The Building of a Police State: Trump's Blueprint for Control

Never in my wildest dreams did I envision that my own country may sink into strongman rule. But it is.

ICE agents assaulting New York mayoral candidate Brad Lander

Masked men, many in civvies, none bearing name patches or agency identification, jump out of unmarked vehicles, snatch people from the street bearing no warrants and “disappear” them into an opaque maw of confinement. Their loved ones are left in the dark. Their kids are stranded at school. Their dogs and cats abandoned in pet care centers. Which third world tin-pot dictatorship are we talking about here? Oh, sorry. It’s the United States of America.

And we haven’t seen anything yet.

I happen to know what it’s like to be treated like this. I was once swept off the street by a plain-clothed thug-o-cop, driven away and “disappeared” for a while. I was a U.S. diplomat posted to communist Laos in the ‘80s when a tyrannical Stalinist regime governed on whim and with an iron fist, forcing tens of thousands of its citizens to flee as refugees. I won’t say I wasn’t scared. I was. I didn’t know what my captors planned to do to me. As they drove me deep into the countryside, I had enough presence of mind to plot my escape, including swimming the Mekong to freedom in Thailand. But, rustling up some bravura, I stood up to them and insisted that they release me or face consequences with their own government for having seized and jailed a diplomat. It sank in and they eventually released me. The final act was a stiff diplomatic protest from Washington.

I’ve been surveilled, tailed and harassed by secret police in multiple countries, the worst being in Cuba. And I’ve known scores of citizens of these regimes who have been imprisoned in secret detention centers, re-education camps and punitive labor facilities. Their crimes? Having served in the prior government, criticized the ruling government, attempted to flee their country or merely been suspected of being “spies.” Many have suffered psychological damage their entire lives.

I fear my own country is on the road to becoming a police state because I know one when I see one.

With the recent passage of the fiscally irresponsible Republican Big Ugly Budget Bill, the annual budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) alone will surge from nearly $9 billion to almost $28 billion, with $75 billion allocated for the agency over the next four years, making it the largest funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. Critics say that ICE’s new budget will be greater than that spent on all 50 state prison systems combined, and greater than that of the U.S. Marine Corps. Spending on ICE will exceed Israel’s annual military budget, or the annual military expenditures of Iran, Turkey, Spain, Mexico, Iran, and at least 23 countries in the top 40 military spenders, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It provides $30 billion for the recruitment of as many as 10,000 new ICE agents, $45 billion for new detention centers and $46.5 billion for border wall upgrades, surveillance, and mobile courts.

Mission creep is clearly built into the administration’s planning. All one has to do is to scan Project 2025, a manifesto for imposing fascist rule. Building out a massive security apparatus ostensibly for deportations of aliens could easily be repurposed into an infrastructure of oppression of perceived domestic foes. U.S. immigration law, furthermore, provides for more leeway to go after targets where due process is less, individuals can be surveilled and arrested without warrants, detained without trial or a public hearing or denied release on bond. Mobile courts, militarized border zones and unilateral federal interventions in “sanctuary cities” incrementally normalize unconstitutional actions against American citizens, as we’ve seen in the arbitrary sweeping up of citizens, the arrest of a judge, unilateral mobilization of the National Guard, flimsy prosecutions and physical assaults of elected officials. As the law gives way to unchecked executive action, targets expand from vulnerable ones like migrants to political ones like politicians, journalists, civic activists, etc. A tried and true tactic of autocracies is to manufacture crises which then enable the regime to go after its political foes.

Trump and his minions, with the connivance of a collaborationist Supreme Court and a catatonic Congress, are achieving significant and swift success in laying the foundation for a police state, with the rapid and robust expansion of ICE to be their sword and shield.

Australian academic Lee Morgenbesser, who is an expert on authoritarian regimes and their secret police, posits that ICE “bears the hallmarks of a secret police force in the making,” citing the following criteria common to secret police:

• it is not controlled by other security agencies and, while it does not answer directly to the president, it does report to his top security officials.

• its operatives and operations are secret.

• it engages in political intelligence and surveillance operations.

• it carries out arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations, indefinite detentions and disappearances.

• while it has not specifically targeted political opponents (yet), it has assaulted a U.S. senator and a New York politician, both Democrats.

Morgenbesser further cites the following:

Targeting dissidents: under the pretext of combating antisemitism, ICE has been tasked with screening individuals’ social media for posts sympathetic to Hamas and deporting foreign nationals under a provision of immigration law citing “adverse foreign policy consequences.” The actual motive, however, is to quell those who engage in free speech that is critical of the administration.

Opaque operations: ICE agents have been disguising their physical and agency identities, do not collaborate with local law enforcement and arrest people without a warrant.

Surveillance capabilities: focus includes social media, including criticism of ICE.

Unlawful policing: ICE conducts arbitrary searches, arrests, interrogations and indefinite detentions. These include entering primary schools under false pretenses, detaining people not previously identified as targets, detaining tourists and visa holders for weeks without being charged and disappearing U.S. citizens without due process.

Potentially expanded scope: while the agency does not yet resemble “history’s most feared secret police forces, there have so far been few constraints on how it operates.” The new bill will “supercharge its use of surveillance, imprisonment and physical violence.”

Morgenbesser concludes that “when combined with a potential shift towards targeting U.S. citizens for dissent and disobedience, ICE is fast becoming a key piece in the repressive apparatus of American authoritarianism.”

Former FBI special agent Mike German told The Guardian that officers’ widespread use of masks was unprecedented in U.S. law enforcement and a sign of a rapidly eroding democracy. “Masking symbolizes the drift of law enforcement away from democratic controls,” he said.

Red blinking signs point to Trump developing ICE as his own nationwide goon squad. My mind calls up two historical models: Haiti’s Tonton Macoutes and Argentina’s military branches and paramilitary groups.

The Tonton Macoutes were the goon squads that served the late Haitian dictators François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier from 1957 to 1986. The Macoutes were largely illiterate thugs who terrorized the population to ensure obedience. They arrested and “disappeared” many thousands, often torturing and murdering their victims. They disguised themselves with sunglasses, straw hats and blue denim civilian clothing, or wore fearsome masks. They are estimated to have killed between 20,000 and 60,000 Haitians.

The military junta that governed Argentina from 1976 to 1983 employed a brutal and systematic campaign of state terrorism against anyone suspected of opposing their regime. They targeted not only dissidents, but journalists, students, lawyers and intellectuals. Their tactics included enforced disappearances of individuals (“desparecidos”), arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture, extrajudicial killings, censorship and restrictions on freedom of assembly and surveillance and intimidation. They established over 600 detention centers for political foes. It is estimated that the regime murdered between 10,000 and 30,000, the bodies of many never accounted for.

During my service in Cuba, the communist regime arrested those it didn’t like under such fluid charges as “disrespect,” “spreading enemy propaganda,” “illegal association” and “dangerousness.” I participated in monitoring the human rights of Cubans who had sought, but failed, to flee the island, and in resettling a number of political dissidents in the United States. I still cringe at the memory of fear that pervaded Cuban society. Never in my wildest dreams did I envision that my own country may itself sink into strongman rule.

But it is fast doing so.

My favorite Cuban dissident is a vivacious woman named Yoani Sánchez. When she was younger, she emigrated with her husband to Spain. But motivated to bring change to her native land, they returned to Cuba where she has been a feisty blogger-activist. She has said that “Freedom is fundamentally the possibility of standing on a street corner and shouting ‘There is no freedom here!’” How much longer will Americans be able to do that?

The opinions and characterizations in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily represent official positions of the U.S. government.