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After dinner last night, I had some extended thoughts on Columbia Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies Rashid Khalidi's decision to cancel his scheduled course this fall at Columbia (anti) University, so I wrote up a journal/opinion piece.

Needless to say, I agreed with his decision and think more professors at compromised collaborator universities around the country should be joining him. But this episode also says a lot about the way Swine Emperor Trump is conducting his war to seize control of American cultural institutions in both the public and private sectors, and repurpose them as organs of fascist propaganda devoted to the cult of Trump/cracker ethnonationalism.

ninaillingworth.com/2025/08/03

Journal: Courage, Cowardice, and Collaboration

"Still, if educators in America had either half a brain, or half a heart, a great many more university professors would be refusing to teach at institutions collaborating with a fascist regime to subvert truth, journalism, and scientific reality this fall. Professor Khalidi isn’t wrong when he points out that the suits running Columbia have allowed their university to be transformed into a militarized security zone, and a fascist propaganda machine that fundamentally inverts the role of educators in our society – an “anti-university” as the professor noted. Not only is it impossible for a genuine educator to function under those conditions, but even attempting to do so will likely result in open fascist collaboration with an increasingly Third Reich-esque Trump regime. Society has a term for people who only collaborated with the Third Reich to spread racist, eliminationist, antidemocratic propaganda for a paycheck; that term is “Nazi propagandists” and history doesn’t speak of them kindly."

Nina Illingworth Dot Com | "When the revolution is for everyone, everyone will be for the revolution" · Journal: Courage, Cowardice, and Collaboration | on NIDCRashid Khalidi's recent stand against Columbia University's collaboration with Trump's fascist cultural agenda is important; more US educators should join him.
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When writing about both the Trump regime's ethnic cleansing project, and the ensuing reign of terror being conducted on our streets by the Gestapo, I've tried to focus on a few reoccurring, and important lines of examination. We've talked a lot about the way local police forces are aiding the Trumpenreich's white nationalist mass deportation project, the role that a pre-existing "counterterrorism" mass surveillance panopticon is playing in the larger fascist agenda to transform America into a dictatorship, and how everything Trump is doing here is built on the already massive skeleton of a racist, fascist police state that was created long before the Swine Emperor ever took office. All of which exemplifies what I've been saying about Donald Trump and the MAGA movement since 2016; namely that Downmarket Mussolini and his entire regime are at once a product of, and an accelerant for, Pig Empire fascism.

Today I'd like to look at a terrifying Intercept report from late July, that in its own way pretty much encapsulates everything I've been saying about Trump, the Gestapo, and the cop-humping fascist society that produced them. A recent investigation reveals that at least eight (and almost certainly more) states and municipalities are sharing their racist, unsupervised, and extremely flawed "gang database" entries with ICE, who are using that data to kidnap and deport people often guilty of nothing more than a civil violation (or indeed, nothing at all) in our workplaces and on our streets.

theintercept.com/2025/07/22/ic

State Cops Quietly Tag Thousands as Gang Members — and Feed Their Names to ICE

"An investigation by The Intercept found that at least eight states and large municipalities funnel their gang database entries to ICE — which can then use the information to target people for arrest, deportation, or rendition to so-called “third countries.” Some of the country’s largest and most immigrant-dense states, like Texas, New York, Illinois, and Virginia, route the information to ICE through varied paths that include a decades-old police clearinghouse and a network of post-9/11 intelligence-sharing hubs.

Both federal immigration authorities and local police intelligence units operate largely in secret, and the full extent of the gang database-sharing between them is unknown. What is known, however, is that the lists are riddled with mistakes: Available research, reporting, and audits have revealed that many contain widespread errors and encourage racial profiling."

Well, the American police state is certainly the gift that keeps on giving, isn't it? Although the article doesn't directly articulate it, what you are looking at here is the nightmare confluence of over four decades of Pig Empire racialized policing policy, transforming into a many-headed Gestapo hydra at Trump's beck and call. The American obsession with gang violence rises out of 80's era US white supremacist politics, where virtually all crime committed by non-whites was racially coded under the auspices of gang activity to allow a largely bipartisan, cop-humping political class to portray marginalized communities as a threat to upstanding (white) citizens in need of aggressive and quite lucrative (for some) policing. The political rhetoric of this era, which continued well into the 90's, defined it as "the War on Drugs," but in reality it was, and always has been a war on marginalized communities. After 9/11, this War on Drugs, was fused with the alarming rise of a new counterterrorism police state inside America, as part of the "War on Terror." This too, turned out to pretty much be a war on nonwhite people, although the government also found time to expand it to include all sorts of dissenters, including anti-war activists, anti-police violence activists, and uh, dangerous environmentalist teens who believe in scientifically-verifiable climate crisis. Regardless of whatever purpose these programs were created to achieve, the reality is that they have resulted in the systemization of racialized policing and oppression in our society.

Naturally then, it only stands to reason that a fascist regime, built around the myth of a formerly-racially pure fallen America, conducting a white nationalist ethnic cleansing project before our very eyes, would seek to integrate the pre-existing, fascist American police state into its even more racially-focused operations; after all, we did build him a machine that already oppresses the shit out of minorities, and that's something the Trump regime wants to do a lot more of. When Tom Homan tells you kidnapped migrants are in a gang because he says so, this pre-existing structure is what he's relying on to make his propaganda hold water in the American discourse. To paraphrase hip Zoomers, if you don't want the torment nexus to fall into the hands of literal fucking nazis, don't build the torment nexus in the first place.

