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THE SEEDS OF TODAY’S FASCIST THREAT LIE IN OUR OWN PAST  
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Whitney Curry Wimbish
May 28, 2026
The American Prospect
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_ The seeds of an authoritarian state will still be there unless the
United States reckons with its own fascist past and how that relates
to Stephen Miller’s vision for the future. _

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Despite what Republicans and some mainstream Democrats would have us
believe, half of Americans agree
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that ICE should no longer exist. Progressive candidates across the
country have taken note and are using “Abolish ICE” as a rallying
cry to organize their communities and win elections.

Rep. Analilia Mejía (D-NJ) is one such progressive. She campaigned on
abolishing ICE against ten other candidates, some of whom had raised
much more money, and won her primary and then the special election.
The day after she was sworn in, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries
(D-NY) announced Mejía’s appointment
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to the House Committee on Homeland Security, the body that oversees
ICE and the Trump regime’s immigration terror campaign, joining
others on the committee who have called for
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ICE’s abolishment
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and redirecting funding to community-based organizations.

_MORE FROM WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH_
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Shortly after her appointment, Mejía participated in a hearing of the
Homeland Security Committee
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immigration agents had shot and assaulted what “meaningful
actions” lawmakers could take to bring them justice. Most said they
wanted accountability for the agents who hurt them. But the Rev. David
Black, senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Chicago, whom
federal immigration agents shot multiple times
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in the head, face, and body with pepper balls and shoved to the ground
when he protested outside an ICE prison in Broadview, Illinois, last
year, had a different answer.

“With respect to the members who believe in reform, I believe that
this department and administration really need an exorcist. That’s
my opinion as a pastor,” he said. “I would like people to
understand in this Congress and in the United States, that what we are
facing, the evil we are facing from this administration, goes beyond
political solutions and goes beyond reform. It requires spiritual
solutions.”

Some Democrats have been more circumspect in the face of ICE’s
terror or have retreated to weasel words that fall short of wholesale
reform. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), for example, wants to “abolish ICE
as we know it
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Political leaders like this have failed to fully internalize the
political project of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller
and his intellectual allies in the Trump administration. They mean to
have the federal government fund, arm, equip, and train a paramilitary
force to roam the country as it pleases, with few or no checks on its
power. They mean to institutionalize an entity that is incompatible
with democracy.

_STEPHEN MILLER AND HIS ALLIES IN THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION MEAN TO
INSTITUTIONALIZE AN ENTITY THAT IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH DEMOCRACY._

The clearest indication of Miller’s desire was when he went on state
media—Fox News—last fall and gave these men with guns a directive.
“To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of
your duties. And anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you
or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony,” Miller said
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one—no city official, no state official, no illegal alien, no
leftist agitator or domestic insurrectionist—can prevent you from
fulfilling your legal obligations and duties.”

Miller made these comments three months before agents killed Renee
Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis; the Department of Homeland
Security shared Miller’s clip on X
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after the Good murder, as if to confirm ICE sat beyond the reach of
the law. It was a matter of time until Miller’s concept would result
in death.

Scholars who study authoritarian and fascist regimes may not be
calling for an exorcism or spiritual renewal. But they do say that
simply erasing institutions that embody such ideologies is not enough
to escape them. Inevitably, authoritarianism will more easily return
if the structures that enable it remain in place, just as Jonathan
Ross, the ICE officer who killed Renee Good, was reassigned
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to another part of the bureaucracy.

They also say that while it is tempting for Americans to look to
places like Argentina, Germany, or Italy for guidance, those are poor
comparisons for what’s going on in America today. Instead, they
suggest revisiting America’s own history, when enough people decided
to take the nation away from its genocidal, slave-owning genesis,
fought a war that left 620,000 dead
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than any other war in U.S. history—and then spent a century
struggling to end Jim Crow laws that oppressed Black people.

“Abolishing ICE is probably not that hard,” said Yanilda María
González, assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy
School, who studies authoritarianism. “Agencies get abolished all
the time.”

ICE IS A MODERN INVENTION. Its creation abolished a different
immigration agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, when
lawmakers overwhelmingly passed the 2002 Homeland Security Act
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following 9/11. That law was ostensibly meant to stop future attacks
from terrorists, and all but ten senators voted for it. (Frank
Murkowski, Republican from Alaska, did not cast a vote.) Enacted
through democratic processes, the new law handed racist authoritarians
a tool with which to terrorize immigrants, drive them underground,
strip them of basic human rights, and facilitate an easily abused
workforce.

