Jonathan P. Baird

Back during the first Trump term when we witnessed the child separation policy ripping families apart, I thought we had reached the height of cruelty. But I was wrong. ICE and Border Patrol are trying for a new standard. And there are so many awful stories to learn about. Somehow the idea of deporting the “worst of the worst” got lost and inexplicably the new mission is persecuting the most innocent.

ICE has been arresting foreign-born spouses of U.S. citizens who are complying with the law and trying to obtain permanent residency. The New York Times just did a feature story about this. In many cases, ICE agents are telling detained spouses at green card interviews that they had overstayed tourist or business visas. Foreign-born spouses are being handcuffed and taken away right from the interview.

The government strategy appears to be to induce couples to give up, abandon their case and accept the foreign spouse’s detention. There has been no consideration for either the fact of marriage or the reality that the couple may have small children.

The Times highlighted the case of Stephen Paul who is married to a British wife. Paul works for the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department and he and his wife have a four month old baby. At her green card interview, federal agents swooped in and took Paul’s wife away. She had been living in the U.S. for 14 months. Paul said, “I had to take our baby from my crying wife’s arms”. Paul went on:

“It’s insane to have them rip our family apart. Whoever is directing this has completely lost touch with their mission to the country.”

Paul’s lawyer said, “In 25 years of practice, I have never seen anything like this”. People like Paul’s wife have always been eligible for green cards in the past. Arrests like this were exceedingly rare as foreign spouses of Americans have typically been approved for permanent residency. The Trump regime is prioritizing fast track deportations regardless of circumstance, no matter how compelling the case or cruel the result.

Paul learned that the government was threatening to deport his wife without a hearing. More generally, this has become their go-to play. Paul’s lawyer had to file a lawsuit in federal court to halt her removal. That worked and secured her release.

The Times also reported the case of Audrey Hestmark. She and her German-born husband, Tom, reported to a government office for a green card interview. Her husband was a robotics engineer. The immigration officer asked if he had overstayed his visa and he responded truthfully. His lawyer had assured him it was a non-issue. Hestmark said:

“Suddenly, we were ambushed by three masked men in bulletproof vests with guns who told Tom they had a warrant for his arrest, that he is here unlawfully.”

The agents handcuffed Tom and gave Audrey a card with a QR code for the ICE website. Tom was then disappeared to an immigration detention center where he remains to this day.

Then there is the case of the interfaith chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Ayman Soliman. Soliman is Egyptian and has been in the U.S. since 2014. He had been in trouble with the Egyptian military regime as he had been working as a journalist. Because of his work, he was detained four times by the Egyptian authorities and he had been tortured. He came to the U.S. on a visa to study film and once here he applied for asylum. In June 2018, he was granted asylum.

In July, ICE took Soiiman into custody after he appeared at a routine check-in with ICE. His asylum status had been revoked. He spent 73 days in detention. Without proof, the government stated he was part of a terrorist organization. During his 73 days in detention, Soliman said he never saw sunlight, never breathed fresh air and never ate a raw fruit or vegetable.

Because of his popularity for his work pastoring to very ill and dying children, Soliman got widespread support in Cincinnati. He received 760 letters of support from people in the community. The support was so intense that ICE released him from custody and he now awaits a green card determination.

I also wanted to mention the story of Ruperto Vicens-Marquez who has lived in the U.S. for two decades. He and his brother Emilio co-own a locally well-known Mexican restaurant, Emilio’s Kitchen, in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, a seashore community. Ruperto is head chef. He had moved to the U.S. from Mexico in 2007. He had a visa that was legally renewed and he was authorized to be in the U.S. until 2029.

Ruperto did not show up at work on October 17. ICE had picked him up a block away from the restaurant, said he had entered the U.S. illegally and falsely asserted he had an order of removal from the U.S. ICE held Ruperto at their immigration detention facility in Newark for over a month. The town of Atlantic Highlands was so upset, advocates in the community organized two demonstrations and created a GoFundMe campaign that raised almost $100000 for legal defense. On October 18, Ruperto was released by an immigration judge’s order.

The Department of Homeland Security says that 500,000 immigrants have been deported since Trump took office. NPR says 300,000 is a more accurate number.

In immigration court, ICE attorneys are short-circuiting due process by filing motions to pretermit which, if granted, avoid giving immigrants any chance to argue their asylum claim. When such motions are granted, people get deported without a chance to testify. The need for zealous immigration lawyers has never been greater.

