[[link removed]]

TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION NIGHTMARE: IT IS HAPPENING HERE (LONG)  
[[link removed]]


 

Radley Balko
December 24, 2025
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most
cherished pillars of a free society. And the experts agree: It’s all
going to get much, much worse. _

Illustration by Brian Stauffer / The New Republic,

 

Donald Trump’s assault on the city of Chicago began in September,
and it claimed its first casualty quickly. As Reuters would later
report
[[link removed]],
on September 12, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez dropped his kids off at
their school in the suburb of Franklin Park on his way to his job at a
diner on the northwest side. Villegas-Gonzalez had come to the United
States in 2007 to flee the violence in his home state of Michoacán,
Mexico—violence wrought by the Mexican government’s militarization
of its drug war, a policy encouraged and funded by the United States.
(In November, the mayor of the city of Uruapan was assassinated
[[link removed]]
after calling for a crackdown on organized crime.)

Described by friends and co-workers as kind and soft-spoken,
Villegas-Gonzalez had two sons and met a woman from his hometown as he
worked long hours in kitchens around the city.

After he dropped off his sons on the morning of September 12, two
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers approached the
38-year-old in his car. He put the vehicle in reverse and attempted to
flee. One officer continued to chase him on foot and eventually fired
his weapon, striking Villegas-Gonzalez, who crashed into a delivery
truck and was pronounced dead an hour later. Officials of the
Department of Homeland Security would later say
[[link removed]]
that Villegas-Gonzalez “drove his car at law enforcement
officers,” a claim clearly refuted by surveillance video. DHS also
claimed
[[link removed]]
the officer who killed Villegas-Gonzalez had been struck and dragged
by the car and feared for his life. That allegation is more difficult
to confirm or refute—the officer is obscured by the car in the
video. The officer was later treated for “minor” injuries.

Villegas-Gonzalez had no criminal record. Over eight years, he had
only a series of traffic citations for offenses like a broken
taillight and driving without insurance. His most serious citation
[[link removed]]
was for driving 30 miles per hour over the speed limit. In its press
release
[[link removed]]
laying out the ICE agents’ version of events, DHS referred to him as
“a criminal illegal alien with a history of reckless driving.” The
release included the striking line, “The illegal alien was
pronounced dead.”

In the weeks that followed, immigration agents continued to arrest
parents and nannies as they dropped off and picked up children from
school, a tactic unheard of in prior administrations.

Videos posted to social media showed ICE and Border Patrol agents
pointing their guns at unarmed protesters, unnecessarily tackling
children and elderly people, and shutting down streets and
intersections as they extracted people from their cars. Agents
tear-gassed entire neighborhoods, in some cases enveloping schools and
even Chicago Police Department officers in clouds of chemical
irritant. Videos showed
[[link removed]]
federal officers engaging in
[[link removed]]
Precision Immobilization Technique, or PIT, maneuvers to cut off
fleeing vehicles, a dangerous tactic banned or limited by the Chicago
Police Department and many other police agencies in the country. On at
least three occasions, ICE officers violently pulled U.S. citizens
from their cars and detained them, claiming the drivers had
deliberately crashed into agents—despite video and witness accounts
contradicting the officers’ narrative.

Activists in Los Angeles photographed immigration officers wearing
Halloween masks of horror movie villains while conducting immigration
raids. When the citizen journalism site L.A. Taco asked DHS for
comment, a spokesperson replied, “Happy Halloween.”

As October dragged on, the raids intensified. Toward the end of the
month, immigration officers gassed a neighborhood just hours before a
scheduled Halloween parade for children. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker
asked the administration to pause the raids on Halloween night so
Chicago kids could go trick-or-treating without fear of being gassed,
witnessing traumatic arrests, or seeing their parents or caretakers
apprehended and detained. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem refused, calling
the request “shameful.
[[link removed]]”
Activists in Los Angeles would later photograph immigration officers,
in an especially galling display of cruelty, wearing Halloween masks
depicting horror movie villains while conducting immigration raids.
When the citizen journalism site L.A. Taco asked DHS for comment, a
spokesperson replied, “Happy Halloween.”

Trump has launched similar federal crackdowns in Los Angeles
[[link removed]],
Washington,
[[link removed]]
Charlotte
[[link removed]],
Memphis
[[link removed]],
Minneapolis
[[link removed]],
and New Orleans
[[link removed]],
and threatened them in Baltimore, San Francisco, New York, and other
cities. He has sent National Guard troops into Los Angeles and
Memphis, and has promised to send more to other cities, along with
active-duty troops. With astonishing speed, the administration has
toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. Masked secret
police now tear-gas entire city streets, jump out from unmarked
vehicles to abduct and detain suspected undocumented people, and
demand that foreign-looking people (mostly Latino) produce papers on
demand. These deportation forces have been told by the president and
his advisers to cast a wide net, that immigrants are “animals,”
that the activists defending them are “domestic terrorists,” and
that the officers themselves have “immunity” from any form of
accountability. Meanwhile, administration lawyers have brazenly lied
to federal judges to supplement those deportation forces by deploying
U.S. troops to the streets of American cities—seeking to break this
country’s healthy antipathy toward domestic use of the military
policing that dates back to the founding. 
A person was detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents in November during
“Operation Charlotte’s Web,” an immigration enforcement surge
across the Charlotte, North Carolina, region.  (Photos: Ryan Murphy)
“They’re assaulting basic democratic ideals on all fronts,” said
Dana Marks, an immigration judge who retired in 2021. “It’s really
just classic authoritarianism. It always starts with the minorities.
It always starts with the immigrants. If we don’t stop them, it will
be American citizens. Congress, the courts, the people, we should all
be jumping up and down and screaming about this. We need to be
screaming that this isn’t America—that this isn’t who we are.”

