Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann

Trump and the GOP are desperate to hang onto the oligarchy they’ve created, particularly in the face of the upcoming elections. Increasingly—as oligarchies usually do when they decide it’s acceptable to use violence to hang onto power—they’re turning to hate, fear, and terror as their tools. To this end, Trump and his lickspittles are reinventing the old Confederate slave patrols in modern form.

Most recently, ICE has begun violently force-feeding and catheterizing people in ICE concentration camps when they protest conditions or the absence of due process by going on hunger strikes.

Being tied down and having a tube shoved up your nose and down your gagging throat to your stomach is painful and degrading, as is having a catheter pushed up through your urethra and into your bladder because you’re now tied to a bed (to prevent you from pulling out the feeding tube) and can no longer get up to use the bathroom.

Force-feeding like this is a violation of the 1975 Treaty of Tokyo and condemned by the World Medical Association. It is considered torture by the international community

Citing the example of Mahatma Gandhi’s successful hunger strike against the British government then occupying India, the Red Cross and United Nations have recognized an absolute right to hunger strike as a legitimate form of legal protest. ICE doesn’t care.

ICE has also turned its attention far beyond immigrants. It’s buying surveillance and hacking services from companies like Palantir, Cellebrite, and Paragon, and drawing on sprawling surveillance networks that include Flock license-plate reader systems, facial recognition, cellphone forensics, and commercial data brokers, creating an infrastructure capable of tracking virtually anyone in America.

This is how nations or regions turn into police states to protect their oligarchs from popular rage and unpredictable elections, and the key to the transition is expanding the reach of the fascist regime’s internal enforcers by getting both local police departments and even volunteers to cooperate or participate.

This is not new in America.

By the 1840s when the Confederate states had pretty much ceased to function as democracies but had turned into overt oligarchies run by a few thousand fabulously rich families, slave patrols were their main means of controlling the population, including white people.

The slave patrol groups cut deals with local police departments to reimburse them when they helped arrest runaway slaves or punished white people opposed to either slavery or oligarchy. The system went national with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

That law allowed police seizing persons accused of being fugitive slaves to ignore the Constitution’s requirements for proof in court and a trial by jury as well as largely abandoning many Fourth Amendment protections for people suspected of harboring enslaved persons. It also paid a “commission” of $10 (about $450 in today’s money) for every enslaved person the local police or the federal commissioners successfully sent back into bondage.

Following that same strategy, over 760 local police agencies have now signed up for a task force model tying them to ICE spanning 1,493 active agreements, deputizing between 13,800 and 15,800 local officers to assist ICE.

And they’re just getting started; right now, only 77.2 million people (32% of the country) live in a county with an enrolled agency. ICE is promising full salaries, overtime, startup costs, and performance bonuses tied to immigration arrests: affiliated local police officers are now directly rewarded financially for arresting Hispanic or Black people suspected of being immigrants and turning them over to ICE, often regardless of the arrestee’s status or citizenship.

Meanwhile, ICE and these contracted local police believe they’re free to ignore the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for a judicial warrant before crashing a door or car window or executing an arrest. They similarly ignore the Fifth Amendment’s requirement that, “No person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”

Virtually none of the roughly 70,000 human beings now being held in brutal conditions by for-profit prison companies have ever been before a real Article III judge, as the Constitution requires.

And, like the old slave patrols, ICE is now going after people who aren’t even suspected of being undocumented but, instead, are merely protesting ICE’s violence, anonymity, abuses and excesses.

In addition to shooting dead Americans like Pretti and Good, a joint ProPublica and Frontline review identified more than 300 American citizen protesters and bystanders arrested during immigration sweeps and accused of assaulting or interfering with law enforcement.

This pattern of abusing our First Amendment right to protest even hits candidates and officeholders, including an Illinois congressional candidate indicted on conspiracy and impeding charges over protests outside the Broadview facility. Professor Erik Davis, for example, was recently arrested and chained for attending anti-ICE meetings in Minneapolis: they’re now using conspiracy laws against protestors, and he’s facing years in prison.

The point is to create an immediate reign of terror, damping protest in ways similar to how the slave patrols prevented eruptions of anti-oligarch sentiment in the Old South. They’ll spray pepper right into your eyes, shoot you in the face with chemical weapons, beat you to the ground, and even shoot you in the back of the head.

