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UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD: CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE BORDER-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
IN THE TRUMP ERA  
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Tod Miller
June 3, 2025
The Border Chronicle
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_ Climate displacement and border enforcement--two dynamics trending
distinctly upward--are on a collision course _

At the Border Security Expo in April. “Securing Borders Around the
World.” , Photo by Todd Miller

 

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, I HAD A TRANSCENDENT EXPERIENCE at this year’s
Border Security Expo [[link removed]], the annual
event that brings Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) together with private industry. I
hesitate to describe it that way, though, because I was on the
exhibition hall floor and instantly found myself in the very heart of
the U.S. border-industrial complex. It was early April and I was
surrounded by the latest surveillance equipment — camera systems,
drones, robodogs — from about 225 companies (a record number for
such an event) displaying their wares at that Phoenix Convention
Center. Many of the people there seemed all too excited that Donald
Trump was once again president.

You might wonder how it’s even possible to have a mystical
experience while visiting this country’s largest annual border
surveillance fair and I would agree, especially since my moment came
just after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gave
the keynote speech to a packed convention center ballroom. Perhaps you
won’t be surprised to learn that Noem, who had infamously worn a
$50,000 Rolex
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watch to a Salvadoran “terrorism” prison photo shoot just weeks
before, received rousing ovation after ovation, as she claimed that
the Trump administration had almost achieved “operational control”
of the U.S.-Mexican border. (Only a little more to go, she insisted!)
The same point had been made by “border czar” Thomas Homan earlier
that day. Both asked the audience to give standing ovations to all
border law enforcement officials in the room for, as Noem put it,
enduring the “train wreck and poor leadership of Joe Biden leading
this country.” And like those who preceded her, she used words like
“invasion” abundantly, suggesting that an all-too-fragile United
States was battling a siege of unknown proportions.

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After a standing ovation for “border czar” Thomas Homan at the
Border Security Expo in April. (Photo by Todd Miller)

The late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano had a name
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such an experience: an “upside-down world,” he called it. In such
a world, we’re presented not with the facts but their very opposite.
For the border-industrial complex, however, it’s just such an
inverted world that sells their product.

Then it happened. I was walking down a corridor lined with drone
companies, including one from India called ideaForge
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“built like a bird” and “tested like a tank.” There were also
sophisticated artificial intelligence camera systems mounted on masts
atop armored ground drones, which might be considered the perfect
combination of today’s modern border technology. There was also the
company Fat Truck [[link removed]], whose vehicles had
tires taller than my car. X-ray and biometric systems surrounded me,
along with green-uniformed Border Patrol agents, sheriffs from border
counties, and ICE agents checking the equipment. As always, you could
practically smell the cash in the air. Of my 13 years covering the
Border Security Expo, this was clearly the largest and most
enthusiastic one ever.

I was walking through it all on one of those worn blue carpets found
in convention centers and then, suddenly, I wasn’t walking there at
all. Instead, I was in the Sierra Tarahumara in the state of
Chihuahua, Mexico, with a Rarámuri man named Mario Quiroz. I had been
there with him the previous week, so it was indeed a memory, but so
vivid it essentially overcame me. I could smell the forest near the
Copper Canyon, one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I could
see Quiroz showing me the drying yellowish trees cracking everywhere
amid a mega-drought of staggering proportions. I could even catch a
glimpse of the fractured Río Conchos, the Mexican river that, at the
border, would become the Rio Grande. It was drying up and the trees
along it were dying, while many local people were finding that they
had little choice but to migrate elsewhere to make ends meet

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Mario Quiroz walking on the dry bed of the Rio Conchos in the Sierra
Tarahumara in March. (Photo by Todd Miller).

I had to sit down. When I did, I suddenly found myself back at the
expo in that stale air-conditioned environment that only promises yet
more surveillance towers and drones on that very border. Then came the
realization that gave me pause: although that devastated Sierra
Tarahumara terrain and the Border Security Expo couldn’t be more
different, they are, in fact, also intimately connected. After all,
Sierra Tarahumara represents the all too palpable and devastating
reality of climate change and the way it’s already beginning to
displace people, while the Expo represented my country’s most
prominent response to that displacement (and the Global North’s more
generally). For the United States — increasingly so in the age of
Donald Trump — the only answer to the climate crisis and its mass
displacement of people is yet more border enforcement.

