Trump’s War on Immigrants Has Become an Attack on Us All

Ordinary American citizens are also feeling pressure from immigration officials for helping immigrants. Investigative journalist Radley Balko reported earlier this week about a lawyer in Texas who was asked for legal help by an immigrant family. Two days after he spoke with them, two men in civilian clothes—who never identified which, if any, law enforcement agency they worked for—knocked on the lawyer’s front door and questioned him about his assistance. The lawyer’s internet access briefly went offline while the agents were present, and they refused to give him their names or badge numbers. (As the lawyer told Balko, the suspicious timing of his internet outage ensured that the Ring camera on his front door could not capture the exchange.)

Balko linked the encounter with the Trump administration’s efforts to go after nonprofits, universities, Democratic fundraising networks, and its many critics. “The goal here isn’t to get convictions, at least not yet,” he wrote. “It’s to harass, intimidate, and incapacitate anyone with the power, money, or platform to thwart this administration’s aspiration for authoritarianism.”

What also stands out to me is not only the authoritarian tendencies but the timing. The second Trump administration is barely one hundred days old. This is supposed to be the president’s honeymoon phase after an election. Presidents are never more popular or more influential than they are at this point in their terms. Trump’s public approval ratings are only now starting to dip to their lows. The economy will likely run aground in the next few months once the full force of his tariffs is felt, but it hasn’t done so yet.