"It's like déjà vu all over again"

For the uninitiated, the quote is from baseball great Yogi Berra. Yogi was a man who - despite great intentions - often struggled to get the message across. The comparison seems apt for many on the left who have similarly genuine intentions but have also failed to stick the landing when it comes to conveying the point. What I'm referring to is propensity on the left to buy into the framework that all of the cruelty of the Trump administration represents an aberration as opposed to a more vicious iteration of racial capitalism.

The first thing I would like to address is the fact that the brutality of the Trump administration is real. What we are seeing is horrific, and my purpose here isn't to minimize that. Naming what is happening is important. Equally important is properly orienting ourselves in this fight, and we accomplish this through an examination of a history of this country. So many want to say that "this is not what America is about" despite the fact that for the better part of our country's existence this has been precisely what America is about.

Why does this matter? It matters because people need to know the reality that we are facing so they know how to move, how to organize, who to fight and when to do so. By casting the repression from the Trump administration as unique to Trump, it muddies the water and misdiagnoses the horrors of racial capitalism as something that can be voted away. I am asking you to hold two ideas in your mind: the idea that this heartlessness and escalation is absolutely real and absolutely terrifying, but also that this very system has given rise to Trump and his ilk and will do so again if we do not ground ourselves properly in our analysis.

I am a criminal defense attorney by trade, and one thing that this role has afforded me is a perspective that has been sharpened by seeing this system of oppression up close every day. Every single day, in red cities and blue cities, human beings are warehoused in detention centers (this includes jails, prisons, ICE detention centers and juvenile facilities) under conditions that are widely understood to be a violation of civil rights, international law, and basic moral decency. We can't mistake the excesses of the system under Trump as a different system entirely, because that's simply not how this country functions.

A prime example of this concept is within the system of immigration. In 2016, Trump was correctly condemned for draconian immigration policy that only further dehumanized individuals in a system that already forces infants to represent themselves at immigration proceedings if they do not have a hired attorney. If you told someone that babies are sometimes forced to proceed without an attorney if they are not in a position to hire one, what are the chances that they would believe this to be an edict of the Trump administration, given the current environment? The very idea of a baby representing themselves in the labyrinth that is the US immigration court system shocks the conscience, but it is a fundamental concept to US immigration law. As Trump's escalation in harm continues, very few stop to ask the question of what kind of harm is occurring on a "good" day - a non-Trump presidency day - in this system.

What happened? People believed that the Trumpian horrors would cease when he exited office, but in 2024 the democrats ran explicitly on a policy of extending the very immigration policies that they so vehemently denounced in 2016. Kamala Harris cut political ads with ICE officers at the border. She promised to build the wall. She pledged to maintain his hard-line stance on asylum applications. Despite all of this, because we needed to defeat Trump, many were willing to look the other way. In This House We Believe No Human Being Is Illegal became In This House We Forget Human Beings Are Illegal If It's the Lesser of Two Evils. This strategy was doomed to fail, because a liberal can't out-fascist a fascist. People on the left were repulsed by this capitulation (as well as the endorsement of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians), while people on the right refused to believe a democrat could ever be as restrictive on immigration as they desire. Rather than plot their course based on the moral imperative, democrats engaged in a flawed political calculus that ended up costing them the White House.

People ushered Biden into office in 2020 as a rejection of Trump, and despite a literal coup attempt the democrats were unable to prevent his second election to the presidency in 2024. You could forgive people for believing that a change in figurehead would alter the trajectory of this country. When better things largely failed to materialize (due in equal parts to the democrat party's commitment to the status quo and the overt conservative rejection of all things that would benefit society as a whole), people felt hopeless. It is in this lack of hope that fascism ascends.

People want an easy answer, but I am not here to provide one because it doesn't exist. The fight ahead will be a long and hard one, and we very probably will spend our lives fighting for a sunrise that we ourselves never get to witness. If we want future generations to have that world, it starts with positioning ourselves against the injustice that is woven into the fabric of this nation, and treating that as the true enemy as opposed to a more brutal hand on its leash. To abolish ICE, we must abolish racial capitalism. To end with another quote, this one from fictional hero Kino Loy, "there is one way out."