based approaches, we have countered terrorism and transnational organized crime in ways that enhance commerce, travel, and tourism and, most fundamentally, preserve our civil liberties’ (White

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House, 2015: 8). It also acknowledges that one of the most effective ways of dealing with the risk of terrorism is to regulate risky environments: We will help build the capacity of the most vulnerable states and communities to defeat terrorists locally. Working with the Congress, we will train and equip local partners and provide operational support to gain ground against terrorist groups. This will include efforts to better fuse and share information and technology as well as to support more inclusive and accountable governance. (White House, 2015: 9)

Therefore, the Obama administration’s two strategies demonstrate not only the continuing significance of risk more generally, but also that of managing risky environments that are conducive to the emergence of security risks such as terrorism. Beyond Obama’s security strategies, other departments produced documentation that similarly highlighted a focus on risk. For example, the Department of Homeland Security adopted a risk management doctrine, outlining this in a 2011 document. It notes that risks are everywhere and therefore emphasises the necessity of living with these risks and developing the appropriate technologies and processes through which risks can be identified, prioritised, and managed (Department of Homeland Security, 2011). The document also outlines the sort of horizon scanning and focus on future trends that one would associate with a security logic of risk, noting that future trends have the capacity to significantly alter the security risk landscape in ways that cannot be anticipated (Department of Homeland Security, 2011: 7). For Krieg (2016: 100), the shift from threat-based to risk-based discourses or logics of security has been one of the major factors influencing the Obama administration’s strategic outlook. It is partly responsible for Obama’s shift towards ‘surrogate warfare’ and the externalisation of risk via its transfer to communities in operating theatres (Krieg, 2016: 101; Shaw, 2005). As we have seen with US drone strikes in South Asia and the Middle East, civilians in operational or conflict zones have been exposed to significant risks. They have been killed indiscriminately and, as will be discussed further below, the Obama administration has received sustained criticism from human rights groups regarding its use of drones and the consequences for civilian populations. This transference of risk is a core feature of what Beck (2009: 149) the ‘risk wars’. For Beck (2009: 149–150), risk wars involve both foreign intervention to manage global risks and the minimisation of risk to one’s military personnel by

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maximising the risks of conflict to others. Hence bombing campaigns and precision drone strikes that minimise the risk of military casualties while increasing the risks to civilians. In this way, Obama’s drone strikes were the continuance of the risk wars begun by Bush. As Fisk and Ramos (2014: 169) suggest, Obama not only continued with the Bush administration’s focus on risk management and prevention, but also advanced it. As Krieg (2016: 105) notes, ‘In fact, Obama’s overall grand strategy was not about fundamentally redefining the core objectives of US foreign and security policy but rather about reconsidering how to achieve them.’ Indeed, some have suggested that Obama’s counter-­ terrorism policy did more than simply continue with that of the Bush administration; it radicalised it (Barrinha & da Vinha, 2014: 15). While Obama shifted away from the Bush administration’s large-scale invasions and regime change in risky territories, it carried on with Bush’s use of drone strikes. Indeed, the Obama administration intensified these strikes and expanded them to new areas (Barrinha & da Vinha, 2014: 15). Obama’s strategy was to continue to prevent the risk of terrorism via the limited use of American airpower, which was less costly in terms of both resources and casualties. Hence Obama’s risk management approach encapsulated both the continued use of force overseas to prevent risks and also the minimisation of risks to US military personnel. The heavy use of drone strikes on suspected terrorists and militants was a controversial feature of the Obama administration’s counter-terrorism and risk management efforts. It was also an early feature of Obama’s presidency—in his first week as President, Obama authorised his first strikes, and during his first year in office, authorised more strikes than Bush had during his entire presidency. Again, although Obama oversaw the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq, this did not mean that US application of lethal force within the Middle East and Afghanistan abated. Indeed, drone strikes increased markedly throughout Obama’s first term as less emphasis was placed on troops on the ground—by December 2013, Obama had authorised 322 strikes (Trenta, 2018: 85). Much of the information on Obama’s signature strikes is classified and only bits are known. What we do know has largely come from leaks of classified material, especially the release of classified National Security Agency material by Edward Snowden (Trish, 2018: 32). While estimates regarding the total number of strikes that Obama authorised vary, most put the figure in excess of 500 during his presidency. Zenko (2017), for example, estimates that Obama

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authorised 542 strikes during his eight years as President, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 3707 people, including 342 civilians. Crucial to the justification for the strikes was the concept of imminence. In short, what we saw with the Obama administration was a loosening of the concept of imminence. Eric Holder, Obama’s first Attorney General, stated in 2012 that the concept of ‘an individual present[ing] an “imminent threat” incorporates considerations of the relevant window of opportunity to act, the possible harm that missing the window would cause to civilians, and the likelihood of heading off future disastrous attacks against the US’ (Holder, 2012). This is a rather loose definition of ‘imminence’, given that it includes not only that which is obviously and clearly about to happen, but also potential and uncertain future attacks against the US as well. In other words, Holder here outlines a preventive doctrine, one that justifies the use of force against suspected terrorists based on possible risks, rather than clear evidence of an imminent threat. Again, this demonstrates the ways in which a security logic of risk continued across the Bush and Obama administrations regarding their respective strategic outlooks and security policies. The definition offered by Holder reflected the desire to understand imminence in more flexible and broader terms, as argued for by John Brennan, a one-time Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism in the Obama administration. Brennan (2011) argued for a redefinition of imminence based on the capabilities, techniques, and innovations of contemporary terrorist organisations. Holder’s definition also contained the core criteria that would form the basis of the Obama administration’s approach to drone strikes: window of opportunity, minimising collateral damage, and preventing future harm (or risk) (Trenta, 2018: 87). The bottom line here is that the broader or looser definition of imminence enabled the Obama administration to argue that the absence of specific evidence of an anticipated attack did not preclude the United States from initiating a drone strike (Jammer 2016: 276). This was necessary in the face of ‘adversarial non-state actors’ with the capability and intent to inflict significant harm on the US and its interests. In short, the risk of terrorism justified and necessitated a relaxation of the temporal parameters traditionally associated with imminence (Erakat, 2014: 195). This relaxation of the temporal parameters of imminence was also reflected in the spatial parameters within which the US can legally employ force. As noted above, a key feature of Obama’s use of drone strikes was

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the expansion of the geographical areas within which strikes could legally be conducted. The Obama administration defined its operations against al Qaeda as a ‘non-international armed conflict’ and suggested that drone strikes outside of areas of active hostilities fell within the scope of this conflict (Nylen, 2020: 638; Jaffer, 2016: 274–278). In the same speech referenced above, Holder (2012) noted: Our legal authority is not limited to the battlefields in Afghanistan. Indeed, neither Congress nor our federal courts have limited the geographic scope of our ability to use force to the current conflict in Afghanistan. We are at war with a stateless enemy, prone to shifting operations from country to country … This does not mean that we can use military force whenever or wherever we want. International legal principles, including respect for another nation’s sovereignty, constrain our ability to act unilaterally. But the use of force in foreign territory would be consistent with these international legal principles if conducted, for example, with the consent of the nation involved – or after a determination that the nation is unable or unwilling to deal effectively with a threat to the United States.

Again, this relaxation of the temporal and spatial parameters governing when and where drone strikes can occur is not surprising given the Obama administration’s perception that it was dealing with debounded risks. Nor is the US reserving for itself the right to determine whether another state is unwilling or unable to effectively deal with threats to the US. Potential catastrophe and debounded risks mean that US risk management must eschew traditional temporal and spatial boundaries and, like terrorist groups themselves, be able to strike anywhere and at any time. This has resulted in drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Libya, beyond designated conflict zones in Iraq, Afghanistan and, from 2011, Syria. Further, the areas that are subjected to drone strikes were constructed and represented by the Obama administration as ‘lawless’ and ‘dangerous’, lacking the required institutional organisation and largely beyond the formal control of the state in which they are located (Nylen, 2020: 642). Effectively, risky zones are established, whether they are part of a formal battlefield or not, within which lethal force can be employed to manage risk. In this sense, drone strikes constitute another exercise in situational risk management. Drone strikes, along with governance reforms in risky areas, would reshape these environments and mitigate the risks that they posed. Brennan (2011) stated:

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In contrast, helping such countries build a robust legal framework, coupled with effective institutions to enforce them and the transparency and fairness to sustain them, can serve as one of our most effective weapons against groups like al-Qa’ida by eliminating the very chaos that organization needs to survive.

This reflects what was said in Obama’s national security strategies regarding the need to regulate risky environments by assisting at-risk states. Drone strikes were a key part of this strategy—by striking terrorist targets, not only could suspected individual terrorists be eliminated, but safe havens could be destroyed and disrupted and risky zones could be made less risky. Strikes were a way of attempting to stabilise risky zones so that law and order and broader governance reforms could proceed as a means of preventing terrorists from using them again as safe havens or bases. This demonstrates the role of drone strikes as a form of situational risk management and the overall importance of environmental regulation to Obama’s counter-terrorism strategy. While Obama was less inclined to engage in costly, large-scale invasions in order to promote democracy, situational risk management continued in the form of drone strikes and assistance to risky states. Aside from a higher intensity and wider geographical scope, one of the other significant changes that occurred regarding drone strikes from the Bush to the Obama administration was how and who was targeted for killing. The Bush administration had focused predominantly on attacking and killing high profile, senior leaders of identified terrorist organisations (Barrinha & da Vinha, 2014: 24). The Obama administration, on the other hand, engaged in ‘signature strikes’, attacking and killing unidentified individuals based on risk profiles. These profiles are generated by analyses of behavioural patterns to identify risky behaviour associated with terrorist activities (Barrinha & da Vinha, 2014: 24). They usually rely on signal intelligence gleaned from mobile phones, email, social media, general internet usage, and the video recording and listening technologies of drones. The reliance on data and risk profiles is an unsurprising feature of Obama’s risk management activities. Faced with the debounded risk of terrorism and the difficulty of conclusively identifying terrorists and distinguishing them from civilians, the US under the Obama administration relied at on high-tech surveillance and data acquisition to build risk profiles and identify targets for strikes. These occurred even if it was not conclusively known that a target was, in fact, a terrorist.

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Chamayou (2014: 37) writes that the drone is ‘God’s eye’, all-seeing and all-knowing. As he eloquently notes, ‘[t]he eye of God, with its overhanging gaze, embraces the entire world. Its vision is more than just sight: beneath the skin of phenomena it can search hearts and minds. Nothing is opaque to it. Because it is eternity, it embraces the whole of time, the past as well as the future’ (Chamayou, 2014: 37). The surveillance capabilities of drones go beyond simply being capable of surveying wide geographical areas from the air. It extends to prediction, to anticipation of future behaviours and movements. By building archives of individual’s lives, patterns of behaviour can be discerned as a means of distinguishing normal from abnormal behaviour, and on this basis anticipating risks (Chamayou, 2014: 43). Thus, the drone sees more than simply the physical world that it surveys; it also sees (probable) intention, danger, and risk. In this sense, it is a quintessential risk management device, preventing risk though overarching, deeply invasive surveillance. Of course, these surveillance capabilities are backed up by highly lethal weapons systems, the employment of which depends on the predictive surveillance to generate kill lists from which targets can be located and eliminated. Two major issues can be raised here—one, the accuracy and efficacy of drone surveillance capabilities and the analytical and predictive capabilities of the algorithms used to analyse collected data, drone operators, and decision-makers who authorise drone strikes; and two, the repeated killing of innocent people by US drones who are regarded as ‘unfortunate collateral damage’. As Trish (2018: 33) suggests, critics have raised concerns that the targeting of individuals and generation of kill lists is predicated on the algorithmically determined likelihood of someone actually being a terrorist. In other words, people are selected or targeted based on risk. It is not what they have done or are doing that is necessarily the catalyst for decisions about whether to initiate a strike against them or not. Rather, it is the risk that they might do something in the future that justifies attempts to kill them in the present. This is morally, ethically, and legally wrong; but also, for the purposes of the discussion here, clearly an exercise in risk management. Yet it is risk management with considerable—many would argue unacceptable—risks itself: that innocent people will be killed. Signature strikes target unfamiliar people that US officials do not know and usually will not be able to identify after they have been killed in a drone strike (de Luce & McLeary, 2016). Innocents have been confirmed as being killed in drone strikes, including 12 Yemeni civilians in a strike in 2013 and one American and one

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Italian hostage in a strike on an al Qaeda compound in Pakistan in 2015 (de Luce & McLeary, 2016). Preventing future catastrophe means dealing with the unknown and uncertain—the chance that an individual could be a terrorist is enough, based on evidence drawn from surveillance data and matched against risk profiles, to justify their killing and risk innocents dying. Of course, for all the emphasis on the objective and analytical nature of the surveillance data, it still has to be interpreted. The data does not tell an analyst, for example, what constitutes risky behaviours that indicate likely terrorist activity. Humans make these decisions, subjectively and with reference to constructed, embodied understandings of terrorism, risk, and probability. Leaked information on US drone strikes published online by The Intercept supports these contentions. It notes that according to a source, the system for creating target packages depends largely on intelligence intercepts and a multi-layered system of fallible, human interpretation. ‘It isn’t a surefire method,’ he said. ‘You’re relying on the fact that you do have all these very powerful machines, capable of collecting extraordinary amounts of data and information,’ which can lead personnel involved in targeted killings to believe they have ‘godlike powers’. (Scahill, 2015)

In other words, the drone can show us what an individual is doing, but ultimately, we decide what it means. Within the groups tasked with collecting and analysing intelligence and conducting strikes, the tendency is to dehumanise the people who are targeted for killing. They become ‘selectors’ to analysts, targets without any rights or recourse (Scahill, 2015). They simply become bodies to be destroyed. This dehumanisation, however, is a product of the gendered and racialised ways in which certain bodies are understood as risky. As Wilcox (2017) argues, drone strikes are fundamentally embodied. The supposedly disembodied nature of drone strikes, conducted by machines, masks the fact that drones are only one part of an assemblage that is designed to kill, including bureaucracies, chains of command, databases, and AI (Wilcox, 2017: 15). Human agency is not removed from either the decision to carry out a strike or the programming of the algorithms, the code, which is used to analyse data, construct risk profiles, and generate kill lists. The subjective nature of risk definition, identification, and assessment is apparent in the fact that the algorithms used to analyse and process raw intelligence and surveillance data would be meaningless if not

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interpreted by humans. That is, ‘they must be considered in relation to the systems of interpretation and to the bodies that do the interpreting and reacting to the information they provide’ (Wilcox, 2017: 17). One of the problems that this presents is that visual representations and interpretations of race and gender become key to determining riskiness and therefore killability (Wilcox, 2017: 21). As Allinson (2015: 121) notes, in the context of US operations in Afghanistan, the ‘Afghan Military Aged Male’ becomes a category describing an inherently dangerous population that must be subjected to violence and destroyed to prevent risk to ‘good’ populations. Drone operators worked to represent and identify all people captured by drone surveillance as part of the risky (and therefore killable) population. As Allinson (2015: 114) argues, drones operate within an ‘algorithm of racial distinction’, the division of populations into that which is to be nurtured from that which is to be subjected to sovereign violence and destruction. Allinson (2015: 120) draws on Mbembe’s (2003: 27) concept of ‘necropolitics’ here—the drone allows drone operators to determine who matters and who does not (and is therefore disposable) according to racial distinctions that inform how and why drone operators target certain populations for destruction. Drone operators may not know who an individual is, but they know what they are, with men and adolescent boys with brown and black bodies particularly susceptible to representation as terrorists and subjected to state violence, again reflecting the gendered and racialised structures informing riskiness, danger, and targeting for attack. However, it is not only the visual register that is significant here, but the affective as well. Visual depictions of suspected terrorists are not always clear—the gender of targets, for example, is not always apparent to the drone operator. This could be because of deliberate obfuscation or disguise on the part of the suspected terrorists, or simply because, for all the advancements in drone, camera, and surveillance technologies, they are not perfect and do not always present drone operators with clear images. As Richardson (2019: 5–6) notes, even the most seasoned drone operator can have difficulty decoding the images that the drone presents to them. Nor is drone surveillance as omnipotent as it might seem—Currier and Maass (2015) note that internal Pentagon documents highlighted that drone shortages and ‘blinking’ was a problem. Because drones needed to be massed for a strike, surveillance of other targets temporarily stopped. This meant that

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continuous surveillance of other targets was not possible and therefore that there were gaps—or ‘blinks’—in intelligence data. Emotions and affect work with the visual to produce targets, attributing particular characteristics on the basis of racialisation (Wilcox, 2017: 23). Fear, anger, and hatred of certain bodies become key here to determining which are risky and therefore killable. It is the fear for soldiers on the ground, and the concomitant hatred of risky others who must be destroyed. Emotion and affect inform the construction of essentialised truths that can be applied to different bodies (Wilcox, 2017: 23). As Puar (2007: 186) notes: The fact that fear does not reside in a body but could be materialized in any body within a particular profile range, allows for the figure of the terrorist to retain its potent historical significatory ambiguity while it also enables the fear to ‘stick’ to bodies that ‘could be’ terrorists.

Emotions and affect are important not only in terms of the actual targeting and killing of suspected terrorists, but also to public opinion and support for the US’ programme of extrajudicial assassinations. Fear and anger are important here—as Fisk et al. (2019: 977) argue, when people react to the risk of terrorist attacks with anger, they are more predisposed to support drone strikes. Gender, race, and affect are all significant regarding the construction of risk. This again highlights the embodied nature of risk and its management. It is why certain populations are defined as risky and targeted for regulation and management. Approaches to risk that do not account for this overlook a core aspect of the logic of risk that has informed Western strategy and security for the last 20 years. Othering people as risky is integral to contemporary risk management in the US and other Western societies. Bodies become a ‘condition of possibility’, a potential hazard or danger that not only legitimates, but necessitates action against them, including the application of lethal force. Again, the cultural, racial, gendered, and ideological foundations of othering do not disappear under a security logic of risk, but are marshalled and employed to determine who and what to subject to risk management efforts in an attempt to prevent imagined future scenarios. In 2016, Obama issued an Executive Order that required intelligence agencies involved in drone strikes, such as the CIA, to provide annual reports of drone strikes, including an assessment of how many people

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were killed. This was in response to growing pressure on his administration from human rights groups and from Congress for greater transparency on US drone strikes and tighter controls that would minimise civilian deaths (Congress passed a bill in 2018 requiring the US military to report on civilian casualties from drone strikes in 2018). Obama recognised that indiscriminate violence and growing civilian casualties were counter-­productive and undermined US efforts to combat terrorists and insurgents. Publishing data on drone strikes and estimated casualties was a way for the administration to counter misinformation from terrorist groups and others that was designed to undermine US counter-terrorism operations. While it is beyond the scope here to examine the controversies and evolution of drone strikes under Obama in depth, the political pressure and the response of the Obama administration does point to the significance of understanding the politics of risk management and the ways in which risks and their management are contested and shift over time. A logic of risk is therefore apparent in the security policies and practices of the Obama administration. Security issues were defined and represented by the Obama administration in terms of future events, demonstrated in the administration’s loosening of the usual temporal boundaries associated with the concept of imminence. Measures and effects involved the prevention of risk via extensive drone strikes against terrorist suspects irrespective of their location and despite considerable uncertainty not only regarding whether they were in fact a terrorist, but even who they were. Uncertainty was thus a notable feature both of the risk that the Obama administration sought to manage and also the way in which they tried to do so. Measures and effects also involved providing assistance to identified at-risk states to ensure stability and order. The desired outcome was preventing terrorist attacks and future catastrophe. Obama’s emphasis on drone strikes and assisting at-risk states by promoting a specific set of legal and governance reforms as a means of preventing the risk of terrorism also shares certain continuities with the Bush administration’s approach to managing security risks. Like Bush, Obama engaged in a form of situational risk management, regulating risky environments as a means to managing risks. Risk and the specific approach of situational risk management both carried over from the Bush administration and continued during that of Obama. It would carry over again into the Trump administration, although there would be changes to how Trump would seek to manage security risks.

