America has a pattern when it comes to “national security” crises:
Frame it as an emergency → Give the government more power → Skip the oversight → Make the harm permanent.
It's not WWII, but it is just the same failure mode: category-first enforcement + weakened process.
Two Times We’ve Done This Before
1942–45: Japanese American Incarceration1942–45: Japanese American Incarceration
Executive Order 9066 let the military create “exclusion zones” that became the legal excuse for mass removal and imprisonment.
Executive Order 9102 created the War Relocation Authority to run the camps.
This wasn’t “we arrested dangerous spies.” It was locking up entire families based on ancestry alone.
1930s: Mexican Repatriation1930s: Mexican Repatriation
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ own records estimate that somewhere between 400,000 and 1 million people left the country during this period. Most of them weren’t formally deported, and there’s no federal paperwork.
Why? Because they were pressured, threatened, or rounded up by local cops until leaving felt like the only option. It’s mass removal with plausible deniability.
So What’s Happening Right Now?So What’s Happening Right Now?
Here’s the live question: Are we building a modern deportation system with the same purpose: turn ‘security’ into a permission slip for category-based enforcement?
The timeline shows the “emergency” rhetoric moving inward:
Day 1 (national): Border emergency declared—sets the “exception” posture.
Los Angeles (June 2025): Marines staged + National Guard deployed after immigration-raid unrest (Reuters: ~700 Marines; ~2,100 Guard).
Washington, D.C. (Aug 11, 2025): Trump declares “Liberation Day in DC,” invokes Home Rule Act authority to take over MPD and deploy the Guard.
Chicago area (late 2025): Federal immigration crackdown (“Operation Midway Blitz”) draws a major judicial rebuke over use-of-force tactics.
Twin Cities / Minneapolis (Dec 2025–Jan 2026): “Operation Metro Surge” described as ICE’s largest operation; thousands of agents; public “door-to-door” enforcement tied to fraud + immigration.
And here’s the number that matters: According to analysis of ICE’s own detention data, there were 68,990 people in immigration detention as of January 7, 2026—a record high. The recent growth? Driven “almost exclusively” by people with no criminal convictions.
The Three Warning Signs
For this to qualify as a “rights-risk era,” you need to see three things:
- Category drift — Targets get wider (not just “criminals,” but entire communities)
- Process drift — Warrants and individual reviews get weaker or skipped
- Oversight drift — Accountability disappears; impunity becomes the norm
The data supports #1. The timeline suggests #2 and #3 are already starting.
The Real QuestionThe Real Question
What safeguards would you demand before “door-to-door” enforcement becomes normal in America?
Today my Twin Cities–based employer shared a notice, and the CEO sent an email, clarifying the company policy on access to our facilities.
In essence, any unplanned visits from government officials or law enforcement are not permitted, and if pressed, employees are instructed to state that a signed warrant is required.
I cannot say what specifically prompted management to take this stance, but even I was spooked over the weekend seeing ICE walk into nearby retail establishments and behave like they owned the place.
I don’t think it’s sleepwalking. There’s major explicit political pressure for mass deportations.
I think we’re sleepwalking into mass deportation, not by accident, but by building capacity and shifting from “violent criminals” and “securing the border” toward a system designed to deport people at scale.
The public story is “border security.” But the numbers we have suggest the detention surge is being driven mostly by people with no criminal convictions.
If that’s what’s happening, then the question isn’t motive. It’s trajectory: once you build a system that can remove massive numbers of people, the target list tends to expand.
That’s true. I just think that was the explicit intention from the beginning.
They started with criminals, at least nominally, mostly because it’s the most obvious place to start but not because they wanted people to think it would stop there.
Yes, they started with "criminals", and now some of the rhetoric slips into membership/legitimacy language. That's when policy enforcement turns into category enforcement, and history has receipts on how that ends.
I voted for this
I support this message
You also omitted operation wetback under Eisenhower
Good catch. Operation Wetback is a real precedent, and it belongs in this history. Appreciate the clarity on “I voted for this”; my point isn’t that enforcement is illegitimate, it’s that when it scales and starts targeting categories, safeguards matter. I left Wetback out of the top 3 because I was ranking by breadth/duration/institutionalization, but it’s definitely in the next tier of “mass removal” precedents worth including.
USA has lost the trade war with China and is facing imminent insolvency.
Its military are incapacitated by the Chinese ban on export of refine rare earths- USA cannot fight a war of any scale for at least a decade.
Trump is using every trick to gain and hold power and respond to the erosion of US hegemony.
The oldest trick in the book is scapegoating minorities and creating division within the population which ultimately provides the perfect pretext to introduce a state of emergency and cancel democracy.
Wanna bet whether we can land a nuke on Beijing?
Sure you could, if you are desperate, insane and suicidal.
Maybe you are...your empire is in steady decline as China power increases.
USA cannot fight a war of any scale and duration for at least a decade because its war material production is incapacitated by the Chinese ban on export of refine rare earths.
#1409989
#1410048
SourcesSources
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066
https://www.uscis.gov/about-us/our-history/stories-from-the-archives/ins-records-for-1930s-mexican-repatriations
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-cities-brace-more-protests-parts-los-angeles-placed-under-curfew-2025-06-11/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/declaring-a-crime-emergency-in-the-district-of-columbia/
https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/92-of-ice-detention-growth-in-fy
They don’t have criminal convictions because they are released by sanctuary cities and states
Immigration court is executive not judicial branch
No criminal convictions” doesn’t mean “sanctuary cities released criminals.” ICE’s published detention stats (as analyzed by Kocher #1407299) suggest most recent detention growth is people without criminal convictions. You can argue they should be deported, but it’s misleading to frame this as “violent criminals first.”
And yes: immigration courts sit inside DOJ (executive branch), which is why safeguards matter more, not less. DOJ has argued that because immigration judges are Article II “inferior officers,” Title VII/EEO doesn’t provide a remedy for their removal #1297530, which means fairness depends on who’s in charge, not structural guarantees. That’s why drift from criminal enforcement to category enforcement is ominous.
Vaya información nueva para mí. Aquí la ironía es que se van por la mala situación del país nadie los deporta casi 2 millones y no desean regresar, aquí no estamos sonámbulo estamos zombis
I not saying deportation are already at "mass" levels. I am saying detention and enforcement are scaling, and the target set is drifting from "violent criminals" towards categories, including many with no criminal convictions. Detention isn't deportation, but it is the pipeline to deportation. So the question is: as the pipeline scales, what safeguards constrain it, and who enforces those safeguards?