A day after Trump said Republicans should nationalize voting, Steve Bannon called on Trump to use these same masked thugs to surround voting sites this fall. Bannon separately claimed that the deployment of ICE agents to airports was “perfect training” for the elections this fall.

The former plumber and DHS Secretary who oversees ICE, Markwayne Mullin, said at his confirmation that ICE could be sent to polling places in the event of a “specific threat.” ICE has since told a court it may hold “thousands of documents” responsive to a demand for its “polling-place plans” but, so far, has produced exactly none.

Meanwhile, the number of cases where actual criminals are pretending to be ICE agents so they can rob, rape, or beat up people of color has exploded.

A hooded man kicked down the bedroom door of a Mexican immigrant in Greensboro, North Carolina, shouting “ICE! ICE!” The man raised his hands, thinking he was being arrested. Instead, four assailants robbed the house at gunpoint, pistol-whipped one resident so hard that his split forehead required ten stitches and four staples, and pointed a gun at a baby while demanding cash from the infant’s terrified parents.

They weren’t ICE. They weren’t police. They were criminals who had figured out that in Trump’s America, all you need to terrorize an immigrant family with impunity is a mask, a gun, a camo outfit you can buy on Amazon, and a loud enough shout.

NBC News and Noticias Telemundo published a sweeping investigation documenting how that Greensboro robbery was not an isolated horror. Reviewing court records, police reports, and news accounts from across the country, they found 31 separate cases in 2025 of criminals impersonating ICE agents to commit violent crimes as of May, up from an average of just five per year over the previous decade.

That’s a 484 percent increase in a single year.

As NBC News reported:

“In mid-January, a man broke into a house in Pittsburgh claiming to be an ICE agent and threatening a teen with a knife. In February, police in San Diego said a man allegedly impersonated an officer and wrapped his arms around the neck of a restaurant manager, claiming the manager was in the country illegally and he was going to arrest him.”

In New York, a Dominican woman was dragged into a basement, beaten, and raped by a man claiming to be an immigration agent. In North Carolina, another woman was raped at her workplace by a fake agent. In Philadelphia, an armed man claiming to be ICE and wearing a vest marked “Security Enforcement Agent” zip-tied a fifty-year-old Dominican cashier and robbed his business.

Most recently, here in Oregon just a few days ago a driver in Marion County was pulled over on Highway 211 by an SUV with blue flashing lights. The driver was dragged out of their car and, after a 20-minute robbery and beating, released; they required hospitalization for their injuries (we don’t yet know the person’s identity details). Portland’s Channel 6 (KOIN) reported:

“The suspects were described as wearing boots, baseball caps, face coverings and green long-sleeved shirts. They also wore tactical vests with the word ‘POLICE’ in white lettering and carried badges marked with the word ‘Police,’ OSP said, noting the suspect vehicle was described as a newer-model small SUV that is blue or gray in color, with no visible license plates.”

The FBI quietly warned in an internal bulletin last October that this was happening, but the administration’s response has been to keep the bulletin on the QT (most of the attacks are on undocumented Hispanics and are apparently never reported) while telling ICE agents to stay masked up.

Police states don’t solely rule by their own decree; at its peak, the German Gestapo under Hitler only had 32,000 members nationwide. But civilian militias and local police across Germany had signed up to help and as their mandate extended from lawbreakers and communists to Jews and protestors, everybody else just came along.

Increasingly, Democratic politicians are calling for abolishing or reforming ICE. The perverse incentive structure that gives billions to private for-profit prisons to hold immigrants is creating millions in campaign donations and gifts for Republican politicians, but communities are starting to speak out against this growing network of what are functionally concentration camps (the distinction being that prisons are for people who’ve been through court and had their due process rights respected).

And the last time masked police appeared on our streets in a widespread fashion was the post-Reconstruction era when cities across the South (and more than a few in the North) were deputizing hooded Klan members to enforce segregation. (The police officers in Mississippi who murdered Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were all Klan members.)

Trump and the GOP, however, are loathe to give up their secret police, apparently secure in the belief that the system will never turn on them or their families and they can use it to intimidate us all into both silence and avoiding the polls this November.

Clearly, they’ve never read history.