When a government ceases to care about human rights, due process and basic dignity, things are pretty bad. However, combine that with minorities being dehumanised and treated like animals and we are well down the road to fascism. But this is happening in America today. The Nazis regarded Jews, Roma, and other minorities as subhuman or Untermenschen. Initially, they were simply designated as second or third-class citizens. Then they were attacked, detained or deported, but eventually the sheer depravity of it all led to the so-called “final solution.” Each small step became normalised and accepted by those involved as well as the population at large. But it all began with demonising people and a basic lack of empathy.
This is what we are beginning to see in Trump’s America. If you’re white, Christian, of European descent and reasonably wealthy, nobody will touch you. But, if you are black, Asian or Latino and speak with a foreign accent, you are likely to face arbitrary arrest, detention and deportation to somewhere overseas that you have no connection with at all.
The godfather of the policy is Tom Homan, Executive Associate Director for Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement department, or ICE for short.
His Wikipedia entry reveals a man seemingly obsessed with the deportation of undocumented immigrants for most of his adult life, beginning in 1984 when he joined the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service as it then was.
All across the USA, gangs of masked ICE agents, travelling in convoys of unmarked SUVs are almost randomly arresting people and shipping them off to detention centres without informing anyone where they are. This happened recently to a professor in California, a US citizen.
Jonathan Caravello was detained and effectively 'disappeared', apparently for the 'crime' of trying to help a legal observer remove a teargas canister from under their wheelchair during an ICE raid on a California farm where a worker was hospitalised after he fell from a roof. It took days for the professor's family and friends to discover where he was being held.
In another case, a Honduran woman from Oregon was arrested along with her four US citizen children while meeting with her relatives in a park on the US - Canadian border. Two weeks later, they are still being held without access to a lawyer:
More abuse from the guys who claim to be the "family values" folks www.kgw.com/article/news...— Peter Montgomery (@petemontdc.com) 13 July 2025 at 13:12
A 75-year-old Cuban man who had been living in the US for 60 years died in ICE custody in Miami after being arrested on 5 June. Twelve detainees in ICE detention have died so far. Homan’s response was “people die”, as if it’s natural for folks to pass away in ICE facilities. Nobody seems to care.
A Canadian-born 47-year-old Trump supporter, married to an American and with five US children, was detained at the border when he tried to return to his home in New Hampshire after a holiday in Canada. He had lived in America from the age of 3! Protesters were arrested in Los Angeles when children (children, for heaven's sake) were seen in shackles at a federal detention centre. This is what a police state looks like.
Homan was interviewed recently and claimed heavily armed ICE agents can detain people partly based on their “physical appearance” and without 'probable cause':
“Based on their physical appearance” Trump kidnapping czar Tom Homan admits their Gestapo agents are being trained to racially profile brown people (without probable cause, crimes committed, warrants, etc.)— The Tennessee Holler (@thetnholler.bsky.social) 11 July 2025 at 15:37
Brought up as a Roman Catholic, Homan is now attacking the Pope and the church. In February, after Pope Francis condemned Trump’s mass deportation program as inhumane, Homan told Fox News the pope should “leave enforcement to us” and “stick to the Catholic Church,” even sarcastically sniping that “he’s got a wall around the Vatican, does he not?”
Homan has admitted publicly that separating families is a deliberate policy to discourage would-be immigrants.
The US government has now built a temporary detention centre in the Everglades in Florida, where men are held in horrendous conditions with little food or sanitation and plagued by mosquitoes. A US Representative, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, was recently and reluctantly allowed to visit:
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz after touring "Alligator Alcatraz": "These detainees are living in cages. The pictures you've seen don't do it just. They are essentially packed into cages. 34 detainees per cage...they get their drinking water & they brush their teeth where they poop, in the same unit"— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 12 July 2025 at 19:14
Most people held there have no criminal record at all, some have committed non-violent offences like speeding, and only a very small proportion are hardened criminals and gang members. The right-wing podcaster and Trump supporter Joe Rogan recently told his followers nobody would have voted for Trump if they thought wholly innocent agriculture workers and the like would be rounded up and deported.
Every society has a small proportion of violent psychopaths more than willing to treat others badly. The Gestapo flourished in the 1930s due to the Germans' obsession with orderliness and following authority. America’s equivalent is flourishing today because of the love of money, the driving force in US society.
Many of these facilities are privately owned and run. There is a boom in the share price of these firms, with one, the GEO Group (CXW), seeing its shares double in value since Donald Trump’s election win. The profit motive means more innocent people are detained and held for longer. It's the American way.
I don't believe this can continue. Polling by YouGov shows there is widespread opposition to Homan's policy, with voters 2:1 against it. But we should be clear about what could lie at the end of this road: a country like Russia, where human life is cheap and the law is simply a tool for repression wielded by the state and routinely misused and bent to suit whatever circumstances arise.
It ends in wars like Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, which has cost the lives of thousands of innocent civilians, as well as over a million soldiers killed or wounded, with thousands more being thrown into the meat grinder every day, and POWs routinely maltreated or killed as they try to surrender. The Russians even execute their own men for cowardice.
Those who argue that 'sovereignty' is somehow paramount, and no country should be subject to a supranational body like the EU and the ECHR - and I'm thinking here about Brexiteers as you know - should take a look at what's happening to the 'shining city on the hill' that Reagan talked about.
Without independent, impartial, non-political legal oversight, any country can descend into lawlessness. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere.
