John and Nisha Whitehead | Rutherford.org | The Rutherford Institute

“You see them on the street. You watch them on TV. You might even vote for one this fall. You think they’re people just like you. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.” — They Live

The spectacle of public executions. Deadly military strikes on foreign countries. Innocent civilian lives lost to war. Aggressive ICE raids. Government officials accused of using their powers to intimidate political opponents. Public office increasingly entangled with private financial interests.  Government leaders who glorify violence, spew hatred, stir up racial prejudice, provoke civil unrest, and stoke discontent.

This is what it looks like when a nation loses its way.

When cruelty is mistaken for courage, vengeance for justice, and the taking of human life for a demonstration of strength.

When government officials tell you not to believe your own eyes and ears about the state of the world around you, when they insist that the truth is a lie and the lie is truth, you’ve stumbled into a dystopian reality in which, as John Lennon rightly concluded, the government is “being run by maniacs for maniacal ends.”

When so-called Christians and self-professed defenders of morality insist that we must accept the lesser of two evils based on exaggerated fears of what might happen if their political opponents gain power, rather than confront the abuses unfolding before our eyes, remember this: the lesser of two evils is still evil.

This is not simply about Donald Trump.

The machinery of the American police state has been assembled over decades, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Presidents have expanded executive authority, waged undeclared wars, authorized drone killings, built surveillance networks, militarized domestic policing, and invoked national security to justify extraordinary powers.

What makes the present moment so troubling is the extent to which the public is encouraged to accept increasingly aggressive exercises of government power as necessary demonstrations of strength and resolve.

The Constitution was never intended to protect only the innocent, the popular, the patriotic, or the politically acceptable. Its restraints on government power matter most when the government is dealing with people whom society has already condemned.

Yet what happens when the public becomes so accustomed to government overreach, corruption and brutality that it no longer recognizes them as warning signs? What becomes of a constitutional republic when its leaders and citizens stop asking whether government actions are lawful, justified or necessary, and concern themselves only with whether those actions punish their enemies, advance their political interests or preserve their sense of security?

We are witnessing a political culture in which demanding due process for an accused criminal is treated as defending criminality, questioning a military strike is equated with sympathy for the enemy, and opposing government cruelty is portrayed as weakness.

The government doesn’t have to abolish the Constitution outright when it can persuade the public that certain people should no longer be entitled to its protections.

That is how constitutional rights cease to be rights at all and become privileges granted or withdrawn at the government’s discretion.

And that is how a population becomes conditioned to accept the unacceptable.

We’re living in two worlds.

There’s the world we see—or are made to see—and then there’s the one we sense and occasionally catch a glimpse of, which bears little resemblance to the propaganda-driven reality manufactured by those in power and amplified through an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

Indeed, what most Americans perceive as life in America—privileged, progressive and free—is a far cry from the reality of a nation where economic inequality persists, government power continues to expand, and freedom is increasingly subjected to the demands of surveillance, security and control.

All is not as it seems.

Monsters with human faces walk among us.

Some of them wield extraordinary government power.

This is the premise of John Carpenter’s film They Live, released in November 1988, which remains unnervingly, chillingly appropriate for our modern age.

Best known for his horror film Halloween, Carpenter’s larger body of work is infused with a strong anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment, laconic bent that speaks to the filmmaker’s concerns about the unraveling of our society, particularly our government.

Time and again, Carpenter portrays the government working against its own citizens, a populace out of touch with reality, technology run amok, and a future more horrific than any horror film.

In They Live, two migrant workers discover that the world is being subliminally controlled and exploited by aliens working in partnership with an oligarchic elite.

All the while, the populace—blissfully unaware of the real agenda at work in their lives—has been lulled into complacency, indoctrinated into compliance, bombarded with media distractions, and hypnotized by hidden messages beamed out of television and various electronic devices, billboards and the like.

Sound familiar?

It is only when homeless drifter John Nada, played by the late Roddy Piper, discovers a pair of special sunglasses that he sees what lies beneath the elite’s fabricated reality: control and bondage.

When viewed through Nada’s lenses, the wealthy and powerful who appear human are revealed as monsters exploiting the citizenry.