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‘America First’: Risk, Resilience, and the Trump Administration Trump was, of course, a radically different President to both Bush and Obama. Styling himself as a populist ‘anti-establishment’ candidate (despite being a wealthy property developer with a gold-plated office in a tower on 5th Avenue in Manhattan and extensive business and political links), Trump’s general approach as President was very different to that of his predecessors. Yet, when we consider the strategic approach of the Trump administration, we can identify elements of both continuity and change. In terms of the former, risk continued to be a preoccupation of the administration’s approach to national security. The 2017 National Security Strategy, the first and only such document produced by the Trump administration, demonstrated a similar focus on risk to that of the Bush and Obama administrations. Risk is a key theme of the Strategy, with ‘reducing risk’, ‘promoting American resilience’, and ‘improved risk management’ among the key areas and priority actions identified (White House, 2017: 14). Interestingly, the document displays very different attitudes to different kinds of risks. National security risks are bad and to be prevented; on the other hand, incentivising, encouraging and rewarding risk-taking is highlighted as an important component of economic security. Whichever attitude the Trump administration demonstrates regarding different forms of risk, risk is again something that the administration was preoccupied with. Unlike previous administrations, though, Trump was less interested in combatting security risks abroad than he was securing American territory and preventing risks by keeping risky individuals, or undesirables, out. This is consistent with Trump’s broader ‘America First’ approach. For Trump, overseas wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were ‘stupid’, costing the US dearly in terms of resources and lives lost. Trump campaigned in both 2016 and 2020 on a pledge to end American involvement in ‘endless wars’ in the Middle East. He noted at a rally during the 2020 campaign that, if re-elected, he would ‘keep America out of these endless, ridiculous, stupid, foreign wars in countries that you’ve never even heard of’ (Crowley, 2020). Despite this reluctance to engage in or continue conflicts overseas, drone strikes against suspected terrorists would continue to be a popular counter-terrorism tool during the Trump administration’s tenure. He had promised during the 2016 campaign to ‘bomb the shit’ out of ISIS, and promoted the dismantling of the terrorist organisation as one of his major

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victories (Sullivan, 2018). The number of strikes therefore continued to grow under Trump, who authorised more strikes in his first two years than Obama did during the entire eight years of his presidency. Trump authorised 2243 strikes during this period compared to the 1846 strikes authorised by Obama over his presidency (BBC, 2019). Trump also infamously relaxed the rules and procedures governing drone strikes that the Obama administration had put in place. In particular, Trump rescinded Obama’s 2016 Executive Order requiring the CIA to publish annual reports of its drone activities, include the number of fatalities. The Trump administration argued that it was a superfluous and distracting measure that did not contribute to greater transparency or oversight of US strikes. It also argued that the measure was redundant, as Congress had already mandated the military report on civilian casualties. However, both the CIA and the military conduct drone strikes, meaning that oversight of the CIA’s drone activities was lost. Trump also changed the rules and procedures that the Obama administration had developed regarding the authorisation of a strike. In short, Trump relaxed them. One of the consequences of this was that Obama’s rule that there must be a ‘near certainty’ that civilians would not be injured and killed and that the target was present within the strike area became more malleable (Shamsi, 2021). After lawsuits compelled the Biden administration to release Trump’s rules for authorising drone strikes, it was reported that the administration had discovered that Trump often made exceptions to the ‘near certainty of no civilian casualties’ rule. While the rule was upheld for women and children, it was relaxed and became ‘reasonable certainty’ for civilian adult men (Savage, 2021). Again, this demonstrates the gendering of risk, security, and violence—gender and age were key here to determining who could be subjected to what protections and what risks regarding US drone strikes. Unsurprisingly, a consequence of these rule changes was an increase in civilian injuries and deaths resulting from US strikes (Sullivan, 2018). As will be shown in subsequent chapters, Trump’s signature risk management policies would not be drone strikes which, after his changes to Obama era rules and reporting, once again became shrouded in mystery and secrecy (at least regarding strikes conducted by the CIA). While drone strikes were important to Trump’s response to the risk of terrorism, immigration and border control would be an important and controversial part of his administration’s risk management efforts. Indeed, from Trump’s initial announcement of his campaign in 2015 through to the end of his

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presidency in January 2021, immigration, risk, and the dangers of not knowing were all key themes of his national security policies and rhetoric. Again, in the only security strategy published by Trump, risk and resilience were key aspects of the overarching strategic outlook of his administration. In this, Trump followed broader trends in immigration policy and the treatment of migrants in both the US and the wider West. Racialised and gendered understandings of migrants, or the identification of foreign others as ‘risky’, were not unique to the Trump administration. We can, for example, see patterns of racialisation and gendering of migrants and asylum seekers in the US for several decades prior to the beginning of the Trump administration and in EU border control policies and practices (see Hall and Clapton 2021). Trump’s immigration practices are thus representative of broader trends regarding immigration, risk, racialisation, and gender and also showcase the erraticism and novelty of Trumpian policymaking.1 While a southern border wall is not a new idea, the way Trump pursued it is and the travel ban was widely viewed as a novel step, one inconsistent with the US constitution.

Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated that a logic of risk has informed the strategic outlook and security policies of successive US administrations. All have broadly employed a situational risk management approach to primarily manage the risk of terrorism, but also other risks such as transnational crime and irregular migration. The specific initiatives that each administration has pursued have generally focused on four key areas: intervention and democracy promotion, drone strikes, enhanced domestic surveillance, and enhanced border control. Drone strikes and enhanced domestic surveillance are the risk management mechanisms that have extended across all three administrations, although both have been subject to revision because of domestic political and legal debates in the US. Still, US strategy and security policy demonstrate an important continuity—that of a security logic of risk in governing the US’ strategic outlook and its national security practices. The next two chapters explore in more detail two of Trump’s signature national security and immigration policies: the travel ban and the wall 1

 I am grateful to the reviewer for this point.

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along the southern border of Mexico. As will be demonstrated, both are exercises in situational risk management, acting upon problematic borderlands to prevent risks. Both also provide good case studies for the riskisation framework, given the political and legal contests that have occurred among a wide range of actors, public protest, and opposition. Both initiatives presented the Trump administration with political, legal, and legislative defeats, necessitating changes to them and affecting the way in which the wall and travel ban were implemented and operationalised.

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CHAPTER 4

Trump’s Travel Ban

Abstract  This chapter examines the three iterations of Trump’s travel ban issued between January and September 2017. As President, Trump moved immediately to implement a travel ban, issuing Executive Order 13769 just one week after his inauguration. This chapter argues that the travel ban is an exercise in situational risk management. Concerned with security risks such as terrorism, the ban targets entire populations in countries identified as ‘risky’ precisely because terrorists and other security risks could come from within the populations of these countries. As a process of riskisation, the travel ban was subject to significant contestation and resistance, which affected the features and shape of the ban, its implementation, and ultimately its broader social and political effects and consequences. Keywords  Travel ban • Muslims • Resistance • Risk • Race • Gender From the moment Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States in 2020, immigration was a key theme of his campaign and subsequent presidency. More specifically, Trump consistently argued that the US had major immigration problems, namely that too many undocumented migrants were coming in from Central and South America across the US’ southern border and that not enough was being done to prevent

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 W. Clapton, Immigration, Risk, and Security Under the Trump Administration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2344-9_4

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Islamic-inspired terrorists from further abroad from accessing American territory. Both a wall along the southern border and a travel ban would become key policy proposals of Trump’s 2016 election campaign and, after his election, policies of his administration. The travel ban was first floated in response to the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attacks. Following these attacks, Trump called for a ‘complete shutdown’ of all Muslim immigration to the US until the government could ‘figure out what was going on’ (Johnson, 2015). As President, he moved immediately to implement a travel ban, issuing Executive Order 13769 just one week after his inauguration. What followed was a period of significant resistance and political and legal contestation, including protests at airports, lawsuits, and federal court rulings barring significant aspects of the Order from being enacted. This chapter examines the three iterations of Trump’s travel ban issued between January and September 2017, focusing on the period commencing with Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim entry in 2015 and ending with the Supreme Court upholding the third version of the travel ban in July 2018. The argument presented is that the travel ban is an exercise in situational risk management. Concerned with security risks such as terrorism, the ban targets entire populations in countries identified as ‘risky’ precisely because terrorists and other security risks could come from within the populations of these countries and attempt to enter the US to carry out an attack. Like the wall, imaginaries of catastrophic futures justified exceptional, precautionary, and preventive attempts at risk management. Importantly, this chapter will demonstrate that as a process of riskisation, the travel ban was subject to significant contestation and resistance, which affected the precise features and shape of the ban, its implementation, and ultimately its broader social and political effects and consequences. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, it outlines the broader discursive and normative context within which the travel ban was proposed, implemented, contested, and refined. Here, the chapter briefly explores the wider discourses on and representations of immigration and border control across Western societies. It then examines the specific forms of resistance and the political and legal battles that took place over each version of the ban, highlighting not just the key actors involved and what they said and did, but also how this affected and shaped the ban itself. Finally, the chapter considers the social and political effects of the travel ban, focusing in particular on its effects for those people who were directly subjected to the ban or significantly affected by it.

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The Risks of Immigration Immigration and border control have become increasingly prominent, and for some, problematic, within the recent security policies of several Western states. Borderlands have become important sites and areas of focus for risk management, viewed as gateways through which potential hazards and dangers might emanate and emerge (Little & Vaughan-­ Williams, 2017). A concern with possible infiltration by terrorists and other undesirables posing as migrants or exploiting weak borders and their consequences has continued to inform Western attempts to distinguish legitimate from risky travellers and migrants within border zones. The European Union, for example, has emphasised greater surveillance, control, and management of borders. The EU Security Union Strategy identifies borders as zones at which all relevant actors must be engaged to achieve and ‘make the most’ of security, which will have an impact on preventing risks such as terrorism and cross-border crime (European Commission, 2020: 23). It is investing in the research and development of AI-based automated border control and surveillance technologies to enhance the efficiency and accuracy of the management of border crossings. A recent report published by Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, outlines the range of technologies produced to control border zones, detect irregular crossings, and distinguish legitimate travellers from those that pose security risks. These technologies, which include unmanned drones that employ AI-based object recognition and tracking capabilities, surveillance towers, and automated maritime data gathering and processing, have already been deployed (Frontex Research and Innovation Unit, 2021: 22). More broadly, this example points to the increased significance of, and attention paid to, borders in the last 20  years. Vallet and David (2012: 112) argue that in an age of risk management following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, borders and walls are back in vogue. Borders have been reinforced and bolstered by techno-security apparatuses which focus on surveillance, data gathering, predictive technologies, and physical barriers, to both manage risk and assure populations that governments are ‘doing something’ (Vallet & David, 2012: 114). Likewise, Karamanidou and Kasparek (2020) argue that risk has become the frame through which migratory movements are represented and addressed in the EU. This is reflected in not only enhanced surveillance and control at the EU’s external borders, but also the legitimation of the implementation and prolongation of

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temporary internal border controls within the EU (Karamanidou & Kasparek, 2020: 2). Borders become risky zones and specific migrant populations become defined as risky, both of which need to be managed to prevent the risks that they ostensibly pose. In the US, the idea of borders and migration as risky was established well before the Trump administration’s tenure began. After 9/11, there were significant changes to US border security practices. One of the main features of this has been the increasing emphasis on high tech borders and the increase in the numbers of law enforcement and border control agents at the southern border with Mexico (Longo, 2016: 187). For Longo (2016: 192), another major trend has been the thickening and widening of the southern border through the use of ground sensors, cameras, and radar installations further inland from the actual border line. This creates a preventative zone or net within the borderland, using technologies designed to accumulate data and intelligence as a way of managing and preventing risk (Longo, 2016: 192). While Trump would continue with this theme of the risky southern border, he would be more explicit in articulating racialised and gendered understandings of migrant populations themselves as risky and undesirable. Trump’s representation of borders as dangerous, risky, and uncertain was clear from the very beginning of his campaign for President. Here, the focus will be on Trump’s representation of Muslims, who were the main group targeted by the travel ban. The following chapter will discuss Trump’s representation of Central and South Americans, and migrants attempting to cross the Mexico-US border irregularly. At the announcement of his campaign for the Republican nomination for President, Trump made several remarks that reflected his othering of Muslims, Mexicans, and other peoples of South and Central America as various categories of undesirables, the riskiness of the border, and the uncertainty and unknowing that characterised US border control efforts at that time. Trump (2015) noted: It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably – probably – from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening.

Trump’s line about ‘not knowing what is happening’ is instructive here. It is reminiscent of former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s

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(2002) infamous ‘unknown unknowns’ speech at a press conference. However, Trump’s line about not knowing is not exactly the same as Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’; it is more akin to Rumsfeld’s ‘known unknowns’—‘we know something bad is happening, just not exactly what or where’. In contrast, ‘unknown unknowns’ is a depiction of a more radical uncertainty, risks that have not yet been imagined. Still, uncertainty is a clear aspect of Trump’s construction and representation of US border control and immigration practices. Trump’s rhetoric regarding Muslim populations would become more pointed during his campaign, especially after the 2015 San Bernardino terrorist attacks in which 14 people were killed and 22 injured in a mass shooting (Botelho, 2015). On 7 December, five days after the shooting, Trump’s campaign first discussed the idea of a Muslim travel ban. Trump’s campaign stated that ‘Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on’ (Johnson, 2015). The last part of this quote is important—the notion that the US government needs to figure out ‘what is going on’ is indicative of the sort of uncertainty that one associates with risk. It also constructed Muslims as a risky population—Trump’s focus here was not on the individual perpetrators, but rather on managing the risks purportedly inherently posed by Muslim communities or populations. Trump argued that ‘[u]ntil we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life’, also stating that his proposed ban was ‘probably not politically correct, but I don’t care’ (Pilkington, 2015). In a radio interview shortly after the attack, Trump said: It turns out to be another terrorist deal. Hard to believe, right? No matter where you look, it’s the same thing. Then when I say we have to practice vigilance and we have look at people  – and whether you’re looking at mosques or not – we have to be smart. They want to be so politically correct, but here’s another case where it’s Islamic terrorism. (Campbell, 2015)

Asked by the interviewer what he meant by ‘looking at mosques’, Trump responded by saying that; ‘You have to look at them. You have to be vigilant. You have to look. I mean, there’s something wrong – something going on, alright?’ (Campbell, 2015).

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Vague claims of ‘something’ going on, the proposal of banning Muslims from entering the US, and the claim that greater surveillance of mosques was needed all underscored the risk-based logic of Trump’s articulation of the perceived dangers at hand. Trump did not speak in terms of clear, identifiable terrorists or terrorist groups or imminent attacks; instead, he spoke in terms of vague possibilities and potential future dangers. In doing so, Trump associates not just specific individuals or groups, but Islam and Muslims in general, with terrorism, violence, and risk. This a key part of the discursive construction of Muslims per se as risky and therefore in need of enhanced surveillance and other risk management measures. It also aligns with Trump’s ideological doctrine of ‘America First’, one that amplifies his grievances regarding America’s treatment by allies and opponents alike and is predicated on an image of American exceptionalism, nativism, and strength via not just military prowess, but strong and effective borders. Trump’s representation of Muslims as risky and dangerous was also gendered and racialised. As Powell (2020: 157) notes, the travel ban and Trump’s claim in 2018 that ‘criminals and unknown Middle Easterners’ were trying to infiltrate the US with a caravan of migrants that were then approaching the US, reflects the gendered and racialised profiling of Muslim men after 9/11. The travel ban reflected the racialisation of Muslims by Trump, associating people with physical characteristics deemed ‘Muslim-looking’ with not just Islam, but also terror and risk (Powell, 2020: 139). Importantly, visual cues are only one layer of a complex process of racialisation, which can also include nationality, ethnicity, and religion (Zopf, 2018: 179). It also includes gender, which as Selod (2019) argues, is critical to the racialisation of Muslims after 9/11. One example here is how religious clothing such as the burqa or hijab marks Muslim women’s bodies as oppressed, abused Selod (2019: 553). Such clothing also signifies deceit and danger—female Muslim religious attire has been banned in several European and African nations, and politicians in other Western societies such as Australia have actively campaigned for a ‘burqa ban’, arguing it is an affront to Western values and a security risk (Belot & Yaxley, 2017). For men, visual cues along with spoken language, accent, or name can result in their racialisation as risky and terrorist. It is these associations, these processes of gendered racialisation, that enable and legitimate specific (and deeply problematic) risk management practices such as intrusive surveillance and, of course, the travel ban. For some, Trump’s rhetoric regarding Muslims points to his entrenched

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Islamophobia and the ways in which he has constructed Islamophobic discourse and othered Muslim populations, both within the US and beyond (Khan et al., 2021). It is also worth noting that there is nothing inherently new regarding the role of race and gender in exclusionary and discriminatory immigration policies and praxis in Western societies. The US has a long history of exclusionary immigration policies—for example, the 1875 Page Act targeted Chinese women attempting to migrate to the US and prevented them from giving birth to children on US territory to prevent the growth of the US-Chinese community (Powell, 2020: 138). In Australia, the ‘White Australia Policy’ legally prevented immigration to the country from non-White countries for several decades after federation in 1901. Trump’s rhetoric did not go unchallenged, nor did his call for a ban on Muslims entering the US in late 2015 during his presidential campaign. The Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina Republican Party Chairpersons all condemned Trump’s call for a Muslim travel ban (Schleifer, 2015). Further criticism followed from former Vice-President Dick Cheney, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Preibus, House Speaker Paul Ryan, Republican primary rivals Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, eventual Democratic presidential candidate Hilary Clinton and White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest (McCarthy et al., 2015). Criticisms included that Trump’s proposal was contrary to conservative values, the constitutionally protected freedom of religion, and was counterproductive in that it would only aid Islamic-inspired terrorist groups in advancing the narrative that the US and the West more broadly hated Muslims. Muslim associations and groups also condemned Trump’s remarks, accusing him of violating the Constitution and engaging in fascist behaviour (McCarthy et  al., 2015). All of the above criticisms generally fed into a broader claim against the ban—that it was not consistent with ‘who we are’, ‘American values’, or what ‘America stands for’. Contesting representations of not only Muslim peoples, but also the US, was a core part of the broader context informing the travel ban and the opposition to it. Importantly, though, much of the pushback against Trump’s proposal, especially from those in the Republican Party, focused on the risk management mechanism of the travel ban, rather than Trump’s claim that Islamic terrorism was indeed a security risk. In other words, it was generally accepted that a risk existed, but that a travel ban was not the best way of addressing it. Preibus argued that ‘[w]e need to aggressively take on

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radical Islamic terrorism but not at the expense of our American values’ (Cilliza, 2015). Marco Rubio, a Senator and at the time a rival candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, noted that the risk from terrorist groups such as ISIS was real, but also that Trump’s proposal was impulsive and would not address the risk at hand. While Trump’s representational practices were contested, used by Republican Party leaders and rival candidates for the Republican presidential nomination to delegitimate his candidacy and demonstrate that Trump was unfit for office, his representation of Muslims resonated with a proportion of the US electorate. While the suggestion here is not that all of those who voted for Trump at the 2016 election necessarily agreed with a travel ban or Trump’s representations of Muslims, it is still significant that Trump won the election and immediately moved to implement a ban after assuming office. However, the controversy regarding the ban and the resistance to it meant that when the first version of the ban was announced, it was framed and represented differently than a total ban on all Muslims entering the US. As will be discussed further below, a specific, and contested, discursive and representational context informed Trump’s rhetoric, his articulation of the risks at hand, and ultimately the various versions of the travel ban itself. This was informed by a broader context and representational practices regarding immigration and Muslim peoples after 9/11, both of which have been represented as risky in most, if not all, Western societies over the last 20  years. Trump’s own representations of Muslim peoples were gendered and racialised, relying on tropes, stereotypes, and assumptions regarding the supposed riskiness of Muslims as a population. By stoking fears of undesirable, risky, Muslim others, Trump both continued with a gendered and racialised process of othering that has been underway since at least 9/11, but also advanced it by proposing a radical, new ‘solution’ to manage the terrorist risk that Trump claimed that Muslims posed. Riskisation draws attention to this representational and discursive context, the ways in which it informs risk management efforts, and the way in which it is contested.

