Trump's Gestapo is already here - ICE

A short excerpt from a post by Tristan Snell in the Big Picture (Substack).

Last year, I did a series called Decoding Project 2025 — and one of the most jarring Trumpian proposals was, from my point of view, the planned degradation of the existing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into an immigration Gestapo to detain undocumented immigrants and deport them without any legal due process.

I was wrong.

It turns out ICE is not a Gestapo for undocumented immigrants.

It is a general Gestapo — a secret national police force not just for undocumented immigrants but for any immigrants, even legal ones with documents, even permanent residents (green card holders), and if Trump has his way, soon, even U.S. citizens.

ICE is arresting and detaining people without alleging that they have committed any crimes at all—holding them without any legal process, without an immigration removal proceeding, without a trial, without an evidentiary hearing, without anything—and then shackling and chaining them into military cargo planes and deporting them for indefinite imprisonment without trial in El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT).

Then the administration lies, falsely claiming that it can do nothing to return anyone who has been sent to CECOT.

Then the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, follows along with the lie, claiming that he is powerless to return anyone to the US.

Meanwhile, the ICE officers try to shrug off any responsibility, claiming that they are just doing what the government tells them to do.

Frankenstein’s monster is running amok, terrorizing people and killing them, and yet everyone involved is throwing up their hands, disingenuously, claiming that they have no power to stop the monstrous Gestapo that Trump has created.

Yet every step of the monster’s creation was premeditated—a completely purposeful crime against humanity.

This is not an accident. This is what they meant to do. They had a blueprint and they are following it.

The question now becomes whether anyone is going to do anything to stop Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller, and everyone else involved in these extrajudicial detentions and deportations.

The courts are being defied and flouted, but will they escalate their response to insist that the law be obeyed?