Authoritarian preamble puts American civil liberties on ice in name of ‘security’

On Jan. 13, 1943, a young Anne Frank wrote about Amsterdam, where she had fled in order to escape Nazi persecution. She wrote, “terrible things are happening outside. Poor, helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” For many of those under persecution from the Nazi regime, one’s safety depended on the kindness of others to hide and shelter them from the military police. Similarly, on September 30, when federal Immigration Enforcement agents raided an apartment building in South Shore, Chicago, people lived in fear of being taken from their homes in the middle of the night by masked men who refused to identify themselves. ICE, or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, with a budget larger than most national militaries, has encroached into the daily lives of many Americans and immigrants alike. However, this has recently worsened due to the involvement of National Guard troops. Military force echoes the establishment of paramilitary and secret police groups of previous fascist and authoritarian regimes. This does not bode well.

Recently, the Trump administration has made efforts to federalize the National Guard by using state troops to assist and protect federal immigration enforcement officers. ‘Assistance and protection’ has instead morphed into an aggressive, hypernationalistic campaign to detain and deport individuals accused of being undocumented migrants or criminals. A recent attempt included bringing troops into Portland, Oregon, which Trump claimed was “war-ravaged” and crime-ridden, despite a noticeably decreasing crime rate. When he attempted to call the Oregon National Guard into the city, he was blocked by a judge’s order. After this initial setback, the administration tried to call in California’s National Guard instead, an order that was again blocked by judges. However, on Oct. 20, an appeals court reversed the block on using Oregon’s personnel, thus stationing federalized troops at the site of an ongoing peaceful protest. This comes in the middle of the administration’s ongoing usage of Texas and Illinois National Guard troops in Chicago, a part of something called, “Operation Midway Blitz.” Chicago has long acted as a sanctuary city for migrants, giving them a place to make a decent living in a safer place while working to gain citizenship. This has made Chicago a major target of the aforementioned immigration enforcement campaign, leading to scenes like the one previously described. Online, reports and posts show scenes of ICE agents ripping people suspected of being undocumented migrants, some of them actually American citizens, from their homes or cars. This has greatly disturbed many people, spurring protests that have been met with inappropriately aggressive force, including tear gas, from the National Guard.

No other American president has made such an aggressive, prolonged usage of the National Guard. It’s important to question what the purpose of this is. While the administration has attempted to justify this use of force with false crime statistics, and claims that officers only target the most violent of criminals, many sources have refuted these claims of a growing crime rate with data that suggests the complete opposite, and Trac Immigration reports that around 70 percent of ICE detainees don’t have any pre-existing criminal convictions. Hundreds of ICE detainees have been deported to countries entirely unrelated to their nation of origin, labeled third country removals,  and in most cases their families aren’t even informed on where this may be. It’s integral to the health of American freedom that its citizens question authority when it appears to be working against, not alongside the people. When one realizes that this aggressive activation of state troops against American people comes as a part of a long line of authoritarian actions by the Trump administration, a possible alternative reason comes into focus. The National Guard is there to crush opposition. In the past months, the administration has given exorbitant amounts of money to a masked police force in order to detain and deport suspected criminals, declared an anti-fascist political movement a “terrorist organization” following yet another Executive Order, and employed the nation’s military against its own people under the pretense of handling a make-believe crime issue. While it’s impossible to speak for the intentions and beliefs of anyone in the Trump administration, this feels like an attempt to get Americans used to authoritarianism. The American government has been using executive power to jail, dehumanize, and harass an entire demographic of people, while simultaneously using its control of the military to suppress the voices of those that oppose it. Whether or not it’s doing this consciously, the American government, at the hands of the Trump administration, is slipping further into full-blown authoritarianism with each passing day. Now, more than ever, it’s important to keep elected officials accountable and ensure that they are committed to the health and survival of American democracy, for this is an issue that can’t be solved without deliberate action.

by Veronica Holladay

Published November 3, 2025

Oshkosh West Index Volume 122 Issue II