“A Disgrace to Policing”

I’ve been writing and reporting on policing in the United States for
more than 20 years. I’ve spent much of that time writing about the
effects of police militarization, or the way military weapons,
training, uniforms, and culture have infiltrated domestic law
enforcement agencies. But I’ve never seen anything quite like the
last six months.

We’ve seen rapid normalization of abuses we once associated with
authoritarian regimes or the old Iron Curtain countries. It’s now
routine for masked, unidentifiable government agents to sweep people
off the street and whisk them away in unmarked vehicles. Some of those
arrested have been quickly shuttled off to detention facilities in
other parts of the country without any notification to their families
or attorneys. Others have been sent to a third country, often a
country in the developing world to which they have no connection.
Still others have been explicitly targeted for their political
opinions, their activism, or their journalism.

The phrase “your papers, please” has historically been the sort of
demand we associated with Hitler’s SS or the East German Stasi.
Immigration officers now routinely stop people who simply “look
like”
[[link removed]]
immigrants and demand they prove their citizenship or legal residency.
Legal residents who fail to produce documentation on demand have been
fined
[[link removed]],
and flustered immigrants who fail to produce sufficient records or
recall a Social Security number have been arrested.

The administration is also shredding due process. The United States
government has extradited immigrants to a torture prison in a foreign
country after lying to a judge, then falsely claimed it was helpless
to get them back. Immigrants are now stacked in detention centers
under already inhumane conditions that appear to be deteriorating. And
in a brazen contravention of a principle ingrained in the American
founding, the president and his aides have claimed the power to deploy
[[link removed]]
active-duty troops in cities they allege have been overrun with
migrants, crime, or homeless people—or merely those overseen by
mayors or governors the administration dislikes.

Most alarmingly, the administration no longer feels obligated to even
pretend that it’s observing norms and constitutional restrictions.
“They just don’t care when judges or the public says they’re
violating the law,” one longtime immigration judge, now retired,
told me. “That’s unheard of in my lifetime.”

Over the last year, I’ve spoken to and met with immigration
attorneys and advocates all over the country. Many who openly spoke
with me prior to the 2024 election are no longer willing to be quoted,
fearing retaliation against their organizations or their funders, or
even against them personally.

In more recent months, I’ve also interviewed former ICE and Customs
and Border Protection officials, and former Immigration Court judges
who served across multiple administrations of both parties. Career
legal and law enforcement officials tend to be circumspect in their
critiques of fellow law enforcement officers. They tend to avoid
casual references to police states, or comparing U.S. police agencies
to those in authoritarian countries. That’s no longer the case.
These career police executives and prosecutors now use language I’ve
rarely heard from current or former government officials in my career.

“What we’re seeing is a disgrace to policing,” said Reneé Hall,
president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement
Executives, or NOBLE. Hall compares the tactics used by ICE and Border
Protection officers to the worst abuses of the civil rights era.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in policing,” she said.
“They’ve wiped it out in months.… We’re back to letting police
target people because of their skin color. We’re letting them kidnap
people and take them to undisclosed locations. They’re barging into
homes with no warrant. We saw them zip-tie young Black children—U.S.
citizens—in Chicago. We’ve seen them use unnecessary force, slam
people on the concrete. If I were just watching these incidents on
television, I would think that we were not in the United States of
America. Back then they wore hoods. Today they wear masks.”

“I’m horrified by what I’ve seen,” said Chris Magnus, who
served both as Joe Biden’s CBP commissioner and as police chief of
Tucson, Fargo, and Richmond, California. “I wish the public had a
better understanding of the harm they’re doing. Because it’s going
to take a very long time to undo.”

“I wish I had something better to say than that it’s really
bad,” another former senior Department of Justice official told me.
“But it’s really fucking bad.”

The new federal budget Trump recently signed into law will triple the
ICE budget and significantly increase the budgets both for Border
Protection and for the construction of new detention centers.
Trump’s deportation force will be larger than all but a handful of
foreign militaries. According to the Brennan Center
[[link removed]],
the 2025 budget for immigration enforcement already exceeds that of
every other federal law enforcement agency combined. And going
forward, spending from the “Big Beautiful Bill” on immigration
alone will exceed total spending by every state and local police
agency in the country.

And if there’s one thing this administration has made clear, it’s
this: What happened in Chicago will soon be happening in cities around
the country.

 
Government Lawyers Are Lying in Court

One of the more maddening patterns playing out in the federal courts
right now is the administration’s exploitation of a legal principle
[[link removed]]
called “the presumption of regularity.” The legal doctrine
instructs courts to presume that government lawyers argue in good
faith and don’t deliberately misrepresent facts. The doctrine has
rarely been a problem, because most administrations have argued in
good faith, even when making bad arguments.

In the months since Trump’s second inauguration, the site Just
Security has documented more than 60 instances in which federal courts
have ruled that Justice Department attorneys misrepresented the facts
or the law.

This administration is different. As of this writing, in the months
since Trump’s second inauguration, the site Just Security has
documented more than 60 instances in which federal courts have ruled
that Justice Department attorneys misrepresented the facts or the law.
Some judges have done so with unusually frank language, including
accusing the administration of outright lying. One judge wrote,
“Trust that had been earned over generations has been lost in
weeks.” 

Many of Trump’s power grabs are grounded in “emergency powers
[[link removed]]”
exceptions that Congress or the courts have built into constitutional
or statutory restraints on executive power. These powers have always
been a glitch in the system. Dozens of emergencies declared with good
intentions at the time have lingered over the years, as new
administrations simply renew them without much oversight from
Congress. Many concern sanctions against international figures
involved in crime, drug smuggling, or weapons trafficking.

But the current administration has exploited those exceptions like
none before. Trump has declared nine new emergencies since January.
His tariffs, for example, are based on a law allowing the president to
temporarily impose tariffs in response to an emergency. But he has
threatened and imposed tariffs for clearly illegal reasons, such as
slapping sanctions on Brazil for prosecuting former President Jair
Bolsonaro for an attempted coup, or on Canada for accurately using
footage of former President Ronald Reagan in a TV commercial.

 
A child clung to her father as ICE agents and federal officers
detained him in Manhattan in July 2025.  (Carol Guzy/Zuma Press Wire
 //  The New Republic)
The presumption of regularity and the enormous deference the Supreme
Court demands courts show to the executive branch mean that any
challenge to one of these declarations faces an uphill battle to prove
that the administration is misrepresenting the facts or acting in bad
faith in each individual case, even though it has shown an almost
routine willingness to lie in other cases. And nowhere is this
disconnect more striking than in Trump’s obsession with putting
troops in American cities.

Using the Military as a Police Force

The norm against using troops for routine law enforcement is one of
America’s most important contributions to democratic governance.
It’s a principle we came by honestly, from firsthand experience.
Prior to the American Revolution, the British crown stationed soldiers
in the streets of Boston to enforce tariffs and import taxes. The
soldiers were armed with general warrants that gave them carte blanche
to force their way into homes in search of contraband. The abuse of
those powers sowed anger and ignited revolutionary fervor.

Lessons from Boston lingered after the Revolution and instilled in the
Founders a deep distrust of standing armies. “A large standing Army
in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties
of a Country,” George Washington wrote in
[[link removed]]
1783. Four years later, at the Constitutional Convention, James
Madison cautioned
[[link removed]], “A
standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be
safe companions to liberty.”

After fierce debate, the Framers of the Constitution reluctantly
concluded that the threats posed to the new republic still demanded an
army at the ready. But to guard against abuses, they divided control
of the military between the executive and legislative branches. Still,
the fears about domestically deployed troops spilled into the Bill of
Rights debates the following year. It’s why we have a Second
Amendment (the purpose of the state militia “is to prevent the
establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty,” Elbridge
Gerry declared [[link removed]]),
as well as the Third Amendment
[[link removed]]
protection against the forced quartering of soldiers, and the Fourth
Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

This fear of domestically deployed troops has become ingrained in
America’s DNA. Presidents have deployed active-duty troops within
U.S. borders only sporadically, and almost always temporarily. The
most common reason for doing so early in the republic was to put down
labor uprisings, rebellions, and riots, and while there are legitimate
reasons to question the motivations and propriety of those
deployments, they were at least temporary and narrowly defined. The
one exception was Reconstruction, which saw federal troops in Southern
states for a decade. But that came after a bloody and destructive
Civil War. 

In fact, one of the healthier and most encouraging characteristics of
American democracy is that this norm has only become more robust over
time. One big reason—also a sign of a healthy democracy—is that
the principle has become ingrained in the military itself.

In the late 1980s, for example, the Reagan administration wanted to
deploy active-duty troops to fight the drug war on American streets.
The plan was thwarted by opposition from the Pentagon. “One of
[America’s] great strengths is that ... we do not allow the Army,
Navy, and the Marines and Air Force to be a police force,” Marine
Lt. Gen. Stephen Olmstead told Congress in 1989. “History is replete
with countries that allowed that to happen. Disaster is the result.”

Prior to Trump’s deployment of 700 Marines
[[link removed]]
in Los Angeles in June, no president had deployed active-duty troops
to a U.S. city since the Los Angeles riots in 1992. And no president
had deployed the military over the objections of a state governor
since Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to desegregate Little
Rock’s public schools in 1957.

The deployment of National Guard troops is much more common
[[link removed]]. But
that’s nearly always done by governors calling up their own Guard
troops, sometimes to put down riots or protests, but more typically to
aid with disaster response after hurricanes and tornadoes. Trump’s
deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles is the first time a
president has deployed the Guard over the objections of a state
governor since 1965.

Trump is a well-documented admirer of dictators
[[link removed]]and
strongmen and has made clear that he harbors little reverence for this
firewall between the military and domestic policing. In his first
term, Trump wanted to deploy
[[link removed]] troops to put down the
George Floyd protests, if possible by “shooting them in the legs.”
He was thwarted by more levelheaded senior staff, including Defense
Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley. Trump
and his second term advisers have made clear that they won’t
tolerate that sort of dissent this time around. To fully implement his
vision for the country, they’d need to purge the federal government
of institutionalists and those who put democratic values and the rule
of law over subservience to the president. As JD Vance put it in a
2021 podcast interview
[[link removed]],
“Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the
administrative state, replace them with our people.” 

Trump found his enforcer in Pete Hegseth, a man who is not only the
least-qualified person ever nominated for secretary of defense, but
whose record—which includes allegations of alcohol abuse
[[link removed]]
and sexual assault
[[link removed]]
and running two veterans’ nonprofits into the ground
[[link removed]]—should
have been disqualifying. Trump really only had two prerequisites for
the position. He wanted someone who loathed Pentagon institutionalists
like Milley and Esper, and someone he could count on to be loyal.
Here, Hegseth was more than qualified—embarrassingly so.

