Six months into Donald Trump’s second term, a lawless president is solidifying his law enforcement powers to create something most Americans didn’t vote for and don’t want: a police state increasingly robbing residents of their rights and due process.

Unaccountable, masked immigration agents, many in plainclothes, are arresting farm workers in fields, raiding Home Depots and car washes, hunting unauthorized workers“like animals,” and grabbing immigrants in courthouses, mothers and children in their homes, high school soccer stars and kids at baseball practice.

Even U.S. citizens have been rounded up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, including children, and other children here legally seeking refuge, some of them sick, along with their parents in the country without legal permission. Many people snatched are quickly deported without due process. Some are“disappeared” into detention facilities or shipped abroad before they can get legal representation.

This hellscape of fear and chaos does not match up with Trump’s campaign promise to mass-deport criminals and arrest “the worst of the worst.” Residents here without legal authorization with no criminal records pleading their cases dutifully in court have been abducted by agents at courthouses. It is a shameful showcase for the cameras, an authoritarian regime running roughshod over constitutional rights, immigrant rights and human rights.

Trump is improperly using the military on U.S. streets, defying court orders, caging detainees in deplorable gulags and dispatching ICE agents to grab anyone they can to meet arbitrary White House quotas of 3,000 a day. He makes a mockery of the rule of law by arresting Americans.

Trump is escalating his war on immigrants as poll numbers on his immigration policies hit a record low. Six months in, the executive orders, court challenges, crypto corruption, firings and budget cuts seem bottomless, as well, and now he is grappling with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

And he’s just getting started. Brace yourselves. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Look for the National Guard or the Marines coming next to Chicago.

Recently, the GOP-led Senate narrowly confirmed Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, Emil Bove, to a lifetime appointment on the federal appellate bench after he was accused of defying the courts. Bove denied it, but one whistleblower said he told fellow Justice Department officials to ignore court orders if necessary to make sure deportation flights took off, alleging: “Bove stated that DOJ would need to consider telling the courts ‘f––– you’ and ignore any such court order.”

To be clear, Republicans and Democrats both agree that illegal immigration needs to be controlled. A bipartisan effort came close to finding a longer-term solution last year until Trump killed the comprehensive reform bill to weaponize the issue against Democrats in the Nov. 5 election. The question is how to do deal with illegal immigration legally and humanely.

Americans voted to get the border under control, and to be fair, Trump’s administration has done that. Crossings and apprehensions have slowed to a trickle. But they didn’t vote for, nor do they support, what he is doing now: lawless crackdowns leaving migrants and Americans alike living in a republic of fear, danger and violence.

“Show me your papers” used to be the catchphrase for villains in World War II movies. Now, it’s the harsh reality for many legal residents. Migrants who may have crossed the border illegally but are now going through the court system to plead their cases can be swept up and disappeared before their day in court.

Worse, Trump and his top White House anti-immigration adviser, Stephen Miller, deliberately appeal to white nationalists and white grievance, leaving the feeling among immigrants that they are targeted in a deportation war aimed mainly against people of color.

His administration has attacked diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and ICE agents have been accused of racially profiling immigrant communities. ICE denies this, but how many white European immigrants do you see in their detention centers? We have seen this pattern before, when whole groups of people are targeted — such as Japanese Americans sent to internment camps during World War II. The inhumane immigration detention center in the Everglades is Exhibit A.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem insists her immigration agents are behaving legally and building cases correctly. She denies racial profiling: “It’s been done exactly how law enforcement has operated for many years in this country, and ICE is out there making sure we get the worst off the streets,” she said.

It’s not hard to do this legally. Barack Obama and Joe Biden, when they were president, fought illegal immigration within the law. In fact, Obama upset many Democrats by being the “Deporter-in-Chief,” deporting more immigrants at a higher rate than Trump has — and he did it legally.

But Trump’s lawlessness and authoritarian conduct goes way beyond immigration, and it has provoked sustained nationwide protests since he took office. He has threatened a number of law firms into submission, tried to quell free speech and dissent at universities, attacked the media with frivolous lawsuits to try to bend them to his will and silence his critics in the entertainment world.

But his police state tactics are causing blowback too. Americans who care about their democracy must continue to rally to defend it. Only people power and voters can stop a criminal president.

Even his unprecedented weaponizing of the Department of Justice to target perceived enemies has caused revulsion among the ranks over abominations such as his attempt to restrict birthright citizenship. The unit that prosecutes those cases has lost nearly two-thirds of its staff as DOJ attorneys leave rather than further his corrupt attempts to tear down the constitutional system.

Trump’s approach toward immigratioin has squandered his support. Many MAGA supporters still approve of his actions, but a majority of Americans in a recent CBS poll now see his deportation program as a net negative.

Moreover, more Americans now see the value of immigration way more than they did a year ago, with the share wanting immigration reduced dropping from 55% in 2024 to 30% today, according to a recent Gallup Poll— and a record-high 79% of U.S. adults now say immigration is a good thing for the country.

Clearly, the police state tactics aren’t working, and that’s a good thing for America.

____

Storer H. Rowley is a former national editor and foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

___

©2025 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.