The Skinny: Hot Gestapo Summer
Hot Gestapo Summer: July 11th – July 20th
Threats, Confessions, and the Ethnic Cleansing Czar
As the popularity of ethnonationalist neighborhood Gestapo raids plummets in our society, Trump regime-aligned fascists have increasingly retreated to legalese and misrepresentation to justify the ethnic cleansing project they’re conducting on American streets. Although some of the cruder minds pushing propaganda for Trump’s mass deportations continue to parrot the fantasy that the Gestapo is rounding up “violent criminals,” more sophisticated nazi intellectuals have primarily shifted to arguing that the regime is acting within the boundaries of US immigration and civil rights law; which in turn means that critics accusing them of racist authoritarianism are at best ignorant, and at worst open enemies of the state. This is, to put it bluntly, absolute horse crap. Everything about the regime’s mass deportation program is clearly white supremacist in nature, dependent on widespread racial profiling, and therefore patently fucking illegal. Whether or not anyone is interested in, or even capable of, holding the Trump administration to account for this lawlessness is irrelevant here; the law itself is quite clear on the fact that you cannot just round people up for being fucking brown.
Naturally, this has not stopped fascists both inside and outside of the executive branch from simply lying to the US public about who they’re targeting and how the mass deportation program works. Once in a while however, one of the dumber nazis in Trump’s coterie of thugs, ghouls, and sociopaths will get too excited and simply blurt the damning truth out loud. Enter the scene-stealing star of the recent Mad Max reboot movies, Tom Homan. Speaking a little too freely in the familiar confines of the Fox News studio, Trump’s “Border Czar” pretty much straight up admitted ICE Gestapo thugs were targeting random brown people for interrogation because of their “physical appearance,” while arguing that ICE pigs literally do not need “probable cause” to detain someone.
Critics Blast Trump Border Czar for Asserting ICE Can Detain People Based on ‘Physical Appearance’
“After being asked about the possibility of a judge in California limiting the scope of ICE’s law-enforcement activities, Homan declared that “people need to understand ICE officers and Border Patrol don’t need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them.”
He then outlined factors ICE agents could use that would justify detaining someone.
“They just need the totality of the circumstances,” he claimed. “They just got through our observation, you know, get articulable facts based on their location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions.”
Homan’s statement about not requiring probable cause to detain people contradicts a statement made in court this week by Thomas Giles, the assistant director of ICE who testified that the standard for making arrests “is we need to determine probable cause and determine alienage.”
Okay so I want to start with the legal part here because it’s easier to get out of the way. What you’re looking at in the quote above is yet another example of the Trump regime’s tried and true pattern of telling the court one thing, while clearly doing something entirely different, and quite illegal. Naturally, because America is an extremely racist place and our immigration laws are a spider web of white nationalist exceptions to the rule, there is a tiny bit of grey area for Homan and the Gestapo to take advantage of here in terms of why they can stop suspected migrants, but that grey area is very clearly surpassed by Homan’s statement that essentially “we don’t need no stinking probable cause if you’re Hispanic-looking.” Of course you could argue that The People Eater is merely throwing red meat to the base, but I think anyone who has watched the livestreamed Gestapo raids occurring across the country since May knows that ICE goons are listening to nazis like Homan, not lawyers like Giles. In other words, the government is openly violating civil rights law and getting away with it for reasons that remain unclear- although it should be noted a federal judge just ruled as much very recently, and has attempted to halt the Gestapo raids; the government has of course, appealed that order.
On the larger question of what kind of policy Trump’s mass deportations actually are, and what purpose they serve however, there really can no longer be any debate. Live on Fox News, Homan happily admitted what was already obvious to everyone but sophists and bootlickers: the Trump regime is engaging in a white supremacist project, targeting brown people, as part of a larger ethnic cleansing operation to re-whiten America. There really is no other conclusion to draw when the regime is willing to openly admit the Gestapo is actively choosing its targets based on location, occupation, and physical appearance. Shouting “we’re not doing ethnonationalism” while describing your goons doing ethnonationalism isn’t going to cut it anymore.
