In the realm of politics, nothing drastic occurs overnight. History is a slow burn, caused in part by negligence towards minute developments in systemic change.
The state-sanctioned executions of Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Minneapolis perfectly exemplify this reality in current-day American society.
These were the logical next steps in a plan, a trajectory the country has been on for years, decades even.
The Trump Administration is turning the United States into a fascist, ethno-supremacist state right before our very eyes.
We’re becoming Nazi Germany. It’s a hard reality, but it’s what the current government intended.
Let’s just go through the most obvious one-to-one parallels.
Free Speech Repression
American free speech has never been close to perfect, but over the last year, overt state repression of all forms of opposition has ramped up significantly.
The two recent murders at the hands of ICE have been lied about and passively justified by the administration.
Mahmoud Khalil and a plethora of students have been detained or sent to prison for exercising their First Amendment rights and opposing the U.S. funded Israeli genocide.
Even talking heads such as Jimmy Kimmel have had their shows pulled due to pressure from the government.
In addition to these direct examples of punishment, a key element of Nazi censorship was their control over all forms of media.
President Trump has made several efforts to have his allies take over several of the most important organizations in the United States.
Elon Musk already owned X — formerly known as Twitter — before Trump’s re-election, and during his tenure, he has consistently manipulated algorithms to promote posts and or content that align with his own right-wing, ethno-supremacist views.
Paramount, CBS’s parent company, was purchased by Trump’s friend David Ellison, who gave the Editor-in-Chief position to the right leaning pro-israel former Free Press Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss.
Trump negotiated a deal with the Chinese government to have a group of U.S. investors take majority ownership of TikTok, and to have the platform’s content recommendation algorithm be licensed to the Tech Firm Oracle, which happens to be owned by David Ellison’s father, Larry.
This administration has transparently been manipulating what can and will be said about them in the media, and has received little to no significant pushback for it.
This is already unprecedented in a country founded on the ideals of the First Amendment, but what’s stopping this government from going even further?
ICE = Gestapo
One of the key pillars of the Nazi project was their secret police force, the Gestapo.
These were masked agents charged with violently rounding up political dissidents and those outside of the racial ingroup, and they did so through vast surveillance networks and large-scale armed invasions into Jewish/minority communities around Germany.
If that paragraph alone wasn’t enough to understand the severity of ICE’s historic funding increase and campaigns in places such as Minneapolis, let’s go through each distinct example of the agency following their predecessors’ footsteps.
The Round Ups
The previous section already covered dissident cases such as Mahmoud Khalil’s, but the most common argument in support of ICE’s invasions is that the immigrants are here illegally and are being removed for their actions, not their status.
If that were anywhere near the case, the vast majority of apprehensions would be criminals. But as it stood in late November, 73% of all detainees didn’t have a single criminal conviction. By December, 41% of them had no criminal charges whatsoever.
The only non-racialized way to justify ICE’s campaign is by saying active members of communities, loving neighbors, individuals who’ve always statistically committed less crime than natural-born US citizens, are a threat to American society because they simply lack paperwork.
For how idiotic many in the administration are, this is not the case. Just like their posturing in support of the Afrikaner population in South Africa, this is a deliberate campaign to flip the demographic makeup of the United States back in the direction of an overwhelming white majority.
Mass Surveillance
In terms of mass surveillance aiding their actions, this is playing itself out through the agency’s partnership with Palantir, the Data analytics firm founded by Peter Thiel. They’ve provided millions of data points guiding ICE’s operations for over 11 years, including driver’s license scans, cell phone records and location tracking.
This went on covertly since 2014, but last April, the firm formally received another 30 million dollar contract to build a new government platform, called ‘ImmigrationOS,’ to quicken the process even more.
Details of each invasion
The minute tactics of each ICE raid have molded further and further into being Nazi-esque. The most transparent and shameless comparison has always been the masked faces, but in Minneapolis, teams have begun extensive door-to-door operations.
Just like the Gestapo, they’re trained to use intimidation to have people give themselves up. They’ve also been authorized to break down doors if need be.
Concentration Camps
Once the secret police successfully kidnapped those they were tasked to by the state, individuals were famously sent to the various concentration and work camps across Germany and the recently annexed Poland.
And while domestic detention facilities today haven’t reached the maximum levels of cruelty subjected to Jews and other minority groups during World War II, the same slow burn that occurred in the years leading up to the final solution can be witnessed now.
In 2025, more people died in ICE detention than in the previous four years combined. According to a Los Angeles Times analysis, one-third of detainees have spent time in a facility that’s over capacity.
Thousands of innocent or non-convicted immigrants are being crammed into small cells without adequate food and water, medical care, disability accommodations or even basic heating.
This is all without mentioning the CECOT prison, perhaps one of the most inhumane in the world, which many American detainees, such as the innocent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, have been sent to.
Now’s the only time we can act.
There are far more parallels that can be made, particularly in terms of the Trump administration’s foreign policy, but the more important thing now is to do everything in our power to stop this trajectory from going any further.
Elections have always been seen as the sole way of expressing discontent with where the country is going. But Trump’s words and actions point to the midterms being far from guaranteed to even happen.
We can’t wait another eight months. Spread the word to your family, friends, third spaces and social media.
If you can take to the streets, go to every protest organizations are holding.
If you have the money, donate to organizations that are doing work such as legal aid for detainees.
And most importantly, if your city is organizing a general strike, participate if at all possible. The strongest tool we have is the power to disrupt business as usual, threatening the bottom lines of those providing material support to ICE and this administration.
We can no longer be hyper-individualistic; we can’t wait until fascism directly affects us to stop it.
It’s time to stop sleepwalking through reality, for everyone’s sake.
It’s time to act, now or never.