Someday this entire enterprise of indiscriminate and racist deportation will be seen for the crime it is. It fits in with other seedier episodes of U.S. history like the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese-American internments and Operation Wetback. If justice ever prevails again, there should be investigations and prosecutions of officials like Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller and Greg Bovino for their violations of due process which have characterized this regime.

ICE officials invariably say they are just following orders but maybe they should be considering whether their orders are legal. When what you are doing is heartless and mean as a crazed rottweiler, it is time to bail.

Inside the American Jewish community, there has been a major conflict going on about how to see the source of antisemitism in the United States. On one side are the mainstream Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations who are focused on activists on the left who have opposed Israel’s war in Gaza. They conflate opposition to the Israeli state and its Gaza war with antisemitism.

On the other side are large numbers of unaffiliated Jews, especially progressive young Jews, who are far more worried about fascism and antisemitism emanating from the Republican right. Many of these Jews actively oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza but they are not antisemitic. These Jews have more universalist values and oppose human rights violations wherever they happen.

Events have vindicated those who see the major threat as coming from the Republican right. As a Jewish person, I would go back to the events at Charlottesville in the first Trump term. Hearing Nazis and their sympathizers chanting “Jews will not replace us” was sobering. Then we saw the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh by a right wing extremist who believed in the great replacement theory.

Since then, the growth of the fascist and antisemitic threat coming from the Republicans has become so much more apparent. There is an internal war inside the Republican Party between Jew-hating neo-nazis, the groypers, and old-line Republicans. An entire generation of young Republicans appear to be infected by the antisemitic and racist virus.

Back in October, Politico published an article about the leaked Telegram chat conducted by leaders of young Republican groups throughout the country. In 2,900 pages of chats, many millennial and Gen Z Republicans spoke of their love of Nazis and Hitler, their hatred for Blacks, gays and women and their desire to put Jews in gas chambers. They always dress up the hate in ironical transgressiveness but the underlying world view is clear.

These were Republican leaders, not rank-and-filers. Although they were reported as being young, they ranged up to age 40. They included a state senator and a member of the Trump administration. The Jew-hating showed up in many of the 28,000 exchanges from January to August 2025 among leaders of Young Republican chapters in Arizona, Vermont, Kansas and New York.

The danger from the right has been highlighted by Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Nick Fuentes. Why was Carlson, an important right wing podcaster, giving such prominence to someone who regularly trafficks in the belief that “organized Jewry” is responsible for society’s problems? Fuentes has called Hitler “really fucking cool”.

I think the interview reflects Carlson’s knowledge that the Republican Party has been flooded by extremists and he is attempting to maintain his relevance by speaking to this growing faction. Rod Dreher has estimated that 30%-40% of all Republican staffers under age 30 are followers of Nick Fuentes. And Carlson is not the only right wing podcaster indulging antisemitism. Candace Owens also deserves mention. With a huge audience, like Fuentes, she blames George Soros and Jews for every imaginable social ill.

Trump is old and it remains an open question what comes next in Republican politics. It is legitimate to ask if the Republicans will become an explicitly racist and antisemitic, pro-nazi political party. A major part of their base, especially their youth, has those politics.

Many of the antisemites on the Republican right have latched onto Gaza as an issue they can exploit. They criticize U.S. support for Israel from an America First perspective. That perspective is at odds with the evangelical Christian Zionist faction of the Republicans but it connects to an earlier isolationist tradition in the party.

The groypers realize that there is massive worldwide opposition to Isreal’s Gaza campaign because of its brutality and its war crimes. Their opposition is sheer opportunism. They want to recruit from those who are legitimately horrified.

The mainstream Jewish organizations have minimized the antisemitic threat from the right because their highest priority has been defense of Israel. They are happy Trump has not interfered with Netanyahu. They play to Trump to keep the money and weapons to Israel flowing. That is also why they give a pass to Elon Musk when he makes nazi salutes. Not seeing Israel’s war crimes is a willful blindness to keep the money spigot on.

The October 7 attack on Israel was criminal and murderous but Israel’s response has been disproportionate and even more murderous. An estimated 67,000 Palestinians have died since October 7, 2023 with nearly a third of the dead under age 18.

Israel’s far right government, led by Jewish racists and fascists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, has been credibly accused of ethnic cleansing and genocide. It is not antisemitic to criticize the actions of the Israeli state but the mainstream Jewish organizations see it that way. Of course, there have been isolated examples where criticism of Israel from the left has been antisemitic but these examples are the exception. Overwhelmingly, the criticisms of Netanyahu’s government have been entirely justified.

