It’s hard to rank what Trump’s worst acts are—so many are so horrible. But the scariest part of Trump’s presidency is the rapid creation of a mini police state, with the administration regularly deploying National Guard troops or a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents or both in major cities, usually against the will of local officials. We are now a country where nonviolent people are regularly arrested and detained with little explanation and where the threat of armed troops coming to your city is constant. And this militarization keeps accelerating. America is certainly not a police state, but this is the most like a police state we have been in my lifetime, including in the months after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Chicago has hardly been unscathed, though. The Windy City and Boston have been the subject of particularly intense ICE operations, in part to punish those cities’ leaders for being very anti-Trump and pro-immigrant. And as events in Los Angeles and now Portland are showing, the ICE and National Guard policies reinforce each other. In both cities, the administration has used protests against ICE actions as pretext to bring in the National Guard to allegedly quell violence and disorder.
What’s so terrifying about these policies is not just the people who are arrested and deported but the randomness of them and the resulting fear and uncertainty for everyone else. When news broke last Friday that ICE had detained Ian Roberts, the superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools, I (and I suspect liberals across the country) were worried that this was the latest example of the administration targeting someone either for their political views, like Khalil and Öztürk, or because of an enforcement mistake, like Abrego Garcia. In fact, there are indications that Roberts had a deportation order issued against him in 2024 (before Trump was in office) and improperly presented himself as a U.S. citizen. I am not sure those are strong enough grounds to detain a well-liked leader of a major public school system who had not committed a violent crime, but it’s not as egregious as Öztürk’s arrest.
“It became clear soon after Trump took power that the First Amendment would simply no longer apply to foreigners.… And as a foreign national, I increasingly felt my choice was to either continue to intervene publicly, at the increasing risk of making myself and my family a target; or to fall silent, accommodate, ignore the political reality,” German historian Thomas Zimmer wrote in a recent essay, explaining why he opted to move back home after living in the United States for several years.
I understand that I am not likely to be shot by a member of the National Guard. Ditto that very few of those 28 million noncitizens will actually be deported. But the point is that there is an undeniable chilling effect. Noncitizens have to be nervous about criticizing this administration and being deported by ICE. Mayors and governors have to worry about ICE being deployed to their cities. Anti-ICE protesters must worry about ICE and the National Guard using tear gas and other weapons against them if they protest. People in cities with the guard on the streets have to worry about any action that might irritate soldiers who are doing on-the-ground policing that they are not trained to do.
“The Trump administration’s threat to deploy troops in Portland is unlawful. Here’s a thought. Focus on protecting the healthcare of the American people,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote in a tweet after Trump announced the deployment, a message that I assume was not reassuring to people in Portland or any other blue city.
I don’t want to be fatalistic. Trump is both unpopular and often ineffective. America overall is far from falling into dictatorship. That said, the risk of any individual person being arrested, detailed, deported, beaten up, or killed by the federal government, on false pretenses, is higher than at any time in recent memory. We still have democracy. I am not so sure we still have freedom.
Hence then, the article about with portland trump s police state is getting bigger and more radical was published today ( ) and is available on The New Republic ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( With Portland, Trump’s Police State Is Getting Bigger and More Radical )
Also on site :