Jonathan P. Baird

This is the first of a two part article about the deportation-industrial complex. This part outlines the components of the complex. Part two will look at the ideology behind it.

Back in 1961 as he prepared to leave office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his famous farewell address warning of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. Eisenhower saw a danger in the alliance between the military establishment and defense contractors. He believed, wisely as it turned out, that excessive military spending promoted war, threatened democracy and individual liberties.

Now, as we head into 2026, we face the risk of a new menace: the creation of a deportation-industrial complex. The Trump regime is engineering the birth of a vast new system involving government agencies, private contractors, and financial interests that profit from mass detentions, mass surveillance and mass deportations.

It is a network designed to lock up thousands without due process while making money off their misery. Many caught in the jaws of this system will have committed no crime and have tried to follow immigration rules and legalize their status. The desire for maximizing profit drives increasing mass incarcerations and mass deportations. They need bodies to make money. Any sense of justice is irrelevant to ICE. They are trying to meet quotas set by Stephen Miller.

Our new danger is the alliance of ICE and private prison companies. Public policy is reduced to greed intertwined with lawlessness and racism. ICE moves detainees around like pieces on a chessboard. Access to counsel is not factored in as a consideration. People disappear into their system and become unreachable. It is no accident that the major criteria for rounding people up is that they have a brown skin and are Latino.

Congress made this possible when it passed Trump’s budget bill. It created the material underpinnings so this massive expansion project could go forward. Congress more than tripled ICE’s annual budget, making it the largest federal law enforcement agency with more than $170 billion allocated over four years for border and interior enforcement. The stated goal is to deport one million immigrants each year.

ICE received $45 billion to build more detention camps to house adults and children. It received $30 billion more for arrests and deportations. The plan is to add 10,000 more ICE detention officers and 50,000 more detention beds. As of late 2025, ICE holds 68,400 people in detention.

ICE contracts with private companies that build and run detention centers. The two largest companies are GEO Group and CoreCivic, two private prison companies. 80% of detained immigrants are being held by privately-run prisons. ICE pays these companies $165 a day for each prisoner held in detention. More arrests means more money for these companies. ICE currently has 180 detention facilities. Many are concentrated in Louisiana and Texas.

Whether the creation of this gulag is a good idea and serves the national interest is not up for discussion. That train already left the station.

On December 24, the Washington Post reported on ICE’s current efforts. They plan to renovate industrial warehouses to hold 80,000 immigrant detainees. Their plan is to greatly increase detentions and to speed up deportations. It is the Stephen Miller white nationalist fantasy put into operation.

ICE is creating a feeder system. Detainees will be booked into processing sites for a few weeks before being funneled into one of seven larger scale warehouses. Each warehouse will hold 5,000-10,000 people. ICE has 16 smaller warehouses. The larger warehouses will be ;located in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Mississippi. They are a staging ground for deportation.

The ICE Acting Director Todd M. Lyons said that their goal is to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages. To quote Lyons: “Like Prime, but with human beings”.

The private prison companies also plan to cash in by doing more than filling beds. Once they maximize detention capacity they plan to use electronic monitoring devices to expand digital surveillance. ICE is hiring private contractors to track and locate immigrants in a model akin to bounty hunting. Once the contractors locate immigrants and provide addresses, federal agents arrest. The private prison companies complete the process by providing ground and air transport.

There have been many lawsuits filed against the private prison companies for inhumane conditions including inadequate medical care, overcrowding, physical abuse, forced labor, freezing cell conditions and unsanitary facilities. In August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to reconsider a lower court ruling that held state minimum wage laws applied to all private employers. GEO Group had been paying immigrant detainees $1 a day rather than the state minimum wage for jobs like kitchen and janitorial work. The Court said no.

The Trump regime has sought to reduce oversight of detention facilities. They eliminated the Office of Immigration Ombudsman and the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. Previously these offices had been watchdogs. They also have often been denying Congress access to detention facilities when Congresspeople seek to see for themselves what the conditions are. Over 30 people have died in ICE facilities. Rep. LaMonica McIver was arrested and charged with assault when she tried to visit an ICE facility in New Jersey.

There is a revolving door between ICE and the private prison companies. This is parallel to the relationship between the military and defense contractors in the military-industrial complex. People slide back and forth drawing huge salaries when they move from ICE to the private side. It is a blood money pipeline that engenders self-perpetuation.

Americans need to consider whether this racist monstrosity is what they want to continue. It follows the sadistic and cruel concentration camp model pioneered over 80 years ago. Whatever happened to the Emma Lazarus tradition inscribed in the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants?