Fascist Propaganda, Secret Police, and the Antifa Scare
Given the amount of time we’ve spent discussing the way the fascist Trumpenreich transforms incoherent propaganda musings into coherent (and invariably harmful) fascist action, folks analyzing the regime are forced to invest time and energy studying even the most unhinged fascist conspiracy nonsense that comes out of the Trump administration. In that vein, I’d like to take a moment to talk about a regional news story from the Pacific Northwest about public resistance to the Gestapo, because I think Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s response to it is at once very typical of the regime’s nazi propaganda style, and also crude enough to perhaps expose the direction the fascist shitshow that is the second Trump administration is heading.
After semi-anonymous groups of heroic citizens worked to publicly identify masked ICE Gestapo agents openly violating the civil rights of Oregonians, noted puppy-murderer Noem publicly promised swift prosecution of “anarchist and Antifa-affiliated groups” who acquire or share “personal information” of federal law enforcement officials. That’s a problem; not only because its entirely unclear any laws have actually been broken, and Gestapo thugs are operating like a secret police force, but also because it hints that Trump may be looking to revive “Antifa terrorism” and “anarchist cities” as the next crisis he’ll use to keep transforming America into a fascist dictatorship.
ICE officers doxxed by antifa, anarchists in Portland, Noem says
“Noem, in a statement and photos, identified Rose City Antifa, “Rose City Counter-Info,” and “The Crustian Daily,” as groups that have published names, photos and personal addresses of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on their websites or put up fliers in the officers’ neighborhoods. In one case, trash was dumped on the front lawn of an officer’s property, but the location was not disclosed.
“We will prosecute those who dox ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law. These criminals are taking the side of vicious cartels and human traffickers,” Noem said in the statement. “We won’t allow it in America.”
Before we get into what I think Noem’s belligerence has exposed about how the Trump regime intends to market the transformation of the United States into a white ethnostate executive branch dictatorship with theocratic characteristics, I just want to clear up an point of order here. ICE agents are public law enforcement officials, who are issued numbered badges, and work for a tax-payer funded department of the US government; it is categorically impossible to dox someone who shouldn’t be allowed to run through American cities wearing neck gaiters pulled up over their faces like a CIA-trained Latin American death squad. So, right off the bat we’ve got the DHS Secretary arguing that people who haven’t broken a law are guilty, because they exposed Gestapo pigs who actually are breaking the law, by openly violating the civil and constitutional rights of both migrants and American citizens alike.
Additionally, I encourage readers not to sleep on Gestapo Barbie’s attempts to revive the “Antifa and anarchist scare” that characterized the first Trump administration’s justification for using federal agents to conduct blatantly illegal operations in cities they consider politically hostile either. Trump and the pigs loyal to him have spent a very long time trying to get you to associate “Portland” with “lawless anarchist violence” and “Antifa terrorism” and I don’t think it’s any sort of accident that Noem is invoking that trope again now. All fascist regimes need boogeymen to wave in front of the public and thereby justify the elimination of civil liberties. And the Trumpenreich knows that when the going gets tough, it’s time to play your greatest hits.
What I think is most revealing about Noem’s line of argument here however is that the DHS Secretary couldn’t resist tying all of this back to the Trump regime’s threats against “sanctuary cities” – which as the article notes, has also been a key talking point being put forward by Trump’s Border Czar, Tom Homan recently. This context, which Gestapo Barbie wasn’t required to provide, paints a giant target on Portland, the primary target of these propaganda attacks during the first Trump administration, for the type of militarized invasion and occupation we’ve been watching for weeks in Los Angeles.
Now, you gentle reader might think it would be ridiculous to pretend an American city had been taken over by “Antifa terrorists” in league with Democrat officials, and therefore needed to be brought to heel by militarized federal forces, and nobody could blame you for that. The problem is, the first Trump administration made precisely that argument already, repeatedly back in 2020, and then started using Federal Marshals to black bag protestors and suspected antifascists right off the streets of Portland. One of the few things that stopped Downmarket Mussolini from using this propaganda to justify a full invasion of multiple Democrat-controlled cities back then was a lack buy-in from the Pentagon and military commanders. Ominously, I think the ongoing invasion and occupation of LA demonstrates that won’t be a problem this time; not with Pete Hegseth running the Department of Defense and a 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court.