Travel Ban 1.0 Prior to the 2016 election, Trump’s rhetoric shifted away from talk of a ‘Muslim ban’ to banning peoples from certain territories. In an interview in July 2016, Trump stated in response to a question about his then-­ proposed ban:

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So you call it territories. OK? We’re gonna do territories. We’re gonna not let people come in from Syria that nobody knows who they are … Call it whatever you want, change territories, but there are territories and terror states and terror nations that we’re not gonna allow the people to come into our country. (CBS News, 2016)

This reflected both the Trump campaign’s reaction to the extensive criticism he had received regarding his call for a ban on all Muslims entering the US, and a situational risk management approach. The not knowing is important here—the uncertainty regarding who might be a terrorist facilitated a focus on territory, on known spaces that could be acted upon. After his inauguration as President in January 2017, Trump moved immediately to deliver on his campaign promises of a travel ban focused on territory and wall along the southern border. The first iteration of the travel ban, dubbed here as ‘Travel Ban 1.0’, was outlined and implemented in Executive Order 13769—Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States (White House, 2017a). The Order was signed on 27 January and barred all nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US for a period of 90 days, suspended the US Refugee Admissions Program for 120 days, indefinitely suspended the admission of refugees from Syria, and directed the Secretary of Homeland Security to prepare a report within 30 days listing countries that do not provide adequate information for the purposes of visa adjudication (White House, 2017a). The Executive Order explicitly mandates the implementation of a programme to identify individuals ‘who are at risk of causing harm subsequent to their admission’ (White House, 2017a). It also articulates a risk profile, identifying those who do not support the Constitution, place violent ideologies over American law, and who engage in acts of bigotry and hatred as ‘risky’ individuals who should be banned from entry (White House, 2017a). The Executive Order also linked the risk of terrorists attempting to enter the US to ‘[d]eteriorating conditions in certain countries due to war, strife, disaster, and civil unrest’, reflecting the continuing concern that risky conditions in particular areas overseas could increase the risk of terrorism (White House, 2017a). A logic of risk and a consequent focus on preventive action informed the rationale for the ban. In addition to the Order itself, then-Secretary of Homeland Security, General John Kelly, provided written testimony to the House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security regarding the travel ban in February 2017. In his testimony, Kelly stated that

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DHS was created to prevent terrorist attacks against the United States. The principal means of prevention within the United States is effective border control, denying admission to aliens who seek to harm Americans or violate our laws, and countering efforts to recruit individuals to undertake terrorist acts.

Again, a logic of risk is apparent in this statement, the emphasis being on preventing risks from materialising. It is precisely because clear threats cannot be readily identified that a broad, sweeping measure such as the travel ban is required. The danger is neither clear nor present, either temporally or spatially. The legality of the Order rested upon section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which provides the President with the authority to suspend entry of certain aliens or any class of aliens into the United States.1 The selection of countries targeted by the ban—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya—was informed by section 217(a) of the INA.2 This specifies that anyone who has been in Iraq, Syria, or any other ‘country or area of concern’ as identified by either the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Homeland Security since 1 March 2011, or is a national of these countries, is ineligible for the US Visa Waiver Program. This provision of the INA was inserted after Congress passed the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act in 2015. Initially, Sudan and Iran were also included as countries of concern due to their being on the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list. Shortly after its signing into law, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson formally added Libya, Somalia, and Yemen as countries of concern. This decision was taken after consultation with the Director of National Intelligence and the Secretary of State and applied to anyone who had travelled to or was from these countries since 2011. Dual nationals of these countries, however, were still eligible for the visa waiver (Department of Homeland Security, 2015). 1  Legislation enacted by Congress and signed into law by the President is referred to both by the title of the Act and the sections contained therein, and also its codification in the US Code, which organises the general and permanent laws of the US by subject matter. To avoid confusion, I will refer to the titles of Acts and use section numbers within these Acts as passed by Congress when referring to their provisions. Their position within the US Code will be provided in footnotes. Section 212(f) of the INA appears as 8 U.S.C. 1182(f) in the US Code. 2  8 U.S.C. 1187(12)(a).

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At the time of the signing of Executive Order 13769, the seven countries above remained classified as countries of concern and were therefore excluded from the US Visa Waiver Program. Citizens or persons who had travelled to these countries were not banned from the US, but would have to obtain a visa to enter. Trump took this further by banning people from these countries from entering the US. By using section 217(a) of the INA to select which countries would be subjected to the ban, the Trump administration attempted to argue that this was not a Muslim ban, despite the fact that all of the countries subjected to the ban were Muslim-majority. It was simply a matter of security. It also stressed that it was not the Trump administration that had originally identified these countries as risky and concerning, but rather the Obama administration. Shortly after signing Executive Order 13769, Trump claimed: My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months … The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror. (Beauchamp, 2017)

Trump’s claims here were supported by senior White House officials such as then-Chief of Staff Reince Preibus, who argued: This is not a Muslim ban … All this is is identifying the seven countries – and the reason we chose those seven countries is those were the seven countries that both the Congress and the Obama administration identified as being the seven countries that were most identifiable with dangerous terrorism taking place in their country. (Schultheis, 2017)

Despite these claims, Trump’s ban went much further than Obama’s rendering nationals of these countries or people who had travelled to them after 2011 ineligible for the Visa Waiver Program. Still, the point again here was to represent the travel ban as ‘routine’ rather than exceptional, something that was simply following and building on from the immigration policies of the previous administration. Again, it was also designed to enable the Trump administration to argue that it was not a Muslim ban, but a proportionate and necessary security measure that was targeting terrorists. It just so happened that the countries in question were all Muslim-­ majority and did not include countries such as Saudi Arabia, the nationality of several of the 9/11 terrorists and where Trump has significant business interests.

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Whether one accepts the Trump administration’s representation and framing of the ban (and, as explored below, many did not), between the election and assuming office, Trump’s initial proposal for a total ban on Muslims entering the US had been tempered. The controversy generated by the proposal and the resistance to it within both government and civil society meant that it was not a palatable or viable option for managing the terrorist risk that Trump had identified. This is further underscored by Trump and senior White House officials repeatedly stating that the Order did not constitute a Muslim ban in the days and weeks after it was signed. This theme of change in the face of resistance would continue across all three versions of the travel ban, which were revised in response to legal challenges and political and popular resistance. Such resistance was apparent immediately after the ban was signed. Popular protests commenced on 28 January at JFK International Airport and spread to other airports across the US (Grinburg & McLaughlin, 2017). Marches occurred in US cities and protests were held around the world. Opposition to the ban was largely framed in terms of its discriminatory nature and its violation of American values, along with the claim that the risks that had prompted the ban were exaggerated and did not warrant such a harsh risk management measure. The early protests at US airports were compounded by confusion that took hold after the ban came into effect, with some approved refugees, students, visa holders, and green card holders from the affected countries either detained upon arrival in the US or barred from boarding flights to the US across cities in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (Walters et al., 2017). Several advocacy, human rights, and civil rights groups and associations formally condemned the ban (Tsoukas, 2020), including organisations such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Immigration Law Center, the International Refugee Assistance Project, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. There were repeated claims of the illegality and unconstitutionality of the ban. The head of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Massachusetts stated that the ban was ‘illegal, unconstitutional, and fundamentally wrong’ (ACLU, 2017), while 17 state attorneys general released a statement condemning the ban, stating: As the chief legal officers for over 130 million Americans and foreign residents of our states, we condemn President Trump’s unconstitutional, un-­ ­ American and unlawful Executive Order and will work together to ensure the federal government obeys the Constitution, respects our history

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as a nation of immigrants, and does not unlawfully target anyone because of their national origin or faith. (Hawaii Department of the Attorney General, 2017)

Several state governors also spoke out against the ban. For example, Governor Jay Inslee of Washington responded to the travel ban by stating: The state of Washington has a proud history of inclusivity, tolerance and compassion for all residents. Our diversity of people and cultures is a critical part of who we are, both as a state and as a nation. We will not let President Trump’s orders break faith with our state’s fundamental values. The president’s executive orders on immigrants signal that the better angels of our nature will not be realized. These actions, if implemented, would be mean-­ spirited, unnecessary and contrary to our values as Americans. (Inslee, 2017)

Such criticisms of the ban largely came from states with Democratic governors. Support for and opposition to the ban among state officials, particularly governors and attorneys general, broke down largely along political lines—Democratic state officials generally opposed the ban, while there was greater support for it among Republican officials. That said, some Republicans in Congress, for example, did oppose the ban. Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham opposed and criticised the ban. Others, however, supported it. Senator Steve Daines of Iowa argued: ‘We are at war with Islamic extremists and anything less than 100 percent verification of these refugees’ backgrounds puts our national security at risk’ (Blake, 2017). Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio noted: ‘I support President Trump’s temporary, three-month, precautionary action directed towards a handful of countries with a history of producing and exporting terrorists. These countries are either torn apart by violence, or under the control of hostile, jihadist governments’ (Blake, 2017). The common theme in these statements is one of amorphous risks and the consequent need for preventive and precautionary action. Rather than pointing to specific dangers, hazards, or enemies, the issue, as expected with a security logic of risk, is couched in broad terms of possible refugees, the dangers of not knowing, and the subsequent desire for greater certainty through the collection of data and information. Several different groups of actors, including government officials, NGOs, and individual citizens, therefore resisted and protested Travel Ban 1.0. Protests and statements in opposition to the ban were supported by

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legal action, which began only hours after Trump issued the Executive Order. Among the first action taken against the ban were writs of habeas corpus filed by the ACLU seeking the release of two Iraqi nationals who had been detained at JFK Airport despite having the necessary documentation to legally enter the US (ACLU, 2017). A flurry of lawsuits ensued in the days following the issuing of the Order. One, The States of Washington and Minnesota vs Trump, resulted in the US District Court for the Western District of Washington issuing a temporary injunction against key aspects of the ban (Family, 2019: 612). Washington’s attorney general stated that the ban was ‘unlawful and unconstitutional’ and that it needed to be abolished (Burns, 2017a). The Ninth Circuit then declined to stay the injunction after an appeal from the Trump administration, effectively halting the travel ban until Trump issued a new Executive Order in March which outlined Travel Ban 2.0 (Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse, n.d.). Travel Ban 1.0 was therefore a short-lived attempt at a form of situational risk management. It was an attempt at risk management based on the identification of risky environments within which risky individuals could reside who might try to enter the US to carry out a terrorist attack. Importantly, however, Travel Ban 1.0 is only one part of the story here regarding Trump’s efforts to block certain populations from entering the US as a national security measure. It is not just the logic of risk informing the ban or Trump’s representations of Muslims and risk that are significant, but also the political and legal contests that shaped the ban and informed its evolution into Travel Bans 2.0, 3.0, and finally 4.0. Popular protest and the clear initial victories won by plaintiffs in the legal challenges to the ban that were upheld point to a broader process of riskisation, one in which resistance and a wider group of actors than just Trump and his officials played notable roles. From individual protestors to civil society organisations to governors, attorneys general, and other state officials who were opposed to the ban, there were a variety of different actors whose agency exercised considerable influence over the travel ban’s evolution. The Trump administration was not simply able to get its own way, but had to fight to maintain some version of its ban.

Travel Ban 2.0 Trump was reportedly furious after his administration’s legal defeat in both the District Court and the Ninth Circuit in early February. He commented on Twitter (in all caps) that he would see ‘you’ in court and that

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the security of the nation was at stake (de Vogue & Jarrett, 2017). Trump later commented that ‘It’s a political decision, we’re going to see them in court, and I look forward to doing that. It’s a decision that we’ll win, in my opinion, very easily’ (de Vogue & Jarrett, 2017). As a result of the courts ‘banning the ban’, Trump issued Executive Order 13790 on 6 March 2017. This Order revoked Order 13769, removed Iraq from the list of banned countries, and clarified that those already in possession of an approved visa from the affected countries, who held a green card, or who were lawful permanent residents, could still enter the US (White House, 2017b; Lee, 2017). In this sense, Travel Ban 2.0 was narrower than Travel Ban 1.0 in its scope and reach (Family, 2019: 626). Nevertheless, it was also immediately challenged in court. Before exploring these challenges, it is worth quoting from Executive Order 13780 at length, as it clearly articulated a perception of risk produced by risky environmental conditions in specific countries and a desire to prevent these risks by banning the populations of these countries from entering the US: Nationals from the countries previously identified under section 217(a)(12) of the INA warrant additional scrutiny in connection with our immigration policies because the conditions in these countries present heightened threats. Each of these countries is a state sponsor of terrorism, has been significantly compromised by terrorist organizations, or contains active conflict zones. Any of these circumstances diminishes the foreign government’s willingness or ability to share or validate important information about individuals seeking to travel to the United States. Moreover, the significant presence in each of these countries of terrorist organizations, their members, and others exposed to those organizations increases the chance that conditions will be exploited to enable terrorist operatives or sympathizers to travel to the United States. Finally, once foreign nationals from these countries are admitted to the United States, it is often difficult to remove them, because many of these countries typically delay issuing, or refuse to issue, travel documents. (White House, 2017b)

Here, the Trump administration outlines its argument for the travel ban—risky conditions in the targeted countries increase the chance that something might happen, that is, that these conditions could be exploited by terrorists to travel to the US. Following this, the Order describes the risky conditions exhibited by six of the seven states subject to Travel Ban 1.0, relying on the State

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Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2015. This was a change to Travel Ban 1.0, which did not include such information. It does so to ‘demonstrate why their nationals continue to present heightened risks to the security of the United States’ (White House, 2017b). Here, classic risky conditions such as state sponsorship of terrorism, porous borders, inability to prevent or willingness to allow terrorist groups to establish safe havens or bases within their territory, and active conflict zones are highlighted as giving rise to risky populations who require management. Until the US has completed an assessment of the screening and vetting procedures in each country that are outlined in section 2 of the Order, ‘the risk of erroneously permitting entry of a national of one of these countries who intends to commit terrorist acts or otherwise harm the national security of the United States is unacceptably high’ (White House, 2017b). Accordingly, like Travel Ban 1.0, version 2.0 imposes the same 90-day ban on nationals from these countries travelling to the US. This is reflective of a situational risk management approach—identification of risky environmental conditions and measures (in other words, the travel ban) designed to prevent the risks that these conditions might pose. Iraq was removed from the list of banned countries due to having a democratically elected government that cooperated with the US, the presence of US forces in the country, Iraq’s commitment to fighting ISIS and other terrorist groups, and improvements that it made since Travel Ban 1.0 to travel documentation, information sharing, and the return of citizens removed from the US (White House, 2017b). New provisions were also included that stated that lawful permanent residents and dual nationals travelling on a non-banned country’s passport were exempt from the ban. This was intended to address the confusion that reigned after the implementation of Travel Ban 1.0 (Family, 2019: 617). Another significant change between Travel Ban 1.0 and 2.0 was the addition of a statement explicitly claiming that Executive Order 13769 did not provide any basis for religious discrimination. As a counter to continuing claims that Travel Ban 1.0 was discriminatory against Muslims and therefore violated the Constitution, Executive Order 13780 argued that Travel Ban 1.0 was not animated by animus towards any particular religion. As will be seen below, this was not an argument accepted by lower courts that heard cases brought against Travel Ban 2.0. Another feature of both Executive Orders is the absence of any clear evidence that supports the Trump administration’s identification of the terrorist risk that it claims the US faces. This was a point made in the

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ruling of the Ninth Circuit on the appeal against the injunction granted against Travel Ban 1.0. It its ruling, it noted that the ‘[g]overnment has pointed to no evidence that any alien from any of the countries named in the Order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States’ (Chemerinsky, 2017). That both Travel Bans 1.0 and 2.0 are light on evidence of terrorists from the affected countries trying to infiltrate the US is, again, not surprising. Both are predicated on a logic of risk, on potential and possibility rather than what is. This is reflected in Trump’s insistence that immigration from risky countries was a dire security risk that needed to be addressed. Trump made it clear that he was not happy with Travel Ban 2.0, stating in June 2017 that 2.0 was a ‘watered down, politically correct version’ and that the Justice Department should have stuck with Travel Ban 1.0 and submitted this to the Supreme Court for review (and not Travel Ban 2.0 which, as discussed below, was reviewed by the Supreme Court) (Nelson, 2017). This reflected Trump’s insistence that immigration from risky countries posed an unacceptable security risk to the US and needed to be dealt with in the strongest possible terms. Again, though, the Trump administration’s identification and representation of the risks in Travel Ban 2.0 were challenged, as was the ban itself, which was again the subject of several lawsuits. One of the first cases against Travel Ban 2.0 was brought by the state of Hawaii, which claimed in its suit that the ban negatively affected its education and tourism sectors, and discriminated against families (Burns, 2017b). It was argued that the ban violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, the Substantive Due Process, Procedural Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fifth Amendment, and section 202(a)(1)(A) of the INA, which states that ‘no person shall receive any preference or priority to be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person’s race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence’.3 Another important case against the travel ban was brought by a coalition of organisations, including the ACLU, the International Refugee Assistance Project, and National Immigration Law Center. Their case, International Refugee Assistance Project vs Trump had been filed on 7 February in relation to Travel Ban 1.0; after Trump signed Executive Order 13780, they filed an amended complaint that argued that Travel Ban 2.0 was based on the same anti-Muslim animus as that which underpinned Travel Ban 1.0. 3

