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This week we've learned that ICE leadership is being purged. A major shakeup is underway Inside of the U.S. immigration and Customs Enforcement leadership, allegedly by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's special friend and employee, Corey Lewandowski. I think that gets right at how Kristi Noem ends up in the Cabinet. You write that Trump says, I did it for Corey, quote, it's the only thing Corey Lewandowski asked me for. Trump was referring to Corey Lewandowski, the Republican operative who had served as his first of three campaign managers during his 2016 run for the White House. We've all seen the footage of Immigration and Customs Enforcement leading violent raids across the country this year. And now we learn that ICE will lose some of its key leadership in that effort. The overhaul affects ICE. Field offices in at least eight cities will replace many senior leaders with Border Patrol officials, marking an unprecedented power shift inside the dhs, exposing sharp divisions on how far to go in ramping up deportations. Another agency, CBP Customs and Border Protection, also known as Border Patrol, is slated to have the upper hand in how the massive immigrant persecution machine is going to operate going forward in America. It's all in an effort to boost deportation numbers, which are already at more than half a million since President Trump took office. This shift has big implications which could be felt quickly. Whether people like that or not, this kind of internal conflict is one I've mentioned a few times in the last year. In rising authoritarian regimes, tensions usually develop between the more law and order squads of the governing party's goons, the ones who represent a worsening of the existing awful system, and those who have embraced more radical forms of detention or extrajudicial violence. And you've been watching what our missiles do to boats and ships and submarines. Think of it as a bad thing made deliberately worse versus new fresh hells. That's what we're doing. So today I want to talk about this shift we're seeing. From the supposed law and order version to the more extrajudicial version. I want to look at its echoes in history, failures of imagination, and how to respond when things get worse. First, I want to address that Wild Born Patrol and ICE have both been part of the system for a little over two decades. We are talking about two different legs of existing law enforcement in the United States. While both agencies are part of DHS and conduct immigration enforcement during Operation Midway Blitz, their officials under oath described methods and tactics that differ. Some of those tactics resulting in untargeted roundups and tear gassed Protesters. ICE and Border Patrol were established under the Department of homeland security in 2003 in the wake of the 911 attacks and were largely split out from the existing US Customs Service, along with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, whose responsibilities were given to Border Patrol. A major contrast drawn in federal court this week. The ICE deputy field office director saying of Customs and Border Protection, quote, we're operating independently of each other. We're still doing targeted enforcement. They do it a little bit differently, as everyone has seen. ICE has a unit called ero, which stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations. With the recent passage of Trump's tax and border bill, the agency will be getting an unprecedented infusion of funds, becoming the highest funded law enforcement agency in this country. Border Patrol operates, in theory to protect the borders. It's those untargeted patrol methods and mentality DePaul University history professor Tom Makaitis says traditionally separated CBP from, from ice. I think cowboy mentality has seeped into the whole operation, though. How that border gets defined and how deeply into the mainland of the United States CBP gets to operate might surprise you. Car chases and crash maneuvers in residential areas. They are going through neighborhoods and so on, picking up people to some degree at random or, you know, certainly based on very, very dubious assumptions about how they look and sound. I currently only has an acting director, Todd Lyons, who's been in place since March of this year. ICE is going to focus on the worst of the worst, and that's what we do need to focus our limited resources on. That's one thing I've always said from the start. The agency hasn't had a director confirmed by the Senate in more than eight years. And Border Patrol has its own unsteady history. With 11 acting directors and only six Senate appointed ones across its history, the agency has been managed by acting directors more than half its existence. This is exactly the kind of wobbly leadership you don't want for people with guns and a strong desire to hurt people. The level of force that is being used is dangerous and unnecessary. This is what I would expect to be seeing in dictatorships overseas, not my own country famous for their abuses. Border Patrol Union has backed Donald Trump since his emergence as a political candidate in the US and has been a steadfast supporter of his anti immigrant rhetoric and actions. I will always stand with the incredible men and women of Border Patrol. And today I'm announcing a plan to address the shortage. You know, we have a tremendous shortage because they haven't been treated right. In 2020, agents of Border Patrol's BORTAC, the Border Patrol tactical Unit, were dispatched to protests in Portland in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the subsequent protests around the country. Some of you may remember the horror over agents in unmarked vans kidnapping protesters off the streets. One was picked up and interrogated in an unmarked van, she said, and then dropped off in a different part of the city. Two others were held in jail cells before