Trump is on a collision course with millions of Americans. He's not backing down.
The White House is doubling down on President Trump's signature campaign promise and escalating efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, targeting Democrat-run cities and heightening tensions with powerful liberal governors from California to New York.
The pressure-cooker campaign comes after the massive "No Kings" protests last weekend that drew millions of Americans out to the streets to oppose Trump's administration, which has made immigration enforcement a top priority. The protests included about 5 million people nationally, according to organizers, and many attendees specifically cited concerns about immigration enforcement.
A week before, fierce protests in Los Angeles sparked by aggressive detentions by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents led to clashes, tear gassing, scattered looting and multiple vehicles being set on fire. The vast majority of attendees were peaceful, however.
To quell the protests and protect ICE agents in California, Trump called up thousands of National Guard troops over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom − referred to by Trump as "Newscum" − and has told federal agents they have his unconditional support to continue aggressive enforcement.
Trump has also invoked military powers usually reserved for wartime, declaring that Biden-era immigration policies facilitated an invasion. And the president is pushing to dramatically expand detention centers and deportation flights while finishing the U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Immigrant-rights advocates have reported harsher enforcement in rural farming communities and big cities alike, and note that federal statistics show more than 40% of ICE detainees have no criminal record.
Trump and administration officials say they are targeting violent criminals and gang members, though Americans are also seeing vineyard workers, car-wash attendants and building contractors snatched up, in many cases by masked men and women refusing to identify themselves, ratcheting up tensions.
Polls show a majority of voters support the president's approach: 51% of Americans approve of his handling of border security and immigration, although only 45% of voters approve of his overall job as president, according to the NBC News Decision Desk Poll, conducted with SurveyMonkey.
"The American people want our cities, schools and communities to be SAFE and FREE from illegal alien crime, conflict, and chaos," Trump said in a social media post. "That's why I have directed my entire administration to put every resource possible behind this effort and reverse the tide of mass destruction migration that has turned once idyllic towns into scenes of third world dystopia."
While border crossings have dropped dramatically, videos of masked federal agents chasing people across fields or grabbing them off city streets have horrified many Americans, and liberal leaders across the country say construction sites, farms and some entire neighborhoods are falling silent as undocumented workers stay home to avoid detention.
Some critics accused Trump of causing chaos with ICE raids, then using the community response to justify even harsher measures.
On June 19, federal immigration agents were briefly blocked at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles by protesters trying to stop detentions.
Trump remains undeterred and is pushing Congress to pass a funding measure that would allow him to hire 10,000 new ICE agents, 5,000 more customs officers, and 3,000 additional Border Patrol agents.
Across the country, the impacts of Trump's aggressive policies are adding up: coffee shops are sharing tips on how to protect workers, advocates are tracking and reporting ongoing ICE raids to warn at-risk communities, and other groups are adopting resistance tactics that include surrounding ICE agents.
In California, officials are even boosting food-bank funding to help people afraid to go grocery shopping as waves of anxiety sweep through immigrant communities. While Trump officials are targeting people living illegally in the United States, the detentions are also affecting the estimated 4.7 million households that have both legal and undocumented members, according to the nonprofit Center for Migration Studies.
"People are living in fear," New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said June 17 after ICE agents arrested New York City Comptroller Brad Lander as he was escorting a defendant from immigration court.
ICE officials claimed Lander assaulted an agent, although video shows Lander appeared instead to have been manhandled by masked men as he demanded to see an arrest warrant. ICE agents have increasingly been detaining people going to court for scheduled immigration hearings, and are using a new Trump directive to detain people who would otherwise be protected from deportation.
White House officials have suggested that other elected officials opposing Trump's immigration policies could also be arrested, and several members of Congress have recently been briefly detained or "manhandled" by federal agents, including California Sen. Alex Padilla, a Democrat.
Some immigration experts say Trump's approach reflects his administration's efforts to find ways to detain and deport people as quickly as possible, often at the cost of ignoring due process.
"They're trying everything to see what they can get away with," said Prof. Michael Kagan, an immigration attorney and director of the immigration clinic at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. "They are being far more provocative with raids in the community and also explicitly targeting Democrats and Democratic politicians."
Kagan said while many Trump voters backed him over his immigration enforcement plans, he believes a growing number of his supporters are concerned that enforcement has not primarily targeted violent criminals and gang members as promised.
"It definitely seems that while there's a core of his supporters who love this, the majority of the public does not," Kagan said.