 8 U.S.C. 1152 (a)(1)(A).

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These bans resulted in both the District Court for the District of Maryland and the District Court for the District of Hawaii issuing nationwide temporary restraining orders against provisions of Executive Order 13780. Again, this effectively prevented the Order from being implemented and, again, the Trump administration appealed the decisions handed down, this time to the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth and Ninth Circuits. Again, both the Fourth and Ninth Circuit declined to stay the restraining orders. The Fourth Circuit’s ruling was clear in rejecting the representation of the risks that the Trump administration had used to justify the ban. The Fourth Circuit found that while national security had been advanced as the justification for the travel ban, there was evidence that it was instead motivated by religious discrimination (Family, 2019: 619). Here, the Fourth Circuit relied on Trump’s own statements regarding his desire to ban Muslims from entering the US to find that Executive Order 13780 was motivated by animus and discriminatory attitudes. The Ninth Circuit similarly found that there was both a lack of evidence to substantiate the administration’s claim that admitting nationals from the banned countries would be detrimental to the security of the US and that there was evidence of a discriminatory motive (Family, 2019: 620). This speaks to the mixed messaging and different representations regarding Travel Ban 2.0 that were advanced by the administration. While Executive Order 13780 itself clearly stated that it was not motivated by animus to any religion and administration officials claimed that they were simply trying to manage security risks, this was undercut by Trump’s own statements and rhetoric. Again, Trump railed against Travel Ban 2.0, arguing that it was watered down and that he would have much rather stuck with Travel Ban 1.0. This, along with other comments made by Trump as both presidential candidate and President, was used by the Fourth Circuit in finding that Trump’s ban was motivated by religion. The majority ruling on an appeal brought by the government against the US District Court for the District of Maryland’s granting of a preliminary injunction against Executive Order 13780 stated: These statements, taken together, provide direct, specific evidence of what motivated both EO-1 and EO-2 [Executive Orders 13769 and 13780]: President Trump’s desire to exclude Muslims from the United States … We need not probe anyone’s heart of hearts to discover the purpose of EO-2, for President Trump and his aides have explained it on numerous occasions

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and in no uncertain terms … The reasonable observer could easily connect these statements to EO-2 and understand that its primary purpose appears to be religious, rather than secular. (International Refugee Assistance Project vs Trump 2017)

Opponents of the ban were clear in their messaging and representation of the ban. Doug Chin, then-Attorney General of Hawaii, was consistent throughout 2017 in framing his opposition to the travel ban in terms of American values, especially those enshrined in the Constitution. As he stated in response to the conversion of the temporary restraining order issued on 15 March to a preliminary injunction on 29 March by the US District Court for the District of Hawaii, ‘This is an important affirmation of the values of religious freedom enshrined in our Constitution’s First Amendment’ (Chin, 2017). This was an important part of the discourse and representational practices of those opposing the ban, namely, to represent it as not just discriminatory, but un-American. Two images of American exceptionalism clashed in the political and legal contests over the travel ban. The first was Trump’s ‘America First’ brand of exceptionalism, which established an image of an exceptional yet besieged America that was justified in doing what it needed to make itself ‘great again’. The second was the more classic brand of American exceptionalism that represents America as a shining beacon, a country defined by its liberal and democratic values, its openness, and its celebration of its diversity. In distinction to the Bush administration, whose risk management efforts were ostensibly underpinned by the celebration and (forcible) spread of American liberal democratic values overseas, Trump’s risk management efforts were decried by opponents as the opposite—dangerously un-­ American initiatives that violated core American values and aspects of America’s identity. Contests over the ban were therefore more than about risk; they were contests over the character of the US as a state and society and what it represents. They were contests over identity, over norms and values, contests in which discourse and representation were key. Processes of meaning-­ making extended beyond the question of whether the risk was ‘real’ or severe enough to warrant the sort of action that Trump was attempting to take to questions of American values and identity. Opponents repeatedly contested Travel Bans 1.0 and 2.0 on these grounds, while the Trump administration’s defence of the ban relied on articulations of risk, severe

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national security concerns, and claims that the ban was in no way targeted at Muslims. Again, this was belied by Trump’s own statements and rhetoric, both in person and via Twitter. This broad discursive context would continue to inform the debates over Travel Ban 3.0.

Travel Bans 3.0 and 4.0 After losing appeals at both the Fourth and Ninth Circuits, the Trump administration sought a review from the Supreme Court regarding the legality and constitutionality of Travel Ban 2.0. On 1 June 2017, the government applied to the Supreme Court for a review of the preliminary injunctions issued by lower courts that were preventing the ban from being implemented. The government also sought an expedited briefing so that the case could be argued in October. The Supreme Court agreed to take up the case and grant an expedited briefing on 26 June 2017. It also stayed significant aspects of the lower court injunctions against the ban, allowing the 90-day travel ban provided for in Executive Order 13780 to come into effect for those who lacked a ‘bona fide’ relationship with the US (the question of what constitutes a bona fide relationship was itself subjected to litigation and debate) (Laughland, 2017). Five months after signing Executive Order 13769, Trump finally had a travel ban in place. At the expiration of the 90-day period in September, Trump issued Presidential Proclamation 9645, which outlined Travel Ban 3.0. The Proclamation begins by noting that the Secretary of Homeland Security had produced a set of criteria regarding information sharing and the policies and capabilities of foreign governments to determine which countries could provide the US with the information it sought, and therefore were not risky, and those that could not, and therefore were (White House, 2017c). More specifically, the Proclamation outlines three key categories for assessing the riskiness of a given country: identity management information, national security and public safety information, and national security and public safety risk assessment (White House, 2017c). Under ‘National Security and Public Safety Information’, the Proclamation states that ‘[t]he United States expects foreign governments to provide information about whether persons who seek entry to this country pose national security or public-safety risks’ (White House, 2017c). The ‘National Security and Public Safety Risk Assessment’ outlines a set of risk indicators, including whether a country is a terrorist haven, meets its obligations as a participant of the US Visa Waiver Program, and regularly fails to

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receive nationals deported from the US (White House, 2017c). This emphasis on information sharing, risk indicators, and prevention is again commensurate with a logic of risk. As the Proclamation notes, The restrictions and limitations imposed by this proclamation are, in my judgment, necessary to prevent the entry of those foreign nationals about whom the United States Government lacks sufficient information to assess the risks they pose to the United States. (White House, 2017c)

In contrast to the previous Executive Orders, which exclusively banned nationals of Muslim-majority countries, the Proclamation imposes entry restrictions on nationals from Chad (eventually removed from the list), Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Libya. Iraqi nationals were also targeted for ‘enhanced vetting’ (White House, 2017c). Travel Ban 3.0 was more tailored than previous bans, however, with different countries subjected to different treatment. Nationals of Syria and North Korea were banned from entry into the US as either immigrants or non-immigrants. For Chad, Libya, and Yemen, all immigrants were banned along with non-immigrants attempting to enter the US on business or tourist visas. Iranian nationals were banned from entering as immigrants, with non-immigrants banned except for those holding valid student or exchange visitor visas, who were subjected to enhanced vetting. In the case of Venezuela, only government officials involved in screening and vetting procedures and their immediate families were banned from entering the US as non-immigrants on business and tourist visas. Finally, despite not being named as a country subject to the ban in section 1(h)(ii) of the Proclamation, Somalia was listed in section 2(h) and its nationals banned from entering the US as immigrants. Non-immigrant entry was still open to Somalians, subject to enhanced vetting (White House, 2017c). Travel Ban 3.0 was limited to nationals of the affected countries who could not establish a bona fide relationship with the US from 24 September, but section 7(b) set a desired date of 18 October 2017 for the application of the ban for all affected nationals, even those who could demonstrate a bona fide relationship (White House, 2017c). The same pattern played out regarding resistance to Travel Ban 3.0 as had occurred with the previous bans. Several lawsuits were immediately brought against the ban, district courts enjoined parts of it that prevented its implementation and enforcement, and courts of appeal upheld the rulings of the district courts (Family, 2019: 623). This time, however, the

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administration applied to the Supreme Court for a ruling that would allow Travel Ban 3.0 to be enforced while the appeals against lower court rulings were heard. This was granted on 4 December, and Travel Ban 3.0 remained in effect (Family, 2019: 623). Eventually, the Supreme Court issued a 5–4 ruling on the case of Trump vs Hawaii on 26 June 2018 that upheld the travel ban, finding that it did not violate the US Constitution or the non-discrimination provisions of the INA (de Vogue & Stracqualursi, 2018). The ruling signalled that the President has broad powers and discretion under the INA to protect national security and determine which aliens can and cannot be admitted into the country, and also that statements made by a President during an election campaign or their term in office may not be legally determinative of their intent (de Vogue & Stracqualursi, 2018). This was a critical point, as the legal team for Hawaii had used Trump’s statements regarding Muslims and the ban to argue that the ban was motivated by religious discrimination and animus, rather than genuine concerns about national security. The Supreme Court’s ruling did not end debates regarding Travel Ban 3.0. Indeed, significant differences between the justices were clearly highlighted in the dissenting opinions. Justice Sotomayor wrote in her opinion: The majority here completely sets aside the President’s charged statements about Muslims as irrelevant … That holding erodes the foundational principles of religious tolerance that the court elsewhere has so emphatically protected, and it tells members of minority religions in our country that they are outsiders, not full members of the political community. (de Vogue & Stracqualursi, 2018)

In the aftermath of the ruling, opponents of the travel ban continued to frame and represent it as unconstitutional, un-American, and ineffective as a national security and risk management initiative. Neal Katyal, counsel for Hawaii, issued a statement after the ruling, noting: While we continue to believe that this third version fails that test, there is no question that by striking down the first two travel bans, the judiciary forced a recalcitrant administration to at least give its order the veil of constitutionality. We continue to believe, as do four dissenting justices, that the travel ban is unconstitutional, unprecedented, unnecessary and un-American. We decided long ago that America doesn’t exclude people based on nationality or religion alone … The travel ban is atrocious policy, and makes us less safe and undermines our American ideals. (Katyal, 2018)

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Katyal’s statement also points to the way in which litigation and judicial action forced the Trump administration to revise the travel ban to ensure its consistency with the Constitution. Again, this shows how contests over risk and its management can influence the evolution of risk management initiatives that are pursued. Of course, the ruling was celebrated by President Trump: ‘This ruling is also a moment of profound vindication following months of hysterical commentary from the media and Democratic politicians who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border and our country’ (Reuters, 2018). Trump’s representation here is interesting—he frames Democrats and the media (a favourite punching bag during his presidency) as ‘hysterical’ in their articulations of the problems associated with the travel ban and their opposition to it while simultaneously reinforcing that the risks he has identified are real and that a strong and secure border, one produced in part by enforcement of the travel ban, is needed. The irony of this representation is that opponents of the travel ban, for all their supposed ‘hysteria’, could at least point to something tangible in making their claims against the ban—the ban itself. Trump and other supporters of the ban, in contrast, were relying entirely on an imagined, constructed articulation of risk and its representation as ‘real’ and ‘urgent’. Other supporters of the travel ban, such as then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions commented that the ruling recognised the President’s authority to protect the American people, while Senator Lindsey Graham stated that the US was ‘at war with radical Islam’ and needed to act accordingly to protect itself (Brueninger, 2018). Sessions’ and Graham’s comments reinforced the representation of an America in danger, at risk from unknown terrorists who could and probably would enter the US to carry out attacks if they were not prevented from doing so. The travel ban is defined here as a necessary tool, needed to manage risk and provide protection. The idea that America is ‘at war with radical Islam’ invokes the spectre of global danger and hazard. Islam is not a place, a defined territory. Radical Islamists can be anywhere, strike at any time. This reflects the debounded nature of the risks at hand and the consequent need for crude, broad measures such as the travel ban. Innocent people were, of course, affected by the ban, as discussed below, but this was deemed necessary to manage risk. Trump, Sessions, Graham, nor any other proponent of the ban could provide concrete evidence that such attacks were imminent and would occur without it. The implication here is clear—immigrants and immigration are risky and need to be

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carefully managed. Immigrants become undesirables, needing to be surveyed and kept out. Unknowing becomes risky, hence the emphasis in all versions of the ban on information sharing and data and intelligence collection. Travel Ban 3.0 remained in force for the remainder of Trump’s presidency. In January 2020, what some called Travel 4.0 was announced via Presidential Proclamation 9983. Trump added several countries to the list of those subject to travel restrictions. These included Nigeria, Kyrgyzstan, Eritrea, Myanmar, Sudan, and Tanzania. Again, the Proclamation provided a rationale for the application of a travel ban to each country, one which articulated their riskiness. For all of the above countries, the Proclamation noted either that their border control and information vulnerabilities presented an unacceptable risk that they could be exploited by terrorists, criminals, and fraudulent entrants, or that they posed an elevated or high risk of terrorist travel to the US, relative to other countries (White House, 2020). The ban did not apply to non-immigrant travellers, but only to immigrants due to the difficulty with removing approved immigrants once they are in the US (White House, 2020). Nationals of Eritrea, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan, and Nigeria were banned from entering the US as immigrants, and nationals of Sudan and Tanzania were banned from entering the US as Diversity Immigrants (White House, 2020).4 Once again, resistance to the revised list of banned countries was immediately evident. The ACLU released a statement which said: The ban should be ended, not expanded. President Trump is doubling down on his signature anti-Muslim policy – and using the ban as a way to put even more of his prejudices into practice by excluding more communities of color. Families, universities, and businesses in the United States are paying an ever-higher price for President Trump’s ignorance and racism. (ACLU, 2020)

Once again, the ban was framed as anti-Muslim and Trump himself delegitimated as ‘ignorant’, ‘racist’, and ‘prejudiced’. Rather than protecting Americans, the ban was represented as actively harming people and businesses in the US. The Brennan Center for Justice released a statement condemning the expanded ban, highlighting what it argued was Trump’s 4  The Diversity Immigration program, also known as the ‘green card lottery’, provides approximately 50,000 visas each year for nationals of countries which have low rates of immigration to the US (US Citizenship and Immigration Services 2018).

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‘hatred of Muslims’ (Panduranga, 2020). The statement also noted Trump’s disdain for what he infamously referred to as ‘shithole countries’ and the concerns of senior Trump advisor Stephen Miller, according to a leaked email, that demographic shifts in the US caused by immigration were ‘an attack upon America’ (Panduranga, 2020). These claims again represented the travel ban as engaged in a process of othering based not upon security risks, or a genuine concern for them, but white supremacist attitudes, racism, and discrimination. Through a process of litigation, popular resistance, and political debate, the ban evolved from the initial proposal of then-candidate Trump to ‘ban all Muslims’, to successively more limited versions of a travel ban as the Trump administration ran into entrenched resistance. While this resistance did not stop a ban from eventually being implemented, it did delay it and force the administration to revise its policy so that it would survive legal challenge. This instance of riskisation therefore demonstrates that the analysis of risk management needs to consider more than just the actors that articulate representations of risk or the specific risk management mechanisms pursued. It must also consider the broader discursive and representational context within which risks are identified and risk management attempted, along with resistance to processes of riskisation and the agency of a larger array of actors than simply risk advocates. Not doing so, as is clear in this case, would be to miss a large part of the story of the travel ban and its evolution.