Likewise, seemingly mundane advertisements conceal subliminal, authoritarian messages. Magazine racks scream “CONSUME” and “OBEY.” Money proclaims “THIS IS YOUR GOD.” Other hidden messages reinforce the same demands: CONFORM. SUBMIT. STAY ASLEEP. WATCH TV. DO NOT QUESTION AUTHORITY. NO INDEPENDENT THOUGHT.

This indoctrination campaign engineered by the elite in They Live is painfully familiar to anyone who has studied the workings of an authoritarian state.

A citizenry that does not think for themselves, obeys without question, is submissive, does not challenge authority, does not think outside the box, and is content to sit back and be entertained is a citizenry that can be easily controlled.

In this way, the message of They Live provides an apt analogy for the distorted vision of life in the American police state—what philosopher Slavoj Žižek has characterized as the invisible structures of domination that sustain the appearance of freedom.

Tune out the government’s attempts to distract, divert and befuddle us and tune into what’s really going on in this country, and you’ll run headlong into an uncomfortable truth: government corruption and power have expanded far beyond the restraints the Constitution was intended to impose.

And the corruption is not always hidden.

What happens when public office, private wealth and political influence become so intertwined that ordinary citizens can no longer distinguish whose interests their government is serving? What happens when those conflicts are repeatedly exposed, yet the public becomes too distracted, too divided or too politically invested to demand answers?

This is where the warning of They Live becomes especially relevant.

The danger is not simply that powerful interests might conceal what they’re doing. It’s that they can operate in plain sight, confident that enough people will refuse to see—or refuse to care.

We have allowed the government’s corruption, brutality, self-dealing and abuses go on for too long. While this has been true of both parties, it has become painfully evident under the Trump administration.

Desperate to hold onto power, the powers-that-be continue to advance a series of carefully contrived narratives, threats and emergencies to justify expanding their authority, encouraging the public to fear one another, distrust our own judgment, and accept increasingly invasive government powers as the price of safety.

Fear is the great enabler of authoritarianism.

Fear of terrorists. Fear of criminals. Fear of immigrants. Fear of foreign enemies. Fear of domestic extremists. Fear of one another.

Every new threat becomes another justification for expanding government authority, weakening constitutional safeguards, and demanding greater obedience from a frightened public.

This is how government power expands in plain sight. The targets are portrayed as threats. The government’s actions are defended as necessary. Those who question its methods are accused of defending criminals, undermining public safety or siding with the enemy.

And with every exception made to constitutional restraints, the public becomes a little more accustomed to powers it once would have considered intolerable. Surveillance becomes security. Censorship becomes protection. Militarized policing becomes public safety. Indefinite detention becomes national defense.

And killing becomes justice.

For too long, Americans have been persuaded to barter their freedoms for promises of security, rationalizing government wrongdoing because they are told the alternatives would be worse.

But no matter how you rationalize it, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

The greatest danger is not merely that government officials may abuse their power.

It is that ordinary people may become so accustomed to those abuses that they lose the ability—or the willingness—to recognize them for what they are.

This brings us back to They Live, in which the danger posed is not simply the alien conspiracy but the population’s willingness to remain asleep and controlled.

Again, not so different from our own.

As one of the characters points out, “The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are nonexistent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices. Their intention to rule rests with the annihilation of consciousness. We have been lulled into a trance. They have made us indifferent to ourselves, to others. We are focused only on our own gain.”

We, too, are encouraged to focus on our own pleasures, prejudices and political victories, while remaining indifferent to the suffering of others. Our poor and underclasses are also growing. Injustice is growing. Inequality is growing. A concern for human rights is nearly nonexistent. We too have been lulled into a trance, indifferent to others.

The government doesn’t have to convince everyone that its actions are lawful, just or humane. It merely has to persuade enough people that those being targeted deserve whatever happens to them.

Nor does corruption have to be concealed when it can be rationalized, dismissed, or excused as the unavoidable cost of keeping one’s preferred political leaders in power.

This is perhaps the most disturbing parallel to They Live: a population that has been shown what is happening, yet remains unwilling to confront the implications.

The warning signs are no longer buried beneath elaborate disguises. They are unfolding in courtrooms, detention facilities, government offices, financial disclosures and daily news reports.

And still, too many people choose to look away.

