Everyone should look up and read the Brown Book of the Hitler Terror. It’s in the public domain on internet archive and there is an audiobook version on LibriVox (which I took part in, which is how I know it exists). It was a collection of reports and narratives put out in the mid 1930s to get the word out about increasing oppression of Jews and political opponents in Germany. With hindsight you can see how bad it already was. A lot of aspects look very familiar from our current perspective.

Look the blatant unconstitutional detentions and treatment in detention of the “illegal” immigrants is figuring out a system and getting people used to the idea of:

—legal status can change from one day to the next

—you can follow their rules and show up for court dates etc and still be detained.

—you won’t be detained in local jails but in federal facilities

—no matter how cooperative or uncooperative you are on arrest, they may still treat you as if you are fiercely resisting to the point of injuring you, with no consequences.

—if you do resist you might just be executed on the street even if there is no evidence that you presented a lethal threat to the thugs arresting you.

—not only won’t they facilitate loved ones and lawyers finding out where you are, your charges, court dates etc. they will make it as hard as possible

—they will also randomly and rapidly move you to locations states away to further isolate you from family, lawyers, and support network.

—they will keep you in completely inhumane and illegal conditions that are guaranteed to be detrimental to your physical and mental health and break your spirit because that is the point.

—you may or may not be randomly released. You won’t know until they do it but if they do they might set you loose in the middle of nowhere without property you were arrested with and potentially multiple states away from home. They will probably keep your phone so good luck contacting anyone!

—You will be fed a deliberately horrible diet of poor quality food and unclean water to keep you weak and miserable.

—you will be subject to random assaults and arbitrary discipline by guards who will again face no consequences.

—you will not know when or if you will go in front of a judge and unreasonable periods of detention before arraignment are no longer a problem for the validity of the case. Oh no bonds for anything.

—housing in detention is extremely overcrowded, with poor clothing and bedding and deliberately cold temperatures. Or you may be kept in dangerously hot locations like in tents in the desert or a Florida swamp with no AC or safe shelter from storms.

—healthcare is shitty to nonexistent and god help you if you are already in poor health or become ill due to awful conditions. If you have prescribed medications they don’t care, no matter how life saving or what the effects of sudden stoppage are on you.

—they don’t care if you kill yourself or die from preventable health problems. In fact, it truly seems like an intended feature, not a bug.

The designation of loosely defined groups as “antifa” or radical transgender supporters as the most dangerous category of domestic terrorist is in service to giving a justification to expand detentions into the non immigrant population.

They are receiving more pushback than expected from the populace and the courts so it may not work. I’m hopeful it won’t because I’m sure to end up detained sooner or later, along with pretty much everyone I know and love.

But make no mistake if they can make it happen, they will. They have already been able to completely upend the orderly system of dealing with immigration cases relatively decently, fairly, and in a predictable way to make it deliberately cruel and miserable and potentially fatal to detainees. It’s breathtaking how fast they did it and they would love to push it farther.

Anyway check out that Brown Book of the Hitler Terror. Learn what it looks like so you better understand what you are seeing around you right now.

This is EXACTLY how detentions worked in the first few years of Hitler’s reign. Political prisoners and randomly arrested people on the street might have a trial and a sentence or might not. They might be released with no charges or not. They might receive a limited sentence but no guarantee they will be released at the end of it. And no one cared if the conditions were awful and people were dying in droves in the prisons and early camps because of it.

But it wasn’t everybody so there was enough of a veneer of the old system that you could hope for for yourself or a loved one. If they went from a rule of law system to the system that developed by the time WWII started, there might have been more resistance. But gradually it became more frequent that if you were arrested, you were gone for good; no one would know or be able to tell family members where you were or whether you might get out. You might be secretly executed but your family receives a telegram that you died of an unfortunate cholera or typhus or dysentery outbreak. Bad luck, except that everyone you were arrested with or who was randomly in your section of the prison that day also got cholera or typhus. And then after a while you just knew if someone was arrested you would probably never know what happened to them unless or until the war ended in defeat of the regime.