The Consequences and Effects of Trump’s Travel Ban It is difficult, if not impossible, to answer the question of whether the travel ban successfully prevented the risk of a terrorist attack in the US. Proponents can point to the lack of an attack in the US by foreign, Islamic-inspired terrorists and argue that, on this basis, the ban was an effective preventive tool (although Islamic-inspired attacks were perpetrated by US residents and citizens during the period of the ban). However, as the old saying goes, correlation does not equate to causation. It is impossible to make a positive case for the ban as an effective risk management mechanism because the measure of success is not what did happen, but what did not. There are myriad reasons that might explain why a terrorist attack perpetrated by a foreign individual did not occur in the US

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during Trump’s tenure as President. Perhaps the risk was overstated and there never were credible plans or operations underway for an attack that were disrupted by the ban. Perhaps factors entirely unrelated to the ban disrupted planned attacks. We cannot know, because we are assessing imaginations of future events that did not come to pass. This of course is not to say that terrorism, violence, and crime did not occur at all during Trump’s tenure—for all the focus on potential terrorists waiting overseas to enter the US, there were real risks to American safety and security at home. In addition to Islamic State-inspired attacks, the continued occurrence and frequency of mass shootings and attacks by white supremacists and far-right extremists are but two examples. This is not to say that the ban did not have consequences. Much of the literature on risk and security has overlooked what particular risk management approaches, initiatives, and mechanisms mean for—and what they do to—the peoples affected. Most of the analyses offered focus on the state or policy level, with relatively few considering the impacts at the local, everyday level. The lived experiences of Muslims in the US and abroad were overtly affected by the ban, by Trump’s articulation of the risks that Muslims supposedly pose, and by their demonisation and othering as a result. Further, white supremacists and far-right extremists were not mentioned randomly above—not only are they examples of risks that are in no way prevented or affected by a travel ban, but they have been emboldened and rendered more severe because of Trump’s rhetoric and his demonisation of Muslims and people from Central and South America as risky and undesirable. Testimony and submissions to a Congressional hearing on ‘Oversight of the Trump Administration’s Muslim Ban’, jointly convened by sub-­ committees of the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs Committees on 24 September 2019, highlighted several adverse impacts of the ban. These include violation of religious liberty, the separation of families, and discrimination and various forms of harm suffered by Muslims. One witness described the ban as a ‘sad story of separation and heartbreak’, arguing that people had been treated like criminals for no reason other than where they were born or what religion they practised. Witnesses described the distress and devastation at being separated from spouses, partners, and other family, at the toll taken by the uncertainty that the ban had imposed on them and their loved ones. The ACLU’s submission to the oversight hearing outlined several impacts. These included the separation of families and the fear of students and others in the US on temporary visas that if

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they returned home to a banned country, they would not be able to re-­ enter the US (ACLU, 2019). The submission outlined cases of people who missed weddings, funerals, and those who were so desperate to see loved ones in the US that they travelled to Canada and met them at the border (ACLU, 2019). The subsequent COVID-19 pandemic has exposed many of us to the difficulties and the pain that separation from loved ones caused by closed borders can bring. It is a significant impact of the travel ban that millions of Muslims and other peoples endured for years prior to the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020. The ACLU submission also highlights the broader discursive and normative consequences of the travel ban. While the focus above was on how the prevailing normative and discursive context affected the travel ban, this works both ways. The ban, and Trump’s representation of Muslims as ‘risky’ and ‘dangerous’ has resulted in the reproduction of such representations and attitudes within US society. The ACLU claims that this, in turn, has led to an increase in cases of bigotry, harassment, and hate crimes perpetrated in the US against ethnic, racial, and religious minorities, especially those perceived as Muslim (ACLU, 2019). Again, neither Trump nor the travel ban represented the beginning of anti-Muslim discrimination—this has been ongoing in the US and elsewhere since at least 9/11 and was exacerbated by a series of Islamic State-inspired terrorist attacks in the Middle East, Europe, North America, and elsewhere from 2013 onwards. However, the ban and Trump’s representation of Muslims only reinforced negative attitudes towards Muslims. For some, it is directly responsible for increased incidents of harassment, the vandalism of mosques, and other overt expressions of hatred. What Trump and the ban did was to normalise this sort of behaviour, with serious consequences for Muslim peoples in the US and beyond (Chen, 2018). The Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion and or belief provided a report to the UN Human Rights Council in early 2021 highlighting the trend of increasing Islamophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment around the world. In this report, the Special Rapporteur noted that, after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, hate crimes against people perceived as Muslim tripled and that the peak of anti-Muslim incidents in the US had been attributed to Trump’s Muslim ban (Shaheed, 2021: 15). This again shows how the ban and the rhetoric of those supporting it contributed to a discursive and representational context that was harmful to Muslim peoples, or those perceived to be Muslim. Again, the racialisation

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and gendering of Muslim identity means that people with particular characteristics are sometimes mistaken for Muslims. Another consequence of the travel ban was its impact on the US’ international image and reputation. Much like the Bush administration’s risk management efforts in Iraq, the travel ban was deeply unpopular across much of the rest of the world. The Pew Research Center found in 2017 that Trump’s travel ban, proposal for a wall, and other policy initiatives were very unpopular, as was the President himself (Wike et  al., 2017). Confidence in the US had dropped significantly due to Trump assuming office and the policies he pursued. This is not entirely due to the travel ban, but certainly the ban did contribute to the erosion of confidence in the US and its declining international reputation. Not all world leaders and officials condemned the ban though. Scott Morrison, the current Prime Minister of Australia and then-Treasurer, pointedly declined to criticise the ban, saying only that how the US handles border protection is up to them and that the rest of the world was catching up to Australia’s own infamously restrictive policies regarding asylum seekers and border control (Murphy, 2017). For all the reported loss of US prestige, however, the ban itself did not appear to seriously undermine the US’ major bilateral and multilateral relationships, although arguments continued until the end of Trump’s presidency regarding its efficacy as a national security measure and its contribution to broader US foreign policy goals. Finally, if we consider the question of whether a process of riskisation was successful as part of the broader focus on its impacts, we might first consider what ‘success’ means. The securitisation literature, for example, has generally held that a process of securitisation is successful to the extent that securitising actors convince audiences of their securitising moves (Buzan et al., 1997: 18). This, however, is rather abstract, and leaves out some key questions—first, how much of an audience or how many people need to be convinced of a securitising move to render it successful? What does acceptance mean, and where does implementation fit in this picture? What about unpopular policies that a government nevertheless pursues and implements? It is not the intention here to consider these questions in detail, but rather to point out that the ‘success’ of a securitisation or riskisation process might look very different in varying contexts, depending on how success is defined, and will likely come with caveats. For example, if we simply say that the Travel Ban 3.0 was a successful example of riskisation because it was implemented and enforced by the Trump administration, we would miss the political and legal contests that

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produced this version of the travel ban and shaped the evolution of the ban across its multiple iterations. We would also miss the continued opposition and resistance to the travel ban among a significant proportion of the American people. Understanding the travel ban as a ‘successful’ process of riskisation must capture, at a minimum, that there were unsuccessful versions of the travel ban that were not implemented, that it was an incredibly divisive attempt at risk management, and that it was eventually implemented in a highly polarised, divided, and febrile political environment in the US.

Conclusion The travel ban demonstrates several of the claims made in previous chapters regarding the nature of risk and the process of riskisation. It has demonstrated the gendered and racialised representations of Muslims as risky that Trump advanced as candidate and later President, the ways in which risks are discursively constructed, the emphasis within contemporary security policy in the US on a logic of risk and the need for preventive action, and the ways in which a variety of state and private actors contest, shape, and influence representations of risk and risk management initiatives. In other words, it has shown that a logic of risk remains a significant aspect of US foreign and security policy, that risks are discursive constructions of future possibilities, and that discursive and normative context, agency, and consequences and effects are important components of a process of riskisation that need to be considered. Riskisation provides a fuller, deeper picture of how and why risks are identified and managed in specific ways than what has been offered in much of the literature on risk and security. These themes will be revisited in the next chapter on Trump’s wall along the southern border with Mexico. This was a proposal floated by Trump at the very beginning of his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President, and again demonstrates the racialised and gendered ways in which he defined and represented the risks posed by irregular immigration from South and Central America into the US. Once again, the evolution and ultimate fate of the wall was shaped not only by Trump and his administration, but by political opponents in Congress, wider civil society, and everyday people. Both the wall itself and wrangling over funding for it would also have consequences for the US government and people.

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CHAPTER 5

A Big, Beautiful Wall

Abstract  One of the most controversial aspects of Trump’s presidential campaign announcement in June 2015 was his declaration that he would build a wall along the US-Mexico border. This was touted as a way of imposing a measure of order and control on the problematic and risky southern borderlands. The wall has been mired in controversy and subject to political and legal challenge since its inception. It triggered the longest US government shutdown in history after Congress declined to authorise Trump’s desired levels of wall funding in late 2018. It is argued that the wall is another attempt at situational risk management, designed to prevent a set of perceived security risks associated with the porous southern border and undocumented entry into the United States. Keywords  Wall • Mexico-US border • Government shutdown • Resistance • Race • Gender Trump’s initial proposal to build a wall (or rather, build some new sections of wall and enhance existing border fences and barriers) along the border with Mexico was a proposal that predated the travel ban. At the announcement of his presidential campaign, Trump (2015) stated: ‘I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 W. Clapton, Immigration, Risk, and Security Under the Trump Administration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2344-9_5

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southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.’ Thus began a series of controversies and contests over Trump’s wall, with critics ranging across Democratic members of Congress and other politicians, the American public, and government officials and publics in Mexico and further abroad. Like the ban, Trump moved quickly to commence construction of his wall after assuming office in January 2017. On 25 January, Trump signed Executive Order 13767, just five days after his inauguration. This provided for a range of measures designed to achieve ‘complete operational control of the southern border’, including the building of a wall. This chapter considers the evolution of Trump’s proposal for a wall. It advances two main arguments. First, the wall is a classic example of situation risk management. Trump identified a risky environment, the southern borderlands with Mexico, and acted to regulate and reshape that environment via the construction of physical barriers. The dangers at hand as articulated by Trump and his officials were explicitly couched in terms of risk—that immigrants entering the US irregularly could be criminals or terrorists and might, at an undetermined time and place, act in violent ways that harmed the American people and US national security. Acting directly against people attempting to cross the US border irregularly was difficult due to the perception that they posed temporally and spatially debounded risks—they could cross at any place along a 3145-kilometre border at any time. Hence reshaping the environment by building a wall was deemed the best course of preventive action to manage the risks identified. Again, risk and riskiness here were explicitly racialised and gendered, with both critical to the construction and representation of peoples from Central and South America as undesirables and risky. Second, the chapter argues that resistance and the agency of a range of actors beyond Trump and the executive branch of the US government was an important part of the evolution of the wall. Political fighting about border wall funding would eventually lead to the longest government shutdown in US history, the declaration of a national emergency by Trump, and significantly altered the scope, timing, and construction of the wall. The administration’s representation of an urgent security and humanitarian crisis at the border, the risks that undesirable migrants from the South supposedly posed, and the wall itself were all subjected to at times intense debate. Again, the wall and its evolution cannot be understood absent analysis and consideration of the political contests that shaped it.

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This chapter proceeds in a broadly similar fashion to the previous one. First, it outlines the discursive and normative context within which the wall was proposed, implemented, and contested. It then examines the various forms of resistance that emerged in response to the wall and the political and legal battles that occurred over it. Here, the chapter will first consider the political battles between Trump and Congress regarding wall funding, before looking at resistance in Mexico, among Indigenous communities within the Mexico-US borderlands, and among US citizens more broadly. Finally, it again considers not only the success, or lack thereof, of the wall as a process of riskisation, but also its effect on the US’ relationship with Mexico and other states in Central and South America. It also explores the local, everyday impacts of the wall for the people that it affected.

‘They’re Not Sending Us Their Best’ As discussed in the previous chapter, Trump ran in part on a platform of hard-line immigration reform and consistently highlighted the risks of immigration during his run for President in 2015 and 2016. He also consistently attacked the then-current border control and security efforts of the Obama administration, arguing that not enough was being done to secure US borders and keep Americans safe. This was coupled with Trump’s derogatory representation of Mexicans and other Central and South American peoples. As Trump (2015) stated at the announcement of his run for President: When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. 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. And some, I assume, are good people.

Several works have outlined the racist and gendered tropes that informed Trump’s depiction of migrants and asylum seekers attempting to cross the southern US border. Trump particularly used gendered and racist tropes of Latino masculinity, as demonstrated above, stereotyping Latino men as risky, criminals, gang members, or rapists (Powell, 2020: 136). In doing so, Trump creates a particular representation of these populations that invokes the spectre of negative—potentially catastrophic— possible futures should they be allowed to enter the US.

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As Powell (2020: 152) notes, ‘Trump’s reference to rape is hardly accidental. There is a long history of associating men of color with crimes of sexual violence against white women. This trope is both raced and gendered, as it constructs both white women as victim-survivors and men of color as “predators.”’ Such language and representational practice would continue throughout Trump’s presidential campaign. In the final presidential debate with Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, Trump argued that securing the border was a key US national security priority and that he would actively seek out and deport any ‘bad hombres’ (Gurdus, 2016). During his presidency, Trump focused on MS-13, an international criminal gang composed largely of people from Central America that operates within the US, Canada, Mexico, and Central America. Trump’s rhetoric here was explicitly raced, gendered, and dehumanising. For example, Trump controversially referred to immigrants entering the US irregularly as ‘animals’, saying: ‘We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in – and we’re stopping a lot of them … You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals’ (Colvin, 2018). Consequently, any act of violence or form of criminal behaviour perpetrated by Latinx people in the US, especially those who were undocumented, came to represent a vindication of Trump’s claims and evidence that action was needed to prevent such incidents from occurring. Shortly after Trump’s campaign announcement in 2015, a woman was shot and killed in San Francisco by an undocumented migrant who had previously (and repeatedly) been deported from the US. Trump commented immediately, describing the killing as a preventable act that occurred because of the unsafe southern border (Lasch, 2016: 168). For Trump, here was evidence of a risk that had materialised—criminal violence perpetrated by undocumented migrants. He used the opportunity to again represent the southern border as risky, a zone that required greater regulation and control, and reiterated the need for a wall. Trump’s focus on victims of violent crime perpetrated by undocumented migrants would continue throughout his term in office. Trump would hold events with ‘Angel Families’, relatives of people who had been killed by undocumented migrants. At such events, Trump reiterated the need for secure borders and a tougher immigration stance to prevent violence by undocumented migrants. Trump’s racialisation of Latinx, like his racialisation of Muslims, drew upon a pre-existing politics of Latinx immigration, southern border control, white fears of demographic shifts in the US, and historical and contemporary forms of Latinx racialisation (Canizales & Vallejo, 2021: 150).

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There is a long history of the racialisation of Latinx people in the US and the reproduction of negative representations and stereotypes. Chavez (2013) has written of the ‘Latino Threat Narrative’ that permeates US society, one in which Latino men are constructed as criminals and intellectually deficient and Latina women and children are represented as resource drainers and a threat to continued white supremacy in the US.  This again reflects the ways in which both race and gender are deployed to configure specific representations and meanings of particular groups or populations. This narrative is applied to all Latinxs, irrespective of nationality or place of birth, and situates them as risky others that present public safety and demographic dangers to the US’ white population (Canizales & Vallejo, 2021: 150). Trump was effective in seizing on white anxieties, actively reproducing the othering of Latinx as criminals, drug smugglers, rapists, and illegal immigrants for his own political advantage. This was, for some, a large part of what propelled Trump to the presidency in 2016 (see Reny et al., 2019). The consequence, though, is that the very existence of Latinx on American territory is delegitimised, their presence within US borders a potential affront to the rule of law. All Latinx and ‘Latinx-looking’ peoples are racialised as suspicious, risky, and potentially dangerous. Trump has used the imagery of ‘invasion’ to underscore the urgency of the situation at the border and the potential peril that the US faces. In the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s campaign repeatedly claimed that migrants seeking to enter the US were an invasion that needed to be stopped (Wong, 2019). This representation would become increasingly important during his presidency as he sought funding for the border wall. As will be discussed below, Trump repeatedly spoke in terms of ‘urgency’, ‘crisis’, and ‘invasion’. Such language was especially apparent in early 2019 as Trump declared a national emergency to secure border wall funding. Finally, another significant discursive move employed by Trump was his conflation of the risks posed by irregular immigration across the US border and the terrorist risk. Trump claimed that the porous southern border was a vector not only for irregular immigrants from Central and South America, but also terrorists from further abroad seeking to enter the US to carry out attacks. During the government shutdown of 2018–2019 over the border wall funding (see below), Trump claimed in a press conference: ‘We have terrorists coming through the southern border because they find that’s probably the easiest place to come through. They drive right in and they make a left’ (Rupar, 2019). This move had a double

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effect—first, it reinforces the image of a risky, dangerous, and unregulated borderland that is in urgent need of regulation, enhanced control, and preventive actions. Second, it amplifies the risks associated with Latinx migrants, who are now not just criminals, rapists, or welfare dependants, but also terrorist associates. Again, this rhetoric was not unique to Trump, nor is the idea of a wall along the southern border. In the aftermath of 9/11, the borderlands to the South received renewed attention. The first physical barriers along the border had been constructed in the 1990s (Painter & Singer, 2020: ii). Congress passed the 2005 Real ID Act1 and 2006 Secure Fence Act2 to enable the construction of 1046 kilometres of fencing along the US-Mexico border by overriding environmental regulations and property laws so that private property could be claimed for construction (Garrett, 2018: 187). Construction of this fencing continued into the Obama administration’s tenure, but once complete, no further wall construction occurred between 2011 and 2017 (Garrett, 2018: 187). Trump’s ambition was, of course, much greater than that of the Bush administration and Congress after 9/11; rather than the construction of fencing along key areas of the border, Trump envisaged a wall that stretched along the entire 3145-­kilometre border. The discursive and representational context associated with Trump’s border wall is similar to that associated with travel ban. It involves the gendered and racialised construction of a specific population as risky, delegitimates their right to access American territory, and invokes imaginaries of possible future violence and catastrophe that must be prevented. Again, it draws upon and reinforces long-standing processes of demonisation, dehumanisation, and othering of Latinx within the US. The uncertainty associated with risk in this context related only to the time and place of the irregular border crossings undertaken by migrants crossing from Mexico into the US and the dangerous and violent things that they might do once they are in the US. What was not uncertain is what they are and what they represent—danger and risk. Trump already knew what these people are— criminals, drug dealers, rapists. Again, Trump’s representations of Latinx migrants were again challenged and contested, as will be demonstrated below. Like Muslim others, Latinx immigrants became situated as

1 2

 8 U.S.C. 1101.  8 U.S.C. 1101.

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undesirables whose entry into the US, especially if it was irregular, required ‘stronger’ action and new solutions.

Funding the Wall: Threats, a Shutdown, and a National Emergency Like the travel ban, Trump moved immediately to begin construction of a wall along the border with Mexico. Five days after assuming office, Trump signed Executive Order 13767—Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements. This Order noted that the administration’s policy was to secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border, monitored and supported by adequate personnel so as to prevent illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, and acts of terrorism. (White House, 2017a)

The preventive intent of the Order was clearly outlined here. It also outlined a range of tasks for the Secretary of Homeland Security, including immediately commencing planning and preparations for the construction of a ‘contiguous’ and ‘impassable’ wall, planning and overseeing the construction of new detention facilities along the border, the hiring of 5000 new Border Patrol agents, and ensuring that illegal aliens are deported from the US (White House, 2017a). Trump and his administration repeatedly framed their case for the wall in terms of risk and urgency. During his first address to Congress, Trump argued that Americans could not succeed in an environment of ‘lawless chaos’, suggesting that the dire situation at the border posed risks to Americans’ safety, jobs, and wages (CNBC, 2017). Trump framed the border wall as an effective weapon against drugs and crime (CNBC, 2017). During remarks to law enforcement officials in 2017, Trump said: The Wall is a vital, and vital as a tool, for ending the humanitarian disaster brought—and really brought on by drug smugglers and new words that we haven’t heard too much of—human traffickers … We’re going to build a wall that works, and it’s going to have a huge impact on the inflow of drugs coming across. The wall is almost – that could be one of the main reasons you have to have it. It’s an additional tool to stop the inflow of drugs into our country. (White House, 2017c)

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In addition to highlighting the risks associated with immigration (killings, violence, drug, and human trafficking), Trump also used his remarks to juxtapose people currently crossing the border from Mexico with migrants of the past. He stated: ‘You say, what happened to the old days where people came into this country, they worked and they worked and they worked, and they had families, and they paid taxes, and they did all sorts of things, and their families got stronger, and they were closely knit? We don’t see that’. This was a significant move, othering specific groups of undesirable immigrants not only in terms of race, gender, or alleged links to terrorism, but also regarding their ostensible deviance from the behaviour and standards of previous, successful immigrants. Again, this was a way for Trump to push his case for risk management at the border— risky, dangerous others were coming in, bent on engaging in crime, violence, and other conduct that posed a direct risk to the safety and security of the American people. In early 2018, Trump and Pence met with Republican senators to discuss immigration reform. Here, Trump again highlighted the preventive intent and necessity of the wall, arguing that drugs and violent criminals were massed at the border waiting to get in. Mexico, too, was singled out as a risky environment, one that meant that risk management in the form of a border wall was required. Trump stated, ‘We need a physical border wall. We’re going to have a wall – remember that – we’re going to have a wall to keep out deadly drug dealers, dangerous traffickers, and violent criminal cartels. Mexico is having a tremendous problem with crime, and we want to keep it out of our country’ (White House, 2018). In the 2018 State of the Union address to Congress, Trump argued that the wall, along with other proposed measures, was needed to close the loopholes being exploited by terrorists and criminals to enter the US (CNN, 2018). Trump suggested that then-current immigration policies ‘present risks we can no longer afford’ (CNN, 2018). Alongside the consistent framing of the issue of irregular immigration across the unregulated borderlands with Mexico in terms of risk and prevention, Trump also spoke of an invasion and the ‘liberation’ of the American people. Key here was his targeting and othering of criminal gangs such as MS-13. In remarks in 2017 during a meeting with ‘immigration crime victims’, Trump said that ‘MS-13 is a prime target … We’re getting them out as fast as we can get them out, and we’re freeing up towns. We’re actually liberating towns, if you can believe that we have to do that in the United States of America’ (White House, 2017b).

