Back in the early 1960s, when Dwight D. Eisenhower was leaving office, the outgoing president warned the American people of the growing influence private military contractors had over our government.
“We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,” Eisenhower said in his farewell address, “by the military-industrial complex.”
This term, decades later and numerous misguided military interventions later, has become ubiquitous within the American political lexicon. The concept of an industrial complex is used to describe many other private industries, given certain political conditions, supercharged by the lobbying of wealthy interests.
Now, amid President Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign disguised as immigration enforcement, there is a relatively new private enterprise whose wheels are being greased by a rapid influx of government funding and a swell of xenophobic political animus — the anti-immigrant industrial complex.
Sitting at the forefront of this nefarious industry is the state of Tennessee.