The Swine Emperor’s Soft Power Play in Brazil
I must confess that every time I hear a “Very Serious Person TM” holding court on the subject of Trump’s drastic departure from the past hundred years of American foreign policy, I kinda feel like I’ve been drugged, kidnapped, and taken to Bizarro World. We’re talking about a guy who set a new record for drone strikes during his first presidency, has brazenly assassinated an Iranian general, and in the first six months of his second presidency alone has already bombed both Iran and Yemen. Furthermore, the situation doesn’t improve for the myth of “Donald the Dove” if you look at the exercise of soft power, because Downmarket Mussolini is far more brazen about flexing US military and financial influence to control the actions of foreign governments; enemy and ally alike. If by “different” foreign policy wonks writing in the media meant “we haven’t threatened to annex Canada since the 1800’s” it would be one thing, but the objectively false implication is that Trump is somehow less an imperialist than his recent predecessors in the White House.
I mention this because hidden in the wash of the administration’s announced re-launch of Der Leader’s soft power global tariff regime, was a curious ultimatum issued by Trump to the Lula government in Brazil; threatening crippling fifty percent tariffs against the Latin American country (an official US Major Non-NATO Ally) unless Brazil’s president overruled his own country’s judiciary to meet Downmarket Mussolini’s outrageous demands. While the mainstream media reporting on this has focused on the ideological aspect of Trump’s bullying attempt, the reality is the nature of those demands speaks to three larger and all too familiar projects the regime is consistently conducting through its foreign policy: the creation of a fascist international of Trump-aligned politicians and governments abroad, the revival of US multi-administration efforts to control or remove da Silva’s Brazilian Worker’s Party from power, and strangling the emerging BRICS economic alliance, or at least eliminating it as a viable alternative to US economic hegemony.
The Deeper Reason That Trump Is Raging Against Brazil Right Now
“Right now, that nation is Brazil. Trump on Wednesday posted a letter on Truth Social addressed to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, threatening to slap 50 percent tariffs the country starting August 1 unless it ends the “witch hunt” against former President Jair Bolsonaro and reverses a Supreme Court ruling that U.S. social media companies can be held financially liable if users’ posts violate the country’s speech laws.”
I’ve mentioned that most US foreign policy reporting is terribly dishonest, and to a degree this piece isn’t all that different. The author focuses on the anti-BRICS angle, and offers lip service to the “Bolsonaro is a fellow-traveler” angle, without expanding on what that means and why the Trump regime cares. Furthermore, a more honest article would have mentioned the infamous and utterly bogus “Car Wash” corruption scandal the US goverment (across two admins) helped create in Brazil, to fuel a actual judicial coup against the Worker’s Party and facilitated the jailing of Lula himself on laughable “corruption” changes that have since been tossed in court. It was of course this very same soft coup that ultimately enabled pro-Trump fascist Jair Bolsonaro to take power in the first place.
Trump’s latest ultimatum then can be seen in part as a continued attempt by the American government to control Brazilian politics while shifting the country’s policies even further to the right to facilitate American corporate colonial extraction, and in part as a way to make further Trump regime interventions to ensure the installation of fascist, pro-Trump political allies in Brazil possible – a maneuver which tracks closely with the regime’s efforts to bolster other fascist parties in the so-called West: in countries like France, Germany, and throughout Latin America.
With all that noted, I do still think there is some merit to the openly Sinophobic, new Cold War and economic hegemony angles the author presents in this piece. Arguments that are only bolstered by the fact that some members of Trump’s political party are openly stating as much on the record.
“Republican Senator Eric Schmitt told Politico that “BRICS is a problem and I’m glad that [Trump’s] addressing it squarely. This is an effort by other countries to undermine the United States of America and, quite frankly, our allies.” It’s an odd statement, given that a number of BRICS members are themselves U.S. allies, notably India and Saudi Arabia. But Schmitt went even further. In a direct echo of yesteryear’s cold warriors, he added, “Countries are going to need to start to choose: Are they going to align themselves with a malign communist regime that has concentration camps or the United States?”
They don’t pay me the big bucks to pontificate on American foreign policy, but nothing about Schmitt’s statements above seem very ambiguous to me; the Senator clearly sees Trump’s soft power attacks on Brazil as attacks on both the BRICS economic alliance, and China in specific. Taken altogether then, this story further exposes a Trumpenreich imperial doctrine in which anti-China neo-McCarthyism, economic intimidation, and Trump’s personal grievances or ambitions blend into longstanding US foreign policy objectives to form a repugnant, destabilizing course of action. This is, to put it bluntly, fascist ideological extortion; and even nazi propagandists like Steve Bannon can’t be arsed to deny it.