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Trump was inconsistent, however, regarding the precise form and shape that the wall would take, along with its cost. During his campaign, Trump had spoken of a 1000-mile wall some 40–50  feet high (roughly 12–15 metres). He also argued that the wall did not need to cover the entire border due to natural geographic features that act as barriers to crossings, including mountains and rivers (Orr, 2019). This remained fairly consistent throughout Trump’s campaign and presidency, though the height of the wall changed frequently, as did the estimated cost (Orr, 2019). So too did its features and construction materials—it went from concrete slabs to steel bollards, for example. At one point in 2017, Trump even suggested that a border wall would feature solar panels and generate energy in order to recoup the costs of its construction (Orr, 2019). In February, an internal report from Homeland Security revealed that the wall would come in at an estimated cost of $21.6 billion and would take three-and-a-half years to build. Trump followed his Order with a supplemental budget request for the Fiscal Year (FY) 2017 budget in March 2017 that included $999 million in funding for the planning, design, and construction of the first phase of the wall and funding for the hiring of 1000 Immigration Customs Enforcement agents and 500 Customs and Border Protection agents (Garrett, 2018: 183; Painter & Singer, 2020: 10). Political resistance to the wall was clear in Congressional debates regarding the wall and the budget request put to it by the Trump administration. Despite the Republican Party holding the presidency and both Houses of Congress during the first years of Trump’s presidency, the administration quickly ran into difficulties regarding its ability to secure the necessary appropriations to fund planning and construction. This was despite Trump’s repeated assertions that Mexico would pay for the wall. Trump’s supplemental request was submitted with his budget proposal for FY 2018, which requested $1.57 billion for border barriers, and came during wrangling in Congress over government spending and negotiations between Republicans and Democratic for a spending bill that would avoid a government shutdown. The Democratic were clear in their opposition to any funding for the wall being attached to an appropriations bill. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer stated that any attempt to include ‘poison pill amendments’ like border wall funding would result in Democratic refusing to vote for it (Schor, 2017). They were thus able to successfully use the threat of a filibuster in the Senate regarding any bill that they did not support to negotiate a spending bill with Republicans that notably included $1.5 billion in funding for border security, but none

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specifically for the wall (Jacobs, 2017). This spending bill would keep the US government funded until September 2017. Trump’s response was to threaten a government shutdown in September when Congress was due to pass a spending bill for FY 2018 (Morgan & Mikolajczak, 2017). This time, the Trump administration was successful in receiving some funding for the wall, with $1.74 billion provided in FY 18 appropriations that included funding for over 90  miles of wall construction, including replacing some existing structures, and improving bollards and levees (Painter & Singer, 2020: 10). This was still nowhere near the funding required for the administration to build the wall that Trump wanted. Entrenched political opposition within Congress thwarted Trump’s attempts to build his wall and continually frustrated the President’s ability to deliver on his signature campaign promise. Resistance in Congress came not only from Democratic, but also fiscally conservative Republicans who were concerned at the expenditure required to construct and maintain the wall. Rumblings within the Republican policy were evident soon after Trump’s Executive Order regarding the wall. Key Republicans in Congress, including the number two Republican Senator, John Cornyn from Texas, suggested that they would oppose wall funding that was not offset by spending cuts. Cornyn also questioned the effectiveness of ‘a physical barrier because people can come under, around it and through it’ (Raju 2017). This reflected the concern among some that the wall would not serve as an effective risk management tool. Opposition to the wall was facilitated not only by concerns regarding its appropriateness or cost, but also its utility and efficacy. Border Patrol agents told Fox News that a wall would be ineffective and would not prevent irregular border crossings (Bier, 2017). Walls can be scaled, tunnelled under, or otherwise circumvented. Additionally, any physical structure built along the border could be subjected to damage and degradation of its integrity simply via exposure to the elements (Bier, 2017). Walls also cannot apprehend people attempting to irregularly cross the border—without agents and technology to provide surveillance and an ability to detain people crossing into the US, a wall or other physical barrier was unlikely to achieve much. What it would do, however, is impose significant costs in terms of both its initial construction and ongoing maintenance. Representatives whose districts straddled the border were also critical of the wall. Republican Will Hurd, former representative of the 23rd Congressional District in Texas, said: ‘I think building a concrete structure

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sea to shining sea is the most expensive and least effective way to do border security’ (BBC, 2019). The 23rd District stretches from El Paso to San Antonio, meaning it runs along the largest share of the Mexico-US border. Hurd wrote an op-ed in 2017 in which he argued his case against the wall at length. He suggested that the wall was a crude, unsophisticated one-size-fits-all measure that was too expensive and inefficient to seriously manage the risks of irregular immigration (Hurd, 2017). Such an approach ignored the very different geographical, cultural, technological, and operational limitations of different sectors of the border, meaning flexible, technology-driven solutions were needed in different sectors along the border (Hurd, 2017). Again, this highlighted the debate regarding the cost and effectiveness of a wall as a situational risk management tool. Bier (2017) also highlights the issue of unintended consequences. Not all immigrants within the US without a valid visa crossed the border irregularly. Some crossed through regular border checkpoints and then overstayed their visa. Building a wall would not stop such people, but could encourage them to stay beyond the period mandated in their visa (Bier, 2017). This is because enhanced border security might have failed to keep people out, but was effective at keeping them in. It could also encourage people to try cross at more dangerous points along the border where the wall could not be built, or to attempt other ways of entering the United States, such as by boat (Bier, 2017). As Bier (2017) concludes, the wall works well as a symbol of Trump’s ‘America First’ nationalism, but as a tool for managing the risks of immigration it will prove ineffective, costly, and disastrous for border communities in both the US and Mexico. Resistance also came at the state level, with California and other states, as well as local authorities in cities such as San Francisco, considering measures to thwart the building of the wall, such as blacklists of companies involved in its construction. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra filed a lawsuit in 2017 against the wall on the basis that it violated federal environmental standards and guidelines (Levine, 2017). Further lawsuits followed, including a lawsuit filed by California in cooperation with 19 other states after Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to obtain wall funding (see below). It argued that the diversion of funds authorised by the national emergency would endanger critical public safety programmes, was unconstitutional and was ultimately unnecessary (McGreevy, 2019). For his part, Trump predicted that such lawsuits would likely eventually be considered by the Supreme Court, where he was confident his

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administration would get a ‘fair shake’ and ultimately prevail in its battle to build the wall (McCarthy, 2019). There was therefore significant resistance to Trump’s wall that prevented it from being constructed in any meaningful way throughout the first two years of Trump’s term. This shaped the process of riskisation in a significant and tangible way, namely by ensuring that it was not successful. Trump was unable to proceed with his preferred risk management solution for the risks he had identified along the Mexico-US border. Still, Congressional, Democratic, and state stymying of Trump’s attempts to build the wall did not mean the issue went away. On the contrary, the battles and debates over the wall throughout 2017 and 2018 culminated at the end of 2018 with Trump’s standoff with Congress over funding for what he regarded as a ‘desperately needed’ wall. Trump’s representations of the situation along the border and the need for a wall were increasingly framed in terms of urgency, emergency, invasion, and impending disaster. His demands for a wall and refusal to sign a spending bill that did not include wall funding would result in the longest government shutdown in US history during December 2018 and January 2019. In September 2018, Congress passed appropriations bills for FY19, funding large sections of the federal government. However, it excluded funding for Homeland Security, with a continuing resolution being passed that extended funding for any unfunded departments and agencies through until December 2018 (Elis, 2018). If an appropriations bill for these areas of the US government was not passed by the deadline, they would be shut down. Negotiations between Trump, Republicans, and Democratic continued over the next three months, with the Democratic assuming some leverage after re-taking the House after the 2018 mid-­ term elections. Trump signed the appropriations bill, although he continued to insist that Republicans in Congress ‘get tough’ on border security and that the wall was a priority (Elis, 2018). This set the stage for significant debates in December as the funding deadline loomed. On 6 December, Congress passed another continuing resolution to keep the government funded through to 21 December. Although the White House’s official budget request for wall funding was only $1.67 billion, Trump publicly asked for significantly more money—$5.7 billion—and pressured Congress to pass an appropriations bill for Homeland Security with this funding included.3 In a televised 3  It was not until 6 January 2019, during the government shutdown, that the White House formally requested that Congress provide $5.7 billion in wall funding.

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meeting, Trump and Pence met with Pelosi, House Minority Leader and presumptive Speaker once the 116th Congress was sworn in in January 2019, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. During an unusually heated and tense exchange for a televised meeting, Trump stated: I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck. People in this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country...I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I won’t blame you for it. The last time, you shut it down. It didn’t work. I will take the mantle of shutting it down. I’m going to shut it down for border security. (Restuccia & Johnson, 2018)

This followed repeated threats by Trump that he would not sign a Homeland Security appropriations bill that did not include his desired level of wall funding. The Senate subsequently agreed to a stop-gap funding bill that would keep the government open until February 2019, but which did not include any funding for the wall (Ferris & Bresnahan, 2018). When it appeared that the House and Trump might be willing to respectively pass and sign the bill, Trump unusually faced a backlash from right-wing conservative commentators who were aghast at Trump’s potential weakness on the wall. Trump was seen by these critics as backing down on both the wall and his threat to shut down the government for the sake of national security. The President subsequently declared on 20 December that he would not sign the Senate stop-gap spending bill as it did not authorise the wall funding (Mascaro et  al., 2018). House Republicans managed to pass a separate stop-gap spending bill that did include wall funding, but this was not going to pass the Senate in the face of Democratic opposition and threats of a filibuster. The result was the partial shutdown of the US government from 22 December. During the shutdown, Trump and his administration repeatedly argued that the situation along the border was a ‘crisis’ posing a severe risk to US security. In a letter to Congress in early January 2019, Trump argued that effective border security needed to prevent the entry of security risks such as terrorists, other public safety risks, and people otherwise inadmissible to the US from crossing the border (White House, 2019a). The representation of a crisis and emergency at the border had been part of Trump’s representations of the ostensible risks that he sought to prevent for several years, but it was amplified during the shutdown and in the lead

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up to his declaration of a national emergency. Speaking in the Rio Grande Valley near the border during the shutdown, Trump commented that border agents needed a wall and that if they did not get one, their work would be hard, the problems they faced would be gruelling, and there would be ‘a lot of death’ (White House, 2019b). Again, Trump’s representational practice was to define all irregular migrants and border crossings as dangerous and risky, inevitably bringing death and mayhem to the US. He also noted that the risks were not confined to the borderlands: And what you see on the border, that’s not as much of a problem as they come through the border and they go out throughout our nation. So you’ll have crime in Iowa. You’ll have crime in New Hampshire. You’ll have crime in New York. You’ll have crime in places – you know, you don’t associate it with the border. (White House, 2019b)

The risks of irregular immigration were thus spatially debounded, unable to be confined to the border. Trump presents an image of a crime-­ ridden future, suggesting that immigrants are a problematic source of ‘a lot’ of crime in the US. Such claims did not sway Congress, which continued to refuse to authorise the $5.7 billion that Trump had demanded. The shutdown and the general discord among the political elite demonstrated the entrenched resistance to Trump’s wall within the US government. Ultimately, Trump was forced to back down, and agreed to sign a short-­ term funding bill that would allow shuttered federal agencies and departments to re-open until 15 February (Restuccia et al., 2019). In the interim, negotiations regarding immigration and wall funding would continue. In doing so, he reiterated threats made during the shutdown to use a national emergency to fund the wall if necessary. This is what eventually transpired. Chuck Schumer noted after legislation passed to re-open the government that ‘Democratic are firmly against the wall’, a position that did not change in the three weeks between the re-opening of the government and the 15 February deadline (Restuccia et al., 2019). On 14 February, Congress agreed to a $333 billion funding designed to keep all government departments and agencies funded through until the end of the financial year in September. The agreement between Democratic and Republican lawmakers resulted in only $1.375 billion in funding for steel post fencing along 55 miles of the border (Cochrane & Edmondson, 2019). The next day, Trump declared a national emergency regarding the situation on the southern border. This allowed him to divert

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$3.6 billion from military construction projects. Trump also diverted $2.6 billion from a counter-narcotics programme and $600 million from a Treasury asset forfeiture fund. Together with the $1.375 billion provided by Congress, Trump had access to over $8 billion in wall funding (Baker, 2019). A discourse of risk, urgency, and emergency was crucial to Trump’s case for the national emergency. Proclamation 9844 declaring the national emergency states that ‘the current situation at the southern border presents a border security and humanitarian crisis that threatens core national security interests and constitutes a national emergency’ (White House, 2019c). The Proclamation explicitly authorises US armed forces to provide additional assistance to the Department of Homeland Security in securing the border. The declaration of a national emergency underscored both Trump’s discourse of urgent risks and crisis at the border, as well as the exceptional nature of his attempt to build the wall and manage identified immigration and security risks. From the declaration of the national emergency onwards, Trump repeatedly spoke of the southern borderlands as a risky zone, a gateway for violence, drugs, and crime into the US interior. The emergency at the border was framed in terms of both a humanitarian crisis as large flows of predominantly women and children attempted to cross the border, as well as a security crisis. Trump stated that ‘[t]he fact that this is an emergency is undeniable … The system is breaking. Security is at risk. And the very humanitarian protections that we hold dear in this country are at risk in terms of our ability to provide those to vulnerable populations’ (White House, 2019e). The wall was again represented as the ultimate situational risk management tool needed to reshape the risky borderlands and prevent a host of risks from impacting the United States. Trump often spoke of the ‘tremendous impact’ the wall was having and that ‘walls work’ (CNN, 2019). Criticism and resistance, of course, came quickly. While there have been 60 national emergencies declared by different administrations—a reflection of the expansion of extraordinary executive powers under several US Presidents—Trump’s national emergency was unprecedented and exceptional in that it represented the first time that a President circumvented Congress to spend money on something that it had already decided not to fund (Savage, 2019). Some claimed that Trump’s action constituted a violation of the constitutional separation of powers between the executive and legislative. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (2019) stated that ‘[t]he President is lawless and does violence to our Constitution, and therefore,

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to our democracy’. Republican senators also expressed concern, especially at the precedent the declaration set. Marco Rubio was concerned that a Democratic President could ‘use this exact same tactic to impose the Green New Deal’, while Susan Collins and Lamar Alexander both expressed reservations regarding Trump’s use of a national emergency to co-opt Congressional authority over appropriations (Edelson, 2020, 224–225). This resistance and the exceptionalism of Trump’s actions is further underscored by the lawsuits brought against it and the fact that Congress voted to rescind the national emergency. The Democratic-controlled House voted to revoke the state of emergency in February 2019, followed by the Senate in March in a 59–41 vote after 12 Republican senators broke ranks (Foran & Barrett, 2019). This bill was vetoed by Trump on 15 March and the national emergency remained in effect until the end of his presidency as the two-thirds majority required in the House and Senate to override the veto was not attainable (White House, 2019d). A joint resolution of the House and Senate terminating the emergency was also vetoed by Trump in October 2019 (White House, 2019f). Lawsuits brought against Trump’s national emergency by a coalition of 20 states led by California and the Sierra Club (an environmental organisation) and the Southern Border Communities Coalition were only marginally more successful. These lawsuits delayed, but did not stop, the transfer of funds from the Department of Defence and other agencies to Homeland Security for border wall construction. In July, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an injunction imposed by the US District Court of the Northern District of California against the transfer of funds from the Department of Defence to Homeland Security, ruling that the transfer and use of funds ‘violates the constitutional requirement that the Executive Branch not spend money absent an appropriation from Congress’ (de Vogue, 2019). However, this was soon overturned by the Supreme Court, which stayed the injunction while litigation continued, allowing the Trump administration to use $2.5 billion from Defence to construct the wall (de Vogue, 2019). In December 2019, the US District Court for the Western District of Texas blocked the Trump administration from accessing a different pool of Department of Defence funds for wall construction than the $2.5 billion that the Supreme Court had authorised. This was overturned in January 2020, when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the order on appeal (Alvarez & LeBlanc, 2020). Further court battles occurred throughout 2020. In June, the

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Ninth Circuit on review issued a ruling stating that the transfer of funds was unconstitutional. This prompted plaintiffs in the District Court cases to apply to the Supreme Court to lift the stay on the lower courts’ injunction it had earlier granted, which was dismissed in a 5–4 ruling in late July 2020 (Millhiser, 2020). The long story of political and legal resistance to the wall only ended when Biden assumed office in January 2021. As can be seen above, the wall and Trump’s representations of the risks posed by immigrants irregularly crossing the border were intensely contentious and contested. Trump failed to gain significant funding for the wall in his first two years in office, despite the Republican Party enjoying majorities in both the House and Senate. After the longest government shutdown in US history, he resorted to the declaration of a national emergency to circumvent Congress and use funds to construct the wall that the latter had explicitly not authorised. While legal opinion regarding the question of whether Trump’s actions were unconstitutional or not was mixed (Edelson, 2020: 225–226), the battles over the wall and Trump’s action do show that representation and invocations of risk can take both routine and exceptional forms. Trump’s case for the wall was framed in terms of urgency and emergency, and his national emergency was itself widely regarded as an exceptional action. The case of the wall again also demonstrates the politics of risk and its management, and the ways in which political contests over risk shape specific forms of risk management and whether or not they are implemented.

