By John & Nisha Whitehead
September
29, 2026
“If
Trump can disappear them, he can disappear
you.”—Robert Reich
America, you got fooled.
Again.
For starters, the war
on illegal immigration was never just about illegal
immigration.
If you fell for that, chances are
you’re still falling for the government’s oldest trick:
manufacture a crisis, identify an enemy, frighten the
public, declare an emergency, and then use the resulting
fear to justify another expansion of government
power.
Terrorism. Crime. Drugs. National security.
Illegal immigration.
Different threats. Same
playbook.
Take a legitimate problem—or inflate it
into an existential menace—and suddenly constitutional
safeguards become inconveniences, extraordinary powers
become necessities, and anyone who questions the
government’s methods can be accused of siding with the
enemy.
Immigration is a perfect example.
A
highly charged issue that pushes all of the knee-jerk,
polarizing buttons when it comes to deep-seated fears and
prejudices, immigration has been the perfect vehicle for the
Trump administration’s political fearmongering and authoritarian
power grabs.
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Trump has repeatedly described
illegal immigration in the language
of invasion, criminality and national-security
emergency.
Yet a closer look suggests a far more
complicated reality.
A 2026 Cato Institute analysis of
Census data found that undocumented immigrants were
incarcerated at a rate of 674 per 100,000 people in 2024,
compared with 1,195 per 100,000 native-born Americans. Legal
immigrants had an even lower incarceration rate of 303 per
100,000. Cato concluded that both legal
and undocumented immigrants are less crime-prone than
native-born Americans.
So, what is the
government’s end game?
We’ve been so fixated on
the overt cruelty, unapologetic authoritarianism, thuggish
brutality, and blatantly unconstitutional abuses of the
Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that we
missed the larger menace taking shape behind it.
While
the country fights over who should be allowed in, who should
be kicked out, and who can participate in a pay-to-play
scheme that benefits the oligarchy, the government continues
building the infrastructure of a prison state.
This is
the real power grab.
The government is using its
so-called war on illegal immigration to normalize something
far more dangerous: a system in which due process can be
bypassed, people can be detained and moved beyond easy
public scrutiny, government agents can wield extraordinary
enforcement powers with minimal accountability, and
constitutional protections can be treated as optional
whenever the government invokes security.
Immigration
is the testing ground.
The precedent being established
and the tactics being trotted out and normalized are the
real danger. Because once the government establishes that it
can suspend the Constitution’s safeguards for one
disfavored group, there is nothing magical that keeps those
powers confined to that group.
We are all at
risk.
Be warned: the literal and figurative
walls being erected in the name of national security should
concern the people already living inside them. The machinery
being built to find, track, identify, seize, detain and
disappear immigrants can just as easily be redirected toward
the population at large.
That is how a police state
becomes a prison state.
Immigration enforcement is the
dress rehearsal in anticipation of the government’s
ultimate muscle flex.
To round people up on the scale
envisioned by the administration, the government first has
to know who people are. Where they live. Where they work.
Where they drive. Who they associate with. What they look
like. What databases contain information about them. Where
they were yesterday. Where they are today. And where they
might be tomorrow.
That requires surveillance. Lots of
it.
Biometric databases. Facial recognition.
License-plate readers. Flock cameras. Data brokers. Location
tracking. Artificial intelligence. Phone extraction tools.
Government databases linked to still more government
databases.
The Brennan Center for Justice reports that
the Department of Homeland Security has committed more
than $2.9 billion in recent years to surveillance, data
collection and analytics technologies used in the interior
of the United States, including more than $1 billion for
biometrics. Those systems include tools capable of tracking
phones and vehicles, collecting facial and other biometric
data, purchasing commercial information and combining
records from multiple databases to create detailed profiles
on individuals.
Then comes enforcement, masked agents,
raids, checkpoints, detention centers, private prisons,
transfers, rendition—all wrapped in the reassuring
language of public safety and national security.
For
now, immigration is the convenient scapegoat to justify the
crackdowns and loss of liberty, but the machinery of
oppression being assembled does not know how to discriminate
and differentiate.
A surveillance camera does not know
whether or not you are a citizen. A license-plate reader
does not know how you voted. A biometric database does not
care why your face is being searched. A location-tracking
system does not distinguish between following an
undocumented immigrant and following a political
protester.