This is one of my favorite Bertolt Brecht poems. I just wanted to share it. It seems especially apropos now.

To those born after

By Bertolt Brecht

Truly I live in dark times!

A trusting word is folly. A smooth brow
A sign of insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet heard
The terrifying news

What times are these, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!
That man calmly crossing the street
Is he not beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It is true: I still earn a living
But believe me: that is just good fortune. Nothing
That I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I am spared. (If my luck runs out
I am lost.)

They say to me: eat and drink! Be glad that you have the means! But how can I eat and drink when
It is from the starving that I wrest my food and
My glass of water is snatched from the thirsty?
Yet I do eat and I drink.

I would like to be wise
In ancient books it says what it means to be wise:
To hold yourself above the strife of the world and to live out That brief compass without fear
And to make your way without violence
To repay evil with good
Not to fulfill your desires, but to forget them
Such things are accounted wise.
But all of this I cannot do:
Truly, I live in dark times!

2.
I came into the cities at a time of disorder
When hunger was ascendant.
I came amongst mankind at a time of uprising
And I rose up with them.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

I ate my meals between battles
I laid myself down to sleep with the murderers
I made love heedlessly
And I looked upon nature with impatience.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

All roads led into the fire in my time
My tongue betrayed me to the butchers
There was little I could do. But the powerful
Would sit more securely without me, that was my hope.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

Our powers were feeble. The goal
Lay far in the distance
It was clearly visible even if, for me
Hardly attainable.
Thus the days passed
Granted to me on this earth.

3.
You who will emerge again from the flood
In which we have gone under
Think
When you speak of our faults
Of the dark times
Which you have escaped.

For we went, changing countries more often than our shoes
Through the wars of the classes, despairing
When there was injustice only, and no indignation.

And yet we know:
Hatred, even of meanness
Makes you ugly.
Anger, even at injustice
Makes your voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the land for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

You, however, when the time comes
When mankind is a helper unto mankind
Think on us
With forbearance.

It has become routine to watch White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller call immigrants “monsters”. Miller is a professional name-caller. It is like he thinks the name-calling gives him permission to void other humans’ constitutional rights and sentence them. Miller did it again in his comments about the Venezuelan migrants who were wrongfully deported to CECOT prison in El Salvador. He said, “..these are monsters who got exactly what they deserved”.

The great majority of the 240 Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador had no criminal record and had violated only immigration laws. They were deported and sent to be tortured at one of the worst prisons in the world without trials, convictions or any due process. In the 60 Minutes episode that CBS spiked, Luis Munto Pinto, a Venezuelan college student who had legally sought asylum in the U.S., described how he had never gotten even a traffic ticket. He had spent six months in custody before he was deported.

The experience of the Venezualan deportees and others arrested by ICE is reminiscent of what happened to Japanese-Americans in 1942. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, fear gripped America. Demagogues came forward, making racist arguments against Japanese-Americans and questioning their loyalty.

Then Japanese-Americans were singled out for mass removal and deportation based entirely on their race. Now Latinos are being targeted for their race. In both cases, people were dehumanized by America’s leaders as a way to justify mistreatment. We are not putting people into concentration camps on the scale done during the Japanese-American internment but ICE is now terrorizing communities all over the U.S. On NPR on Christmas morning, they said 65,000 people are currently being held (the largest number ever) and we know that ICE has the money for large expansion of its operations.

People are being abducted, pulled from vans, cars, work sites, and homes and being disappeared. ICE’s actions are lawless, more consistent with a fascist regime than a democracy. Many immigrants are afraid to leave their homes and this goes far beyond the undocumented. The Trump regime has been going after anyone with a brown skin who looks like they might be an immigrant and the U.S. Supreme Court has let them even though lower courts have objected.

In her new podcast Burn Order, Rachel Maddow documents parallels to our past and revisits the Japanese American internment. Maddow showed how the government invoked the Alien Enemies Act to arrest citizens of the countries we were fighting. That is the same law Trump has invoked even though we are not at war. At that time Japanese-Americans were barred from applying for naturalized U.S. citizenship.

The U.S. government placed two men, Gen. John DeWitt and Karl Bendetsen, in charge of the Army’s Western Defense Command. Both were racists and they devised the program of forced removal and imprisonment. DeWitt didn’t want African-American soldiers under his command and he was opposed to Asian-Americans serving in the military, even in segregated units. DeWitt said:

“ The Japanese, I have no confidence in their loyalty whatsoever. I am speaking now of the native-born Japanese (by which he means U.S.-born American citizens)…A Jap’s a Jap.”