The Intercept · State Cops Quietly Tag Thousands as Gang Members — and Feed Their Names to ICEBy Chris Gelardi
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At the close of a long July for The Skinny on both a personal, and professional level, we managed to squeeze in one last newsletter collecting and cleaning up the best of my blog analysis, for the period of July 21st to 31st.

I don't imagine you'll be surprised to learn the news was pretty grim as our fascist government really got down to the business of embracing terrible friends, and marking out internal enemies. Our horrifying ethnic cleansing project kept surging forward with the only limit to how many brown people we're willing to lock up appearing to be how many people we can physically cram in cages and improvised holding areas inside our concentration camps. DHS wants the police to treat anti-Gestapo activism as a form of terrorism, Trump is making Medicaid spy on you for the nazis, and Trump wants to lock up unhoused people all over the country. Along the way we also talked about why the Paramount-Skydance merger is looking like a Pork Reich political project, what it might (or might not) mean that Trump is waffling on Israel's engineered famine in Gaza, and checked in on the expanding global gulag the regime is creating through deals with dangerous third countries to accept trafficked US prisoners being "deported."

Yeah, a good time was *not* had by all.

ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/31

The Skinny: Friends and Enemies

"Painting resistance to the mass deportation program as inherently criminal, the DHS threat warning conjures up a picture of a coordinated, media-driven conspiracy to turn Americans against the agency; rather than resistance being an obvious consequence of the Gestpo’s blatantly fascist, and often entirely illegal activities on the streets of America. The real purpose of the threat memo becomes clear however when you realize what the Gestapo is advising police to look out for and protect them from, which very obviously includes protestors, observers filming Gestapo activities, and literally people posting online about this fascist bullshit."

Nina Illingworth Dot Com | "When the revolution is for everyone, everyone will be for the revolution" · The Skinny: Friends and Enemies | Nina Illingworth Dot Com - Part 2As July drew to a close, the fascist Trumpenreich focused on identifying friends and marking out enemies; knives are being sharpened, and The Skinny was there. - Part 2
#Fascism#Trump#USPol
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I decided to expand this one out because I ran out of room to finish my argument here on the blog. I wrote about why a recent OPM memo allowing Christian Nationalists to attempt to convert their federal coworkers is a disturbing sign that may point to what the Trump regime's next excuse for a fascist crusade will be - combatting "anti-Christian bias" (by doing more fascism!)

ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/30

Nina-Bytes: Dark Omens of a New Crusade

"There will of course be folks who accuse me of overreacting when I say this new guidance is clearly the on ramp for the official adoption of Christian Nationalism as a state ideology, but I think even a cursory reading of what OPM Director Scott Kupor just released here demonstrates that this has nothing to do with workplace tolerance, or freedom of religion. In addition to allowing religious iconography, and public prayer, Kupor also wants government employees to be able to display “posters” with “religious messages” and solicit participation from even non-Christian employees in group expressions of religious sentiment. So what happens when your evangelical nazi co-worker puts up a poster saying “God hates queers?” How about when your Christian Nationalist supervisor calls “the team” together for a group prayer asking Jesus to protect the chosen one, Donald J. Trump? If you have to ask those questions, you’re clearly not understanding the policy; remember, laws, rights, and rules have no dominion over fascists in power, and only serve to bind or oppress their enemies."

Nina Illingworth Dot Com | "When the revolution is for everyone, everyone will be for the revolution" · Nina-Bytes: Dark Omens of a New Crusade | on NIDCNina talks about how a recent, barely noticed OPM federal workplace guidance may signal the next fundie fascist crusade the Trump regime intends to conduct.
#Fascism#OPM#Trump
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One of the most underexamined, perhaps even actively avoided topics of discussion in the larger discourse about the Trump regime's fascist ethnic cleaning project, is the administration's efforts to establish what Nick Turse has dubbed a "global gulag" of dangerous third party countries willing to accept trafficked migrants the US government insists are "dangerous criminals" yet in many cases, have no significant criminal record at all. Perhaps adhering to a philosophy of out of sight, out of mind, the US media has shown little interest in pursing these stories beyond whatever mystifying, pro-kidnapping and deportation rulings come out of a 6-3 fascist-high Supreme Court. As multiple investigations by The Intercept have shown however, the regime is running far more deportation flights, to far more dangerous concentration camps around the globe, than mainstream media coverage would lead you to believe.

In this examination, Turse checks out the US State Department's own assessments of the human rights records of both the countries the Trump regime has actually trafficked people to, and the countries the Trumpenreich is negotiating with to allow those "deportations." To the surprise of precisely no one, Foggy Bottom gave the vast majority of them a failing grade - 91% of them to be precise.

theintercept.com/2025/07/29/tr

State Dept: Trump’s “Third Countries” for Immigrants Have Awful Human Rights Records

"The nations that the Trump administration is collaborating with to accept these expelled immigrants are some of the worst human rights offenders on the planet, according to the U.S. government’s own reports.

More than 8,100 people have been expelled in this manner since January 20, and the U.S. has made arrangements to send people to at least 13 nations, so far, across the globe. Of them, 12 have been cited by the State Department for significant human rights abuses.

But the Trump administration has cast a much wider net for its third-country deportations. The U.S. has solicited 64 nations to participate in its growing global gulag for expelled immigrants. Fifty-eight of them — roughly 91 percent — were rebuked for human rights violations in the State Department’s most recent human rights reports."

Given the alarming number of people the Gestapo is rounding up off the streets, I can understand folks getting the idea that 8,100 kidnapped migrants trafficked to countries they often have no connection to whatsoever, is merely a drop in the bucket. They reality however is that these deportation flights, which can often contain as few as five people, represent one of the highest priorities for the Pork Reich's larger ethnic cleansing project because they are among the most difficult to stop, or undo. This is why the Trump regime took their case to remove the injunction blocking these third country deportation flights, all the way to the Supreme Court - where Roberts and the other "conservatives" found a loophole to let them get away with it.

