Donald Trump is holding the world hostage

There’s a stretch of highway in South Orange County, CA, where everyone suddenly starts driving differently. You feel it as soon as you cross an invisible line in the road. The cars slow to exactly the speed limit. Not a mile over. It’s not a coincidence. Everyone who grew up here, or lived nearby, knows why. The highway patrol waits there every day, especially at the end of the month. Not because anything dangerous is happening, but because they’re trying to hit their numbers. I used to drive that road back and forth between San Diego and Orange County, and it was always strange to bring friends who didn’t know the drill. As soon as we crossed into that stretch, they’d look around, confused by how the energy on the road shifted without anyone saying a word.

That feeling, of being watched, targeted, hunted, is now the baseline in this country. On the freeway, it was predictable. It made sense. But what ICE is doing now is something else entirely. This isn’t about immigration enforcement. It’s about hitting quotas at any cost. They’ve turned this country into a police state. Not with trained, accountable law enforcement, but with hastily coached, unqualified thugs wearing hidden badges, with no accountability and no regard for human life. They’ve become Trump’s personal enforcers, the modern version of the Gestapo or the SS. They don’t answer to the law. They answer to the regime.

Their job isn’t to protect our country from outside threats. It’s to intimidate, punish, and disappear. That’s what they’re being paid for. That’s what the quotas are really about. Wreak as much damage as possible. Kidnap as many people as they can, and test how far they can push it. Today, they’re targeting immigrants, black and brown folks, people with accents, people who don’t “look American.” Citizens or not, it doesn’t matter. Some they release. Some they don’t. But tomorrow it will be you and me. It’ll be anyone who speaks out. Anyone who questions the regime. Anyone who doesn’t conform to their vision of the world. That means people who aren’t far-right Christian nationalists, who aren’t their version of white, who are disabled, neurodivergent, gender nonconforming, or politically disloyal.

We know how this story ends. Because we’ve seen it before, in the 1930s and 1940s. They always start with the “others.” And they never stop until every undesirable is gone. Nobody is safe.

What ICE is doing isn’t unique. It reflects the same model authoritarian regimes have used around the world: incentivize cruelty, reward compliance, and let fear do the work. In Argentina between 1976 and 1983, the government was run by a military dictatorship that carried out a campaign of state terrorism now known as the “Dirty War.” During that period, a military junta seized control of the country, dissolved democratic institutions, and unleashed security forces and secret death squads against anyone they labeled a threat. Tens of thousands of people were “disappeared,” kidnapped by masked men, held without charges, tortured, and never seen again. Many of those taken were ordinary citizens, students, activists, workers, journalists, and even people with no political affiliation at all. People lived in uncertainty and fear because no one knew who would vanish next.

That’s where we’re heading. You don’t hand out signing bonuses and set detention quotas if your goal is justice. You do it if your goal is fear. You do it to test how far you can go. This is a trial run to see what the public will tolerate. To see who stays quiet and to see how much cruelty can be normalized before the next step is taken.

This isn’t a warning about what might happen someday. It’s already happening. And even if someone argues that ICE is following internal policy, that misses the point. Just because something is ordered doesn’t make it just. At the Nuremberg trials, the number one excuse given by those who carried out atrocities was: “I was just following orders.” But the court rejected that defense: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.” Of course, this isn’t about international law applying to us right now. It’s about what history has already shown us. That was true then. It’s true now. No order justifies what ICE is doing.

Even if we assume the most generous version of events, that every ICE action is technically within the bounds of current policy. And that people were protesting, interfering, or present where they shouldn’t have been. The rule of law still does not allow execution without due process. It does not allow summary punishment. It does not allow masked men to act as judge, jury, and executioner in the street. In the United States, more than 99 percent of offenses do not carry the death penalty, and none of them are decided on the spot by armed agents with no warrants and no hearings. Once society accepts that the government can kill without due process, the law is no longer real. It becomes optional. And when that happens, it won’t stop with immigrants or protesters. It will eventually reach us all.