Hegseth has also echoed Trump’s contempt for the Pentagon’s
healthier, democratically grounded principles. In his book, he has
argued for enlisting the military in a modern-day crusade. And prior
to 2025, other than his weekend co-hosting duties on Fox News, Hegseth
was probably best known for lobbying Trump
[[link removed]]
to pardon troops convicted of conscience-shocking war crimes.

After his confirmation, Hegseth dutifully began purging the Pentagon
[[link removed]]
of its Milleys and Espers. He dismissed dozens of senior officials
with centuries of experience (particularly those who weren’t male
and weren’t white). Importantly, he also purged
[[link removed]]
senior-level Judge Advocate General’s Corps, or JAG, officers, the
attorneys who provide legal guidance on critical issues like rules of
engagement or, say, the legality of deploying troops in U.S. cities.

The administration has since been caught brazenly lying to federal
courts to justify Trump’s military interventions. In Portland,
Oregon, a Trump-appointed Federal District Court judge wrote that
Trump and the DOJ’s claims that the city was “war ravaged” and
“under siege” were “simply untethered to the facts
[[link removed]].”
The administration was later found
[[link removed]]
to have vastly overstated to the court the number of federal officers
it had sent to Portland to protect federal facilities.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, a federal judge rejected the administration’s
claims that the city was under “coordinated assault” by unnamed
“violent groups … actively aligned with designated domestic terror
organizations.” The judge chided
[[link removed]]
the administration for its “lack of candor,” which, she wrote,
“calls into question their ability to accurately assess the
facts,” and noted
[[link removed]]
a “troubling trend” of DOJ officials “equating protests with
riots.”

 
Creating a Secret Police Force

The most alarming images to emerge from the first year of Trump’s
second term are those of immigration officers in balaclavas, gaiters,
and ski masks stopping immigrants on sidewalks and demanding proof of
citizenship, chasing day laborers
[[link removed]]
and landscapers through parking lots and city streets, or emerging
from unmarked vehicles
[[link removed]],
snatching people off the streets
[[link removed]], then quickly carrying
them away.

 
In Chelsea, Massachusetts, federal agents detained a woman in
September as her son watched.  (Brian Snyder/Reuters  //  The New
Republic)
Those unmarked vehicles are often rented, and officers have been
caught swapping out
[[link removed]]
license plates to prevent themselves from being identified—or just
not bothering with license plates at all. “The agency clearly wants
to appear like a ghost,” one former Baltimore ICE official told NPR
[[link removed]].
“I have never experienced this.”

“When law enforcement officers of any kind wear masks and withhold
their identity, it smacks of tactics that are consistent with an
authoritarian government,” said Magnus, the ex-police chief and
former head of Border Patrol.

“We’ve had police here for two centuries,” said George Pappas,
an immigration judge whom Trump’s Justice Department fired in July
[[link removed]].
“They didn’t need masks. You use masks when you’re looking to
carry out an illegal, extrajudicial operation. This is straight from
the fascist playbook.”

The images and videos of masked agents have provoked alarm in law
enforcement and legal communities. They’ve been criticized by groups
ranging from the New York City Bar Association
[[link removed]]
to the International Association of Chiefs of Police
[[link removed]].
Even the FBI has asked DHS to remove the masks
[[link removed]],
pointing out that criminals have committed robberies and sexual
assaults while impersonating immigration officers.

But more to the point, masked secret police jumping out of vans to
snatch people up and whisk them away isn’t supposed to happen in a
free society. It’s the sort of thing we’ve cited to distinguish
ourselves from military juntas or, more recently, from countries like
Brazil or the Philippines, where masked officers have carried out
horrific extrajudicial killings by the thousands
[[link removed]].
Or from Russia, where the spectacle of masked police carrying out
illegal and undemocratic orders is common enough to have birthed the
term “mask show.”

Those distinctions are getting harder and harder to make. Trump has
lavished praise on the current and former authoritarian leaders of all
three countries, often specifically for their despotism. He praised
[[link removed]]
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte explicitly for his drug war
policies, which even then were known to include sending masked police
teams to execute
[[link removed]]
thousands of drug offenders. Because of those killings, Duterte is now
facing trial [[link removed]] at the
International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. 

Anya Bidwell heads up the Project on Immunity and Accountability
[[link removed]] for
the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm. IJ is currently
representing
[[link removed]]
two U.S. citizens
[[link removed]] who were
wrongly arrested and detained by immigration officers. “I was born
in what was part of the Soviet Union at the time,” she said. “So
seeing these kinds of things chills me to the bone. It brings bad
memories.”

DHS officials have dismissed such comparisons as hysterical and
hyperbolic. They say masking is necessary to prevent activists from
“doxing” immigration officers and claim there has been an alarming
surge in assaults
[[link removed]]
on those officers. In June, they put the increase in assaults at 413
percent; by July, it was over 700 percent; and by October, it was over
1,000 percent.

Those figures are deceptive. The 2024 baseline figure against which
the administration is making these calculations is 10, according to
Fox News. That is, there were 10 alleged assaults on ICE officers
between January and June 2024. There were 79 in 2025. Meanwhile, over
the same period, the number of federal agents participating in
deportations and removals has swelled from 6,000 to over 30,000. That
puts the assault rate on federal immigration officials (0.23 per 100)
exponentially lower than the assault rate on police officers more
generally (13.5).

