Trump Disappearances
April 08,2025
During Trump’s first term, the word "deportation" lost its legal meaning. It stopped being a matter of due process and became an instrument of cruelty. Under the guise of immigration enforcement, ICE began pulling people from homes, schools, and hospitals with no warning, no hearing, and often no trace. This wasn’t deportation. It was disappearance.
Families were torn apart with no record of where loved ones were taken. Thousands of children were separated at the border, some permanently, because the government didn’t bother to track them. People disappeared into a vast and opaque detention network, often run by for-profit corporations, and emerged weeks or months later, traumatized or not at all. Legal residents and even U.S. citizens were mistakenly detained and held. And ICE agents operated with impunity, using intimidation and deception rather than legal warrants.
Agents were seen handcuffing third graders, dragging people from hospital beds, and detaining immigrants at routine check-ins with no warning. These weren’t rogue actors. These were policies set at the top, with the blessing of the White House. The cruelty was not a side effect; it was the strategy. Trump and his allies believed that fear would serve as deterrence, and in that belief, they built a machinery of state-sanctioned terror.
It was not just about undocumented immigrants. The entire apparatus was designed to dehumanize and criminalize entire communities. ICE raided workplaces, separated families in courtrooms, and created a culture of silence where people were too afraid to report crimes, attend school, or seek medical care. Even U.S. citizens were swept up in the chaos, wrongfully detained, and forced to prove their status to an unaccountable system.
But if Trump’s first term normalized this erasure, his second has accelerated it to authoritarian extremes. There is no more pretense of legality. The Supreme Court’s recent ruling has effectively rubber-stamped the practice of vanishing people without due process, gutting what little protection remained. With that decision, Trump and his allies have been handed a green light to continue these disappearances unchecked, and to expand them.
And that expansion is already underway. Trump has made clear that immigrants are just the beginning. He has openly threatened to use the same machinery against U.S. citizens he deems enemies. He has said he would enjoy it. Protesters. Journalists. Political opponents. The threat is not hypothetical, it’s a promise. Disappearance is no longer an immigration issue. It’s a tool of fascist control.
The line between foreigner and citizen has begun to blur in the eyes of this administration. Trump has openly flirted with suspending habeas corpus, praised foreign dictators who disappear dissidents, and threatened to invoke military force on American soil against his own people. His administration has proposed internment camps for the homeless. He has demanded mass deportation raids and promised to detain millions. This is not the rhetoric of a president, it is the doctrine of a tyrant.
And now the judiciary, once a check on executive overreach, has capitulated. The recent Supreme Court ruling is nothing short of catastrophic. By giving the green light to disappearances without oversight or due process, they have dismantled one of the final safeguards of our democracy. It is an endorsement of authoritarianism under the guise of law.
We must be clear: these are not deportations, and they are not about immigration policy. They are disappearances. People taken by government agents, with no accountability, and often with no paper trail. Some never return. Others emerge damaged. Many more simply vanish into the system, lost to the bureaucracy and fear. We are watching history repeat itself in real time—and we know how that story ends.
The parallels to past atrocities are not accidental. El Salvador’s death squads, Chile’s disappearances under Pinochet, Argentina’s Dirty War, Nazi Germany’s early purges, they all began with a justification, a group to demonize, and a public willing to look away. We are standing at that precipice.
And ICE has become the enforcement arm of this descent. Its agents now operate as the modern-day Gestapo, empowered to act without warrant, without oversight, and without consequence. Those who continue to work in that system must confront the truth: you are enforcing tyranny. You are not keeping anyone safe. You are vanishing people. And history will not forget.
This is not about policy differences. It is not about border security. It is about whether or not we allow our government to seize people off the street, detain them in secret, and erase them from public view. It is about whether we live in a democracy or a police state. The machinery of disappearance is in motion, and if we don’t stop it now, it will expand beyond anything we can imagine.
We must call it what it is. And we must stop it before more lives are lost to silence and shadow.
