The Securitization of the Migrant: CECOT and Restrictive Executive Policy

Before the Trump Administration used the Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador's Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo in March 2025, extraterritorial detention had been a tactic reserved for the highest risks to national security. Taking Guantánamo Bay as a point of departure, this thesis considers how migrants have become treated as criminal threats to public safety and security through policy and language. By using a dual methods approach with discourse analysis and text-as-data pattern recognition to analyze the text of Executive Proclamations regarding immigration, I hope to develop the understanding of implications of the construction of the migrant as a securitized subject in the years since 9/11. I posit that increasingly securitized language has played on American memories of terrorism and established the migrant as a threat to national security in popular political imagination, and that this discourse is activated by Executives seeking to pass restrictive and exceptional policy.