The Skinny: Trump’s Fascist Panopticon Expands
Trump’s Panopticon Expands: April 10th-12th
Trump Regime Demands Migrant Social Media Handles
It is difficult to properly contextualize for people who stopped paying attention to mass surveillance policies after the Bush administration left office, just how vital the vast digital panopticon installed in America in the post 9/11 era is to the fascist Trump regime’s mass deportation efforts here in 20205. This surveillance state reality then combines with the rise of surveillance capitalism, whereby private sector entities have transformed the collection and monetization of our private data into an entire business model, to create what amounts to an all-seeing eye that the government can access to hunt down targeted individuals; in this case, migrants in the United States. For an example of what that looks like in action, take this early March announcement that was underreported at the time (but just became a lot more relevant in early April) revealing that the Trump regime intends to collect and presumably monitor social media handles of folks applying to legally work and reside in the United States:
Trump Wants Immigrants on U.S. Soil to Hand Over Social Media Accounts to Apply for Citizenship
“Collecting social media information, according to the USCIS proposal first posted March 5, is necessary “for the enhanced identity verification, vetting and national security screening.”
The proposal specifically cites Trump’s January 20 executive order, which advocates have warned goes well beyond the Muslim travel ban from Trump’s first term, which targeted people living abroad.
The new executive order stated that “the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”
USCIS said the social media handles it collects would be used to determine if people applying for a variety of immigration statuses pose a “security or public-safety threat.””
Given that we’re talking about a Trump administration that has worked with anonymously-funded Zionist doxing groups to kidnap and try to deport foreign students who protested against a US-backed genocide on American college campuses, I think it’s safe to say they’re not trying to monitor immigrants social media handles for benign reasons. Unsurprisingly, this direct connection between this social media surveillance policy and Trump’s ideological policing and repression targeting anti-genocide protestors was not lost on informed observers who oppose all this fascist bullshit:
“In light of Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil’s ongoing detention, one official from a Muslim civil rights group said the new policy poses special danger for critics of Israel and the Trump administration.
“This policy would disparately impact Muslim and Arab applicants seeking U.S. citizenship that have voiced support for Palestinian human rights,” said Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Collecting the social media identifiers of any potential green card applicants or citizens is the means to silencing their lawful speech.”
Furthermore as a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation presciently observed, there are few if any stated limits on the scope of what the government can do with this data if they get it, and modern AI technology allows for the regime to ideologically police and target a terrifying number of people who oppose our fascist overlords. Oh, and it almost goes without saying that the entire plan is strictly speaking, a violation of US constitutional rights:
“The policy proposal does not sketch out limits on how USCIS can use its newly acquired data, according to Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Hussain said she was particularly concerned that the government might use artificial intelligence or other automated tools to punish speech it dislikes, pointing to a news report that the State Department is using AI to revoke the visas of people who allegedly express “pro-Hamas” sentiments.
Hussain said she feared a chilling effect, where people applying for a change in status refrain from speaking about potentially controversial issues.
“Anybody who is within the bounds of the United States has First Amendment rights,” she said. “The Constitution applies whether you are somebody who is a citizen or somebody who is a green card holder who is here in the United States. I think that this administration is trying to chip away at that notion, but that is very much what First Amendment jurisprudence has been under the courts.”
Finally, it should be pointed out that the regime’s proposal gives no indication whatsoever of when the government would stop recording and monitoring the social media activities of the people it’s targeting:
“CAIR’s McCaw said he worried that the policy could be used to continue tracking people’s activity on social media even after they become naturalized citizens.
“There’s no clear sign on when this intrusion into our electronics and communications will end,” he said.”
Ultimately I think it’s very easy for the mainstream discourse to ignore these fascist panopticon policies individually, especially given how little Americans still drunk on white supremacist ideology care what happens to migrants under a fascist mass deportation campaign. Taken together however, these orders prove that the Trump administration is clearly constructing a digital surveillance web that can easily be adapted to any targeted group as the regime’s fascist agenda progresses; which means that some day soon, even the most racist people in our society might wish they’d cared more about Trump’s version of the panopticon while his regime was still building it out.
Propaganda, Antisemitism, and the Panopticon
Of course, the other shoe of the regime’s proposed online surveillance of immigrants using legal pathways to work, study, and reside in the United States, would eventually drop because there’s no way the white nationalist Trump administration would be satisfied with kidnapping and attempting to deport a handful of student protest leaders. As such, the Department of Homeland Security has announced that it is now monitoring the social media activity of law-abiding immigrants for “antisemitism” – a word that no longer has meaning when used by a regime (itself littered with antisemites and nazis) that seems to think criticizing a genocide, opposing US funding for Israel’s bloodthirsty fascist government, and saying Palestinians have human rights too, is antisemitism.