Popular Resistance at the Border Lost in much of the discussion of the wall was the resistance to the policy that arose within First Nations communities and other landowners along the border. While a lot of attention was focused on Trump’s conflicts with Congress, as admittedly is the case in much of this chapter, there were also key sites of popular resistance along the Mexico-US borderlands. These sites of resistance are important. They reflect everyday examples of agency exercised by local populations regarding articulations of risk and attempts at risk management. Several First Nations communities were particularly strong critics of the wall. They are an important stakeholder given that federally recognised communities have reservations that span significant tracts of the border. For First Nations peoples, the border itself represents an ongoing division of their lands and their communities. Several Nations stretch across the Mexico-US border and were cut in two and separated as

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the Mexico-US border took shape throughout the nineteenth century. For the Tohono O’odham people, one of the prominent First Nations critics of the wall, the Gadsden purchase of land in present-day Arizona and New Mexico sliced through their traditional lands, splitting them between Mexico and the US (Tasker, 2019: 306–307). This purchase was made, and a border formed, without Tohono O’odham people being informed, let alone consulted. While the new border initially had little impact, increasing enforcement by US Border Patrol has made it more difficult for Tohono O’odham people to move freely across the border and access their lands (Tasker, 2019: 307). This, then, has been one of the significant consequences of Trump’s proposed wall that First Nations peoples have criticised and resisted— deepening division and the increasingly forceful separation of First Nations communities from their lands and each other on different sides of the border. This has had a profound impact, including disrupting religious and cultural practices and preventing people from freely visiting family on the other side of the border. Members of the Tohono O’odham community have been detained while trying to access their lands across the border and have been prevented from transporting goods and material that are essential to their spiritual, religious, and cultural practices (Tohono O’odham Nation, 2016). This prompted the Tohono O’odham Nation to criticise Trump’s Executive Order regarding the wall in early 2017. The Tohono O’odham Legislative Council passed a resolution in February 2017 opposing the wall, as did the Inter-Tribal Association of Arizona, representing 21 Indigenous nations, shortly thereafter. Bradley Moreno, a Tohono O’odham person, said: ‘It’s going to affect our sacred lands. It’s going to affect our ceremonial sites. It’s going to affect the environment … There are just so many things that are wrong with this. The whole idea behind it is just racist’ (Levin, 2017). After declaring a national emergency, the Trump administration was able to significantly advance its work on the wall. Throughout 2019 and 2020, contractors descended on parts of the border in Texas and Arizona to begin construction of segments of the wall. The resulting construction has led to the destruction of ancestral and sacred lands, which have been dynamited, bulldozed, and cleared (Zoledziowski 2021). The risks presented by wall construction to First Nations lands along the border prompted resistance from the Esto’k Gna tribe in Texas, who have several sacred sites along the Rio Grande which separates Texas from Mexico. The Esto’k Gna’s lands straddle both sides of the Rio Grande in Mexico and the US, and on the

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US side is the Eli Jackson cemetery, a sacred burial site for the tribe where several members are buried along with the descendants of freed slaves, white abolitionists, and war veterans (Cortez and Harman 2020). When it was revealed that siting for 25 miles of border wall construction in the Rio Grande Valley placed it on top of a river levee next to the cemetery, the Esto’k Gna people moved to resist. They occupied the cemetery in January 2019, creating Yalui Village to save the cemetery and prevent any form of construction that would endanger it (Cortez and Harman 2020). Along with descendants of the original founders of the cemetery, the Esto’k Gna also revived ancestral villages along the Rio Grande, including Lehai Village and Mariposa Village, that are situated along the path of the planned wall as a means of resistance (Cortez and Harman 2020). The Esto’k Gna occupied the cemetery for over one year, only moving on once they had confirmed that the cemetery would not be cleared to make way for the wall (although land very close to the cemetery was cleared for wall construction). Such acts of resistance may not have prevented the segments of the wall under construction during 2019 and 2020 from being built, but nevertheless represented important sites of local resistance and agency, influencing the construction of the wall and its specific location along the border. First Nations peoples also organised protests at border wall construction sites. In September 2020, a small group of Tohono O’odham Nation people staged a protest at the site of the construction of replacement fencing in the Quitobaquito region of the Organ Pipe National Forest in Arizona (Ruiz, 2020). This lasted for several hours as protestors prevented construction equipment from moving in and work commencing. It eventually ended after National Park rangers and Border Patrol agents forcibly removed the protestors from the site (Ruiz, 2020). Another protest by Tohono O’odham people in October 2020 near the border in Arizona resulted in the use of teargas and 11 arrests as law enforcement moved to disperse the protestors (Native News Online, 2020). Such protests again underscore the active resistance of First Nations peoples along the border and their attempts to protect their lands and communities from the impacts of Trump’s wall. First Nations communities also joined lawsuits filed against Trump’s national emergency and the wall. The Tohono O’odham Nation filed an amicus brief in support of the Sierra Club in the Supreme Court case Trump v. Sierra Club, which resulted in the Supreme Court granting a stay on lower court injunctions against the administration’s appropriation of

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funds from the Department of Defence. The brief outlined the impacts of the wall on the Nation and the reasons for its opposition. These included the devastation of cultural and natural resources, environmental damage, limitations on freedom of movement and tribal sovereignty, and spiritual and cultural concerns (Tasker, 2019: 318–323). Testifying in Congress before the House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Indigenous Peoples of the United States in February, Tohono O’odham Nation Chair Ned Norris Jr. stated: The federal government’s continued destruction of sites and resources that have religious and cultural significance to our people amounts to the bulldozing of our church grounds and our civilian and military cemeteries. For us, this is no different than DHS building a 30-foot wall through Arlington Cemetery, through the grounds of the National Cathedral, or through George Washington’s Mt. Vernon. (Norris Jr., 2020)

This speaks to the erasure of Indigenous peoples in the US settler colony that will be discussed further in the next section. Other landowners also resisted the Trump administration’s attempts to acquire their land for wall construction. Construction of the wall required the Trump administration to purchase significant tracts of private land. A 162-mile portion of the wall planned for southern Texas encompassed 144 miles of private land (Kanno-Youngs, 2019). The government used eminent domain to acquire land, but this did not prevent some landowners from going to court. This is a familiar battle for landowners in southern Texas, some of whom engaged in lengthy court battle with the government after it attempted to acquire their land for border fencing after President Bush signed the Secure Fence Act in 2006 (Zezima & Berman, 2019). The Rio Grande Landowners Coalition (RGLC), comprised of ranchers, small businesses, developers, homeowners, and other individuals and entities who own riverfront property along the Rio Grande, filed an amicus brief in support of the Sierra Club in its Supreme Court case against the Trump administration (ACLU, 2021). As outlined in its brief, the government planned to acquire substantial parts of the Coalition’s properties for wall construction. The RGLC maintained that a border wall would be costly, ineffective, and unfairly disruptive and destructive of their properties and riverfront communities along the Rio Grande (ACLU, 2021). Landowners also sued the Trump administration. Landowners in South Texas, for example, filed a suit against the federal government in 2020 that objected to condemnation proceedings brought by the government in a

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bid to survey and eventually acquire their land. The suit argued that the government’s bid to survey private land without compensation violated landowners’ Fifth Amendment right to just compensation (Méndez, 2020). A separate suit, filed by Zapata County in southern Texas and two landowners, argued that landowners in the majority Latinx county were being discriminated against on the basis of President Trump’s consistently negative comments regarding Latinxs and Mexicans (Méndez, 2020). Not all landowners resisted, of course, with some agreeing to sign right of entry agreements with the federal government or allow construction on their property. Still, there was significant resistance from landowners to the acquisition of their property for the purpose of building the wall. Trump’s wall was a contentious undertaking and was actively resisted, both within elite political circles and amongst local communities in the borderlands of southern Texas and Arizona who were directly impacted by construction of the wall. While such resistance did not completely prevent Trump from constructing parts of his wall, it did slow him and the government down. At the end of Trump’s term in January 2021, the federal government had managed to construct only 453  miles of wall along a 1954-mile border (Romero & Kanno-Youngs, 2021). The end of Trump’s term saw a flurry of activity as contractors attempted to finish stretches of wall, but much of it was left unfinished by the time Biden took office. Today, there are ‘islands’ of wall, isolated sections that connect to nothing and can be walked around on either side (Romero & Kanno-Youngs, 2021). It is estimated that $15 billion was spent by the Trump administration to build an incomplete wall along a relatively small part of the border (Romero & Kanno-Youngs, 2021). Again, the failure to substantively finish the wall can be credited at least in part to the local, political, and legal resistance of a host of different actors, both elite and everyday. From battles in Congress over funding to local protests at border wall sites, resistance shaped this process of riskisation, influencing the evolution and form of Trump’s border wall.

The Consequences and Effects of the Wall: Risk Management, but at What Cost? The wall was an incomplete instance of riskisation, if not a failed one. Like the travel ban, though, assessments of success or failure very much depend on how we define these concepts. Certainly, if we only focused on whether Trump was able to build the wall and how much of it was built, we would

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be missing much of the detail and much of the story of this instance of riskisation. Again, like the travel ban, we can say the wall was contentious and heavily contested. Trump was only ever able to gain significant funding for the wall via the declaration of a national emergency that members of his own party in Congress voted to rescind. Even after declaring the emergency, Trump left office with the wall far from complete. Unlike the travel ban, which was at least validated by the Supreme Court, Trump was never able to fully overcome resistance to either his depiction of the risks along the Mexico-US border or his proposed solution of a border wall. Trump faced not only resistance to his attempts at risk management along the southern border, but also the practical difficulties of building a large physical barrier across vast tracts of land. As highlighted above, Trump’s attempts to build a wall to manage the risks of irregular immigration also had several significant consequences and impacts on local communities in the Mexico-US borderlands. These impacts were especially pronounced for First Nations communities. The wall represented the continuing erasure of First Nations people in the US. Like other settler colonies, First Nations peoples have suffered marginalisation and the erasure of their cultures, their languages, their histories, their lands, and themselves, for centuries. The wall continued this in two significant ways. The first was the literal destruction of physical sites that were sacred and of religious, cultural, and agricultural significance to First Nations peoples. The second is their sidelining from much of the mainstream discussion on the wall, which focused more on Trump and his battle with Congress than it did the impacts of the wall on First Nations communities along the border. Indeed, while some First Nations voices were heard in Congress, they can scarcely be said to have been actively listened to or engaged by the Trump administration. The latter continued with wall construction despite the concerns and active resistance of First Nations peoples. Indeed, in May 2020, the Secretary of Homeland Security used their power under section 102(c) of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act 1996 to waive several other Acts with respect to border wall construction in Texas.4 This was done ‘to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads in the vicinity of the international land border in Webb County, Texas, and Zapata County, Texas’ (Office of the Secretary, , 2020). These Acts included the American 4

 8 U.S.C. 1103.

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Indian Religious Freedom Act, Native American Graves Repatriation and Protection Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and several other environmental protection Acts (Office of the Secretary, , 2020).5 The waiving of these laws removed legislated protections for First Nations communities and the local environment, leaving them exposed and vulnerable to harms caused directly and indirectly by border wall construction. As discussed above, the result has been the destruction of sacred sites and damage to the local environment and ecosystems. The damage done to the local environment and ecosystems has, in some areas, been significant. In some areas, the wall has prevented communities from accessing floodplains, cutting them off from water supplies that they need for drinking, sanitation, and livestock (Lakhani, 2021). Contractors pumped water out of local springs, rivers, and wetlands to mix concrete, draining them and damaging already fragile ecological systems. At Quitobaquito Springs in Arizona, 40 species of migratory birds that were registered between 2016 and 2019 did not return in 2020 (Lakhani, 2021). Sections of wall were built through the habitat of the endangered Sonoran Pronghorn within the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. Sections of wall built in protected areas of the Lower Rio Grande Valley have increased the risk of flooding and carved through the woodland habitats of several endangered species (Reese, 2021). At the time of writing, the full extent of the environmental and ecological damage wrought by the construction of the wall remains unknown. The waiver of federal laws regarding environmental protection means that environmental impact assessments usually required for federal projects were not completed (Reese, 2021). In the rush to build the wall, especially in the final weeks of the Trump administration after Trump’s defeat in the presidential election, local communities and environs were substantially impacted in adverse ways (Reese, 2021). Latinx people in the US and beyond faced many of the same issues as did Muslim peoples, stemming from their identification as a population of undesirables by Trump and his administration. Like Muslim peoples, the racialisation of Latinx peoples in the US has had significant consequences. Menjívar (2021) writes of the ‘racialisation of illegality’—the way certain racial groups become represented and understood as illegal immigrants. 5  Respectively, these Acts appear in the US Code as 42 U.S.C. 1996, 25 U.S.C. 3001, 42 U.S.C. 4321, and 16 U.S.C. 1531.

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The effects of this are various, including the overrepresentation of Latinx peoples in immigrants who are detained and deported. Latinx people make up approximately 70 percent of the undocumented population, but 88.6 percent of detainees are from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador (Menjívar, 2021: 91). Some 90 percent of Immigrations and Custom Enforcement Removals involve people from these countries, and nearly 80 percent are men (Menjívar, 2021: 91). Latinx peoples are thus disproportionately the target of law and border enforcement in the US. Another significant impact has been the expansion of the deportation and detention regime and the state-sanctioned, institutionalised violence committed against irregular migrants. For example, in 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new zero-tolerance approach to irregular border crossings, resulting in the separation of children from their families when they presented at the southern border. Over 2500 children had been separated from their families by the end of 2018 (Todres & Villamizar Fink, 2020: 384), and were often kept in appalling conditions, prompting sustained criticism of the Trump administration. By May 2019, six children ranging in age from 2 to 16 had died in US custody, three reportedly from influenza (Todres & Villamizar Fink, 2020: 387). For its part, the Trump administration argued before the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that having detained children sleep on concrete floors or not providing them with basic necessities did not violate the law (Todres & Villamizar Fink, 2020: 379). These examples of the impacts of this process of riskisation are not a direct consequence of the construction of the border wall itself. However, they are a consequence of the broader normative and discursive context that positions and represents Latinx peoples as racialised others, informs their identification as risky, and informs the perceived need for situational risk management via a border wall to manage the risks that they ostensibly pose. Finally, another predictable consequence of Trump’s rhetoric and policies regarding Latinx peoples and irregular immigrants was an increase in abuse and violence against these communities. Counties that hosted Trump rallies during the 2016 presidential election campaign reported a 226 percent increase in hate crimes. A terrorist attacked a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, killing 22 people and injuring another 26. Prior to the shooting, he had engaged in an anti-Latinx tirade, stating that he was defending the US from a ‘cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by invasion’ (Canizales & Vallejo, 2021: 155). These are but two examples of

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wider experiences of racialised hatred, marginalisation, and othering, that Latinx peoples, or those that are perceived to look like a Latinx person, have experienced in the US. In sum, the wall represents a deeply problematic process of riskisation, one that imposed considerable risks and had substantial impacts upon Latinx peoples, irregular migrants, and local communities within the southern borderlands.

Conclusion Although Trump is now out of office, some persist with the idea of building a border wall. Governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, declared a state of disaster at the southern border and announced plans in June 2021 to spend $250 million in state funds to continue construction of Trump’s wall. He also started a crowdfunding campaign to generate funds for wall construction, which as of August 2021 had raised less than $1 million (Barrágan, 2021). Border security and the risks posed by irregular immigration remain issues that continue to prompt senior US leaders to engage in situational risk management via the construction of physical barriers along the border, despite their questionable cost and efficacy. This process of riskisation and the politics of the risks of immigration more broadly are thus far from played out in the US, especially considering that as of the time of writing, Trump has not ruled out running for President for a third time at the 2024 election and would likely secure the Republican Party nomination. As with the travel ban, the riskisation framework has highlighted the representational and discursive basis of risk identification and management; the racialised and gendered ways in which risks are defined, understood, and represented; and the ways in which the agency and support of resistance of a variety of different elite, civil society, and local actors can influence and shape a process of riskisation. Finally, this chapter has once again underscored the often-terrible consequences that impact communities identified as undesirable or impacted by risk management initiatives. Violence and abuse, both state-sanctioned and within the wider US society, cultural decimation, and environmental destruction are but some of the outcomes produced by border wall construction within the Mexico-US borderlands. Riskisation does not just produce winners and losers among the political elite; it can severely impact everyday people and communities too.

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2021, from https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/05/ 15/2020-­1 0383/determination-­p ursuant-­t o-­s ection-­1 02-­o f-­t he-­i llegal­immigration-­reform-­and-­immigrant-­responsibility Orr, G. (2019, January 8). From ‘wall to barrier’: How Trump’s vision for the border keeps changing. Politico. https://www.politico.com/story/2019/ 01/08/trumps-­vision-­wall-­concrete-­steel-­changes-­1088714 Painter, W.  L., & Singer, A. (2020, January 29). DHS border barrier funding. Congressional Research Service. Report R45888. Retrieved September 5, 2021, from https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R45888 Pelosi, N. (2019, February 23). Pelosi remarks at press call on introduction of privileged resolution to terminate President Trump’s emergency declaration. Retrieved October 15, 2021, from https://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/22219-­3/ Powell, C. (2020). Race, gender, and nation in the age of shifting borders: The unstable prisms of motherhood and masculinity. UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs, 24(1), 133–162. Reese, A. (2021, January 25). Some ecological damage from Trump’s rushed border wall could be repaired. Scientific American. Retrieved October 25, 2021, from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/some-­ecological-­damage­from-­trumps-­rushed-­border-­wall-­could-­be-­repaired1/ Reny, T. T., Collingwood, L., & Valenzuela, A. A. (2019). Vote switching in the 2016 election: How racial and immigration attitudes, not economics, explain shifts in white voting. Public Opinion Quarterly, 83(1), 91–113. Restuccia, A., Everett, B., & Caygle, H. (2019, January 25). Longest shutdown in history ends after Trump relents on wall. Politico. https://www.politico.com/ story/2019/01/25/trump-­shutdown-­announcement-­1125529 Restuccia, A., & Johnson, E. (2018, December 11). The 17 gripping minutes that captivated Washington. Politico. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/ 12/11/trump-­pelosi-­schumer-­meeting-­oval-­1056862 Romero, S., & Kanno-Youngs, Z. (2021, March 16). Trump’s incomplete border wall is in pieces that could linger for decades. The New York Times. https:// www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/us/border-­wall-­trump-­biden.html Ruiz, R.  R. (2020). Protest at border wall site on Hia-Ced O’odham Territory ends in standoff, scuffle. AZCentral. Retrieved October 22, 2021, from https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2020/09/21/ border-­wall-­tohono-­oodham-­protest-­site-­ends-­standoff-­scuffle/5861647002/ Rupar, A. (2019, January 4). Trump’s bizarre Rose Garden news conference shows why he’s impossible to negotiate with. Vox. https://www.vox.com/policy-­and-­ politics/2019/1/4/18168860/trump-­news-­conference-­shutdown Savage, C. (2019, February 15). Presidents have declared dozens of emergencies, but none like Trump’s. New York Times. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/02/15/us/politics/trump-­presidency-­national-­emergency.html

