Republished with permission from Florida Phoenix, by Barrington Salmon

“For just as weakness is a disease of the body, so wickedness is a disease of the mind.” —Boethius, “The Consolation of Philosophy”

Usually, politicians will bloviate during campaigns about all the wonderful, transformative things they’ll do if voted into office. Most fall far short of their promises; others use smoke-and-mirrors or sleight-of-hand to distract the public from their shortcomings.

But in Donald Trump’s case, in the early days of his second term, he has used a raft of executive orders, staffing shifts, and slashed budgets to disassemble parts of the federal government, including entire agencies. He has concentrated on significantly reducing the federal workforce and deleting regulatory agencies.

He has been making good on his vow to deport 1 million undocumented immigrants from the United States. Even before he assumed office, Trump and a coterie of far-right billionaires, bigots, kooks, and shadowy entities began building the framework to make this nightmare real.

Gov. Ron DeSantis built one concentration camp deep in the Florida Everglades and just opened another at the closed Baker Correctional Institution. It now holds 117 people but has the capacity to hold 1,500, according to DeSantis administration officials. The site is about 45 miles west of Jacksonville near the Osceola National Forest.

CNN says DeSantis is “doubling down” on his plans to build a third detention site in Florida’s Panhandle, which he has dubbed “Panhandle Pokey,” along with another facility at a Florida National Guard training center known as Camp Blanding, about 30 miles southwest of Jacksonville.

Other states are jumping on the bandwagon with other proposed immigration facilities, including Indiana’s “Speedway Slammer” and Louisiana’s “Camp 57,” located at Angola Prison farm, an 18,000-acre plantation sitting an hour north of Baton Rouge.

Trump and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller have successfully linked immigration with crime and we are watching dragnets in Florida cities and across the country with untold numbers of undocumented and legal immigrants being swept up.

But Trump couldn’t do this alone. Much like Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, Benjamin Netanyahu, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, or Leopold II of Belgium, a whole bunch of people need to sign onto your vision and they must be willing to build the legal, ideological, and logistical infrastructure needed to pull this off.

That’s where Ron DeSantis comes in. On this issue, DeSantis is an eager underling, working since June in concert with the Trump administration. He, Attorney General James Uthmeier, and others have embarked on an unprincipled, sadistic crusade of indiscriminately disappearing, imprisoning, and deporting Latino, Black, and Brown immigrants.

The Trump and DeSantis administrations lacked legal authority to do what they’ve been doing, but they have bent laws and ignored precedent and norms to trample on immigrants’ rights.

Domination

It becomes clearer by the day that the imposition of white domination, power, and control of the state and the country animates everything DeSantis and Trump are doing.

DeSantis has fervently signed on to the MAGA Republican white nationalist project of dragging the United States back to a time when European Americans ruled the roost using brute force; murder; laws, customs and norms; and terrorism and fear to intimidate and control African Americans.

Florida has served as the petri dish for DeSantis and his enablers to roll out the far-right agenda and gauge the public response or acceptance of these policies. Whether it’s banning books, laws seeking to curb or erase gay and trans individuals, anti-Black and anti-DEI bias, whitewashing facts, rewriting history, and attacking African Americans and other marginalized groups.

We are witnessing American apartheid, with the use of a range of mechanisms to more fully marginalize those who DeSantis and Trump deem “the other.” As the ACLU reminds us, DeSantis has joined Trump in amplifying already strained racial tensions in the United States. Both have been brazen in their overt quest to weaponize anger, resentment, and racial grievance.

Political content producer Danielle Moodie notes that Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, and a white nationalist Supreme Court are dismantling democracy, civil rights, and America’s economy.

“Isn’t it remarkable how the Supreme Court can rule in one breath that race cannot be considered in college admissions—stripping away affirmative action—and in the next, empower ICE to racially profile, detain, and harass Latinos simply for speaking Spanish in Los Angeles?” Moodie asks. “This hypocrisy reveals a troubling truth: The Court claims to be color-blind when protecting opportunity, yet suddenly sees race when it comes to criminalization, detention, and fear.”