“The answer is obvious to Steve Bannon, MAGA’s leading anti-globalist, who said Brazil can easily solve its problem: “If you drop the trial and drop the charges, the tariffs go away.” When asked how this policy approach—which treats tariffs like sanctions—differed from extortion, he remarked that “it’s MAGA, baby … It’s a brave new world.” Effectively, Trump and his minions are demanding that the judicial system of Latin America’s largest nation, the fourth-biggest democracy in the world, do his bidding or suffer the consequences—specifically, a potential economic calamity that would impoverish millions of Brazilians. Furthermore, in addressing his letter to Lula, Trump is implying that the chief executive must be the one to break Brazil’s institutional order, even though the letter’s main complaints pertained to decisions by the judiciary.”
Look folks, I don’t want to sound like a doom-speaker, but if this is how Trump intends to conduct foreign policy for the next three and a half years, I think things are going to get pretty bumpy in and for the Pig Empire. Analysis isn’t prophecy but a rational woman might look at all of this and say that Trump and the Pork Reich don’t seem satisfied with a US dictatorship – as far as I can tell, these nazis are after the world.
Criticism and Reprisal in the Corporate Trumpenreich
While it’s been a hot minute since we checked in on the corporate media wing of the Vichy American establishment, the truth is that vast swathes of the American private sector continue to openly collaborate with an objectively fascist Trump regime, actively transforming America into an executive branch dictatorship with theocratic characteristic. While this is happening all across the American corporate sector, some of the most grave bootlicking and morally unconsciousnable acts of surrender have been undertaken by the American media and entertainment complex. As such, I’m guessing you will not be surprised to learn that bootlicking media and entertainment corporate “leaders” are once again kissing Downmarket Mussolini’s ass by silencing dissent on behalf of a fascist would-be dictator.
Take for example the recent skullduggery surrounding Paramount, an eight billion dollar corporate merger, and the popular if not necessarily profitable Late Show on CBS. As you may have heard, Paramount is trying to pull off an eight and a half billion dollar merger with Skydance Media; a merger that Trump and his corrupt ass FCC can block without too much effort. Although they’d deny it, this caused Paramount to settle an entirely baseless sixteen million dollar lawsuit against CBS news (which Paramount owns) brought by Trump himself for “deceptively editing” an interview with Kamala Harris during last year’s presidential election. This craven bullshit stunk to high heaven even at the time; enough so that one of CBS’s own employees, Late Night host Stephen Colbert was comfortable calling the settlement “a big fat bribe” on his show.
Well let me tell you gentle reader, the universe works in mysterious ways. A mere three days later in what CBS assures us is completely unrelated news, they announced that the network is cancelling the Late Show entirely at the end of the year, despite the fact that the show still gets great ratings and is “often the highest-rated show in late-night.”
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to end in 2026 as CBS cancels show
“CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, is attempting to close the merger with Skydance after the deal fell apart last year. Paramount’s owners have been pushing the Trump administration to approve the sale of CBS to Skydance.
Colbert, speaking about the lawsuit settlement with Trump, said on Tuesday’s episode “Paramount knows they could have fought it”, because the company itself had called the lawsuit “completely without merit.”
Starting with the lawsuit itself, I think its important to understand that Colbert is entirely right. In the grand history of baseless lawsuits against the media, Trump’s litigation against CBS for editing an interview for run time and clarity might be one of the all time howlers. News programs edit filmed interviews all the fucking time, including and perhaps especially interviews with Downmarket Mussolini. At the end of the day the Swine Emperor’s legal argument basically comes down to saying “this media organization dislikes me so they made my opponent look smarter and more articulate than she is.” Which is not only absurd and not actually a thing you can claim injury for in court, but also actively describes how the mainstream media has reported on the stream of consciousness, word-salad vomit that comes out of Trump’s mouth daily.
So Paramount rolled over even though they would have won on the merits in court; meaning they more or less just gave Trump sixteen million dollars and a key political win (after all, he can now say “if I’m lying that the media is out to get me, why do they all keep settling with me?”) to just bribe him, and thereby get the FCC to approve their merger. Colbert is right, it’s an obvious bribe, and whether or not Trump directly had a hand in the network’s decision not to renew his contract, criticism of the President and his corrupt enablers in the US establishment is now resulting in a reprisal by a media company already collaborating with a fascist would-be dictator. Furthermore, that’s not really a radical opinion because even milquetoast Democrat politicians are cautiously articulating those same concerns:
“Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat who appeared as a guest on Thursday night’s show, later wrote on social media: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”
Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has called for an investigation into Paramount Global’s relationship with Trump over the Skydance merger, wrote: “CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount … America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.”
