State Violence Escalates Across Borders as Power Protects Itself
The pattern is unmistakable: state apparatuses across multiple continents are upgrading their capacity for violence against people who challenge capital and its ideological enforcers. The evidence arrives in fragments — a procurement order here, a disciplinary hearing there, a police visit to a woman's home — but the architecture is shared.
The Department of Homeland Security plans to spend $20 million to equip Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents with gloves that can deliver an electric shock, and a law enforcement officer's recently unearthed admission left multiple immigration advocates stunned. The technology turns every encounter into a potential torture session, designed for the caged and the disappeared. Documents from ICE's investigation into the Sunrise Movement show an agent volunteered to build tools for "direct-action" protests, revealing how the agency infiltrates and provokes the very movements it criminalizes.
On September 16, 2025, Devion Canty was forced to withdraw from Texas State University just two weeks into his first semester after he attended a protest at a campus "memorial" for Charlie Kirk, head of the white supremacist group Turning Point USA. The university chose to protect the fascist's platform and punish the Black student who objected. The administration functions as a shield for white power.
Women in India who joined protests face widespread online abuse and visits from the police — a dual assault where digital mobs and state agents coordinate to enforce patriarchal silence. The police visits are not protection; they are intimidation, reminding women that dissent carries a price the state will collect.
In Britain, the state seeks to destroy Palestine Action through rigged "terrorism" trials where a judge has threatened defendants with a "terrorism connection" if they explain their motives, muzzling defendants and blinding jurors. The British legal system operates as an arm of imperial complicity.
An AlterNet editor writes: "Today in America, tired, desperate sailors are jumping off aircraft carriers , masked government agents armed with guns and cattle prods are murdering and caging innocent people, proverbial and real wrecking balls…" The USS Abraham Lincoln had been docked in the Middle East for over 260 days, its crew exhausted by endless deployment. The cattle prod is not metaphor; it is the precursor to the shock glove. The logic is continuous: the border, the campus, the street, the courtroom — each site where the state tests new instruments of compliance.
These are not isolated abuses. They are a system learning from itself. The university disciplines the student who names white supremacy; the border agency procures torture tools for the agents who cage migrants and infiltrates the movements that oppose them; the patriarchal state deploys police to the homes of women who refuse silence; the imperial legal system criminalizes solidarity with the colonized. Capital requires this repression. It requires the university to legitimize its ideologues, the border to discipline the global workforce, the patriarchy to suppress the reproductive and social labor of women, the courts to protect its geopolitical interests.
The cost is borne by the bodies on the receiving end: the migrant shocked in a detention cell, the student erased from the roster, the woman answering a knock at her door, the activist silenced in a rigged court. The organized left sees the connections. The task is to make them ungovernable.