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mass deportations
Trump Just Tried to Illegally Deport 600+ Guatemalan Kids on Holiday Weekend
"It is a dark and dangerous moment for this country when our government chooses to target orphaned 10-year-olds and denies them their most basic legal right to present their case before an immigration judge," a lawyer said.
Aug 31, 2025
In an effort reminiscent of US President Donald Trump using the Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds of migrants to a Salvadoran prison, his administration just tried to deport more than 600 unaccompanied children to Guatemala over Labor Day weekend—though for now, a federal judge's order appears to have halted the plan, unlike last time.
CNN exclusively reported Friday morning that the Trump administration was "moving to repatriate hundreds of Guatemalan children" who arrived in the United States alone and were placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Subsequent reporting confirmed plans to deport the kids, who are ages 10-17.
Fearing their imminent removal after the administration reportedly reached an agreement with the Guatemalan government, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) launched a class action lawsuit around 1:00 am Sunday, seeking an emergency order that was granted just hours later by a federal judge in Washington, D.C.
"Plaintiffs have active proceedings before immigration courts across the country, yet defendants plan to remove them in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Constitution," NILC's complaint explains.
Efrén C. Olivares, vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the NILC, said that "it is a dark and dangerous moment for this country when our government chooses to target orphaned 10-year-olds and denies them their most basic legal right to present their case before an immigration judge."
"The Constitution and federal laws provide robust protections to unaccompanied minors specifically because of the unique risks they face," Olivares noted. "We are determined to use every legal tool at our disposal to force the administration to respect the law and not send any child to danger."
Politico's Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein reported on the judge's moves:
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan issued the order just after 4:00 am Sunday, finding that the "exigent circumstances" described in the lawsuit warranted immediate action "to maintain the status quo until a hearing can be set."
The judge, a Biden appointee, initially scheduled a virtual hearing on the matter for 3:00 pm Sunday, but later moved up the hearing to 12:30 pm after being notified that some minors covered by the suit were "in the process of being removed from the United States."
Sharing updates from the hearing on social media, Cheney reported that Sooknanan took a five-minute recess so that US Department of Justice attorney Drew Ensign could ensure that the details of her order reached the Trump administration—which is pursuing mass deportations. Ensign confirmed to the judge that while it's possible one plane took off and then returned, all the children are still in the United States.
Following the judge's intervention, NILC's Olivares said in a statement that "in the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala."
"We are heartened the court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm," he added. "We are determined to continue fighting to protect the interest of our plaintiffs and all class members until the effort is enjoined permanently."
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The Disappearance Machine
If this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions.
Aug 30, 2025
"What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again."—Anne Frank
US President Donald Trump has federalized the DC police department and put more than 2,000 National Guard troops on city streets, even as crime remains at historic lows. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seizing more than 1,000 people every day. Palantir is rolling out its AI-powered “ImmigrationOS,” designed to fuse the private details of millions into a single surveillance grid. These are not accidents or isolated headlines. They are pieces of a larger architecture: a disappearance machine that erases lives quietly while making absence look routine.
The system is not hypothetical. It is funded, operational, and expanding. What began with undocumented immigrants now extends to visa holders, asylum seekers, parolees, aid workers, and dissenters. By the government’s own numbers, more than 20 million people are potentially vulnerable. Many are not accused of crimes at all. They are flagged by association, by proximity, by the digital trails of daily life. And still there is no clear plan for where millions would be sent.
This is not only about immigration. It is about what happens when disappearance becomes policy, not error. It is about how authoritarian systems succeed, not through spectacle alone, but by presenting themselves as orderly, legal, and necessary. History offers its warning: Absence becomes normal, silence becomes institutional. If this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions.
The Enforcement System
The machine does not announce itself with spectacle. Its danger lies in its efficiency, humming beneath the noise of everyday life. The quotas, contracts, and deployments pile up like the hum of an engine, so constant that many people stop hearing them.
ICE has already blown past its legal detention limits, booking more than 31,000 people in June alone. Overflow has been moved into tent camps on military bases and newly leased private facilities. But the real innovation lies beneath the numbers: the wiring of the system. Department of Motor Vehicle records, school rosters, medical files, protest photos—all are now drawn into ICE’s databases, where AI-driven analytics map not only who people are, but who they know.