being let go without explanations or charges. For many outside immigrant communities, it was their first exposure to these kinds of tactics, which have been in use by police and various law enforcement agencies in many cities. Another, a U.S. citizen was misidentified by federal agents as a foreigner and arrested on charges that were later dropped. People also often hadn't realized how Border Patrol could be sent to places all over the country, far from what most Americans might imagine as border regions. Federal law says immigration officers can search people within a reasonable distance from the border. Courts have interpreted reasonable distance to be 100 miles from the border. The 10 largest cities in the United States, New York, Chicago, Louisiana, all of Florida are all impacted by this 100 mile rule. Their deployments also happened absent any invitation or even against the wishes of local governments. A new report from the Department of Homeland Security's internal watchdog reveals that hundreds of federal law enforcement agents that were deployed to Portland during the violent protests there last summer summer lacked proper training and equipment. All this was an early indicator of how federal law enforcement resources and even National Guard units are being deployed now. There was really no comprehensive strategy for this deployment, which became known under the Trump administration as Operation Diligent Valor. These kinds of actions rarely rise out of nowhere. There are almost always visible seeds planted years before. What we are seeing today has been in process for years, for decades and even for centuries. Our failures to stop these kinds of abuses in their early forms allows them to take root. The current purge of ICE leadership is said to be in response to what the White House sees as low apprehension and deportation numbers compared to the quota of 3,000 per day set by White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller. Stephen Miller held a meeting screaming at ICE officials to arrest more undocumented immigrants, according to two sources who spoke with attendees, Miller setting a new quota of 3,000 arrests per day to include more than just migrants with criminal records. Remember, before the election, long before it became clear that Congress would cave entirely, Trump announced that he wanted to deport some 20 million people. I will run the biggest deportation operation this country's ever seen, a number far larger than the population of undocumented immigrants in the United States. What did everyone think mass deportations meant? Only the worst. Tom Homan has said it himself. Anyone in the US Illegally is on the table. Those are the words of one Border Patrol officer to Fox News Bill Mulligan. The Trump administration wants deportation efforts to get much more aggressive. Apparently, if Tom Homan won't adopt the kinds of tactics to do that, the kind of tactics that DHS wants, then Border Patrol is willing. They conduct roving patrols and raids at places like Home Depot car washes and fleet markets, pretty much arresting anyone they suspect is in the US Illegally. They've introduced a kind of showmanship almost designed to appeal to the president, jumping out of rental vans like Patriot Front rejects who failed upward somehow. They've rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters onto the roof of a Chicago apartment building. And they've done tremendous harm to immigrants and non immigrants alike. Before Trump took office earlier this year, I talked to Aaron Raichlen Melnick, I'm a senior fellow of the American Immigration Council on Immigrant Rights nonprofit, about the threat to immigrants that the coming administration would represent. We know that the question is not whether they're going to attempt mass deportation, because of course they aren't. He underlined the ways in which immigration had become a disaster across several decades. Because the government had effectively made it impossible for people to follow a legal track to citizenship, Congress has affirmatively made it impossible for a person to do that. When he looked at the likely paths U.S. immigration policy would take once our already bad history was made worse by a president bent on punishing millions born outside the US he laid out two paths. One approach was represented by Stephen Miller and the other by Tom Homan. I would say the Miller version would be Trump 2.0 and the Hohman version is Trump 1.5. He suggested that Homan, who had been appointed as ICE's executive associate director of Enforcement and Removal Operations by none other than Barack Obama, we removed a lot of people in the first term, and largely because we're counting Border Patrol removals with ICE removals. And that's how come the number got so big. He was a systems guy. Miller, on the other hand, America is for Americans and Americans Only would introduce new tactics and methods less bound by any existing structure of detention and deportation, where immigration enforcement looks categorically different than it has in the past. What this would likely mean in practice was that if Homan gained the upper hand in immigration policy, he would more or less expand the US Immigration system, putting it on steroids. The system was already very cruel, and laws had already been shaped to allow widespread mistreatment of targeted groups. Under Homan, we should expect a massive increase in the same tactics that immigrants had suffered for years. If Miller got control, however, an already bad situation could change in significant ways. Even if they somehow had no disagreement on tactics, Miller's crusade against immigrants risked becoming a much more dangerous project. Yes, we are going to enforce our national sovereignty and those who trespassed into our country will be returned to their country of origin or any other country willing to take them. Now, I often try to use other examples than Nazis in the detention history