The evolution of the Homeland Security Act from a response to 9/11 to
one facing inward came within a matter of years. The law held that ICE
would answer to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and be
responsible for enforcing immigration law, investigating the illegal
movement of people and goods, and preventing terrorism. The agency it
replaced had answered to the Department of Justice.

ICE had an initial budget of $3.3 billion. Funding for the new agency
crept upward for years and under President Barack Obama was slightly
less than $6 billion in 2015. During that fiscal year, the federal
government reported
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that ICE had removed or deported 235,413 people.

Ten years later, the base budget is now roughly $10 billion, but it
has been supplemented with a surge of $75 billion in extra funding
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from the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Meanwhile, the number of
deportations in FY2025 hit 443,000
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according to Reuters, up from 271,000 the year before. The Trump
administration has stopped issuing detailed statistics on immigration,
just as it has stopped issuing timely notices each time someone dies
in its immigrant concentration camps. The _Prospect_’s nonscientific
tally
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listed the names of 55 people who have died in ICE custody as of April
24. Immigration agents have injured dozens of people since the
beginning of 2025 and killed at least 28. These are minimum numbers.

Democrats tried to at least hold up the base funding for the 2026
fiscal year, conditioning it on a series of relatively modest reforms.
But at the end of April, Republican lawmakers introduced a measure
using the party-line budget reconciliation process that would send yet
more money to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP): a $70
billion baseline
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that would fund the agencies through at least the end of President
Trump’s term. Because both the surge funding and this baseline
funding do not go through the normal appropriations process, this
avoids certain guardrails and accountability measures, like time
limits on spending and directives about where the money goes. The
money becomes a slush fund for abduction, warehousing, deportation,
and mass death and injury.

The vast amount of taxpayer wealth handed to immigration enforcement
has spread and nurtured violence, beyond abusing immigrants and those
trying to protect them. It’s also spawned a massive surveillance
network that can spy on anyone, regardless of their immigration
status, and acted as a jobs program for violent far-right bigots, whom
it recruits with Nazi imagery at gun shows, “Ultimate Fight Club
venues, rodeos, martial arts centers, and other haunts for men who
tend to have a far right political vision,” as Truthout reported
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Homeland Security officials are hiring at such a fast rate that
they’re unable to fully vet their new recruits, an AP investigation
found
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filling the ranks with bankrupt people who are easy to extort and
people who have previously been accused of misconduct. The rot that
this represents goes beyond the existence of a single governmental
agency.

THE IMPLICIT GOAL OF ICE is to eliminate illegal immigration entirely.
But immigrants are always going to come into the United States, as
North Carolina Justice Center senior attorney Carol Brooke explained.
“Unfortunately,” she said, “the economic situation in other
countries is such that people will come regardless of how difficult we
make it for them while they’re here.”

At some level, Miller and his allies know this. The presence of the
paramilitary force is not solely to enforce immigration laws or
improve job availability for native-born citizens. It’s to project
authoritarian power. And that’s made easier by the fact that such
power projection is already all around us.

The brutality of rounding up and kicking out hundreds of thousands of
people and imprisoning at least 60,311
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immigration detention camps has infuriated people across the U.S., who
have put themselves physically and financially in danger to protect
themselves and their neighbors. Many have wondered how widespread
violence conducted by masked agents could happen in the land of the
free.

But the surrealism of such a tyrannical force existing within a
democratic nation is not as odd as it sounds, González said.
Authoritarian enclaves routinely exist within democratic nations,
using authoritarian practices, formal rules, and informal norms,
including arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killings.
And while the U.S. is accustomed to denouncing these practices in
State Department human rights reports, they persist in the United
States just as they do in countries that have undergone celebrated
transitions to democracy, including Brazil and Argentina.

“Even in the U.S there are all these different ways where the local
police departments have operated in authoritarian enclaves,” she
said. The emergence of ICE as an institution is just one example, she
and other scholars said. Other modern examples include prison and even
American workplaces, where employees’ ability to access modern
medicine, buy groceries, and pay rent comes to an end if a boss
decides to hand out pink slips.

“These authoritarian policies are the outcomes of ordinary
democratic policies,” González said. One reason she gave will make
average Democratic voters uncomfortable: Some Americans want them.
Consider the Trump rallies across the country, at which white
supporters held up signs that said “Mass Deportation Now!”
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“We have bottom-up societal demand for this violence, for extralegal
force,” González said. In Brazil, for example, surveys throughout
the years show that the popular phrase “bandido bom é bandido
morto,” or “a good criminal is a dead criminal,” routinely draws
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between
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36 and 60 percent agreement. Her own survey found that 40 percent of
participants agreed with the phrase. Some tolerate the violence, and
some outright support it.

Infrastructure like ICE fulfills this latent desire. “These are
demands that end up getting channeled through democratic
institutions,” she said. “I’ve sat in committee meetings where
citizens applaud when someone says a police officer killed someone.
They applaud like, ‘Thank God.’”

That outlook comes from frustrations with crime, feeling unsafe and
unprotected, and anger that the government has responded inadequately.
Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right former president of Brazil who is now
serving a 27-year term for an attempted coup, campaigned on that
violence, saying “a police officer who does not kill is not a police
officer
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and that cops should get medals for killing
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Donald Trump has voiced similar sentiments
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suggesting that the government grant police officers “one real
rough, nasty” and “violent day” in the style of _The Purge_,
because that would “immediately” end crime. These are appealing
statements to people who are afraid and angry about crime, and in the
U.S., for people who do not know that overall crime and property
offenses across the country have been falling for years
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“People’s frustration with rising crime or a sense of disorder,
candidates using this type of really pro-violence rhetoric is not a
minus, it’s a plus, it’s not a bug it’s a feature, it’s
something that makes people vote for them as opposed to something that
would repel voters,” said González. “There are incentives for
politicians to make these types of demands.”

Those incentives get a boost from a highly concentrated media
apparatus that works in service of regime officials yet brands itself
as news, scholars said. Fox News is the standard-bearer of state
media, but the propagandistic nature of the news industry is
everywhere, laundering the talking points of the political party in
power, accepting corporate economic theories as fact, and taking the
side of the State Department.

_MANY HAVE WONDERED HOW WIDESPREAD VIOLENCE CONDUCTED BY MASKED AGENTS
COULD HAPPEN IN THE LAND OF THE FREE._

As civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis points out in his book
_Copaganda_ [[link removed]], consuming
content from mainstream media outlets that routinely take the side of
police skews perceptions (including in subtle ways like using the
passive voice to shield cops), makes people feel less safe, and
increases their fear of marginalized groups. And as Jeremy Busby
writes from a Texas prison
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where he is incarcerated, “propaganda can turn people into
individuals they would have once despised,” including leading
incarcerated people to believe they no longer deserve soap and toilet
paper, “and get angry at anyone who did,” after watching enough
“law and order” commentary on Fox. He warned that the same is true
for anyone: Watch enough anti-democratic propaganda, and “people on
the outside may stop believing they deserve democracy.”

These are some of the factors that lead members of a democracy to
support authoritarianism, scholars said. Simply replacing ICE, or even
the entire DHS, won’t touch the real problem, nor do nations that
have rejected full-blown fascist dictatorships hold the answers.

A BETTER SOURCE FOR GUIDANCE, said Alberto Toscano, an adjunct
professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Communication, is
to look at the fascism America has already confronted and to the
radical Black thinkers who have been doing that since the nation’s
founding. He outlined this position in a 2020 column
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pointing out that radical Black thinkers have struggled to get white
Americans to face the fascism inherent to colonialism and racial
slavery for more than a hundred years—“long before Nazi violence
came to be conceived of as beyond analogy.”

The American tendency to look for answers abroad ignores that America
has already contended with fascists in the form of racist slavers who
bought and sold Black people on an industrial scale. It’s one thing
to take inspiration from international anti-fascist fights. But
imagining oneself as analogous to a member of the French resistance,
he said, is “silly.” It’s also a tendency driven by American
exceptionalism and emotional fragility, allowing Americans to think of
fascism “as a kind of aberration or exception,” Toscano said.
“It allows you to think there is something fundamentally positive in
the U.S. order.”

