As I've explained in other threads, the simple truth is that I'm a one-woman news analysis operation here in the "flood the zone with shit" era of what I've come to understand is a fascist variation on "the shock doctrine" Naomi Klein wrote about. No matter how hard I try, so many stories that I know are crucially important to my readers and their understanding of the bigger picture surrounding the Trump regime and the installation of a Christian Nationalist dictatorship, fall through the cracks; including, perversely a topic I used to write about a lot more *before* Trump's return to the White House and his unleashing of fascist Gargamel aka Stephen Miller on brown people in general - the white nationalist war on immigrants and the highly-profitable (for some) migrant carceral complex.

Of course, if you understand how important punishing migrants is to the regime as both a fascist political strategy, and a permission gate for installing a larger Christian Nationalist dictatorship in the United States, you already know that it's impossible for readers to get the "big picture" of America's descent into *overt* fascism (as opposed to covert fascism) without being aware of, and understanding those stories. So, I'm going to start taking steps to correct that going forward in this thread. Unfortunately however, we're quite a bit behind the fascist machinations of the Trump regime on this subject at the moment, so I'm going to need to make a bunch of short posts establishing the evidentiary support necessary for a larger discussion about this topic; I hate it too, but the story just got away from me while I was busy writing about a fascist administration that's been black bagging student protestors and re-writing history.

One of the most important necessary illusions to maintain (largely bipartisan) public support for the American war on migrants, is the idea that the fascist repression structures used to target brown noncitizens are only been used on "bad hombre" criminals who have snuck across the border for nefarious purposes. Bizarrely, this delusion remains popular with a US public that would rather not see how the sausage is made, even as the Trump regime actively targets migrant communities in America who have been granted state protection, are seeking asylum, and are otherwise "playing by the rules" that supposedly justifies brutalizing anyone who isn't following "the process" to enter and reside in the United States.

For example, since Trump took office back on January 20th, 2025, the regime has revoked the protected status and demanded the "self-deportation" of hundreds of thousands of law abiding immigrants registered with and monitored by government programs designed to curb illegal entry into the United States by offering a legal pathway to residency; including many people who are residing in America precisely because US foreign policy and exploitation has rendered their countries of origin objectively unsafe to return to. These folks aren't drug smugglers, or coyotes running undocumented people across the border, they are for all intents and purposes refugees created by US imperialist policy and they are precisely the kind of migrants apologists for our fascist deportation regime claim won't be targeted - a fact that has changed drastically under the tender mercies of Trump's unofficial Secretary for White Nationalist Shit, Stephen Miller.

https://apnews.com/article/immigration-cbp-one-trump-biden-border-95b89a3bb0859ec8b6a39f2eef78f672

Trump’s DHS revokes legal status for migrants who entered the US on Biden-era CBP One app

"CBP One was a cornerstone of the Biden administration’s strategy to create and expand legal pathways to enter the United States in an attempt to discourage illegal border crossings. By the end of December, 936,500 people had been allowed to enter with CBP One appointments at border crossings with Mexico. President Donald Trump ended CBP One for new entrants on his first day in office, stranding thousands in Mexico who had appointments into early February.

Trump has ended and revoked temporary status for many who benefited under Biden’s policies. Homeland Security said Monday that Biden’s use of parole authority — more than any president since it was created in 1952 — “further fueled the worst border crisis in U.S. history.”

Homeland Security said last month that it was revoking another form of parole for 532,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who flew to the country at their own expense with a financial sponsor. It ends April 24.

The Trump administration has also announced an end to Temporary Protected Status for 600,000 Venezuelans and about 500,00 Haitians, though a federal judge temporarily put that on hold, including for about 350,000 Venezuelans who had been scheduled to lose TPS on Monday. TPS is granted in 18-month increments to people already in the U.S. whose countries are deemed unsafe for return due to natural disaster or civil strife."

Ultimately I chose this story to demonstrate how week after week, the Trump regime is quietly enacting an immigration policy designed to produce and entrench an American white ethnostate, and by and large this news doesn't really penetrate the public consciousness. When you combine the figures provided in this article alone, we're talking about the rapid expulsion of almost two million people who are objectively *not* the bloodthirsty "illegal" predators the regime claims these policies are designed to stop; newsflash, hardcore narco-terrorists don't register with the US government via phone app when they arrive in America. They are however nonwhite people Stephen Miller can parade in front of an extremely racist American public in a sort of fascist theater show designed to assure crackers that the government is "keeping them safe" from people with the wrong skin tone. Furthermore, despite what the Trump regime would have you believe about deterrence, anyone who has studied the history of US immigration laws can tell you that shutting off the legal pathways for, again, what amount to refugees of US imperialist policy, to enter and remain in the United States will simply *increase* the number of undocumented people who sneak into the country illegally. The conditions that caused them to flee to America aren't going to change, migrants just aren't going to register with the US government anymore because it means inviting DHS and ICE to pick them off as low hanging fruit to make the white nationalist regime's quotas.

#Fascism #Trump #StephenMiller #Migrants #Immigration #DHS #MigrantCarceralComplex #ICE #WhiteNationalism #Ethnostate #WhiteSupremacy #Imperialism #BorderImperialism

Another consistent feature of the American war on migrants, is a sort of fascist two-step surrounding the term "criminal." Typically, and even long before Trump, white supremacists in government office will justify hunting down and brutally suppressing migrants by claiming that they are only going after dangerous "criminals," often while invoking largely isolated stories of migrants committing violent crimes, to generate the necessary fear and outrage needed to maintain public support for these policies. The reality however is that once you see the system functioning in real time, the "dangerous" or "violent" part stops mattering, and folks end up being targeted for minor offenses, or even the civil "crime" of overstaying their visas in the United States; particularly under right wing reactionary governments, but even more so under the Trump regime and the modern fascist GOP.

Take for example the recent news that nearly forty international students had their visas cancelled and were ordered to leave the United States by the Trump administration for minor civil offenses, including in one case, a speeding ticket.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/07/trump-student-visas-deportation

Deported over a speeding ticket? Dozens of US students’ visas abruptly revoked

"Lisa is one of several students across states who found their legal status revoked by the US government on 4 April, without prior notice or clear explanation. University statements show that at least 39 students have been affected, including UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC San Diego, Stanford, Ohio State, the University of Tennessee, the University of Kentucky, Minnesota State University and the University of Oregon.

An online self-reported data sheet created by affected students suggests the issue may be more widespread. Students from 50 universities reported their visas were canceled around 4 April, with many noting that they had prior records, some limited to citations or non-criminal offenses.

This secret wave of revocation came a few days after the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, announced the revocation of 300 or more student visas. “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” he said at a news conference on 27 March, referring to students he described as national security threats.

Lisa’s university had included a screenshot of her Sevis record in the message. Termination was logged on 4 April by a system administrator, with a note: “Individual identified in criminal records check and/or has had their VISA revoked.”

Please keep in mind here that I couldn't find any evidence, anywhere, that the students targeted in this story participated in anti-genocide protests or any activities Downmarket Mussolini has defined as "anti-American." The purpose here doesn't appear to be a question of ideological policing, or political reprisals - this is the regime deporting foreign students because it hates foreign students and ruining these young people's lives helps the nazis make their nativist deportation quotas. The only relevant "crime" any of these folks committed appears to be that they were foreign students who could have their visas revoked and then be deported under the guise of purging the US of foreign "criminals."

#DHS #ICE #Trump #StephenMiller #Immigration #WhiteNationalism #BorderImperialism #StudentRights #Nativism #Xenophobia #Fascism

In an early March announcement that was underreported at the time (but just became a lot more relevant in early April) the Trump regime revealed its intention to collect and presumably monitor social media handles of folks applying to legally work and reside in the United States:

https://theintercept.com/2025/03/23/trump-immigrants-social-media-citizenship-green-card/

Trump Wants Immigrants on U.S. Soil to Hand Over Social Media Accounts to Apply for Citizenship

"Collecting social media information, according to the USCIS proposal first posted March 5, is necessary “for the enhanced identity verification, vetting and national security screening.”

The proposal specifically cites Trump’s January 20 executive order, which advocates have warned goes well beyond the Muslim travel ban from Trump’s first term, which targeted people living abroad.

The new executive order stated that “the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”

USCIS said the social media handles it collects would be used to determine if people applying for a variety of immigration statuses pose a “security or public-safety threat.”"

Of course, observers immediately noted the connection between this proposed policy and Trump's ideological policing, kidnaping, and attempted deportation of foreign students who participated in anti-Genocide protests and/or oppose the Trump regime:

"In light of Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil’s ongoing detention, one official from a Muslim civil rights group said the new policy poses special danger for critics of Israel and the Trump administration.

“This policy would disparately impact Muslim and Arab applicants seeking U.S. citizenship that have voiced support for Palestinian human rights,” said Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Collecting the social media identifiers of any potential green card applicants or citizens is the means to silencing their lawful speech.”

Furthermore, as a representative of the EFF presciently observed, there are few if any limits on the scope of what the government can do with this data if they get it, and modern AI technology allows for the regime to ideologically police and target a terrifying number of people who oppose our fascist overlords. It's also, strictly speaking, a violation of Constitutional rights:

"The policy proposal does not sketch out limits on how USCIS can use its newly acquired data, according to Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Hussain said she was particularly concerned that the government might use artificial intelligence or other automated tools to punish speech it dislikes, pointing to a news report that the State Department is using AI to revoke the visas of people who allegedly express “pro-Hamas” sentiments.

Hussain said she feared a chilling effect, where people applying for a change in status refrain from speaking about potentially controversial issues.

“Anybody who is within the bounds of the United States has First Amendment rights,” she said. “The Constitution applies whether you are somebody who is a citizen or somebody who is a green card holder who is here in the United States. I think that this administration is trying to chip away at that notion, but that is very much what First Amendment jurisprudence has been under the courts.”

Finally, it should be pointed out that the regime's proposal gives no indication whatsoever of when the government would stop recording and monitoring the social media activities of the people it's targeting:

"CAIR’s McCaw said he worried that the policy could be used to continue tracking people’s activity on social media even after they become naturalized citizens.

“There’s no clear sign on when this intrusion into our electronics and communications will end,” he said."

#Fascism #DHS #ICE #Trump #AI #WhiteNationalism #SocialMedia #OnlineSurveillance #Immigration #MigrantRights #Islamophoba #Palestine #Genocide #PoliceState #McCarthyism #USCIS #Nativism

Of course, the other shoe of the regime's proposed online surveillance of immigrants using legal pathways to work, study, and reside in the United States, would eventually drop; the Department of Homeland Security has announced that it is now monitoring the social media activity of law abiding immigrants for "antisemitism" - a word that no longer has meaning when used by a regime (itself littered with antisemites and nazis) that seems to think criticizing a genocide, opposing US funding for Israel's bloodthirsty fascist government, and saying Palestinians have human rights too, is antisemitism.

https://truthout.org/articles/dhs-announces-its-surveilling-immigrants-social-media-for-antisemitism/

DHS Announces It’s Surveilling Immigrants’ Social Media for “Antisemitism”

"In a chilling statement, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin effectively said that the administration is carving out an exception to free speech rights to punish certain viewpoints.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem “has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism — think again. You are not welcome here,” McLaughlin said.

Advocates for Palestinian rights noted that the clear goal of the administration is to suppress speech critical of Israel, as well as punish Muslim and Arab rights groups — similar to the implementation of the Patriot Act after 9/11.

“It doesn’t matter what you actually say. We are at the point where anything short of pledging allegiance to Israel is, in the eyes of the U.S. government and its many institutions, a criminal offense worthy of the infliction of state violence,” said media analyst Sana Saeed on social media."