That wiring has corporate architects. Palantir. Amazon Web Services. Anduril. Palantir’s AI engines feed the machine with millions of cross-linked records, turning raw fragments into actionable targets. Anduril watches from autonomous towers. Amazon stores the data that makes it possible. Each contract transforms misery into revenue, turning deportation into a line item on a balance sheet. Together they prove a brutal truth: Deportation is not just policy. It is profit.
What binds people to one another—love, kinship, faith, compassion—becomes evidence against them.
Congress has widened the channel further. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” earmarks $170 billion for detention, deportation logistics, and 10,000 new ICE agents. If enacted, ICE would surpass the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Marshals combined budgets and operational reach. Contracts like these rarely expire. Facilities like these rarely close. Permanence is the point, and permanence is the profit.
The military presence seals the fusion. Guard units have been mobilized in 19 states. Marines handle logistics. In Los Angeles, Washington, and other threatened cities, troops now patrol the streets. Each deployment erodes the line between military and civilian. Each step embeds martial presence deeper into ordinary life.
This is the machine. Arrests that exceed the law. Contracts that bind the future. Corporations cashing in. Soldiers on our sidewalks. A van arrives. A door closes. A name disappears. It does not need to announce itself loudly. It hums through budgets, contracts, and signatures. It looks procedural. It looks harmless. And that is the danger.
Silence allows it to run. And what it runs toward is not enforcement, but disappearance.
When Bureaucracy Becomes Disappearance
Once the machine is in motion, it does not deliver justice. It delivers absence. Disappearance is not a malfunction. It is the product the system is built to deliver.
When ICE takes someone, the trail goes dark by design. Families call and hear nothing. Lawyers search and find no records. Facilities deny they are holding anyone. Transfers happen within hours, often across state lines. A man leaves for work and never returns, his vehicle still running, lunch packed, a child’s car seat strapped in. Fields go unharvested, animals untended, trucks unloaded. This is not error. It is method. Not accident. Design.
Authoritarian regimes have long understood this power. Nazi Germany perfected registries, codes, and camps placed far from public view. The parallel is structural, not identical. Then it was files and cattle cars. Today it is biometric databases and chartered flights. What once took days can now be done in seconds with AI-driven servers and algorithms.
This is the innovation: speed. A protest photo flagged. A clinic visit cross-matched. An address linked to a file. Palantir’s AI system merges millions of fragments into real-time triggers. ICE no longer needs loud raids. It can knock softly, often. A van at the corner. A name missing the next day. Absence hardens into fact. Silence hardens into complicity.
The Logic That Criminalizes Connection
This system punishes not only identity but connection. In it, solidarity itself is criminalized. The machine does not only target individuals. It ensnares through association.
If you share an address with someone flagged, your file may be tagged. If your number appears on a church roster, a school list, or a protest sign-in sheet, it can be enough. If you drive a neighbor, open your home, or hand someone food, you may be prosecuted for “harboring.” AI-powered algorithms do not need guilt. They need only connection.
This logic makes solidarity itself dangerous. What binds people to one another—love, kinship, faith, compassion—becomes evidence against them.
We are already seeing it in practice. Arizona volunteers charged for leaving water in the desert. Texas laws making it a felony to drive undocumented neighbors to church. In Florida, vehicles parked near churches or immigrant-serving sites were scanned and flagged by law enforcement using surveillance data accessible to ICE. The ordinary acts of care that sustain community are reclassified as crimes. The message is unmistakable: Kindness itself can put you on the list.
These are not outliers. They are the system. Piece by piece, the fragments form a net.
A Net Cast Over Millions
Public debate still circles around the figure of “11 million undocumented.” But that number is a mirage. The government’s own statistics show a pool of vulnerability far larger.
In fiscal year 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported nearly 400,000 visa overstays. US Citizenship and Immigration Services lists 1.1 million people on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and another 525,000 enrolled in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DHS reports show more than 530,000 parolees admitted from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Executive Office for Immigration Review and Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data confirm over 2 million asylum cases pending and 3.7 million in active removal proceedings. To this must be added parolees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, more than 200,000 new foreign F-1 student visa recipients each year, and several hundred thousand seasonal or temporary workers.
The risk is not only to millions already vulnerable. It is to every one of us, to the very possibility of a society that remembers, that dissents, that refuses to be silent.