that I share with you because because it's important to understand how often and in how many places these dynamics have played out before. Is Donald Trump a fascist, with some comparing him to Nazi Adolf Hitler? To get to the bottom of this, I sat down with Timothy Ryback, historian and author of Take Hitler's Final Rise to Power. But in this case, I want to go through the Nazi case from the mid-1930s beginning a little more than a year after Hitler came to power, because this is the case that's relevant to our moment. Hitler was ridiculed throughout his entire political he was considered a buffoon. They called him out on all kinds of things. But the point was in the fall of 32, when Hitler was at his high water mark and he said, you know, for 12 years people have been laughing at me. No one's laughing now. Which read in retrospect is chilling. Keep in mind that though the Nazis made aggressive use of preemptive arbitrary detention from the first weeks of their rule, in the beginning, German camps were very much like those seen in other places around the world. In some cases, early labor camps were reminiscent of internment and labor camps for Ukrainians in Canada during World War I. I've had people tell me that they can't believe this happened in Canada. They didn't know about it. They weren't taught about it in school. In the worst settings of those early years, Nazi camps were more like Soviet pre Gulag detention in the 1920s. Alexander Nogtev, the first commander of the camp, welcomes the newcomers with these can forget all the rights you once had, for here we have our own rules. There might be sadism, there might be torture. Some executions took place. But Nazi camps were not yet an anomaly in the world. A purge in the summer of 1934 would lead to a major shift. However, despite all the repression and violence, Hitler's power remains fragile. He's torn between the two forces that brought him to power on the one hand, the conservatives. On the other, the party revolutionaries. Among them, the members of the sa, the Assault Section, the paramilitary group of the Nazi Party, who now number 4 million. Beginning on the last day of June, the Night of Long Knives led to purges and the elimination of Ernst Rohm, then generally regarded as the second most powerful man in Germany. Hitler had entered Rohm's bedroom alone with a whip in his hand. Behind him had stood two detectives holding pistols with the safety catch removed at the ready. He had spat out the words, rum. You are under arrest. Rohm had looked up sleepily out of the pillows on his bed. Hail, mein Fuhrer. You are under arrest. Hitler had bawled for the second time. He had turned on his heel and left the room. His Brown shirts the SA had provided the street violence and the enforcement needed to power Hitler to victory. SA leaders are coming out of their rooms and being arrested. Hitler shouts at each one. Have you had anything to do with Rome's machinations? Of course, none of them says yet, but that doesn't help them. He turns to Goebbels with question. And then comes his decision. Arrested. So that was Eric Kemper, who was the driver of Adolf Hitler, who was describing the morning of 30 June 1934. That sees a bloody and carnivorous faction fight in the Nazi Party. But now the party needed something different. In August, after the death of President von Hindenburg, Hitler took the title of Fuhrer. From that day on until the end of the Reich in 1945. Soldiers will take an oath to Hitler himself. The troops are no longer required to take an oath to the Constitution, to the state. At that point, there were two visions of a German future. One focused on bringing the extrajudicial methods used to secure power completely under the control of existing institutions. Now that the Nazis had control over everything, having shattered their opposition in every direction, in some cases through murder, they could create a government relying mostly on legal channels rendered more aggressive and more brutal. But working through the inherited system, the other vision was focused on maintaining a national state of ongoing terror, mass detention through extrajudicial means. Concentration camps lay at the heart of that terror. Reichsfuhrer Henrik Himmler was its biggest proponent, and also the man who had the most to gain in terms of power from a massive expansion of camps. I found that there's often this kind of window in concentration camp history where a system teeters for a time between abandoning extrajudicial methods and giving over entirely to them. In this window, the German legal system tried to hold These kinds of camps and the abuses that inevitably resulted, it tried to hold them at bay. State prosecutors bought cases against camp guards, but Hitler stepped in to give pardons, but briefly, offering some promise to another possible outcome for Germany. In August 1934, Hitler did put limits on the uses of protective meaning, preemptive custody, ahead of an election in which he was going to run unopposed. Cast your vote now. If so, then stand up for me, just as I stood up for you. He announced amnesties that freed thousands. Nazi leadership seriously considered reducing the role of concentration camps or even eliminating them. But Himmler ignored and worked against those who opposed the camps. BSS identifying marks, black uniform and white rune symbols that Himmler wanted to stand for toughness and Germanic heroism. He rearrested a thousand of the prisoners who had just been released. He ordered the arrests of thousands more of those he deemed suspect. Heinrich Himmler is the father of this organization. It was only when he became Reichsfurer in 1929 that this unique mixture of political extremism, racist insanity, and occult cultic rituals took shape. He met with Hitler privately over letters of complaint and persuaded the Fuhrer to take his side. He argued the critical nature of keeping terror constant and using camps to deal with the masses of