I don't think anyone with a functioning brain needs to be told that a Trumpenreich regime full of literal fucking nazis, does not at all care about antisemitism. What it does care about is protecting its investment in a MENA region client state it uses to ensure American dominance of fossil fuel availability, and the US-funded genocide of Palestinians that state, Israel, is conducting in Gaza. Furthermore, the Pork Reich is also very concerned with creating ideological justification to unleash its Gestapo (ICE) on foreign students and Muslims in general, as part of a white nationalist agenda to establish America as an ethnostate.

The story here however isn't really about the hypocrisy of a fascist regime hell bent on both punishing dissent and bleaching the demographics of the American population; when you factor in the regime's use of online surveillance, AI technology, and ICE's Investigative Case Management database, what we're looking at here is the expansion of our police state panopticon during a period where the US government under Trump is actively looking to obliterate civil rights and apply its fascist ideological policing policies to an ever widening circle of people; a circle that consists of both immigrants and "natural born" US Citizens. You should care about this not just because immigrants are human beings who have rights just like anyone born in the US does, but because this digitized fascist repression does not have to, and almost certainly will not, stop with immigrants; who it must again be pointed out, are in the US legally and are actually "following the process" to study, work, and reside in the country.

#Fascism #Panopticon #DHS #ICE #Trump #Stephen Miller #Israel #Gaza #Genocide #Palestine #PoliceState #WhiteNationalism #KristiNoem #TriciaMcLaughlin #StudentProtests #CivilRights

As the fascist Trump regime moves to revoke the protected status of literally millions of law abiding, mostly non-white migrants who are, effectively, refugees from US imperialism and economic predation, I think it's instructive to take a look at what type of immigrants the administration *does* want to protect and provide a pathway to US citizenship for:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/06/white-afrikaner-donald-trump-america-us-administration

As a white Afrikaner, I can now claim asylum in Trump’s America. What an absurdity

"Imagine my bewilderment when Donald Trump and his “first buddy”, South African-born Elon Musk, declared that we Afrikaners are a threatened species; that our black compatriots are engaged in a “genocide”; that we are victims of oppression and discrimination and as such offered special refugee status in the United States – at the very point in time that thousands of migrants to that country are being repelled or deported. The US state department is even preparing “refugee centres” in Pretoria to house these “victims”.

The criticisms and threats coming from Trump, his secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and Musk outraged the majority of South Africans because the claims were patently false and were seen as unacceptable meddling with internal affairs. A section of the white population, however – the ethnic Afrikaner nationalists and separatists – welcomed the US intervention, leading to harsh exchanges with racial undertones on social and other media.

Just for the record: Afrikaners are generally better off today than prior to 1994, when they gave up political power; materially, culturally and in terms of personal freedom.

South Africa’s progressive constitution with its extensive bill of rights is intact; the rule of law is maintained and the judiciary is independent and functioning; we are a genuinely open society with free speech and media that many other democracies, especially Trump’s America, can be jealous of."

So let's review here for a second. According to the regime, hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing a country destabilized by US policy to the point that it's being run by armed gangs, Haiti, are not deserving of US protection and harboring. But specifically white Afrikaners whose rights and liberties are being protected by a coalition government in South Africa that has a better human rights record than the US does, are endangered refugees who need to actively lured to the United States and offered the smoothest possible path to US citizenship because, um, Trump read fake fascist "news" stories about white farmers having their land seized by the South African government? A thing that objectively did not happen, but probably should have given the vast racialized wealth inequality still remaining from the fallout of the white nationalist Apartheid regime that ended in 1994. Well that sure sounds "about white."

Is this policy about appeasing white nationalists littered throughout the Trump regime? Yes. Is this policy about Trump doing a favor for his billionaire South African-born nazi donor Elon Musk; a man raised under the Apartheid system? Also yes. Is all of this just straight up racism and ethno-nationalist policy? Yes yet again. Finally of course, I don't think anyone should sleep on the fact that at the precise time the Trump regime is enacting objectively white nationalist edicts to fully restore and entrench white supremacy as official government policy, these cracker fascists are actively looking to import people who liked fucking Apartheid in South Africa.

#Trump #ElonMusk #SouthAfrica #Afrikaners #EthnoNationalism #WhiteNationalism #Immigration #Imperialism #Haiti #Apartheid

I've spent much of the past eight and a half years avoiding unproductive arguments with people who insist that "you can't compare Trumpism to Hitler and the Nazis" despite knowing that those people rarely, if ever, have much understanding of what made the Nazis the definitive genocidal fascist movement in human history. At some point however, you have to stop relying on Godwin's Law to avoid naming the beast when the Trump administration continues to actively borrow policies and methods of operation from the actual Nazi Party; particularly when those policies ended in the literal fucking Holocaust last time.

To understand what I'm talking about, let's take a look at what Trump's Gestapo (ICE) Director had to say at a recent "border security" conference about his hopes to logistically optimize the process of snatching up migrants for deportation in the streets of America:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/todd-lyons-ice-amazon-prime

Trump's ICE Chief Craves Deportation Process Like Amazon Prime, 'But With Human Beings'

"While speaking a 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons outlined a chilling vision for how deportations in the United States ought to be carried out: with the swift efficiency of Amazon Prime.

"We need to get better at treating this like a business," said Lyons, explaining that he wants to see a deportation process that is "like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings." His comments citing the e-commerce giant's subscription servicewere first reported by the Arizona Mirror.

"This is a chilling example of drawing inspiration from Nazi Germany to deploy logistics for mass deportation and ethnic cleansing," wrote journalist Luis Feliz Leon in response to Lyons' statement."

Although this article doesn't mention it, other sources online (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/ice-todd-lyons-deporation-amazon) have revealed that part of what Lyons is talking about here is a plan to "implement a system of trucks that rounds up immigrants for deportation in a system similar to how Amazon delivers packages around the US."

First of all, this is nightmare dystopian fascist shit that absolutely mirrors the process of rounding up Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Additionally Lyons is implying that the US government intends to deport so many people, that it would make sense logistically, to requisition a fleet of trucks for that ongoing purpose. Finally, don't sleep on the fact that Lyons is talking about running ICE like a business and modeling its operations on Amazon, because for the people who own or invest in a private prison sector getting filthy stinking rich on anti-migrant policies and ICE detention contracts, this absolutely is a business; it might be costing the American taxpayer public money, but it's making a whole lot of nazis huge bank.

Ultimately however, I think the most important part of the story is what Common Dreams alluded to in its short article above; the employment of the government's extensive logistical abilities to streamline and optimize the mass deportation process and speed up the establishment of a white nationalist ethnostate, is more or less how the Nazis ultimately facilitated the Holocaust using the punch card computing system IBM helped them build for that purpose. Speaking frankly, what separates the Nazis and the Holocaust from other eliminationist campaigns by fascist governments in human history is the creation of an optimized system to apprehend, detain, and eventually exterminate whole classes of people; this was systemic fascist murder, and it ended in the deaths of millions of people, most notably but not exclusively over six million Jewish people from all over Europe.

If you look at the overarching theme of the Trump regime's employment of AI technology, mass surveillance, and the integration of data from all government sources into ICE databases, it becomes very clear that we're looking at systemic, logistically organized fascist repression that sure looks an awful lot like the Nazis under Hitler. You might say to me that I can't prove the administration is working itself towards an eliminationist program targeting migrants, but I'd respond by reminding you that mass deportations have historically been part of the process of genocide, bullets in the head are cheaper than airplane flights, and the very same systemic fascism this regime is now admitting is necessary for its mass deportations to function, can just as easily be purposed for mass executions when the time comes.

#Fascism #ICE #DHS #ToddLyons #Trump #Genocide #NaziParty #MassDeportations #MigrantRights #MigrantCarceralComplex #EthnoNationalism #Eliminationism #WhiteNationalism #Logistics #SystemicFascism

In what must be understood as a tightening of the digital panopticon the fascist Trump regime is deploying to target migrants, the administration has negotiated an agreement between ICE and the IRS to share tax data with the American Gestapo for the purpose of facilitating mass deportations, without the consent of the IRS's acting commissioner - who has since resigned in protest:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/08/irs-ice-tax-data

IRS agrees to share tax information of undocumented immigrants with Ice

"A memorandum of understanding between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the IRS was filed late on Monday in a case brought by immigrants’ rights groups Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, represented by Public Citizen and other lawyers. The memo says Ice can request information from the IRS for its investigations into undocumented immigrants who have not left the country after receiving a final order of removal from a judge. It is signed by the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday evening that the acting IRS commissioner, Melanie Krause, is planning to resign, in part over being bypassed in the decision.

The lawsuit over the plans to share IRS information, filed in March, says Internal Revenue Code makes clear that tax records for all taxpayers must be confidential, disclosed only in ways authorized by statute.

“Taxpayer privacy is a cornerstone of the US tax system,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “This movement by the IRS is an unprecedented breach of taxpayer privacy laws – confidentiality which has been respected by both political parties for decades.”

Although every expansion of the regime's ability to hunt down and target migrants is an important stepping stone to a white nationalist dictatorship, this policy is particularly cruel and nonsensical. For starters, it deprives the US government of tax revenue because an overwhelming number of undocumented people do in fact pay their taxes. More importantly however, the US government and the IRS have been encouraging migrants to do so for decades, under the promise that this information won't be used to target and deport them. In one single agreement signed by two members of the Trumpenreich, the US government has simultaneously harmed the American people, and forced more migrants further underground, to break our collective promise to folks who otherwise would have stayed below the radar:

"The Trump administration has been working to get the IRS and Ice to agree on some information sharing for weeks, a way to use tax filings to aid in his mass deportations. The Washington Post reported on a draft of the agreement in March, citing current and former IRS workers who said the move would be an unprecedented change in access to tax records and upend immigrants’ willingness to file taxes.

“It is a complete betrayal of 30 years of the government telling immigrants to file their taxes,” one former IRS official told the Washington Post."

#Fascism #DHS #IRS #ICE #Trump #MigrantRights #WhiteNationalism #PoliceState #Panopticon #MassDeportations #KristiNoem #ScottBessent #MelanieKrause

Thanks to a Trump-appointed judge once again playing legal Simon Says, the Trumpenreich has taken yet another step towards a type of apartheid system and the mass deportation of migrants who overwhelmingly represent no threat to America. Ruling that the rights groups opposing the move have no standing to challenge it, Judge Trevor Neil McFadden has allowed the Trump regime to move forward with a requirement that all noncitizens register with a government hell bent on enacting mass deportations, and carry documentary proof of registration or suffer criminal consequences.

https://apnews.com/article/illegal-immigration-immigrant-registry-trump-homeland-security-329d9b1523792aaf5940f72948d8b48b

Judge allows requirement that everyone in the US illegally must register to move forward

"While questions remain about how the registration requirement will function, its impact is potentially far-reaching. The Trump administration — which has worked to make good on campaign promises of mass deportations — has said between 2.2 million and 3.2 million people could be affected.

One of the groups that sued, the National Immigration Law Center, called the Thursday ruling “disappointing” in a statement.

“This disappointing ruling unfortunately means that, for now, Trump’s scheme to force people into an impossible choice moves forward. As we weigh next steps in our case, we urge affected community members to consult with an immigration attorney to better understand the consequences of registering or not,” said Nicholas Espíritu, deputy legal director at National Immigration Law Center.

Homeland Security officials announced Feb. 25 that it was mandating that all people in the United States illegally register with the federal government, and said those who didn’t self-report could face fines or prosecution. Failure to register is considered a crime, and people will be required to carry registration documents with them or risk prison time and fines.