Taken together, these categories already exceed 22 million people potentially at risk. And that does not include the at least 4.4 million US-born children in mixed-status households, whose futures hinge on their parents’ deportability.
This is not just a pool of migrants. It is a blueprint: proof of how entire populations can be flagged, managed, and erased.
Most chilling of all, many of these groups—DACA recipients, TPS holders, parolees—were once granted provisional protection. Their status was designed to provide safety, but now those same categories function as easily revoked permissions. What was once stability has become a list. What was once recognition has become a trap.
Quiet Files, Loud Fear
The system works on two levels at once, and the tension is intentional.
It is quiet, bureaucratic, relentless. Arrest. Transfer. Conceal. Data-matched names pulled into custody. People erased without a headline.
It is also loud, theatrical, meant to frighten. Guard patrols in DC. Raids at food pantries and churches. And in the Florida Everglades, a detention complex nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” built in just over a week on an abandoned airstrip. With 200 cameras, miles of barbed wire, and capacity for thousands, the camp was raised almost overnight and showcased as proof of federal resolve. It was not only a camp. It was a message: that human beings can be caged faster than homes can be built. The spectacle was the point: Not only could the government erase, it could do so at speed, in full view.
These displays are not mistakes. They are signals, designed to spread fear.
The precedent is clear. Nazi Germany paired hidden registries with public raids. Bureaucracy made atrocity look like procedure. Spectacle made fear look like power.
The result is devastating. Efficiency makes absence seem administrative. Spectacle makes fear seem permanent. One normalizes disappearance. The other normalizes submission. Like two sides of a coin, the system flips back and forth, but the outcome is always the same.
We’ve Seen This Logic Before
Nazi Germany balanced quiet registries and files with public terror. The paperwork processed millions. The raids displayed the strength of the state.
The parallels here are structural, not identical. Then it was racial laws and household registries; now it is DMV databases and predictive analytics. Then it was cattle cars; now it is charter flights. Then it was propaganda films; now it is press conferences and televised ICE raids.
The point is not to equate outcomes, but to recognize how bureaucracy and spectacle normalize atrocity in slow motion. In Germany, disappearance was accepted because it looked like order—files, trains, uniforms, procedure. The danger now is the same logic in digital form. When arrests are by algorithm, when transfers vanish into databases, when detention is described as “routine,” absence can be made to feel like administration instead of atrocity.
Ordinary Germans tolerated disappearance because it looked like order. That is precisely the risk now: authoritarian disappearance creeping forward one administrative step at a time, while the public is told everything remains under control.
It Starts with Them. It Ends with Us.
What begins with immigrants does not end there. Once a disappearance machine exists, its reach expands outward.
The list is already long: undocumented residents, visa overstays, TPS and DACA recipients, parolees, asylum seekers. Around them ripple aid workers, clergy, family members, volunteers, neighbors. Association is enough.
And the warning is clear: If there is a list, there are many. No one’s record is spotless. To be added requires only an electronic click, a database match, a fragment of data. Protest and your photo may be flagged. Write and your words may be logged. Share a home or a meal, and your act may become evidence. The logic is merciless: No category is safe, no community beyond reach. It does not stop at the border. It does not stop at citizenship.
Nowhere to Send Them, Nowhere to Hide
Two hundred detention sites are already locked into contracts. Offshore deals with countries such as Rwanda and El Salvador, and negotiations with many others, are ongoing. Daily arrests now number over a thousand, with internal targets aiming for 3,000 or more. A deportation system scaled for millions now exists, but the government has offered no clear plan for where those millions would go.
History warns what happens when removal outpaces destination. Nazi Germany built camps faster than authorities could decide what to do with those inside. Bureaucracy outran policy, and atrocity followed. The United States is not there yet, but it is building a machinery of disappearance faster than it can credibly process.
When numbers overwhelm the system, detention becomes indefinite. The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch have documented cases in which migrants were kept in prolonged detention without legal basis, sometimes without access to lawyers or family, effectively leaving them with no country of return or lawful destination. Congressional Research Service reports flag the capacity gap. In practice, that means expanded camps, more offshore transfers, and prolonged detention for those who cannot be removed.
The time to act is not when the machine is finished. It is now, while it is still assembling.
