"The Trump administration is restricting the number of refugees it admits annually into the country to 7,500 and they will mostly be White South Africans, a dramatic drop after the United States previously allowed in hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war and persecution from around the world."
— Associated Press, Trump sets 7,500 annual limit for refugees entering US. It’ll be mostly White South Africans, CNN, Oct 30, 2025
"And as for the purported criminals they’re arresting...? Sixty-five percent of the people arrested by ICE so far this year have no criminal records, per the Cato Institute, and more than 93% have never been convicted of a violent offense."
— Ian Kumamoto, Children Deserve A Fascism-Free Halloween: But, in many cities across the country, it doesn't look like they're going to get it. HuffPost, Oct 31, 2025
"ICE leadership is being purged," Andrea Pitzer reminds us. (When bad things get worse: Border Patrol, ICE, and the repetition of grim history. Degenerate Art, October 28, 2025)
She gives us this history:
"ICE and CBP were established under the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, as part of government reorganization in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. They were largely split out of the U.S. Customs Service (along with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, whose responsibilities were given to CBP).
ICE includes ERO, which stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations. CBP operates in theory to protect the borders, though how that border gets defined and how deeply into the mainland CBP gets to operate might surprise you.
For the last eight years, ICE has only had acting directors (none confirmed by the Senate), while Border Patrol "has been managed by acting directors more than half its existence."
"In rising authoritarian regimes, tension usually develops between the more law-and-order squads of the governing party’s goons—the ones who represent a more simple exacerbation of the existing awful system—and those who have embraced more radical forms of detention or extrajudicial violence." An example: "Before Trump took office again, I talked with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, about the threat to immigrants ... if [Tom] Homan gained the upper hand in immigration policy, he would more or less expand the existing U.S. immigration system, putting it on steroids... [whereas Stephen] Miller’s crusade against immigrants risked becoming a much more dangerous project."
The Nazis, too, once they took power, were deciding whether to lean into Lawful Evil or Chaotic Evil. In 1934, Hitler limited arbitrary detention and released thousands of incarcerated people, but Himmler rearrested a thousand of them and convinced Hitler that more camps were needed. "In the months and years that followed, the Nazi concentration camp system devolved again and again into larger and more abominable forms—ones that would have been impossible to imagine in 1934."
Pitzer says:
"I expect that the coming months will bring a rapid expansion of impromptu facilities, more porous categories for apprehension, and more aggressive tactics applied indiscriminately to those who stand up for the rights of anyone targeted.
Maybe you’ve seen this coming all along. But if you had a failure of imagination at the beginning—not knowing how bad it had already gotten or realizing how much worse it might get if we didn’t take action then—don’t let despair over how we got here paralyze you. Don’t let that first failure of imagination lead you into another one: one where you fail to imagine ways that we can get out of this."
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