Please then, keep in mind that the regime fought tooth and nail for the right to conduct expensive and inefficient migrant trafficking flights, while you consider what the rest of this data means. Specifically, and as Refugees International's Yael Schacher told the Intercept, that "the Trump administration cares nothing for human rights and wants these deportations to third countries to be punitive." Which is a very college way of saying we're purposely shipping migrants to unstable third country gulags because we want to disappear them in the cruelest, most harmful way possible. Let me rephrase that: we are paying to vanish people in some of the worst dungeons, and least safe places on Earth because our white nationalist government loves hurting nonwhite people, and is trying to create a white, or at least significantly whiter, American ethnostate.

Given the broad spread of countries the US is secretly negotiating with (at least 64 right now), the conditions trafficked migrants are held in vary significantly; but as the State Department's own reports detail, confinement, abuse, torture and extrajudicial murder are common dangers in the majority of third party countries accepting US deportation flights. For example, both South Sudan and Eswatini, countries which recently accepting 8 and 5 kidnapped migrants from the US government, are unquestionably hotbeds for extrajudicial killings and torture according to both the US State Department, and the United Nations.

In the end, it doesn't matter what the media, or the Supreme Court say, these are all violations of international law, and in some cases crimes against humanity. The Trump regime can write themselves whatever policy guideline excuses they like, it doesn't change the fact that this is absolutely nightmare Nazi shit, and everyone involved had better hope America never sees another day free from fascist domination, or they're all going to prison for a very long time.

The Intercept · State Dept: Trump’s “Third Countries” for Immigrants Have Awful Human Rights RecordsBy Nick Turse
#Fascism#Trump#DHS
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I made some time last night to write a little bit about why the massive increase in Gestapo funding in the recently-passed GOP reconciliation budget has me extremely nervous about the future in Trump's fascist America. When a fascist, would-be dictator's private police force, becomes a private army, we're no longer talking about *just* an American Gestapo...

ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/28

A Schutzstaffel of His Own

"All of which simply presupposes that the massive funding increase for a militarized police force loyal to the executive branch is only, or even primarily, about immigration enforcement. As the author notes, when a fascist regime that has already abused its power over immigration enforcement to punish its political enemies, gives its private Gestapo more than enough money to deport every immigrant in America, legal or otherwise, it would be foolish to believe the regime is going to stop at hunting down migrants. We are talking about a government that routinely links protest with terrorism, kidnapped and attempted to deport foreign anti-genocide student activists under the guise of protecting US national security, and pretends America is being invaded by narco-terrorist gangs, all to grant the regime extraordinary and legally dubious authoritarian powers. Between targeting campaigns like Project Esther, Trump’s attempts to create an AI-powered surveillance state, and DHS preparing ICE agents to kick in the front doors of American citizens, we don’t have to ask if an ICE the size of an army will be turned on American citizens and Trump’s political enemies, because the Gestapo already is targeting those people without all this additional funding now."

Nina Illingworth Dot Com | "When the revolution is for everyone, everyone will be for the revolution" · A Schutzstaffel of His Own | Nina Illingworth Dot ComAlthough it didn't register much in American corporate media, the budget bill Republicans just passed transforms ICE from Trump's Gestapo, into the Regime's SS.
#Fascism#Trump#ICE
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I want to engage in a little news necromancy to briefly look at a story from a couple of weeks ago, because I think the discourse around it quickly got lost in a "just Trump being Trump" narrative across corporate media. As widespread Gestapo workplace raids continued in California, popular resistance to both the Trumpenreich's federal occupation of Los Angeles, and ICE fascist repression across the entire country, has predictably increased. After two violent July Gestapo raids on farms in California (that left one person dead), resulted in ICE having to flee bystanders throwing rocks at their vehicles, the Swine Emperor took to his personal social media site to issue legally-dubious authorization for the Gestapo to arrest, and potentially shoot protestors.

theguardian.com/us-news/2025/j

Trump authorizes Ice agents to protect themselves using ‘whatever means’ necessary

“I am giving Total Authorization for Ice to protect itself, just like they protect the Public,” Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday, adding that he was directing the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, and “border czar”, Tom Homan, to arrest anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) protesters who impede immigration enforcement operations.

Trump said he’s told the administrators to “instruct all Ice, Homeland Security, or any other Law Enforcement Officer who is on the receiving end of thrown rocks, bricks, or any other form of assault, to stop their car, and arrest these SLIMEBALLS, using whatever means is necessary to do so”.

The president appeared to be referring to an incident on Thursday when federal agents clashed with protesters during immigration raids on two farms in California’s Ventura county, north of Los Angeles."

There's a lot going on here, so let's just start with Trump's wording and work our way backway here.

I quoted this part of the article specifically because it quoted the Swine Emperor, and I think it's really important to see the way he seizes on one response to brutal ICE workplace raids that literally killed a guy, specifically folks throwing rocks at the windows of fleeing Gestapo vehicles, to go after everyone trying to stop an ethnic cleansing operation, even though lawful protest activity. This is intentional, and Trump's grouping of these very different forms of resistance to the Gestapo fits in well with the larger argument the Trumpenreich is making, from Tom Homan, to Troy Edgar, and even Seb Gorka, that trying to stop Gestapo kidnappings and an ethnic cleansing operation in any way at all, including nonviolent protest or simply documenting the Gestapo's activities, is effectively violent sedition, a form of terrorism, or material support for terrorists. Trump treats protestors, and outraged bystanders throwing rocks as the same thing, because in the regime's eyes they are the same thing - treason against the Trumpenreich. This pattern of establishing an alternate false worldview, and then repeatedly speaking and behaving as if it were true, is a consistently-applied method of transforming fascist fantasy into enforced reality for the Trump regime, as we've documented previously on this blog.