We can convince ourselves that we are different from the victims of government abuse. That we are too law-abiding, too patriotic, too respectable, too insignificant to become targets ourselves.

We can tell ourselves that the government means well, that extraordinary measures are necessary, and that those caught in the machinery of state power must have done something to deserve their fate. But every exception made to someone else’s rights weakens the protections intended to safeguard our own.

That was the warning behind the Bill of Rights.

The founders understood that government officials could not be trusted to restrain themselves simply because they professed good intentions. The Constitution was intended to bind government power, not magnify it.

So where does that leave us?

The characters who populate Carpenter’s films provide some insight.

Underneath their machismo, they still believe in the ideals of liberty and equal opportunity. Their beliefs place them in constant opposition with the law and the establishment, but they are nonetheless freedom fighters.

When John Nada destroys the alien hypno-transmitter in They Live, he delivers a wake-up call for freedom. As Nada memorably declares, “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.”

In other words, it’s time to get active and take a stand for what’s really important.

Stop allowing yourselves to be easily distracted by political spectacles and manufactured fears. Stop treating constitutional rights as privileges reserved for people you agree with. Stop excusing government abuses merely because the victims are unpopular or the perpetrators share your political loyalties.

As we make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all the trappings of the American police state are now in plain sight.

The greatest danger is not that the monsters have become so adept at hiding among us. It is that we have become so conditioned to their presence, so accustomed to their abuses, and so willing to excuse their corruption that we no longer recognize them for what they are.

Wake up, America.

If they live—the tyrants, the oppressors, the invaders, the overlords—it is only because “we the people” sleep.

Original Article: https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_politics_of_denial

John and Nisha Whitehead | Rutherford.org | The Rutherford Institute

“United States AI companies must be free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.”—President Donald Trump, Executive Order 14365

The era of small government is over.

Anyone who tells you differently is selling you a lie.

Case in point: Donald Trump promised to shrink the federal government.

But what if Trump’s pledge to cut the federal work force wasn’t really about eliminating government bureaucracy but outsourcing it to the AI tech sector?

What if Trump, with the backing of a self-serving industry eager to automate government, is instead helping to build a government that no longer needs as many human beings to operate it?

Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are disappearing from the government payroll at the same time that Washington is racing to automate the work they once performed with artificial intelligence.

Since Trump returned to office, the federal workforce has shrunk by more than 270,000 employees, the result of hiring freezes, deferred resignations, early retirements and reductions in force.

At the same time, the Trump administration has embraced an aggressive campaign to automate government operations, with the General Services Administration instructing agencies to “eliminate, optimize and automate“ their work wherever possible.

This is not a return to smaller government.

It is a dangerous recalibration of government power.

What we are watching unfold is the construction of a government that requires fewer human beings to carry out its will, fewer human beings to question its orders, and fewer human beings to stand in the way when efficiency collides with legality, morality or constitutional restraint.

That is the real danger of automating government.

Human beings hesitate. Human beings question. Human beings object. Human beings refuse. Human beings blow the whistle.

Machines do not hesitate. They do not object. They do not blow the whistle.

For the most part, machines do what they are programmed to do. Until they don’t.

For an administration increasingly impatient with legal restraints, institutional resistance and anyone who says “no,” that is not merely a technological convenience.

It is an authoritarian temptation.

Anyone who believes smaller government means less government power needs to think again, because a government run by machines is still government.

Likewise, a government without bureaucrats is not necessarily a government without bureaucracy.

It may simply be bureaucracy without human beings.

And bureaucracy without human beings may prove far more powerful, pervasive and difficult to restrain than anything that came before it.

What is taking shape is a government that may employ fewer human beings while possessing exponentially greater power to surveil, process, classify, investigate and control the population.

Indeed, the administration has now launched America.gov, an AI-powered centralized digital gateway through which Americans will eventually interact with federal agencies and complete government transactions. The White House boasts that it will allow the federal government to “do its own paperwork.”

AI can certainly reduce backlogs, simplify forms, process information and free workers from tedious tasks.

Certainly, artificial intelligence can help eliminate repetitive paperwork, reduce backlogs, identify waste, simplify complicated forms, translate government jargon into plain English, process enormous amounts of information and free human workers from tedious tasks.

The concern is not whether AI can be useful.

It can.

