The cruel grip of fascism is tightening around our necks — and if we are to succeed in the struggle against it, we must recognize the horrors of history when they show signs of resurfacing. As the Trump administration advances toward its ultimate goals for the country, its similarity to historical regimes becomes apparent.
For nearly a month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted massive raids against immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees as part of President Donald Trump’s ongoing plan for mass deportation. By using intimidation and deception to gain access to homes and workplaces, ICE is targeting the same people who Trump has vilified for years.
As is expected from a decade of the MAGA movement’s xenophobic, white supremacist propaganda, ICE maintains little regard or precision for who it detains or its methods. With its efforts expanded to schools and places of worship, even safe havens are now fair game for state-sanctioned raids.
In recent weeks, ICE has racially profiled and arrested a large number of people, immigrants of Venezuelan heritage and members of the Navajo Nation among them. Its focus continues to be targeting and arresting members of communities deemed “undesirables” by Trump and his allies.
Despite attempts to manufacture consent for ICE and its actions through state propaganda, the vague, racist trope of “criminal aliens” is a rhetorical smokescreen. In truth, ICE does not care about citizenship or legal status, nor do its government financiers.
Since its inception in 2003, ICE has maintained a cruel history of targeting communities of color and perpetuating racist abuse against them. Like its predecessors, ICE is an extension of the ruling class in America, whose material interests rely on the expulsion of racial others and the maintenance of white Christian hegemony.
To enforce and advance ruling class interests, ICE relies on the racialization of “illegality” and the racial othering of immigrant communities. These communities are criminalized, scapegoated and persecuted by the ruling class and its agents. Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric is a mechanism within this system; it is designed to elicit support for white supremacist violence in the name of white America.
Though some portray these atrocities as “unprecedented,” they evoke the intermediate stages of 20th-century fascist regimes. Like all fascist movements, Trump and his allies require a scapegoat to woo their supporters and galvanize them into action. In the case of the MAGA movement, immigrants are blamed for societal ills.
As some have rightfully pointed out, the ongoing wave of ICE raids resembles the mass deportation of Polish Jews from Germany in 1938, during which approximately 17,000 people living under the Nazi regime were stripped of citizenship and hunted down by the Gestapo, Hitler’s secret police.
Like the deportees of 1938, who were forced to live in makeshift encampments after rejection by Polish authorities, those arrested by ICE have been relocated to detention camps and military facilities upon failed attempts at deportation. As history has shown, encampments are precisely the goal. The Trump administration is manufacturing a displacement crisis for ICE arrestees — and in “response” to the scenario they created for their targets, they seek to build more holding facilities with no indication of when or where arrestees will be transported.
As Trump orders the construction of an expanded detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, the echoes of history grow louder. The future of current ICE arrestees remains uncertain, though the dehumanizing, exterminationist rhetoric of MAGA-aligned politicians indicates the long-term purpose of these detention facilities. Fascism never starts with concentration camps — but if history has taught us anything, the steps toward them are being laid down.