So, is it actually legal for the President to "authorize" ICE to start arresting protestors and using "whatever means necessary" to punish people they think "attacked" them? No, probably not. Since the Gestapo, including ICE, DHS, and CBP all pretty much answer only to the President however, I wouldn't bet on that mattering a whole fuck lot the next some some Gestapo pig decides you didn't get out of the way fast enough at an anti-ethnic cleansing protest. Furthermore, the existence of this quasi-official "gloves off" command from the Swine Emperor, takes on even more ominous tones when you remember that the fascist GOP just approved funding the Gestapo like a small army, and the hiring of at least 10,000 more nazi immigration pigs. If the Gestapo is coming to a town near you, and it is indeed evolving beyond immigration enforcement and into Trump's own personal militarized secret police force, it should probably concern you that Downmarket Mussolini is telling them to start mass arresting protestors and cracking heads in reprisal for resistance.

Finally I should note the sheer petulant reaction Trump's behavior exposes here. The Guardian carries a lot of water for the Swine Emperor in this piece by dredging up other, more serious examples of armed resistance to the Gestapo to cover his tracks, but Trump's own post makes it clear what he's mad about - folks who just watched the Gestapo frighten a man off a roof to his death, throwing bricks at Gestapo vehicle windows. In Trump's worldview, damaging a "brand new" ICE pig-mobile is a crime punishable by violence and even death, while Gestapo workplace raids that violate the US constitution, racially profile nonwhite workers, and literally murdered a guy, are "law and order."

The Guardian · Trump authorizes Ice agents to protect themselves using ‘whatever means’ necessaryBy Edward Helmore
#Fascism#Trump#ICE
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@karlauerbach

I could have sworn that G.M. was on a current suicide watch; went back the next day and could find nothing that wasn't years old

If this case suddenly had another unmonitored, off-camera "suicide" of a primary participant while in Federal custody it would prove nothing while proving everything all at the same time

So while the dead tell no tales, their death shouts volumes to anyone willing to listen

cc @dangillmor

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I wrote a little bit about why I don't like the way Gestapo leaders are talking about Democrat-controlled sanctuary cities in the wake of the random shooting of an off-duty Gestapo goon in New York during a botched robbery that had nothing to do with immigration enforcement. The playbook being run here smells a lot like the Invasion of LA to me.

ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/23

Nina-Bytes: A License to Occupy

"What’s important here is that Tom Homan, who has never won an election in New York and has no authority over its public safety policies whatsoever, is asserting an executive branch right that does not exist, to take over policing in the city because of a lack of cooperation from local authorities. And by “cooperation”, the Border Czar means letting him use local police and government agencies to conduct the regime’s fascist mass deportation raids. This argument actually has nothing to do with the shooting at all, Homan is just dressing his pre-existing intentions up in a bloody shirt and rhetoric about securing public safety because one of his boys caught a stray in a random criminal incident that could have happened anywhere in America, but happened to occur in New York."

Nina Illingworth Dot Com | "When the revolution is for everyone, everyone will be for the revolution" · Nina-Bytes: A License to Occupy | Nina Illingworth Dot ComAfter an off-duty Gestapo pig got shot in a botched NYC robbery, Gestapo leaders are seizing the moment to put a target on the back of Dem-run sanctuary cities.
#Fascism#Trump#DHS
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@fulelo

For those not following along closely, this was a complete setup by #DonaldTrump

"A US judge has denied a bid to unseal grand jury material from the investigation into the late convicted paedophile financier #JeffreyEpstein."

"#Trump had directed #Bondi to seek the release of all grand jury materials, prompting the justice department to ask courts in Florida and New York to release files related to cases in both US states."

"In her 12-page order on Wednesday, #JudgeRosenberg ruled that the transcripts could not be released due to guidelines governing #GrandJurySecrecy set by the federal appeals court that oversees Florida.

"The court's hands are tied," she ruled."

Game and set to #Trump

The match itself, to be determined

This outcome was expected, and will not satisfy anyone on either side of the issue

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While it's certainly true that one week seems to feel very much like another in our Hot Gestapo Summer, fascism continues unabated in American society - and thus The Skinny was there once again. Check out our newsletter featuring the best of my blogging from the past ten days.

ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/20

The Skinny: Hot Gestapo Summer

"If, as I and others have argued, these mass deportations are clear violations of constitutional and human rights, then ICE lawyers working to ram every brown person they can through via legally dubious methods (like say, declaring that a fake invasion by a Venezuelan gang nobody has ever heard of means you can ship people to foreign gulags without due process) would be legally accountable for their role in perpetuating these crimes. If you know what you’re doing is illegal, because you’re a lawyer, “I was just following orders” has a pretty poor track record as an excuse in court. So you can understand why it might behoove immigration judges, who literally work for Trump’s executive branch, not the judiciary, to hide the names of government attorneys doing the legal legwork for a fascist ethnic-cleansing project; a project that probably represents a real as fuck crime against humanity if several international scholars are to be believed. This isn’t about protecting ICE attorneys, it’s about protecting folks complicit in criminal atrocities."

