We are in Grave Danger

The Big Beautiful Bill is much worse than you think

Fascism has arrived in the United States, enabled by a terrified Congress and a feckless Supreme Court. While the severe cuts to health care and food assistance in the Big Beautiful Bill will surely kill countless people, the real crime — the one we need to talk about urgently — is the $100 billion it allocates to ICE over the next four years.

This funding is more than the money the FBI, the CIA or any other law enforcement or national security agency receives. It makes ICE the most funded law enforcement agency in history. And it puts all of us in danger.

How? Let us counts the ways. Typically, law enforcement has been left to municipalities and states. In 2020, federal authorities arrested about 120,000 people, 56% of whom were apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border. Local and state law enforcement arrested more than 7.6 million people, marking the federal government’s share at under 2%.

No more. Today, there are masked bounty hunters without insignia snatching people off the streets, sometimes in full view of local police officers, who can do nothing to stop them. One incident in Worcester, Massachusetts, underscores the crisis. According to CBS News:

A witness describes what she saw. "The mom as she was being detained too, she was screaming, I don't know if she was being hurt as she was handcuffed, but she was truly screaming," Dali RaRocha said. "Those are the screams I have truly engrained in my ears right now."

Another relative, believed to be her daughter, was flailing in front of the ICE vehicle in a scene that rapidly grew into chaos in front of agents, some masked, and witnesses saying they had no answers about the arrest.

"We were all asking for a warrant, they didn't answer at first, and then eventually just said this is a warrantless arrest when they were shoving them into the vehicle," said witness David Webb.

And here is the key:

Worcester police say they moved in to deescalate the situation, but the response has outraged the community, some saying they question which side the police were on.

"We saw both federal and Worcester officers descend on a family with a level of aggression that you would use when apprehending someone who is known to be dangerous and carrying weapons," said Fred Taylor of the Worcester NAACP.

At best, police will do nothing to prevent ICE from arresting anyone the agency deems fit. At worst, they will assist agents who are arresting someone without a warrant. How do the officers know that the arrest is legitimate? They don’t, because ICE does not need to tell them. Their only role, if they do not want to help with arrests, is to get out of the way.

This is how fascism starts, with masked thugs detaining whomever they are told to detain. Understand what this means: Donald Trump now has an exorbitantly funded personal law enforcement agency that does not comply with pesky things like warrants. Its agents do not wear insignia, provide their names and badge number or reveal their faces when making an arrest. They can just smash and grab — except, instead of grabbing products off the shelves, they are grabbing people off the streets.

They do not answer to anyone but Trump, including, increasingly, the law. The Big Beautiful Bill caps the number of immigration judges at 800, despite a massive backlog in asylum cases. (As of April, that backlog stood at 4 million.)

Why? Because Trump and his allies in Congress do not concern themselves with the courts, which may thwart their plans. Since we are not at the show trial stage yet, the easiest thing to do is to limit someone’s ability to appear before a judge at all.

(Rest assured, the show trials are coming next, when Trump and his Republican senate fill every federal district and appellate court seat with unqualified MAGA lackeys whom even the Federalist Society would consider too extreme.)

Working with likeminded states, the Trump administration is now building concentration camps to house its detainees. ICE apparently does not have to comply with prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment. Because what is placing human beings in a tent city built atop an alligator-infested swamp prone to hurricane damage, if not cruel and unusual?

This is how it starts but this is not how it will end. Trump is diverting national security personnel and funding to his scam immigration raids. Meanwhile, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem is slashing the Office of Intelligence & Analysis from about 1,000 workers to 275. CBS News reports that “DHS' Office of Intelligence & Analysis — created after the September 11 terrorist attacks — is the only member of the U.S. intelligence community tasked with sharing threat information to state, local, tribal and territorial governments across the country.” Now it will be a shell of what it once was.

The CIA, the National Security Agency and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have been similarly gutted. Meanwhile, DHS is in the process of hiring countless ICE agents with scant law enforcement qualifications to snatch people off the streets.

Think back to the period before September 11, 2001. Our national security agencies were unfocused on the terrorism threat at hand. The 9/11 Commission found that “no one was truly in charge” of the national counterterrorism effort. Our eye was off the prize.

Sound familiar? In their quest to appeal to Trump’s bloodlust, his national security officials are allowing our real enemies — not the refugees fleeing death and persecution but the ones who really wish us harm — to probe our vulnerabilities again. This is all happening against a backdrop of kidnappings, renditions to foreign gulags and now a multibillion dollar detention center industry that will fill homegrown concentration camps with detainees.

To do this, Congress has allotted Trump billions to build more Alligator Alcatrazes across the country. Our national security agencies have been redirected to the invented threat that Trump and right-wing media have created, the one where some undocumented migrant is coming to get you. They are ignoring the real threat, where nation states and malign foreign actors continue to test the safety of our homeland.

But God help us if another 9/11 happens on Trump’s watch, as is increasingly likely because he has drastically weakened our national security. Those concentration camps he is building won’t just be housing the migrants whose plight too many of us ignore. They will be full of Americans whom Trump will deem enemies of the state. Fascism is here but its full potential under this administration has not yet been realized.

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If you are someone who worries about losing access to healthcare, nursing homes, food or other lifelines because of Trump’s policies, please contact me and tell me your story. The plan is to create easily digestible narratives that can be repurposed for social media to put real faces to the horrors of this legislation. We need to get the word out about how this president is hurting the people he was elected to protect.

Unfortunately, our leaders are failing to fund this, so we will have to do it ourselves. I am so deeply grateful to those of you who have become paid subscribers to Salty Politics in recent days. If you are able to become a paid subscriber, your money will go towards creating content that will get the message out about the harm that Trump is causing to real Americans every single day.

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Further Reading:

Photo by Valdemaras D. on Unsplash

Axios: How the GOP spending bill will fund immigration enforcement

Department of Justice: Federal Justice Statistics, 2020

CBS News: Worcester residents outraged by ICE arrest, police response

NPR: How Trump's tax cut and policy bill aims to 'supercharge' immigration enforcement

Department of Justice: Executive Office for Immigration Review Adjudication Statistics

CBS News: DHS to cut 75% of staff in its intelligence office amid heightened threat environment

CBS News: Cybersecurity agency that oversees election infrastructure to face significant cuts, sources say

National Commission On Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: Foresight-And Hindsight