DHS Announces It’s Surveilling Immigrants’ Social Media for “Antisemitism”
“In a chilling statement, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin effectively said that the administration is carving out an exception to free speech rights to punish certain viewpoints.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem “has made it clear that anyone who thinks they can come to America and hide behind the First Amendment to advocate for anti-Semitic violence and terrorism — think again. You are not welcome here,” McLaughlin said.
Advocates for Palestinian rights noted that the clear goal of the administration is to suppress speech critical of Israel, as well as punish Muslim and Arab rights groups — similar to the implementation of the Patriot Act after 9/11.
“It doesn’t matter what you actually say. We are at the point where anything short of pledging allegiance to Israel is, in the eyes of the U.S. government and its many institutions, a criminal offense worthy of the infliction of state violence,” said media analyst Sana Saeed on social media.”
I don’t think anyone with a functioning brain needs to be told that a Trumpenreich regime full of literal fucking nazis, does not at all care about fighting antisemitism. What it does care about is protecting its investment in a MENA region client state it uses to ensure American dominance of fossil fuel availability, and the US-funded genocide of Palestinians that state, Israel, is conducting in Gaza. Furthermore, the Pork Reich is also very concerned with creating ideological justification to unleash its Gestapo (ICE) on foreign students and Muslims in general, as part of a Christian Nationalist agenda to establish America as a white ethnostate.
The story here however isn’t really about the hypocrisy of a fascist regime hell bent on both punishing dissent and bleaching the demographics of the American population. When you factor in the regime’s use of online surveillance, AI technology, and ICE’s Investigative Case Management database, what we’re looking at here is the expansion of our police state panopticon during a period of time when the US government under Trump is actively looking to obliterate civil rights and apply its fascist ideological policing policies to an ever widening circle of people; a circle that consists of both immigrants and “natural born” US Citizens. You should care about this not just because immigrants are human beings who have rights just like anyone born in the US does, but because this digitized fascist repression does not have to, and almost certainly will not, stop with immigrants; who it must again be pointed out, are in the US legally and are actually “following the legal process” to study, work, and reside in the country.
The Pork Reich Is Tracing Dark History
I’ve spent much of the past eight and a half years avoiding unproductive arguments with people who insist that “you can’t compare Trumpism to Hitler and the Nazis” despite knowing that those people rarely, if ever, have much understanding of what made the Nazis the definitive genocidal fascist movement in human history. At some point however, you have to stop relying on Godwin’s Law to avoid naming the beast when the Trump administration continues to actively borrow policies and methods of operation from the actual Third Reich; particularly when those policies ended in the literal fucking Holocaust last time.
To understand what I’m talking about, let’s take a look at what Trump’s Gestapo (ICE) Director had to say at a recent “border security” conference about his hopes to logistically optimize the process of snatching up migrants for deportation in the streets of America:
Trump’s ICE Chief Craves Deportation Process Like Amazon Prime, ‘But With Human Beings’
“While speaking a 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons outlined a chilling vision for how deportations in the United States ought to be carried out: with the swift efficiency of Amazon Prime.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” said Lyons, explaining that he wants to see a deportation process that is “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” His comments citing the e-commerce giant’s subscription servicewere first reported by the Arizona Mirror.
“This is a chilling example of drawing inspiration from Nazi Germany to deploy logistics for mass deportation and ethnic cleansing,” wrote journalist Luis Feliz Leon in response to Lyons’ statement.”
Please note that the acting ICE Director isn’t really employing a metaphor here, he’s speaking quite literally. Although this article doesn’t mention it, other sources online have revealed that part of what Lyons is talking about in the above quotes is a plan to “implement a system of trucks that rounds up immigrants for deportation in a system similar to how Amazon delivers packages around the US.”
First of all, this is nightmare dystopian fascist shit that absolutely mirrors the process of rounding up Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Additionally Lyons is directly implying that the US government intends to deport so many people going forward, that it would make sense logistically to requisition a fleet of trucks for that ongoing purpose. Finally, don’t sleep on the fact that Lyons is talking about running ICE like a business and modeling its operations on Amazon, because for the people who own or invest in a private prison sector getting filthy stinking rich on anti-migrant policies and ICE detention contracts, this absolutely is a business; it might be costing the American taxpayer public money, but it’s making a whole lot of nazis huge bank.