Registration will be mandatory for everyone 14 and older without legal status. People registering have to provide their fingerprints and address, and parents and guardians of anyone under age 14 must ensure they registered."

This one is a little complicated because the Trump administration has argued that this requirement has existed for decades, but just wasn't being enforced. As the article notes, there's some truth to that line of (motivated) reasoning, but the reality is that these rules haven't been enforced since almost immediately after they were introduced in the 1940's because by and large, migrants are *not* a criminal threat to the United States. Furthermore the requirement to provide fingerprints and carry documentation of registration or face *criminal* penalties is as far as I know, a new and disturbing wrinkle the regime has thrown in to make their arguments that they're only deporting "criminals" a de facto reality in retrospect. As any student of history can tell you, if law enforcement can demand "papers, please" and then lock you up for not producing them, what you're talking about is the criminalization of human beings in something akin to an apartheid system, and a racialized legal pretext to arbitrarily detain anyone who *looks like* (this is crucial) they might be a foreign national; since after all, the authorities won't know if you have "papers" until they ask, and not having papers will be treated as a crime until such a time as you can prove that you (even US citizens of the wrong complexion) aren't legally obligated to carry them.

Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum, and the reality is that no matter what the rules say, this is an openly white nationalist government that has falsely argued migrants don't have *any* Constitutionally protected rights, and have already begun the process of revoking legal status for hundreds if not thousands of people lawfully residing in the United States, while brazenly deploying deportation to engage in fascist ideological policing to target its perceived enemies. This is a regime that hates migrants, does not care if they "follow the rules," is willing to play legal Calvinball to deport literally anyone who isn't white and a natural born citizen, and has overwhelmingly targeted immigrants following the legal process to remain in the US as a sort of "low hanging fruit" to easily generate big numbers of deportations to brag about to its deeply racist base of support. They *are* going to use this registration system to locate and detain migrants for mass deportation, and they know full well you'd have to be some kind of crazy to willingly turn over your location and identity to a nativist regime dead set on bleaching the American population demographics through the force of law. What the administration is doing here is purposely criminalizing migrants to justify more and more repressive crackdowns on folks it has now effectively made truly "illegal."

#Trump #Fascism #DHS #ICE #Apartheid #MassDeporations #PoliceState #IdeologicalPolicing #Panopticon #MigrantRights #WhiteNationalism #McFadden

So, how ominous of a sign is it when the white nationalist government that's openly violating the US Constitution to facilitate fascist mass deportations, decides to declare thousands of immigrants legally dead for all intents and purposes? This week Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (aka Cracker Fascist Barbie) and acting Social Security commissioner (and gammon-y human thumb) Leland Dudek, got together and "terminated" the "financial lives" of 6,000 immigrants the regime claims are "convicted criminals and 'suspected terrorists,'" by moving their Social Security numbers into the agency's "death master file."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-social-security-immigrants

'Outrageous Abuse of Power': Trump Weaponizes Social Security for Deportation Spree

"The Trump administration this week reportedly classified thousands of immigrants living in the United States as dead in a Social Security database in an effort to force them out of the country, a scheme that was met with furious uproar from advocates and lawmakers.

By entering the names and Social Security numbers of roughly 6,000 immigrants into Social Security's "death master file," the administration has revoked their ability to legally work in the U.S. and receive benefits in a bid to get them to "self-deport," several news outlets reported Thursday.

"This is an outrageous abuse of power," Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, said in a statement. "It will not only create extreme hardship, but kill people. Imagine, in one Trump administration keystroke, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more."

"If they get away with this, it would be no surprise if they then move on to marking their perceived enemies as dead—citizens and non-citizens alike," Altman added. "This is a total misuse of the dedicated revenue that workers contribute to Social Security, with every paycheck. Though Trump claimed he wouldn't cut benefits, he essentially is by diverting dedicated monies from their intended purpose of paying Social Security benefits to the immoral purpose of maliciously ruining lives."

First off let me start by noting that some, if not the majority of folks targeted by the Trump regime for financial termination are people with valid social security numbers, and while undocumented immigrants can pay into Social Security, they can't collect even when they reach retirement age anyway; so this has nothing to do with migrants stealing benefits, or preventing fraud. Additionally it should be pointed out that while we're being assured that those targeted are all "convicted criminals and "suspected terrorists," our source for that is the very same administration trying to deport student visa holders for traffic tickets and telling you anti-Tesla protestors are "domestic terrorists," so who the fuck knows what that assertion even means anyway; it appears that at least some of the targets are simply people "who were allowed to enter and remain temporarily in the United States under programs instituted by the US president’s predecessor Joe Biden" according to The Guardian.

Finally, it should be understood that this is about a lot more than collecting Social Security benefits in your late 60's; in modern American society you typically need a Social Security number to open a bank account, get a credit card, rent an apartment, obtain health insurance, access car loans, and so forth, so when Dudek says they're trying to "exterminate" the "financial lives" of targeted immigrants, he's only partially employing a metaphor here; the opponents of the plan calling this "digital murder" are absolutely right to do so. This is definitely going to destroy lives and get people killed, and as the article notes the regime is reserving the right to expand the list of targets to "others in the country without authorization," which sounds rather ominous when we're talking about a government that's taken to having Marco Rubio instantly revoke visas and legal status for student protestors before ICE kidnaps them.

All of which means that even if the regime's actions are taken in the best possible light, this is fascist bullshit designed to push a nativist, white nationalist agenda while harming folks the administration deems illegal primarily for their skin tone and place of birth. As both a target of the regime's ongoing anti-trans pogrom, and a student of history however, I can't help but notice an ominous déjà vu quality in all of this. Historically speaking, mass deportations have always lead to mass graves, and when a fascist regime declares you and folks like you legally dead, it's usually because they mean to eventually make that a literal reality.

#Fascism #DHS #KristiNoem #ICE #LelandDudek #SocialSecurity #SSA #Trump #WhiteNationalism #MigrantRights #Nativism #Genocide #History #DigitalMurder #MassDeportations #Immigration

Quietly, and relying on the numbness created by their fascist "shock doctrine" so far, the Trump regime has stripped legal protections from and ordered the expulsion of thousands more law abiding people who are effectively refugees, including thousands of folks driven to seek asylum and protected status by US imperial and economic policy; this time targeting asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Cameroon:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-ends-tps-afghanistan-cameroon

'Cruel and Dangerous': Trump Ends Protected Status for Afghans and Cameroonians

"President Donald Trump made his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants a central plank of his 2024 campaign. However, since taking office, he has consistently moved not only to crack down on undocumented immigration but to revoke the status of migrants who are in the country legally. This has included attempting to strip TPS from other nationalities, revoking visas and even green cards from immigrants from certain countries or who voice opinions the administration dislikes, and ordering nearly 1 million people who entered the country using a Biden-administration app to leave "immediately."

Friday's decision would impact more than 14,600 Afghans and 7,900 Cameroonians, who would now have to leave the country by May and June respectively, according toAl Jazeera.

TPS means that immigrants from certain countries undergoing conflict or hardship—who may not qualify for asylum—will not be deported and will be able to work legally in the U.S. until the situation in their home country improves."

As the article notes, it's entirely unclear if the Trump regime will get away with this clearly targeted suppression as part of its mass deportation scheme; a judge did temporarily block a similar order targeting Venezuelans legally living and working in America with TPS status after all. Looking at the types of people the regime is targeting however, puts to lie the government's arguments that they're enacting a mass deportation scheme to "keep us safe" or "remove dangerous criminals" from the US. Furthermore, looking a who they're targeting with orders like this, specifically nonwhite folks who are for all intents and purposes refugees, also exposes their fascist intentions to establish America as a white ethnostate in a way that should be being reported in corporate media, but simply isn't for reasons that range from cowardice, to capitalist greed, and even shared racist sympathies among the ruling class (and their minions) in our society. Quite frankly, the fact that for-profit media outlets are no longer telling Americans that mass deportations are recognized as crimes against humanity by international law, speaks volumes as to why they aren't talking about what the Trump regime's activities clearly represent when taken as a whole; the demographic bleaching of America by force, to create a while ethno-state.

Folks, the regime isn't targeting "dangerous criminals" for expulsion because there aren't enough migrants committing violent crimes to justify their mass deportation agenda and white nationalist schemes. These folks are refugees, coming from situations the US state has already recognized present a real and present danger to their lives. Cameroon is in the middle of a years-long civil war, against a regime executing peaceful protestors, that has already caused over a million people to flee the country. The denial of protected status to Afghans is even more galling because refugees fleeing that country are almost invariably being targeted by a Taliban regime the US just fought a two-decade long war with, or a byproduct of American imperial policy that bombed the country flat during that war. These are "our guys" in so much as there is ever an "our" in US imperial foreign policy situations.

If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and keeps doing the same things historically fascist duck regimes have done in human history, it's time to start naming the beast; not just on blogs written by anarchists with a library card, but everywhere in our society. Failure to do so isn't just cowardice, it's collaboration with a fascist regime that is rapidly chugging towards openly genocidal behavior every day, while gleefully admitting that's where they intend to go if only anyone understood what "mass deportations" actually mean. These folks are fascists, they are actively trying to establish an American white entho-state, and they are making no effort whatsoever to hide their activities or intentions.

#Fascism #Trump #Refugees #TPS #MassDeportations #Genocide #DHS #ICE #Cameroon #Ethnostate #Imperialism #Afghanistan #Media #WhiteNationalism #ShockDoctrine

Throughout the entire decade or so I've been writing about the migrant carceral complex, I've tried to help people understand apparent contradiction this vast federal apparatus represents. Hunting down and caging migrants, particularly on the scale the Trump regime is attempting to do, is a mind-fuckingly expensive operation that provides literally no benefit whatsoever to the vaunted "America taxpayer" (so, you) and yet we do it anyway - why? Well part of it is certainly racism and white nationalism, but the reality is that our vast incarceration and deportation machine is actually extremely profitable for some highly influential people; particularly folks that own or invest in private prison companies. How profitable? Well a recent ACLU report reveals that the Trump regime has put $45 billion (with a b) up for grabs in contracts to facilitate a massive expansion of the migrant carceral complex and their white nationalist scheme to bleach America's demographics by (lawless) force.

https://truthout.org/articles/aclu-exposes-trump-admins-plan-for-massive-expansion-of-ice-jail-system/

ACLU Exposes Trump Admin’s Plan for Massive Expansion of ICE Jail System

"The documents, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, “signal a massive expansion of ICE detention capacity — including at facilities notorious for misconduct and abuse — which echo reports earlier this week that the Trump administration has sought proposals for up to $45 billion to expand immigrant detention,” ACLU said.

“The discovery also comes on the heels of a ‘strategic sourcing vehicle‘ released by ICE earlier this month, which called for government contractors to submit proposals for immigration detention and related services,” the group added."

The truth here is that there are billions of dollars swimming around in the migrant carceral complex whether the facilities are private or publicly controlled; but Trump's close relationship with donors and lobbyists from the private prison industry ensures that he's going to turn out maximum value for *his* investors - who are some of the worst human beings on earth, quite frankly. This article in particular singles out three companies (Geo Group, CoreCivic, and Management Training Corporation) that are soliciting big contracts to make the regime's nativist dreams of an upgraded national gulag system for brown people a reality; and the free market is rewarding them in anticipation of the regime's mass deportation agenda:

"The documents received provide important details regarding what we have long feared — a massive expansion of ICE detention facilities nationwide in an effort to further the Trump administration’s dystopian plans to deport our immigrant neighbors and loved ones,” said Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project.

