America's (not-so) secret police

June 16 marked a decade since Donald Trump first rode the escalator to announce his candidacy for presidency of the United States. Back then, working on a global history of concentration camps, I was immediately struck (as were many others) by the similarity between his rhetoric and that of twentieth-century strongmen and dictators.

Just as disturbing were the common ways that media outlets were dealing with such brazen demagoguery, repeating mistakes made by newspapers a hundred years ago. I began to post links to historical newspaper articles.

There were many of them, including a few where reporters did manage to see what was going on. Joseph Shaplen wrote in the pages of the New York Times three years before Hitler came to power, “Apparently it matters little to his followers what he says. Their chief concern seems to be how he says it. What he says may not appear true to those who know better, but to those who like it it is not without its logic.”

Journalist Miriam Beard noted that Hitler was drawing comparisons to Machiavelli, before further observing that others might be more inclined to mutter “Barnum und Bailey.”

Not everyone was as perceptive. Under the heading “A mellowing viewpoint” in 1932, this passage appeared in the Times:

“It is beyond doubt that, as the party is moving toward power, the sharp edges of many of its views are becoming blunt. Even though Hitler refused to submit to cross-examination the other day on the ground that the lawyer of is opponent was a Jew, his speeches no longer bristle with pointed references to the anti-Semitic cause.”

Today, I’ll write about the ways we’re tilting toward full-blown dictatorship and what’s keeping us from it for now. I also want to give you some suggestions about what these things mean in terms of priorities on how to take action.

Trump and extremists

The U.S. has a long history of paramilitaries and vigilantes, and Trump clearly received the support of most of the extreme right wing in America early on. Yet general support is different than having individuals responding directly to his agenda and waiting to do his bidding. Before coming to power, Adolf Hitler had paramilitary backing that Donald Trump lacked when he arrived in 2015.

In the months ahead of the 2016 election, when people asked how deep the Nazi parallels went, I suggested things weren’t looking great, but he still had a ways to go, noting that “during 7 weeks of pre-election violence in 1932 Germany, 72 people died & nearly 500 were critically injured.”

We saw those deeper connections with paramilitary types begin to form in concrete ways as white nationalists came out in Charlottesville in 2017, and Heather Heyer was murdered. By October 2020, bonds were strengthened when Trump, invited to condemn “white supremacists and militia groups” during a debate, communicated directly to the Proud Boys telling them to “stand back and stand by.”

There were interim responses from individual actors, like Kyle Rittenhouse’s man-on-a-mission drive across state lines bringing an AR-15-style weapon to a protest in the wake of a police shooting, in what looked very much like a plan to shoot protesters (he was later acquitted for the deaths of those he shot). But it took until January 6, 2021, to see how the shift among whole groups of extremists might result in not just intermittent killing on the streets or violence at a campaign event, but a full-out assault on the Capitol Building and an attempt to derail the transfer of power to keep Trump in office.

Since his return to the presidency, we’re seeing distinctions between the U.S. and authoritarian nations collapse further. The assassinations and attempted assassinations in Minnesota in June were just one tragic indicator of our political fabric unraveling.

Yet the U.S. is a vast country with a population in the hundreds of millions. And in the wake of the attempted January 6 coup, the government began prosecuting those active in the effort, which discouraged further violence of this kind during the Biden administration.

It wasn’t that Trump lacked a mass of supporters willing to carry out his bidding in a police state. The issue was that they didn’t have the means and the organization to do it. The institutions themselves had not become fully complicit.

Much of what Trump’s allies have been doing on the ground in 2025 looks like nothing so much as an attempt to create this kind of police state, one focused on removing foreigners they target as undesirable. But they also appear to want to use that police state to crush internal dissent. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s important to repeat it. I don’t intend for the emphasis on this to frighten you as much as I hope it will clarify what’s happening and give you ideas on how to take action.

Even during his first administration, Trump actively lobbied to shoot protesters, punish political opponents with jail, use his power against reporters, and worse.

At that point, people around him in his administration were discouraging him. Now they’re abetting him. Just Monday, the White House announced that stripping Americans of citizenship through denaturalization will be one of its top five priorities for the Department of Justice going forward. The same day, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt announced the administration would be open to an investigation aimed at revoking the citizenship of Zohran Mamdani, last week’s winner of the Democratic primary in the race for New York City’s next mayor.

