{"id":7049982,"date":"2026-08-28T13:25:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T13:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/you-or-someone-you-love-could-be-next\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T13:25:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T13:25:18","slug":"you-or-someone-you-love-could-be-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=7049982","title":{"rendered":"You or Someone You Love Could Be Next"},"content":{"rendered":"


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\u2014 from Robert Reich’s Substack<\/a><\/i><\/b> <\/p>\n

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Friends,<\/p>\n

Imagine living in a country that can arrest and imprison you whenever it wants, without any judge or jury deciding you did anything wrong. It can call you a \u201cdomestic terrorist\u201d and put you in prison for life. It can even execute you on the basis of nothing more than its own decision that you\u2019re dangerous. <\/p>\n

Well, I have bad news for you. You\u2019re living in that country right now. <\/p>\n

As he loses power and popularity \u2014 and faces mounting resistance abroad and at home \u2014 Trump is enlarging his police state.<\/p>\n

His regime is having ever more people arrested, imprisoned, and deported without any judge or jury deciding they did anything wrong. It\u2019s using racial profiling in deciding whom to target. It\u2019s making warrantless searches and seizures of people, their cars, and their homes. All of this violates the U.S. Constitution.<\/p>\n

According to a new analysis by The<\/em> New York Times<\/em>, the regime\u2019s surge in immigration arrests<\/a> this summer has swept up thousands of people, most of whom have not <\/em>been charged with or convicted of a crime (less than 4 percent had a past violent criminal conviction).<\/p>\n

Those being arrested, imprisoned, and potentially deported include some married to U.S. citizens, others who entered the U.S. legally and are pursuing asylum claims, and some who came here with temporary legal status that the Trump regime has decided to revoke.<\/p>\n

In other words, they were all here legally. <\/em><\/p>\n

If you have temporary protected status because you escaped from inhumane conditions in another country, ICE might now summon you to an ICE office and put a monitor around your ankle \u2014 even if you have no criminal history and are in full compliance with your immigration status. The Trump regime has unilaterally revoked temporary protected status and claims the ankle monitors are necessary to track people whom it may want to deport at some point.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re not even safe if you\u2019re a U.S. citizen born in America. ProPublica has found that more than 170 U.S. citizens<\/a> have been wrongfully detained by ICE agents in raids and protests over a recent nine-month span. It described cases involving alleged force and multiday detention without access to counsel or communication. <\/p>\n

Some estimates put the number of U.S. citizens subjected to ICE as much higher<\/a>, but there\u2019s no way of knowing because there\u2019s no legal process for filtering out and protecting American citizens, just as there\u2019s no legal process for protecting anyone else who\u2019s here legally. Trump\u2019s police state is extrajudicial, and it\u2019s being done in secret.<\/p>\n

You might even be murdered, without a trial finding you guilty of anything. In addition to Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota last January, ICE agents have murdered two others just this summer. <\/p>\n

One was Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, murdered by ICE in Houston on July 7, 2026. Salgado Araujo had lived in the U.S. for decades. ICE agents pursued him in unmarked cars and shot him while he was driving a work crew to a job site. The Department of Homeland Security claims Salgado Araujo tried to use his vehicle as a weapon against an officer, but witnesses dispute this account. <\/p>\n

The other was Johan Sebastian Dur\u00e1n Guerrero, murdered by ICE on July 13, 2026, in Biddeford, Maine. Dur\u00e1n Guerrero was a 25-year-old immigrant from Colombia. Agents pursued him while he was driving to work. The Department of Homeland Security claims its agent feared for public safety as Dur\u00e1n Guerrero tried to drive away, but elected officials and family members dispute this account, noting that Dur\u00e1n Guerrero was not an intended target of the immigration operation. <\/p>\n

None of these murders has been fully investigated. <\/p>\n

You might also be murdered without a trial if you happen to be on a vessel off Latin America\u2019s Caribbean coast or in the eastern Pacific Ocean. A mere accusation of drug trafficking is enough to kill you, without any evidence presented before any court of law or neutral magistrate.<\/p>\n

The U.S. military announced Monday that it had again carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people it accused <\/em>of trafficking drugs \u2014 bringing the overall death toll to 223 people killed<\/a> in 67 strikes during the nearly yearlong U.S. campaign of bombing boats alleged<\/em> to be smuggling drugs. <\/p>\n

Finally, the Trump regime is imprisoning Americans who demonstrate against its police state. <\/p>\n

In June, in two federal courts sentenced nine people who protested outside an immigrant detention facility in Texas to 30 to 100 years <\/em>in prison, after the regime accused them of being members of Antifa. During the protest, a police officer was shot; he survived. <\/p>\n

Those sentences are longer than the harshest sentence handed down to any of the convicted rioters in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 (all of whom have since received pardons or commutations from Trump). <\/p>\n

These cases are the first to incorporate new guidance from the regime that classifies Antifa as a \u201cdomestic terrorist organization.\u201d That\u2019s despite the fact that Antifa is a decentralized movement rather than a single organization and that there is no federal charge of domestic terrorism under existing U.S. law.<\/p>\n

I want to make three concluding points about all this. <\/p>\n

First,<\/em> Trump\u2019s police state not only continues, but it is growing larger by the day. Kristi Noem\u2019s replacement as secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, along with his boss in the White House, Stephen Miller, and the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, have more money, manpower, and firepower than ever. They are ramping up all of their extrajudicial arrests, detentions, deportations, and murders. <\/p>\n

The only difference between last year and now is they\u2019re no longer announcing what they\u2019re doing with fanfare and braggadocio, because the American public has grown wary of it. <\/p>\n

Second,<\/em> none of us is safe from this because the arrests, installations of ankle bracelets, imprisonments, deportations, and murders are made without any judge, jury, or neutral party deciding that the assumptions on which they\u2019re based are adequate and truthful. <\/p>\n

Not even \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d arrests and lengthy prison sentences necessitate judicial inquiry into what exactly is meant by \u201cdomestic terrorism\u201d and whether defendants have done anything to justify that appellation. <\/p>\n

Finally<\/em>, this growing menace is cruel, inhumane, and likely unconstitutional. It is causing hundreds of thousands of families in our country extreme mental distress; many people are not leaving their homes for fear of being arrested or worse. It is likely chilling First Amendment rights to speak up and protest against these atrocities.<\/p>\n

Historians looking back on this shameful period will wonder how this was allowed. How can one maniacal man in the Oval Office, his fanatical assistant, and two suck-up Cabinet secretaries have been so cruel and oblivious to basic human rights? How can their Republican enablers in Congress have been willing to go along? How can the American public have been so quiet?






_______<\/p>\n

About author<\/span>
\nRobert B. Reich is Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers “Aftershock<\/a>“, “The Work of Nations<\/a>,” and “Beyond Outrage<\/a>,” and, his most recent, “Common Good<\/a>“. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine<\/a>, chairman of Common Cause<\/a>, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences<\/a>, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, “Inequality For All<\/a>.” He’s co-creator of the Netflix original documentary “Saving Capitalism<\/a>,” which is streaming now. <\/div>\n<\/div>\n