I can’t deny that part of me is tempted to look at all of this and laugh my ass off at centrist liberals because now their outspoken favorites are getting the “pro-Palestine, anti-genocide” treatment so many progressive journalists and commentators suffered under the previous administration; which was of course run by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. In trying to be the bigger person here however, I’ll instead point out that the goddamn Late Show and Stephen Colbert are by no means radical leftists, pushing “dangerous” ideas in the public discourse. What Colbert offers is bog standard liberal political criticism repackaged in a mildly humorous way. If corporate media companies are prepared to dump a successful, ratings-generating critic like Stephen Colbert at the drop of a hat over some mild criticism of their collaboration and the fascist regime in general, then it means that nobody is safe from these kind of reprisals in our mainstream discourse. This too is an example of the erosion whatever democratic rights remain in American society, and the imposition of a fascist cultural order that brokers few if any criticisms of power. Most of all, it’s a sign that despite Trump’s recent gaffes, the fascist creep in America continues unabated.
Protecting the Complicit in Mass Deportations
In my opinion, one of the most obvious tells that the Trump regime and all of its minions are fully aware that the slow motion, ethnic cleansing operating they’re currently conducting as part of their “mass deportation” program is both morally unconscionable, and flat out illegal, is the insistence on operational secrecy all throughout the horrifying fascist deportation machine. ICE Gestapo thugs hit the streets in pulled-up neck gaiters, fascist governments work to obscure who is getting paid to build concentration camps, and the DHS refuses as many oversite visits to ICE facilities by political officials as they possibly can; even going so far as to arrest two Democrat politicians in New Jersey who got sick of getting the run around and just went to the migrant cages themselves. If this was, as the Trump regime continues to insist, a totally legitimate, strictly constitutional law enforcement or public safety matter, it wouldn’t be necessary for ICE goons to be running through our streets dressed up like members of a CIA-funded death squad or obscure the names of contractors to “protect against [expected] reprisals.”
To place another piece of evidence on that specific pile then, let’s look at this recent Intercept investigation into a couple of very unusual immigration court hearings involving migrants. Why were they unusual? Because in multiple instances the judges running these “courts” agreed to keep the name of the government’s immigration attorney, aka “the prosecution,” secret.
ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court
“Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers.
“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration’s deportation regime.
As ICE agents across the country wear masks to raid workplaces and detain immigrants, government attorneys need not cover their faces to shield their identities. Legal experts who spoke to The Intercept agreed the practice of concealing the lawyers’ identities was both novel and concerning.”
Alright, let’s start with the obvious: as the article clearly notes, no, this is not normal. In fact its so abnormal that I don’t think anyone knows if it is legal or not because this simply doesn’t happen; the court record traditionally includes the name of ICE’s lawyer in all immigration proceedings. With good reason – without a named attorney, it is impossible to identify, investigate, and hold someone accountable for prosecutorial misconduct, and while the Intercept doesn’t highlight that as the obvious reason Trump’s immigration courts are doing this, I’m more than happy to do so.
If, as I and others have argued, these mass deportations are clear violations of constitutional and human rights, then ICE lawyers working to ram every brown person they can through via legally dubious methods (like say, declaring that a fake invasion by a Venezuelan gang nobody has ever heard of means you can ship people to foreign gulags without due process) would be legally accountable for their role in perpetuating these crimes. If you know what you’re doing is illegal, because you’re a lawyer, “I was just following orders” has a pretty poor track record as an excuse in court. So you can understand why it might behoove immigration judges, who literally work for Trump’s executive branch, not the judiciary, to hide the names of government attorneys doing the legal legwork for a fascist ethnic-cleansing project; a project that probably represents a real as fuck crime against humanity if several international scholars are to be believed. This isn’t about protecting ICE attorneys, it’s about protecting folks complicit in criminal atrocities.
