From Portland to the Polls: ICE Is Deporting Your Political Power
If You Think the Fascism You're Experiencing Now Is Bad, You Will Be Horrified by Their Long Game
ICE agents and federal troops now occupy American streets, a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act barring the military from domestic law enforcement. While the issue awaits national adjudication, the illegality is glaring, and courts are already slamming the Trump regime for similar overreaches. We witness the daily attacks on free speech, the neighbors with spotless records vanished into detention, the communities torn apart. Each outrage is a fire we must fight.
But fighting these daily fires, as we must, risks blinding us to the inferno they are building.
It kicked into high gear in May, when Stephen Miller demanded ICE hit a target of 3,000 arrests a day. Now, DHS brags about shattering that goal, with over 2 million removals in under 250 days—a brutal 8,000-per-day clip. They cloak this in the rhetoric of “making America safe”, but this isn’t about crime. It’s a calculated assault on political power. Every victory we’ve ever won—for abortion rights, racial justice, climate survival, LGBTQ+ liberation, and an end to mass incarceration—is on the chopping block. The regime is forging a weapon to erase it all. That weapon is ICE, backed by their illegal military muscle.
The Real Math Will Make Your Blood Boil
This purge isn’t slowing down. It’s accelerating from a 3,000-a-day goal to an 8,000-a-day reality, fueled by a bottomless slush fund for enforcement. If they hold this pace, we are staring at over 14 million people gone by the 2030 Census. That’s not a statistic—it’s a dagger aimed at the heart of American democracy.
Don’t be fooled by the raw numbers. The regime’s defenders will point to high arrest volumes in red states like Texas and Florida to claim this isn’t targeted. They’re counting on you not to look closer. The real strategy is in the fine print: even in red states, enforcement hammers blue-leaning urban centers like Houston’s Harris County or Miami-Dade in Florida—Democratic bastions where diverse communities drive progressive power. This isn’t random; it’s precision warfare.
Nationally, it’s a congressional apocalypse. Depopulating these areas means blue states lose seats in the House, handing them straight to growing red states. It’s gerrymandering on steroids—not redrawing lines, but rewriting the whole damn map. Stack that on their voter suppression and regular gerrymandering playbook, and you’ve got locked-in minority rule.
Within red states, the pain is just as brutal. GOP legislatures exploit these population drops in blue cities to redraw districts, cracking and packing Democratic votes. The deportations create a chilling effect in mixed-status families, suppressing civic engagement and turnout among citizen voters who fear for their loved ones. Depopulated urban hubs are then starved of the federal funds that sustain them, weakening the very infrastructure of resistance. It’s a vicious one-two punch: rigging the national board while choking local power. A Surgical Strike Masquerading as Policy
A Targeted Strike, Not a Policy
Let’s be clear: this isn’t an argument for “open borders” or padding numbers. Anyone spinning that lie is gaslighting to dodge the truth. The key isn’t just the number of removals—it’s where they bite hardest. With border crossings down, the focus has shifted to “aggressive arrests in non-border communities nationwide”. And the operations zero in on blue cities everywhere.
If this were real “law and order,” it’d be uniform. It’s not. The selectivity proves it’s political engineering. They’re not enforcing laws—they’re deporting dissent, one family at a time.
The Constitutional Cage They’re Building
This rigged system isn’t the finale; it’s the setup for every nightmare they’ve plotted, all stamped with “constitutional” approval. The fall of Roe was a preview. A 14-million-person census purge makes a nationwide abortion ban a certainty. By gutting seats from pro-choice states, they will manufacture an unassailable anti-choice majority in Congress. No state sanctuary will be safe. The pregnant women dying from lack of healthcare in Texas today? That’s your—or someone you care about—tomorrow. That horror is what they plan to export nationwide, courtesy of ICE’s blade.
The fight to end voter suppression? This is their checkmate. By depopulating the Black and Brown strongholds that anchor Democratic wins, they erase electoral weight on a scale that makes gerrymandering look quaint. It is a path to Jim Crow 2.0, where even if every vote may be counted, they mean exponentially less by the time you account for the shift in congressional shifts and gerrymandering.
And it doesn’t stop there. The fight for climate survival will be legislated into oblivion by a permanent pro-polluter majority that will gut the EPA and subsidize fossil fuels indefinitely. The battle for LGBTQ+ liberation will be crushed under the weight of national anti-trans laws and attacks on marriage equality. The push to end mass incarceration will be buried by a federally mandated return to the failed “tough on crime” policies that enrich their private prison donors.
The fascism we see daily—the troops in our streets, the disappearances—is monstrous. But the machine they’re assembling is worse. It’s a constitutional cage, designed to ensure that even when we win the argument, we still lose the count, every single time.
If you believe in this fight, then stand with us beyond this article. The American Manifesto is more than analysis—it’s the strategic intelligence for the information war. We expose their endgame so we can break it. Every subscription sharpens our message, funds our work, and ensures this truth cannot be ignored. Join us, support us, and help make sure this movement cannot be stopped.
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The Bullseye: Your Voice, Silenced
Never forget: The census tallies everyone, not just citizens. Those numbers dictate congressional seats, Electoral College votes, and federal dollars. Every removal from a progressive hotspot—be it a blue city in a blue state or a Democratic island in red territory—is a direct hit on our power.
They’re not just deporting people. They are deporting your future. They’re crafting a world where they can’t lose by vanishing millions to steal the decade.
Our job is to wake up, resist, and expose this before they lock us out for good. But exposing the threat is only the first step. Understanding the scale of this attack can feel paralyzing. That’s intentional. They want you to feel hopeless. They are counting on your despair.
But we are not powerless. Their plan has weaknesses, and we have a strategy to exploit them. This isn’t a theoretical fight; it requires a concrete battle plan. We have one. It’s time to stop reacting and start dismantling their machine.
Our full strategy, Fighting Fascism: The Battleplan to Break the Regime, lays out exactly how we fight back and win and how you can take part in that plan.
Read it. Share it. And get in the fight.
Your move — I want to hear from you
I need to hear from you in the comments:
Do you agree that this ICE strategy is a deliberate plan to rig the census? Or do you see a different motive at play?
Which consequence of this strategy worries you the most—the loss of congressional power, the threat to abortion rights, or the disenfranchisement of voters?
How do we make people see this long-term threat when the daily outrages are so overwhelming? What’s the most effective way to fight back?
What other “long game” strategies from the regime do you think are being overlooked right now?
What angle of this story did I miss? If you see this differently, I want to hear your perspective.
Absolutely terrifying!!!
Obviously they couldn't hit 3k/day legitimately, so now they're arresting anybody who wasn't born here. I don't see it as an attempt to rig the census, I see it as a kissup.