When Will His Reign of Terror End?

Have the ICE raids gone too far? “I don’t think they’ve gone far enough.” -President Donald Trump on 60 Minutes tonight.

A mom gets her little boy ready for school. This little boy loved his teachers, his friends, and learning. He’d always loved learning. Since he was very little, his favorite thing to do was read books. Sometimes reading six or seven books a day. Once he started kindergarten and learned his letters, his joy only grew. He came home so proud of every word he could sound out and every story he could read on his own. Then one morning, the masked men came.

The light dimmed from his eyes, not because he was scared of the men taking him, but because he was scared of the panic around him when they did. He was scared they would take his friends. He looked at his mother, confused, and said, “Mom, I don’t know what they’re doing. Why are they doing that?” And the mother, not really understanding it herself, told him to be brave. Not to worry. That he was safe. She said it because she needed to believe it, even as something deep in her gut told her the world had shifted, that safety no longer meant what it once did.

Across town, another mother was getting her son ready, too. He also loved school. He also loved his friends. He also asked questions she couldn’t answer. But this mother did something different. Every morning before she sent him off, she took a permanent marker and wrote on his arm the phone numbers of his aunt, his grandmother, and their next-door neighbor, just in case.

Every morning, the same ritual. Every morning, the same fear. When she dropped him off at school, she never knew if today was the day that the masked ICE men would kidnap either of them. If they would ever see each other again.

And you might be thinking, well, that’s what happens when you’re not here legally. Except she was. She is. She came here exactly as she was supposed to. And still, her friends, mothers just like her, here legally, were rounded up and taken to modern-day concentration camps.

And the only difference between these two children is the color of their skin. Their parents’ accents. Where their parents were born. That’s it. If I had told you this story a year ago, you might have thought I was talking about Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Or maybe somewhere far away. But I’m talking about Chicago, Illinois, 2025.

And it would be easy to keep scrolling. To walk the other direction. To shake our heads and say, “This is not what I voted for,” or, “This is not the America I want.” But it’s the America we have.

History is begging us not to look away this time. Because there has never been a time in history when the good guys were the ones rounding up people based on what they look like or how they speak. Never. They have never been the ones taking away healthcare or making it harder for people to see a doctor. Never been the ones increasing food insecurity, cutting SNAP, or making sure children go to bed hungry while billionaires get tax breaks. Never been the ones silencing journalists or threatening to jail political opponents. Never been the ones banning books or rewriting history so that truth becomes treason. Never been the ones using faith as a weapon to control instead of a light to guide. Never been the ones cheering cruelty or mistaking it for strength. Never been the ones locking up women for making medical decisions. Never been the ones taking away freedoms and calling it patriotism. Never been the ones who needed to lie to stay in power.

Because the good guys don’t build cages, they build communities. They don’t destroy institutions; they strengthen them. They don’t hoard power; they share it. And they don’t use fear to rule; they use hope to lead. And it would be so easy for us, especially those of us who don’t look like the people they’re kidnapping, to look away. To walk past it. To convince ourselves it isn’t happening. To tell ourselves it’s not our fight. But that’s how it always begins.

When Hitler first came for the trade unionists and the intellectuals, people looked away. When Japanese Americans were forced into camps on our own soil, neighbors said, “It’s for security.” When McCarthy started his witch hunts, most Americans said, “It’s only the communists.” When Black families were driven from their homes by redlining, when Indigenous children were taken from their parents and sent to “boarding schools,” too many said nothing. When LGBTQ+ people were rounded up in night raids in the 1950s, the country looked away again. When the first Muslim registry appeared after 9/11, people said, “It’s only temporary.”

When this has happened in America in the past, we rallied and ended it where it started. But this is not the America we know. This is Trump’s America. He and his enablers are not doing any of this in the name of security or in the best interest of the American people. This time, they are doing it because it’s another chapter in the fascism playbook. And fascists never stop with the first group. They test how much cruelty we’ll tolerate, how much silence they can count on, how many people will look away before it feels normal. And once it’s normal, they add to their hit lists. They always add more groups to their target list.

And even if you don’t care about what’s happening to someone else, they will come for you. You will be on their list. Unless you’re one of the untouchable few, the elite, the one percent who write the rules, they will come for you too. Even if you think you’re safe. Even if you think your bank account will protect you. Even if you think your skin color, your passport, your zip code makes you untouchable. You’re wrong.

Because power like this is never satisfied. It feeds on obedience. It thrives on fear. It grows stronger every time a good person looks away. The lesson is always the same: they start with the marginalized, but they end with everyone.

And here we are again. The names have changed, but the pattern hasn’t. They’re moving people into silence, one policy at a time. One order, one purge, one “security measure” at a time. The White House is forcing journalists to sign loyalty pledges just to do their jobs, just like the early censorship boards that silenced dissent in every regime that came before. Seasoned correspondents are walking away rather than betray their integrity, and that’s exactly what those in power want: fewer witnesses, less truth. Top officials are being relocated to military bases under the guise of “safety,” while information gets sealed behind locked doors. That’s what authoritarians do when they’re no longer confident they can control the narrative: they militarize it.

They’ve shut down the government not out of necessity, but strategy. Because when you cut off food programs, when you strip healthcare from millions, when you make survival itself a full-time job, you create desperation. And desperate people are easier to control. They call it patriotism. They call it order. But it’s control. It’s the same script history has written a hundred times before. A government that hides information from the press, isolates its decision-makers, silences its critics, and starves its citizens into obedience is not protecting democracy. It’s dismantling it.

And the worst part? They’re counting on us to do nothing. To scroll. To shrug. To wait for someone else to fix it. But history doesn’t remember the ones who looked away. It remembers the ones who stood up. The ones who refused to sign. The ones who refused to be silent.

And there is still hope. The courts are still working. Maybe not the Supreme Court, but the lower courts are, and they might buy us enough time until the midterms next year. That might be enough. We have to keep the heat on them, keep pressure where it counts, and refuse to normalize any of this.

I’m going to be very direct now. I’m concerned. All the signs are there that this next year is going to be a life-and-death battle for our country. If we’re fortunate, we take back Congress in the midterms. But until then, Trump and his enablers are going to push as many lawless initiatives as possible. They are going to ram through the entire Project 2025 playbook if they can. They know they are on borrowed time, that if the election next year doesn’t go their way, this is the year they will dismantle as much of our government as possible, so that by 2028, they can still remain in power. And this goes far beyond Trump. Far beyond the Republican Party. This is a group of powerful and wealthy people who think they are above the law and who want to keep this façade going permanently.

This is our reality, but it doesn’t mean it has to be our future. It doesn’t mean we just accept our fate and say that 250 years was a good run for the United States of America. Quite the opposite. This is our time to push back every way possible. Tonight, I heard from friends who are finalizing their exit plan to Europe. My first thought was “lucky.” I want the same safety plan they are creating for their children for my own. But I nearly instantly pushed that out of my head. America is worth fighting for. This is our moment to prove that.

We can no longer be silent, not now, not ever. We need to harness the same playbook that MAGA uses. Flood social media with the truth. Show up in a way they can’t ignore. Donate. Form our own networks like they do. Sell our own merch. Go all in on this, because when Trump lost last time, that didn’t quiet him down one bit. It just lit the fire even hotter. Because they branded their hate. It’s time we brand our hope. Now it’s our time to do the same.

I’m all in. I hope you are too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather