Yale historian Timothy Snyder has a grim view of the Trump administration's lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown: it's the early stages of totalitarianism, and must be treated as such.
"We have to see the logic of the killings as well as the killings themselves," wrote Snyder on his Substack. "The horror is a truth in itself. But it is also a sign of a political logic, one known from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Soviet as well as Nazi, and from attempts to replace the rule of law with personal tyranny. It is the logic of lies and of lawlessness."
Trump and his underlings, warned Snyder, have done what dictatorships before have done: look for loopholes and exceptions to the rule of law that let them simply do whatever they want in a narrow circumstance, then expand that until it is the reality across the whole country. In this case, they are taking advantage of the ill-defined limits of power the Border Patrol has to carry out its mission.
"The country stops at the border. And so the law stops at the border. And so for the tyrant an obvious move is to extend the border so that is everywhere, to turn the whole country as a border area, where no rules apply," wrote Snyder. "Stalin did this with border zones and deportations in the 1930s that preceded the Great Terror. Hitler did it with immigration raids in 1938 that targeted undocumented Jews and forced them across the border."
This has brought America to where it is now, with border agents prowling the streets of major cities assaulting and kidnapping people with impunity. This has led in Minneapolis to the fatal shootings of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. But it has also led to a network of "concentration camps," Snyder argued, that are now holding illegal immigrants and, increasingly, brown people suspected of being illegal immigrants.
Drastic action must be taken to restore the rule of law and set an example for future generations, Snyder said.
"The president should be impeached and convicted, as should everyone responsible for these outrages," he wrote. "ICE should be disbanded. So should the Department of Homeland Security. The other agencies within it should be redistributed across other departments. And the people who have killed should be investigated and brought before judges and juries."
