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Donald Trump Is Building the Foundations of a Fascist State
Trump is building a large, lawless national police force in conjunction with a network of concentration camps.
by Ari Armstrong, Copyright © 2025
Right now a national police force, often masked and often without showing identification or any warrant, violently kidnaps nonviolent people off the streets of America and locks them in concentration camps, often in torturous conditions, sometimes in foreign lands. A fraction of the U.S. population is living under fascism now.
Further, this police force is growing massively in size, and the U.S. is rapidly building more concentration camps. Trump also is experimenting with sending federal troops in U.S. cities—something conservatives just a few years ago would have screamed about—and he has proposed sending U.S. citizens to foreign gulags. We have every reason to fear that this national police force eventually will push well outside its current boundaries of immigration enforcement, bearing in mind that this effort already has ensnared numerous citizens and people here legally. Put bluntly, Donald Trump is building the foundations of a fascist state. This is obvious to anyone willing to see. That many will scoff at my claims and call me hyperbolic does not change the facts on the ground.
I am not saying that we currently live in a thoroughgoing fascist state; far from it. Most of us still live in one of the freest regions on Earth. In important respects the U.S. has gotten more rights-protecting over the last few decades. That said, to the victims of oppression, debating the degree to which our government currently is fascist is beside the point. The difference between partial fascism and full fascism is one of degree, and where precisely we draw the line is of little consequence. What I am saying is that Trump and his sycophants currently are building the foundations of a possible future fascist state. I am saying that we are at risk of ending up in full-blown fascism, unless we rein in this danger.
A centerpiece of Trump's 2024 campaign was his conspiracy mongering that the 2020 election was "rigged." Trump continues to openly flirt with trashing the Constitution to run again in 2028; at this moment people can buy "Trump 2028" hats through the Trump store. Trump strongly encouraged (although did not directly promote) the violent assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Then, after assuming office in 2025, Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 people convicted of crimes or facing prosecution for the January 6 assault. These pardons sent the very clear message that the federal government under Trump will protect people who commit violent crimes in the name of furthering Trump's aims. Through the pardons Trump openly embraced domestic terrorism—so long as it furthers his agenda.
As I pointed out last year, Trump is a fascist, not in the sense that he currently presides over a full-blown fascist state, but "in the sense that he would act like a fascist to the extent that circumstances allowed." We still live in America, we still (often) have a Constitution, we still have courts sometimes willing to push back against executive abuses, we still have some members of Congress and some state-level political leaders willing to stand up to Trump. But we are now closer than we have ever been in this country to a fascist dictatorship. That many Americans will refuse to believe this does not make it less true. The time to take a stand is now, while we still mostly have the freedom to speak out, before it is too late.
In the remainder of this article I'll lay out some of the supportive facts and reflections, in no particular order.
The Case of George Retes
Thank god for the Institute for Justice, which has taken up the case of George Retes:
George Retes, a U.S. citizen and Iraq War veteran, was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies for three days and three nights. During that time, he was denied access to an attorney, was not allowed to make a phone call, was not presented to a judge, and was put in an isolation cell. He missed his daughter’s third birthday. He was never charged with a crime. . . .
George was on his way to his security guard job at a Southern California farm when he encountered an ICE roadblock, along with protesters and observers. Not wanting to lose his shift, he asked agents to let him get through. As protestors and agents clashed, George’s car became engulfed in tear gas.
An officer broke George’s car window. Another pepper sprayed him. They dragged George out of his car and forced him to the ground. One officer put a knee on George’s neck. Another put a knee on George’s back, even though he was not resisting.
Without checking George’s ID, federal agents detained George, transporting him first to a nearby navy base, then to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles, where he was held for three days and nights. George pleaded with them to explain to him why he was being detained and told them that he didn’t want to miss his daughter’s third birthday.
George’s pleas were met with silence. He was not given a hearing before a judge, a phone call to family, or contact with an attorney. Though he was covered in tear gas and pepper spray, the facility never allowed George to shower. On the second day, George was placed on suicide watch in an isolated cell. While George’s family searched for him frantically, George remained locked in a cell, incommunicado without any explanation of alleged wrongdoing.
He was released with no apology and no charges.
If you are not outraged by this then either you or not paying attention or you are a fascist.
Aurora ICE
Colorado's Democratic Congressional delegation, exercising their Congressional oversight authority, visited an Aurora concentration camp, but "immigration officials were unable to provide basic information during an oversight visit to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Aurora," reports the Auora Sentinel.
Planned Expansion of ICE
"By January, ICE will have the capacity to hold more than 107,000 people" (Washington Times).
"Trump has secured an extraordinary injection of funding for his immigration agenda—$170 billion, the vast majority of which will go to the Department of Homeland Security over four years. The annual budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement alone will spike from about $8 billion to roughly $28 billion, making it the highest funded law enforcement agency in the federal government" (New York Times).