Bendetsen held similar views, stating:

“The Japanese race is an enemy race. Racial affinities are not severed by immigration…The vast majority of those who have studied the Oriental mind assert that a substantial majority of Nisei bear allegiance to Japan and will engage in organized sabotage.”

Maddow shows how others in the government had real intelligence about Japanese-American communities on the West Coast. She cites one man, Naval Intelligence Officer, Ken Ringle, who spoke Japanese and who had immersed himself in Japanese-American communities. Contrary to the views of DeWitt and Bendetsen, Ringle found Japanese-Americans were intensely loyal to America.

Ringle tried unsuccessfully to reach Bendetsen and other government officials. He then wrote a formal report in which he argued the Japanese problem “has been magnified out of its true proportion, largely because of the physical characteristics of the people”. Ringle wrote that mass incarceration was ’not only unwarranted but very unwise”.

But Ringle did not win out. He had some support in the Department of Justice but the Attorney General Francis Biddle went along with Bendetsen and President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. As a result, an estimated 120,000 Japanese-Americans were incarcerated and held until 1944-45. They lost all their property and freedom without trial.

Bendetsen wanted to strip citizenship from Japanese Americans who were born in the U.S. but he could not do it because of birthright citizenship (sound familiar). To avoid that likely losing issue, the military got a legal opinion in February 1942 saying it was constitutional to round up and lock up U.S. citizens on the basis of nothing other than their race. There always seem to be amoral lawyers who will say anything as long as they are paid.

The government moved Japanese-Americans into horse stalls at Santa Anita racetrack. There was hay, horse urine, and horse feces in the stalls which had not been cleaned and prepped to be living quarters. People were initially housed there behind barbed wire and armed guards for six months until they were sent to permanent government camps in places like Arkansas, Utah and Wyoming.

Not all states went along. Maddow tells how Ralph Carr, a conservative Republican governor of Colorado heroically opposed the Japanese American internment. He was a lone voice and it cost him elected office. Gov. Carr welcomed Japanese Americans to come to Colorado in complete contradiction to the federal government policy. Japanese-Americans streamed into Colorado. Carr’s story is remarkable and should be much better known because he almost alone had the courage to go against the tide.

While the U.S. Supreme Court did the wrong thing in its infamous Korematsu decision and upheld the internment, Maddow shows how the efforts of ordinary citizens led to ultimate repudiation of that decision and recognition of its racist underpinnings.

Learning from that experience, Americans must do everything in our power to oppose ICE now and tell them to get the hell out of our communities. America doesn’t need a racist repeat of where it went horribly wrong 83 years ago.

With the mid-term elections coming up in November 2026, Democrats need to rethink their political approach. This is true on a wide range of fronts including our substantive politics as well as our messaging. It is not enough to define as simply being against Donald Trump and his fascist regime. Democrats need a more affirmative identity.

Any honest appraisal of Democratic performance in recent years must acknowledge our weaknesses. Democratic Party leadership, which is both elderly and out-of-touch with Democratic base voters, has been unwilling to engage any deep process of rectification. We have been losing elections with regularity but I have not seen much soul-searching. Now the Democratic leaders hope to win with only minor adjustments.

Neither major political party serves the interests of the working class. Both parties are controlled by Big Money but the Democrats were supposed to be the party of the have-nots. The Republicans have always been the party of the haves. In the last few election cycles that has flipped around. More of the have-nots have voted Republican and more of the haves have voted Democratic.

MAGA has attracted more people who feel like neither party has served them as we all have watched the economic erosion of working people. Economic anxiety is very high with undeniable inflation and fears about AI and job loss. While white working class voters have gravitated to the Republicans, that tendency has also evidenced with Latino and African American voters.

I think the problem for Democrats goes back to Bill Clinton embracing the centrist path of neoliberalism. Clinton’s triangulation politics undermined workers’ bargaining power and entirely pushed aside progressives and those who favored an economic populist message. Clinton allied with Wall Street and the financial sector. Since that time, the majority faction in the Democratic Party has favored a strategy premised on appealing to suburban moderates. Most recently it showcased Kamala Harris campaigning with Liz Cheney in the misguided belief that would win Republican voters.

Centrist Democrats sidelined Bernie Sanders and his brand of progressive politics. This approach of moving to the middle as advocated by centrist Democrats is bankrupt. It is a vanilla brand guaranteed to continue the losing tradition and it fails to give people any reasons to vote. One thing you can say about the Republicans, they are not afraid to let the fascism hang out. Democrats have been political cowards, unwilling to stand up for strong values of any kind.