While the Intercept reporting here could have emphasized that point better, I will give them credit for identifying at least one of the ICE lawyers facilitating criminal migrant expulsions, a one Cosette Shachnow – who I sincerely hope becomes as infamous as she clearly deserves to be. Cosette (I hate bougies) aside, I think it’s important to understand this is a real problem for Trump, the Gestapo, and Stephen Miller’s pet project to re-whiten American demographics for generations to come no matter how many brown lives that costs. Although it’s not being reported all that much, DHS and ICE have faced numerous resignations and early retirements in their immigration law divisions because even those ghouls didn’t sign up for fascist mass kidnappings and crimes against humanity. The regime needs lawyers to help slap a legalist veneer on all this ethnonationalist bullshit and they’re working to make it easier to hire replacements for folks who accidentally grow a conscience along the way – even if they have to build a modern day Star Chamber to do it.
Gestapo Kidnappings and Unworthy Victims
One of the immutable truths of any large scale, targeted fascist oppression operation, is that the most horrifying consequences of fascist repression will tend to fall directly on marginalized communities, and within those communities, the outcomes will be the worst for the most marginalize people overall. As such, it shouldn’t come as a surprise for anyone to learn that the Gestapo’s recent mass deportation project is disproportionately destroying the lives of undocumented sex workers as a result of targeted ICE raids featuring near ubiquitous civil rights abuses, and even sexual extortion. Unfortunately, the tragic reason that it may still surprise you to learn this, is that despite widespread coverage of the Gestapo’s fascist abuses targeting other migrants, almost nobody in our society, including migrant activists and civil rights organizations, is speaking out for migrant sex workers targeted as part of the Trump regime’s slow motion ethnic cleansing project.
To learn more let’s explore this excellent essay on Truthout, which is divided up into main themes. Firstly, it raises awareness about targeted ICE raids on massage parlors, and calls advocates out for not standing up for sex workers who’re being disappeared into the Gestapo’s migrant cages at an alarming high rate without anyone really keeping track of it at all. Additionally, the piece also explores the way anti-sex work legislation and surveillance technology, originally adopted under the guise of preventing human “trafficking” has functioned as both a permission gate and a testing ground for the larger anti-migrant panopticon DHS is operating; a panopticon Trump is now trying to turn towards his political enemies more broadly by partnering with companies like Palantir to create dossiers on as many Americans as they possibly can.
Sex Workers Are Being Abducted by ICE — and Abandoned by Respectability Politics
“Since January 2025, police raids on massage parlors have intensified, targeting immigrant women suspected of sex work. Amid nationwide protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), these workers — among ICE’s most systematically targeted — are largely excluded from community defense.”
I don’t want to give short shrift to the primary thrust of authors Kate Zen and Chanelle Gallant’s work here, because at the end of the day it really is both alarming and disheartening to see that we as a society have learned very little over the past six months about how the regime targets those it is somehow socially acceptable to victimize (migrants instead of Americans, brown people instead of white people, trans people instead of cis people, and so forth) for fascist repression and abuse first, and uses that to create a gateway that allows those very same policies to work more broadly against everyone. The fact that nobody is fighting to protect migrant sex workers, calling for the release of kidnapping victims who happened to be captured at massage parlors, or even tracking what’s happening to these (primarily) women isn’t just respectability politics; it’s mutual suicide in the face of fascist ethnic cleansing and a broader eliminationist program. Migrant sex workers are migrants. Migrant sex workers are also workers. Most importantly, migrant sex workers are human beings. That makes the issue of Gestapo kidnappings targeting migrant sex workers a labor issue, a civil rights issue, and a human rights issue all rolled up into one horrifying fascist jelly roll of oppression.
Which of course then brings us to the long term costs of ignoring carceral violence, oppression, and civil rights violations of sex workers in the first place; because right now those consequences are unfolding all around us in the form of a Gestapo police state and a slow-motion ethnic cleansing project in America.
“The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (2015) authorized the creation of the Cyber Crimes Center within ICE, enabling wiretaps and internet surveillance. Between 2014 and 2018, DHS funneled over $3 million to local police for license plate readers to combat trafficking — now used in broader workplace raids.
Authorities justified travel bans, surveillance, racial profiling, raids, detentions, deportations, asset seizures, even sexual assault as anti-trafficking measures to protect women and children. But these measures do more harm than good, exposing migrants to additional forms of violence. Most funding went to prosecutions and public campaigns promoting false statistics and racist stereotypes, not victims’ services — fueling misguided vigilantism and MAGA fearmongering around child trafficking.”