Moodie added: “This contradiction is not just a legal nuance. It is a reflection of how deeply embedded white supremacy remains within our institutions. And under Donald Trump’s leadership, aided by his handpicked justices, the Supreme Court has become less an arbiter of justice and more an enabler of authoritarianism.”

The immediate result: Immigrants—documented and undocumented—are being disappeared by ICE agents without reasonable suspicion. The far-right faction is allowing federal and state law enforcement agents to confront and detain anyone who looks Latino, speaks little or no English, and gathers in certain places where Latinos congregate.

This blessing granted by the high court of racial profiling allows gangs of ICE, Border Patrol, Homeland Security, ATF, and others to hunt down immigrants, the vast majority of whom have committed no crime.

Moodie notes that the Supreme Court, its credibility at an all-time low, stripped away affirmative action in higher education; handed presidential immunity to Donald Trump while he faced multiple indictments; and enabled a wave of anti-immigrant policies that echo the darkest chapters of American history.

“Chief Justice John Roberts will likely be remembered not as a guardian of the Constitution, but as the leader who rolled back a century of progress on civil rights,” she said.

Theatrics

Critics including James Greenberg, emeritus professor of anthropology at The University of Arizona, have been warning about the authoritarian path that DeSantis and MAGA Republicans elsewhere are laying out. They mean to stoke fear and compel compliance.

“These theatrics work like rituals. Military vehicles rumble through desert towns, children in cages, recruitment ads with warriors silhouetted against flags —all ceremonies of fear,” Greenberg said. “They draw sharp lines of belonging and exclusion, marking who belongs and who is cast out. Raids at dawn, walls built for cameras, soldiers posing for photo ops are repeated gestures that turn cruelty into liturgy, weaving it into civic life until it looks ordinary.”

“Power has left marks on the land and surveillance has become a terrain of expansion,” Greenberg added.

“Tools once built to track foreign terrorists now target immigrants, activists, journalists, even civil servants. Private tech firms fused with federal agencies, creating databases that sweep up social media posts, license plate scans, phone metadata, and travel patterns,” he said. “These systems persist without oversight. Algorithms flag ‘suspicious behavior’ that often means nothing more than speaking out, worshiping differently, or crossing paths with the wrong people.”

Those who resist are surveilled by drones, have their phones and laptops searched at airports and border crossings.

“The effect is not only to collect data but to intimidate, to show people they are always visible. Surveillance has become a system of control, a constant warning that belonging can be questioned at any time,” said Greenberg.

“Detention has followed the same logic. Private prison companies, once in retreat, under Trump found new life. Contracts multiplied, decommissioned facilities reopened, tent cities sprouted in remote deserts. These sites were deliberately hard to reach, far from lawyers and reporters. Images of overcrowded cells and children behind fences remain etched in memory as proof of how cruelty is normalized.”

In total, detention “has always been as much spectacle as policy, a ritual of exclusion designed to instill fear before it processes anyone,” he continued.

“Inside, migrants are fingerprinted, DNA-tested, and placed in systems that reduce human beings to biometric codes. What looks like confinement is both political theater and an extraction of data and profits,” Greenberg said.

“Family separation reveals the cruelty in its starkest form. Parents deported without their children. By severing the most basic bonds of belonging, the state redefined what it means to be part of the nation. Citizenship papers could not shield children from being rendered effectively stateless if their parents were removed. Belonging is treated as a privilege that can be revoked at will.”

The deeper truth, Greenberg warns, is that repression relies on infrastructure.

“Prisons, surveillance grids, militarized zones—once built, rarely vanish. They remain in place for whoever comes next,” he said. “Like irrigation canals dug centuries ago, they channel flows of power long after their builders are gone. Trump accelerated this process, turning the latent into the active, the possible into the real.”

Depending on who you ask, there are those who believe that it’s already too late to reverse what DeSantis, Trump, the orchestrators of Project 2025, and MAGA Republicans are doing, while others believe America still has time.

Regardless of where you stand, what are we prepared to do to dismantle this architecture of tyranny?