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Schor, E. (2017, March 14). Schumer to GOP: Funding the wall means government shutdown. Politico. https://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/chuck-­ schumer-­government-­shutdown-­threat-­border-­wall-­236036 Tasker, K. C. (2019). Waived: The detrimental implications of U.S. immigration and border security measures on southern border tribes  – An analysis of the impact of President Trump’s border wall on the Tohono O’odham Nation. American Indian Law Journal, 8(1), 303–329. Todres, J., & Villamizar Fink, D. (2020). The trauma of Trump’s family separation and child detention actions: A children’s rights perspective’. Washington Law Review, 95(1), 377–428. Tohono O’odham Nation. (2016). History and culture. Retrieved October 21, 2021, from http://www.tonation-­nsn.gov/history-­culture/ Trump, D. (2015, June 16). Full text: Donald Trump announces a presidential bid. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-­ politics/wp//2015/06/16/full-­t ext-­d onald-­t r ump-­a nnounces-­a -­ presidential-­bid/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.054af746605b White House. (2017a, January 25). Executive order: Border security and immigration enforcement improvements (Executive Order 13767). Retrieved August 1, 2021, from https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2017/01/30/ 2017-­02095/border-­security-­and-­immigration-­enforcement-­improvements White House. (2017b, June 28). Remarks by President Trump during meeting with immigration crime victims. Retrieved October 2, 2021, from https:// trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-­s tatements/remarks-­p resident­trump-­meeting-­immigration-­crime-­victims/ White House. (2017c, July 28). Remarks by President Trump to law enforcement officials on MS-13. Retrieved October 2, 2021, from https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-­s tatements/remarks-­p resident-­t rump-­l aw­enforcement-­officials-­ms-­13/ White House. (2018, January 4). Remarks by President Trump and Vice President Pence in a meeting on immigration with Republican Members of the Senate. Retrieved October 2, 2021, from https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/ briefings-­s tatements/remarks-­p resident-­t rump-­v ice-­p resident-­p ence-­ meeting-­immigration-­republican-­members-­senate/ White House. (2019a, January 4). President Trump sends a letter on border security to Congress. Retrieved October 18, 2021, from https://trumpwhitehouse. archives.gov/articles/president-­trump-­sends-­letter-­border-­security/ White House. (2019b, January 11). Remarks by President Trump at the Rio Grande Valley US-Mexico border. Retrieved October 18, 2021, from https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-­s tatements/remarks-­p resident-­t rump­briefing-­rio-­grande-­valley-­u-­s-­mexico-­border/

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White House. (2019c, February 15). Presidential proclamation declaring a national emergency concerning the southern border of the United States (No. 9844). Retrieved October 18, 2021, from https://www.federalregister.gov/ documents/2019/02/20/2019-­03011/declaring-­a-­national-­emergency-­ concerning-­the-­southern-­border-­of-­the-­united-­states White House. (2019d, March 15). Veto message to the House of Representatives for H.J.  Res. 46. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://trumpwhitehouse. archives.gov/briefings-­s tatements/veto-­m essage-­h ouse-­r epresentatives-­ h-­j-­res-­46/ White House. (2019e, March 15). Remarks by President Trump on the national security and humanitarian crisis on our southern border. Retrieved October 19, 2021, from https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/ remarks-president-trump-national-security-humanitarian-crisis-southernborder-2/ White House. (2019f). SJ. Res. 54 veto message. October 15. Retrieved October 13, 2021, from https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-­actions/ s-­j-­res-­54-­veto-­message/ Wong, J. C. (2019, August 6). Trump referred to immigrant ‘invasion’ in 2000 Facebook ads, analysis reveals. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ us-­n ews/2019/aug/05/trump-­i nternet-­f acebook-­a ds-­r acism-­i mmigrant­invasion Zezima, K., & Berman, M. (2019, January 10). Trump’s wall needs private property. But some Texans won’t give up their land without a fight. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/trumps-­border-­wall-­ would-­n eed-­p rivate-­p roperty-­b ut-­t exas-­l andowners-­p lan-­t o-­d ig-­i n-­f or-­ lengthy-­l egal-­f ight/2019/01/10/d7e4cba8-­1 443-­1 1e9-­8 03c-­4 ef2831 2c8b9_story.html Zoledziowski, A. (2021, June 1). Trump’s border wall has destroyed Indigenous sacred sites for good. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7v43x/ trumps-border-wall-hasdestroyed-indigenous-sacred-sites-for-good

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

Abstract  For over 20 years now, risk management has been central to the strategic outlook and security practices of the US and other Western states. This has resulted in wars, other military actions, and several other problematic attempts at risk management. Risk has been deployed to represent certain bodies as dangerous and, on this basis, justify sovereign violence that, at best, involves violations of civil and human rights and, at worst, sees the physical destruction of ‘risky’ bodies. Trump’s wall and travel ban are only the latest in a series of discriminatory and biased risk management initiatives that have been justified in the name of security. We must continue to be alert to the problematic aspects of processes of riskisation and their consequences. Keywords  Risk • Embodied • Everyday Upon assuming office in January 2021, the Biden administration ended both the wall and the travel ban. On his very first day in office, Biden issued Proclamation 10141—Ending Discriminatory Bans on Entry to the United States, revoking Executive Order 13780 and Proclamations 9645, 9723, and 9983 that had been issued by Trump (White House, 2021a). Proclamation 10141 stated that the travel ban was a ‘stain on our national conscience’ and that rather than preventing risks, it had posed serious risks © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 W. Clapton, Immigration, Risk, and Security Under the Trump Administration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2344-9_6

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to and had undermined national security (White House, 2021a). Proclamation 10142, Termination of National Emergency with Respect to the Southern Border of the United States and Redirection of Funds Diverted to Border Wall Construction, as the title suggests, ended border wall construction (White House, 2021b). It described the wall as ‘not a serious policy solution’ that was a waste of money and diverted attention from genuine risks to US security (White House, 2021b). Construction projects were to be paused as soon as practical, and the Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security were directed to work with the Secretary of Treasury, the Attorney General, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and any other relevant executive departments and agencies to redirect wall construction funding (White House, 2021b). Clearly, the ‘risk calculus’ of the new Biden administration regarding migrants and immigration differs markedly from that of its predecessor, as does its broader representation of migrants and the Muslim and Latinx communities identified as undesirable by Trump. However, this does not mean that the perceived risks associated with immigration have suddenly dissipated or that risk is no longer an animating concept of the US’ strategic outlook and security policy and practice. Regarding the former, Trump and his allies remain convinced of the need for strong risk management measures to prevent risks and secure the US homeland against the potential dangers posed by migrants. The Texas state government remains committed to building its own walls and barriers along its border with Mexico, and both Trump and other Republican officials have been strongly critical of Biden’s immigration policies since he took office. Whether one defines or understands the policy issues presented by the Mexico-US border in terms of security and risk or not, very serious challenges remain. The number of migrants presenting at the border has risen considerably, and Biden has faced strong criticism for the continued deportations of irregular migrants. For example, the Biden administration has kept in place a Trump administration policy known as ‘Title 42 expulsions’, which is aimed at preventing the spread of COVID-19 and allows immigration and border officials to expel almost all undocumented migrants seeking entry (BBC, 2021). While Biden has stopped wall construction, he has not yet moved to tear down the sections of wall that Trump built and remediate the lands damaged by construction. Chapter 3 demonstrated that a broad focus on risk has been a consistent feature of the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, even if the specific risk management initiatives that each pursued differ. As of writing,

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it is still relatively early in Biden’s term, but certainly some have already suggested that there are significant continuities between his administration and Trump’s (see, e.g., Haas, 2021). With specific regard to the logic of risk informing its predecessors’ security outlook and policies, early signs are that risk remains an important frame through which the Biden administration understands the security challenges facing the US. Biden has continued with drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere as a means of managing terrorist risks. His administration also published an interim ‘National Security Strategic Guidance’ document in March 2021. This document outlines the debounded nature of the security risks confronting the US, noting that they ‘respect no borders or walls’, and outlines several risks that the US seeks to prevent (White House, 2021c: 7). These include terrorism, what the document refers to as the ‘existential risk’ of climate change, and future pandemics and disease outbreaks (White House, 2021c: 9–22). Uncertainty and a focus on preventing future catastrophe continue to inform US leaders and defence and security decision-makers, as does the sense of a rapidly shifting and changing world in which global economic and security dynamics are in a constant state of flux. This means that focus continues to be placed on preventing possible futures. Again, this understanding of complex, spatially and temporally debounded risks is discursively constructed. While actors’ interactions with their physical and material environments, and how this shapes their perceptions, matter, ultimately risk can only exist in discourse and in our imaginations of what the future might bring. As argued above, identity, norms, and values matter a great deal here. Across the Bush, Obama, and the Trump administrations, risk was racialised and gendered, with both critical to the identification and definition of who, and what bodies, were deemed risky. Risk and riskiness were represented as inherent to certain brown and black bodies in ways that did not apply to other people. Riskiness is also gendered—the risks that the Trump administration associated with Latinx or Muslim males and females, for example, differed. Values and norms remain important too. For the Bush administration, liberal democratic values and institutions, or the lack thereof, informed the riskiness of a particular state or territory. Biden, too, has stressed democratic values in his recent security policy statements. His interim strategic guidance document argues that liberalism, democracy, and American values remain the best means for securing the US and protecting peace and freedom around the world. Again, this underscores how important

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identity, values, and broader discursive and representational contexts are to understanding risk, its operationalisation in security policy and strategic doctrine, and its management, included who and what is targeted for said management. This is one of the strengths of the riskisation framework—its explicit focus on norms, values, identity, and discourse means that it captures the ways in which all shape prevailing understandings of risk, how risk and its management are represented, and how this can change over time. Crucially though, the story does not end with the articulations of risk or risk management practices pursued by political elites and decision-­ makers. Elite discourses of risk and its management are themselves divergent, inconsistent, and contested, as the political fighting over the wall and travel ban demonstrate. Presidents can advance specific representations of risk, but these can and usually will be contested and resisted by political opponents within Congress and beyond. More importantly, elite discourses of risk are entangled within wider societal and everyday understandings of risk, its management, and the impact at both the national and local level. The agency of both elite and everyday actors is important— both play a significant role in shaping and determining the evolution of a process of riskisation. In much of the risk literature, everyday agency and resistance to risk and risk management are overlooked, with much of the focus, especially in those works employing Beck’s risk society thesis, generally only on what different administrations and governments are saying and doing. Capturing broader processes of resistance and agency provides a more holistic understanding of how riskisation plays out and the factors influencing and informing this. The general lack of focus on the everyday in the literature on risk and security is an issue within IR more broadly. Too often, much of the discipline of IR forgets people, content instead to focus on abstract theorising or state, international, or global level analysis. Contextual richness is lost, but more importantly, so too are the impacts, experiences, and agency of everyday people. One of the aims of the riskisation framework has been to capture both elite and everyday experiences of risk management, and how Presidents, politicians, civil society organisations, and everyday people have mobilised to defend or oppose the processes of riskisation represented by the wall and the travel ban. Focusing solely on the actions of state decision-makers overlooks the ways in which the agency of a wider variety of actors and their actions influence riskisation. Decision-makers

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and leaders do not operate in a vacuum—they are influenced, enabled, and constrained by a variety of actors. The lack of focus on people also leads to the issue of the relative neglect of the impacts of risk management on everyday people. Generally, there has been a lack of attention paid to how risk management specifically affects local populations where risk management activities take place, or those individuals and communities that are regarded as risky, dangerous, or undesirable. While there has been a greater focus on the embodied nature of risk and its management, as well as the localised, everyday impacts of both, within post-structuralist works on risk, the ‘Beckian’ literature on risk has said relatively less on this issue. It has focused more on the importance of risk to national security policies and strategic doctrines. As demonstrated above, the impacts of risk management activities can be severe for some people. These impacts have been well-documented regarding Muslims and Latinx peoples in the US and beyond across a range of disciplines and popular media. Violence, harassment and abuse, and increased surveillance and encounters with law enforcement and border security personnel are just some of the impacts and consequences that Muslim and Latinx peoples have faced. They have been actively othered and discriminated against in the US and, in the case of Muslim peoples, across the wider Western world. First Nations peoples and communities have also been forced to bear considerable costs and losses as part of the construction of Trump’s wall. The destruction of sacred sites and other sites of cultural, religious, and agricultural significance on the lands of First Nations communities reflects both the impacts of wall construction and the US government’s disregard for the voices, perspectives, and histories of First Nations peoples. In this sense, the wall is a continuation of structures and processes of settler colonialism in the US, silencing, marginalising, and eliminating First Nations peoples through the destruction of their culture and lands. Understanding the politics of risk must include a consideration of the effects of representations of risk and attempts at its management, and the embedding of both within broader social structures, institutions, and relations of power. Again, for certain communities, risk poses specific hazards and dangers. Finally, riskisation also demonstrates that there is a considerable dynamism associated with the discourse and practice of risk. Despite the commonalities in the security logic of risk informing the security policies and practices of the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, each employed distinct approaches and engaged in different forms of risk management.

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While not a focus of this book, the exceptional risk management practices examined above (regime change, drone strikes, and the wall and travel ban), exist alongside a host of more routine, everyday forms of surveillance, insurance, and control in the US (and elsewhere) that are designed to mitigate risk. Different discursive contexts informed each administration’s representation of risk, with Trump more overtly relying on gendered and racialised representations of Muslim and Latinx peoples to identify and articulate risks and advance his case for a wall and travel ban. Still, this was not unique to Trump, and again he drew upon long histories in the US of the othering of Muslims, Latinx peoples, and migrants more generally. However, compared to Bush and (to a lesser extent) Obama, Trump was significantly less inclined to identify democratic values or democracy promotion as fundamental to managing security risks. For over 20 years now, risk management has been central to the strategic outlook and security practices of the US and other Western states. This has resulted in wars, other military actions, and several other problematic attempts at risk management. Risk has been deployed to represent certain bodies as dangerous and, on this basis, justify sovereign violence that, at best, involves violations of civil and human rights and, at worst, sees the physical destruction of ‘risky’ bodies. Trump’s wall and travel ban are only the latest in a series of discriminatory and biased risk management initiatives that have been justified in the name of security. As there are currently no signs, as of writing, that risk will soon ‘go away’, we must continue to be alert to the problematic aspects of processes of riskisation and to understand that risk is embedded within historical and contemporary structures and practices of marginalisation and discrimination. Risk is never objective or neutral, but always subjective, constructed, contested, and embodied.

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White House. (2021b). Proclamation on the termination of emergency with respect to the southern border of the United States and redirection of funds diverted to border wall construction. Retrieved March 2, 2021, from https://www.whiteh o u s e . g o v / b r i e f i n g -­r o o m / p r e s i d e n t i a l -­a c t i o n s / 2 0 2 1 / 0 1 / 2 0 / proclamation-­termination-­of-­emergency-­with-­respect-­to-­southern-­border-­of-­ united-­states-­and-­redirection-­of-­funds-­diverted-­to-­border-­wall-­construction/ White House. (2021c). Interim national security strategic guidance. Retrieved October 26, 2021, from https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-­content/uploads/ 2021/03/NSC-­1v2.pdf

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Index1

A Afghanistan, 2001 invasion of, 17, 21, 26, 38, 39, 41, 44 ‘America First’ approach, 59–61, 72, 85, 111 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 78, 80, 83, 90, 92, 93, 120 B Beck, Ulrich, 4, 6, 11–18, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 49, 136 and risk society (see Risk, society) and risk wars (see Risk, wars) Biden administration and Presidential Proclamation 10141, 133 and Presidential Proclamation 10142, 134 Borders and border control, 20, 60, 61, 68–71, 76, 90, 94, 103, 104

and irregular border crossings, 106, 110, 114, 124 as risk, 13, 60, 102, 105, 107, 115, 124, 134 Bush administration, 4, 12, 22, 28, 35, 36, 38–48, 50, 53, 58, 85, 94, 106, 135 D Doctrine of anticipatory self-defence, 4, 22, 39 Drones, 4, 27, 37, 45, 48–61, 69, 135, 138 E Emotions, 57 Everyday resistance, 121, 136 and risk management, 20, 136, 137 Executive Order 13767, 2, 102, 107

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 W. Clapton, Immigration, Risk, and Security Under the Trump Administration, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2344-9

161

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INDEX

Executive Order 13769, 2, 68, 75, 77, 81, 82, 84, 86 Executive Order 13780, 81–84, 86, 133 Executive Order 13790, 81 G Government shutdown, 2, 102, 105, 109, 110, 112, 112n3, 117 I Immigration, 2–5, 12, 17, 20, 27, 36, 60, 61, 67–74, 77, 81, 83, 89, 90n4, 91, 95, 103–105, 107, 108, 111, 114, 115, 122, 125, 134 as security issue, 3 Imminence, 22, 39, 40, 51, 58 Iraq, 2003 invasion of, 4, 15, 21, 26, 38, 39, 41, 44 N National emergency, declaration of, 2, 102, 111, 114, 115, 117, 122 O Obama administration, 4, 27, 36, 48–60, 77, 103, 106

everyday, 25, 26, 117, 136 Risk constructed nature of, 41 debounded nature of, 45, 89, 135 definition of, 18, 23, 24 as gendered and racialised, 27, 55, 56, 72, 74, 95, 106, 138 logic of, 3–6, 12, 18, 19, 21, 26, 29, 36, 38, 39, 41–44, 46, 49, 51, 57, 58, 61, 75, 76, 79, 80, 83, 87, 95, 135, 137 post-structuralist approach to, 4, 6, 12, 13, 16, 17, 24, 29 and the riskisation framework, 23, 28, 62, 125, 136 and risk management, 4–7, 12, 16, 20–23, 25, 26, 28, 29, 36, 38, 39, 41, 43–45, 47–50, 52–54, 57–61, 68, 69, 72–74, 78, 80, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 102, 108, 110, 112, 117, 121–125, 134, 136–138 and risk society framework, 25, 28 and situational risk management, 3, 6, 12, 36–39, 44, 45, 48, 52, 53, 58, 61, 62, 68, 75, 80, 82, 111, 115, 124, 125 society, 4, 6, 12–15, 17–19, 22, 23, 25, 28, 29, 136 wars, 49, 50

P The Patriot Act, 45–47

S Surveillance, 20, 22, 27, 36, 38, 45–47, 53–57, 61, 69, 72, 110, 137, 138

R Resistance, 5, 7, 23, 25, 26, 68, 74, 78, 80, 87, 90, 91, 95, 102, 103, 109–112, 114–122, 125, 136

T Travel ban criticisms of, 79 and legal action, 80

 INDEX 

and Muslim populations, 71, 73 and Presidential Proclamation 9645, 86 and Presidential Proclamation 9983, 90 resistance to, 5, 7, 68, 78, 80, 91, 122, 136 Trump administration, 2–7, 20, 29, 35–62, 70, 77, 78, 80–86, 89, 91, 92, 94, 109, 110, 116, 118, 120–124, 134, 135, 137 W Wall cost of, 109, 110, 137 criticisms of, 124

163

and declaration of national emergency, 2, 102, 105, 111, 114, 115, 117, 118, 121–125 and environmental damage, 120 and impact on First Nations communities, 117–119, 122, 123, 137 and Presidential Proclamation 9844, 115 and representations of Latinx people, 124, 125 resistance to, 5, 102, 103, 109, 110, 112, 114, 117–119, 121, 122 and US government shutdown, 2, 102 White Australian Policy, 73