Indeed, the Brennan Center notes that DHS
technologies acquired for border security and criminal
investigations have capabilities that can
be directed at anyone—immigrants, protesters,
travelers and other members of the public.
The
machinery simply does what it was built to do: find, track,
identify, classify, control and, when ordered,
detain.
We are watching the infrastructure of a prison
state being assembled in plain sight.
Surveillance,
however, is only the beginning. The real power comes when
the government takes everything it knows about you
and acts on it.
Find you. Seize you.
Detain you. Move you. Cut you off from
the people who might intervene on your behalf. Eventually,
make it difficult for anyone outside the system to determine
where you are at all.
This is where ICE becomes
particularly instructive.
Not because every American
is about to be deported, but because ICE demonstrates what
government looks like when surveillance, databases,
aggressive enforcement, detention and secrecy are fused into
a single system.
As historian Timothy Snyder warns,
“If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due
process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to
due process. All
the government has to do is claim that you are not a
citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove
the contrary.”
Once due process ceases to be a
non-negotiable right for one disfavored group, it becomes an
optional privilege for everyone.
This is the slippery
slope that eventually allows the government to make everyone
disappear—citizen and immigrant alike—whenever they
become inconvenient, or disfavored, or no longer useful to
the powers-that-be.
People are already disappearing
inside the United States.
Seized without warning,
denied due process, and locked up indefinitely in a
sprawling network of immigration detention centers, county
jails, private prisons, temporary holding facilities and
federal facilities, these individuals are being transferred
from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, moved hundreds or
thousands of miles from family and lawyers, made
increasingly difficult to locate—they are being made to
disappear.
Their whereabouts are effectively being
scrubbed from public view.
On September 15, 2026, ICE
stopped publicly listing the locations of many detainees
with final removal orders in its online detainee
locator.
Immigration attorneys told the Associated
Press that clients
suddenly vanished from the public system, making it
harder to determine whether they had been transferred,
remained somewhere in federal custody or were being prepared
for removal. ICE defended the change as part of its effort
to prioritize deportations of people with final
orders.
There can be no understating what is at stake
when the government acquires the power to make people
disappear from public view.
This is disappearance by
bureaucracy.
People disappear first from public view.
Then from the practical reach of their lawyers and families.
Then, potentially, from the database. Public records no
longer reveal where some detainees are. And sometimes the
next stop is another country entirely.
For now, it’s
immigrants—our fellow workers, friends, family members,
members of our communities, people who pay taxes, contribute
to the economy, and once helped make America and its economy
the envy of the world—who are being rounded up, designated
as “unhuman” in order to deny them basic human rights
and made to disappear, but they are just the
warm-up.
Watch and learn: once these tactics have been
refined and mastered, we’ll be the next targets.
The
government has been perfecting variations on this machinery
for decades.
After 9/11, the United States transported
terrorism suspects—some never convicted of crimes—to secret
CIA detention facilities beyond the ordinary reach of
American courts and public scrutiny. Extraordinary
rendition allowed government to outsource detention and
interrogation into legal gray zones.
Yet disappearing
people has never required sending them
overseas.
Consider Homan
Square.
For years, the Chicago Police Department
operated a facility on the city’s West Side where lawyers
and former detainees alleged that people were taken for
interrogation before appearing through normal booking
channels. Records later obtained by the Guardian documented
more than 7,000 arrests associated with Homan Square over
roughly eleven years, while documented attorney access
was extraordinarily rare.
That danger is becoming
harder to dismiss.
In September 2026, Amnesty
International released
a report alleging extensive human-rights violations in
U.S. immigration enforcement. Amnesty alleges that the
current mass detention and deportation campaign has
subjected migrants, refugees and asylum seekers to a broad
range of abuses.
Amnesty has called
for ICE to be abolished.
Whatever the remedy, no
government agency should be empowered to act lawlessly and
make people disappear.
The Trump administration’s
latest tactic for discouraging migration into the U.S. and
instilling terror in the hearts of immigrants already here
is the use of “third-country
removals”: sending certain deportees to countries
where they are not citizens and may never have
lived.
We saw this in the wake of 9/11 under the Bush
administration with their use of extraordinary rendition and
remote torture sites.
The rationale seemed to be that
if you removed someone from the United States, the
Constitution wouldn’t follow them.