Nina Illingworth Dot Com | "When the revolution is for everyone, everyone will be for the revolution" · The Skinny: Hot Gestapo Summer | Nina Illingworth Dot Com - Part 2As the July sun scorches Trump's fascist America, The Skinny is again here to bring you the very best of Nina's daily blogging content about the Pork Reich. - Part 2
#Fascism#Trump#USPol
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I don't know if its an artifact of cable news, cowardice, or genuine ignorance but there's a countercurrent developing in the discussion around the disgustingly-named "Alligator Alcatraz" migrant cages in the Florida Everglades and I think it's important to nip arguments that it's not *really* a "concentration camp" in the bud. So I cleaned up a post from earlier this week, threw some links in, and got into how the camp is run, the efforts Trump and DeSantis are undertaking to keep much of this a secret, and what conditions are like inside.

ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/18

Recommended Reading: Yes, It’s A Concentration Camp

"I think the debate over whether or not “Alligator Alcatraz” officially qualifies as a “real” concentration camp is both farcical and insulting. However you feel about longtime DNC minion Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as a politician, it is inarguable that she’s objectively describing a type of concentration camp. With dozens of brown bodies packed into small cages, inadequate access to washroom facilities and water, purposely reduced caloric counts inadequate for the preservation of healthy adults, exposure to elements and insects; what else would you call what we’re doing in the Florida swamp besides running a concentration camp? It’s not an accident Wasserman-Schultz references America’s dark history with the term “interment camps” but I think she’s still being too generous to the Trump regime here; this is a camp of cages for cruelly concentrating migrants without any concern for their wellbeing at all – a concentration camp, to be precise."

Nina Illingworth Dot Com | "When the revolution is for everyone, everyone will be for the revolution" · Recommended Reading: Yes, It’s A Concentration Camp | NIDCAs fascists and cowards push back on calling Alligator Alcatraz a concentration camp, Nina reads the news and asks what else you could possibly describe it as?
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One of the immutable truths of any large scale, targeted fascist oppression operation, is that the most horrifying consequences will tend to fall directly on marginalized communities, and within those communities, the outcomes will be the worst for the most marginalize people overall. As such, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone to learn that the Gestapo's recent mass deportation project is disproportionately destroying the lives of undocumented sex workers as a result of targeted ICE raids featuring common abuses, and even sexual extortion. Unfortunately, the reason that it *may* still surprise you is that despite widespread coverage of the Gestapo's fascist abuses targeting other migrants, almost nobody, even among migrant activists and civil rights organizations, is speaking out for migrant sex workers targeted as part of the Trump regime's slow motion ethnic cleansing project.

This excellent essay on Truthout is divided up into main themes. Firstly, it raises awareness about targeted ICE raids on massage parlors, and calls advocates out for not standing up for sex workers who're being disappeared into the Gestapo's migrant cages at an alarming high rate without anyone really keeping track of it at all. Additionally, the piece also explores the way anti-sex work legislation and surveillance technology, originally adopted under the guise of preventing human "trafficking" has functioned as both a permission gate and a testing ground for the anti-migrant panopticon DHS is operating; a panopticon Trump is now trying to turn towards his political enemies more broadly by partnering with companies like Palantir to create dossiers on as many Americans as they possibly can.

truthout.org/articles/sex-work

Sex Workers Are Being Abducted by ICE — and Abandoned by Respectability Politics

"Since January 2025, police raids on massage parlors have intensified, targeting immigrant women suspected of sex work. Amid nationwide protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), these workers — among ICE’s most systematically targeted — are largely excluded from community defense."

I don't want to give short shrift to the primary thrust of authors Kate Zen and Chanelle Gallant's work here, because at the end of the day it really is both alarming and disheartening to see that we as a society have learned very little over the past six months about how the regime targets those it is somehow socially acceptable to victimize (migrants instead of Americans, brown people instead of white people, trans people instead of cis people, etc) for fascist repression and abuse first, and uses that to create a gateway that allows those very same policies to work more broadly against everyone. The fact that nobody is fighting to protect migrant sex workers, calling for the release of kidnapping victims who happened to be captured at massage parlors, or even tracking what's happening to these (primarily) women isn't just respectability politics; it's mutual suicide in the face of a fascist ethnic cleansing and a broader eliminationist program. Migrant sex workers are migrants. Migrant sex workers are workers. Migrant sex workers are human beings. That makes the issue of Gestapo kidnappings targeting migrant sex workers a labor issue, a civil rights issue, and a human rights issue all rolled up into one horrifying fascist jelly roll of oppression.

Which of course then brings us to the long term costs of ignoring carceral violence, oppression, and civil rights violations of sex workers in the first place.

"The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (2015) authorized the creation of the Cyber Crimes Center within ICE, enabling wiretaps and internet surveillance. Between 2014 and 2018, DHS funneled over $3 million to local police for license plate readers to combat trafficking — now used in broader workplace raids.

Authorities justified travel bans, surveillance, racial profiling, raids, detentions, deportations, asset seizures, even sexual assault as anti-trafficking measures to protect women and children. But these measures do more harm than good, exposing migrants to additional forms of violence. Most funding went to prosecutions and public campaigns promoting false statistics and racist stereotypes, not victims’ services — fueling misguided vigilantism and MAGA fearmongering around child trafficking."

Folks, the authors of this piece are absolutely correct to point out that our decades long obsession with stopping "trafficking" was just an excuse to crack down on sex workers, and the digital panopticon used to do so is now being expanded to target migrants and even Trump's political opposition. Once you're willing to sacrifice the human rights of some ppl, for nothing more than patriarchal morality in this case, you're inevitably fueling the argument that your rights too, are subject to conditions and exemptions. And well, here we are.