“This expansion is a disastrous waste of billions of taxpayer dollars that will only line the coffers of the private prison industry,” Cho added.

Indeed, GEO shares have nearly doubled in value since Trump’s election, while CoreCivic stock is up 57% over the same period."

Of course, there are other benefits to expanding a massive private prison complex for migrants for a white nationalist regime bent on creating an ethno-state besides appeasing donors. As the article notes, privately run ICE facilities are not subject to state regulation or inspection; which is both why the reported levels of abuse are so much higher than in publicly run prison facilities, and why they're the preferred destination to send migrants for a cracker fascist regime that has more or less openly admitted "the cruelty, is the point."

Look, as an abolitionist it's not lost on me that all prisons are bad no matter who is running them. But the reality here is that most Americans don't really understand what the migrant carceral complex actually is, and without that realization it's easier for them to fall into the trap of casually believing this monstrous bullshit serves the public interest somehow. The migrant carceral complex is at the end of the day a business, in which billions of dollars in public funds are distributed to rich people for the privilege of having them cage and torture brown people as part of a (shockingly bipartisan) nativist agenda. You don't get healthcare, your kids don't get lunch at school, and your grandma is eating cat food because the wise people running our society would rather make blood ticks running prison companies fat and happy, to appease racists in the body politic. Yeah, it's certainly worse under a white nationalist Trump regime, but the reality is they're just expanding this system in anticipation of conducting mass deportations (which are legally recognized as a crime against humanity by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court). Trump didn't build the migrant carceral complex; it was handed to him by generations of politicians before him who laid the roads he's running towards a genocide on, as we speak.

#Fascism #ICE #Trump #DHS #MigrantRights #MigrantCarceralComplex #PrivatePrisons

In studying media, news, and propaganda, there are moments in time when you realize that if things break the wrong way, you're watching events that will live on in infamy in our collective history; this might be one of those moments.

This morning Trump's FBI arrested a sitting Wisconsin County Judge, Hannah Dugan, at the courthouse where she works; as revealed in an unhinged, since-deleted tweet by FBI Director and noted conspiracy crank Kash Patel. Unfortunately, the arrest has since been confirmed via multiple sources, and was discussed on Fox News earlier today by US Attorney General, Pam Bondi.

The government, which is currently being run by a bunch of Christian Nationalist freaks in a cult of personality who're trying to build a white ethnostate, appears to be accusing Dugan of obstructing federal agents (so ICE) by allowing an undocumented immigrant to hide in her chambers and misdirecting the Gestapo goons coming to seize him. If even half of that turns out to be true, I accuse Justice Dugan of being a goddamn hero.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/judge-hannah-dugan

'Fascism Getting Turned Up' as Trump FBI Arrests Wisconsin County Judge

"Wisconsin state Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-19) said in a statement Wednesday that "several witnesses report that [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] did not present a warrant before entering the courtroom and it is not clear whether ICE ever possessed or presented a judicial warrant, generally required for agents to access nonpublic spaces like Judge Dugan's chambers."

Clancy continued:

I commend Judge Hannah Dugan's defense of due process by preventing ICE from shamefully using her courtroom as an ad hoc holding area for deportations. We cannot have a functional legal system if people are justifiably afraid to show up for legal proceedings, especially when ICE agents have already repeatedly grabbed people off the street in retaliation for speech and free association, without even obtaining the proper warrants.

While the facts in this case are still unfolding, it's clear that actions like Judge Dugan's are what is required for democracy to survive the Trump regime. She used her position of power and privilege to protect someone from an agency that has repeatedly, flagrantly abused its own power. If enough of us act similarly, and strategically, we can stand with our neighbors and build a better world together."

I quoted the part with Rep. Clancy's statement both because I agree with every word of his defense of, and praise for Dugan's actions, but also because I wanted to highlight the part about ICE not having a judicial warrant when they entered Dugan's court. This is an extremely sore point for the fascist right and their mass deportation scheme and they've argued that all branches of the government, including the independent judiciary, should allow them to snatch up migrants with only immigration orders that are much easier to obtain for the Gestapo than judicial warrants are. Obviously many government officials and lawmakers with a conscience refuse to do so, Dugan is clearly one of those that isn't willing to collaborate with a fascist regime's mass deportation scheme, and that's why they're charging her.

Furthermore, I think it's safe to say the Trumpenreich is actively trying to intimidate judges who defy their mass deportation plans, while gearing up for a propaganda war about how courts that won't let them do whatever they like to create a white ethnostate are somehow illegitimate, because of the extremely public show they've made of all this. Patel didn't gleefully tweet the news out by accident, Bondi wasn't just bumming around a Fox News camera when the news broke, and as the article notes standard procedure for charging a judge with obstruction would involve inviting her to "to show up and accept process" - not a highly public FBI arrest at the courthouse. This is another example of the Trump regime employing fascist theater to justify the enforcement of unreality; in this case their supposed right to arrest a Judge for stopping the American Gestapo from caging another undocumented immigrant because *they* didn't have the paperwork to allow them to do so.

The perverse part here is that in an American legal logic twisted towards the needs of a reactionary ruling class and authoritarian principles, it's entirely possible Dugan has committed a crime of some kind here. Be that as it may, the truth is that even if she has, nobody has any right to say Justice Hannah Dugan is guilty. She's not guilty, she might be the only one in the whole damn government who isn't guilty. The guilty people are the fascists hunting down migrants and the greedbag "bipartisan" consensus that built them the fascist police state they're using to do it. If you tell me that Hannah Dugan is guilty, then let me just say now that I don't want to be innocent.

#Fascism #Trump #ICE #FBI #HannahDugan #Authoritarianism #Immigration #Courts #KashPatel #PamBondy #Antifascism #MigrantRights #Justice

Update to above (Judge Dugan Arrested) story:

A couple of days ago someone contacted me to share a post from what I believe was a legal blogger analyzing the government's filing in the obstruction case they're bringing against Judge Hannah Dugan. Imagine my surprise when once again it became clear that what the Trump regime was arguing in court, is in fact different than the propaganda they're disseminating to the US media. Crucially, the government is absolutely not claiming that Dugan hid a migrant and his lawyer in her judicial chambers; which is a key right wing talking point in the media right now. According to both Dugan, and the Department of Justice's lawyers, that never happened.

Unfortunately at that time all I had to work with was a blog post with no citations, so I decided to wait a couple of days for more information about this story to emerge. It didn't, so eventually I went digging through local reporting at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel to confirm at least some of what I'd read in the blog.

https://archive.ph/0EN6J

Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan charged with 2 felonies in ICE case

"The complaint says federal officials used biometric fingerprint comparisons to see that Flores-Ruiz, who was set to appear before Dugan on April 18, had been deported from the United States in 2013. ICE officials obtained an arrest warrant for Flores-Ruiz on April 17.

A day later, six members of the Milwaukee ICE task force dressed in plain clothes and went to the county courthouse to arrest Flores-Ruiz at about 8 a.m., the complaint says. They then informed the bailiff in Dugan's courtroom that they were planning the arrest, agreeing to wait to do so until after his court appearance.

A clerk notified Dugan that it appeared ICE agents were waiting in the hallway outside her courtroom.

"Judge DUGAN became visibly angry, commented that the situation was 'absurd,' left the bench, and entered chambers," the complaint said.

According to the complaint, Dugan confronted members of the arrest team while "visibly upset and had a confrontational, angry demeanor." She told the group members they needed a judicial warrant, not an administrative one, and directed them to report to Chief Judge Carl Ashley's office.

While this was going on, the bailiff informed the arrest team — which included ICE, FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency officials — that Dugan had expedited Flores-Ruiz's case. Witnesses told federal authorities that she then "forcefully motioned" for the defendant and his attorney to exit through a side door near the jury box that leads to a private hallway and then to the public area outside the courtroom."

So I'm not a lawyer, but absolutely nothing about the government's own filing sounds like felony obstruction to me; and I don't need to be a lawyer to know it doesn't sound anything at all like the brazen criminal act Trump AG Pam Bondi described it as. In digging around local Wisconsin media, the impression I got is that Dugan doesn't want ICE snatching people out of her courtroom without a judicial warrant, and the Gestapo doesn't like being told no; which in turn makes all of this a confrontation with the judiciary and a propaganda op that the Trump regime welcomed and intentionally initiated itself.

Whether or not pulling rank on some ICE goons and telling the migrant and his lawyer to get out of her courtroom before the ICE goons made a scene actually qualifies Dugan for "hero" status, as I implied in the previous post, is probably more debatable now. It does however seem like legally speaking, she's in the right and the Gestapo does need judicial warrants if they want to kidnap people in her courtroom. For the government to argue that telling them where they could get a warrant and shooing their target out of the courtroom, where he was eventually detained by ICE anyway, constitutes felony obstruction is both absurd, and yet another example of the regime's attempt to enforce fascist "unreality" on us all through the machinery of state.

Aight, sorry to break the fourth wall but I try to keep my analysis rooted in absolute truth as I understand it, so I felt obligated to update y'all.

Over the course of both Trump administrations so far, I've always felt that one of the easiest ways to spot the odious fascist inclinations of the regime is to observe the Trumpenreich's malevolent disdain for, and gleeful desire to harshly police, migrant children. No matter how wrong a person is about immigration policy, there's a demarcation of human decency line that should come into play before you decide to take out your nativist authoritarian fantasies on innocent children who're in the United States through no real fault of their own; yet in Trumpworld that line simply doesn't seem to exist.

Take for example the news that Trump's DHS and the ICE Gestapo have been tracking "unaccompanied alien children" with an eye towards deporting or prosecuting them, under the guise of benevolent "wellness checks" and yet another far right conspiracy theory about child trafficking.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/28/ice-unaccompanied-immigrant-children

Ice seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children to deport or prosecute them

"Although DHS is characterizing the welfare visits as benevolent, an internal Ice document accessed by the National Immigration Project advocacy group and then shared shows Ice is also seeking out children who came into the US alone as immigrants – and their US-based sponsors – for immigration enforcement purposes and/or to pursue criminal prosecutions. The recent operations and document confirm a February report from Reuters, that the Trump administration has directed Ice to track down and deport this group.

Meanwhile, in Donald Trump’s second term, legal services provided to unaccompanied minors have been slashed and funds are not flowing despite court intervention. And the federal agency monitoring unaccompanied immigrant children has begun sharing sensitive data with Ice.

The Ice document shows “ it’s not just about checking in on kids, making sure that they can account for them and that they’re not being exploited”, said Michelle Méndez, the director of legal resources and training for the National Immigration Project. “It shows they have other goals, and the goals are criminalization of the kid or criminalization of the sponsor. It’s backdoor family separation.”

Look, I don't know about you but I definitely remember a time when Americans were up in arms because Trump was separating migrant families in detention and essentially trafficking children to Christian American foster families. So for the Trump regime to be working on a backdoor way to deport unaccompanied migrant children under the guise of fighting a made up reactionary moral panic about stopping "child trafficking" under Joe Biden, is both nauseating and outrageous. I can think of dozens of more appropriate government agencies than DHS and ICE to monitor the welfare of what amount to child refugees, but it's irrelevant because the Trump regime's own internal documents say they picked the Gestapo because they want to deport literal children. I don't know who needs to be told that a government pretending it cares about helping and protecting migrant children while simultaneously slashing all the programs that would actually do that is lying, but clearly that's what's going on here. These people are fucking heartless animals; and I don't mean the kids.

