Dystopian America
Thugs in unmarked tactical gear, aiming guns as they shout at everyone to get against the wall, manhandling anyone who doesn’t comply fast enough—no badges shown. No warrants. Masks and sunglasses cover their faces. People are shoved into vans or SUVs. Some aren’t seen for weeks. Some never again.
This isn’t Russia, or North Korea, nor is it a dystopian novel. This is America.
Those here legally are finding their visas are suddenly and secretly revoked. They’re detained for writing articles that call out the suffering happening in Gaza. They’re nabbed exiting their immigration hearing, punished for doing things the right way—the way Republicans have always demanded that immigrants come to America. Worksites are raided to fill quotas despite the campaign promise to round up all of the hardened criminals they claimed filled our country from the invasion at the southern border.
Why the quotas? When you spend years fearmongering about the ruthless, violent criminals flooding into the country and campaign on rounding up those monsters to save America, you need to make it look like you’re solving the problem you invented. That’s why you make a Hollywood production out of flying shackled men to South America and bussing them into one of the most notorious prisons in the world.
When it is revealed that you sent people who had zero criminal convictions, you spend more energy fabricating evidence and attacking their character than it would take to follow the court order to get them released. The image of ridding America of violent gang members is more important than upholding due process and constitutional rights.
Citizens aren’t immune to this authoritarian approach to governing. Americans are being detained during raids, told their identification was fake, and held until their citizenship was satisfingly proved, or public outrage was loud enough for the government to want the problem to go away. Others are being pulled aside at the airport and questioned about what they’ve used their free speech, all to intimidate them, just like suing the media, bringing up charges against mayors and members of Congress, and calling judges who enforce the law "rogue” or even treasonous.
That’s if you criticize or resist Trump’s agenda. If you proudly support it, you can expect a pardon, no matter if you stormed the Capitol and mercilessly beat police officers, ran an online dark web drug and murder for hire website, or committed classic tax fraud or embezzlement. All that matters in the Trump world is support and loyalty, not law and order.
This president is selling a meme coin to those who want to curry favor and even held a gala for the top purchasers to hang out and see a leader board encouraging them to buy more. The corruption is endless and open, yet so many still refuse to see it. They refuse to believe that Trump is ripping visas away from law-abiding immigrants who’ve done nothing wrong. Because they’ve been trained to see Trump as infallible, they can’t allow themselves to know the truth. Here are the names of people experiencing this nightmare. But still, those who don’t want to see what is happening will find ways to dismiss their stories.
There is Mahmoud Khalil, a student activist at Columbia who led pro-Palestinian protests, who was pulled from his residence by ICE agents without a warrant. They wrongly believed Khalil was here on a student visa, which they could easily revoke, but he is a legal resident with a green card. They threatened to revoke that instead.
There is no criminal charge against Khalil because he broke no law. Instead, the Trump administration is trying to use an obscure power of the Secretary of State which allows the deportation of aliens who are deemed that their presence in the US will be a severe detriment to foreign policy. The grounds for this claim have not been provided, and a federal judge ruled that applying that power in this case is unconstitutional. Khalil is still in custody.
The Trump administration had held other pro-Palestinian immigrants, but they have since been ordered to be released by judges. This includes:
Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student who had been held for 45 days following the viral video of plain-clothed agents abducting her in the streets of Somerville, MA, because she wrote an op-ed about the oppression of the Palestinian people.
Mohsen Mahdawi, a permanent resident and Columbia student, was detained during his naturalization hearing. Marco Rubio attempted to use the same excuse against Khalil: Mahdawi’s presence would damage foreign policy. He is currently out on bail.
Badar Khan Suri is a professor at Georgetown and a father of three. Like others, the government accused him of supporting Hamas, but provided no evidence to back up the claim. A judge ruled that Suri must be released because his detention violated his First and Fifth Amendments, the right to free speech and due process.
These are but a few names; there are plenty of other examples and seemingly new ones every day. Beyond the lack of morality of these detentions, Constitutional rights are being violated in the US. The very basis of our freedom is being ignored. The last line of defense is the judges trying to uphold the Constitution as the White House and Congress try to tear it down.
ICE has begun detaining immigrants as soon as they walk out of the courtroom after having their request for asylum or motion to stay in the US denied. While the next step in the process is deportation, the show of force at courthouses will discourage other immigrants from following the proper process, which is what the government wants.
Once an immigrant misses a hearing, they have violated their right to be here and can be detained and deported. Concerns have also been raised that the administration may pressure judges to dismiss these cases to facilitate quick arrests.
While the lower courts have been weighing in on individual cases and halting deportation flights, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the approval to revoke visas for over 500,000 immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Haiti who had received their visas under a Biden program that protected immigrants fleeing economic and political turmoil. Every one of those migrants is now at risk of deportation. This ruling follows one that allowed the Trump administration to revoke the Temporary Protected Status of 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants.
The people being rounded up without due process aren’t only hardened criminals; they aren’t even all here illegally. It is a massive assault on anyone who disagrees with or resists the Trump administration through an unprecedented power grab that is continually being ruled against in courts across the nation.
The courts can only do so much. The people must speak out against this oppressive action. We must be loud, unrelenting, and unafraid.
Trump just gave access to your government data to the company Palantir, which was founded by bond villain Peter Thiel, to link all of your data together in a massive surveillance database. And a Texas sheriff recently tapped into 83,000 license plate readers nationwide to track down a woman who had an abortion.
Oppression begins with the most vulnerable, such as immigrants, but it always expands from there. We are seeing legal residents being targeted by the Trump administration and US citizens getting caught up in the hurried raids that care little about facts. It will get worse. How bad depends on how hard we work to stop it.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8d21zmm88o
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/technology/trump-palantir-data-americans.html
Security is the disguise for tyranny.
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