Trump's ICE Raids & His International Escalation Threaten Us All

It's more critical than ever we overcome culture wars and stand united against Trump's actual wars

Officers running over demonstrators in Chicago on October 11. Source: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon

Anne Frank wrote in her diary:

Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated.

If I told you that 97.4% of the people arrested by Nazi Germany were innocent of any wrongdoing, you’d accept that as entirely plausible. That’s what fascists do: they use the machinery of the state to target vulnerable communities, manufacture “criminals,” and normalize mass repression.

This week Trump’s Department of Justice confirmed that 97.4% of the people ICE has arrested over the past several weeks in Chicago have no criminal record whatsoever. They are being seized, denied due process, and subjected to illegal detention and abuse. That is not “border security.” That is not “law and order.” That is the state using its power to terrorize a community because it is politically useful to do so. And worst of all, this is not isolated to Chicago. Let’s Address This.

This Is A National Epidemic

The LA Times likewise reports that in recent Los Angeles immigration raids, the majority of those arrested had no criminal history, with more than 90% having no criminal record at all. And over the weekend, the Trump regime escalated yet again—raiding Charlotte, North Carolina, and arresting more than a hundred people in a single weekend operation. If later reporting reveals, once again, that the overwhelming majority had no criminal history, it will only confirm the pattern we already know is in place.

This is not what due process of law looks like. This is collective punishment dressed up as policy.

One of the most dangerous things happening right now is the framing of these abuses as a normal partisan disagreement. It is not “Democrats vs. Republicans” to ask whether the government can imprison people without evidence, deny them counsel, or torture them in custody. It is rule of law vs. rule by fear.

The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution does not say “no citizen shall be deprived of life or liberty without due process of law.” It says no person. That includes immigrants. It includes asylum seekers. It includes people accused of being undocumented. It includes every human being inside our borders. When a government decides certain communities are beneath the protection of due process, it is not just violating their rights—it is rewriting the basic terms of who counts as fully human under the law. And this is exactly what Nazi Germany did.

As the Holocaust Encyclopedia records:

Two distinct laws passed in Nazi Germany in September 1935 are known collectively as the Nuremberg Laws: the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor. These laws embodied many of the racial theories underpinning Nazi ideology. They would provide the legal framework for the systematic persecution of Jews in Germany.

This is not unlike the United States Supreme Court ruling in September that race can be a valid factor in profiling someone’s immigration status—a horrific break from anti-discrimination laws that ban racial profiling. In that case, law enforcement targeted Latinos based on their ethnicity, not based on any actual illegal activity. When Nazi Germany was able to apply that racist principle against German Jews, that fascism soon expanded to other marginalized communities as well:

While the Nuremberg Laws specifically mentioned only Jews, the laws eventually extended to Black people and Roma and Sinti (Gypsies) living in Germany. The definition of Jews, Black people, and Roma as racial aliens facilitated their persecution in Germany.

And yet again, that fascism expanded to other nations in Europe:

During World War II, many countries allied to or dependent on Germany enacted their own versions of the Nuremberg Laws. By 1941, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Vichy France, and Croatia had all enacted anti-Jewish legislation similar to the Nuremberg Laws in Germany.

That is why this moment is so dangerous. Rounding up immigrants without criminal histories and throwing them into detention centers is not a “tough stance” on immigration. It is the construction of an authoritarian apparatus that can be turned on anyone the regime decides is inconvenient. And now the United States, under Trump, is set to expand that racist policy internationally. In fact, it already is.

From Domestic Raids to International Killings

These abuses do not stop at our borders. The same contempt for due process that shows up in ICE raids is also driving U.S. conduct abroad.

So far, Trump has already killed at least 57 fishermen from Venezuela and in the Pacific on the mere accusation that they were “narcoterrorists.” There was no transparent evidence presented, no trial, no congressional declaration of war. Just unauthorized executive action used as a license to kill. Now Trump is openly threatening to invade Venezuela.