Given the ramped-up immigration enforcement and the exceptionally
violent and aggressive tactics, we’d expect to see an increase in
assaults on agents. More interactions, and more violent interactions,
mean more opportunities for those interactions to escalate. We also
know from surveillance and cell phone videos that agents have arrested
and charged people with assault either on little evidence or for
defending themselves when assaulted by police. After an ICE officer
shot a Chicago woman named Marimar Martinez five times, for example,
the administration claimed she had intentionally boxed agents in with
her car and fired a gun at them. She was arrested and charged with
assault. After that account was contradicted by witnesses and video,
Martinez was released without charges.

“The mask issue really burns my biscuits,” said Reneé Hall. “I
patrolled in the city of Detroit for nearly 20 years. I lived in the
place that I policed. I didn’t get to hide my face. And you know
what? Every other police officer across this country arresting people
for drugs, for violent criminal acts, for gang violence, show their
faces, too. My father was a police officer who was killed on duty. He
never would have dreamed of hiding his face from the people he served.
These federal officers are coming into these communities from other
places, hiding their faces, using unnecessary force and violence, and
then just walking away. That isn’t how it works. Hell no to that.”

There are, of course, limited circumstances in which it may be
justified for police officers to shield their identities. But the most
important reason U.S. police don’t wear masks isn’t grounded in
the law, but in democratic values

There are, of course, limited circumstances in which it may be
justified for police officers to shield their identities—officers
who investigate organized crime, for example, or who frequently work
undercover. So there are no federal laws that prohibit it. But the
most important reason U.S. police don’t wear masks isn’t grounded
in the law, but in democratic values. “I find the masking absolutely
fucking horrific,” said “Bryan,” a former high-ranking official
in the DOJ. “It’s not something we do in a free society. It’s
what they do under regimes we should never be emulating. It’s about
intimidating and terrorizing.”

That shared understanding has broken down under an administration that
seems to emulate those regimes, and that has made clear that it
_wants_ to instill fear and terror in immigrant communities. They
aren’t letting federal immigration agents terrorize neighborhoods
like Chicago’s Little Village because terrifying these places makes
them safer. They’re doing it because they don’t believe
neighborhoods like Little Village should exist. “The president’s
goal is to create fear and anxiety,” said Michael Rodriguez, an
alderman whose district includes the heavily Mexican American
neighborhood. “It’s a sinister agenda to relitigate the Civil War.
I don’t think that’s vitriol. This country is becoming majority
minority, and they can’t handle that. So they’re turning to
xenophobia to reverse the trend.”

One needn’t look far to validate Rodriguez’s fears. Stephen
Miller, who has been traipsing about the fever swamps of white
nationalism for years, has made it no secret
[[link removed]]
that he wants to reduce immigration from nonwhite countries to zero.
Trump has echoed the sentiment, bemoaning at one point why so many
immigrants come from “shithole countries” (the countries he’s
named have all been predominantly Black and brown), and so few from
countries like Norway or Switzerland. It’s now been widely reported
that by the end of Trump’s second term, the bulk of the country’s
refugee program will be redirected to aid white farmers from South
Africa.

 
Placing Law Enforcement Above the Law

The most basic definition of a police state is a society in which the
police themselves are above the law. In 2024, Donald Trump campaigned
on promises to make police officers completely immune from both
criminal prosecution and civil liability. Whether a president could
actually do that isn’t as important as the fact that a major
party’s nominee for president was, quite literally, promising to
turn the country into a police state. And then he won.

The United States has long had a problem with holding bad cops
accountable, and, to be fair, much of that problem predates Donald
Trump. The George Floyd protests in 2020 provoked public discussion
about qualified immunity
[[link removed]], a legal doctrine
wholly invented by the Supreme Court in 1967 that makes it extremely
difficult to sue state and local police for abuses that violate the
Constitution.

Less discussed is that it’s even more difficult—all but
impossible, really—to sue federal law enforcement officers. For
years, the only real avenue to do so was through the precedent set in
the 1971 Supreme Court case _Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents_
[[link removed]]_._ But the court has been
gradually chipping away at that case ever since and all but overturned
it in 2022. There is one remaining, far more complicated law, the
Federal Tort Claims Act
[[link removed]],
which lets people sue federal police officers, but to sue under that
law is an immensely complicated process. The law also bars punitive
damages, and it, too, is being eroded by the federal courts.

“People ask me questions like ‘Is it constitutional for them to
wear masks?’ or ‘Can they really detain U.S. citizens
incommunicado?’ or ‘Is it really legal for them to scare children
like that?’” said Bidwell, the IJ attorney. “The answer is that
it doesn’t matter if what they do is legal. Because they know that
fundamentally they can’t be sued, either as the government itself or
individually.”

So while the administration sets arrest and deportation quotas,
attacks immigrants with dehumanizing rhetoric, and tells immigration
officers that they’ve been “unleashed,” Bidwell said, there’s
nothing pushing back to keep deportation forces in line. “There’s
no incentive for these officers to act in a cautious manner that’s
compliant with the Constitution.”

“Back when I worked for ICE, there would occasionally be times when
they’d inadvertently arrest or detain an American citizen or legal
resident,” said Javad Khazaeli, who was an immigration prosecutor
during the Obama administration and now works as an immigration
defense attorney. (Disclosure: Khazaeli is also a friend.) “When
that happened, it would be all hands on deck. It was like, OK, what
went wrong here and how do we fix it? Now there’s nothing like that.
Now they just don’t care.” 