Ultimately however, I think the most important part of the story is what Common Dreams alluded to in its short article above; the employment of the government’s extensive logistical abilities to streamline and optimize the mass deportation process and speed up the establishment of a white nationalist ethnostate, is more or less how the Nazis ultimately facilitated the Holocaust using the punch card computing system IBM helped them build for that purpose. Speaking frankly, what separates the Nazis and the Holocaust from other eliminationist campaigns by fascist governments in human history is the creation of an optimized system to apprehend, detain, and eventually exterminate whole classes of people; this was systemic fascist murder, and it ended in the deaths of millions, most notably but not exclusively over six million Jewish people from all over Europe.
If you look at the overarching theme of the Trump regime’s employment of AI technology, mass surveillance, and the integration of data from all government sources into ICE databases, it becomes very clear that we’re looking at systemic, logistically organized fascist repression that sure looks an awful lot like the Nazis under Hitler. You might say to me that I can’t prove the administration is working itself towards an eliminationist program targeting migrants, but I’d respond by reminding you that mass deportations have historically been part of the process of genocide, bullets in the head are cheaper than airplane flights, and the very same systemic fascism this regime is now admitting is necessary for its deportation regime to function, can just as easily be purposed for mass executions when the time comes.
Spite and Supremacy: the IRS and ICE cut a deal
How badly does Trump and the movement that put him in office despise migrants? Badly enough to upend three decades of IRS tax collection practices and cost the government millions of dollars in revenue, apparently. In what must be understood as a tightening of the digital panopticon the fascist Trump regime is deploying to target migrants, the administration has negotiated an agreement between ICE and the IRS to share tax data with the American Gestapo for the purpose of facilitating mass deportations; without the consent of the IRS’s acting commissioner – who has since resigned in protest:
IRS agrees to share tax information of undocumented immigrants with Ice
“A memorandum of understanding between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the IRS was filed late on Monday in a case brought by immigrants’ rights groups Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, represented by Public Citizen and other lawyers. The memo says Ice can request information from the IRS for its investigations into undocumented immigrants who have not left the country after receiving a final order of removal from a judge. It is signed by the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday evening that the acting IRS commissioner, Melanie Krause, is planning to resign, in part over being bypassed in the decision.
The lawsuit over the plans to share IRS information, filed in March, says Internal Revenue Code makes clear that tax records for all taxpayers must be confidential, disclosed only in ways authorized by statute.
“Taxpayer privacy is a cornerstone of the US tax system,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “This movement by the IRS is an unprecedented breach of taxpayer privacy laws – confidentiality which has been respected by both political parties for decades.”
Although every expansion of the regime’s ability to hunt down and target migrants is an important stepping stone to a white nationalist dictatorship, this policy is particularly cruel and shortsighted. For starters, it deprives the US government of tax revenue because an overwhelming number of undocumented people do in fact pay their taxes. More importantly however the US government and the IRS have encouraged migrants to do so for decades, under the promise that this information won’t be used to target and deport them. In one single agreement signed by two members of the Trumpenreich, the US government has simultaneously harmed the American people and forced more migrants further underground, while breaking our collective promise to undocumented people who otherwise would have stayed below the radar:
“The Trump administration has been working to get the IRS and Ice to agree on some information sharing for weeks, a way to use tax filings to aid in his mass deportations. The Washington Post reported on a draft of the agreement in March, citing current and former IRS workers who said the move would be an unprecedented change in access to tax records and upend immigrants’ willingness to file taxes.
“It is a complete betrayal of 30 years of the government telling immigrants to file their taxes,” one former IRS official told the Washington Post.”
Of course the obvious reality here is that all of this fascist surveillance targeting migrants, undocumented or otherwise, is clearly going to affect people who’re in the US administrative system and following the rules, the most. Far from the regime’s stated claims that their horrifying deportation regime is about getting violent criminals out of the country and keeping Americans safe, the administration is simply making it easier for ICE to meet its deportation quotas by snatching up precisely the kind of immigrants most people who voted for this monstrous bullshit say aren’t the problem. For a Christian Nationalist government full of literal nazis, brown skinned people in America are the problem however; which is why they don’t really care who ends up in ICE detention centers because of Trump’s fascist policies.
Trump Regime Admits to Ideological Policing in Khalil Case
As if they’re trying to prove my point that the Trump regime is engaging in the fascist policing of “ideas” and the targeted repression of those who articulate them, the US government has admitted in court that it has no legal basis to detain and try to deport Columbia University graduate and activist leader Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States, besides his ideas and political positions. The government, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is straight up arguing that Kahlil’s opposition to Israel’s US-backed genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, which it baselessly describes as “antisemitism,” represents a threat to US foreign policy objectives; which in turn they say allows the regime to enact a rarely used provision in the Immigration Nationality Act to justify the fascist targeting of the former student protest spokesman.
In other words: the regime is admitting that Mahmoud Kahlil hasn’t committed a crime, but is being deported for purely ideological reasons under the guise of protecting American national security; which is more or less exactly what the administration has been saying out loud at every opportunity, at least until the precise moment when someone points out that this is fascism, at which point they briefly deny it.
The Case Against Mahmoud Khalil Hinges on Vague “Antisemitism” Claim
“Khalil’s attorneys said it’s clear the government’s case is about cracking down on his speech in support of Palestine and represents a precedent amid the Trump administration’s nationwide attacks on universities and students. The Trump administration has revoked hundreds of students since Khalil’s arrest. Many were not involved in protests at all, while some were being targeted for low-level misdemeanors.
“And where would this lead?” Van Der Hout said. “Are we going to now throw people in jail for speaking out against the Social Security cuts in this country? This is a dangerous slope, and we are taking a stand on behalf of Mahmoud, and he is taking a stand.”
“He’s decided to stay in jail and fight this case to the bitter end,” he added, “while we try to establish that people like Mahmoud have a constitutional right to speak out in this country.”
If there’s an upshot here it’s that all of this is patently illegal, and even the Immigration Nationality Act little Marco is using to justify this fascist bullshit contains a provision “that prevents the secretary of state from using the “foreign policy” provision to deport someone based on an individual’s speech unless it has compelling grounds to do so.” The fact that the government has refused to produce evidence that would justify deporting Kahlil probably increases his chances of being released, and soon.
The bad news of course is that the Trump regime has already ignored multiple court orders forbidding its fascist activities, and the government is openly asserting the right to target, detain, and deport, again, a legal permanent resident of the United States, who is married to an American citizen, for purely ideological reasons. That assertion may not survive a judge’s ruling in this particular case, but with a 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court in its pocket it feels like it’s only a matter of time before the regime wins one of these arguments before a more sympathetic judge – and then there is no predicting how far the new American Nazi movement will go to crush dissent and ideological opposition to its authoritarian rule.
Papers Please: Our New Apartheid Reality
Thanks to a Trump-appointed judge once again playing legal Simon Says, the Trumpenreich has taken yet another step towards a type of apartheid system and the mass deportation of migrants who overwhelmingly represent no threat to America. Ruling that the rights groups opposing the move have no standing to challenge it, Judge Trevor Neil McFadden has allowed the Trump regime to move forward with a requirement that all noncitizens register with a government hell bent on enacting mass deportations, and carry documentary proof of registration or suffer criminal consequences.
Judge allows requirement that everyone in the US illegally must register to move forward
“While questions remain about how the registration requirement will function, its impact is potentially far-reaching. The Trump administration — which has worked to make good on campaign promises of mass deportations — has said between 2.2 million and 3.2 million people could be affected.
One of the groups that sued, the National Immigration Law Center, called the Thursday ruling “disappointing” in a statement.
“This disappointing ruling unfortunately means that, for now, Trump’s scheme to force people into an impossible choice moves forward. As we weigh next steps in our case, we urge affected community members to consult with an immigration attorney to better understand the consequences of registering or not,” said Nicholas Espíritu, deputy legal director at National Immigration Law Center.
Homeland Security officials announced Feb. 25 that it was mandating that all people in the United States illegally register with the federal government, and said those who didn’t self-report could face fines or prosecution. Failure to register is considered a crime, and people will be required to carry registration documents with them or risk prison time and fines.
Registration will be mandatory for everyone 14 and older without legal status. People registering have to provide their fingerprints and address, and parents and guardians of anyone under age 14 must ensure they registered.”