It is past time for Democrats to develop a far more progressive, economic populist identity. The billionaire class is buying elections like they would any commodity. We need a vision that can attract the American majority. The pieces of this vision should not be any great mystery but I will suggest some policy planks:

• Medicare for all. It is wildly popular and needed especially as we watch the disappearance of Obamacare subsidies which will devastate 24 million people and make health care unaffordable. Universal health care is exactly the kind of value Democrats should embrace enthusiastically.
• Federal jobs guarantee. Considering economic fears, this could not be more timely. It would be very reassuring and supportive if a political party demonstrated caring for the economic circumstances of working people. There is a reason affordability is such a hot buzz word. Jobs remain a central issue and will for the indefinite future. This demand is entirely in keeping with Democrats’ FDR tradition.
• Housing is a human right. We need to increase the supply of affordable housing especially for low and middle income people. We also need to strengthen tenants’ rights and protections. It should be a national goal to end homelessness. It is morally unacceptable that our country which has so much wealth tolerates the degree of homelessness we have.
• No war in Venezuela and opposition to the massive military budget. We must oppose war crimes (the boat strikes and their lawless murders) and the $900 billion military budget. Most Democrats just voted for this budget in spite of how bloated it is. Fighting a war in Venezuela for regime change and to access Venezuela’s oil is in the worst tradition of American imperialism.
• Opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza. The Democratic base overwhelmingly opposes this war but the Party leadership has been clueless. The Democratic leaders are wedded to AIPAC money. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is a moral disgrace. There is nothing antisemitic about opposing this war. Ironically, it is the bellicose and racist actions of the Israeli state under Bibi Netanyahu which promotes antisemitism.
• Abolish ICE. ICE is an entirely out-of-control agency acting like a fascist gestapo. Its masked and unidentified agents are disappearing and deporting people with no due process. Nothing could be more un-American. Whatever concern the masses of Americans had about undocumented immigration, they did not bargain for the nightmare that ICE has caused and is causing. Trump has been scapegoating immigrants. He and the billionaires are using racism to divide the working class. We should be calling on people to join together across racial lines to fight the power of greedy elites.
• Expanding the Supreme Court. Democrats should push to add four seats to the U.S. Supreme Court. That Court has been corrupted and it has acted like a tool of the Republican Party. Nothing prevents Congress from changing the number of seats on the Court. As currently embodied, Democrats can expect the Court would veto any legislation which helps the majority of the American people just as they did when Biden was President.
• Oppose climate change denialism. One of the worst aspects of the Trump agenda has been an anti-science agenda which fails to recognize the harm of climate change. Trump’s doubling down on fossil fuels is beyond stupid. The rest of the world is embracing renewable energy. Democrats should be opposing greenhouse gas emissions as climate change remains an existential risk.

In her book, Outclassed, Joan Williams describes the Democrats’ class blindness. The Democrats lost the allegiance of the working class because they betrayed the interests of that class. They allowed MAGA and the Far Right to act like they were the anti-elitists even though they were in bed with Elon Musk and the broligarchs.

Democrats need to create a far more welcoming approach to all working people and we should get away from the snobbiness, disdain and moral judgmentalism which has characterized many college-educated Democrats. Politics is a game of addition, not subtraction. I think anger at Trump voters is stupid.

The sociologist C. Wright Mills once wrote about “crackpot realism” and how ruling circles indulged in that type of thinking. That is exactly the kind of thinking too many Democrats indulge. Even if masses of people hate what the Trump regime is doing, there is a no guarantee they will vote for Democrats. The Democrats need to give the people reasons to vote for them. It remains unclear whether that will happen.

In a little-noticed decision on its shadow docket, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority allowed Texas to use a racially gerrymandered congressional map in next year’s mid-term election. The map Texas drew was designed to disadvantage minority voters and add five congressional seats for the Republicans.

The Court was doing a big favor for Donald Trump. Redistricting is typically done every 10 years. The Court was responding to Republican panic about the 2026 mid-term elections. Fearing big losses, Trump initiated a gerrymandering arms race to gain advantage in as many states as possible for the Republicans. The purpose was to improve the chances of electing Republicans from Texas to Congress.

It is notable that the Supreme Court had previously held for more than 30 years that the government violates equal protection when it uses race as a predominant factor in districting. That is exactly what Texas did.