Folks, the authors of this piece are absolutely correct to point out that our decades long obsession with stopping “trafficking” was just an excuse to crack down on sex workers, and the digital panopticon used to do so is now being expanded to target migrants and even Trump’s political opposition. Once you’re willing to sacrifice the human rights of some people, for nothing more than patriarchal morality in this case, you’re inevitably fueling the argument that your rights too, are subject to conditions and exemptions. And well, the fact that we as a society have avoiding engaging with that reality until now, is probably a big part of why we are here.
ICE Hides Trans Migrants in Custody
As we discussed in a the post above about Gestapo raids targeting undocumented sex workers, the consequences of fascist oppression on a targeted group have historically fallen hardest on, and compounded for people in that group who also exist under multiple layers of marginalization in our society. For example, in a white supremacist patriarchal state currently conducting an ethnic-cleansing operation, and an anti-trans pogrom, undocumented trans people are going to be subject to the state-sanctioned oppression and terrorization applied to both migrants, and trans people, as well as compounding forms of oppression unique to the trans migrant experience.
Furthermore, because this marginalization serves to mark out worthy and unworthy victims of various forms of oppression, a situation compounded by the fascist agenda of the Trump regime, this more extreme (and potentially fatal) targeting may occur entirely apart from the more visible and commonplace attacks on the larger targeted group. In short, multiple vectors of marginalization tend to create “forgotten people” its easier to get rid of amid a larger, extremely unpopular fascist political program careening towards eliminationism at speed.
All of which is why I think its extremely alarming that the Gestapo stopped keeping track of the number of transgender migrants they’re locking up back in February; despite a Congressional mandate ordering the Gestapo to report the number of trans and other vulnerable people detained in immigration facilities.
Trans People Have Disappeared From ICE Records, Against Congressional Orders
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement quietly stopped reporting how many transgender people it keeps locked up in February, as the total population of immigrants in detention soared and the agency rescinded protections for trans people.
The move follows Trump’s executive order in January to essentially stop recognizing that trans people exist. According to the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice, it appears to run afoul of a congressional mandate to report how many transgender and other vulnerable people are being kept in immigration detention.”
As this article implies, context is crucial here as this decision to cease tracking trans inmates in the migrant carceral complex, comes at the same time the Trump regime is arguing that trans people don’t exist, working to deny trans medical care nationally, and erasing evidence of trans people from public life and official government websites. Please remember this is a regime that already had to be taken to court multiple times to force them to stop housing trans woman inmates with male prisoners in the regular carceral system, despite clear and unambiguous evidence that doing so exposed trans inmates to discrimination, violence, and sexual assault. It seems likely then that due to the more lax oversight of immigration detention facilities and the operations of ICE in general, they are almost certainly replicating that same pattern of behavior with undocumented trans migrants in the ICE gulag system.
Although the number of trans inmates in ICE jails is not likely to be high, it has certainly risen in much the same way detained migrants overall have risen since the Trumpenreich stepped up its ethnonationalist, ethnic-cleansing operation under the banner of “mass deportations,” but we have no way of knowing, or even being sure trans migrants inside the system are still alive, because the Gestapo is intentionally no longer tracking trans inmates in the system. This should be a problem for a US Congress that ordered them to do so going forward back in 2021, but given the GOP’s control of government, as well as their fundie fascist support for the anti-trans pogrom going on in our society, I wouldn’t hold your breath waiting for them to do something about it.
Of course, just because the fascists want to end trans people in US life, doesn’t mean they aren’t also cracker supremacists trying to deport their way to an ethnostate. The Trumenreich doesn’t want any migrants in America period after all, including refugees. As Bridget Crawford from Immigration Equality notes, the nature of trans marginalization globally often means that undocumented trans migrants have excellent asylum claims once they do arrive in the US.
“The broader context is quite alarming, especially because the vast majority of our clients have very, very strong asylum claims,” Crawford said. “The vast, overwhelming majority have experienced very high levels of abuse, sexual assault, often torture before they come to the United States.”
As I’ve said before, when an openly fascist government says you don’t exist, and takes efforts to erase records that prove you do, it’s usually because they have designs on making that a reality. The triumph of cruelty in America, the entire fascist program, now hinges on getting you to accept that some people aren’t worth protecting. There is no reason whatsoever to assume this government, built around a patriarchal, transphobic cult of personality has innocent reasons for erasing the existence of trans migrants in the immigration tracking system. And if you let them disappear trans migrants now, don’t be surprised when the knock on the door comes for you in due time.
– Nina Illingworth
Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic and analyst.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, and on Mastodon.
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