The danger is that a system built in the name of immigration control becomes one of social control. People are held not because they will be deported tomorrow, but because their absence today serves the machine. This is not immigration enforcement. It is the architecture of social control. Giorgio Agamben called this the creation of “bare life”: existence reduced to custody and stripped of political standing. As Hannah Arendt warned, the first loss is political: lose the “right to have rights,” and a “rule by Nobody” normalizes erasure from public life.
What cannot be done is to pretend this is merely immigration policy. What should not be done is to accept disappearance in any form as ordinary. What can still be done is to name the system for what it is, to resist normalization, and to defend the human ties that the machine seeks to criminalize.
The risk is not only to millions already vulnerable. It is to every one of us, to the very possibility of a society that remembers, that dissents, that refuses to be silent.
Before It’s Too Late to Speak
What once seemed unimaginable is quickly becoming routine. Daily arrests in the thousands. Troops on city streets. Contracts that turn human beings into commodities. Each day the machine expands. Each day Americans adjust, telling themselves it is not their concern.
But immigration is not the endgame. It is the cover story. Behind it, a larger project advances. The same AI-powered system that is designed to erase millions will erase dissent. The same silence that excuses raids will excuse repression.
This is how atrocity is normalized: not with sudden rupture, but with forms, files, and procedures that look ordinary until it is too late to resist them. History shows how absence can be made to feel like order, and how silence can become institutional.
The time to act is not when the machine is finished. It is now, while it is still assembling. Before the erasure of those targeted becomes irreversible. Before mass erasure becomes routine. History will not care about our excuses. It will remember our silence as complicity. It will ask not whether we knew, but whether we spoke.
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Bully-in-Chief Trump Delights in Cruelty
Violent imagery helped launch this made-for-TV president on his journey into the Oval Office. Now, he’s using it to govern with fear.
Aug 27, 2025
US President Donald Trump, his cabinet, and those who have profited from his rise seem to revel in public displays of cruelty.
Take former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) head Elon Musk, holding a chainsaw at a televised event to celebrate the firing of civil servants. Or Trump’s White House sharing a video featuring Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers marching handcuffed immigrants onto a deportation flight, with Jess Glynne’s musical hit “Hold My Hand” playing in the background. Or how about ICE allowing right-wing TV host Dr. Phil to film its sweeping immigration raids for public consumption? And don’t forget those federal agents tackling Democratic California Sen. Alex Padilla to the floor (and handcuffing him!) when he asked a question at a Department of Homeland Security press conference. Or what about during the first Trump presidential campaign, when the then-candidate boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York City and he wouldn’t lose a voter?
Violent imagery helped launch this made-for-TV president on his journey into the Oval Office. Now, he’s using it to govern with fear.
As journalist Adam Serwer put it, “Cruelty is the point.” Physical attacks and threats serve both to dehumanize vulnerable Americans (especially people of color) and to suggest what could happen to individuals who speak out against the wealth gaps and other problems of our times.
The underbelly of MAGA malice is, of course, greed. Compare the scenes I’ve just mentioned to the president welcoming to his inauguration not public figures who had done positive things for the welfare of Americans, but billionaires who made seven-figure donations to that very event. At the Oval Office, he also loves to host those who have presented him with shiny baubles—like Apple CEO Tim Cook, who had given him a gold trophy with his company’s logo on it. (Even then, Trump used the occasion to mock his visitor’s slight frame.)
We have long lived in a country where unfettered capitalism at the expense of so many of us thrives on violence meant specifically to silence people at the bottom.
Or consider Vice President JD Vance, who got the U.S. military to raise the level of a river so he could take a birthday boat trip on it. And that, tellingly, was only weeks after a real flood in Texas had killed more than 100 people, while the administration slow-walked aid in response to the disaster. And don’t forget that the president spent about $45 million taxpayer dollars on a military parade on his birthday in Washington, the very city in which he’s decried the homeless population as “unsightly” (and has now sent the National Guard into its streets). Those same funds could have paid for a significant amount of housing for hundreds of people in that same city.
America’s leadership has come unmoored from the values of equality and self-determination outlined in this country’s founding documents. They would prefer to display a let-them-eat-cake America that today boasts more than 800 billionaires (compared with around 60 in 1990), one where the average hourly wage has risen just 20% over the past 35 years—less than half what working people need to afford basic necessities like housing, food, and healthcare.