When Texas drew these racially gerrymandered districts, a legal challenge ensued. A three judge panel in the federal court found tha Texas map was unconstitutionally racially gerrymandered. The Court said the map was designed to dilute the power of black and brown voters.

The conclusion was not superficially arrived at. The judges had conducted a nine day hearing with over 20 witnesses with thousands of exhibits introduced. The factual record was over 3,000 pages. In a 160 page decision, the majority opinion, authored by a judge appointed by Trump, found Texas impermissibly used race as a basis for drawing election districts.

The decision would have prevented Texas from slicing and dicing Latino voters into districts for the purpose of weakening their voting strength. Texas is only 40% white but white voters control 73% of the state congressional seats. The trial court decision, if it had been put into effect, would have forced Texas back to the 2021 map which had already given the Republicans an advantage.

What was upsetting about the Supreme Court’s decision was not only the bottom line result. It was the way the decision was effectuated, once again on the shadow docket where decisions are offered without any substantial rationale and with no oral argument. There is no solace in the fact the decision is preliminary. The Court absurdly said that Texas made a strong showing of irreparable harm and that the equites and the public interest favor it. The idea this decision is in the public interest is laughable.

In response to a detailed 160 page opinion, the Court put forth five paltry, embarrassing paragraphs. To quote Justice Elena Kagan’s dissent, the Court intervened “ based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend of a cold paper record”. Kagan went on:

“We are a higher court than the district court but we are not a better one when it comes to making such a fact-based decision.”

The Supreme Court is a court of appellate jurisdiction. Its role is supposed to be limited since it does not re-try the facts. The Supreme Court and appellate courts generally are bound to accept the trial court’s fact-finding unless it is clearly erroneous.

In reversing the federal district court, the Supreme Court showed disdain and disrespect for a lower court. With barely any explanation, the Court majority brushed aside very detailed fact-finding. While the Court can say what the law is, they don’t have the power to say what the facts are. In this case, they swatted the facts away and erased them.

There is a pattern of the Supreme Court doing that. Chief Justice John Roberts did exactly the same thing in the Shelby County case which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act.

To say it is a bad look doesn’t go far enough. Lawyers and judges should be declaring a five alarm fire. The Court has been corrupted. It is now a Republican Party subsidiary. They have sided with the Trump regime in 90% of shadow docket cases that have reached them. The best that can be hoped for is that fear of loss of all credibility will rein them in occasionally.

The justifications offered by the conservative majority were exceedingly weak. They said the lower court failed to honor the presumption of legislative good faith. But the Texas legislature did not even try to camouflage this racial gerrymander as simply a partisan one. Texas admitted the use of race. The High Court also chastised the lower court for not coming up with its own viable alternative map but that doesn’t make the racial gerrymandering go away.

The Court said the challenge to the new districts came too close to the next election. But when the trial court made its decision, the election was a year away. The plaintiffs had filed suit as early as they possibly could. The Supreme Court is, in effect, encouraging states to monkey around with gerrymandering before elections.

To appreciate the harm the Texas redistricting case represents, a wider angle lens is required. The Supreme Court has been reading the 14th Amendment out of the Constitution. Given the history of racism and white supremacy in the United States, we need to understand that the whole point of the 14th Amendment was the recognition of Black people as full citizens. Full citizenship, requires, among other things, equal voting rights. The Supreme Court has entirely lost that thread.

The historian Eric Foner once wrote that the 14th Amendment was the most consequential addition to the Constitution since the Bill of Rights. Sherrilyn Ifill says it was our nation’s reset after the Civil War but we have not honored its legacy. The reset was about creating a multi-racial democracy.

For 100 years, the 14th Amendment was almost snuffed out. It came back to life in the 1960’s but it has been strangled again. The Supreme Court has almost murdered it. I would suggest that re-invigoration of the Reconstruction amendments, the 13th, 14th and 15th is one means to advance the goal of multi-racial democracy. Those amendments don’t have to be enfeebled. Some day lawyers and jurists will bring them back to life.

Among the most repellent things Donald Trump has said were his comments on December 2 that Somali immigrants were “garbage”. He said, “They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in my country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks”. He went on to say Somali immigrants “have destroyed our country”. He singled out Congresswoman Ilhan Omar who is Somali saying she “shouldn’t be allowed to serve in Congress” and she “should be thrown out of our country”.

Minnesota has the largest concentration of Somalis in the country. About 84,000 people of Somali descent live in Minnesota. They have settled in Minnesota over the last three decades. The great majority are U.S. citizens or legal residents. There are very few undocumented Somalis.

