Trump's ICE 'horror' has a brutal logic to it: historian

[turbinetree]

By Matthew Chapman
Published January 26, 2026 4:15 PM ET

Yale historian Timothy Snyder has a grim view of the Trump administration's lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdown: it's the early stages of totalitarianism, and must be treated as such.

"We have to see the logic of the killings as well as the killings themselves," wrote Snyder on his Substack. "The horror is a truth in itself. But it is also a sign of a political logic, one known from the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Soviet as well as Nazi, and from attempts to replace the rule of law with personal tyranny. It is the logic of lies and of lawlessness."

Trump and his underlings, warned Snyder, have done what dictatorships before have done: look for loopholes and exceptions to the rule of law that let them simply do whatever they want in a narrow circumstance, then expand that until it is the reality across the whole country. In this case, they are taking advantage of the ill-defined limits of power the Border Patrol has to carry out its mission.

https://www.rawstory.com/ice-horror/

[Klarkashton]

1. The use of border patrol as a paramilitary force with no oversite is pure evil genius.

Was this part of "project 2025" ?

[rampartd]

2. it has probably been planned since the creation of "homeland security"

in the c w bush era. it was always an idea to circumvent posse comitatus.

[mr715]

4. I never appreciated the term "homeland".

Domestic security doesn't sound too much better, though.

[leftstreet]

3. Not even competent enough to pull it off

Beginning to see that historical analyses of roads to fascism have ZERO to do with Trump's Cabinet and Insiders clown posse. The couldn't even manage a Pizza Hut swing shift without burning the restaurant down

DURec for a great editorial all the same