This one is a little complicated because the Trump administration has argued that this requirement has existed for decades but just wasn’t being enforced. As the article notes, there’s some truth to that line of (motivated) reasoning, but the reality is that these rules haven’t been enforced since almost immediately after they were introduced in the 1940’s because by and large, migrants are not a criminal threat to the United States. Furthermore the requirement to provide fingerprints and carry documentation of registration or face criminal penalties is as far as I know, a new and disturbing wrinkle the regime has thrown in to make their arguments that they’re only deporting “criminals” a de facto reality in retrospect. As any student of history can tell you, if law enforcement can demand “papers, please” and then lock you up for not producing them, what you’re talking about is the criminalization of human beings in something akin to an apartheid system, and a racialized legal pretext to arbitrarily detain anyone who “looks like” (this is crucial) they might be a foreign national; since after all, the authorities won’t know if you have “papers” until they ask, and not having papers will be treated as a crime until such a time as you can prove that you (even US citizens of the wrong complexion) aren’t legally obligated to carry them.
Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum, and the reality is that no matter what the rules say, this is an openly white nationalist government that has falsely argued migrants don’t have any Constitutionally protected rights, and have already begun the process of revoking legal status for hundreds if not thousands of people lawfully residing in the United States; while brazenly deploying deportation to engage in fascist ideological policing to target its perceived enemies. This is a regime that hates migrants, does not care if they “follow the rules,” is willing to play legal Calvinball to deport literally anyone who isn’t white and a natural born citizen, and has overwhelmingly targeted immigrants following the legal process to remain in the US as a sort of “low hanging fruit” to easily generate big numbers of deportations and brag about to Trump’s deeply racist base of support. They are going to use this registration system to locate and detain migrants for mass deportation, and they know full well you’d have to be some kind of crazy to willingly turn over your location and identity to a nativist regime dead set on bleaching the American population demographics through the force of law. What the administration is doing here is purposely criminalizing migrants to justify more and more repressive crackdowns on folks it has now effectively made truly “illegal.”
The GOP is Purposely Installing Fascism Too
Forgive my bluntness, but at some point “Very Serious People TM” in the media and the political class are going to have to accept reality; the fascist GOP is actively and knowingly working to make Trump a literal dictator and they’re prepared to deploy any crass deception, rhetorical argument, and instrument of state power to do so. On Wednesday, the GOP-controlled House passed a bill that would make it functionally impossible for a single lawsuit to stop even the Trump regime’s most blatantly unconstitutional activities, by drastically curtailing the judiciary’s power to issue nationwide restraining orders; under the nonsensical argument that ruling against Trump’s orders is part of some vast left wing conspiracy to stymie the President’s lawful right to um, make America conform to his unhinged authoritarian nonsense, apparently.
House Passes Bill Limiting Judges’ Ability to Place Injunctions on Trump Orders
“Trump has had the most nationwide injunctions placed against him due to his presidential decrees oftentimes flatly violating the law or U.S. Constitution — for example, three federal judges this year alone have placed injunctions on his ability to enforce an executive order to redefine the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.
While blatantly improper orders like those have been blocked, Trump loyalists have errantly claimed that so-called “activist judges” on the left have chosen to stymie the president’s agenda for political reasons — ignoring the fact that right-wing judges (including some Trump himself picked) have also issued injunctions against the president.
Republican Rep. Darrell Issa (California) authored a bill entitled the “No Rogue Rulings Act,” which would restrict judges’ rulings to only apply to the litigants directly included in the lawsuit — under the bill’s terms, only a plaintiff could receive relief from a judgment against a presidential administration, even if the underlying reason for that judgment is that the law or order at issue is unconstitutional and shouldn’t be enforced on anyone.”
Okay, let’s start with the good news: although the bill passed on a party lines vote in the House, it still has to make its way through the Senate and unless Chuck Schumer has another brain tumor for breakfast, that seems highly unlikely to happen. Given the level of collaboration Democrat Senators have already engaged in while (not really) opposing the Trump regime, I can’t guarantee anything, but here’s to hoping the opposition party realizes what a monumentally bad idea it would be to upend “hundreds of years of judicial case law and precedent” and allow Trump to essentially force everyone victimized by even his most unconstitutional orders, to seek remedy separately in the courts. If you want to understand just how bad this would be for our civil rights, consider the three current injunctions preventing Downmarket Mussolini from ending birthright citizenship and how folks whose only “crime” is being born in the US to parents who aren’t citizens, would have to seek legal remedy under these new rules; not only are all of them unlikely to be able to bring a suit in federal court, but just processing all of those cases would take decades, and in the meantime Trump would be free to treat those victimized by his executive order as if his word was law.