Retired California police officer Diane Goldstein said she's been "appalled" to see the tactics ICE agents have been using against immigrant communities and some American citizens. Goldstein was a police lieutenant in the Los Angeles area and now is executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, a nonprofit that works with communities to help reform policing.
Goldstein said the way ICE is acting risks erasing decades of hard-won bonds of trust between law enforcement and communities across the country, from the immigrants who are growing reluctant to call 911 for help to the ordinary Americans watching masked agents grab people without producing any identification or warrant. The New York City Bar Association on June 20 said letting agents obscure their identities with masks and other measures helps them evade accountability.
"They are setting local law enforcement back on their heels after we have fought for years to engage with people," said Goldstein. "They're not policing in a constitutionally protected manner. We are disappearing people. We are even arresting U.S. citizens and disappearing them, and that is not what we do."
She added: "We can't serve people unless they trust us. Having an angry community doesn't benefit either the community or our police officers. People think it's not going to impact them until it does."
In a statement, the ACLU said Trump will continue to escalate his efforts unless reined in by the courts, Congress and the American public.
"We have never experienced a moment like this in our lifetimes, when our troops are being turned against our communities, acting in the service of a military police state," the ACLU said. "These attacks are transparently about consolidating power, bringing critics to heel, and eliminating the space to fight back."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump's on a collision course with many Americans over immigration
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Italy and Russia offer textbook examples: Different as they were and are, both nations had rapidly advanced in some industrial sectors and metropolitan regions, while conditions in rural areas were primitive and there was considerable social discord and festering injustice. The horrendous bloodletting of World War I bloodletting removed all inhibitions against a total, violent resolution of social conflict. Germany was in many ways the archetypal example: It was a world leader in industry (especially chemicals, metallurgy, and machinery), and by some distance at the forefront of scientific research. (Early in the 20th century, Germans were awarded more Nobel Prizes for science than citizens of any other country.) Its universities were the best in the world. 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One could fill a library with all that has been written about Hitler as the archetype of the charismatic totalitarian leader, full of violent hatred, reflexive deceit and a taste for destruction that eventually unmasked itself as an annihilating nihilism. But despite the morbid fascination he continues to evoke in our collective historical memory, Hitler is less interesting — and less important in the long run — than the people who voted for him, regarded him as a messianic national savior and fought to defend his rule till their country was in ruins. Or for that matter, consider Josef Stalin, who was patently less charismatic than the German dictator, yet was worshipped by countless Russians — along with millions of foreigners who should have known better — and whose death occasioned a paroxysm of public weeping that, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, even extended to inmates of the Siberian gulag. To this day, an official cult of Stalin endures, deployed today to motivate Russians to serve as cannon fodder in Vladimir Putin's Ukraine war. Countries like Germany and Russia suffered a crisis of industrial modernization, with wrenching change, uneven development and the atomization of the individual in a newly created mass society. I submit that the United States is undergoing a similar social process in its transition from an industrial society to a digital society, and is in danger of suffering an extended totalitarian experience rather than a brief bout of Constitution-flouting. America presents a paradox similar to that of early 20th-century Germany: It leads the world in science and technology (at least until this year), its elite universities are the finest anywhere, and its major cities are hubs of wealth and economic vitality. 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The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. What are the systemic factors that have resulted in so many people in the so-called leading country of the so-called free world being so vulnerable to totalitarianism? The short answer is that its institutions rotted from within. Contemporary America has operated under a Constitution that is well over 200 years old, has been substantially unchanged for over a century and under current circumstances is virtually unamendable. This Constitution has archaic features like the Electoral College — unheard of anywhere else since the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 — and grotesquely gerrymandered electoral districts (a hangover from the 'rotten boroughs' of 18th-century England), as well as a Senate that privileges rural states, much as the rural Prussian junker class politically dominated imperial Germany. These anachronisms and inequities are further exacerbated by the unaccountable malefactors of the wealthiest classes, who are able to thwart any fundamental reforms that might weaken the popular urge for a radical or totalitarian solution. As has been frequently noted, the rise of social media (often controlled by these same malefactors) has operated as an informational Gresham's Law, with genuine information systematically driven out of existence by disinformation, myth and mindless diversion. Just