The danger begins when AI stops assisting human beings and starts replacing them—not merely as clerks but as decision-makers, investigators, gatekeepers, analysts and enforcers of government power.

Thus, the concern is not the technology itself but what happens when government begins using it to eliminate the human restraints that constitutional government depends upon.

We are rapidly moving from a society ruled by laws and due process to one ruled increasingly by software.

In such a regime, the law is no longer merely interpreted. It is executed. Automatically. Mechanically. At machine speed.

The result is a system in which government no longer governs. It processes.

Your application. Your tax return. Your disability claim. Your immigration status. Your face. Your movements. Your associations. Your financial transactions. Your government records request. Your threat profile.

Perhaps eventually your guilt or innocence.

And, if some military planners have their way, whether you qualify as a target.

This is where the supposed efficiency of artificial intelligence collides head-on with the Constitution.

Government is not a private corporation. Its purpose is not merely to become faster, cheaper or more productive. Government possesses powers that no corporation possesses. It can tax you. Search you. Arrest you. Imprison you. Seize your property. Monitor you. Restrict your liberty. And in extreme circumstances, take your life.

And in extreme circumstances, take your life.

When government exercises those powers, efficiency cannot be the highest value. Liberty must be.

Due process is inefficient. Search warrants are inefficient. Trials are inefficient. Appeals are inefficient. Human review is inefficient. Checks and balances are spectacularly inefficient.

They are supposed to be.

The Constitution deliberately places obstacles between government power and the individual.

Before the police may search your home, they generally need a warrant. Before the government may imprison you, it must give you an opportunity to challenge the accusations. Government power is deliberately divided so that one branch can restrain another.

All of that takes time.

All of that requires human beings.

All of that frustrates officials who would prefer to simply get things done.

Yet those safeguards are among the things standing between a free people and a government that can act instantly, universally and without meaningful resistance.

Artificial intelligence promises to cut through the delays, obstacles and human steps that slow government down.

That is marvelous if you’re trying to schedule an appointment. It is terrifying when the government is making decisions about your liberty—or your life.

For generations, government power was also constrained by manpower. There were only so many investigators, analysts and bureaucrats—and only so many hours in a day.

AI changes that equation.

By doing what the police state has historically lacked the manpower and resources to do quickly, AI surveillance is already reorienting our world into one in which freedom is increasingly difficult to recognize: it can be everywhere, watch everyone and everything, monitor, identify, catalogue, cross-check, cross-reference and collate enormous quantities of information.

The surveillance state no longer needs enough people to watch everyone. It needs enough computing power.

That distinction matters.

A human investigator can follow only so many people. An algorithm can analyze millions. A bureaucrat can make only so many decisions in a day. A machine can make millions without sleeping, hesitating or developing a conscience.

That allows government power—and government abuse—to operate on a scale the Founders could scarcely have imagined.

It also creates an enormous accountability problem.

For decades, critics of the administrative state have warned about unelected bureaucrats wielding excessive government power.

Replacing the bureaucrat with an algorithm does not solve that problem. It may make it worse.

At least the bureaucrat has a name. A human being can be questioned. A supervisor can At least the bureaucrat has a name. A human being can be questioned. A supervisor can intervene. An employee can refuse an unlawful order. A whistleblower can expose misconduct. Someone can be held responsible.

But what happens when government responds, in effect, that the computer made the decision? Who do you cross-examine? Who explains the reasoning? Who takes responsibility for the mistake? Who possesses the authority to override the machine? And what happens when the algorithm itself belongs not to the government but to a private corporation whose code, training data and internal workings are shielded from public scrutiny?

The government’s dependence on private technology companies only compounds the problem.

Government power remains government power, but accountability becomes privatized.

We are already seeing glimpses of this future.

Federal agencies are already experimenting with AI to review Freedom of Information Act requests and recommend which portions of government records should be withheld from the public. Customs and Border Protection is testing AI-assisted redaction tools, while other agencies are developing similar systems. Human reviewers are still involved, but the trajectory is unmistakable: tasks requiring judgment about what the public may know are increasingly becoming candidates for automation.

The stakes become far greater once AI moves from paperwork to policing and warfare.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon clashed with Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI system, after Anthropic insisted on maintaining restrictions against two uses of its technology: mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.