#Fascism #Trump #ICE Gestapo #SexWork #Labor #HumanRights #Kidnapping #surveillance

An ICE officers badge is seen as federal agents patrol the halls of immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on June 10, 2025, in New York City.
Truthout · Sex Workers Are Being Abducted by ICE — and Abandoned by Respectability PoliticsSex workers targeted by ICE need the migrant justice movement’s full solidarity.
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To me, one of the most obvious tells that the Trump regime and all of its minions are fully aware that the slow motion, ethnic cleansing operating they're currently conducting as part of their "mass deportation" program is both morally unconscionable and flat out illegal, is the insistence on operational secrecy all throughout the horrifying fascist deportation machine. ICE Gestapo thugs hit the streets in pulled-up neck gaiters, fascist governments work to obscure who is getting paid to build concentration camps, and the DHS refuses as many oversite visits by political officials to ICE facilities as they possibly can; even going so far as to arrest two Democrat politicians in New Jersey who got sick of getting the run around and just went to the migrant cages themselves. If this was, as the Trump regime continues to insist, a totally legitimate, strictly constitutional law enforcement or public safety matter, it wouldn't be necessary for ICE goons to be running through our streets dressed up like members of a CIA-funded death squad or obscure the names of contractors to "protect against [expected] reprisals."

To place another piece of evidence on that specific pile then, let's look at this recent Intercept investigation into a couple of very unusual immigration court hearings involving migrants. Why were they unusual? Because in multiple instances the judges running these "courts" agreed to keep the name of the government's immigration attorney, aka "the prosecution," secret.

theintercept.com/2025/07/15/ic

ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court

"Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers.

“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration’s deportation regime.

As ICE agents across the country wear masks to raid workplaces and detain immigrants, government attorneys need not cover their faces to shield their identities. Legal experts who spoke to The Intercept agreed the practice of concealing the lawyers’ identities was both novel and concerning."

Alright, let's start with the obvious: as the article clearly notes, no, this is not normal. In fact its so abnormal that I don't think anyone knows if it is legal or not because this simply doesn't happen. This is primarily because without a named attorney, it is impossible to identify, investigate, and hold someone accountable for prosecutorial misconduct, and while the Intercept doesn't highlight that as the obvious reason for doing this, I'm more than happy to.

If, as I and others have argued, these mass deportations are clear violations of constitutional and human rights, then ICE lawyers working to ram every brown person they can through via legally dubious methods (like say, declaring that a fake invasion by a Venezuelan gang nobody has ever heard of means you can ship ppl to foreign gulags without due process) would be legally accountable for their role in perpetuating these crimes. If you know what you're doing is illegal, because you're a lawyer, "I was just following orders" has a pretty poor track record as an excuse in court. So you can understand why it might behoove immigration judges, who literally work for Trump's executive branch, not the judiciary, to hide the names of government attorneys doing the legal legwork for a fascist ethnic-cleansing project that probably represents a real as fuck crime against humanity if several international scholars are to be believed, right?

While the Intercept reporting here could have emphasized that point better, I will give them credit for identifying at least one of the ICE lawyers facilitating criminal migrant expulsions, a one Cosette Shachnow - who I sincerely hope becomes as infamous as she clearly deserves to be. Cosette (jfc I hate bougies) aside, I think it's important to understand this is a real problem for Trump, the Gestapo, and Stephen Miller's pet project to re-whiten American demographics for generations to come no matter how many brown lives that costs. Although it's not being reported all that much, DHS and ICE have faced numerous resignations and early retirements in their immigration law divisions because even those ghouls didn't sign up for fascist mass kidnappings and crimes against humanity. The regime needs lawyers to help slap a legalist veneer on all this ethnonationalist bullshit and they're working to make it easier to hire replacements for folks who accidentally grow a conscience along the way - even if they have to build a Star Chamber to do it.

The Intercept · ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration CourtBy Debbie Nathan
#Fascism#Trump#ICE
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At this point if you cannot see that the Trumpenreich is actively engineering the conditions necessary for a fascist genocide of migrants and a massive ethnic cleansing project against brown people to create a white ethnostate, I need to ask if you've been living in a cave for the past six months. With recent news that the Trump administration is looking to fire up a mass denaturalization program, we are now in the process of both expanding the ethnic cleansing project to include American citizens and establishing the kind of stateless people fascist regimes are able to exterminate in unfathomable numbers. This isn't a debate anymore, and we're running out of time to stop this nightmare - mass graves are on the horizon.

ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/16

Ominous “Solutions” to Nonexistent Problems

"Folks, if this doesn’t terrify you I’m not sure you’re paying enough attention to the nightmare unfolding around us in Trump’s brave new Amerikkka. Historically, denaturalization policies have lead to some of the worst atrocities in Pig Empire history, including, you guessed it, the actual fucking Holocaust. If that sounds like scaremongering to you please let me remind you that we are currently bragging about building a concentration camp surrounded by migrant-eating alligators, and the Supreme Court has more or less signaled its willingness to let the Trump regime at least temporarily ignore the constitution to commit life-destroying human rights violations against non-citizens. How much longer do you think it’s going to take these fascist pigs to figure out that deportation flights are more expensive than bullets, or even just letting underfed people die in remote internment camps, far away from the public eye? We are through the looking glass now, and waiting until we’re finding mass graves outside of ICE facilities to recognize a rapidly escalating ethnonationalist genocide being conducted under the guise of immigration enforcement is an unacceptable course of action."