Indeed, the Trump
administration appears to be trying to move faster than the
lawyers and courts in an effort to outrun judicial review
and the Constitution.
Perhaps the destination is
overseas. Perhaps it is another jail. Perhaps it is another
prison right here in America. That distinction no longer
matters: you do not have to leave the United States to
disappear into the machinery of the prison state.
This
is precisely why due process matters.
Due process is
not a privilege. It is not a legal loophole. And it is not a
technicality reserved for people the government considers
deserving of special treatment.
Due process is what
stands between accusation and punishment, between suspicion
and imprisonment, and between government power and
individual liberty.
At the heart of that protection is
habeas corpus, which translates to “you should have
the body.”
Dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215,
habeas corpus allows
someone imprisoned by the government to challenge that
detention in court and demand that the government make
the case for why they should be held.
The Founders
considered habeas such a fundamental and necessary
ingredient in guarding against government tyranny that they
included it in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 of the
Constitution. As the Brennan Center explains, habeas “was
conceived
to guarantee protection from the king arbitrarily
disappearing subjects to secret dungeons without just
cause or due process.”
Despite what the Trump
administration would have us believe, habeas applies equally
to citizens and non-citizens alike within the United
States.
The act of transporting someone outside the
U.S. does not lessen that protection, but it does make it
harder to enforce.
History has supplied enough
warnings.
Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus
during the Civil War resulted in arrests without ordinary
judicial process. The internment of Japanese Americans
during World War II demonstrated how quickly fear and
prejudice can overwhelm constitutional safeguards. The
post-9/11 rendition program demonstrated how easily
government can try to place human beings beyond the
effective reach of American courts.
Homan Square
demonstrated that you do not have to leave American soil for
that to happen.
And today’s immigration detention
system demonstrates how these tactics can merge: masked
arrests, county jails, private prisons, remote detention
centers, repeated transfers, limited access to attorneys,
disappearing locator records, expedited deportations and
third-country removals.
Each scenario arose from
different circumstances, but each also demonstrates what
happens when government insists that extraordinary
conditions justify extraordinary powers.
This is why
the familiar refrain—if you are here legally, you have
nothing to fear—misses the point. So does: if you are an
American citizen, you have nothing to fear. And: If you have
done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.
That is
the oldest sales pitch in the police-state playbook: “Just
trust us.” “We’re only going after the bad
people.”
But inevitably, the definition of “bad
people” changes.
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published
It Can’t Happen Here, imagining authoritarian
government taking root not in some distant dictatorship but
in America.
Those four words capture one of the most
dangerous assumptions a free people can make.
It
can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to citizens. Not to
innocent people.
Not to me.
Perhaps not.
Perhaps the government will never put you on a rendition
flight to a country you’ve never visited. Perhaps you will
never disappear into a detention center. Perhaps masked
agents will never come to your door.
But there are
other ways for a free people to disappear.
Privacy
disappears. Anonymity disappears. The freedom to move about
without being tracked disappears. The freedom to associate
without creating a digital trail disappears. The freedom to
protest without being identified, catalogued and entered
into a database disappears. The presumption that government
should leave you alone unless it has legitimate cause to
investigate you disappears.
Bit by bit, the boundaries
separating a free citizen from a prisoner begin to
disappear, too.
You are watched. Tracked. Catalogued.
Scanned. Recorded. Flagged. Followed.
Your movements
become data. Your associations become data. Your face
becomes data. Your life becomes searchable.
All that
remains is for someone in government to decide what the data
means.
This is how “We the People”
disappear.
Not necessarily onto rendition
flights.
Not necessarily into secret prisons.
We
disappear when we cease to live as a people presumed free
and begin living instead as inhabitants of a country-sized
surveillance state—watched constantly, tracked everywhere,
our movements and associations increasingly subject to
monitoring, cataloguing and government scrutiny.
That
is the larger danger concealed by the immigration
debate.
ICE is showing us what the machinery can
do.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People and in its
fictional counterpart The
Erik Blair Diaries, eventually the prison built for
someone else can become the prison imprisoning all of
us.
WC: 2405
Constitutional attorney
and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The
Rutherford Institute. His latest books The
Erik Blair Diaries and Battlefield
America: The War on the American People are
available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at
johnw@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive
Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The
Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
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