Nina-Bytes: Jackboots at the Door

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Empowering Trump’s American Gestapo

Honestly my friends, I’m running out of new ways to say that the Trump administration are a rampaging pack of lawless fascists whose maximalist views on presidential authority and emergency powers put them in direct opposition to a US Constitution and American legal tradition that is on the whole, extremely friendly to the exercise of executive power. There appears to be no article of law, no regulation, no rule the Pork Reich won’t violate in their objectively nazi quest to create a white ethnostate; at this point I half expect the Trump regime to try to find a workaround to the rarely-remembered Third Amendment so they can force every American family to quarter an ICE agent in their home.

If you think I’m being hyperbolic, keep in mind that I’m literally just working with the information the Trump regime writes down in its own internal memos. Take for example this April 26th, 2025 article by Brett Wilkins writing for Common Dreams that examines a recently revealed Department of Justice directive arguing that ICE has the legal authority to conduct warrantless home invasions in search of “suspected” Venezuelan gang members, and instructing the Gestapo to do so. If that sounds illegal and unconstitutional to you, that’s because it is! According to Downmarket Mussolini’s Injustice Department however, the Fourth Amendment no longer applies because Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act as a kind of Uno-reverso card to every piece of civil rights legislation in US history.

DOJ Memo Shows Trump Admin Ordered ICE to Conduct Warrantless Home Invasions

“Lee Gelernt, the ACLU’s lead counsel in cases challenging use of the AEA, told USA Today: “The administration’s unprecedented use of a wartime authority during peacetime was bad enough. Now we find out the Justice Department was authorizing officers to ignore the most bedrock principle of the Fourth Amendment by authorizing officers to enter homes without a judicial warrant.”

Monique Sherman, an attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, expressed alarm over the DOJ memo.

“The home under all constitutional law is the most sacred place where you have a right to privacy,” Sherman told USA Today. “By this standard, spurious allegations of gang affiliation means the government can knock down your door.”

As Georgetown University Law Center professor Steve Vladeck said, “There’s no Alien Enemies Act exception to the Fourth Amendment.”

As I’ve indicated elsewhere, I’m not a lawyer; although the article I’m sharing certainly quotes a few of them. As someone who has spent many years studying fascism, authoritarianism, and police states however, I’m pretty sure you don’t issue a Department of Justice order like that unless you intend to use ICE to start going house to house in American communities; and once a fascist government grants itself the power to do that, it really doesn’t matter why they claim they’re doing so anymore. This is quite literally the beginnings of the dystopian police state winger prepper reactionaries are always going on about guarding against, and in anything resembling a functioning democracy US Attorney General Pam Bondi would be arrested immediately for even signing it. As both the article and your middle school civics class will tell you, absolutely none of this is legal no matter what ancient laws Trump tries to invoke and Bondi’s Justice Department is basically telling ICE to ignore the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, “because we say so.”

The question then remains, does the Trump regime even care if the fascist bullshit they’re doing is legal, even under a Calvinball winger interpretation of US law? Signals coming out of the administration on that front are mixed so far; on one hand the regime continues arguing its nonsensical theories in court, but on the other hand they stand in violation of several court orders already. For example, the Trump administration appears to be making no effort whatsoever to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home from a torture prison in El Salvador, despite a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling that they must do so. From out here it sure does look like the Pork Reich wants to give the appearance of respecting the law and court orders, but when push comes to shove they’re prepared to intimidate the judiciary, disregard the US Constitution, and if necessary just ignore the courts.

Of course, just because Pam Bondi’s office issues a directive, doesn’t mean individual immigration officials and agents will follow it. It’s remotely possible that ICE goons fearing future legal consequences might choose to ignore a Department of Justice order that tells them to violate the US Constitution, but I’m not sure I’d like to bet on that outcome; there’s a reason Trump has always used ICE as his personal Gestapo after all. The agency self-selects for nativists who don’t mind authoritarian repression or violence, and Trump’s vast power over immigration matters as President means ICE is largely his to control; at least through a Department of Homeland Security the regime has stacked full of white nationalist authoritarians and other fascist freaks. In other words, I don’t really know what happens if and when the Trump regime orders ICE to go for the full V for Vendetta experience; but it probably isn’t good, and I’m not keen on finding out if Der Leader’s private Gestapo cares about the Constitution at all.

Ultimately I can’t predict the future, but it is increasingly becoming clear to me that the fascist Trump administration knows it cannot accomplish its authoritarian goals without a loyal, empowered, and ideologically aligned force of police state thugs to enact and enforce its agenda. The fact that they’re crawling around the fringes of the America legal system and trying to invoke emergency executive authority to empower ICE to be that army of goons, tells you the regime has plans to use that power if they can get away with it. For what purpose? I don’t know, but authoritarian police state powers to enter American homes to fight a made up war against “narco-terrorist gangs,” have far more potential uses to a fascist regime that’s already kidnapping foreign students for protesting a US-backed genocide, than just mass deportations.

 

 

– Nina Illingworth

 

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.

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