Portside

For all the autocratic abuses that characterize U.S. President Donald Trump’s second tenure, nothing more parallels the historic pattern of dictatorships than the kidnapping of disfavored individuals by armed agents of the state. Then concealing them in detention facilities, including as a prelude for some to be renditioned to horrific prisons in foreign countries. All while trampling on constitutional protections of legal due process, often ignoring court orders to stop it.

"The one power you cannot give the executive is the power to arbitrarily imprison people who oppose the regime,” says Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “Today it may be an El Salvadorian immigrant or a foreign student, but tomorrow it is you or me. The slope to despotism can be slippery and quick.”

“In fascist states, individual rights had no autonomous existence,” writes Robert Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism. “The State of Law vanished, along with the principles of due process” for “guaranteed equitable treatment by the courts and state agencies. A suspect acquitted in a German court of law could be rearrested by agents of the regime at the courthouse door and put in a concentration camp without any further legal procedure.”

Despite repeated legal setbacks demanding an end to these autocratic practices, the Trump administration continues to escalate the assault on the rule of law. Recent incidents illustrate the rising danger.

Federal agents have begun targeting judges and elected officials. In late April, the FBI arrested sitting state court Judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee on charges of obstructing immigration agents for allowing an undocumented immigrant who had properly appeared for a hearing to evade the federal officers who were waiting outside her courtroom.

Judge Dugan was handcuffed behind her back, her ankles later shackled, and publicly paraded outside. FBI director Kash Patel celebrated the arrest by posting a photo on X in a display obviously intended to intimidate other judges, as over 150 former state and federal judges emphasized in a letter. Attorney General Pam Bondi doubled down proclaiming, “nobody is above the law,” apparently omitting her boss, Donald Trump.
 

Then, on May 9, federal agents arrested Newark, New Jersey Mayor Ras Baraka for alleged “trespassing” when he, Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) and LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), arrived to inspect a New Jersey Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facility that Baraka says has operated in violation of city and state certification of occupancy, inspections, and permits laws. A Department of Homeland Security official menaced that arrests are “definitely on the table" for the Congress members, despite their oversight rights at federal facilities, claiming they were “body-slamming” an ICE agent.

Persecution of judges and elected officials and warnings by Trump prosecutors to other critics are designed to silence resistance, as experienced in other dictatorial regimes. In Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, Ruth Ben-Ghiat quotes Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset reflecting on Franco’s murderous regime. “The threat in my mind of an eventual violence, coercion, or sanction that other people are going to exercise against me” bred conformity.

These steps coincide with the seizure of undocumented persons, foreign students, and even U.S. citizens by ICE and other federal agents. They are then hastily transferred to detention facilities in preparation for deportation or rendition abroad, typically without evidence, barring rights of due process, depriving them of contact with family or legal counsel, in open defiance of court orders.

Due process is mandated by the Constitution’s Fifth and 14th Amendments stating no “person,” not just citizens, can be “deprived of life, liberty, or property” without legal protection under law. Separately, the Constitution declares a right of habeas corpus, the ability to go to court to ensure a person is not improperly charged or unjustly imprisoned, as former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann explained on MSNBC.

In its crusade for mass deportations and renditions, the administration is “actively looking” at formal suspension of habeas corpus, says Stephen Miller, Trump’s White House deputy chief of staff and its most fanatical architect of immigration policy. Georgetown University Law Center professor Steve Vladeck notes that "Miller doesn’t deign to mention that the near-universal consensus is that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral suspensions by the president are per se unconstitutional.”

Habeas corpus has been postponed just four times in U.S. history—during the Civil War, in response to the post-Reconstruction KKK terror campaign in the South, amid an insurrection against the U.S. 1905 occupation of the Philippines, and after the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack in Hawaii.

For some of those snatched off the streets, at home, from their car with children in the back, or in a courtroom, the ultimate destination is a foreign hellhole. By early May, Trump had already deported 152,000 people, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

More than 200 were dispatched to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, in flagrant disregard of court rulings. One of them is Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Trump has doggedly rejected a unanimous Supreme Court order he “facilitate” his return despite the administration’s admission he was deported by mistake.

Further, Trump has expelled hundreds of others to countries not their own, including to Costa Rica, Panama, and the Guantánamo Bay prison in occupied Cuba. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made it clear he is scouring for more rendition locations. “We are working with other countries to say… will you do this as a favor to us?... And the further away from America, the better.”

One plan near fruition this month, until blocked by a court order, involved expelling Filipino, Laotian, Vietnamese, and Mexican migrants to detention centers in Libya, which Amnesty International has depicted as a “hellscape.” Most, said Human Rights Watch, are “controlled by abusive, unaccountable armed groups. Such violations include severe overcrowding, beatings, torture, lack of food and water, forced labor, sexual assault and rape, and exploitation of children.”

Global Precedents of Fascist Practices

Beatings, torture, and starvation in CECOT and Libyan camps are chilling reminders of the most brutal end game of death camps by fascist dictatorships from Hitler’s Nazi Germany to Franco’s Spain, Pinochet’s Chile, and others. “The global history of (concentration) camps shows that most internees die from disease, overwork, or starvation rather than from execution,” notes Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

Within days of being appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler established models other authoritarian regimes would follow. Hermann Göring, second only to Hitler, was granted “extraordinary police powers” to brutally assault and round up political adversaries “with increasing ruthlessness,” writes Peter Fritzsche in Hitler’s First Hundred Days.

Soon, after a fire ravaged the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, the Nazis enacted emergency legislation to fully unleash dictatorial powers, to ratchet up arrests, press censorship, and repression. Similarly, Trump has invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and is scheming to use the 1792 Insurrection Act and other emergency laws to legitimize autocratic moves, despite not meeting the constitutional requirements for either.

By late March 1933, the Nazis had opened their first of many concentration camps, Dachau, near Munich, initially to incarcerate communists, socialists, then social democrats, gay men, gypsies, others labeled “asocials,” and eventually Jews. Notes Fritzsche, the Nazis, aided by friendly press coverage, successfully painted opponents as the “enemies from within” and racist and antisemitic dehumanization of their enemies as “subhuman”—a practice Trump has also employed.

“What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison,” states the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, “is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The major purpose of the earliest concentration camps during the 1930s was to imprison and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”

Fortunately, many Americans are aware of the history and what is at stake, tens of millions have protested in the streets, and Trump has failed to complete neutralization of the courts and political opposition, not for lack of trying.

Victories have been won. One notable example is the court ordered freedom for Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk released from a Louisiana detention center after she was frighteningly seized by masked federal agents on the street for the “crime” of writing an op-ed protesting the Israeli-U.S. war in Gaza. The job for all of us is to build on that, and to never stop the pressure.

[Chuck Idelson, retired, is the former Communications Senior Strategist for National Nurses United, the nation's largest union and professional organization of registered nurses with 225,00 members.]