REPRISE: America as a police state

Quotation

Martin Niemöller, “When the Nazis came for the communists…”

German text

Als die Nazis die Kommunisten holten,
habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Kommunist.

Als sie die Gewerkschafter holten, habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Gewerkschafter.

Als sie die Sozialdemokraten einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Sozialdemokrat.

Als sie die Juden einsperrten, habe ich geschwiegen;
ich war ja kein Jude.

Als sie mich holten, gab es keinen mehr, der protestieren konnte.

English translation

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn't a communist.

When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a trade unionist.

When they locked up the Social Democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a social democrat.

When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.

BACKGROUND

See,

1) M. Gessen, “Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived,” New York Times, April 2, 2025 (5:04 a.m. ET);

2) James P. Rowles, “July 17, 2020 “Trump’s “Little Green Men” in Portland: Rehearsal for a Coup d’État?” in James P. Rowles, The Rape of American Democracy: Republican Actions and Democratic Failures, 2016-2021 , Chapter 59, pp. 210-212 (2024). First published in The Trenchant Observer, July 17, 2020.

3)James Rowles, “REPRISE: Rehearsal for a coup d’état? Violence in American cities and “the chaos president” (June 2, 2020, updated July 17, 2020),” in James P. Rowles, The Rape of American Democracy: Republican Actions and Democratic Failures, 2016-2021 , Chapter 54 , pp. 192-197. Published in The Trenchant Observer, July 17, 2020.

Masha Gessen in a New York Times op-ed has concisely summarized the Trump administration’s actions that are characteristic of a police state. These police-state tactics were already apparent in the summer of 2020, when unidentified federal agents in unmarked vans detained people off the streets in Portland, as items (2) and (3) in the BACKGROUND section above reported at the time.

Gessen, who is a Russian exile, begins the column with the following vignette:

It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.

“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

The detention of a Turkish student at Tufts University in Boston provides another chilling example of the police-state tactics currently being employed by the Trump administration. Gessen writes,

It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.

Gessen notes that these police-state actions have been combined with a defiance of court orders, writing,

It’s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers. A federal judge ordered flights carrying the Venezuelan men to be turned around and demanded information about the abductees. Another federal judge forbade the government to deport, without notice, Rasha Alawieh, the Brown University medical school professor who was detained on return from a trip to Lebanon. Another judge prohibited moving Rumeysa Ozturk from Massachusetts without notice. The executive branch apparently ignored these rulings.

After citing other examples of lawless police-state behavior by the Trump administration, Gessen concludes,

But while we are still capable of looking, we have to say what we see: The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.

On a personal note, as a senior staff attorney at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States (OAS) during the military dictatorship in Argentina in the late 1970’s, I personally met with and processed the complaints of individuals and relatives of individuals in Argentina who were detained, and often “disappeared”, by agents of the state who wore masks and refused to identify themselves or their unmarked cars and vans.

These are pure police-state tactics.

The refusal by government agents to identify themselves and the use of unmarked cars and vans as well as masks are measures designed to avoid accountability before the courts, the Constitution, and the law.

These police-state methods have no place in America or in any democratic state governed by the rule of law.

President Donald Trump, under whose direction such actions are being carried out, must be impeached and removed from office at the earliest opportunity.