Image by Rubaitul Azad.

Having just spent a weekend in a place where FOXNews was blaring every time I was in a common space, I was reminded of how easily people can be propagandized. The trigger for this recurring realization took place on Friday when I first heard that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had been returned to the United States from El Salvador to face charges. As I watched the report, it became clear that the charges he was facing were based on an absurdly fantastical interpretation of existing law. Indeed, the reportage of Garcia’s charges made it seem like he was the mastermind of an operation beyond the greatest exploits of the CIA and the Mob. Drugs, pornography, human trafficking and more; you name anything in the criminal world and Mr. Garcia had organized it. At least that’s how FOXNews was reporting it. I watched people absorb this news getting angrier at Garcia by the minute. I knew what I was hearing was a lie. Simultaneously, I wondered how FOXNews could be reporting it. Where did they get the “facts” to rationalize such reportage? After all, even they base their interpretation of world events on some facts and what I was hearing sounded beyond ridiculous. Then they showed the press conference where Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, had announced Garcia’s return and arrest. To put it as honestly as possible, the Attorney General is a liar.

The grand jury indictment has only two charges. Both are essentially about giving a few undocumented people rides. There are no charges regarding narcotics or porn. Yet she makes public statements claiming Garcia was involved in all the above and conspired to transport thousands of undocumented people. Her so-called proof is that he was pulled over in Tennessee driving a van that had three rows of seats. The Tennessee cops found anything to hold him on. In essence, what the trumpists are doing is pretending that the phenomenon of migration is somehow a centralized industry with Garcia at its center. Bondi and her minions in government and the media are taking advantage of people’s ignorance and manipulating their prejudices. Anyone who remembers the 1960s knows that grand jury indictments are historically used to target political enemies. A few such examples of this from that time period are the cases against the Chicago 8/7, the Harrisburg 7—a group of religious and lay antiwar activists charged with conspiring to kidnap Henry Kissinger, and the arrest of Leslie Bacon in the 1971 bombing of the US Capitol—a bombing claimed by the Weather Underground, which Bacon had no connection to. In short, Garcia is a political football being kicked around to satisfy the xenophobic and racist elements of the criminal Trump administration.

By the time my Florida weekend was over, National Guard troops were stationed in parts of Los Angeles where protests against armed kidnappings by masked ICE agents had erupted after some of those agents raided a workplace and began throwing people at work into unmarked vehicles. Other workers and nearby residents attempted to block the vehicles and local police in riot gear moved in. The ICE agents fired tear gas and concussion grenades. Trump and his anti-immigrant spokespeople responded as expected. They attacked the protesters and the arrestees, calling them terrorists, criminals and the like. Indeed, as I finished this piece up on June 11, 2025, Trump continues his attacks, calling the protesters animals and armed invaders. Then Trump and his cabal federalized the California National Guard and sent 4000 of them to LA. Then they sent Marines. Liberals, including California Governor Newsom, vocally protested the federalizing of the Guard and questioned the use of the Marines. After all, US troops are not supposed to be used against US citizens except in cases considered to be insurrection.

Most readers can remember Trump doing the same thing in 2020 in the massive protests following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, MN. Some can recall the use of the Guard in the uprisings after police were acquitted of the beating of Rodney King in 1991. Fewer may recall the multiple times Guard and federal troops were used to quell uprisings in the 1960s; uprisings that probably reached their peak in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and during the Democratic Convention in Chicago that year. In most if not all of these situations, the Guard was called into the protests by the governor of the respective state. Of course, when federal troops were called, they were ordered into duty by the President. In most cases, those orders were said to be given at the request of the local authorities. This is not the case in Los Angeles in June 2025. Trump, who supposedly represents a faction of the US polity that puts so-called states rights before any authority emanating from Washington, DC, is ignoring California officials and sending in the military. Furthermore, he and his henchmen (and women) are threatening to arrest any state officials who attempt to overturn the White House orders. This isn’t the first time the trumpists have threatened to arrest state government officials who disagree with the authoritarians in DC.

Regarding Trump’s fascism, it can be summed up in a couple of his comments regarding the protests against ICE in Lox Angeles. In classic simplistic drivel, he told the media regarding the protesters who supposedly spat on the cops: if they spit, we hit. I’m certain some of Trump’s supporters will see that couplet as another example of the wannabe dictator’s supposed wit.

Meanwhile, instead of demanding a complete retreat of the military from LA, many Democrats are afraid to tell their police forces to reject assisting ICE and the military, for fear their state or city might lose federal funding. Others are asking for an investigation. Besides the fact that this is about the most weak-kneed response that one could have, there’s the obvious truth that Trump, Hegseth, Bondi, et al. Could give a shit about any investigation, especially one mounted by Democrats. Indeed, the White House ignores court orders which would result in anyone like you and I getting tossed in jail. It’s more than worthwhile to note that in 1933, the Nazis began to nationalize the previously decentralized police forces across Germany. This series of actions was mostly completed by 1936 when Hitler appointed SS leader Heinrich Himmler as Chief of the German Police, who effectively centralized the police forces across the country under his control. This included the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei-loosely translated as homeland national police) and the Ordnungspolizei, made up of the local and other police forces centralized under one command in Berlin. Although US law enforcement is organized differently and subject to different laws, the possibility of the trumpists doing something similar increases with each previously illegal use of law enforcement by the regime in DC.

The only way the assault on US residents by ICE and other such agencies is for people to resist as they are in Los Angeles. This becomes clearer each time the trumpists attack, pushing what they consider to be legitimate government action further towards fascist territory. It’s a territory that becomes more difficult to exit the deeper a nation goes in.

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