Frum on ICE
David Frum acknowledges (citing the Center for Immigration Studies) that the U.S. has lost some 1.6 million illegal aliens since Trump took office, yet the U.S. has also lost some 600,000 legal residents. He says, "The United States is losing more legal residents than it is gaining, something that I don't think has happened since the Great Depression."
Let me comment here about "illegal aliens." Everyone agrees that people should come to the U.S. legally. The problem is that for decades, due to Congressional cowardice, the de facto U.S. immigration policy has been a lot more permissive than the formal one. This is what has led to the "Dreamers" issue, lots of people who have lived here for years, sometimes decades, sometimes since they were young children, with no formal legal standing. I realize that I'm not going to persuade many people of my "very permissive" immigration stance. Basically, I think we should allow people to come as fast as we can vet them and safely absorb them into our communities. Definitely I think we should allow substantial numbers of legal immigrants every year. But even if you think we should totally lock down legal immigration (a self-destructive policy), you should at least agree that building a fascist, unaccountable police force and torturous concentration camps, and kidnapping people off the streets and locking them in cages without due process, is not the right way to handle illegal immigration.
Anyway, even Frum, who is less pro-immigration than I am, points out:
Police officers or paramilitary officers—often dressed in non-uniforms, often without badges or identification, often with their faces disguised—are seizing people, most of them without status, but not all of them, some of them even U.S. citizens. Seizing them, putting them into vans, driving them away, offering them no process, and in the worst cases, sending them off to dungeons, prisons, in countries that the person apprehended has never seen before, has no contact with. We've seen people ending up in South Sudan, people who have no connection with El Salvador ending up sent for life—at least, that was the theory—to a prison in El Salvador. Some of the people in the El Salvadoran prison have been released, and they have told of horrors, of conditions that amount to torture, for people who have been accused of no crime, convicted of nothing.
Detention Abuses
In early August, the number of people in immigration detention in the U.S. surged to an all-time high of more than 60,000. . . . The overcrowding, combined with negligence and malevolence, has led to inevitable abuses that are too large to ignore or deny. . . . An ICE detainee . . . alleged he and other detainees were not given access to medical care or showers and were kept in cells so crowded that they didn't have space to lie down. . . .
A report published July 30 by the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff (D–Ga.) identified 510 "credible reports" of human rights abuses against individuals held in the archipelago of federal lockups, county jails, and military bases that comprise the Trump administration's mass deportation program. . . .
Investigations earlier this year by Reason and the Miami Herald uncovered overcrowding, lack of access to lawyers and phone calls, and major dysfunction inside the [Miami] facility.
Washington Post on the El Salvador prison: "One detainee was beaten unconscious. Others emerged from the dark isolation room covered in bruises, struggling to walk or vomiting blood. Another returned to his cell in tears, telling fellow detainees he'd just been sexually assaulted." Read more at NPR.
Tracinski on Concentration Camps
Some of us are old enough to remember a favorite conspiracy theory on the far right which held that the real purpose of FEMA was to build concentration camps. Now a far-right administration is fulfilling this theory, directing FEMA to fund detention camps that are notoriously abusive, have no clear legal status, and target immigrants but also sweep up U.S. citizens.
The Trump administration branded immigrants who committed no crimes as "the worst of the worst" and deported them to a prison in El Salvador, where its strongman president, Nayib Bukele, insisted that they were being held on behalf of the U.S. Now these prisoners have been traded to Venezuela, and they are telling stories of their systematic abuse.
Last on ICE Power
Jonathan V. Last: "Trump created his own internal security apparatus: His goal is to have ICE supplant the FBI in national law enforcement. This is a big deal. Because the FBI is a professionalized organization with strict standards and a well-defined mission while ICE is more or less a national brute squad. The Trump administration realized that corrupting the FBI would be a tall order. So while they're certainly trying to do that, they put most of their chips on a different number: Reinventing ICE as the primary instrument of internal state power."
The Kidnapping of Sara Lizeth Lopez Garcia
Suffolk County Community College honors student Sara Lizeth Lopez Garcia was detained by ICE agents and sent to a Louisiana detention facility to await trial and probable deportation.
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has arrested an increasing number of migrants with no criminal convictions, according to an ABC News analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data.
Star student Sara and her mother were taken from their Mastic, New York, home, said fiancé Santiago Ruiz Castilla.The ICE agents claimed they were looking for someone else entirely when they entered the family home—but they chose to detain the two anyways. . . .
Sara followed steps to legally migrate to the United States and does not have a criminal record. The Colombian national was in the midst of obtaining her permanent residency, a lengthy process.
This is persecution for the sake of persecution, meanness for the sake of meanness, cruelty for the sake of cruelty. This is not "Making America Great Again"; this is nihilistically destroying people's lives for the sake of destruction.
These are, of course, only a smattering of the relevant details. A full accounting would take a book at least. Still, anyone with eyes can see. Only some choose to pretend to be blind.