“UNWANTED STARVING IMMIGRANTS”

Consider the 2003 Pentagon-commissioned report entitled
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_An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United
States National Security_. It stated, “The United States and
Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their
countries because they have the resources and reserves to achieve
self-sufficiency.” It also predicted that “borders will be
strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving
immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem),
Mexico, and South America.” Twenty-two years later, that prophecy
— if the Border Security Expo is any indication — is coming true.

In 2007, Leon Fuerth, former national security adviser to Vice
President Al Gore, wrote that “border problems” will overwhelm
American capabilities “beyond the possibility of control, except by
drastic measures and perhaps not even then.” His thoughts were a
response to a request from the House of Representatives for scientists
and military practitioners to offer serious projections connecting
climate change and national security. The result would be the book
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Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of
Climate Change._ Since, according to its editor Kurt Campbell, it
would take 30 years for a major military platform to go from the
“drawing board to the battlefield,” that volume was, indeed, a
book of preparation for a bordered future that only now is beginning
to truly envelop us.

In March, I stood on a hill in the town of Sisoguichi in Chihuahua,
Mexico, with the local priest, Héctor Fernando Martínez, who told me
people there wouldn’t be planting corn, beans, and squash at all
this year because of the drought. They feared it would never again
rain. And it was true that the drought in Chihuahua was the worst
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ever seen, affecting not only the mountains but also the valleys where
drying lakes
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and reservoirs had left farmers without water for the 2025
agricultural cycle.

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View of barren fields in Sisoguichi. (Photo by Todd Miller).

“What do people do instead?” I asked the priest. “Migrate,” he
told me. Many people already migrate for half the year to supplement
their incomes, picking apples near Cuauhtémoc or chiles near Camargo.
Others end up in the city of Ciudad Juárez, working in maquiladoras
(factories) to produce goods for Walmart, Target, and warplane
manufacturers, among other places. Some, of course, also try to cross
into the United States, only to encounter the same technology and
weaponry that was before my eyes that day at the Border Security Expo.

Those displacements, anticipated in assessments from the early 2000s,
are already happening in an ever more unnerving fashion. The Internal
Displacement Monitoring Center reports that each year now about 22.4
million people are forcibly displaced
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by “weather-related hazards.” And projections for future migration
are startling. The World Bank estimates that, by 2050, 216 million
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people could be on the move globally, while another report
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speculates that the number could even hit 1.2 billion. Multiple
factors influence people’s decisions to migrate, of course, but
climate change is rapidly becoming a (if not the) most prominent one.

Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to banish climate change
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from all government documents and discourse and quite literally wipe
it out
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as a subject of any interest at all, the DHS’s 2025 _Homeland Threat
Assessment
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describes what’s going on in Chihuahua and elsewhere all too well:
“Natural disasters or extreme weather events abroad that disrupt
local economies or result in food insecurity have the potential to
exacerbate migration flows to the United States.” The 2021 _DHS
Climate Action Plan [//hidden/]_ stated that the department would
“conduct integrated, scalable, agile, and synchronized steady-state
operations… to secure the Southern Border and Approaches.” It
turns out that the “operational control” Kristi Noem mentioned at
the Border Security Expo includes preparations for potential
climate-induced mass migration. That hellish dystopic world
(envisioned in movies like _Mad Max_) is coming to you directly from
Trump’s Department of Homeland Security along the U.S.-Mexican
border.

THE BORDER-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX IN ACTION

As I continued through that expo hall, I recalled walking in
drought-stricken Chihuahua and thought about what’s now happening on
our border to face the human nightmare of climate change in an
all-too-military fashion. Ominously enough, the company Akima, which
operates the ICE detention center in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, was a
prime sponsor of the Expo and I saw its name prominently displayed.
Its website indicates that it is “now hiring
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effectively framing the mass deportations promised by Trump as a good
opportunity for volunteers.

One booth for the company QinteQ displayed a ground robot resembling a
multilegged insect. I wondered how this could help with the Chihuahuan
drought. A vendor told me it could be used for bomb disposal. When I
gave him a look of disbelief, he mentioned that he’d heard of a
couple of cases of bombs found at the border. At another company, UI
Path, an enthusiastic vendor claimed their software was focused on
administrative “efficiency” and, he assured me, was well
“aligned with DOGE” (Elon Musk’s Department of Government
Efficiency), allowing Border Patrol agents to not have to handle the
“tedious tasks,” so that they could “go out in the field.” I
then asked about their success with the Border Patrol and he replied,
“They already have our program. They are already using it.”

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Surveillance tower at the Border Security Expo. (Photo by Todd
Miller).

