You or Someone You Love Could Be NextAs he loses power, Trump’s extrajudicial gestapo tactics are worseningFriends, Imagine living in a country that can arrest and imprison you whenever it wants, without any judge or jury deciding you did anything wrong. It can call you a “domestic terrorist” and put you in prison for life. It can even execute you on the basis of nothing more than its own decision that you’re dangerous. Well, I have bad news for you. You’re living in that country right now. As he loses power and popularity — and faces mounting resistance abroad and at home — Trump is enlarging his police state. His regime is having ever more people arrested, imprisoned, and deported without any judge or jury deciding they did anything wrong. It’s using racial profiling in deciding whom to target. It’s making warrantless searches and seizures of people, their cars, and their homes. All of this violates the U.S. Constitution. According to a new analysis by The New York Times, the regime’s surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands of people, most of whom have not been charged with or convicted of a crime (less than 4 percent had a past violent criminal conviction). Those being arrested, imprisoned, and potentially deported include some married to U.S. citizens, others who entered the U.S. legally and are pursuing asylum claims, and some who came here with temporary legal status that the Trump regime has decided to revoke. In other words, they were all here legally. If you have temporary protected status because you escaped from inhumane conditions in another country, ICE might now summon you to an ICE office and put a monitor around your ankle — even if you have no criminal history and are in full compliance with your immigration status. The Trump regime has unilaterally revoked temporary protected status and claims the ankle monitors are necessary to track people whom it may want to deport at some point. You’re not even safe if you’re a U.S. citizen born in America. ProPublica has found that more than 170 U.S. citizens have been wrongfully detained by ICE agents in raids and protests over a recent nine-month span. It described cases involving alleged force and multiday detention without access to counsel or communication. Some estimates put the number of U.S. citizens subjected to ICE as much higher, but there’s no way of knowing because there’s no legal process for filtering out and protecting American citizens, just as there’s no legal process for protecting anyone else who’s here legally. Trump’s police state is extrajudicial, and it’s being done in secret. You might even be murdered, without a trial finding you guilty of anything. In addition to Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota last January, ICE agents have murdered two others just this summer. One was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, murdered by ICE in Houston on July 7, 2026. Salgado Araujo had lived in the U.S. for decades. ICE agents pursued him in unmarked cars and shot him while he was driving a work crew to a job site. The Department of Homeland Security claims Salgado Araujo tried to use his vehicle as a weapon against an officer, but witnesses dispute this account. The other was Johan Sebastian Durán Guerrero, murdered by ICE on July 13, 2026, in Biddeford, Maine. Durán Guerrero was a 25-year-old immigrant from Colombia. Agents pursued him while he was driving to work. The Department of Homeland Security claims its agent feared for public safety as Durán Guerrero tried to drive away, but elected officials and family members dispute this account, noting that Durán Guerrero was not an intended target of the immigration operation. None of these murders has been fully investigated. You might also be murdered without a trial if you happen to be on a vessel off Latin America’s Caribbean coast or in the eastern Pacific Ocean. A mere accusation of drug trafficking is enough to kill you, without any evidence presented before any court of law or neutral magistrate. The U.S. military announced Monday that it had again carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people it accused of trafficking drugs — bringing the overall death toll to 223 people killed in 67 strikes during the nearly yearlong U.S. campaign of bombing boats alleged to be smuggling drugs. Finally, the Trump regime is imprisoning Americans who demonstrate against its police state. In June, in two federal courts sentenced nine people who protested outside an immigrant detention facility in Texas to 30 to 100 years in prison, after the regime accused them of being members of Antifa. During the protest, a police officer was shot; he survived. Those sentences are longer than the harshest sentence handed down to any of the convicted rioters in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 (all of whom have since received pardons or commutations from Trump). These cases are the first to incorporate new guidance from the regime that classifies Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” That’s despite the fact that Antifa is a decentralized movement rather than a single organization and that there is no federal charge of domestic terrorism under existing U.S. law. I want to make three concluding points about all this. First, Trump’s police state not only continues, but it is growing larger by the day. Kristi Noem’s replacement as secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, along with his boss in the White House, Stephen Miller, and the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, have more money, manpower, and firepower than ever. They are ramping up all of their extrajudicial arrests, detentions, deportations, and murders. The only difference between last year and now is they’re no longer announcing what they’re doing with fanfare and braggadocio, because the American public has grown wary of it. Second, none of us is safe from this because the arrests, installations of ankle bracelets, imprisonments, deportations, and murders are made without any judge, jury, or neutral party deciding that the assumptions on which they’re based are adequate and truthful. Not even “domestic terrorism” arrests and lengthy prison sentences necessitate judicial inquiry into what exactly is meant by “domestic terrorism” and whether defendants have done anything to justify that appellation. Finally, this growing menace is cruel, inhumane, and likely unconstitutional. It is causing hundreds of thousands of families in our country extreme mental distress; many people are not leaving their homes for fear of being arrested or worse. It is likely chilling First Amendment rights to speak up and protest against these atrocities. Historians looking back on this shameful period will wonder how this was allowed. How can one maniacal man in the Oval Office, his fanatical assistant, and two suck-up Cabinet secretaries have been so cruel and oblivious to basic human rights? How can their Republican enablers in Congress have been willing to go along? How can the American public have been so quiet? So glad you can be here today. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber of this community so we can do even more. |