internal enemies that remained in Germany. Himmler wants to take the SS back to the supposedly glorious times of the Nordic race. He wrote a letter to the Minister of Justice at the time declaring that the Fuhrer has forbidden the consulting of lawyers and has charged me with informing you of his decision. Historically, this is nonsense, but the SS chief eagerly invents corresponding laws, symbols and rights. So it was that the Himmler faction won out and the Nazi concentration camp system devolved again and again into larger and more abominable forms that would have been impossible to imagine at the beginning. We are going to crush them, and we're going to fulfill the mandate that the American people voted for in 2024. In our case here today, the diminishment of ice and purges of its leadership are apparently meant to give Border Patrol agents free rein to use their more extreme methods to increase the numbers of those apprehended and detained. Some of their replacements will be Border Patrol officials, hand selected by Border Patrol commander Greg Bevino, whose aggressive and sometimes controversial tactics to arrest illegal aliens have elevated him within the Trump administration. The focus in some prior administrations on people with CRIM records, which had lingered still in some corners of ice. We've embedded with both agencies multiple times. When we are with ice, they are typically doing targeted enforcement of criminal illegal aliens always knowing who they are arresting beforehand and often doing hours of surveillance to try and learn the target schedule seems like it will now be discarded entirely in the pursuit of higher numbers. I'm told these changes were made based off who the administration feels can execute a mass deportation agenda with all of that added money and staffing coming from that bill. In one way, this is the reverse situation of that in the Third Reich. A year into gaining power there, the street violence methods of the SA were eliminated and brought under a more rigid Nazi hierarchy. In our case, the administration is loosing the violent cowboys of the Border Patrol on the country. They're moving immigration enforcement farther outside of any rigid control at all. The federal government is fueling chaos. Why would they do this? In part, as I mentioned, it's because of disappointment with the numbers of people that ICE is detaining. I suspect it is also because the White House hasn't yet accomplished what the SA did for the Nazis. The SA functioned as a kind of internal, unregulated army, offering a level of street violence that cowed the opposition and made dissent a more fearful enterprise. In my opinion, expanding Border Patrol operations are meant to intimidate and harm US Citizens alongside immigrants. For some time now, open defiance of accountability is what Border Patrol agents are known for. It's likely no accident that U.S. border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino came to head up the operation in Chicago in recent days, or that he showed up in the city's Little Village neighborhood just before the purge of ICE leadership was announced. And we saw footage of him throwing what appeared to be a tear gas canister at protesters. He may or may not know all this history that I'm talking about, but he knows the role that he's playing. Hauled into court by a US District Judge, Sarah Ellis, on Tuesday, he showed up in the long coat that was very reminiscent of both Gestapo and Soviet Cheka officials alike. The judge, too, seems to sense what is at stake in terms of history. Bovino's appearance happened after she had put a temporary restraining order in place on October 9, blocking agents from using specific tactics on protesters. And videos show what overwhelmingly appears to be agents repeatedly violating the judge's order. 24 hours ago, he left federal court in dramatic fashion. Border Commander Gregory Bovino, in charge of immigration enforcement in Illinois, had moments earlier agreed to come back each weekday for in person daily updates with Federal Court Judge Sarah Ellis, part of a sweeping series of requirements she put in place On Tuesday. She announced that Bovino must be trained on the use of a body camera and then wear it. But in this late day court filing, just two hours before the first update meeting, the US Justice Department asked a higher court to stop those in person briefings and 90 minutes before it was set to begin, the higher court said okay, she is trying to drag him back inside a legal framework of accountability. Legal analyst Irv Miller calls it a very short term win. The only thing the 7th Circuit said today he doesn't have to appear. The feds still need to turn over all body cam video from federal officers during arrests and clashes with protesters. Arrest records need to be handed over and incident reports too Changing Directions for a second here I want to say that when I gave birth for the first time, I wound up with a kid who for various reasons could not sleep when horizontal. I knew that newborns should be sleeping a majority of the day, but every time I laid the kid down, wails of distress followed. My husband and I split the night, with one of us taking the baby from 11pm to 3am and the other one from 3am to 7am for more than a year, for the most part, the kid could only sleep upright, and we'd always planned on two children if we decided to have any at all. But a year into parenthood, we had to have a talk. It had been a hard infancy, even without any life threatening medical crisis that I know other parents have faced, and sleep was still an issue. At that point, there was just no way we could do all that again. What were the odds, we asked ourselves, that a second kid would have the same issues? It had been so extreme we decided it probably couldn't happen again. It couldn't get worse. Well, I got pregnant again and again wound up with a healthy baby. But the second kid was even worse at sleeping than the