Trump’s comments followed his first term remarks where he referred to African nations and Haiti as “shithole” countries.

Intentional dehumanization such as Trump’s racist rant creates a permission structure for violently-inclined MAGA followers to act out against people of color. Some portion of white supremacists in the MAGA base get their switch flipped by the venom. Acts of violence or shootings against those perceived as Somali are predictable along with accompanying manifestos justifying the acts based on great replacement theory.

Congresswoman Omar has received many death threats. In February 2019, the FBI arrested a Coast Guard Lieutenant for plotting to assassinate Omar. Later in April 2019, a man threatened to assault and murder Omar in a phone call to her office and he ended up pleading guilty. Trump re-tweeted a tweet that falsely said Omar partied on the anniversary of 9/11. Omar has been a prime target of online hate. The newest Trump comments further endanger her life.

It is notable that none of the cabinet members or people around Trump publicly reacted to the racist offensiveness of his comments about Somalis. Profiles in courage – not. It is more like profiles in moral debasement. Nothing that comes out of Trump’s mouth would propel his circle of sycophants to say a peep. Silence is golden like everything around Trump.

Trump’s language is reminiscent of the German Nazi terminology directed against Jews. The Nazis saw Jews as racially inferior sub-humans. Negatively categorizing entire groups as garbage is unacceptable and below any standard of civilized public discourse.

In justification of his remarks, Trump cited alleged fraud committed by Somali immigrants. Dozens of Somali immigrants have been charged with fraud for allegedly stealing $1 billion from Minnesota’s COVID-19 pandemic relief.

Even if Somalis were engaged in fraud, they are still entitled to the presumption of innocence like all criminal defendants. In the United States, estimates for the total amount of COVID-19 relief fraud range from hundreds of billions to over $1 trillion. The Paycheck Protection Program, Economic Injury Disaster Loans and unemployment insurance all experienced widespread fraud because prevention controls were relaxed.

There is no reason to single out Somalis considering the national scope of the fraud. They were hardly alone. Also, it prejudices the fraud cases of the Somali defendants when a President weighs in. Because of the President’s influence, a fair trial becomes much harder to accomplish.

What Trump does not mention is the unprecedented corruption of his own regime. Being a convicted felon himself, you might think that someone with his track record for self-dealing and for pardoning white collar fraudsters would tread lightly. He just pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former President of Honduras, who was convicted in federal court for drug trafficking 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. Trump has used the pardon power to normalize corruption. His hands could not be dirtier. He makes the 19th century robber barons look like choir boys.

As bad as the overt racism, Trump’s comments about Somalis also reflect total ignorance of Africa and its history. I was reminded of a book I read a long time ago, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney, a historian from Guyana. Trump evinces no awareness of the history of slavery and European colonialism in Africa. Africa was robbed by the Europeans and later by the Americans. It was made poor because of the slave trade and economic exploitation. Rodney writes:

“The question as to who and what, is responsible for African underdevelopment can be answered at two levels. Firstly, the answer is that the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent. Secondly, one has to deal who those who manipulated the system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system. The capitalists of Western Europe were the ones who actively extended their exploitation from inside Europe to cover the whole of Africa.”

American slave traders and capitalists followed up on the exploitation and to some extent replaced the Europeans. Rodney doesn’t remove the ultimate responsibility for development from the shoulders of Africans but he recognizes that African poverty must be seen inside the context of colonialism and imperialism.

Like the rest of Africa, Somalia was victimized by European colonialists, primarily Italians. European powers colonized Somalia in the late 19th century as part of the scramble for Africa. Both the British and the Italians had colonies there and Somalia did not gain independence until 1960. It has become the model for a failed state considering the constant warring but the historical background is not appreciated as evidenced by Trump’s scapegoating. He quite obviously knows nothing about Somalia.

It is like the news cycle has already moved on from the Somalis as garbage comments. The public is anesthetized to the racism. America’s collective response to the comments has been pitifully weak. Voltaire once said, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities”. Those words still ring true. We must never forget that all human beings have inalienable rights by virtue of being human.

Back during the first Trump term when we witnessed the child separation policy ripping families apart, I thought we had reached the height of cruelty. But I was wrong. ICE and Border Patrol are trying for a new standard. And there are so many awful stories to learn about. Somehow the idea of deporting the “worst of the worst” got lost and inexplicably the new mission is persecuting the most innocent.

ICE has been arresting foreign-born spouses of U.S. citizens who are complying with the law and trying to obtain permanent residency. The New York Times just did a feature story about this. In many cases, ICE agents are telling detained spouses at green card interviews that they had overstayed tourist or business visas. Foreign-born spouses are being handcuffed and taken away right from the interview.