Anthropic warned that present AI systems are not reliable enough to independently decide when weapons should fire and argued that AI-powered mass surveillance could allow government to piece together enormous quantities of otherwise scattered information about Americans at unprecedented scale.

The Pentagon responded by designating Anthropic a supply-chain risk, a decision that has since become the subject of litigation.

The dispute should concern anyone who cares about the limits of government power.

The issue was not whether artificial intelligence could assist military personnel.

It was whether there must always remain a human being responsible for certain decisions.

That question became even more urgent in September, when the United States and Russia opposed provisions under discussion at the United Nations that would have required human review of AI-generated military targets and imposed stronger requirements concerning the predictability and reliability of autonomous weapons systems.

The consequences of that rush toward machine-speed warfare are no longer hypothetical.

In February, U.S. missiles struck the Shajarah Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing more than 150 people, including at least 120 children.

The school had once been part of a military compound, but it had been operating openly as a school for years. Yet outdated intelligence still classified the site as a military target.

According to reporting on the Pentagon’s internal investigation, the flawed target was fed into Maven, the military’s AI-assisted targeting system. Officials reportedly relied too heavily on the technology to identify stale or contradictory intelligence while an accelerated targeting process compressed work that once took hours into minutes. At the same time, civilian-harm mitigation teams had been dramatically reduced.

The machine did not simply wake up one morning and decide to bomb a school. Human beings built a system that placed a premium on speed, automation and scale—and then gave it priority over human judgment and careful vetting.

That distinction matters. It is also precisely the danger.

Think about the progression: First AI does the paperwork. Then AI recommends the decision. Then AI makes the decision.

Eventually AI decides who lives and who dies.

At each step, humans remain tempted to surrender a little more judgment to the machine because it is faster, cheaper, more efficient and supposedly more objective.

Yet technology does not eliminate human bias, political agendas or government misconduct.

It can automate them. It can amplify them. It can conceal them behind a technological black box. And it can reproduce them millions of times before anyone realizes what has happened.

This is why assurances that AI companies can largely police themselves should provide little comfort.

At a White House gathering with technology executives on September 29, Trump praised what he called “tremendous self-policing” by the AI industry and joined major technology companies in announcing a voluntary safety accord emphasizing internal controls, outside audits and corporate oversight.

In other words, Trump wants us to trust the government and the AI sector to police itself.

The Founders knew better than to trust power to police itself. That is one of the central premises of the Constitution.

As James Madison famously observed in Federalist No. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

The Founders did not assume that those entrusted with power would always restrain themselves. They divided power among competing branches because they understood that good intentions are not a safeguard against tyranny. Neither are voluntary promises. Neither are corporate ethics policies. Neither are algorithms.

Machines are not angels. The corporations building them are not angels. The politicians deploying them are not angels. And artificial intelligence does not repeal the oldest lesson in the history of government: power requires limits because power will always seek to expand.

This is where the campaign to shrink the federal workforce takes on an entirely different significance.

There is nothing inherently wrong with reducing unnecessary government employment, eliminating waste or using technology to make public services work better.

The danger lies in confusing fewer government employees with less government.

A government can have fewer workers and still become vastly more powerful. It can automate surveillance. Automate investigations. Automate eligibility decisions. Automate regulatory enforcement. Automate censorship. Automate watchlists. Automate targeting. Automate punishment.

Indeed, a government freed from the practical limits imposed by manpower could become more pervasive than anything an earlier generation of bureaucrats could have achieved.

That is the paradox confronting us.

We may be building a smaller federal workforce and a larger government machine.

Trump will not be president forever. Neither will the politicians who come after him.

But the AI infrastructure being erected now—the databases, automated systems, surveillance capabilities, digital gateways and government relationships with technology companies—will be inherited by every future administration.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once those powers become embedded in the machinery of government, they will be exceedingly difficult to dismantle.

That is why the debate over artificial intelligence cannot be reduced to whether AI creates jobs, destroys jobs, saves taxpayer money or makes government more convenient.

The greater question is what happens when fewer and fewer human beings stand between government power and the people subjected to it.

What happens when there is no human face behind the decision? No human judgment. No human hesitation. No human mercy. No human conscience.

No human being willing—or able—to say: this is wrong.