as earlier totalitarians dominated the first generation of electronic media, the current crop of dictators rule digital platforms.A fundamental flaw in America's early development was of course slavery, which functioned as a rigidly totalitarian state within a state. From the beginning, acute foreign observers like Alexis de Tocqueville noticed that beneath all the self-flattery about rugged individualism, Americans had a tendency towards conformity that could lead to a tyranny of the majority (or a sufficiently dogmatic minority). In the 1960s, political scientist Richard Hofstadter wrote that America had periodically been swept by waves of conformist anti-intellectualism: One can trace ... the emergence of what I would call the one-hundred per cent mentality – a mind fully committed to the full range of dominant popular fatuities and determined that no one shall have the right to challenge them. This type of mentality is a relatively recent synthesis of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist Americanism, very often with a heavy overlay of severe fundamentalist morality. Political absolutism has been a chronic temptation throughout American history. But its most recent extreme outbreak is unique in that the intellectual ground had been prepared by religious fundamentalist theocrats and white supremacists for more than four decades. This is reminiscent of the fact that while the German-speaking lands had had an authoritarian basis for centuries, the radical, violent nationalism of the Nazis was preceded by 40 or 50 years of writings by failed intellectuals like Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Moeller van den Bruck (who coined the term 'Third Reich'). They brought authoritarianism to a new and mystical level, paving the way for Hitler. An internet search of the most influential American political books of the last half-century will reveal such works as Noam Chomsky's 'Manufacturing Consent' or Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine.' But however accurate their depictions of politics and society, how influential were they? I submit that Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' 'Left Behind' series (which apparently traumatized a generation of adolescents), and William Luther Pierce's 'The Turner Diaries' (the Popular Mechanics of race-war incitement) were vastly more impactful, both politically and culturally. One could also mention Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale,' although what Atwood intended as a warning has been embraced by America's ayatollahs as a blueprint. With that ideational foundation already in place on the political right, the current descent into national madness began in the period between the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the early years of the military occupation of Iraq. The Bush administration's false pretext for so-called preemptive war against Iraq was thoroughly in the tradition of Joseph Goebbels' Big Lie or George Orwell's Newspeak. What was notable, however, was not that the general public, which could hardly find Iraq on a map, readily fell for the Bush-Cheney lie campaign. Erstwhile flagships of liberal thought, like The New Yorker and The New Republic, swallowed the falsehoods like hungry barracudas, and self-styled public intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens sullied their reputations forever by writing propaganda questioning the patriotism and good faith of opponents of the war. The true Rubicon that Americans crossed was on the question of torture, or 'enhanced interrogation,' in the Bush administration's Orwellian terminology. Torture is a barbaric practice condemned since the Enlightenment, proscribed even in our 18th-century Constitution and condemned in international law. But even after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated no evidence that torture 'worked' in eliciting usable information, nearly two-thirds of Americans supported its use. Now that Trump has asked the Supreme Court to declare both the U.N. Convention Against Torture and its federal implementing statute void, we cannot assume that his position on the matter is unpopular. The U.S. is now distinctly moving toward the principal goal of the totalitarian project: erasing the distinction between civil society and the state. The Trump regime is eagerly working to insert itself into every facet of American life, from effectively taking over private universities and dictating their curricula to banning books from the Naval Academy, dictating prices to retail businesses, attempting to change cartographic nomenclature (like 'Gulf of America') and vetting exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution, which is not formally a part of government and has had an independent policy on exhibits for the last 178 years. Another feature of totalitarianism is omnipresent surveillance. Since the 1970s, there have been numerous privacy laws enacted to protect ordinary citizens, and government databases are not systematically interlinked. But the Trump regime has contracted with the notorious tech firm Palantir to do just that. Palantir was of course co-founded by Silicon Valley oligarch Peter Thiel, a Trump supporter and co-conspirator with Elon Musk in the DOGE project. Some nonfederal entities, eager to curry favor with Trump, have gotten into the act. The University of Michigan hired thuggish private contractors to spy on and harass students (before reportedly retreating). How long will it be until a major university bans the teaching of evolutionary biology, acting in the same spirit as German universities under Hitler, which proscribed 'Jewish physics'? Historian Ian Kershaw has written that Hitler had thousands of 'little Hitlers,' Gauleiters, district leaders and block wardens throughout the German provinces who were not only happy to do his bidding, but sought to anticipate his will with their own initiatives, a scheme called 'working towards the Führer.' Trump has his