The immunity problem pervades the chain of command from top to bottom.
Thanks to a spate of Supreme Court rulings from the case that all but
killed _Bivens,_ to rulings protecting political appointees for policy
decisions, to the Supreme Court’s infamous ruling on presidential
immunity
[[link removed]],
everyone is protected, from the Border Patrol officer who abandons a
baby in the back seat of a car after detaining his immigrant parents
(as happened in a suburb of Chicago) to the Border Patrol commander
who tear-gasses elementary schools, to the president who says
immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.”

That leaves only criminal liability. It seems unlikely that Trump’s
DOJ would ever prosecute an immigration officer, even for egregious
abuses. Some have suggested that local police and prosecutors arrest
and charge Border Patrol agents caught committing clear crimes, or
that states pass laws prohibiting masking by law enforcement, and then
arrest officers who violate it. But state and local charges against
federal police are almost always removed to federal court, at which
point the Trump administration would presumably take over the
prosecution and drop the charges. There may be some value in bringing
charges anyway to force the issue and draw public attention to these
abuses. But they aren’t likely to bring much accountability. It’s
yet another policy that, while in place over multiple administrations,
could be particularly destructive in the hands of an administration so
averse to the rule of law.

In the end, this administration has exposed how the Supreme Court has
made the Bill of Rights almost entirely reliant on the executive
branch’s willingness to police itself. If federal police officers
can violate constitutional rights with impunity, those rights may as
well not exist.

Trump’s immigration agents are erasing accountability in other ways,
too. They’re specifically targeting journalists who report on their
actions. In Chicago, they tackled and arrested
[[link removed]] a WGN producer,
claiming she threw something
[[link removed]]
at ICE officers—an allegation that was disputed by witnesses. She
was later released without charges. In June, the administration
arrested an immigrant journalist in Georgia who had been reporting on
immigration raids. At his deportation hearing, DOJ lawyers explicitly
argued that his journalism was a threat to public safety. He has since
been deported
[[link removed]].
In Los Angeles, immigration officers shot a citizen journalist
[[link removed]]
who had built an online following for streaming ICE raids. They claim
he rammed his vehicle into theirs. He was arrested for assaulting a
federal officer. In Texas, another freelance journalist and DACA
recipient had his status revoked and was arrested for “glorifying
terrorism” over social media posts after he advocated at a city
council meeting for a Muslim man who had recently been detained.

 
A sequence from a Ring camera captured federal agents planting an
explosive device at the front door of a Los Angeles home in June.
 (Youtube Screenshots Courtesy of NBCLA  //  The New Republic)
Shortly after the raids on Home Depot
[[link removed]]
parking lots and car washes
[[link removed]]
began in L.A., civil and immigration rights groups filed a lawsuit
accusing the administration of racially profiling Latino people.
Notably, a federal judge ordered the government to stop, and arrests
dropped dramatically. The Supreme Court eventually ordered a pause on
that temporary restraining order, allowing raids and stops based on
skin color, language, and presence in areas where immigrants live and
work to continue.

There was no majority opinion, but in a concurring opinion
[[link removed]], Justice
Brett Kavanaugh wrote that people who are in the country illegally
have no right not to be racially profiled. As for U.S. citizens or
legal residents, Kavanaugh wrote, once immigration officials establish
legal status, “they promptly let the individual go.”

In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that
[[link removed]]
Kavanaugh’s “concurrence improperly shifts the burden onto an
entire class of citizens to carry enough documentation to prove that
they deserve to walk freely.” It effectively made anyone who
“looks immigrant” into a second-class citizen.

Kavanaugh added that if immigration officers violate other rights of
citizens or legal residents, such as by using excessive force or not
“promptly letting that individual go,” those people could always
sue. It had been just three years since Kavanaugh joined the majority
in all but overturning _Bivens_
[[link removed]]_,_ effectively shutting down the
right to sue federal law enforcement.

Kavanaugh’s claim that citizens and legal residents would simply be
“let go” hasn’t held up. About a month after the ruling on
racial profiling, ProPublica published a report
[[link removed]]
documenting 170 cases in which immigration officers had detained U.S.
citizens. The publication found 130 cases in which U.S. citizens had
been arrested for allegedly interfering with immigration operations or
assaulting officers but were often never charged. It found over 20
cases in which U.S. citizens were held for more than a day without
being permitted to contact an attorney or their families. “Americans
have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased and shot by immigration
agents,” the publication wrote. “They’ve had their necks kneeled
on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear.
At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One
of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem watched.” More recently, immigration
officers stopped a Latino U.S. citizen in Los Angeles during a raid on
a Home Depot. They arrested the man for an alleged assault and weapons
violation, then drove off in his vehicle with the man’s one-year-old
daughter still in the back seat. All of this in just the first 10
months of the new administration.

“This version of the Trump administration is a stress test for the
United States,” said Bidwell. “They’re very good at identifying
cracks in the system, then working at those cracks to widen them.
These gaps in accountability for federal police have been around for a
long time. We’re going to see how bad it can get when those gaps are
exploited by an administration with no respect for constitutional
restraints.”

 
Shredding Due Process

In a different world, immigration judges might be a check on all this
abuse by immigration officers. But that isn’t the world we’re
inhabiting. Despite their name, immigration courts have always
operated within the executive branch, not the judicial
[[link removed]],
so they lack the independence of federal courts. Still, previous
administrations mostly just tinkered with these courts at the margins,
replacing judges as necessary with judges more in line with their
policies. The Trump administration has changed all of that
[[link removed]].
Shortly after the inauguration, the DOJ issued memos to immigration
judges making clear that they’d be expected to support the
administration’s deportation goals. “There was a drastic change in
tone,” Pappas said. “They were denigrating the people before us in
terms of leadership, calling judges and leadership in the courts
unethical and unprofessional.”