Even if the bill doesn’t pass the Senate however, I think it’s pretty instructional to look at the overarching theme of the fascist GOP’s arguments for running it through the House. To justify the bill, House Republicans have constructed a vast conspiracy theory whereby even conservative judges who disagree with Trump are working with an undefined “radical left” to undermine the country; this is “if you’re not with us, you’re against” us logic and as author Jason Stanley noted in his excellent book How Fascism Works, fascism functions by transforming everything into the politics of “us versus them.” And what pray tell is their evidence for this conspiracy theory? The fact that Trump, who is actively trying to transform the United States into an autocratic fascist dictatorship, has seen his orders subject to a record number of injunctions and court orders preventing him from, um, breaking the law and violating the constitution? As at least one House Democrat noted, it probably makes sense that Trump’s agenda has been targeted by the most nationwide court orders because Trump has tried to violate the constitution more than probably any other president in American history.
“If it seems like an incredible number of cases to lose in less than 100 days, recall that Trump is engaged in a record number of illegal actions at a breathtaking velocity never seen before in U.S. history,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said.”
My friends, we all know what we’re looking at. This is fascism, and the fascist GOP party is willingly installing a fascist dictator; there’s nothing accidental or “misguided” about it.
When The Regime Says You’re Already Dead
So, how ominous of a sign is it when the white nationalist government that’s openly violating the US Constitution to facilitate fascist mass deportations, decides to declare thousands of immigrants legally dead for all intents and purposes? This week Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, also known as “Cracker Fascist Barbie,” joined acting Social Security commissioner and gammon-y human thumb, Leland Dudek, and together they “terminated” the “financial lives” of 6,000 immigrants the regime claims are “convicted criminals and ‘suspected terrorists,'” by moving their Social Security numbers into the agency’s death master file.
‘Outrageous Abuse of Power’: Trump Weaponizes Social Security for Deportation Spree
“The Trump administration this week reportedly classified thousands of immigrants living in the United States as dead in a Social Security database in an effort to force them out of the country, a scheme that was met with furious uproar from advocates and lawmakers.
By entering the names and Social Security numbers of roughly 6,000 immigrants into Social Security’s “death master file,” the administration has revoked their ability to legally work in the U.S. and receive benefits in a bid to get them to “self-deport,” several news outlets reported Thursday.
“This is an outrageous abuse of power,” Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, said in a statement. “It will not only create extreme hardship, but kill people. Imagine, in one Trump administration keystroke, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more.”
“If they get away with this, it would be no surprise if they then move on to marking their perceived enemies as dead—citizens and non-citizens alike,” Altman added. “This is a total misuse of the dedicated revenue that workers contribute to Social Security, with every paycheck. Though Trump claimed he wouldn’t cut benefits, he essentially is by diverting dedicated monies from their intended purpose of paying Social Security benefits to the immoral purpose of maliciously ruining lives.”
First off let me start by noting that some, if not the majority of folks targeted by the Trump regime for financial termination are people with valid social security numbers, and while undocumented immigrants can pay into Social Security, they can’t collect even when they reach retirement age anyway; so this has nothing to do with migrants stealing benefits, or preventing fraud. Additionally it should be pointed out that while we’re being assured that those targeted are all “convicted criminals and “suspected terrorists,” our source for that is the very same administration trying to deport student visa holders for traffic tickets and telling you anti-Tesla protestors are “domestic terrorists,” so who the fuck knows what that assertion even means anyway; it appears that at least some of the targets are simply people “who were allowed to enter and remain temporarily in the United States under programs instituted by the US president’s predecessor Joe Biden” according to The Guardian.
Finally, it should be understood that this is about a lot more than collecting Social Security benefits in your late 60’s; in modern American society you typically need a Social Security number to open a bank account, get a credit card, rent an apartment, obtain health insurance, access car loans, and so forth, so when Dudek says they’re trying to “exterminate” the “financial lives” of targeted immigrants, he’s only partially employing a metaphor here; the opponents of the plan calling this “digital murder” are absolutely right to do so. This is definitely going to destroy lives and get people killed, and as the article notes the regime is reserving the right to expand the list of targets to “others in the country without authorization,” which sounds rather ominous when we’re talking about a government that’s taken to having Marco Rubio instantly revoke visas and legal status for student protestors before ICE kidnaps them.
All of which means that even if the regime’s actions are taken in the best possible light, this is fascist bullshit designed to push a nativist, white nationalist agenda while harming human beings the administration deems illegal primarily for their skin tone and place of birth. As both a target of the regime’s ongoing anti-trans pogrom, and a student of history however, I can’t help but notice an ominous déjà vu quality in all of this. Historically speaking, mass deportations have always lead to mass graves, and when a fascist regime declares you and folks like you legally dead, it’s usually because they mean to eventually make that a literal reality.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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