little Trumps at the state and local level as well; I live in Virginia, a supposed purple state, where 121 books have been banned in the school libraries of various counties. These include such racy and controversial fare as 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Romeo and Juliet,' as well as (irony alert) Orwell's '1984.' At what point will this ban extend to public libraries, or to Barnes & Noble? The little Trumps are also present as interpreters for the journalists and social scientists who make the trek to Trump Country to understand the locals. Inquiring as to whether the Trump regime's cuts to Medicaid and social services, along with the higher retail prices caused by tariffs, might lead overwhelmingly pro-Trump inhabitants of impoverished eastern Kentucky to think again, a visiting sociologist was told by a local mayor that their loyalty was unshakable. "You know how proud and stoic Appalachians are,' the mayor told Arlie Russell Hochschild. 'We know how to take a little pain. People may have to suffer now to help make America great later. Trump's tariffs could raise prices, but that will force companies to gradually relocate to the U.S.' In other words, he was saying that his own community was too stupid to understand their own material interests. A demographic notorious for voting according to the price of gasoline or eggs would gladly further impoverish itself for the sake of Trump's vision, or so the mayor claimed. Any well-read person is likely to consider the rise of the modern nation-state to be a distinctly mixed bag, as the history of the last two or three centuries has demonstrated. But it arose concurrently with the Enlightenment, and one of its less remarked-upon features was the idea of the state as an entity above the interest of individuals, a kind of neutral arbiter. There were of course nascent political parties in those days (usually called 'factions'), and the usual horde of lobbyists, job-seekers and influence peddlers. But the state and its functions, like the post office, weights and measures, or even the nurturance of science and letters (as with the French Academy) were, at least in theory, above politics and venal ambition. Only in such an atmosphere could anyone get the idea that the law should nominally treat all people equally (even as economics divided them into classes), or that an abstract notion called human rights might exist and apply to everyone. Only under a neutral state, above or beyond partisan conflict, could dreamers theorize about constitutions and parliaments representing the interests of the nation. Even English monarchs were not above the constitution (if it was an unwritten one), as James II and Edward VIII discovered. What Trump and his gang are perpetrating is a regression from the modern nation-state to personal rule, in which the autocrat effectively owns everything in the territory he controls, clientelism runs rampant, and ordinary people are subjects rather than citizens. But there are significant differences between then and now: Under the feudal system, the lord had, in principle, certain obligations to peasants in addition to his right to command them. The modern totalitarian leader feels no such duty to law, custom or decency. He represents warlordism in a business suit instead of a thawb. It has become conventional wisdom that America's elite institutions – the entities with the most at stake in preserving what's left of an open society, even one as flawed as ours — have surrendered to the Trump regime with breathtaking (and disgusting) alacrity. From law firms to elite universities like Columbia and Michigan to billion-dollar businesses damaged by Trump's tariffs to major media organizations, they have chosen capitulation even when resistance seemed both more rational and more effective. As I write this in the aftermath of the 'No Kings' protests (the same weekend that Trump tried to stage a North Korea-style military parade to his own glorification), it has become equally conventional wisdom that ordinary people are resisting: in congressional town halls, spontaneous demonstrations and other forms of resistance. This is of course encouraging. But is it enough? For all the failures of our elites, they were not responsible for the 77 million votes Trump received last November. The battle for democracy will not be staged by the elites or against them, but at the mass level. The lesson of Trump's first term was soon forgotten in the popular mind, and overcoming his second regime will be an order of magnitude more difficult, especially as his followers are more numerous, more deeply entrenched in the governmental system and radicalized to a far greater degree than they were the first time around. Not long after I wrote the previous paragraph, I learned that a Minnesota state representative and her husband had been assassinated and a state senator critically wounded in a 'targeted political attack.' We have accelerated from Trump's perceived opponents receiving death threats to political murder. How long will it take our so-called thought leaders to recognize what has been staring them in the face since at least the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally in 2017: Trump and his Republican followers and enablers are only symptoms of something much deeper? Our national crisis will not be correctly perceived, let alone solved, until we recognize that the root of the problem lies in that supposed repository of virtue, the American people. The prestige media's rote expeditions to rural diners in Iowa to discover the Real America are wearing distinctly thin at this juncture, because what lies at the core of Trump's support is a not-insignificant fraction of would-be totalitarians who possess the same mentality as those who lynched Black people in the Jim Crow South, mobbed Jews during Kristallnacht and beheaded professors during Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. It will be a long, hard road back to decency and sanity.