This is what regime justice looks like. The law still exists on paper, but it no longer protects people equally. In Nazi Germany, the 1941 “Nacht und Nebel” (Night and Fog) decree allowed authorities to abduct anyone accused of threatening state security. No charges or trial necessary. People vanished overnight, pulled from their homes, never seen again, and the fear of that silence kept everyone else in line. That’s what happens when the law is no longer grounded in rights or fairness.

And it’s not just happening here. You can see it internationally as well. Donald Trump announced this week that the United States will “do something” about Greenland, “whether they like it or not,” openly threatening to seize territory belonging to Denmark, a NATO ally. He said he would prefer to make a deal “the easy way,” but that there was also a “hard way.”

This is the language of a man who no longer believes rules apply to him. Not here. Not abroad. And if a U.S. president feels entitled to threaten allies and claim foreign territory as his own, imagine what else he’s willing to do behind closed doors.

For international readers watching this unfold, I try to imagine what it must look like from the outside. Most Americans were never under the illusion that the country was perfect. But there was pride in what it aspired to be. A nation built by immigrants. A flawed experiment grounded in freedom, opportunity, and the rule of law. That experiment is now nearly 250 years old, and it is being openly dismantled. Anyone who has taken a basic history course can see the pattern and know where we are headed.

And I can only imagine how heartbreaking and terrifying it must be to witness from another country. This isn’t just affecting Americans. It’s disrupting the entire global order. It’s putting the whole world at risk of another world war. Many are saying this is the closest we’ve been to the brink of World War III in a generation. And it’s all because of one man.

It’s hard to look at this and fully grasp that the American people voted for it. He was elected the first time and did a catastrophic job. He botched the pandemic response. He undermined science. He gutted public health, environmental protections, and education. He separated families, encouraged hate, and built a cult around cruelty. And now, we’ve done it again. That’s not something the rest of the world can fix. Only we can.

I can only imagine how powerless it must feel to watch this unfold in a country with outsized influence over everything from trade to climate to global security. You’re trying to live your own life. Take care of your own people. And yet you’re forced to watch as one man destabilizes entire continents. I know it must be infuriating and exhausting. Like one man has a grip, both emotional and physical, on the entire planet. And it probably feels like we aren’t doing enough to stop it.

I feel that too. I started writing these daily posts because I felt that same frustration. What were we doing to stop this, and who can we look to for a path out of this? And unlike most countries facing authoritarian collapse, we don’t even have an opposition leader. We don’t have a figurehead people can rally around. And that makes the isolation worse.

I see the comments. “You need to rise up.” And I agree. I do. And I also feel like this is all I do. Thanks to the support of this community, I’ve been able to dedicate nearly all my time to this work. I don’t clock out. I’m reading news, watching press briefings, writing posts, making videos, and helping people understand what’s happening, at least 16 hours a day, every single day. And I’m still a mom. I still have a child at home. This has taken over five years of her childhood. And I carry that with me, too. And yet I still want to do more.

But I want you to know this: there are more of us than you think who don’t support this and are doing everything we can to resist. And more people are joining the resistance every single day. I know it might not look like it from the outside, but it’s happening. We see the danger. We feel the shame. We know what’s been lost, and what’s still at stake. We are not giving up on our country or on you. Americans were built on resolve. We’ve survived every dark chapter we’ve faced before. And we will again. For those of you outside the U.S, and those of you inside, don’t think for a second that this will last. It won’t. We will rise like we always do. And that is why I still have hope for America. I hope you do too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

P.S. If you’ve made it this far, chances are we see things the same way. You can make a difference right now by subscribing to my Substack. There is a free option and the option to help me reach a wider audience with a $5/month paid subscription. Your support allows me to cover more ground and keep telling the truth about the lies and destruction unfolding in our country.