The Fascist War on Human Rights: The GOP’s Descent into Detention, Torture, and the Death of the Rule of Law

They said it was about "illegals." Now, they’re detaining legal immigrants and green card holders—ignoring courts, consolidating power, and excusing the murder of U.S. citizens.

Let’s get one thing straight—this isn’t just about immigration anymore. This isn’t about “border security” or “law and order.” This is about a government that has abandoned even the pretense of respecting human rights, the rule of law, or basic human decency.

This is about state-sanctioned cruelty.

This is about Donald Trump, Tom Homan, and the Republican Party unleashing a system of inhumane detention, torture, and lawless deportations—not just against undocumented immigrants, but against legal immigrants, green card holders, and even U.S. citizens.

This is about an administration that isn’t just targeting those it calls “illegal”—it’s targeting anyone it wants, ignoring the courts, and escalating towards full-blown fascist rule.

This is who they are.

The Evidence of a Fascist State: The Faces of Their Brutality

They don’t want you to think about the people in those detention centers. They want you to picture vague, faceless “illegals” in orange jumpsuits. They want you to dehumanize them—because once you stop seeing them as people, it’s easier to justify their suffering.

So, let’s make them real. Let’s tell their stories.

Jessica Brösche: The German Tourist Trapped in an American Nightmare

Jessica Brösche should be home in Berlin right now, tattooing clients and drinking coffee with her friends. Instead, she’s been rotting in an ICE detention center for over a month—with no end in sight.

She wasn’t trying to sneak into the country. She had her German passport. She had her return ticket home. She had legal permission to be here under the Visa Waiver Program.

It didn’t matter.

ICE decided—on nothing but a hunch—that she was going to violate her visa by working as a tattoo artist while visiting. No proof. No trial. Just the word of an agent who “suspected” her.

Then the real horror began.

They threw her into a freezing cell with no bed and no contact with the outside world. When her best friend, Amelia, desperately searched for her, ICE refused to tell her where Jessica was.

For eight days, Jessica was put in solitary confinement.

She listened to screams echoing from the other cells. She started hallucinating. She punched the walls until her knuckles bled, just to feel something real.

And the U.S. government still won’t let her go.

Fabian Schmidt: A Green Card Holder Treated Like a Criminal

Fabian Schmidt isn’t undocumented. He has lived in the U.S. legally for 17 years. He’s an engineer. He has a home in New Hampshire.

None of it mattered.

When he landed in Boston after a trip to Luxembourg, ICE snatched him at the airport and locked him in a detention center. Why?

Because his green card renewal was “flagged.”

That’s it. That was all it took.

They stripped him naked.
They violently interrogated him.
They threw him into a freezing shower, then left him shivering on the floor.

For days, his mother, Astrid, had no idea where he was. She called every agency she could, desperately trying to find out what had happened to her son.

The response? “We must refer you to CBP.”
CBP’s response? “These claims are blatantly false.”

Fabian was locked away for a week before anyone in his family was allowed to speak to him.

He told his mother he felt like an animal.

Jasmine Mooney: A Canadian Businesswoman in Chains

Jasmine Mooney wasn’t trying to sneak into the country. She had a job offer. She had visa paperwork. She had followed the legal process—exactly as the U.S. tells immigrants to do.

ICE shackled her in chains and threw her into a private prison.

For two days, she lay on the floor with nothing but a sheet of aluminum foil wrapped around her like a corpse.

Then, in the middle of the night, they woke her up and shackled her wrists, ankles, and waist in metal chains. They herded her onto a bus with 30 other women.

They drove all night. They didn’t stop for food, for water, or for bathrooms.

By the time they reached the next detention center, she had been awake for 24 hours. She was too dehydrated to speak.

ICE refuses to say why she’s being detained.

April Amaya-Luis: Seven Days in a Baltimore Concrete Tomb

April Amaya-Luis wasn’t a fugitive. She wasn’t hiding. She wasn’t running. She had done exactly what the law told her to do—she had married a U.S. citizen, filed for legal status, and was waiting for her paperwork to be processed.

ICE came for her anyway.

They threw her into a holding cell in Baltimore that wasn’t even designed for overnight stays.

No bed. No shower. No toothbrush. No clean clothes.

For seven days, she slept on the cement floor, wrapped in a thin blanket. The food was inedible, so she tried to ration what little she could stomach. When she complained, they stopped feeding her altogether.

She lost track of time, trapped in a windowless cell. With no way to contact her husband or lawyer, she felt herself slipping away, drowning in the kind of fear that makes time stop existing.

She battled suicidal thoughts in that cell—because that’s what ICE does to people now.

And for what?

Because ICE ran out of beds at other detention centers.

Their own rules say detainees should never be kept in these holding rooms for more than 12 hours. But in Baltimore, people are now being held for days at a time—some for over a week—without access to a lawyer, medical care, or even basic human necessities.

April was one of the lucky ones—if you can call seven days of psychological torture “lucky.” She eventually made it home to her family.

But what about the asylum seekers left in that room for nine days?
What about the woman who went three days without her hypertension medication?
What about the ones still trapped there right now, with no way to escape?

This is what Donald Trump, Tom Homan, and the Republican Party have built.

Not a border policy.
Not a security system.
Not a rule of law.

A machine designed to break people until they give up.

These cases are not isolated incidents. They are test runs. Every abuse of power ICE commits is a stress test for what they can get away with next. And now, they are going further—detaining people indefinitely on suspicion alone, ignoring court orders, and chipping away at birthright citizenship. This is not about undocumented immigrants anymore. It is about control. And if you think they won’t come for you next, you’re not paying attention.