We see concentration camps on the rise in new places, particularly in the ad hoc Florida camp rising around an airstrip in the Florida Everglades. But nowhere are the expanded efforts toward a police state more visible and quantifiable than the massive surge in the budget bill related to immigration, the border, and detention.

Along with benefiting the ultra-wealthy and cutting basic health services for millions of the poorest and most disadvantaged Americans, the budget bill has been crafted to make more widespread violence possible—to create a police state that can purge people by targeting groups based on race and ethnicity and political opposition rather than any true concern about criminal activity, doing so at rates that beggar recent arrest statistics.

But to do that, you need a lot of money. And money is what the drafters of the budget bill intend to provide.

The bill passed by the Senate today is perhaps the biggest red flag for the country since Trump’s re-election—bigger and more dangerous even than Supreme Court corruption. According to the American Immigration Council’s handy fact sheet, the budget includes $51.6 billion for border walls, $45 billion for ICE detention, and $29.9 billion for ICE enforcement.

Full funding in these areas, as well as the cooperation of friendly local law enforcement in many regions, would give the administration the means by which to build a nationwide police state. At this point it can all be done in the way that concentration-camp regimes have typically moved forward—through a mishmash of impromptu law, court decisions defying precedents, and the auspices of complacent or corrupt legislators.

Once in place, that police-state apparatus will be enormous enough that it will be extremely difficult to fight in any comprehensive way. (Keep in mind that, though well underway, it’s not fully in place yet.)

Himmler’s lament

In 1937, four years into Nazi rule in Germany, Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler lamented the challenges of surveilling so many enemies of the state. “What does it mean, putting a man under surveillance? For that I need at least three officials per day—there are 24 hours in a day—these three officials need two cars, because if the fellow is at all clever, he’ll leap from one streetcar to another… So it’s can’t be done without five officials.”

This line of thinking was his core argument for the need to maintain and expand the German concentration camp system. Himmler wanted to keep people he portrayed as threats to public safety in concentration camps indefinitely. In the same talk, he gave a careful explanation about how the camps were not cruel or sadistic, despite what outsiders said, but were instead havens of restraint, cleanliness, and discipline.

Though Trump doesn’t yet have full dictatorial powers, in his second administration, he is skipping through the first few years of Nazi rule in terms of what he is pushing agencies to do.

They’re currently expanding the use of abusive tactics allowed to fester in the U.S. for decades—tactics which now face much less in the way of restraints on when and how they can be applied. But the administration is also looking to expand a vast network of law enforcement loyal to Trump, with de facto power to kidnap in broad daylight without warrants or identification. The government asserts the ability to take those they detain and ship them overseas to untraceable destinations for unknown treatment, while building detention camps at home on a massive basis for those targeted by the government.

This is basically Germany in the mid-1930s in terms of what the ruling party wants and is actively pursuing. But as I’ve said before, we still have so much power to act in public, and we still have the lower courts on the side of democracy. It’s not yet clear what role the Army would be willing to take in a widespread action against American citizens. These things matter hugely, and they put us on a different path for the moment than Berlin in 1937, although many of the same shadows are threatening.

Putin and Rosgvardia

I would argue that another useful place and time to consider at our current inflection point is Russia almost a decade ago. In 2016, four years after returning to a presidency he had exited for a time, Vladimir Putin established the Russian National Guard, the Rosgvardia, to keep internal peace for “the good of society, the state and law and order.” It currently is reported to have over 300,000 members, which would make it several times the size of many countries’ armies.

I won’t get too deep in the weeds about where the Rosgvardia has taken action in Russia and how they’ve behaved. My main point is that a massive force authorized to commit state violence serving the president directly is a recipe for repression. And I would argue that the existence of the Rosgvardia, combined with targeted violence against any and all powerful leaders arising in opposition to Vladimir Putin, is how Putin has managed to keep internal dissent from expanding or even setting down strong roots. He basically has an army to crush domestic protest.

The conflation of the roles of ICE, the national guard, and local police are already wreaking havoc in the U.S. We’ve already seen U.S. citizens detained in what appear to be deliberate abuses of power. Journalists have been fired on with “less lethal” munitions.