It should also be noted that here again we can observe the same "inversion of purpose" the regime has been using to justify enacting other aspects of its authoritarian Christian Nationalist agenda; for example transforming the Department of Justice's civil rights division into a vehicle for state prosecution of white grievance, or arguing that illegally kidnapping anti-genocide protestors on behalf of our bloodthirsty client state Israel is actually "fighting antisemitism on college campuses," and so forth. I'm sure it amuses Stephen Miller, Trump's unofficial Secretary of Nazi Shit, to no end that he's able to weaponize the language of tolerance and equality to straight up do state-sanctioned white supremacist dictator shit and enforce mass acceptance of the regime's fascist "unreality."

Finally I would encourage folks not to sleep on the fact that ICE's own internal documents are instructing agents to target, um, children with “gang or terrorist ties/activities.” Even setting aside the fact that the regime is implying literal children might be a national security threat or in a nacro-terrorist organization, we already know the Trumpenreich is prepared to accuse anyone they don't particularly like of being in a terrorist gang so they can traffic them to a torture prison in El Salvador without due process. I can't say why the regime wants to mark again, literal children, as narco-terrorists but given the fascist bullshit they're already using that designation to accomplish, I can pretty much guarantee you it won't be anything good.

#Fascism #ICE #DHS #Trump #MigrantRights #Children #UnaccompaniedMinors #WhiteNationalism #ChristianNationalism #StephenMiller

This outrageous story didn't generate a ton of national attention last week, but as someone from the area where it occurred I think it speaks both to the cruelty of DHS's mass deportation campaign and the inhumane lengths the regime will go to solve the logistical problem presented by trying to detain millions of people in order to deport them.

Rashida Tlaib (D-MI12) is reporting that Customs and Border Protection is snatching people on the Ambassador Bridge and detaining them at a holding facility there that is not designed to be used as a long term jail. As this report indicates, conditions are brutal, several American citizens have been detained for days at a time, and most of the families detained there simply made a wrong turn onto a poorly labeled road.

https://truthout.org/articles/tlaib-cbp-has-detained-200-in-michigan-where-people-took-wrong-turn-to-canada/

Tlaib: CBP Has Detained 200 in Michigan Where People Took Wrong Turn to Canada

"Last month, Tlaib visited an immigrant jail where Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is holding and “disappearing” people who cross the Ambassador Bridge, in Detroit, a one-way toll road.

Between January 20 and March 21, CBP has detained at least 210 people this way, Tlaib discovered, with over 90 percent of them having crossed the bridge by accident, taking the wrong turn on the road — a mistake frequently made by people living in the area, locals say. Tlaib said in a press conference that advocates in Michigan have long called for better signage and directions around the bridge.

Immigration advocates say that the immigrant jail is not built to hold people long term, and that officers have denied detainees proper medical care, food, and access to legal counsel."

Folks, as someone who has driven in the area and almost ended up on that very same bridge, because of that very same road multiple times, I have no problem at all believing ICE snatched up 210 people in two months at that crossing. The important issue here however is that our white nationalist regime is so desperate to meet Trump's fundamentally racist deportation quotas that they're lying in ambush for migrants who are almost certainly not a danger to public safety, just people who struggle with Detroit's byzantine network of roads.

Furthermore, the fact that CBP is shoving entire families into a small facility designed to temporarily hold people trying to cross the border, speaks to the sheer scale of this ongoing ethnic cleansing operation. The United States already has what most believe to be the largest migrant carceral system in the world, and we're repurposing border jails to lock up whole families in horrifying conditions for as long as twelve days? As the article notes, there's already been one suicide attempt at the jail and while I'd argue that caging brown people for being born on the wrong side of an imaginary line was already a crime against human decency, locking people up in a makeshift dungeon without adequate provisions to hold them is an internationally recognized violation of human rights. The fact that we're basically torturing families for making a wrong turn onto the bridge is just the fascist cherry on top of this cruel and repugnant sundae.

#Fascism #Trump #MigrantRights #MassDeportations #Michigan #HumanRights #Detroit #CBP #DHS #RashidaTlaib #Immigration #Nativism #WhiteNationalism

I'm a few days behind on this story because I incorrectly assumed it would go away; which means that now we have to get up to date on Tom "the People Eater" Homan and his threats to arrest elected officials who "obstruct" ICE and Trump's fascist mass deportation campaign. Homan, a man so inarticulate it sounds like his own tongue lives in opposition to the abhorrent shit that comes out of his mouth, is Trump's "Border Czar" - a job that sounds like it should mean he's the head minister for deportations, but mostly appears to involve going on TV to explain why every awful cribbed from the literal Nazis thing Stephen Miller told Trump to do is awesome, and threaten anyone who opposes mass deportations and the fascist apparatus that enables them, including some members of the opposition Democratic Party.

In the wake of the Trump regime's arrest of Wisconsin County Judge Hannah Dugan, the Democratic Governor of that State, Tony Evers issued a fairly milquetoast guideline for state employees on how to interact with federal immigration employees. When Homan was directly asked about Evers and his directive, the Border Czar shot back with a thinly-veiled threat to arrest the Governor of Wisconsin.

https://archive.ph/ljrVW

Trump border czar makes veiled threat against Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers

"Your comments on the Wisconsin governor sending directives to state agencies to not comply with ICE and actually stop your deportation efforts?" a reporter asked Homan.

"Wait to see what's coming. I meant what I said. You can not support what we're doing, and you can support sanctuary cities if that's what you want to do. But if you cross that line into impediment or knowingly harbor or conceal an illegal alien, that is a felony, and we will treat it as such," Homan said."

Well, that certainly isn't alarming or anything, is it? Furthermore, while you might be forgiven for assuming Trump's goon nazi border pit bull is speaking out of pocket here, this actually isn't the first time in the past thirty days that Homan has directly threatened elected officials in the opposition party with arrest and prosecution.

https://archive.ph/TxzZ8

Trump’s Border Czar Has Chilling Threat for Every Democratic Leader

"Donald Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said Tuesday that leaders from cities and states with sanctuary policies could expect to face prosecution very soon.

A reporter outside of the White House asked Homan whether he believed that the leaders of sanctuary states and cities should be “prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and possibly go to prison,” alleging that they’d violated law prohibiting U.S. citizens from transporting, smuggling, or harboring undocumented immigrants.

“Absolutely, and hold tight on that one,” Homan replied. “’Cus it’s coming. It’s coming.”

Sharp-eyed readers will note that as crude and malevolent as Homan clearly is, his word selection is careful here. While this is unquestionably a threat to arrest opposition elected officials who don't help the regime conduct mass deportations, Homan's language does (barely) provide him with plausible deniability based on the "question" of whether or not Evers, or any other official actually *did* illegally impede federal officials or "knowingly harbor" migrants from their grasp. Of course, as we already discovered when the GOP tried to imply AOC hosting a webinar on migrant rights was "illegally impeding" immigration officials, the question of whether or not Evers' guidance does so is itself ridiculous fascist propaganda. The Governor has broken no law, as he recently explained himself.

https://archive.ph/89qgj

'Disgusted' But 'Not Afraid': Wisconsin Governor Rips Arrest Threat From Trump Border Czar

"These threats represent a concerning trajectory in this country," said Evers. "We now have a federal government that will threaten or arrest an elected official—or even everyday American citizens—who have broken no laws, committed no crimes, and done nothing wrong."

"And as disgusted as I am about the continued actions of the Trump administration, I am not afraid," he added. "I have never once been discouraged from doing the right thing, and I will not start today."

At this point anyone who has been reading along with my analysis of fascism in the Trump 2.0 era, should be starting to see the familiar outlines of a regime propaganda op to create a permission gate for fascist repression, in action. Evers has broken no law, but Homan and the rest of the fascist GOP are committed to spreading the propaganda idea that merely informing migrants of their rights is in fact "impeding" federal immigration officers, and "harboring" migrants illegally. I'm pretty sure the idea here isn't to win the legal argument, but to muddy up the waters enough that the American right will broadly support the regime when it does in fact, start arresting its political opposition.

#TomHoman #TonyEvers #Fascism #Wisconsin #IdeologicalPolicing #PoliceState #USPol #ICE #Trump #DHS

With the heat rising on the Pork Reich because of their migrant trafficking scheme with noted fascist and torture prison operator Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, the regime is apparently looking for new foreign torture gulags to traffic migrants to. Multiple reports have emerged that the Trump regime is on the verge of a deal with Libya to accept "deported" migrants from the United States; this despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that both the UN and the US government's own investigations label Libya as one of the most dangerous places on earth for migrant detainees.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/07/us-planning-to-deport-migrants-to-libya-despite-hellish-conditions-reports

US planning to deport migrants to Libya despite ‘hellish’ conditions – reports

"Human rights groups condemned the reported plans, noting the country’s poor record on human rights practices and harsh treatment of detainees.

“Migrants have long been trafficked, tortured and ransomed in Libya. The country is in a civil war. It is not a safe place to send anyone,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), wrote on X.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on the platform alongside a picture of a Libyan detention facility: “Don’t look away. This is what Libya’s migrant detention facilities look like. This is what Trump is doing.”

Reichlin-Melnick added: “Amnesty International called these places a ‘hellscape’ where beatings are common and sexual violence are rampant. There are reports of human trafficking and even slavery.”

Claudia Lodesani, head of programs for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said the group was “very concerned” about the possible consequences of such a plan, saying reports by media outlets and human rights organisations showed that “Libya is not a safe country for migrants”

Lodesani pointed to a 2023 United Nations report which documented “widespread practices of arbitrary detention, torture, rape and slavery and concluding there were grounds to believe a wide array of crimes against humanity have been committed against migrants in Libya.”

Reports on exactly how this objectively fascist scheme would work are currently sketchy, but given that the Trump regime's modus operandi has been to willfully break the law to violate the rights of migrants before anyone can tell them not to, and then claim what's done is done after the fact, this particular rumor and the lack of denial by the White House is pretty alarming. At this point it seems abundantly clear that the regime considers human rights violations and potentially lethal confinement conditions to be a feature, not a bug, in the places they're trying to send migrants; which tracks with the Pork Reich's discredited and debunked rhetoric about the effectiveness of intentional cruelty towards migrants as a "deterrent" across both of the Klepto Kaiser's administrations.

Unfortunately, we as a society that presumably doesn't want the government to traffic folks guilty of nothing more than a civil immigration violation to foreign torture prisons don't really have time to wait around for the regime to confirm their plans. As the article indicates, some sources claimed the first flights might occur as early as yesterday, so the time for the media and Trump's political opposition to pressure the regime on why it's even considering sending undocumented migrants and asylum seekers to a carceral state where murder, violence, and slavery reportedly awaits them, is right now. Given the response from the media, the judiciary, and society at large to the regime's El Salvador scheme, Trump and DHS officials have to know that they're not legally allowed to traffic abducted migrants to torture prisons in Libya either, so clearly the plan here is to do it fast and let the chips fall where they may; it makes no sense whatsoever to wait around until they actually do it before anyone tries to do anything about it.

#Fascism #Trump #MigrantRights #Libya #MigrantCarceralComplex #WhiteNationalism #ICE #DHS #MarcoRubio #USPol #Gestapo

The story about the Trump regime's (apparently not so) secret plans to traffic migrants to torture prisons in Libya has taken a dramatic turn for darkly comic reasons. A federal judge has ordered the US government to halt plans to "deport" migrants to Libya and hand over any information related to planning to do so, after detainees reported being told by ICE agents that they would soon be shipped to that country.

https://truthout.org/articles/federal-judge-blocks-trump-administration-from-deporting-immigrants-to-libya/

Federal Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Deporting Immigrants to Libya

"The injunction placed by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy states that the Trump administration’s actions would “clearly violate” a previous order he made, violating immigrants’ right to challenge their expulsion to countries other than their homelands.