Trump’s Deportation Machine No Longer Follows the Law

If you thought ICE’s brutality was bad, let’s talk about the open defiance of court orders.

Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan—because yes, in this administration, a literal border czar exists—has made it crystal clear: they don’t care what the law says. They don’t care what judges say. They don’t care what the Constitution says.

“I don’t care what the judges think.” That’s what Homan said after ignoring a federal court order to halt a deportation flight to El Salvador.

That flight carried over 250 Venezuelan and Salvadoran immigrants, sent to one of the most brutal prisons in the world—El Salvador’s infamous 40,000-person mega-prison, where prisoners are shaved, beaten, and starved, all for social media spectacle.

And what was their crime?

The Trump administration claims these were “gang members.” But they provided no evidence. No due process. No charges. No convictions. But they have no problems calling these people “terrorists” and “criminals” while the actual felon, who had due process, a trial and a conviction on 34 counts sits in the White House.

If “law and order” actually mattered to them, they’d be deporting their own boss.

And that’s the point. They don’t need evidence anymore.

This is indefinite detention and mass deportation by executive order—something so authoritarian, so brazenly illegal, that even past Republican administrations wouldn’t have dared to try it.

Now? They don’t even pretend to justify it. They brag about defying the courts.

This is the death of legal process.

This is what happens when power is wielded without accountability.

The courts said no. Trump said, “I don’t care.”
ICE is no longer just violating human rights—it is now violating the U.S. legal system itself. A president who can deport whoever he wants, against a judge’s orders, is a president who can arrest whoever he wants. And once that happens, there is no law left—only power.

If You Believe in This Fight, Help Keep It Alive

There’s still more below, I just need a moment of your time.

The American Manifesto isn’t backed by corporations. There are no ads, no paywalls, no billionaires funding it.

It’s just one person, fighting like hell to expose the truth and give you the weapons to push back.

If you value this work—if you want this movement to keep growing, keep calling out fascism without fear, and keep fighting for the future we deserve—then I need your support.

Join the fight. Become a supporter. Every contribution keeps this mission alive.

Because silence is surrender. We do not surrender. We are #TheRelentless.

This Isn’t Just Fascism—It’s a Test Run

You might be thinking, “This is horrible, but I’m not an immigrant. What does this have to do with me?”

Everything.

Because this is how authoritarian regimes always start. First, they brutalize the people society won’t defend—the poor, the marginalized, the voiceless. Then, they expand.

ICE is the testing ground. If they can get away with torture, starvation, and extrajudicial deportations against immigrants, what’s stopping them from using these same tactics against American citizens?

It’s already happening.

Trump’s DOJ is already arguing that U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants aren’t really citizens—a direct attack on birthright citizenship. If they win that argument, what happens next?

How long before they strip citizenship from naturalized Americans?

How long before they decide that their political enemies should be treated like “criminal illegals” too?

We already have a precedent for this.

Remember Karon Hylton-Brown? He was a U.S. citizen, an American-born Black man killed by police in Washington, D.C., after they chased him down for riding a moped without a helmet. Trump pardoned the cops who murdered him—but not before referring to Karon as an “illegal” in his speech about the pardons.

They don’t care about facts. They don’t care about who is actually a citizen or not. If they decide you’re illegal, you’re illegal. That’s all it takes.

Karon Hylton-Brown was lucky he had a name. The next Karon won’t. Because now, they’re putting that power into law.

Enter the Laken Riley Act, which allows law enforcement to detain anyone they “suspect” of both being undocumented and committing a crime—without requiring actual evidence for either.

Read that again. They don’t need proof that you’re undocumented. They don’t need proof that you committed a crime. If they think you “might” be both, they can hold you indefinitely.

If you’re an American and you think you’re safe, you’re not paying attention.

This law doesn’t require ICE to prove you’re undocumented before locking you up. You could be a citizen, a green card holder, or someone with a visa—doesn’t matter. They just have to “suspect” you.

Once you’re in the system, good luck proving your innocence. Ask the American citizens who’ve already been detained by ICE because the government “mistakenly” thought they were undocumented. Ask the immigrants who’ve been denied access to lawyers, to medical care, to basic human dignity.

The Laken Riley Act is a blank check for mass incarceration—and it’s not just for immigrants anymore.

We Are Past the Point of Neutrality

This is not a policy debate anymore. This is not a question of “reasonable disagreements” or “border security.”

You are either against this, or you are complicit.

A government that tortures immigrants will not stop with immigrants. A government that ignores the courts will not stop with deportation orders. A government that passes laws allowing indefinite detention based on suspicion alone will not stop with immigrants.

So, ask yourself: How far does this have to go before you care?

When they strip citizenship from people born here?
When they start detaining political activists under the same laws they’re using now?
When they use ICE’s tactics against anyone they deem a threat?

Because that is where this road leads.

Donald Trump, Tom Homan, the Republican Party, and their entire authoritarian apparatus have already crossed the Rubicon.

It’s up to the rest of us to make sure they don’t go any further.

Join the Fight, Amplify the Truth

Because silence is surrender. We never surrender. We are #TheRelentless.

Sources

• The Guardian: ‘Like a horror movie’: ICE detaining German tourist in California indefinitely

• Newsweek: US Green Card Holder Stripped Naked, 'Violently Interrogated' by ICE—Mother

• 10 News San Diego: Canadian woman put in chains, detained by ICE after entering San Diego border

• The Baltimore Banner: ‘It’s scary right now’: ICE holds detainees for days in bedless Baltimore cells

• Axios: Trump's border czar: "I don't care what the judges think"

• The Guardian: US deports 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador despite court ruling to halt flights