That is why, he said, it’s better to study Black radical activists
and authors in the U.S., including W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes,
and Angela Davis, and ask, “What are the homegrown forms of
racialized fascism and authoritarianism that are baked into U.S.
institutions?” It’s not that nothing can be learned from other
countries, but thinking about what Europeans did after fascism has
limited virtue if you’re not thinking about how the U.S. failed to
ever truly transition into a multiracial democracy. Why are white
people still trying to disenfranchise Black voters in 2026? Is the
U.S. Constitution fundamentally corrupted by existing with slavery for
80 years? The experiences of other countries cannot answer.

“In all those cases you’re talking about the passage from one
political order or form of government to another,” said Toscano.
“That’s not really the case with the U.S. All of the institutions
are in some sense the same. [Trump and Miller have] grown ICE, but Tom
Homan was hired and given a medal by Barack Obama … The political
and institutional architecture of the U.S. has not been radically
transferred, but abused or perverted.”

Toscano added that instead of learning what Americans can learn from
Europe after World War II, a better question is what can be learned
about the fact that much of the right wing is unhappy about the
results of the Civil War. To truly change the future of the United
States, he said, the electorate would need to engage in a version of
what Rev. Black suggested with his “spiritual solutions.”

“Whatever comes after Trump, if there were a political movement and
a shift in government such that the idea would be to really revoke
many of the effects of Trumpism in the United States, this would
actually involve not returning to the previous status quo but engaging
in some serious radical reforms,” Toscano said, such as changing the
nature of the Supreme Court or radically rethinking U.S. residency
rules, which “have always been authoritarian in its potentiality.”

But, he said, a real discussion of a Third Reconstruction can’t
happen if people think the order is good, just taken over by bad
people. “That’s the fundamental flaw in the ideology of the
mainstream Democratic Party,” Toscano said.

 

FOR MEJÍA, THE ANSWER LIES in organizing. Speaking with the
_Prospect_ after the DHS hearing, she agreed that simply getting rid
of one agency is not enough, and like Toscano she is drawing
inspiration from American civil rights fighters, who used legal
challenges, direct actions, boycotts, and protests, while holding
their ground against vicious racists who attacked them and their
children physically and assassinated their leaders. They also
organized, which was one of the messages from Rev. Black’s testimony
she said resonated with her.

As an organizer, Mejía said she heard a call for community-building,
connecting with neighbors, and getting more people to take an active
role in participating in governance. She cited research by Erica
Chenoweth, dean and Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at
Harvard Kennedy School, who theorizes that governments typically fail
to withstand challenges from 3.5 percent of the population
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To her, that means doing exactly what she did to get elected: meeting
with constituents, offering training and education sessions, and
listening to their needs, fears, and hopes, and encouraging them to do
the same.

“In many ways we’re going to have to return to old-school
organizing,” she said. “3.5 percent deeply engaged doesn’t just
mean people reading the news but rather … 3.5 percent of the
population has to be actively engaging with their neighbors,
activating them.”

That is what will roll back ICE and the rising fascism it embodies.
After all, she said, the United States has already endured a fascist
regime. “We’ve experienced that in the U.S,” she said. “It
just wasn’t evenly distributed.”

For Toscano, it also requires imagining a new future, as Du Bois wrote
about in the 1930s. Toscano says it is striking that the best that
many Democratic leaders can do is think about removing recent
institutions, not radically overhauling any of the American systems
that have made ICE and the Trump/Miller immigration terror campaign
possible. It’s not as if the South just gave Black people better
representation out of kindness, he said. The Union Army occupied
Southern states and forced them to.

“There’s almost no willingness to recognize that the reason things
have come to this really grim point is because the U.S. laws and the
U.S. state make all of this possible,” Toscano said. “What I
don’t see happening, even among the further left edges of the
Democratic Party, is a political analysis that would really say that a
very drastic reform of the U.S. constitutional order would be
necessary for this not to happen again.”

Without that, he said, rhetoric about the rule of law, the
Constitution, the checks and balances is completely hollow. That
unwillingness, the inability to really question the institutional and
legal order of the United States, is what has made ICE possible.

“So, what would a reform or transformation or abolition of this kind
of precedent look like?” he asked. “And who’s willing to take it
on?”

_WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She
previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The
Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her
work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York
Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature,
North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a
coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes
short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on
Signal at wwimbish.07._

_Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024.
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* Fascism
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* slavery
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* History
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