MADRID - Thomas Friedman’s recent column in The New York Times, in which he equated the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with Hamas, falls into an analytical simplification that ultimately obscures more than it clarifies.

The problem lies not merely in a factual imprecision or an error of scale, but in a deeper conceptual confusion regarding the nature of sovereign power, the legitimate use of violence, and its insertion into the contemporary political order. From a historical and structural perspective, the relevant analogy is not between ICE and a Palestinian resistance organization, but between ICE and the classical state apparatuses of settler colonialism, particularly those designed for the coercive management of populations deemed problematic or surplus.

This distinction is not a minor terminological dispute. On the contrary, it allows us to properly situate the genealogy of what has been described as necropolitics: the institutionalized capacity to decide which lives deserve protection, which may be exposed to extreme precarity, and under what conditions certain subjects are excluded from effective political membership. Far from being an anomaly returning from colonial peripheries, this logic is part of the foundational fabric of Western modernity and today unfolds with striking coherence in both domestic and international arenas.

By proposing a provocative comparison, Friedman overlooks the fundamental ontological difference between the entities he equates. Hamas operates from a position defined by occupation, siege, and the absence of international recognition. Its political and military room for maneuver is conditioned by a radical asymmetry, and its capacity to exercise authority is permanently contested, limited, and fragmented. ICE, by contrast, is a central agency of a fully sovereign and hegemonic state, endowed with legal authority to exercise coercion within its own territory and backed by a juridical framework that not only legitimizes but normalizes its actions.

ICE’s function is not to respond to an equivalent military threat, but to administer populations classified as irregular or undesirable within the metropolitan space. Prolonged detention without due process, family separation, accelerated deportation, and the systematic production of legal insecurity constitute ordinary tools of a technology of governance aimed at preserving a particular political and demographic order. This rationality is comparable to that of population-control apparatuses developed in settler-colonial contexts: it does not seek to defeat a symmetrical adversary, but to regulate, fragment, and contain collectives defined a priori as a problem. The separation of children at the southern U.S. border does not represent an exceptional deviation, but the contemporary application of techniques of power long rehearsed in the management of subalternized populations.

The colonial mirror: ICE and the boomerang that never left

From this perspective, it becomes necessary to rigorously question the liberal narrative that interprets these practices as the supposed “return of the imperial boomerang.” According to this reading, coercive methods developed in the colonies would have unexpectedly returned to the metropolitan center, disrupting an internal order previously governed by the rule of law. The implicit premise is that violence was originally external and that its domestic appearance constitutes a historical anomaly.

This interpretation is misleading. Necropolitical violence is not an exported technique that later comes back; it is a constitutive component of Western political architecture from its inception. The formation of the United States through the systematic displacement of Indigenous populations and an enslaved economy laid the groundwork for a dual structure: full citizenship for some, permanent exposure to coercion for others. Political liberalism has historically rested on a differential distribution of rights, in which proclaimed universality depends on the effective exclusion of subjects defined as incompletely human or politically deficient.

What we observe in ICE’s contemporary practices is not the return of an alien violence, but the internal activation of an always-available repertoire. The border does not function merely as a territorial limit, but as a privileged space for the production of categories of humanity. By narrating this violence as an external contamination, liberal discourse preserves the fiction of an essentially neutral rule-of-law state, disturbed only episodically by imperial excesses.

There are not, however, two opposing logics at work here. The same legality that protects the citizen enables the exceptionalism applied to the migrant. This is not a contradiction, but a structural complementarity. Law operates as a selective technology that produces protection for some and extreme vulnerability for others. In this sense, the violence exercised by ICE does not represent an anomaly within the liberal order, but its ordinary functioning under conditions of political, economic, and demographic pressure.
 

The persistent threat to Iran

This same logic is expressed with even greater clarity in the realm of foreign policy, where the case of Iran offers a particularly illustrative example. The relationship between the United States, its allies, and the Islamic Republic reveals the global dimension of this necropolitical rationality, in which the so-called “rules-based order” functions less as a universal normative framework than as a device for the selective legitimation of the use of force.

The events of the June 2025 war, as well as the tension that persists to this day, do not constitute an exceptional rupture. They respond to a well-established structural pattern. The Israeli offensive launched following the announcement of new negotiations in Muscat made clear the instrumentalization of the diplomatic process as tactical cover for a planned military action. This was not a system failure, but a coherent use of its ambiguities, executed with U.S. material and political backing.
The strategic impact was considerable. Residual confidence in the usefulness of Western diplomatic channels was severely damaged. In this context, negotiation ceases to be perceived as a mechanism of de-escalation and comes to be understood as a potentially hostile space. Thus, at the international level, the same logic that governs the domestic sphere is reproduced: the norm is not openly violated, but selectively suspended for those previously defined as an exception.

The reaction of European capitals after the conflict confirmed this asymmetry. The preemptive condemnation of Iran and the automatic reiteration of the right to self-defense of the actor that had initiated hostilities revealed an institutionalized double standard. Iran consistently appears as the problematic subject, whose mere capacity to respond is interpreted as aggression. The declared neutrality of international institutions functions, in practice, as a mechanism for stabilizing the existing power imbalance.

For Iran, and for broad sectors of the Global South, this episode consolidated a strategic and cognitive rupture. The expectation that the international system could offer minimal guarantees of predictability or restraint was profoundly eroded. Diplomacy thus reveals itself as yet another terrain of confrontation, where structural asymmetry predetermines outcomes.

The consequence is a comprehensible strategic reorientation. Defensive self-sufficiency—military, technological, and economic- ceases to be an ideological option and becomes a basic condition of survival. It does not respond to an expansionist impulse, but to a rational reading of an environment in which multilateral guarantees operate selectively.

The lesson is sober and devoid of unnecessary dramatization. Tension with Iran is not the product of a diplomatic misunderstanding that could be corrected through procedural adjustments. It is the predictable result of an order that distributes sovereignty hierarchically. The United States does not face an existential threat, but rather the challenge posed by the persistence of actors unwilling to accept subordinate integration. Likewise, migrant populations at the U.S. border do not constitute an invasion, but the terrain upon which the state reasserts its capacity for exception.

To understand the connection between a migration raid in Texas and an attack on a strategic facility in Iran is to grasp the unified logic of contemporary power: a logic that does not distinguish between internal and external borders and that manifests itself less in extreme figures than in normalized administrative practices. In this context, resistance, expressed in different political grammars, appears not as a maximalist ideological assertion, but as a minimal political response to an order whose only effective alternative remains subordination or exclusion.