Murphy also ordered that the U.S. government — which hasn’t formally acknowledged whether or not it is planning to deport people to Libya — hand over any details relating to claims that they are planning such a move, if such details exist.

The immigrants in question are reportedly from the Philippines, Vietnam and Laos, among other countries, according to a report from NBC News. In the legal motion seeking the injunction, lawyers claimed that their clients are being targeted for deportation “without any reasonable fear screening, let alone a fifteen-day window to file a motion to reopen with the immigration court to contest any negative reasonable fear determination.”

I know this is hardly the point of the story, but I remain periodically thankful that all these nazis are such assclowns because the Trump regime would be so much more dangerous if they weren't. Snitched-out by racist braggarts in your own Gestapo is the most "Trump" possible twist to this story, and it'd be grand if for once these peoples' malevolent white supremacy and crass authoritarianism worked on the side of justice and human rights.

Of course the Trump regime continues to neither confirm, nor deny the existence of a plan to traffic migrants illegally and unconstitutionally to torture prisons in Libya, and there's always the possibility that these nazis just ignore the judge's order and dare the courts to do something about it. What they aren't going to be able to do now is replicate their operation to traffic undocumented migrants to a torture prison in El Salvador under the cover of darkness and then claim they had no idea they were breaking the law and violating the constitution. At the end of the day the judge's order is just a slip of paper, but now the scheme is out in the open; Trump's opposition in the media and political classes have no excuse not to go after the regime for this fascist bullshit and demand answers about this clearly criminal plan.

#Fascism #Trump #Libya #Courts #MigrantRights #MassDeportations #WhiteNationalism #USPol #Immigration #ICE #DHS #HumanRights #Racism

In a breaking story, the Mayor (D) of Newark has been arrested for "trespass" at an ICE detention facility in New Jersey, Delaney Hall. Reports indicate that the Mayor, Ras Baraka was at the facility with other area politicians to conduct oversight at the recently re-opened privately-run detention center after reports of horrifying and inhumane conditions in other ICE facilities operated by GEO Group. Local news outlets are reporting that Baraka and 3 Congressional Democrats attempted to join a scheduled tour of the facility and were denied entry and ordered to vacate the premises by uniformed staff; an argument broke out and Members of Congress were shoved by agents, before multiple officers swarmed and arrested Baraka.

Clearly seeking to get out ahead of the crisis, woefully unqualified interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey Alina Habba (yes, that Habba; Trump's discredited former lawyer) took to social media to declare "no one is above the law" and low key threaten Trump's political opposition, while the Department of Homeland Security is now making up wild stories about Congressional Representatives Robert Menendez and Bonnie Watson Coleman storming the facility; even though the entire encounter was captured on camera by news outlets and observers in the parking lot of the facility.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/mayor-of-newark-nj

'This Is Not Normal': Newark Mayor Ras Baraka Arrested at Contested ICE Detention Facility

"Alina Habba, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, said on social media that Baraka "committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW."

Baraka's office told PIX11 that the mayor was taken to an ICE field office at 620 Frelinghuysen Ave. in Newark, adding that "we are actively monitoring and will provide more details as they become available."

The members of Congress explained on social media that they were at the facility to conduct oversight. As Watson Coleman put it: "We're at Delaney Hall, an ICE prison in Newark that opened without permission from the city and in violation of local ordinances. We've heard stories of what it's like in other ICE prisons. We're exercising our oversight authority to see for ourselves."

On one hand you would assume that even the Trump regime isn't stupid enough to try and lie about an incident captured entirely on videotape; on the other hand these are the same people who declared they won a 9-0 SCOTUS ruling against them, argue that the existence of undocumented migrants in America means we're in a literal war that gives the President extraordinary powers, and continue to insist that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election even though he absolutely did not, and that was four and half years ago. Clearly the plan here is to throw up enough bullshit to fire up winger outrage at Democrats "endangering our beloved Gestapo" and hope emotion overrules logic as the regime engages in clear fascist repression of their political opposition.

"DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said that "members of Congress storming into a detention facility goes beyond a bizarre political stunt and puts the safety of our law enforcement agents and detainees at risk. Members of Congress are not above the law and cannot illegally break into detention facilities. Had these members requested a tour, we would have facilitated a tour of the facility. This is an evolving situation."

The department also claimed that "the allegations made by Newark politicians that Delaney does not have the proper permitting are false. We have valid permits, and inspections for plumbing and electricity, and fire codes have been cleared."

This is utterly unhinged nonsense; nobody was trying to "break into" an ICE detention facility and the entire purpose of not informing DHS that they wanted a tour is so that the elected officials could investigate reports of abuse and unsafe conditions at the facility *without* DHS being able to set the scene before they arrive. Everything Baraka and the Congressional Democrats did here is a completely reasonable exercise of their oversight authority during what amounts to a fact-finding mission at local private prison facility contracting with the US government. The fact is that the Trump regime doesn't want the American people or their representatives to see what goes on inside private migrant detention facilities because they know it would outrage public sentiment and expose the regime to legal consequences; that's why the officials were stopped and ordered to leave. When they refused, the Gestapo went to the only thing they know; carceral force. This is fascism in action.

#Fascism #Trump #ICE #DHS #AlinaHabba #Newark #RasBaraka #PoliceState #DelaneyHall #TriciaMcLaughlin

As the Trump regime welcomes 59 (specifically) white South African "refugees" to the United States, most corporate media outlets are (accidentally or otherwise) obfuscating the fascist ideology behind Trump's only asylum exemption by describing the situation as "baffling." The reality however is that in actively favoring and financially supporting white South African migrants while denying all other asylum claims, Trump is governing by nazi conspiracy theory and exposing the white nationalist agenda behind the regime's immigration policies.

https://truthout.org/articles/trump-is-bending-the-refugee-program-to-fit-his-white-nationalist-agenda/

Trump Is Bending the Refugee Program to Fit His White Nationalist Agenda

"Trump’s executive order prioritizing South Africans under the refugee program is likely due in part to his close relationship with Elon Musk. The billionaire SpaceX CEO grew up in a wealthy family in apartheid-era South Africa and has publicly claimed that white South Africans are persecuted for their race. Peter Thiel, another one of Trump’s far right billionaire backers, also spent years in apartheid South Africa and has praised that system.

But Trump’s fixation on Afrikaners runs deeper than his political allyships: For years, Trump has indirectly platformed the “white genocide” conspiracies of South Africa’s far right. That rhetoric — recently manifested in concrete policies and actions — lays bare the white nationalism at the heart of Trump’s agenda."

If you've been following my other account, you already know I've had some words for the mainstream media coverage of this event, so I'll keep this part brief. The fact that the vast majority of news outlets aren't expressly reporting that Trump is arguing that a years old neonazi conspiracy theory is true when he directly says the US government is intervening because white South Africans are the target of a "genocide" is absolutely fucking outrageous. Simply repeating the racist lies powerful fascists utter and hoping the reader will figure out this is nazi conspiracy shit straight from the front page of Stormfront is not fucking journalism, it's stenography. As the author of this piece demonstrates, a little bit of research exposes that Trump is literally governing by nazi conspiracy theory.

"Fringe panic about a “white genocide” in South Africa gained mainstream prevalence during Trump’s first presidency, when right-wing groups pushed the lie that a string of murders on commercial farms was disproportionately targeting white South Africans. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson helped sensationalize these claims at the time, boosting stories about South African farm attacks alongside inflammatory rhetoric about undocumented immigration in the U.S. and a domestic “fertility crisis.” As many analysts pointed out, Carlson’s favored talking points echoed the “great replacement theory,” the white supremacist myth that white U.S. citizens are being systemically erased by people of color."

As the article points out, the existence of a "white genocide" in post-apartheid South Africa is literally a cracker supremacist conspiracy theory promoted by a racist organization in South Africa; it's not real, far right politicians in the Pig Empire are treating years old, sensationalist white nationalist propaganda (that wasn't believable even in the moment) as if it were the gospel truth, and the whole thing was thrown out of court in South Africa because again, it's a nazi conspiracy theory. Stormfront posters and racist Tucker Carlson conspiracies are now governing White House immigration policy.

Which brings us to the larger, overarching meaning behind this sham "refugee" program; namely that the Trump regime's immigration policies are blatantly white nationalist, and clearly an extension of the administration's fascist quest to support global white supremacy while transforming America into a white ethnostate. If banning asylum claims from countries full of predominantly brown people, while paying real cash money to lure South African migrants and promote a nazi conspiracy theory about post-apartheid "white genocide" didn't prove the point, the contents of Trump's original executive order allowing this fascist bullshit probably should. In denying all aid to South Africa, Trump's order directly railed against reparations-style land redistribution policies, and South Africa's case against Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza; it's not hard to see the white nationalist animus behind these arguments, but when Trump goes a step father and directly supports the "white genocide" nazi conspiracy theory when explaining his policies, we're well past the realm of plausible deniability here. It is not enough for Trump to permanently enshrine white nationalism in American policy, this administration is determined to enforce white supremacy on a global scale.

#Fascism #Trump #Immigration #SouthAfrica #TuckerCarlson #NeoNazis #WhiteNationalism #USPol #Refugees #StephenMiller #CosnpiracyTheories #ElonMusk #PeterThiel #ForeignPolicy #Racism

As far back as the first Trump administration, I was writing about the way the president's absolute power over immigration policy and enforcement, combined with Trump's ethno-nationalist worldview, and ICE's disturbingly broad powers to act as a private army for the executive, ultimately made ICE Trump's literal "Gestapo." I'm old enough to have been for abolishing ICE from its inception as a federal agency back in 2003, but now that we've actually seen what happens when an authoritarian president trying to establish a Christian Nationalist ethnostate gets ahold of a poorly regulated security force full of white nationalists, I think it behooves everyone who isn't a fascist themselves to advocate for abolishing ICE as a matter of personal preservation. If that sounds radical to you, please let me remind you that immigration officials and ICE agents are *already* arresting judges and opposition party politicians on made up "obstruction" and "trespassing" charges to ram through illegal mass deportations without interference from folks who care about things like "the law," or "human rights."

As this excellent article by Mehdi Hasan points out, the need to abolish ICE entirely wasn't always a "radical" left wing position in American politics; as recently as 2018 even "centrist" Democrats like Kirsten Gillibrand and future Democratic Party presidential nominee Kamala Harris were both willing to publicly say the agency needed to be ripped down to the studs and "reimagined." So now that Trump has fully unleashed ICE to behave as his own private Gestapo, where is the Democratic Party on the subject of abolishing ICE today? As Hasan notes, nowhere at all; and that includes progressive firebrands like AOC and Bernie Sanders.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/13/democrats-abolish-ice-trump

Ice has become Trump’s private militia. It must be abolished

"So where are the Dems on this? Why aren’t they calling for an end to a lawless, violent, deadly, institutionally racist, sexually abusive agency, whose employees’ union endorsed Trump for president in both 2016 and 2020, and whose former acting director, Tom Homan, has become this administration’s gung-ho “border czar” and “the face of Trump’s cruelty”, to quote my Zeteo colleague John Harwood?

Forget about talk of “reform”. At this point, there is no way to improve or “fix” Ice. It has to be abolished. Shut down. Scrapped. To quote Gillibrand in 2018, the entirety of immigration enforcement in the United States must be “reimagined”.

