by Jacob G. Hornberger

September 10, 2026

There is one thing that every libertarian supporter of the decades-long, deadly, and destructive U.S. immigration-control system and the harsh and brutal immigration police state that comes with it should be fully aware of: the nationwide immigration police-state tyranny will become a permanent part of American life.

That should especially matter to libertarians for one simple reason: libertarians want to live a life of freedom, but the problem is that an immigration police state is the opposite of freedom — it is a destroyer of freedom. It is impossible to have a genuinely free society and an immigration police state. One has to make a choice.

Look at the U.S.-Mexico border. Long ago, the immigration police state became a permanent part of life in the borderlands. There is a simple reason for that: As the immigration-control system failed to “secure” the border, the federal government would enact a new police-state measure. But that police-state measure would fail to “secure” the border. That required a new police-state measure, but the previous police-state measure — the one that had failed to “secure” the border — wasn’t repealed. It became a permanent part of people’s lives along the border.

But then the second police-state measure also failed to “secure” the border. And so the same thing would happen. The feds would enact a never-ending series of police-state measures because all of the previous ones failed to “secure” the border. Each new police-state measure would be piled onto all the old, failed police-state measures. They all became a permanent part of life along the border.

Consider, for example, warrantless searches of ranches and farms along the border or near the border. I had personal experience with this police-state measure because I grew up on a farm along the Rio Grande. The Border Patrol could trespass onto our farm whenever it wanted. If we put a lock on our gate near the main highway and didn’t give them a key, they would shoot the lock off the gate and enter anyway. The idea was that if the Border Patrol wielded the omnipotent authority to “patrol” all the lands on or near the border, the border would finally be “secure.” They busted our workers because they were illegal, but what good did it do? The immigration police state just kept going on and on, year after year, decade after decade, just like, for that matter, the drug war.

In other words, those tyrannical trespasses and warrantless searches didn’t succeed in “securing” the border. But that didn’t motivate the feds to repeal this tyrannical police-state measure. Instead, they just enacted more police-state measures. For example, they made it a civil offense and, in some cases, a criminal offense for American citizens to hire, house, or care for illegal immigrants. That would surely “secure” the border, right? If illegal immigrants couldn’t get jobs or housing, they’d stop coming, right? Nope. That didn’t work either.

As each decade passed, more and more police-state measures were adopted, such as domestic highway checkpoints that subject travelers to interrogation and vehicle searches even though they’ve never entered Mexico. Another related police-state measure was roving Border Patrol searches, where the Border Patrol agents would simply stop vehicles at random and subject the driver to interrogation and search. I was the victim of this type of search in high school.

Over time, people along the border became accustomed to all these police-state measures, just as a frog in a vat of water gets accustomed to the water warming up.  Sometimes there would be temporary protest movements against some of the measures, but over time people came to realize that the federal government was just too powerful. Nothing could stop the immigration police-state juggernaut. A good example of this phenomenon was Trump’s Berlin Wall and the forcible taking of people’s property against their will through eminent domain to build it.

But Trump’s much ballyhooed Berlin Wall didn’t work to “secure” the border either. To truly “secure” the border, Trump knew that he had to bust the police state out of the borderlands and expand it all across the nation. How else could he ferret out all the illegal immigrants who had made it through the borderlands police state? How else to cleanse America of all the illegal immigrant “invaders”? After all, if Trump left illegal immigrants north of the borderlands alone, then every illegal immigrant would know that all he would have to do is make it through the borderlands and he’d be home free. Trump realized that if he was going to succeed in “securing” the border, he needed ICE, the Border Patrol, the FBI, and the agents of the Nazi-sounding “Homeland” Security imposing harsh, even deadly, police-state measures all across the nation.

But make no mistake about it: those police-state measures aren’t going away after the cleansing process is complete. If they went away, then the illegal immigrant “invaders” would return. The nationwide immigration police state will become as permanent as the borderlands police state has become. And Americans will come to accept it, just as borderland Americans have come to accept it. Worst of all, they will come to view the immigration police state as part and parcel of their “free” society. Why, they might even get to the point where they thank ICE, the Border Patrol, the FBI, and Homeland Security agents for their “service” in protecting their “freedom.”

After all, like the war on illegal immigration, the drug war has been waged for decades, also without success. As everyone knows, the nationwide drug-war police state, including now the omnipotent and tyrannical power of due-process-free assassination, has become a permanent part of American society. The same thing will happen with the immigration police state, which, needless to say, is problematic for anyone, especially libertarians, who still wishes to live in a genuinely free society before he dies.