ICE is disappearing people.
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ICE is disappearing people.
This is a grim and difficult piece, but it is heartening to read it one particular way: the broader national and global conversation is finally, finally starting to pick up on what so many of us have been yelling for weeks and months: the Department of Homeland Security is acting as Trump’s secret police, a group of Brownshirts with a military-sized budget whose horrors extend far beyond two murders.
https://emptywheel.net/2026/01/29/the-disappearances-in-minnesota/
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The sooner Americans come to terms that tRump, evangelicals, repugnicans and Maggots are running #deathcamps, the better it will be for everyone.
Imagine rotting and being tortured in an #ICE deathcamp warehouse, thinking "There are good folks on the outside that know I am her...that can stop this"
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It's kinda the same, in the way a hatching coccoon of a hideous bloodsucking monster is the same as its hideous bloodsucking larva. Same species, different stage.
It's been incubating. The larva was smaller, and not as often biting at white skin-- but it was a sign, proof, of awful things left unchecked and hungrily growing stronger. It's accelerating, getting bolder and testing where it has or hasn't built up enough political and social infrastructure to bring the hammer down in earnest.
And it has a great many nests and a great many stinging tentacles.
I wish I were that optimistic. But using your metaphor, the larva have actively been quietly attacking the political and social infrastructure, to make sure that we can't bring the hammer down when fascism rears its ugly head. The solution (as always) is to make the rich not rich somehow, but as long as they are and have been rich, richer than ever, they've pushed programs to criminalize friendship and decimate communities. To turn our hammers into manacles, and turn us against each other.
This isn't a parasite. This is leukemia.
CC: @inthehands@hachyderm.io -
@inthehands
From the wonderful post https://degenerateart.beehiiv.com/p/into-the-abyss you cited:
"…nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.""…the U.S. is currently holding three times as many people in immigrant detention as were detained in the Nazi concentration camp system in spring 1939—six years into the Third Reich and just before the start of World War II."
@inthehands @zillion Also as a measure of how unlawful and messed up the modern detentions are, those 1930s death camps bothered to give the prisoners toilets. -
Precedented, but not the same:
If ICE and CBP are basically the reincarnation of the KKK, it’s the KKK with a budget the size of Russia’s entire military.
Literally. In the literal sense of “literally.” The incoming ICE + CBP budget is ~$140 billion.[1] Russia’s military budget is ~$145 billion.[2]
(If I’m misreading these numbers, please correct me.)
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-hikes-national-defence-spending-by-23-2025-2024-09-30/
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@inthehands it is becoming increasingly clear that the anti-immigration crackdown is actually an excuse to raise a paramilitary force. They want to avoid another Jan 6 failure and ensure that, the next time they lose an election, they have the force to finish the coup
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People were jumping into action here in Minneapolis — droves of people, comfortable people, white people — not in mid-January, but in •early December•. (And the groundwork started much earlier!)
Community meetings overflowing. Signal groups exploding. Observer trainings filling day after day after day. Mutual aid networks popping up like mushrooms. On and on.
Why? Because we saw brown and Black neighbors being dragged from their cars, dragged from their homes, stalked, terrorized, •kidnapped• with barely the slimmest shadow of due process or legal oversight.
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@inthehands thank you, for your part inneducating folks.
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ICE is disappearing people.
This is a grim and difficult piece, but it is heartening to read it one particular way: the broader national and global conversation is finally, finally starting to pick up on what so many of us have been yelling for weeks and months: the Department of Homeland Security is acting as Trump’s secret police, a group of Brownshirts with a military-sized budget whose horrors extend far beyond two murders.
https://emptywheel.net/2026/01/29/the-disappearances-in-minnesota/
1/
@inthehands more than 9 murders. Two are white.
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I wish I were that optimistic. But using your metaphor, the larva have actively been quietly attacking the political and social infrastructure, to make sure that we can't bring the hammer down when fascism rears its ugly head. The solution (as always) is to make the rich not rich somehow, but as long as they are and have been rich, richer than ever, they've pushed programs to criminalize friendship and decimate communities. To turn our hammers into manacles, and turn us against each other.
This isn't a parasite. This is leukemia.
CC: @inthehands@hachyderm.ioFortunately, society is not a biological organism, and we're not brainless cells, so I think we have a chance, if we can just figure out how to keep the machinations of the rich from manipulating us into acting like brainless cells. If we cannot resist the manipulation though, the prognosis for an organism composed of dumb cells with leukemia is not promising.
CC: @inthehands@hachyderm.io @violetmadder@kolektiva.social -
Theoretically, if they got rid of all the immigrants, I wonder what they would do with all the money?
I guess they would just return it and the budget would shrink and everybody would go home.
A well armed, well financed, fascist paramilitary recruited from Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and neo-Nazis, will *not* disband willingly. It's not going to happen.
They'll defend themselves by every means at their disposal.
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ICE is disappearing people.
This is a grim and difficult piece, but it is heartening to read it one particular way: the broader national and global conversation is finally, finally starting to pick up on what so many of us have been yelling for weeks and months: the Department of Homeland Security is acting as Trump’s secret police, a group of Brownshirts with a military-sized budget whose horrors extend far beyond two murders.
https://emptywheel.net/2026/01/29/the-disappearances-in-minnesota/
1/
@inthehands
That's 3 observed ones, isn't it?
There'll be more, waiting to be found. -
A well armed, well financed, fascist paramilitary recruited from Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and neo-Nazis, will *not* disband willingly. It's not going to happen.
They'll defend themselves by every means at their disposal.
Of course. They're being paid huge money right now the likes of which they've probably most of them never seen before. They will absolutely not give that up.
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Of course. They're being paid huge money right now the likes of which they've probably most of them never seen before. They will absolutely not give that up.
Or their guns and ammunition.
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Or their guns and ammunition.
Many of them probably already had plenty of guns and ammunition (go, USA!). However, if we're making a list of everything, add their wonderful immunity to prosecution for everything they get to do to immigrants on the pile.