This is not “peace through strength”. It is lawless violence justified by rhetoric about “terrorists” and “drug traffickers” that is never seriously scrutinized. Once again, people who are poor, brown, and far from the centers of power are treated as inherently expendable.

When the U.S. normalizes extrajudicial killings abroad, it erodes the very norms that are supposed to protect all of us—here and everywhere. The idea that a human being can be executed on a label alone, without scrutiny, is the same idea that allows a government to throw families into indefinite detention on a label alone. The scale and tools may differ. The logic is the same.

The Madness of the Propaganda Machine

To justify these abuses, the Trump-aligned media ecosystem has to invent increasingly ridiculous stories. One recent example on Fox News had commentator Scott Bessant insisting that high beef prices were not caused by tariffs, or by Trump’s decision to blow up our trade relationships, or by the shift of major markets like China to importing beef from Argentina instead of the United States.

No, according to this narrative, beef prices are high because migrants are allegedly crossing the border with their cows.

We’re meant to believe that a heavily militarized border—which separates desert terrain, river crossings, and physical barriers—is being defeated by cattle in transit. MAGA logic, once you strip away the noise, amounts to: if a cow can jump over the moon, it can jump over a wall. It would be laughable if it weren’t being used to justify a regime of raids, detentions, and shattered families.

Propaganda like this has a purpose. It keeps the base angry at the most powerless people in the system, while the most powerful—those who caused the economic crises, gutted protections, and hoarded wealth—escape accountability entirely.

The Trump regime’s message could not be clearer: white violence is rewarded; non-white existence is punished.

We have seen armed white militias storm statehouses, threaten elected officials, and march openly with Nazi symbols, only to be described as “very fine people” or treated as a political constituency to court. Meanwhile, Latino families are torn apart in predawn raids, their children traumatized, their legal status questioned even when they are citizens or long-time residents.

These are not isolated excesses. They are part of a coherent worldview in which whiteness is presumed innocent and legitimate, while non-white communities are presumed suspect, criminal, and disposable. That worldview is then reinforced through law, policy, and rhetoric until it feels “normal” to treat some neighbors as permanent suspects.

What We Do Now: Refuse to Be Divided

The most important thing I can say in this moment is this: do not let yourself be divided by culture wars. That is exactly what authoritarians want. They need you so consumed with arguing over flags, slogans, and imagined threats that you stop noticing what is happening in courtrooms, detention centers, and international waters.

Whether you are Latino, Black, white, Asian, Arab, documented, undocumented, born here, or newly arrived—you have a stake in whether the government respects due process. Because once the precedent is set that some people are beneath the law’s protection, the list of who qualifies for that category can and will expand.

This is not about agreeing on every policy detail. Reasonable people can debate immigration frameworks, asylum processes, and border management. What we cannot legitimately debate is whether human beings deserve basic constitutional protections. On that question, there is no “both sides.” There is only the side that insists on due process and the side that is willing to discard it.

Fascism does not announce itself with a label. It creeps in through exceptions: just this group, just this emergency, just this once. We are already far past that stage. We are watching mass arrests of people with no criminal history. We are watching citizens questioned for existing in the wrong neighborhood, speaking the wrong language, or having the wrong last name. We are watching our government kill people abroad without proof or oversight.

That cannot be normalized.

Conclusion

So stand with your neighbors. Stand with Latino communities being targeted today, knowing that what is being done to them is a test of what can be done to all of us tomorrow. Reject the propaganda that tells you the real threat is a family seeking work or safety. The real threat is a government that believes it is accountable to no one.

Our task is simple, but not easy: defend due process, defend human dignity, and refuse to participate in the dehumanization of any community. Because once we accept that some people do not deserve rights, we have already conceded more than we can ever afford to lose.

History is clear on this: concentration camps are never ultimately just about the first group that is targeted. Immigrants are being used as the test case, the scapegoat, and the trial run. Once the public is conditioned to accept that some people simply do not deserve rights, expanding that category becomes frighteningly easy.