The current administration has found and is exploiting a real weakness in our system of government and culture: our shared desire for security from crime and economic hardship. The question worth asking is at what cost that security is being purchased, and who is actually the greater threat to most Americans' day-to-day safety — immigrants, or the actions of an increasingly unconstrained executive and the oligarchy around it.
This law recodified a patchwork of immigration statutes into a single comprehensive policy. Congress passed it over President Truman's veto. Truman himself warned that provisions of the bill would let "minor immigration officials act as prosecutor, judge, and jury," and cautioned against the risk of unreasonable invasions of privacy that came with it. For decades afterward, by policy, administrations of both parties generally required warrants and judicial review before INS arrests.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, signed by President Clinton, allowed the INS to expedite removal — without the right of habeas corpus — for undocumented arrivals at official ports of entry. The change was achieved in part simply by replacing the word "deportation" with "removal" throughout the relevant federal code. The law addressed real problems at the border, but also backfired badly: new entry requirements made illegal entry easier than legal entry, driving a surge in unauthorized crossings. President George W. Bush, a longtime Texas rancher who valued immigrant labor and spoke Spanish, later pushed a comprehensive reform bill in 2007 — it was defeated in both chambers after intense lobbying from business interests benefiting from a cheap, vulnerable workforce.
Following the 2007 reform bill's failure, the Bush administration expanded expedited removal to anyone encountered within two weeks of arrival and within 100 miles of any border — a zone that includes numerous large cities.
A further policy change gave the interviewing officer sole discretion to determine a person's status on the spot, with no investigation and no evidence required.
An executive action extended expedited removal to cover the entire United States, not just border regions.
The current administration both directs and fully supports ICE's use of expedited removal without warrant or judicial review. In principle, local police could arrest ICE agents who break the law, but federal statute would refer any such case to federal court, to be prosecuted only at the discretion of the Attorney General — and given a recent mass pardon of January 6th defendants, the likelihood of any such prosecution appears slim. With few remaining checks on this authority, an individual immigration officer can now effectively act as police, prosecutor, judge, jury, and in some recent cases, executioner.
The Sturmabteilung, or SA — Hitler's original paramilitary "stormtroopers" — formed from citizens embittered by a collapsed post-WWI economy, answered only to Hitler personally, and terrorized political opponents while spreading propaganda. In Italy, the OVRA functioned as Mussolini's secret police from 1927 onward, executing the rulings of a special tribunal created to try "enemies of the state," under Mussolini's direct command.
By comparison: U.S. police officers typically train for the equivalent of a two-year associate's degree at a state academy. ICE has hired roughly 12,000 new agents in the past year with training reduced to six weeks. The agency's use-of-force policy was redacted almost entirely within hours of a recent killing, leaving only a single public paragraph where a detailed policy once stood.
Hitler and Mussolini operated largely in secrecy. We do not have that excuse today — cameras are everywhere, and the documentation of these incidents is extensive and growing. A government structure where one person commands an unaccountable armed force, operating with minimal oversight, meets a reasonable definition of a police state, regardless of what country it happens in.
The Fourth Amendment guarantees the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, absent a warrant supported by probable cause. The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees due process and equal protection to all persons within U.S. jurisdiction. Both protections are directly implicated by the policy trajectory described above.
An executive order and a related national security memorandum issued in September 2025 define a broad category of "domestic terrorism" that, as written, could encompass any of us. This is not an abstract concern — ask residents of Russia, China, or North Korea what unconstrained executive power actually does to ordinary people over time.