The following month, the firings began. Since February, DOJ has fired
at least 98
[[link removed]]
immigration judges, and another 55 or so left voluntarily after seeing
the writing on the wall. “Amanda” was one of the first judges
fired in February. “I was never told why I was let go,” she said.
“A lot of people were shocked. I don’t think anyone would have
described me as a liberal judge. I’m a former immigration
prosecutor. The feeling was that if they’d fire someone like me, no
one was safe. Which is probably the message DOJ wanted to send.”

Amanda said there was one incident in her record, when she worked for
the Executive Office of Immigration Review, that may have flagged
Trump’s DOJ. “I was once reported for engaging in ‘illegal
DEI,’” she said. “One of the individuals I supervised moved the
seating arrangements for African American staff to the same
undesirable hallway, causing staff to refer to that hall as ‘Jim
Crow Row.’ I told her she had to stop doing that. When this new
administration called for reporting of ‘illegal DEI,’ the staff
member forwarded an email to me to notify me that she had reported me.
Maybe that’s why I was fired. But my termination notice was a few
sentences long. So who knows.”

In October, the DOJ announced that it would begin appointing military
lawyers from the JAG Corps to serve as temporary immigration
judges—the officers who had survived Hegseth’s purge. The move has
been widely derided
[[link removed]]
in the legal community as an effort to turn the courts into little
more than a rubber stamp for the administration. “Immigration law is
incredibly complicated,” Pappas said. “There’s just no way
you’re going to be able to pick it up in a matter of weeks and treat
these cases with the judgment and care they require.”

The most immediate effect of the administration’s politicization of
immigration courts will be in denials of asylum claims and in
expedited removal orders and deportations. “Immigration courts are
like litigating death penalty cases in a traffic court setting,”
said Marks, the longtime immigration judge who retired in 2021.
“When you deny asylum to someone, there’s a real possibility that
person will turn up dead after they’re deported.”

Trump has also purged
[[link removed]]
the board that hears immigration appeals
[[link removed]] and
replaced those members with his own appointees. The new,
Trump-friendly version of the board then announced
[[link removed]]
that judges could no longer order bond for anyone in the country
illegally. That decision—which has been roundly rejected when
challenged in federal courts—potentially means millions more people
in federal detention, where conditions are rapidly deteriorating.

This, too, is all part of the plan. Miller, Tom Homan, and the
architects of the child separation policy during Trump’s first term
have made clear that one goal of their immigration policy is to
disincentivize people from coming to the United States by inflicting
suffering on those who do. One way to make people suffer is to take
away their children. Another is to stuff them into overcrowded cells,
deny them access to a shower, medication, and clean food and water,
and make it all but impossible for them to contact their families or
attorneys. Human rights groups have already documented these and other
inhumane conditions at detention facilities all over the country,
including at brand new centers like “Alligator Alcatraz
[[link removed]]”
in Florida.

 
It _Is_ Happening Here

When Trump took office in January 2025, there were 39,000
[[link removed]]
people in ICE custody. By September, there were more than 60,000, and
there will be capacity for around 107,000 by January 2026. As of this
writing, 23 people
[[link removed]]
have died this year in ICE custody. That’s the most since
[[link removed]]
2005, and more than the previous three years combined
[[link removed]].
The conditions faced by those in custody are only likely to get worse
as deportation efforts continue to ramp up.

At the same time, the administration has hollowed out the offices
within DHS and DOJ that oversee detention facilities. “There’s no
oversight. There’s no reporting. There’s no access,” said
“Dan,” a longtime former DHS employee and immigration prosecutor.
“Until this administration, if a lawyer or an NGO complained about
inhumane conditions, that was something we took very seriously. Now
they just don’t care. It’s fully part of the plan. They’re open
about it. You put people in detention, deny them access to a lawyer,
and just continue to squeeze them until they’re so miserable that
they give up their rights.”

In the midst of all of this, the Pentagon began engaging in this
administration’s most egregious and brazen breach of due process to
date: bombing boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, off
the coasts of Colombia and Venezuela. The Pentagon claimed the
occupants of the boats were “narco-terrorists
[[link removed]],”
but provided no evidence to support the accusation—nor would it be
justified to kill them if they were. Smuggling drugs is not a capital
crime in the United States. It also seems unlikely that most of the
boats were bound for the United States, and neither Colombia nor
Venezuela produces or exports
[[link removed]]
significant quantities of fentanyl, the drug most responsible for
overdose deaths in America.

The strikes are illegal, under both domestic and international law.
The United States is not engaged in an armed conflict with drug
cartels, drug cartels are not terrorists or enemy combatants, and the
administration has provided no evidence beyond its say-so that the
people it has killed fit into any of those categories. The
administration later conceded that it doesn’t actually know the
identities of the people it is killing, but that it would be legally
justified to kill anyone who is “as much as three hops away from a
known member” of a designated terrorist organization. Setting aside
the fact that, again, drug cartels are not terrorist groups,
sociological studies estimate that the average person knows about 600
people
[[link removed]].
This means that under the “three-hop rule,” which allows
authorities to pursue individuals three “hops” away from the
target, each member of a terrorist group would make about 216 million
people eligible for legal assassination by the U.S. government.