Meanwhile, as some Democrats obsess over opinion polls and worry about looking “soft” on the border, the actual experts on authoritarianism are sounding the alarm. The political scientist Lee Morgenbesser has compared Ice to a “secret police” and says the agency “is fast becoming a key piece in the repressive apparatus of American authoritarianism”. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat calls Ice the “foot soldiers” of the “fascists”. Even the “anti-woke” libertarians over at Reason magazine say Ice is on a “militaristic mission that effectively turns nonviolent immigrants into fugitives.”

On some level, it's mind-blowing to me that "we should dismantle the fascist regime's cracker supremacist secret police" is a controversial position in American politics, but here we are. I do not comprehend how anyone who has been watching the fascist activities of the Trump regime, and the operational centrality of the War on Terror era DHS (under which ICE operates) security structure to most of that fascist bullshit, can argue that an agency built to enforce American nativisim and "counterterrorism" police state repression, can be reformed somehow. Furthermore, even if it could be separated from the executive branch's far too broad immigration powers to reduce abuse, what would we be reforming it for? To hunt down brown people more "humanely?" That's absolute cracker nonsense, and while I know *why* the Democratic Party accepts that framework (they have rich racist donors who profit from the migrant carceral complex too), that doesn't make it any less nativist, or corrosive to our civil liberties when they do so. Hasan is right, the only politically and morally acceptable position here is "abolish ICE."

Even setting aside how strongly I agree with Hasan's argument, I'd like to note that this article is a wonderful work of evidentiary scholarship; there are no less than 56 source links documenting years worth of American political attitudes about ICE, the agency's numerous authoritarian abuses in the past month of the Trump 2.0 era, and why it's absolutely fair to describe them as Trump's personal (fascist) militia. Anytime you can spit so much truth "Very Serious People TM" don't want to hear that it requires your poor editor to spend an entire evening hunting down reference links, you're doing that work; game recognize game, Mr. Hasan.

#Fascism #Trump #USPol #ICE #DHS #WarOnTerror #Democrats #Gestapo #CivilRights #Nativism #WhiteNationalism #Ethnostate #TomHoman #Immigration #PoliceState

So, I just want to do a little bit of follow up work on the story about the Trump admin paying to import 59 white seemingly racist "refugees" while Trump openly promoted a nazi conspiracy theory about the least effective "white genocide" in history, in post-apartheid South Africa.

This short, 10 minute clip from The Majority Report covers a lot of the same factual ground I went over in my post; including a thorough debunking of the numbers behind farm violence the Trump regime (and neo-nazis worldwide) insist is a "white genocide." As it turns out farm violence accounted for 0.2% of all murders during the last year with available figures for South Africa. Furthermore, even the eminent domain/land reclamation argument is horseshit because it's intended to reclaim *unused* land and governments in post-apartheid South Africa have literally never enacted the law to do so; it's no different than US eminent domain law, and so far the government isn't even using it. Finally, Sam Seder points out the absurd racism motivating the decision to rescind protected status from Afghani refugees who often actively aided the United States in a misguided war, while rolling out the red carpet and government funds to attract racist white South Africans who absolutely should not be considered "refugees."

The real reason I'm sharing this clip however is because I think watching it allows you to viscerally *feel* just how much the media is covering up for Trump's nazi bullshit. As you might remember, I was highly critical of corporate media outlets for engaging in acts of translation and "Trump-splaining" that obscured the fact that Der Leader was literally spouting a known nazi conspiracy theory about a nonexistent "white genocide" in South Africa to justify the regime's actions; which are obviously motivated by white nationalist solidarity and a desire to once again invert the language and machinery of what some might call social justice (in this case anti-genocide activism and asylum laws) on its head, to do fascist bullshit. At that time, I was responding to printed accounts of the Trump press conference about the white South Africans arriving, which even at the time I considered poor enough to border on apologia for again, the president spreading a nazi conspiracy theory to justify white nationalist ethnostate bullshit. Well, The Majority Report actually just clipped Trump answering questions directly, and I think it's pretty instructional to hear what the president actually said, and then examine how the media reported it. If you literally only want to hear Trump's repugnant answer, the clip of the president talking starts at 2:10.

When you watch it, you will discover that far from being confused or rambling, Trump's answer is hyper focused and dripping with indignation. He confidently espouses again, a nazi conspiracy theory about nonexistent white genocide in post-apartheid South Africa, and then literally fucking chides the media for not covering his cracker racist conspiracy theory. There was no translation or additional sourcing required here; the president literally trotted out in front of the cameras and acted out a Nick Fuentes podcast segment while spreading outright fascist lies, with little or no pushback from a captured group of media stenographers pretended they were doing journalism. Seeing is believing, and as you watch this I want you to consider for a moment that this is just one Trump tirade, during one press conference, about one (admittedly repugnant) story. If this is how the media reports the president openly embracing a nazi conspiracy theory and chastising the media for not embracing it too, how many other acts of translation and Trump-splaining have they engaged in during his entire time in office? What other unhinged nazi shit is Trump saying that is being reported in the mildest possible terms, by an army of stenographers determined to make Trump make sense to readers even when he's clearly a brainwormed nazi who isn't going to make sense to anyone who isn't also a brainwormed nazi, unless the media essentially lies to make him sound more normal? We've talked a lot about an American establishment collaborating with the fascist Trump regime in far less subtle ways, but this is literally the media helping to normalize nazi conspiracy theories under the guise of "interpreting" a fascist president who requires no interpretation if you just listen to the nazi bullshit that spews out of his mouth.

The Majority Report: Trump's Racist Refugee Policy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fUHfqixkwQ

#Fascism #Trump #Video #TheMajorityReport #SouthAfrica #Refugees #ForeignPolicy #Racism #WhiteNationalism #USPol #ConspirayTheories #Nazis #Immigration

One of the ways I repeatedly rat myself out as a product of the Reaganite 80's in the Pig Empire is my insistence on comparing modern fascist America to Gen Xer hit films like Robocop, or Starship Troopers. This is of course basic bitch behavior, but I can't help myself and one of the frequent film references I've made to contextualize fascism in the Trump era(s) has been the Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie "The Running Man." It's a delightfully subversive, albeit not particularly intellectually challenging film, and the important detail to our discussion here is that involves forcing a framed military officer to compete for his life in a rigged Gladiator-style gameshow that's the biggest TV hit in a dystopian, near future America. The film has all kinds of messages about class warfare, covert fascism, and collusion between the government and the private sector to suppress the poor and extract wealth from the marginalized; so it's basically confirmed prophecy today. Okay, I kid, but the gamified aspect of the fascist propaganda the regime deployed in the film has been remarkably prescient in our modern, algorithmically-driven fascist society. I'm a big fan of this movie.

And apparently so is Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, America's own "fascist Barbie." Or at least I assume she would be if she ever saw the film after reports have leaked out that DHS is considering, I shit you not, teaming up with a reality TV show producer to create a televised gameshow in which contestants would compete for U.S. citizenship. You must know by now that I couldn't make unhinged nazi shit like this up if I tried; DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin recently confirmed to Huffpost that the show was at least in "the “very beginning stages” of the department’s vetting process and has not been approved or denied."

https://truthout.org/articles/dhs-is-reportedly-considering-reality-show-for-immigrants-to-win-citizenship/

“The Department of Homeland Security receives hundreds of television show pitches a year,” read a statement from DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, noting that many of the pitches are for documentaries.

Notably, McLaughlin’s statement doesn’t say the pitch has been denied yet, and she has said that she personally thinks the show is “a good idea.”

Citing its own sources, The Daily Mail reported that it “has confirmed that Noem supports the project and wants to proceed” with it.

Several users on social media have described the proposal as being similar to the competition in the “Hunger Games,” the dystopian young adult novel where oppressed children compete in a battle royale to the death for the chance at income for life and special status within society."

Frankly, I've never seen the Hunger Games but there is literally so much horrifying shit about this proposal that is morally, ethically, and I should hope legally wrong that I don't even know where to start. DHS has denied that Noem is even aware of the project, but the Daily Mail contradicts that with their own sources and given that the DHS Secretary has already spent several months turning her own role at the department into a kind of nazi reality TV experiment, I'm inclined to believe the Mail here. Trump is the reality TV president, his administration is stuffed to the gills with television "stars" and right wing extremist "influencers" and transforming the regime's war on migrants into an "entertaining" game show would undoubtedly be an effective, if disgusting and surreal, bit of white nationalist propaganda. I think they're serious about this dystopian racist bullshit, but the regime isn't sure whether or not they can actually get away with such a crass fascist display yet, so they're proceeding with caution.

Of course it goes without saying that it says a lot about your positions on the humanity of migrants and asylum seekers, if you're willing to even consider transforming their struggles with an American immigration system that was white nationalist in nature long before Trump became president, into entertainment and propaganda for the presumably cracker reactionary masses. It also objectively undermines the Trump regime's stated arguments that American citizenship is a precious commodity that must be protected from "undesirables" having access; but this is a government already importing white South African nazis it claims are refugees, and selling off $5M "gold card" visas to any rich prick who wants to pony up the cheddar, so that's basically par for the course at this point. Finally of course, the fact that the Trump regime and its DHS Secretary are actively exploring this deeply unserious, but objectively fascist bullshit, speaks directly to the fact that these nazi assclowns have no fucking business serving in the US government and this regime has repurposed (in so much as it was even required) the American state to promote Christian Nationalism at any and all costs.

#Fascism #DHS #Trump #KristiNoem #MigrantRights #TriciaMcLaughlin #USPol #WhiteNationalism #RealityTV #Racism #Immigration #Nazis

In a story that as far as I can tell represents a petulant fascist temper tantrum as a result of fallout over the clown-show authoritarian arrest of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, noted sycophant Trump minion Alina Habba has announced criminal charges against US Congresswoman (D-NJ) LaMonica McIver. The regime is accusing the Congresswoman of assaulting two ICE agents during the lawful oversight visit she conducted on a sketchy, privately-run, recently reopened migrant detention facility called Delaney Hall; the very same visit that resulted in Trump's Gestapo arresting Baraka as part of the regime's attempts to intimidate opposition to their unlawful mass deportation campaign.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/lamonica-mciver-charges

'Should Send a Chill Down the Spine of Every American': Trump DOJ Charges New Jersey Democrat

"In a statement, Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Alina Habba announced the charges against U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), claiming the lawmaker "assaulted, impeded, and interfered with law enforcement" at GEO Group's Delaney Hall. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded GEO Group a billion-dollar contract earlier this year to detain migrants there, even as the facility faced legal challenges and accusations of abuse.

McIver rejected the charges against her as "purely political," saying that "they mischaracterize and distort my actions" in an attempt to "criminalize and deter legislative oversight."

"We were fulfilling our lawful oversight responsibilities, as members of Congress have done many times before, and our visit should have been peaceful and short," said McIver. "Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor [Ras] Baraka."

Habba said Monday that her office has agreed to drop the trespassing charge against Baraka, who welcomed the decision while expressing solidarity with McIver."

Okay so I don't know if you remember the post I made about Baraka's arrest, but there are literally a bunch of links to video footage of the confrontation Habba is talking about and needless to say it doesn't show the Congresswoman assaulting anyone, let alone "body-slamming" anyone as at least one DHS official previously claimed. Even the government's own out of context video clip just shows some shoving in a crowd of people trying to protect the Mayor of Newark. In other words the Interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey is straight up lying about something we can all watch on video. This would of course be more shocking if the world hadn't gotten to know Habba during her time as a defense attorney for Downmarket Mussolini, in which is she routinely spat out easily disprovable lies in court. As an activist I can say from personal experience that this feels an awful lot like the standard bullshit charge cops who just roughed up some protesters press to keep the heat off long enough for the story to go away, and then quietly drop later. You can see that same pattern at work in the "trespass" charges laid against Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, which were ultimately dropped because the regime knows they don't have a leg to stand on when they're under oath.