The government strategy appears to be to induce couples to give up, abandon their case and accept the foreign spouse’s detention. There has been no consideration for either the fact of marriage or the reality that the couple may have small children.

The Times highlighted the case of Stephen Paul who is married to a British wife. Paul works for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and he and his wife have a four month old baby. At her green card interview, federal agents swooped in and took Paul’s wife away. She had been living in the U.S. for 14 months. Paul said, “I had to take our baby from my crying wife’s arms”. Paul went on:

“It’s insane to have them rip our family apart. Whoever is directing this has completely lost touch with their mission to the country.”

Paul’s lawyer said, “In 25 years of practice, I have never seen anything like this”. People like Paul’s wife have always been eligible for green cards in the past. Arrests like this were exceedingly rare as foreign spouses of Americans have typically been approved for permanent residency. The Trump regime is prioritizing fast track deportations regardless of circumstance, no matter how compelling the case or cruel the result.

Paul learned that the government was threatening to deport his wife without a hearing. More generally, this has become their go-to play. Paul’s lawyer had to file a lawsuit in federal court to halt her removal. That worked and secured her release.

The Times also reported the case of Audrey Hestmark. She and her German-born husband, Tom, reported to a government office for a green card interview. Her husband was a robotics engineer. The immigration officer asked if he had overstayed his visa and he responded truthfully. His lawyer had assured him it was a non-issue. Hestmark said:

“Suddenly, we were ambushed by three masked men in bulletproof vests with guns who told Tom they had a warrant for his arrest, that he is here unlawfully.”

The agents handcuffed Tom and gave Audrey a card with a QR code for the ICE website. Tom was then disappeared to an immigration detention center where he remains to this day.

Then there is the case of the interfaith chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Ayman Soliman. Soliman is Egyptian and has been in the U.S. since 2014. He had been in trouble with the Egyptian military regime as he had been working as a journalist. Because of his work, he was detained four times by the Egyptian authorities and he had been tortured. He came to the U.S. on a visa to study film and once here he applied for asylum. In June 2018, he was granted asylum.

In July, ICE took Soiiman into custody after he appeared at a routine check-in with ICE. His asylum status had been revoked. He spent 73 days in detention. Without proof, the government stated he was part of a terrorist organization. During his 73 days in detention, Soliman said he never saw sunlight, never breathed fresh air and never ate a raw fruit or vegetable.

Because of his popularity for his work pastoring to very ill and dying children, Soliman got widespread support in Cincinnati. He received 760 letters of support from people in the community. The support was so intense that ICE released him from custody and he now awaits a green card determination.

I also wanted to mention the story of Ruperto Vicens-Marquez who has lived in the U.S. for two decades. He and his brother Emilio co-own a locally well-known Mexican restaurant, Emilio’s Kitchen, in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, a seashore community. Ruperto is head chef. He had moved to the U.S. from Mexico in 2007. He had a visa that was legally renewed and he was authorized to be in the U.S. until 2029.

Ruperto did not show up at work on October 17. ICE had picked him up a block away from the restaurant, said he had entered the U.S. illegally and falsely asserted he had an order of removal from the U.S. ICE held Ruperto at their immigration detention facility in Newark for over a month. The town of Atlantic Highlands was so upset, advocates in the community organized two demonstrations and created a GoFundMe campaign that raised almost $100000 for legal defense. On October 18, Ruperto was released by an immigration judge’s order.

The Department of Homeland Security says that 500,000 immigrants have been deported since Trump took office. NPR says 300,000 is a more accurate number.

In immigration court, ICE attorneys are short-circuiting due process by filing motions to pretermit which, if granted, avoid giving immigrants any chance to argue their asylum claim. When such motions are granted, people get deported without a chance to testify. The need for zealous immigration lawyers has never been greater.

Someday this entire enterprise of indiscriminate and racist deportation will be seen for the crime it is. It fits in with other seedier episodes of U.S. history like the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese-American internments and Operation Wetback. If justice ever prevails again, there should be investigations and prosecutions of officials like Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller and Greg Bovino for their violations of due process which have characterized this regime.

ICE officials invariably say they are just following orders but maybe they should be considering whether their orders are legal. When what you are doing is heartless and mean as a crazed rottweiler, it is time to bail.

Inside the American Jewish community, there has been a major conflict going on about how to see the source of antisemitism in the United States. On one side are the mainstream Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations who are focused on activists on the left who have opposed Israel’s war in Gaza. They conflate opposition to the Israeli state and its Gaza war with antisemitism.

On the other side are large numbers of unaffiliated Jews, especially progressive young Jews, who are far more worried about fascism and antisemitism emanating from the Republican right. Many of these Jews actively oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza but they are not antisemitic. These Jews have more universalist values and oppose human rights violations wherever they happen.

Events have vindicated those who see the major threat as coming from the Republican right. As a Jewish person, I would go back to the events at Charlottesville in the first Trump term. Hearing Nazis and their sympathizers chanting “Jews will not replace us” was sobering. Then we saw the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh by a right wing extremist who believed in the great replacement theory.

Since then, the growth of the fascist and antisemitic threat coming from the Republicans has become so much more apparent. There is an internal war inside the Republican Party between Jew-hating neo-nazis, the groypers, and old-line Republicans. An entire generation of young Republicans appear to be infected by the antisemitic and racist virus.

Back in October, Politico published an article about the leaked Telegram chat conducted by leaders of young Republican groups throughout the country. In 2,900 pages of chats, many millennial and Gen Z Republicans spoke of their love of Nazis and Hitler, their hatred for Blacks, gays and women and their desire to put Jews in gas chambers. They always dress up the hate in ironical transgressiveness but the underlying world view is clear.

These were Republican leaders, not rank-and-filers. Although they were reported as being young, they ranged up to age 40. They included a state senator and a member of the Trump administration. The Jew-hating showed up in many of the 28,000 exchanges from January to August 2025 among leaders of Young Republican chapters in Arizona, Vermont, Kansas and New York.

The danger from the right has been highlighted by Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Nick Fuentes. Why was Carlson, an important right wing podcaster, giving such prominence to someone who regularly trafficks in the belief that “organized Jewry” is responsible for society’s problems? Fuentes has called Hitler “really fucking cool”.

I think the interview reflects Carlson’s knowledge that the Republican Party has been flooded by extremists and he is attempting to maintain his relevance by speaking to this growing faction. Rod Dreher has estimated that 30%-40% of all Republican staffers under age 30 are followers of Nick Fuentes. And Carlson is not the only right wing podcaster indulging antisemitism. Candace Owens also deserves mention. With a huge audience, like Fuentes, she blames George Soros and Jews for every imaginable social ill.

Trump is old and it remains an open question what comes next in Republican politics. It is legitimate to ask if the Republicans will become an explicitly racist and antisemitic, pro-nazi political party. A major part of their base, especially their youth, has those politics.

Many of the antisemites on the Republican right have latched onto Gaza as an issue they can exploit. They criticize U.S. support for Israel from an America First perspective. That perspective is at odds with the evangelical Christian Zionist faction of the Republicans but it connects to an earlier isolationist tradition in the party.

The groypers realize that there is massive worldwide opposition to Isreal’s Gaza campaign because of its brutality and its war crimes. Their opposition is sheer opportunism. They want to recruit from those who are legitimately horrified.

The mainstream Jewish organizations have minimized the antisemitic threat from the right because their highest priority has been defense of Israel. They are happy Trump has not interfered with Netanyahu. They play to Trump to keep the money and weapons to Israel flowing. That is also why they give a pass to Elon Musk when he makes nazi salutes. Not seeing Israel’s war crimes is a willful blindness to keep the money spigot on.

The October 7 attack on Israel was criminal and murderous but Israel’s response has been disproportionate and even more murderous. An estimated 67,000 Palestinians have died since October 7, 2023 with nearly a third of the dead under age 18.

Israel’s far right government, led by Jewish racists and fascists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, has been credibly accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is not antisemitic to criticize the actions of the Israeli state but the mainstream Jewish organizations see it that way. Of course, there have been isolated examples where criticism of Israel from the left has been antisemitic but these examples are the exception. Overwhelmingly, the criticisms of Netanyahu’s government have been entirely justified.

The Anti-Defamation League has gone completely off the rails with its assertion that New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has promoted antisemitic narratives. Any close observer of Mamdani knows that charge is baseless, even laughable.

Sadly, it is Israel’s own actions in Gaza that are doing more to create antisemitism than anything else. If the mainstream Jewish organizations would take their blinders off, they could see that.

One of our two major political parties is at risk of being captured by explicit racists and antisemites. Drawing on the lessons of history, fascism and antisemitism need to be stopped before they gain more traction. We face a moment like Germany experienced in 1932 when people failed to speak out enough. We all know the consequences of that.