It Is Happening Here

on dropping the delusions & finding our courage

“Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.” - John Lewis

In 1942, Japanese-American internment commenced. Thousands of innocent people were forcibly taken from their homes, businesses, and schools, to be imprisoned indefinitely in remote locations.

For decades thereafter, we have held a societal consensus that it was wrong. We have taught this in our schools. We strove to educate the younger generations, to prevent a recurrence. Never again, we vowed.

We built memorials to remind ourselves of our vow. The photographs in this essay are from one such memorial in Eugene, Oregon.

On March 15, 2025, we broke our vow. Around two hundred innocent Venezuelan men were taken from American soil, loaded onto planes, and, in direct violation of court order, taken to a foreign dictatorship to be locked away in a brutal, notorious mega-prison.

Both episodes, 1942 and 2025, were carried out pursuant to invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. Despite all our promises to ourselves, the statutory basis that could enable a recurrence was never repealed. It remained available, until we foolishly elected a regime openly abusive and racist enough to use it again. I was among the voices warning that this would happen.

Now, not only have we done it again, but we have also upped the ante.

The number of victims this time is far fewer, so far, thanks to our courts holding the line for now. But the harm to those victims is objectively more irreversible, and far more brutal. The Japanese-Americans who were interned were kept stateside, families were mostly kept together, and they were eventually let go.

Unlike the Japanese-Americans who were interned, Andry Romero has dim prospects for ever coming home.

Since the March 15, 2025, flights to CECOT, and the degrading, violence-porn propaganda footage that we were all treated to immediately afterward, I’ve had this sense that the gloves have come off. The veneer of liberalism has been torn away. We are staring at our own thuggish ugliness, and it is terrifying.

I’ve seen the atmosphere in Gaza described, by at least one commentator who has been on the ground there, as “the end of humanity.” Meanwhile, the menace of techno-feudalist spheres of influence rises on the back of the same sci-fi data technology that is facilitating the unabated abuses there. Its creators do not believe in human rights.

On March 8, 2025, Mahmoud Khalil was arrested. It was obvious that he would not be the last to be incarcerated solely for political speech. Rumeysa Ozturk, Mohsen Mahdawi, and other students soon followed. How did this happen in spite of the First Amendment? Because Secretary Marco Rubio exploited a free speech loophole for visa holders, found in a McCarthy-era statute.

Long after the others were released, Khalil finally walked free (for now) on June 20, 2025. The judge in his case found that the use of the McCarthy-era statute violated Khalil’s First Amendment rights, and that the statute is unconstitutionally vague.

In June 2025, as I write this, Americans are being acclimated to paramilitary, masked secret police (comprised of ICE, Border Patrol, and DHS) who are regularly kidnapping people into unmarked vehicles. There are already scattered incidents of U.S. citizens being caught up in the dragnet. Reports of extreme human rights violations in ICE detention facilities are emerging.

The big ugly bill is poised to direct exponentially more funds for private prisons to incarcerate immigrants. Will such an industry be willing to simply wind up, after this attempted ethnic cleansing is complete? If not, what will the legal mechanisms be by which U.S. citizens could be diverted into its snares, so as to ensure continuing profitability? These are loopholes I am watching for now.

On June 23, 2025, a SCOTUS decision spawned a wave of doomsday headlines and social media angst. It allows Stephen Miller to exploit a statutory exception to the rule that people to be deported are to be sent home, or to another country where they have a meaningful connection. The scheme is to drop East Asians & Latinos into North African war zones, Muslim theocracies and countries with active illicit slave trades. Thus, the valves are opened to the jaws of death. Mass murder outsourced. A trans-continental slave trade re-established.

At least for the moment. The SCOTUS decision is actually an emergency stay on a preliminary injunction issued by Judge Murphy, that is being appealed on the merits in the First Circuit. The majority gave no reason for its decision, just a dry paragraph on procedure. Sotomayor penned a dissent that appears unambiguously correct both on procedure and on the merits. But for now, all Miller needs is an initial removal order. He’s got an end-run around the additional process that a person is supposed to be entitled to, for contesting removal to a third-country location where they will experience persecution or torture, or where they will be killed.

I am speculating that what SCOTUS has done here is bail out the Trump regime from its self-induced debacle in which a bunch of sick immigration guards are stuck with a bunch of sick deportees in a shipping container on an air base in Djibouti, where they are at some risk of being hit by airstrikes. If so, it is a better job at bailing the regime out than SCOTUS did in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose return was in fact eventually facilitated, albeit with all the unnecessary show and bluster of a fabricated criminal prosecution.

Regardless, I expect Stephen Miller to try to hit the accelerator while he has the green light.

It’s no longer a question of it can happen again, or if it can happen here. It is happening here, now. It is in motion. We can see it taking shape. We can see the emerging patterns. How history will define it in the end —period of extreme violence, ethnic cleansing, genocide, other— is what we can’t yet see.

We enjoyed a period of liberalism in this country, and believed we’d reached the end of history. We convinced ourselves that our long history of authoritarianism, extreme violence, and oppression was remote, and that modernity made us immune. We pretended that the irrationality of racist violence and mass hysteria were ills cured by our modernity. We ignored the authoritarian infrastructure being assembled all the while. Mass incarceration. We ignored the oppression that never ended. Continual police murders of Black Americans.

Now, we tell ourselves that the lawlessness of MAGA is unprecedented. It is, but it isn’t. It’s a reincarnation of the confederacy. The masked men in tactical gear beating a father in the head while they have him flat on the ground is an echo of the KKK. What we’re experiencing now is an outgrowth of our legacy, as much as it is an aberration therefrom. We’ve always been a nation of profound contradictions.

Too many of us are inclined to throw up our hands, to surrender to cynical disillusionment, to resign ourselves to what we have decided is fast-approaching and unavoidable doom. I think this is a mistake. Americans have a capacity for resistance that may eclipse all our peers and historical predecessors. We are a massive country. We have a decentralized, federalist system. We have a robust civil society that is not easily dismantled. We have wealth. Most of us, especially those of us who are white, middle class, educated, licensed professionals, wield a great deal of social power. As a society, we have the capacity to withstand the long game of democracy, to get to the other side of this period of history without becoming permanently Putinized. We have the capacity; my question now is whether we have the will.

Americans have been coddled and lulled into complacency, ignorance, and self-defeating cynicism. We must search within ourselves and reclaim the sense of American identity that is our birthright. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of association, freedom of religion. Individual liberty. Equal protection of the law. No kings. Separation of powers. Checks and balances. Federalism, sovereignty of states and localities. Freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. Due process. Justice. Self-determination. These are just some of our defining ideals. Our commitment to them is our fuel for what will be a long, hard, worthwhile and necessary path to redemption.