With all that established however, I think it's important to understand that even if they ultimately drop the charges against McIver, as they did with Baraka, this is still an example of a fascist regime weaponizing the enforcement arm of the state, to target and intimidate their political opposition. Pam Bondi might not love the Justice Department's chances in a court of law, but a message is still being sent to opposition party politicians that if they try to interfere with the unlawful, openly fascist "whitening" of America, security forces will be deployed to stop them. This when combined with the regime's threatening rhetoric, and its day to day attempts to erode the oversight of the judiciary to do blatantly unconstitutional authoritarian bullshit, effectively creates an unstable political environment where opposition to the regime's program, even legal opposition, carries an impossible to properly calculate degree of personal risk to the critic. Whatever your opinion of the Democratic Party happens to be, I think we can all admit that putting their own asses on the line to protect dissidents and critics hasn't exactly been their forte since at least October 7th, 2023; although obviously Baraka, McIver, and Robert Menendez deserve full marks for doing so now.

Finally; I can't prove it, but for a fun thought experiment google up some pictures of Baraka, McIver, and Menendez and tell me if you can think of any obvious reasons a white nationalist government might charge only the two people they did. Yeah, looked about white to me too.

#Fascism #Trump #PoliceState #LaMonicaMcIver #ICE #DoJ #PamBondi #AlinaHabba #DHS #RasBaraka #DelaneyHall #RobertMenendez #Intimidation #DemocraticParty #USCongress #Newark #NewJersey #USPol #MassDeportation #Racism #WhiteNationalism

When I first saw headlines about this story, I genuinely thought the media was just taking the bait while yet another Trump regime official "played stupid" under questioning, but seeing is believing; as this short Majority Report segment demonstrations, DHS Secretary (and former Governor of South Dakota) absolutely does not know what the Writ of Habeas Corpus is and what, or even whose rights it protects. Facing down questions during a Senate oversight committee hearing, the DHS Secretary responded to the simple question of "what is habeas corpus" with "habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country, and suspend their right to" before being cut off by Senator (D-NH) Maggie Hassan, who provided the correct answer. The entire exchange, as well as Noem's responses to further questioning by Senator (D-NJ) Andy Kim have a bizarro-world quality to them that exposes Noem as a deeply unserious and untrustworthy person who absolutely should not be serving in the US government in any capacity whatsoever; I wouldn't trust this lady to run the Easter Egg Roll.

I would however like to note that the things Noem did say, or at least clearly had absorbed by repetition for propaganda purposes, were just as revealing as the things she didn't know and couldn't recite. Analyzing Noem's answers, it's very clear that she was making a propaganda argument to manufacture consent for suspending habeas corpus, and Donald Trump's presumed power to do so; even going so far as to push back against the clearly better informed and more legally knowledgeable Senators questioning her. Listening to the DHS Secretary, it's pretty easy to sketch a rough outline of Stephen Miller's plan to declare Trump can suspend habeas corpus without Congressional approval, under the presumption that said approval will be given retroactively because Abe Lincoln did so one time during the literal Civil War.

Of course none of the regime's arguments for this fascist bullshit are legally valid or make any sense at all. As we've discussed many times already here in this space, America is absolutely not being invaded, by narco-terrorist gangs or otherwise, and I think "we saw too many Mexican-looking people in our neighborhoods" doesn't represent an equivalent public safety "crisis" to that time Lincoln had to stop Confederate soldiers from pillaging Union territories when the South formally seceded and declared war on the US government. Despite this however, the Trump regime is currently working hard to make that argument and win the court of public opinion on this alarming subject for a reason; Kristi Noem might be an ignorant fool, but someone certainly fed her the talking points the administration wants to use to justify suspending habeas corpus, and that should concern us all

The Majority Report: Trump Team's Stunning Ignorance On Full Display During Noem's 'Habeas Corpus' Flop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aZH2dQcwyQ

#Fascism #Trump #HabeasCorpus #TheMajorityReport #KristiNoem #DHS #Immigration #USPol #PoliceState #MassDeportations #USConsitution #USCivilWar #AbeLincoln #Propaganda #GOP #ManufacturingConsent #Video

This story is a couple of days old, but I want to highlight it briefly because I think it speaks to the stunning myriad of ways the Trump regime is actively looking to claim and consolidate extraordinary, often unconstitutional and blatantly illegal powers in the hands of the executive branch; which for now means the Trump administration. Standing before a three judge appellate court, a Department of Justice lawyer argued with a straight face that Attorney General Pam Bondi had the right to revoke anyone's green card, for any reason, even if they've been legally residing in the country for years.

https://truthout.org/articles/doj-lawyer-argues-ag-pam-bondi-can-revoke-a-persons-green-card-at-any-time/

DOJ Lawyer Argues AG Pam Bondi Can Revoke a Person’s Green Card at Any Time

"During an appellate court hearing last week, a lawyer for the Trump administration argued that Attorney General Pam Bondi has the authority to revoke a person’s green card at any time, for any reason she sees fit — even if they have lived lawfully in the United States for decades.

Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney Lindsay Murphy made the argument before a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday in a case involving Mohammad Qatanani, a Palestinian-born Muslim imam who has lived in New Jersey since the mid-1990s."

The article goes on to talk about the details of Qatanani's case, which has been ongoing for years and began anew in 2021 in a scenario that to me, sounds a lot like the US government once again enforcing unrealtiy on behalf of Israel, but your mileage may vary and I can't profess to be intimately familiar with the details of Qatanani's life. What's important to take note of here is that a Trump administration that's already asserting that the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio can unilaterally and instantaneously revoke someone's green card without providing justification under dubious foreign policy concern arguments, are now putting forward the legal position that Trump's fascist DoJ pit bull Pam Bondi can do so, just 'cause. It is of course unclear how legally successful this strategy will be overall, given this case is ongoing and the deportations facilitated by Rubio's actions against Mahmoud Khalil, Rümeysa Öztürk, Mohsen Mahdawi and others are still mired in legal proceedings.

What we do know however is that the Trump regime is desperately searching for a way to legally revoke green cards quickly and without oversight. Furthermore I think we can surmise from the openly nativist, white nationalist nature of Trump's, or perhaps Stephen Miller's immigration policies, that despite the regime's protestations otherwise, the ongoing "whitening" of America project being conducted under the fascist Trump regime is ultimately designed to target legal immigrants as well; and in sufficient enough quantity as to require no oversight whatsoever. Which to anyone who has studied the history of politically-empowered fascist movements, sounds like a recipe for some type of ethnic cleansing.

Folks, I don't know how to say this any clearer, but I'm convinced these guys are basically the Nazis, like with a capital N. This is a fascist regime, stacked to the brim with actual white nationalists, built around a hyper-racist cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump. In just under fourth months, virtually all of these people have shown a horrifying lack of concern for human life in general while exposing their eliminationist worldviews in a staggering number of ways. The regime may not win in court here, but whether its through the budget reconciliation bill, emergency Supreme Court petitions, or public propaganda disseminated on cable news, they are making it clear that the intention is to consolidate all state power in the executive branch; when that happens to a country being run by fascists, you've got yourself a fascist dictatorship. There is no fucking bottom here, no depth too low for these people to sink to, no power too forbidden for them to try to exert. I can't predict the future, but a reasonable understanding of history says that this sort of shit usually ends in mass graves unless the people living under fascist tyranny do something to stop it.

#Fascism #Trump #Courts #PamBondi #JusticeDepartment #Immigration #GreenCard #CivilRights #Dictatorship #MohammadQatanani #WhiteNationalism #Ethnostate #Nazis #USPol #EthnicCleansing

While I think anyone still arguing that the Trump regime is not fundamentally fascist in nature is engaging in one form of motivated reasoning or another, I still believe it's important to remember that this particular fascist movement remains firmly grounded in American historical, ideological, and cultural experiences at its core. Indeed, almost every aspect of Downmarket Mussolini's fascist agenda and the methods by which the regime is attempting to conduct it, has an administrative precedent in US political history; although that precedent will almost always come from the most reactionary and objectively shameful activities our government has ever engaged in. You don't have to take my word for it: Trump regime minions on your TV and Justice Department lawyers in court openly admit as much regularly.

There can be no doubt that Trump minions like Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi, are cribbing from America's white supremacist, anti-labor, anti-civil rights history; with a particular focus on the Second Red Scare, the Nixon administration's war on Civil Rights activists and student protestors, and the Bush administration's War on Terror. This synthesis of reaction, oppression, and executive overreach has allowed the Trump regime to create what many identify as a "new form of McCarthyism" empowered by the legalist logic and nativist, white supremacist sentiments underpinning America's "counterterrorism" apparatus, mass surveillance systems, and the national security state; by freely applying the almost legally meaningless "terrorist" label to protestors, student activists, and undocumented migrants, this administration has sought to render the judiciary and even the entire US Constitution, irrelevant.

Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum, and a fascist Trump regime seeking to enshrine an executive branch dictatorship is fully aware that civil society will eventually understand what they're doing, and fight back. To prevent this they need a skeleton key to enable the active suppression and criminalization of dissidents, opposition groups, and civil rights activists the fascist right broadly classifies as "the radical left." Unfortunately if recent work to connect the dots in the second Trump era are any indication, the regime has already found that key in legally conflating opposing a genocide, with supporting Hamas; and its doing so by design in yet another scheme brought to you by the architects of Project 2025. If the opening salvos of Trump's war on American civil society can be describes as a "new McCarthyism" then I think it's fair to say that the Heritage Foundation's "Project Esther" can be best understood as the Trump regime's "new COINTELPRO."

https://truthout.org/articles/project-esther-is-a-mccarthy-era-blueprint-for-crushing-the-american-left/

Project Esther Is a McCarthy-Era Blueprint for Crushing the American Left

"Mainstream coverage of Project Esther has largely framed the document as an effort to crush the pro-Palestinian movement. It’s important to emphasize, however, that the threat Project Esther poses to the left more broadly is not a byproduct — it’s part of the plan’s core design. The text lays bare the McCarthyist nature of this political moment and underscores the urgent need for the left to mount a multipronged, coalitional defense.

At the center of Project Esther’s crosshairs are the people and organizations it dubs the “Hamas Support Network,” or HSN, though there’s no evidence that the entities it’s targeting actually support Hamas, or that they are even organized in any sort of a network. The playbook proposes a slew of recommendations for dismantling this fictional network, including deporting international students, purging pro-Palestine faculty from educational institutions, defunding organizations, increasing criminalization and promoting social ostracization of people that speak out in support of Palestinian rights. “Within the United States, the HSN receives the indispensable support of a vast network of activists and funders with a much more ambitious, insidious goal — the destruction of capitalism and democracy,” Project Esther claims."

Folks, after four months of watching the Trump regime pretend we're at war with a gang and opposing genocide is "materially supporting terrorism," I think we're past the point of pretending these guys aren't serious about the plans they wrote down and are clearly enacting now that Trump is president. Project Esther is the logical extension of every argument ghouls like Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, and Seb Gorka have been making on your TV for weeks. They want to use FARA and RICO Act prosecutions to dismantle every aspect of organized resistance to Trump's fascist agenda under the guise of fighting "terrorism," and they are being quite clear that they consider opposition to capitalism and the American state to be fair game under that rubric.

#Fascism #Trump #ProjectEsther #HeritageFoundation #McCarthyism #COINTELPRO #Activism #Left #USPol #PoliceState #StephenMiller #PamBondi