first. It had been a failure of imagination to assume that something difficult was unlikely to get worse. This kind of failure of imagination sometimes protects us. If we could imagine every impossible challenge or piece of bad news that lay ahead without having any knowledge of or guarantees of the good things that would also come, how would we ever get through life? But it got so bad that we realized that we needed help. It turned out medical assistance was possible. What we needed was to switch doctors and to change up our strategy. Six months into a second screaming baby, we found that with a pretty simple daily treatment, the second child could sleep more or less through the night. Our failure to imagine no sleep for three years had given way to our failure to imagine that there was any way out of it. But our worsened circumstances drove us to action and we got help. My sense is that with Border Patrol taking the lead on US Immigration enforcement, we are going to see a worsening of daily life in several parts of the country and mostly urban areas. To start, Americans whose lives had not already been touched by agencies charged with immigration enforcement, even those worried about the effects of discrimination and police violence have failed to imagine how bad things already were for those who had come in closer contact. And now the national failure to end these practices sees them being visited on wider and wider numbers across the country. I expect that the coming months will bring a rapid expansion of impromptu detention facilities, more porous categories for apprehension, and more aggressive tactics applied indiscriminately to those who stand up for the rights of anyone targeted. Maybe you've seen this coming all along, but if you had a failure of imagination at the beginning, not knowing how bad it had already gotten or realizing how much worse it might get if we didn't take action, then don't let despair over how we got where we are paralyze you. Don't let that failure of imagination lead you into another one where you fail to imagine ways that we can get out of this. So starting this week, the danger is likely to step up. Reporting from the Wall Street Journal reveals that the Pentagon has ordered the National Guard to create what's known as Quick Reaction Forces in every state and U.S. territory that are trained to respond to riots and civil unrest within the United States. But the administration's power isn't locked in across the board. In the US we still have so much power ourselves. We are one week away until that special election that could determine the balance of power in Washington. But millions of ballots have already been cast. 56% of likely voters say they'd vote yes on Prop 50. Of that 56%, 95% disapprove of President Trump's performance. When something bad happens, band together, plan together. Use your resources. Don't forget you have them. My sense is that the administration for some time has been overreaching and that this is yet another example. A new poll out today by The Economist and YouGov finds that Trump is at his lowest approval rating yet, which is 39% of Americans approving of his job as president. Among Americans under 29, just 20% of them approve of his job performance. That is a 3030 point drop since February. In terms of prior countries where authoritarianism solidified, they are rushing the persecuting minority side before they have the kind of lock on suppressing dissent from the rest of the population that you usually see in these situations. We spoke with one of the owners of 185th Produce in Aloha about how they're helping the community. They tell us the idea for a mutual aid program came about after speaking with customers who are interested in helping their neighbors. Basically, customers can donate money to help cover other people's food purchases along with all the mutual aid projects that you can do, especially ones helping with food and shelter. There's another idea that I've mentioned here a few times that's worth underlining today. Talking with people around the world about past camp systems and mass detention projects, I have heard how different places were used. I think with Border Patrol taking the lead on enforcement, we are going to see, along with massive locations like Fort Bliss in Texas, many, many more ad hoc detention solutions. The kinds of things around the world that have been used in the past include stadiums, schools, concert venues, civic centers, horse racing tracks, stables, hotels, motels, campgrounds, even nightclubs and community centers. In more recent decades, there seems to be a particular pleasure in using community venues beloved by the very people that the government is targeting. So call or meet with your civic and community leaders and your state representatives. Work on how to deny access to these venues for immigration enforcement operations and for detention in your area. If your local representatives are currently supporting the administration's policy on immigrants, push back. And in the meantime, work with local businesses, developers, community groups and religious leaders to create community pressure outside official channels. You can do things even outside those channels and work to elect people who represent your views and to educate people about what's happening. So many people do not know. The important thing is that we are none of us helpless, but we have to act. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what a five star review where you get your podcasts. Don't forget, if you're a paid subscriber who wants to ask a question about anything at all, we're doing a special episode. For that. You can send your question to nextcomeswhatmail.com and I will do my best to answer it. We're going to gather these questions across the next couple weeks and we'll do a bonus post and bonus episode of Next Comes what? Later in the month to address that and it will eventually be available to everyone as well.