The great danger is not that artificial intelligence will suddenly seize control of the government. It is that government officials will willingly surrender more and more control to artificial intelligence because machines are faster, cheaper, more obedient and easier to blame.

That is how bureaucracy without bureaucrats becomes authoritarianism without accountability.

The government may employ fewer people. It may operate fewer offices. It may eliminate paperwork and automate entire agencies. But if it can watch more people, investigate more people, process more people, target more people and exercise more power over more lives than ever before, that is not smaller government.

It is government without human limits.

The Founders built the Constitution around a simple truth: power cannot be trusted to restrain itself.

That truth does not become obsolete because the machinery of power now runs on artificial intelligence. If anything, it becomes more urgent.

Because once we remove the human beings who can question, resist, object and refuse, we may discover too late that we have not eliminated the bureaucracy at all.

We have eliminated the brakes.

Original Article: https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/ai_authoritarianism_a_government_without_constitutional_brakes

John and Nisha Whitehead | Rutherford.org | The Rutherford Institute

“If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you.”—Robert Reich

America, you got fooled. Again.

For starters, the war on illegal immigration was never just about illegal immigration.

If you fell for that, chances are you’re still falling for the government’s oldest trick: manufacture a crisis, identify an enemy, frighten the public, declare an emergency, and then use the resulting fear to justify another expansion of government power.

Terrorism. Crime. Drugs. National security. Illegal immigration.

Different threats. Same playbook.

Take a legitimate problem—or inflate it into an existential menace—and suddenly constitutional safeguards become inconveniences, extraordinary powers become necessities, and anyone who questions the government’s methods can be accused of siding with the enemy.

Immigration is a perfect example.

A highly charged issue that pushes all of the knee-jerk, polarizing buttons when it comes to deep-seated fears and prejudices, immigration has been the perfect vehicle for the Trump administration’s political fearmongering and authoritarian power grabs.

Trump has repeatedly described illegal immigration in the language of invasion, criminality and national-security emergency.

Yet a closer look suggests a far more complicated reality.

A 2026 Cato Institute analysis of Census data found that undocumented immigrants were incarcerated at a rate of 674 per 100,000 people in 2024, compared with 1,195 per 100,000 native-born Americans. Legal immigrants had an even lower incarceration rate of 303 per 100,000. Cato concluded that both legal and undocumented immigrants are less crime-prone than native-born Americans.

So, what is the government’s end game?

We’ve been so fixated on the overt cruelty, unapologetic authoritarianism, thuggish brutality, and blatantly unconstitutional abuses of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that we missed the larger menace taking shape behind it.

While the country fights over who should be allowed in, who should be kicked out, and who can participate in a pay-to-play scheme that benefits the oligarchy, the government continues building the infrastructure of a prison state.

This is the real power grab.

The government is using its so-called war on illegal immigration to normalize something far more dangerous: a system in which due process can be bypassed, people can be detained and moved beyond easy public scrutiny, government agents can wield extraordinary enforcement powers with minimal accountability, and constitutional protections can be treated as optional whenever the government invokes security.

Immigration is the testing ground.

The precedent being established and the tactics being trotted out and normalized are the real danger. Because once the government establishes that it can suspend the Constitution’s safeguards for one disfavored group, there is nothing magical that keeps those powers confined to that group.

We are all at risk.

Be warned: the literal and figurative walls being erected in the name of national security should concern the people already living inside them. The machinery being built to find, track, identify, seize, detain and disappear immigrants can just as easily be redirected toward the population at large.

That is how a police state becomes a prison state.

Immigration enforcement is the dress rehearsal in anticipation of the government’s ultimate muscle flex.

To round people up on the scale envisioned by the administration, the government first has to know who people are. Where they live. Where they work. Where they drive. Who they associate with. What they look like. What databases contain information about them. Where they were yesterday. Where they are today. And where they might be tomorrow.

That requires surveillance. Lots of it.

Biometric databases. Facial recognition. License-plate readers. Flock cameras. Data brokers. Location tracking. Artificial intelligence. Phone extraction tools. Government databases linked to still more government databases.

