The System Is Already Turning Inward

What begins as immigration enforcement is becoming a domestic infrastructure for silencing dissent, criminalizing solidarity, and managing political crisis through exclusion.

There is a familiar pattern emerging: the silencing and targeting of opponents. It’s a page torn from the authoritarian playbook, and ignoring it comes at our peril.

If you think the detention centers are only for undocumented immigrants, think again. The same machinery is being readied for dissenters, protesters, educators, and public workers. What begins at the margins doesn’t stay there.

The trap isn’t waiting to be sprung. It’s being assembled in daylight, piece by piece, using executive orders already issued, agencies already aligned, and legal categories already redrawn. Under Trump’s second term, criminality is no longer defined by action but by association, identity, and perceived disloyalty.

The logic was set in motion during his first presidency: normalize detention, discredit oversight, and turn legal language into a weapon of political control. Now, that architecture is being fitted out for wider use.

EO 14159 declares that all undocumented immigrants are criminal threats subject to immediate detention and prosecution, regardless of length of stay or family ties.¹ The order also targets U.S. citizens who provide aid—medical, legal, even shelter. It threatens them with criminal charges and cuts federal funds to cities that refuse to comply. EO 14157 invokes the Alien Enemies Act to label designated gangs and cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, laying the groundwork for mass deportation without trial.²

Then there’s EO 14288, which directs federal resources toward local law enforcement while shielding officers from civil liability and accountability.³ This isn’t just about funding. It’s about insulation. The same order calls for longer sentences for those who commit crimes against police, while declining to apply the same standard when violence flows in the other direction.

A separate order issued July 24 instructs cities to forcibly remove unhoused people from public spaces and permits states to use involuntary commitment for those deemed a “nuisance to public safety.”⁴ Judicial protections are bypassed by framing the issue as health and sanitation. In January, Trump signed an executive directive to convert Guantánamo Bay into a detention center for up to 30,000 people labeled “serious criminal illegal aliens”: a category not clearly defined.⁵ Once offshore, normal constitutional protections no longer apply.

It would be easy to think these measures are confined to immigration or law enforcement. But the pattern of expansion is already visible. State legislatures in Florida, Texas, and Oklahoma have passed laws that redefine peaceful protest as riot if a single person engages in property damage or if the protest blocks traffic. These same laws grant immunity to drivers who injure protesters on the roadway. Others impose mandatory jail time for assembling without a permit, even when no violence occurs.

The targets have also shifted. In Florida, teachers risk felony charges for discussing gender identity or sexual orientation before high school. In Texas, legislation allows the state to remove educators who teach what lawmakers call “anti-American” or “divisive” concepts. The language is vague by design, turning every lesson plan into a potential liability. Libraries have been raided for LGBTQ books. School boards have faced threats for maintaining inclusive curricula. Under Project 2025, such restrictions would become national policy, enforced through a “Schedule F” purge of federal workers and criminal penalties for those who violate ideological guidelines.

And the scope keeps widening. Scientists who challenge state environmental policies, public health officials who contradict partisan narratives, even election workers following legal procedure—all have been recast as saboteurs. The category of “enemy” is no longer about what one does. It’s about who one is perceived to represent.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice talks of rooting out “weaponized government” even as it targets journalists and nonprofits with subpoenas. The ActBlue investigation—framed as financial oversight—is a thinly veiled warning to grassroots donors. Trump has floated the use of military tribunals for “traitors” and suggested re-education camps for those he claims are undermining the country from within. These are not offhand remarks. They echo policy outlines already circulating among allied think tanks.

Behind it all is selective enforcement. EO 14288 makes it harder to hold police accountable, while Trump allies push for blanket pardons for January 6 rioters. In contrast, environmental activists, pro-choice organizers, and trans-rights advocates are increasingly treated as national security risks. Loyalty, not legality, is becoming the operative standard.

The machinery of repression begins quietly—through procedural shifts, redefined categories, and legal tools that seem neutral until they’re applied unevenly. By the time it becomes clear who the system is built to contain, the mechanisms for resistance may already be compromised.

The anthropology of state power teaches us that categories are never neutral. Labeling someone a threat doesn’t just justify their removal. It normalizes it. The same techniques used to detain immigrants or silence protesters are easily redirected toward librarians, doctors, scientists, or journalists. The further that logic spreads, the less it needs to justify itself. Surveillance becomes routine. Detention becomes administrative. The legal system doesn’t have to silence you. It only needs to move you into a different category.

This isn’t simply a carceral expansion. It’s a form of governance that manages inequality through exclusion. As the economy produces ever larger populations deemed unnecessary or unruly, detention replaces care, punishment substitutes for dialogue, and political control is exercised through categorical disappearance. In that sense, repression is not just a tactic. It’s a strategy for ruling under conditions of permanent crisis.

There’s a precedent for all of this. The Palmer Raids of 1919, Japanese internment during World War II, and the use of vagrancy laws to criminalize Black labor after Reconstruction all followed a similar pattern: define a threat, invoke an emergency, and build an apparatus that outlives its justification. What makes today different is how thoroughly the apparatus is being constructed through digital records, executive orders, and administrative procedure—without ever needing to declare it exceptional.

There is nothing spectacular about how it unfolds. No declarations. Just quiet authorizations, agency memos, adjusted criteria for detention, surveillance, and enforcement. The paperwork of authoritarian rule.

There is still time to resist, but not if we insist on treating each policy as if it exists in isolation. These are not missteps or excesses. They are parts of a system. One no longer quietly designed, but openly deployed.

Endnotes

1. Executive Order 14159: Protecting the American People Against Invasion (Jan. 20, 2025), outlining expanded expedited removal authority, criminal penalties for aid providers, and denial of funds to sanctuary jurisdictions.

2. Executive Order 14157: Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (Jan. 20, 2025), enabling use of the Alien Enemies Act for deportation.

3. Executive Order 14288: Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens (Apr. 28, 2025), expanding police authority and limiting liability.

4. Executive Order issued July 24, 2025 on homelessness criminalization, directing forced removal and involuntary commitment of unhoused individuals.

5. Executive directive (Jan. 29, 2025) converting Guantánamo Bay into a detention center for “serious criminal illegal aliens.”

Suggested Readings

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation. Verso, 2022.

Golash-Boza, Tanya. Deported: Policing Immigrants, Disrupting Communities. NYU Press, 2015.

Heyman, Josiah McC. “Putting Power in the Anthropology of Bureaucracy: The Immigration and Naturalization Service at the Mexico–United States Border.” Current Anthropology 36, no. 2 (1995): 261–87.

Hinton, Elizabeth. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. Liveright, 2021.

Legal Defense Fund (NAACP). “President Trump’s Executive Order on Policing Explained.” www.naacpldf.org

Project on Government Oversight. “Trump’s Schedule F Executive Order Would Politicize the Civil Service.” www.pogo.org

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. University of Arizona Press, 2025.