As of publication, the administration had killed more than 83 people
in 21 strikes. The strikes embody Trump’s most authoritarian
instincts—unchecked and unreviewable executive power; crass
imperialism; a feverish, 1980s-era approach to illicit drugs (Trump
has frequently said that drug dealers should be executed); and
xenophobic bigotry, particularly toward the developing world. Both
Trump and Vice President Vance have even joked about the possibility
that the strikes may have killed innocent people, delivering wry bons
mots about how Caribbean fishermen probably don’t go out on the
water much anymore.

The strikes are abominable, reckless acts of violence in and of
themselves. But it isn’t difficult to envision how an administration
with so little regard for law, human life, and due process might make
the leap to think it can also carry out extrajudicial executions
inside the United States, particularly one run by a president who
equates criticism of him with treason, likens immigrants to vermin,
and calls his opponents “the enemy within.” This, after all, is an
administration already trying to legally define peaceful protesters
and their supporters as “terrorists,” the same term it uses to
justify those extrajudicial killings.

There would certainly be far more popular and political backlash to
such strikes within U.S. borders, or against U.S. citizens. But public
opinion isn’t a dependable xxxxxx against an administration that
has anointed itself judge, jury, and executioner. It’s of little
comfort in the throes of an administration that believes it can kill
on demand, regardless of domestic or international law, and feels no
obligation to justify its decision to do so to Congress, the courts,
or the public.

Perhaps that sounds overwrought. But if you had suggested in 2024 that
if elected, the Republican candidate for president would instruct
federal police to sweep immigrants off the street—some of whom were
here legally, and most of whom had no prior criminal record—put them
on airplanes, and send them to a Central American gulag, all without
ever letting them speak to a judge, you’d also have been called
overwrought. But it is happening.

If you had suggested 10 years ago that federal agencies would use
Nazi, fascist, and white nationalist iconography and allude to
explicitly white supremacist literature in their social media posts,
or that the Department of Homeland Security would use nativist,
blood-and-soil messaging about preserving Western heritage in its
outreach to recruit new immigration officers, you’d also have been
called overwrought. But this, too, is happening.

If you had suggested during the Obama era that a U.S. president would
encourage a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol in order to prevent
his successor from taking office, that said president would then be
reelected, would pardon all of the insurrectionists, and then go about
erasing that history from official records, you’d also have been
called overwrought. But Trump has done all these things. 

 
A man was detained after a Customs and Border Protection raid on a
Los Angeles store in June.  (Photo: Etienne Laurent/Agence
France-Presse (AFP)  //  The New Republic)
 

During the week I finished this story, a federal judge ruled that the
conditions at the main immigration detention facility in Chicago were
“inhumane.
[[link removed]]”
U.S. District Court Judge Robert Gettleman found that prisoners were
being forced to sleep on top of one another, slept next to overflowing
toilets, were provided with no beds or access to showers, didn’t
have adequate food or medicine, and were forced to drink water that
“tasted like sewer.” 

The following day, in a separate lawsuit, U.S. District Court Judge
Sara Ellis ruled that federal immigration officers in the city were
using levels of force that “shocks the conscience.” She found that
Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino and other government agents had
lied to her
[[link removed]]
in court proceedings. In an impassioned opinion, Ellis mounted an
eloquent defense of both the city of Chicago and American values,
quoting Carl Sandburg and John Adams. She also ruled that federal
forces were deliberately undermining free speech by detaining and
beating protesters. “The freedom of speech is a principal pillar in
a free Government,” she wrote, quoting Benjamin Franklin, “when
this support is taken away the Constitution is dissolved, and Tyranny
is erected on its Ruins.”

The next day, Bovino and his agents were back in Little Village,
clashing with protesters. In the days that followed, they dragged
[[link removed]] a day care teacher out
of her school as she screamed, used tear gas
[[link removed]]
on large groups of protesters, and pepper-sprayed a one-year-old (they
denied at least the pepper-spraying of the infant). Later, Bovino and
his agents posed in front
[[link removed]]
of Cloud Gate, the iconic sculpture more commonly called the Bean.
According to local reports, the officers shouted out “Little
Village!” as they mugged for a group selfie.

Just a few days before Ellis’s ruling, in a prime-time interview on
CBS’s _60 Minutes,_ President Trump was asked if in tear-gassing
entire neighborhoods, beating U.S. citizens, terrorizing children, and
lying to federal courts—if given all of that—he thought that
perhaps his deportation force in Chicago may have gone too far.

He answered, “I don’t think they’ve gone far enough.”

_[__RADLEY BALKO_ [[link removed]]_ is
an award-winning independent investigative journalist based in
Nashville, Tennessee. He formerly worked for The Washington Post,
Huffington Post, and Reason magazine, and has been published in The
New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other
publications. You can read his latest reporting and commentary at his
newsletter and website, __The Watch_
[[link removed]]_.]_ 

* Immigration
[[link removed]]
* Immigrants
[[link removed]]
* Torture
[[link removed]]
* Stephen Miller
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* Trump 2.0
[[link removed]]
* ICE
[[link removed]]
* DHS
[[link removed]]
* Child Separation
[[link removed]]
* concentration camps
[[link removed]]
* Deportation
[[link removed]]
* Kristi Noem
[[link removed]]
* chicago
[[link removed]]
* Los Angeles
[[link removed]]
* Charlotte
[[link removed]]
* due process
[[link removed]]
* US Rule of Law
[[link removed]]
* rule of law
[[link removed]]
* Immigration Courts
[[link removed]]
* dictatorship
[[link removed]]
* Fascism
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Bluesky [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]