A Second Reign of Terror: Trump's Blueprint for ICE Home Raids

 

When Trump was elected, many Americans wondered if we were in for a brutal nationwide reign of terror, or if he’d merely content himself with more tax cuts for billionaires and a repeat of his last term’s personally profitable crony capitalism.

While the mainstream media has treated him (for years) as if he’s just another, albeit quirky, politician, others among us, as Carole Cadwalladr noted at The Power, remember that when Rodrigo Duterte was elected president of the Philippines (whose constitution is modeled after ours) within a mere 6 months he was imprisoning opposition politicians, protesters, and journalists.

Taking down the free press in Germany and imprisoning dissidents and journalists only took Hitler three months, about the same as Mussolini and Pinochet.

America’s rightwing oligarchs are apparently ready for the fun to begin: Elon Musk tweeted last week that it’ll soon be time to use the force of law and the Department of Justice to prosecute the people at The Center for Countering Digital Hate who’ve been relentless in outing Nazis on Xitter. (Musk just lost a lawsuit to them.)

But even though they moved quickly, Hitler, Pinochet, Mussolini, and Duterte didn’t start with journalists; they started with the most marginalized and least powerful people in their nations. For Hitler it was trans people he went after within his first two weeks; for Duterte it was drug addicts.

Pinochet and Mussolini arrested vulnerable working class supporters of their opposition political parties who dared show up in the streets to demonstrate against them.

So, who’s the weakest here in America? While Trump campaigned against trans people (just like Hitler had in 1933), it looks like he has another group in mind for his first geneticize. Trump has his sights on undocumented Black and Hispanic migrants to begin the state-sponsored violence and inure the American public to what will eventually come for many more of us.

Get ready for midnight door-knocks by men with guns starting in January. Particularly if you or anybody in your extended family has a last name that ends with a vowel or a z, or even if you simply have black hair and brown eyes. Trump and Thomas Holman are on the case.

Holman notoriously ran ICE during the last Trump administration and is often considered, along with Stephen Miller, as the father of Trump’s brutal child separation policy that traumatized so many thousands of young families and has left about 1,000 youngsters trafficked into pop-up “Christian” adoption services missing to this day.

Alone. Frightened. Not knowing where their parents are or if they’ll ever see them again.

Holman also helped write part of the immigration policies for Project 2025. And famously bragged to CBS that if he found families with “illegal” members in this country, he’d simply deport the entire family, US citizens or not.

When asked by Cecilia Vega on 60 Minutes, “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?” Holman barely took a breath before asserting, “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”

America has done this before, and the results were ugly.

In the 1920s, Republican President Herbert Hoover initiated a nationwide roundup and deportation of people of mostly Mexican ancestry. Police and border agents simply went house-to-house in Hispanic neighborhoods from Arizona to Alaska, often kicking in doors and dragging out people who couldn’t immediately prove their citizenship. As many as 2 million people with Hispanic last names were arrested.

As a result, an estimated 40% to 60% of the people arrested, detained, and deported were actually US citizens by virtue of their birth on US soil. Because they were deported without proof of citizenship (often because of home births without hospital records), however, they were never able to return to the US.  

During WWII, American employers encouraged Mexicans to come to the US to fill jobs vacated by US citizens who’d been drafted and sent off to war.

After the war, President Eisenhower launched Operation Wetback and essentially replicated Hoover’s program; an estimated 300,000 to 1.1 million people were similarly dragged from their homes. Nobody is certain how many were US citizens, but estimates range from 30% to as many as 60%.

Again, because they weren’t able to instantly prove citizenship when the police arrived at their homes, they had no way to get back into the US once they were dumped in Mexico.

If Trump’s leading candidate for Attorney General, Mike Davis, assumes that role he’ll almost certainly back up Holman’s efforts, even if millions of US citizens are seized, imprisoned, and deported. He’s the guy, after all, who just tweeted:

“Fuck unity. We have the votes. And they tried to kill Trump.” And “Here’s my current mood: I want to drag their dead political bodies through the streets, burn them, and throw them off the wall. (Legally, politically, and financially, of course.)”

The fact that Trump and the people around him are giddy about going after Hispanics and other Black and Brown immigrants from “shithole countries” answers the question everybody is asking about how brutal his second administration could become. It’s going to be rough. Get ready.

And if you have a Hispanic last name or live anywhere near Hispanics and have black hair and brown eyes, be sure to get your proof of citizenship ready and carry it with you at all times, even when you sleep.

And the rest of us? No dictator in history has ever started a violent inquisition attacking the weakest in society — and they all begin there — without soon extending his terror against every person he thought opposed him or who represented a challenge to his power. The smug media idiots who’ve been sane washing Trump for years will either roll over (as has already begun) or end up in jail themselves. Along with many of us on Substack and in the progressive press.

As JD Vance recently said, implying the thought and speech police will soon be coming for Trump’s critics: “You cannot lie, take your position of public trust, and lie to the American people for political purposes. It’s disgraceful. And people have to suffer consequences for it.”

Welcome to Trump’s version of hell. And welcome to the resistance.

 

-Thom Hartmann

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