#Fascism #Trump #DOJ #MassDeportations #PamBondi #EthnicCleansing #Denaturalization #Ethnonationalism #Nazis #Genocide #WhiteSupremacy

(NIDC original post)

Nina Illingworth Dot Com | "When the revolution is for everyone, everyone will be for the revolution" · Ominous “Solutions” to Nonexistent Problems | on NIDCNow that Trump's DoJ intends to ramp up efforts to denaturalize foreign-born Americans, it's time to be frank about where this ethnonationalist nightmare ends.

#Trump claims Coca-Cola will swap corn syrup for cane sugar in US - 'It's just better!'.

Coke has neither agreed or denied the claim. Cane sugar is used in Mexico & UK.

“Corn Refiners Association President and CEO John Bode said in a statement: "Replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar would cost thousands of American food manufacturing jobs, depress farm income, and boost imports of foreign sugar, all with no nutritional benefit."”

bbc.com/news/articles/czxe59zl

www.bbc.comTrump says Coca-Cola will swap corn syrup for cane sugar in US - 'It's just better!'Coca-Cola said they "appreciate President Trump's enthusiasm", without confirming they plan to make the tweak.
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If I'm being honest, I only added about 300 words to this piece from yesterday's blogpost about Rubio sanctioning UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur and Palestine expert Francesca Albanese, for exposing American companies profiting on genocide in Gaza and Settler Colonial apartheid in the West Bank. The plain truth here is that I cleaned that post up, added source links and published it on my website just because I wanted to see an American admit we're the nazis, we own this genocide, and our government is full of war criminals - in writing, and in relation to this news. Cause lord knows I wasn't gonna find that in the New York Times.

ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/14

Nina-Bytes: Our Genocide and the Limits of Pretend

"Speaking more broadly however, this is a blatant attempt by the US government to sideline one of the most dedicated and effective critics of the Israeli-American joint genocide in Gaza and the larger ethnic cleansing project being conducted against Palestinians in the region. Furthermore, while in the days since the sanctions were announced Albanese has indicated that she has no intentions of halting her work to expose these crimes against humanity, the truth is that this is going to make it harder for her to work with other scholars and investigators from Pig Empire aligned nations. And for what? Investigating and reporting on genocide profiteers who have friends in high places? The Trump regime could not more clearly articulate if they tried that they unequivocally support the genocide, and are happy to corpse farm Palestinian children for profit."

Nina Illingworth Dot Com | "When the revolution is for everyone, everyone will be for the revolution" · Nina-Bytes: Our Genocide and the Limits of Pretend | on NIDCWith recent news that the US sanctioned UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, it's time for everyone to admit we're watching an American genocide in Gaza.
#Fascism#Trump#Gaza
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I'd like to take a moment to talk about a regional PNW news story about resistance to the Gestapo, because I think Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's response to it is at once very typical of the regime's fascist propaganda style, and also crude enough to perhaps expose the direction the fascist shitshow that is Trump 2.0 is heading. After semi-anonymous groups of heroic citizens worked to publicly identify masked ICE Gestapo agents openly violating the civil rights of Oregonians, noted puppy murderer Noem promised swift prosecution of “anarchist and Antifa-affiliated groups” who acquire or share "personal information" of federal law enforcement officials who work for the government.

oregonlive.com/crime/2025/07/i (archived: archive.ph/0cm2B)

ICE officers doxxed by antifa, anarchists in Portland, Noem says

"Noem, in a statement and photos, identified Rose City Antifa, “Rose City Counter-Info,” and “The Crustian Daily,” as groups that have published names, photos and personal addresses of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on their websites or put up fliers in the officers’ neighborhoods. In one case, trash was dumped on the front lawn of an officer’s property, but the location was not disclosed.

“We will prosecute those who dox ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law. These criminals are taking the side of vicious cartels and human traffickers,” Noem said in the statement. “We won’t allow it in America.”

So, before we get into what I think Noem's belligerence has exposed about how the Trump regime intends to market the transformation of the United States into a white ethnostate executive branch dictatorship with theocratic characteristics, I just want to clear up an point of order here. ICE agents are public law enforcement officials, who are issued numbered badges, and work for the government; it is categorically impossible to dox someone who shouldn't be allowed to run through American cities wearing neck gaiters pulled up over their faces like a CIA-trained Latin American death squad. So, right off the bat we've got the DHS Secretary arguing that people who haven't broken a law are guilty because they exposed people, Gestapo pigs, who actually are breaking the law, or at least openly violating the civil and constitutional rights of both migrants and American citizens alike.

Don't sleep on Gestapo Barbie's attempts to revive the "Antifa and anarchist scare" that characterized the first Trump administration's justification for using federal agents to conduct blatantly illegal operations in cities they consider politically hostile either. Trump and the pigs loyal to him have spent a very long time trying to get you to associate "Portland" with "lawless anarchist violence" and "Antifa terrorism" and I don't think it's any sort of accident that she's invoking that trope again now.

What I think is most revealing here however is that Noem couldn't resist tying all of this back to the regime's threats against "sanctuary cities" - which as the article notes, has also been a key talking point being put forward by Trump's Border Czar, Tom Homan recently. This context, which Noem wasn't required to provide, paints a giant target on Portland, for the type of militarized invasion and occupation we've been watching for weeks in Los Angeles.