With the proposed numbers of border agents and detention facilities, and law enforcement in the immigration arena already normalizing violence against civilians and support for authoritarian measures from the president, any increase in the budget, let alone the massive one that appears to be emerging, is by far the biggest threat to democracy in the moment.

I’m telling you this not to terrify you into crawling under your bed. I want to make clear that up until now, a majority of Americans have had fairly free range to act, but this is the mechanism by which Trump and his inheritors could establish control over public dissent and the political system. So we need to work against it.

A majority of Americans already oppose the president’s tactics on the budget bill and immigration, as well as his defiance of U.S. courts. More people will oppose them as the policies the government is enacting continue to unfold (not only with regard to immigration, but also in the arenas of trade tariffs and health care). Almost no one wants to see their beloved ice cream vendor detained. Even fewer want their grandmother’s Medicaid care interrupted.

Immigration law

One of the problems we’re facing is that the brutality the current administration is inflicting right now has been baked into the system across several administrations. Trump has a base of continuous violence against immigrants stretching back four decades on which to stand as he seeks to expand the cruelty. Nevertheless, we can and should press back and push to get Congress to take up its constitutional duties. And I really do believe that these efforts can make a huge difference in ways we might not be able to predict, even before midterm elections.

But the degree to which things are baked into our system make it such that we’re going to have to override existing institutional momentum by showing up and making our voices heard against abuses by ICE, against immigration detention, and against the ability of law enforcement to operate in the U.S. as a secret police force, working anonymously and often without warrants.

What to do

Very few people at this point face no risk at all, but it’s important to see what’s going on and assess your own risk clearly. In general U.S. birthright citizens, cishet folks, white people, and especially white women have the most cover. Because of rampant prejudice that the public will be encouraged to indulge by bad actors, white women over 40 are the hardest for law enforcement to abuse with impunity.

The administration is still several months from having everything they need in place. But the budget will be huge in terms of planning. And Trump’s allies are already working quickly. Look at the speed with which the concentration camp being promoted as “Alligator Alcatraz” is being declared almost ready to go.

Speaking from Ochopee, Florida, today, Trump expressed interest in a multi-state network of detention camps like the one in Florida, saying that “At some point, they might morph into a system.” Meanwhile, the Florida Republican Party is selling camp merchandise celebrating violence against detainees. Their promotional ads sparked immediate thoughts from several people who heard echoes of lynching parties and postcards in the way that this kind of extrajudicial violence is being celebrated.

The current administration is looking to create a community of atrocity, to recruit people into a brotherhood of violence. They are celebrating their brutality.

What can we do? Learn how to record ICE encounters. Learn about what is legal and what rights individuals have. Hold agents and officials to it as often as you can, slowing them down when you can’t stop them. Let me be clear. You will absolutely need to know how to keep yourself safe before you turn to these tactics, but most people can do it.

If you are not one of those people, almost anyone, including many who are homebound, can find out where detention is happening in your community and what your local law enforcement agencies’ relationships with ICE are. You can lobby your local officials to shut down ICE access to local partnerships and detention areas. You can become a court observer, like Brad Lander in New York.

Find out who’s working to address the needs of those targeted. With the recent Supreme Court decision on universal injunctions, the number of lawsuits is likely to balloon. Connect to church groups helping communities—including the El Salvadorans, Haitians, Cubans, and Iranians—currently being targeted for removal, despite fears of persecution in their countries of origin.

We need solidarity to stand against these behaviors, publicly, and shame supporters of draconian immigration policy to a degree that creates a momentum against this cowardice. You can join union drives to circulate flyers educating immigrants on their rights (this one happened today, but you can keep an eye out for future ones).

You can circulate flyers in your city or town to let them know what private detention contractors and law enforcement agencies are doing. The public already doesn’t like what ICE is doing, but we need to make sure what they’re doing stays as public as possible.

To do that, we need more than fear. We also need anger. And we need joy that imagines a better country that we’re moving toward. It’s possible to call out to one another in community. It’s clear that now the stakes are high for everyone.

There are more of us than there are of them, and we can stop them. But we have to show up—and soon.

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