Americans This Is Happening In Your

Chicago, Illinois, October 3, 2025

The non-partisan, non-sectarian Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), which has been taking opinion surveys for sixteen years, announced October 22 a stark conclusion: “Fifty-six percent of Americans agreed with the proposition that ‘President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy’ (up from 52% in March 2025). ) Fifty-two percent also said that “the increase in funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to speed up efforts to arrest, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants had gone too far.” A majority of Americans, including many Trump voters, reject the way he has handled the issue. Trump’s people can’t use a common authoritarian propaganda trick – deflecting to zealous subordinates any popular uneasiness by insisting that “if only the Leader had known” what was happening, he would have stopped it. The country knows that ICE’s lawlessness happens at Trump’s direction or inspiration.

The Republican budget act included more than $170 billion (that’s not a typo) over four years for immigration and border security. ICE’s annual budget tripled, exceeding – according to the Brennan Center at New York University –the combined annual expenditures on police by all fifty states’ and DC’s governments. Some of the money was to go to hiring about 10,000 deportation officers. That is a wildly ambitious undertaking: the Brennan Center noted that a 2017 study by DHS’ Inspector General had found that hitting that target would require vetting 500,000 applicants. Not surprisingly, law enforcement agencies have been having trouble finding anywhere near that number.

ICE therefore began offering in August a $50,000 signing bonus and dropped its age limits. NBC News reports that some new ICE recruits have shown up to training without full vetting, and that ICE has already shortened its training program from 13 weeks to 6. Over half of the recruits dismissed by ICE over the past three months could not pass an open-book exam. Others could not run 1.5 miles in less than 14 minutes, 25 seconds, or do 15 push-ups and 32 sit-ups. Officials have not explained how America’s alleged need to round up and deport undocumented immigrants requires such a drop in recruiting standards or putting large numbers of agents on the streets who do not have the requisite mental or physical capabilities.

Shocking stories of lawless ICE behavior have become commonplace. They cannot be allowed, however, to be thought of as a “new normal.” Here are two.

The October 1 “Chicago Sun-Times” reports : “Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down residents’ doors in a five-story apartment building overnight, pulling out men, women and children, some of them naked. U.S. citizens were among those detained for hours.” One resident found some possessions missing and others strewn around his floor. DHS alleged, but offered no evidence, that “some of the 37 people arrested were believed to be involved in drug trafficking, weapons crimes, and immigration violations.” One U.S. citizen in his 60’s interviewed said he had been dragged out of his apartment and left outside in zip ties for nearly three hours. His requests to see a warrant and a lawyer were ignored. A neighbor said she saw “agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes on and into U-Haul vans. Kids were separated from their mothers.”

Columnist George Will wrote on October 24 “Washington Post”) about a man named George Retes, who, driving to his factory job July 10, was stopped by gas mask-wearing ICE agents, who falsely told him the plant was closed. Retes’s driver’s license, which he says the ICE agents never asked to see, identified him as an Army veteran. They apparently never noticed either his license plate (”DV,” indicating disabled veteran) or his rear window sticker (“Iraq Combat Veteran”). The agents smashed his driver’s-side window and pepper-sprayed him. He was dragged from his car, his wrists were zip-tied behind his back, and he was made to sit on the ground for four hours. His requests for a lawyer were ignored. After three days in detention, he was told that never-revealed charges had been dropped.

Will wrote that “in today’s hiring binge, ICE recruiting ads ask: ‘Which way, American man?’ Recruits will ‘defend the homeland,’ ‘recapture our national identity,’ stymie an ‘invasion,’ halt ‘cultural decline’ and even save ‘civilization.’ Something uncivilized is indeed happening. What jobs, if any, are recruits leaving for the glory of donning battle gear and masks (hiding what from whom?) and roaming U.S. communities, throwing their weight around and throwing unarmed people to the ground?”

Trump is using known authoritarian methodology: wielding “shock troop” violence, creating ate a paramilitary force by lying about lost national grandeur, appealing to basic resentments and hates, ignoring recruiting standards, or keeping them low, because the goal is having muscle available that has few considered thoughts, is not likely to develop any, and can be easily commanded to indulge in brutal and lawless conduct. Don’t insist on strict discipline and often schedule raids for the early morning hours, when locating victims is easy. Secret police forces all over the world know that because of normal human physiology, victims’ mental and physical defenses are lowest at that time of night. Over the course of our careers, my Foreign Service colleagues and I have observed in many countries (or even been on the receiving end of) such state lawlessness. Beatings; harsh, arbitrary behavior, intended to intimidate; shows of force (sometimes deadly) for the same purpose; home searches, damage, and monitoring at will; and other abuses.

The America depicted by those ICE recruitment pitches exists, of course, only in Trump’s and MAGA’s tangled minds. But we need to ask what kind of individual is attracted by this mendacious and mean-spirited appeal. Whatever one’s attitude to immigrants (and after all, we are all immigrants in this land – some just arrived earlier than others), we need to ask ourselves whether we want battle-dressed, armed, and masked government agents ignoring civil liberties, constitutional restrictions on arbitrary power, and even common decency, cruelly treating fellow human beings. No American can dodge the fact that these outrages are being committed daily in our names. Moreover, no American can take comfort in thinking “these things are terrible, but they have nothing to do with me.”

Even leaving aside the moral aspects of ignoring fellow residents’ and citizens’ suffering, who can say that this Administration’s definition of who or what is undesirable in this country might stop with undocumented immigrants, or even high-profile political opponents (now clearly labeled by Trump as “enemies”)? There are already rapidly proliferating signs this is not the case.

The risks to every American are higher than one might think.

Tom Wolfson is a former senior U.S. diplomat who has lived and worked in six foreign countries, occasionally multiple times. His work representing the U.S. has included assignments at the United Nations, in the U.S. Congress, and with an international democracy-building organization. He is a member of The Steady State.

Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 340 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.