The Brennan Center for Justice reports that the Department of Homeland Security has committed more than $2.9 billion in recent years to surveillance, data collection and analytics technologies used in the interior of the United States, including more than $1 billion for biometrics. Those systems include tools capable of tracking phones and vehicles, collecting facial and other biometric data, purchasing commercial information and combining records from multiple databases to create detailed profiles on individuals.

Then comes enforcement, masked agents, raids, checkpoints, detention centers, private prisons, transfers, rendition—all wrapped in the reassuring language of public safety and national security.

For now, immigration is the convenient scapegoat to justify the crackdowns and loss of liberty, but the machinery of oppression being assembled does not know how to discriminate and differentiate.

A surveillance camera does not know whether or not you are a citizen. A license-plate reader does not know how you voted. A biometric database does not care why your face is being searched. A location-tracking system does not distinguish between following an undocumented immigrant and following a political protester.

Indeed, the Brennan Center notes that DHS technologies acquired for border security and criminal investigations have capabilities that can be directed at anyone—immigrants, protesters, travelers and other members of the public.

The machinery simply does what it was built to do: find, track, identify, classify, control and, when ordered, detain.

We are watching the infrastructure of a prison state being assembled in plain sight.

Surveillance, however, is only the beginning. The real power comes when the government takes everything it knows about you and acts on it.

Find you. Seize you. Detain you. Move you. Cut you off from the people who might intervene on your behalf. Eventually, make it difficult for anyone outside the system to determine where you are at all.

This is where ICE becomes particularly instructive.

Not because every American is about to be deported, but because ICE demonstrates what government looks like when surveillance, databases, aggressive enforcement, detention and secrecy are fused into a single system.

As historian Timothy Snyder warns, “If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.”

Once due process ceases to be a non-negotiable right for one disfavored group, it becomes an optional privilege for everyone.

This is the slippery slope that eventually allows the government to make everyone disappear—citizen and immigrant alike—whenever they become inconvenient, or disfavored, or no longer useful to the powers-that-be.

People are already disappearing inside the United States.

Seized without warning, denied due process, and locked up indefinitely in a sprawling network of immigration detention centers, county jails, private prisons, temporary holding facilities and federal facilities, these individuals are being transferred from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, moved hundreds or thousands of miles from family and lawyers, made increasingly difficult to locate—they are being made to disappear.

Their whereabouts are effectively being scrubbed from public view.

On September 15, 2026, ICE stopped publicly listing the locations of many detainees with final removal orders in its online detainee locator.

Immigration attorneys told the Associated Press that clients suddenly vanished from the public system, making it harder to determine whether they had been transferred, remained somewhere in federal custody or were being prepared for removal. ICE defended the change as part of its effort to prioritize deportations of people with final orders.

There can be no understating what is at stake when the government acquires the power to make people disappear from public view.

This is disappearance by bureaucracy.

People disappear first from public view. Then from the practical reach of their lawyers and families. Then, potentially, from the database. Public records no longer reveal where some detainees are. And sometimes the next stop is another country entirely.

For now, it’s immigrants—our fellow workers, friends, family members, members of our communities, people who pay taxes, contribute to the economy, and once helped make America and its economy the envy of the world—who are being rounded up, designated as “unhuman” in order to deny them basic human rights and made to disappear, but they are just the warm-up.

Watch and learn: once these tactics have been refined and mastered, we’ll be the next targets.

The government has been perfecting variations on this machinery for decades.

After 9/11, the United States transported terrorism suspects—some never convicted of crimes—to secret CIA detention facilities beyond the ordinary reach of American courts and public scrutiny. Extraordinary rendition allowed government to outsource detention and interrogation into legal gray zones.

Yet disappearing people has never required sending them overseas.

Consider Homan Square.

For years, the Chicago Police Department operated a facility on the city’s West Side where lawyers and former detainees alleged that people were taken for interrogation before appearing through normal booking channels. Records later obtained by the Guardian documented more than 7,000 arrests associated with Homan Square over roughly eleven years, while documented attorney access was extraordinarily rare.

That danger is becoming harder to dismiss.

In September 2026, Amnesty International released a report alleging extensive human-rights violations in U.S. immigration enforcement. Amnesty alleges that the current mass detention and deportation campaign has subjected migrants, refugees and asylum seekers to a broad range of abuses.

Amnesty has called for ICE to be abolished.