Mind you, Donald Trump is anything but solely responsible for creating such steep inequalities. However, he’s shown us how little he cares to make things right by cutting spending on health insurance, schools, farm subsidies, and so much more, while attacking the working poor and those who stand up for them.
American Carnage
Violence against people of color—especially workers of color who dare strive for better conditions—was already baked into American history. After all, we’re a nation that supersized our economy by using free or low-wage work. For example, the lynching of Black slaves and later Black Americans was one way that American leaders showed marginalized groups what they might expect if they spoke out.
In thousands of documented incidents in the history of this country, White mobs, often led by wealthy landowners, whipped, beat, hung, or otherwise murdered Black people in public places. (No surprise, then, that to this day, police violence against Blacks is all too commonplace.) Historically, in many lynchings, law enforcement either carried out the violence directly, organized the mobs who did, or at least stood by and watched without intervening.
With recent police crackdowns on protesters in LA and on people simply showing up to work, it should hardly come as a surprise that many Black Americans are now being punished for incidents when all they did was exercise the sorts of rights that many of us take for granted like going to school, writing, or gathering without the permission of whites. Once upon a time, in places like pre-Civil War Virginia and North Carolina, the law forbade enslaved people from gathering for any reason, even to worship. Nor, in the post-Civil War South, were whites subtle in their condemnation of Americans of color who managed to advance economically or challenged the status quo.
In 1892, for example, the Memphis office of Black journalist Ida B. Wells was destroyed by a mob whose members threatened to kill her after she wrote an article condemning the lynching of three Black men who owned a successful grocery store. Incidents like that may look very different from the sorts of confrontations Americans are now witnessing on their streets, but they remind me that we have long lived in a country where unfettered capitalism at the expense of so many of us thrives on violence meant specifically to silence people at the bottom.
The point was driven home for me by a scene in Percival Everett’s timely 2024 novel James, a rendition of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the title character, an escaped slave. The narrator watches a slave owner beat and hang a Black man who stole a pencil so that James could write something. As I read, it was easy for me to imagine life leaving the man’s body as he endured the lashes, and to feel his community’s terror. The lynched man’s last exchange during the beating involves him mouthing the word “Run!” to James, who is hiding in the bushes nearby.
The message of that scene should resonate today: If you want to express yourself or even just live in certain American towns and cities (including our capital!) in Donald Trump’s America, you’d better know that you’re risking your neck. Considered against such a historical backdrop, Trump and his followers could be thought to come by their moments of cruelty—as the saying goes—honestly (although if that’s honest emotion, what a world we’re now living in).
Our Contemporary Public Square
Since the president’s second inauguration, millions of Americans have turned out to stand up for fired federal workers, women, and LGBTQ+ people, as well as immigrants and people of color who have been the focus of ICE raids and extrajudicial detentions. The vast majority of those demonstrators have been peaceful, showing up in the streets or at immigration courts where they take down the information of those being detained so ICE can’t simply “disappear” them. Some have even waved Mexican flags to show solidarity with immigrant families hailing from that and other countries. Most importantly, such demonstrators committed their own bodies, including their eyes and ears, to ensure that people facing increasing state violence in Donald Trump’s America don’t always have to experience it alone.
In the Los Angeles area this spring and summer, ICE raids drew national attention for the frequent way they targeted Latino neighborhoods, with masked federal agents swarming public places and chasing workers based on skin color, type of job, and language. From just early to mid-June, tens of thousands of people actively protested such raids in Los Angeles, expressing solidarity with the people and neighborhoods targeted.
Imagine fearing getting tackled by the police and sustaining injuries, particularly in a country where nearly half of all adults are either uninsured or underinsured.
To be sure, a handful of those protesters made the demonstrations less productive by setting police and private vehicles on fire and vandalizing storefronts, causing significant damage. However, it just may be the understatement of the year to say that the law enforcement response to those protests was disproportionate to the threat. In addition to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and other local police responses, Trump ordered 2,000 National Guard members and 600 Marines into Los Angeles, despite the warnings of local leaders that doing so would only escalate the confrontations between protesters and law enforcement.
And those concerns turned out to be all too well-founded. The police violently attacked at least 27 journalists, using supposedly non-lethal crowd-control munitions and tear gas. All too sadly, for instance, an LAPD officer struck a photographer in the face with a rubber bullet, fracturing his cheek and tearing open his eye, forcing him to undergo five hours of emergency surgery and potentially leading to permanent vision loss. ICE agents typically shoved David Huerta, a labor union leader, to the ground while he was observing raids in the city’s fashion district. Huerta would be hospitalized for his injuries. State police shot a New York Post journalist in the forehead with a rubber bullet as he filmed anti-ICE protests from the side of the highway, causing him to fall and leaving him with severe bruising and neck injuries. The journalist said he thinks he was shot because he was isolated and so “an easy target.”
Meanwhile, at least five police officers were treated on the scene for injuries sustained when a few of the protesters threw rocks from highway overpasses onto cars and one fired paintballs at officers. They were also harmed by their own flash-bang grenades and tear gas. Numerous protesters were, of course, injured, some by being tackled by police officers and others by tear gas and “non-lethal munitions.” Hundreds were arrested then (and continue to be), including peaceful observers and legal monitors attempting to track “disappeared” immigrants through the system.
Not surprisingly, I found it hard to get anything like a full count of people injured or detained in those demonstrations, which leads me to think that one future project of the Costs of War Project that I’ve long been associated with might be to tally up injuries and possible deaths among Americans whose streets are clearly going to be increasingly overrun by law enforcement and National Guard troops in this new Trumpian era. With the president already sending federal law enforcement officers and the National Guard into this country’s capital, surely, in the months to come, he’ll do the same into minority-led Democratic-majority cities (including, undoubtedly, New York, should Zohran Mamdani be elected mayor there in November). In my own backyard—I live near Washington, DC—it’s likely that we’ll see an increase in violent confrontations, too.
The rhetoric of the president and his followers has played no small role in the escalations we’ve witnessed in Los Angeles and elsewhere as he focuses the anger of Americans against each other. For instance, before he deployed troops in LA, Trump stated, “We will liberate Los Angeles and make it free, clean, and safe again,” while describing protesters as “animals” and “a foreign enemy.” His close advisor Stephen Miller wrote on X, “Deport the invaders, or surrender to insurrection.” And note the ambiguity there. It’s not clear whether the invaders are immigrants, protesters, or both. Such statements give new meaning to the term “the bully pulpit” and the tacit permission the administration gave the police to hurt civilians (or else).
Imagine going to a protest and having to worry about some version of those crowd-control munitions or even a bullet getting lodged in your body. Imagine fearing getting tackled by the police and sustaining injuries, particularly in a country where nearly half of all adults are either uninsured or underinsured. Egged on by the highest office in the land, police violence makes a distinct point: it shows that, in the era of Donald Trump, Americans like you or me, should we decide to speak out, could find ourselves in danger.
Violence in Unexpected Places
These days, state violence (or the threat of it) arises even in places you might not expect. Recently, for instance, the Texas Senate attempted an untimely gerrymander meant to recarve that state’s electoral maps, diluting districts with large minority populations and so possibly delivering five more House seats to Trump’s Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.
In a move of creative civil disruption, dozens of Texas Democratic senators, including significant numbers of women and minorities, promptly fled the state to ensure that there would be no quorum possible in that state’s senate and so delay a vote on the proposed new electoral map. The response from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott? To urge Trump to have the Federal Bureau of Investigation find and arrest those senators and force them back to Texas.
That Texas attempted gerrymander is exactly the sort of escalation of tactics that will only normalize the bullying of law-abiding Americans and could lead to the sort of democratic backsliding that, in 2028, might land us all in a full-fledged military dictatorship.
To counter such heavy-handed tactics, we should be ever clearer and more public about the violence that MAGA leaders are likely to commit against anyone who crosses their ravenous path. Sadly enough, television images of chainsaws, handcuffed migrants, and ICE raids don’t simply speak for themselves in the United States of 2025. They could just as easily offer the message that we should indeed hate minorities, poor workers, and homeless people as suggest that this president is violating basic freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. While Trump and his followers may not always have the courage to say what they really mean, those of us who care about freedom of speech and assembly and other basic American freedoms certainly should—as loudly as we can.
If you have a few minutes, grab a pencil, a pen, or your laptop and make some noise about what you see “our” government doing, particularly when it involves such contempt for human life and dignity. Write your lawmaker, or a letter to the editor, or post something on social media. Make a sign and go to a protest. Stand up for America and against terror. After all, at this point in our history, what choice do we have? Where is there to run to?
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