When I approached the Matthews Environmental Solutions booth, the
vendors weren’t there. But behind a lone green chair, a large
placard stated that the company was one of the “global leaders in
waste incineration,” with over 5,000 installations worldwide. A
photo of a large metal waste incinerator caught my eye, somewhat
morbidly, because the website also said that the company offered
“cremation systems
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weren’t selling that service at the Border Security Expo, there was
certainly a macabre symbolism to such an expo where human ashes could
be converted into profit and suffering into revenue.

Forecasters at the global management consulting firm IMARC Group
cheerily project an even more robust global homeland security market
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growing number and severity of natural disasters and public health
emergencies,” they write, “is offering a favorable homeland
security market outlook.” By IMARC’s calculations, the industry
will grow from $635.90 billion this year to $997.82 billion by 2033, a
nearly 5% growth rate. The company Market and Markets, however,
predicts
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a far quicker ascent, estimating that the market will reach $905
billion by next year. The consensus, in short, is that, in the age of
climate change, homeland security will soon be on the verge of
becoming a trillion-dollar industry — and just imagine what future
Border Security Expos will be like then!

Certainly, the Trump administration, eager to toss out anything
related to climate change funding while also working hard
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to increase the production of fossil fuels, has ambitious plans to
contribute to that very reality. Since January, U.S. Customs and
Border Protection (CBP) and ICE have already put out about $2.5
billion
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in contracts. It’s still early, but that number is actually lower
than Joe Biden’s pace a year ago; his spending reached $9 billion
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at the end of fiscal year 2024. Despite constant accusations from
Trump and others that Joe Biden maintained “open borders,” he
finished his term as the top contractor
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of any president when it came to border and immigration enforcement
and so set a high bar for Trump.

In 2025, Trump is operating with a CBP and ICE budget
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of $29.4 billion, slightly lower than Biden’s 2024 one, but
historically high (approximately $10 billion more [//hidden/] than
when he started his first term as president in 2017). The change,
however, will come next year, as the administration is asking for $175
billion
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for the Department of Homeland Security, an increase of $43.8 billion
“to fully implement the President’s mass removal campaign, finish
construction of the border wall on the Southwest border, procure
advanced border security technology, modernize the fleet and
facilities of the Coast Guard, and enhance Secret Service protective
operations.”

On top of that on May 22nd, the House of Representatives passed the
One Big Beautiful Bill Act
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that, among other things, would infuse $160 billion more in funding
into the CBP and ICE budgets over the next four and a half years. As
Adam Isaacson from the Washington Office on Latin America stated
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“We have never seen anything come close to the level of border
hardening and massive deportation enforcement resources foreseen in
this bill” that will now go to a vote in the Senate. This may
explain the industry’s optimism; they sense a potential bonanza to
come.

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A cracked tree in the Sierra Tarahumara. (Photo by Todd Miller).

Despite Trump’s deep urge to erase global warming from
consideration, climate displacement and border protection — two
dynamics trending distinctly upward — are on a collision course. The
United States, the world’s largest historic carbon emitter
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had already been spending 11 times
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border and immigration enforcement than on climate finance and, under
President Trump, those proportions are set to become even more
stunningly abysmal. U.S. climate policy now boils down to this:
reducing fossil fuel extraction and consumption are far less important
(if important at all) than the creation of a profitable border and
immigration apparatus. In fact, the dystopia of the Border Security
Expo I saw that day _is _the U.S. response to the drought in Chihuahua
and so much else involving the overheating of this planet. And yet,
when it comes to this country, whatever Donald Trump may want to
believe, no border wall can actually stop climate change itself.

As I listened to Kristi Noem and Thomas Homan discuss what they
considered to be a besieged country, I thought of Galeano’s
provocative analysis of that inverted world where the oppressor
becomes the oppressed and the oppressed the oppressor. That world now
includes fires, floods, increasingly devastating storms, and
encroaching seas, all to be met with high-tech cameras, biometrics,
robotic dogs, and formidable walls.

I still can’t shake my vision of those yellowish hues on the dying
trees in the Sierra Tarahumara. I walked with Quiroz down that canyon
to the Río Conchos River and out onto its bed of dried stones that
crunched like bones underfoot. Quiroz told me he came to that
then-flowing river every day as a kid to tend to his family’s goats.
I asked how he felt about it now that it looked like a bunch of
disconnected puddles stretching before us to the horizon.
“_Tristeza_,” he told me.

Walking the halls of the expo, I felt the weight of that word:
_sadness_. Sadness, indeed, in this thoroughly upside-down borderworld
of ours.

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* Climate Displacement; US Border Security; ICE; Drought; Mexico;
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