Our Authoritarian Atrocity
Our Authoritarian Atrocity
Trump’s goal is blood-and-soil nationalism. The only choice is opposition.
March 26, 2025: Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stands in front of the prison bars of an overcrowded cell at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center. The scene is staged: Noem wears a $50,000 Rolex and a tight-fitting white shirt, while the men behind her have been ordered to stand, their own shirts and masks removed to display their body and face tattoos. (In El Salvador today gang members are discouraged from having tattoos, so these men are from a previous generation, chosen not because of present menace but to look threatening.) “Do not come to our country illegally,” Noem says. “This facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.” The purpose of her appearance is to reinforce a story that links migrants to criminality, and to demonstrate Trump’s willingness to use cruelty in response.
Except: 90 percent of those deported to El Salvador have no criminal records. Among them are Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a sheet-metal worker in Maryland and father of three children with special needs, deported because of administrative error. Or Andry Hernández Romero, a Venezuelan makeup artist who had sought asylum in the United States because of his sexual orientation. To Trump it matters little, for the goal of his administration is to create a pervasive climate of fear among migrants in the service of a campaign of mass expulsion.
Trump has removed temporary legal status from hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, though they have broken no laws. University students are having visas canceled without warning. Rümeysa Öztürk of Tufts was snatched off the street, kidnapped by a gang of ICE officers in plain clothes, seemingly for doing no more than co-authoring an op-ed. The government asserts the right to deport Mahmoud Khalil of Columbia, who holds a green card, on the grounds of “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful.” After spending $3.4 billion for immigrant detention last fiscal year, ICE has requested $45 billion for the next two years.
For now, the sobering reality is that Trump’s treatment of immigrants is the most popular part of his broadly unpopular agenda. There are voices, including some who identify with the left, who insist that there is no choice but to adopt a restrictionist agenda, and that to do so is to defend the interests of the working class.
Democratic politics requires hard compromises. But Trump’s deportation program is part of an authoritarian project. He luxuriates in its massive and purposeful abuses of human rights—while simultaneously working to dismantle or disarm sources of potential criticism in the media, law firms, and universities. The goal is blood-and-soil nationalism. “The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive,” Trump said all the way back in 2017 (in words written by Stephen Miller). “Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it?” To collaborate with an authoritarian project as it dismantles democracy would be complicity in our own destruction. The only choice is opposition: to protect families, neighbors, workers. To protect ourselves.
The pieces gathered in the special section of this issue, “Border Politics,” work to set out an understanding of the situation worthy of the challenges we face. They describe the hard choices faced by migrants who leave their homes. They describe the overlapping logics of persecution that turn human beings into “deportable aliens.” They describe the work being done in unions and churches to support and protect immigrants. They envision a more secure society that could afford to be more welcoming.
While this issue was being prepared, I passed through São Paulo. There, the Memorial da Resistência preserves cells in a prison that once held political prisoners who resisted Brazil’s military dictatorship. On display is a letter from an imprisoned father to a young son who wants to know when his dad will be able to come home. Such scenes are playing out today as the Trump administration attempts to purge from the nation those who he has declared internal enemies. Now it is the United States that is practicing “disappearances” and producing political exiles. Someday, the United States too will have to remember its atrocity, and demand consequences for those who ordered it. For now, we—as members of the left—must work to stop this authoritarian project as it strips away rights from migrants and citizens alike.
Patrick Iber is co-editor of Dissent.