Whatever the remedy, no government agency should be empowered to act lawlessly and make people disappear.

The Trump administration’s latest tactic for discouraging migration into the U.S. and instilling terror in the hearts of immigrants already here is the use of “third-country removals”: sending certain deportees to countries where they are not citizens and may never have lived.

We saw this in the wake of 9/11 under the Bush administration with their use of extraordinary rendition and remote torture sites.

The rationale seemed to be that if you removed someone from the United States, the Constitution wouldn’t follow them.

Indeed, the Trump administration appears to be trying to move faster than the lawyers and courts in an effort to outrun judicial review and the Constitution.

Perhaps the destination is overseas. Perhaps it is another jail. Perhaps it is another prison right here in America. That distinction no longer matters: you do not have to leave the United States to disappear into the machinery of the prison state.

This is precisely why due process matters.

Due process is not a privilege. It is not a legal loophole. And it is not a technicality reserved for people the government considers deserving of special treatment.

Due process is what stands between accusation and punishment, between suspicion and imprisonment, and between government power and individual liberty.

At the heart of that protection is habeas corpus, which translates to “you should have the body.”

Dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215, habeas corpus allows someone imprisoned by the government to challenge that detention in court and demand that the government make the case for why they should be held.

The Founders considered habeas such a fundamental and necessary ingredient in guarding against government tyranny that they included it in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 of the Constitution. As the Brennan Center explains, habeas “was conceived to guarantee protection from the king arbitrarily disappearing subjects to secret dungeons without just cause or due process.”

Despite what the Trump administration would have us believe, habeas applies equally to citizens and non-citizens alike within the United States.

The act of transporting someone outside the U.S. does not lessen that protection, but it does make it harder to enforce.

History has supplied enough warnings.

Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War resulted in arrests without ordinary judicial process. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II demonstrated how quickly fear and prejudice can overwhelm constitutional safeguards. The post-9/11 rendition program demonstrated how easily government can try to place human beings beyond the effective reach of American courts.

Homan Square demonstrated that you do not have to leave American soil for that to happen.

And today’s immigration detention system demonstrates how these tactics can merge: masked arrests, county jails, private prisons, remote detention centers, repeated transfers, limited access to attorneys, disappearing locator records, expedited deportations and third-country removals.

Each scenario arose from different circumstances, but each also demonstrates what happens when government insists that extraordinary conditions justify extraordinary powers.

This is why the familiar refrain—if you are here legally, you have nothing to fear—misses the point. So does: if you are an American citizen, you have nothing to fear. And: If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.

That is the oldest sales pitch in the police-state playbook: “Just trust us.” “We’re only going after the bad people.”

But inevitably, the definition of “bad people” changes.

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, imagining authoritarian government taking root not in some distant dictatorship but in America.

Those four words capture one of the most dangerous assumptions a free people can make.

It can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to citizens. Not to innocent people.

Not to me.

Perhaps not. Perhaps the government will never put you on a rendition flight to a country you’ve never visited. Perhaps you will never disappear into a detention center. Perhaps masked agents will never come to your door.

But there are other ways for a free people to disappear.

Privacy disappears. Anonymity disappears. The freedom to move about without being tracked disappears. The freedom to associate without creating a digital trail disappears. The freedom to protest without being identified, catalogued and entered into a database disappears. The presumption that government should leave you alone unless it has legitimate cause to investigate you disappears.

Bit by bit, the boundaries separating a free citizen from a prisoner begin to disappear, too.

You are watched. Tracked. Catalogued. Scanned. Recorded. Flagged. Followed.

Your movements become data. Your associations become data. Your face becomes data. Your life becomes searchable.

All that remains is for someone in government to decide what the data means.

This is how “We the People” disappear.

Not necessarily onto rendition flights.

Not necessarily into secret prisons.

We disappear when we cease to live as a people presumed free and begin living instead as inhabitants of a country-sized surveillance state—watched constantly, tracked everywhere, our movements and associations increasingly subject to monitoring, cataloguing and government scrutiny.

That is the larger danger concealed by the immigration debate.

ICE is showing us what the machinery can do.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, eventually the prison built for someone else can become the prison imprisoning all of us.

Original Article: https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/first_them_then_us_americas_shift_from_police_state_to_prison_state

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