Now, you gentle reader might think it would be ridiculous to pretend an American city had been taken over by "Antifa terrorists" in league with Democrat officials, and therefore needed to be brought to heel by militarized federal forces, and nobody could blame you for that - the problem is, the first Trump administration made precisely that argument already, repeatedly in 2020, and started using Federal Marshals to black bag protestors and suspected antifascists right off the streets of Portland. The only thing that stopped Downmarket Mussolini from fully invading a bunch of Democrat-controlled cities back then was a lack of military buy-in, and I think the ongoing invasion and occupation of LA demonstrates that won't be a problem with Pete Hegseth running the Department of Defense and a 6-3 fascist high Supreme Court.

oregonlive · ICE officers doxxed by antifa, anarchists in Portland, Noem saysBy Maxine Bernstein | The Oregonian/OregonLive
#Fascism#Trump#DHS
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As the popularity of ethnonationalist neighborhood Gestapo raids plummets in US society, Trump regime-aligned fascists have increasingly retreated to legalese and misrepresentation to justify their very obvious ethnic cleansing project. Although some of the cruder minds pushing propaganda for Trump's mass deportations continue to parrot the fantasy that the Gestapo is rounding up "violent criminals," more sophisticated nazi intellectuals have primarily shifted to arguing that the regime is acting within the boundaries of US immigration and civil rights law; which in turn means that critics accusing them of racist authoritarianism are at best ignorant, and at worst open enemies of the state. This is, to put it bluntly, absolute bull-pucky. Everything about the regime's mass deportation program is clearly white supremacist in nature, dependent on widespread racial profiling, and therefore patently fucking illegal. Whether or not anyone is interested in, or even capable of, holding the Trump administration to account for this lawlessness is irrelevant here; the law itself is quite clear on the fact that you cannot just round people up for being fucking brown.

Naturally, this has not stopped fascists both inside and outside of the executive branch from simply lying to the US public about all of this. Once in a while however, one of the dumber nazis in Trump's coterie of thugs, ghouls, and sociopaths will get too excited and simply blurt the truth out loud. Enter the scene-stealing star of the recent Mad Max reboots, Tom Homan. Speaking a little too freely in the familiar confines of the Fox News studio, Trump's "Border Czar" pretty much straight up admitted ICE Gestapo thugs were targeting random brown people for interrogation because of their "physical appearance," while arguing that ICE pigs literally do not need "probable cause" to detain someone.

commondreams.org/news/tom-homa

Critics Blast Trump Border Czar for Asserting ICE Can Detain People Based on 'Physical Appearance'

"After being asked about the possibility of a judge in California limiting the scope of ICE's law-enforcement activities, Homan declared that "people need to understand ICE officers and Border Patrol don't need probable cause to walk up to somebody, briefly detain them, and question them."

He then outlined factors ICE agents could use that would justify detaining someone.

"They just need the totality of the circumstances," he claimed. "They just got through our observation, you know, get articulable facts based on their location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions."

Homan's statement about not requiring probable cause to detain people contradicts a statement made in court this week by Thomas Giles, the assistant director of ICE who testified that the standard for making arrests "is we need to determine probable cause and determine alienage."

Okay so I want to start with the legal part here because it's easier to get out of the way. What you're looking at is a replication of the Trump regime's tried and true pattern of telling the court one thing, while clearly doing something entirely different, and quite illegal. Naturally, because America is an extremely racist place and our immigration laws are a spider web of white nationalist exceptions to the rule, there is a tiny bit of grey area for Homan and the Gestapo to take advantage of here in terms of why they can stop suspected migrants, but that grey area is very clearly surpassed by Homan's statement that essentially "we don't need no stinking probable cause if you're Hispanic-looking." Of course you could argue that The People Eater is merely throwing red meat to the base, but I think anyone who has watched the livestreamed Gestapo raids occurring across the country since May knows that ICE is listening to nazis like Homan, not lawyers like Giles. In other words, the government is openly violating civil rights law and getting away with it for reasons that remain unclear - although it should be noted a federal judge just ruled as much very recently, and has attempted to halt the Gestapo raids; the government has of course, appealed.

On the larger question of what kind of policy Trump's mass deportations actually are, and what purpose they serve however, there really can no longer be any debate. Live on Fox News, Homan happily admitted what was already obvious to everyone but sophists and bootlickers: the Trump regime is engaging in a white supremacist project, targeting brown people, as part of a larger ethnic cleansing operation to re-whiten America. There really is no other conclusion to draw when the regime is willing to openly admit the Gestapo is actively choosing its targets based on location, occupation, and physical appearance. Shouting "we're not doing ethnonationalism" while describing your goons doing ethnonationalism isn't going to cut it anymore.

Common Dreams · Critics Blast Trump Border Czar for Asserting ICE Can Detain People Based on 'Physical Appearance' | Common DreamsWhite House border czar Tom Homan sparks outrage by stating ICE agents can detain based on physical appearance.
#Fascism#Trump#ICE
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Been a rough few weeks, and I'm having some new fun health problems, but I managed to cobble together an edition of The Skinny - I'd write an intro, but you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows; shit's bad, and getting worse.

ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/10

The Skinny: Staggering On Fumes

"This isn’t about elections, this is about a pre-existing reactionary police state that already regards marginalized people and protesters as the enemy. Folks who are actively opposing the fascist regime have to understand that when we take to the streets, it’s not going to be “red versus blue” at a law enforcement level and we cannot rely on support from opposition political leaders who built and immunized the police state for precisely the same purpose Trump is using it for now; crushing opposition and suppressing constitutionally-protected protest against the machine. When the shit hits the fans on the streets of Trump’s America, the police aren’t going to protect you from fascism; they’re going to protect fascism from you."

Nina Illingworth Dot Com | "When the revolution is for everyone, everyone will be for the revolution" · The Skinny: Staggering On Fumes | Nina Illingworth Dot Com - Part 2The Skinny returns after a brief hiatus due to a pet death in the author's family to find that things are not improving in Trump's emerging Fourth Reich. - Part 2