The Anti-Defamation League has gone completely off the rails with its assertion that New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has promoted antisemitic narratives. Any close observer of Mamdani knows that charge is baseless, even laughable.

Sadly, it is Israel’s own actions in Gaza that are doing more to create antisemitism than anything else. If the mainstream Jewish organizations would take their blinders off, they could see that.

One of our two major political parties is at risk of being captured by explicit racists and antisemites. Drawing on the lessons of history, fascism and antisemitism need to be stopped before they gain more traction. We face a moment like Germany experienced in 1932 when people failed to speak out enough. We all know the consequences of that.

When it comes to corruption, it is impossible to keep up with the Trump regime. There is always more and worse. The corruption is constant and recurring and you don’t have to look hard to find it.

I would lead off with Trump’s scheme to obtain a $230 million settlement from the Department of Justice (DOJ) for alleged violation of his rights in the 2022 Mar-a-Lago search for classified documents and in the 2016 election. The chutzpah is unbelievable. Trump wants taxpayers to pay him back for the investigation into his bad acts.

On the classified documents case, Trump removed many boxes of federal records from the White House that were famously photographed in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. No one knows what he was up to in snatching the documents because a poor-excuse-for-a-judge made the case go away in spite of the law. Then the Supreme Court compounded the injustice by granting Trump immunity.

Trump is now seeking payment from the DOJ attorneys who previously represented him. He filed an administrative claim for the money and under the DOJ manual, settlement of claims over $4 million “must be approved by the deputy attorney general or an associate attorney general”. These two people are former Trump lawyers who represented him and his closest associate.

You might ask: how can you be both the lawyer for the complaining party and the decision maker? Trump is shaking down the DOJ and getting his own former lawyers to decide the case. In America, the general rule in litigation is that parties pay their own costs and attorney’s fees but not here. The government is being treated like a personal piggy bank because Trump is in office to plunder.

Then there is the matter of his pardons. Pardoning white collar fraudsters who have demonstrated no remorse is the signature Trump move. The pardons come in two flavors: those who have provided financial support and those who have shown political loyalty.

To grease the process, Trump fired the highly ethical government pardon attorney Liz Oyer and replaced her with Ed Martin, a far right political operative. As Martin posted on X: “No MAGA left behind”. Trump fired Oyer after she refused to restore gun rights to actor Mel Gibson after he lost those rights due to a domestic violence conviction.

The outstanding example of misuse of the pardon power is Trump’s pardon of the Binance chief, Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ. Binance is a cryptocurrency exchange and CZ was possibly the most influential person in that entire industry. Forbes estimates his wealth at $89 billion making him one of the wealthiest people in the world.

CZ had pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective money laundering program. He paid a $4.3 billion fine and served four months in prison. CZ had been allowing drug traffickers, child sex abusers and terrorist groups like al Qaeda to move money on his platform.

In October Trump granted CZ a full and unconditional pardon. Binance and the crypto industry generally had poured money into the Trump coffers in the 2024 election campaign. During the campaign, Binance became the infrastructure provider for World Liberty Financial, a crypto business owned by the Trump family. Binance accepted World Liberty stablecoin as payment for a $2 billion investment by Abu Dhabi investment firm, MGX. That pay-for-play move, channeling $2 billion into Trump’s pocket, enormously boosted the family crypto business.

The connection between the CZ pardon and putting $2 billion into Trump family hands is no accident. When questioned about it on 60 Minutes, Trump said he didn’t know who CZ was. Even for someone who has such a loose relationship to the truth, that’s a stretch. If someone gave your family $2 billion, you wouldn’t remember who they were?

Crypto has become the preferred shadowy vehicle for contributing to the Trump regime. It is anything but transparent. It is the means to suck up and get favors with outsiders not knowing. Trump has made $3 billion since becoming president last January. Forgotten is the Domestic Emoluments Clause of the Constitution that prohibits presidents from receiving any benefit or payment other than their fixed salary. Trump pretends that clause of the Constitution doesn’t exist and no one has held him to account.

Along with using the pardon power to reward wealthy donors and to enrich himself, Trump has also used it to reward political loyalists like the January 6 rioters and 77 people associated with his fake electors plots from the 2020 election. This list included Rudy Giuliani and his former chief of staff Mark Meadows. He also pardoned MAGA ally, George Santos, who had barely begun to serve a 7 year sentence for fraud, identity theft and money laundering.

There are many other shady operators who Trump has inexplicably pardoned. Being a wealthy white collar criminal would appear to be the key qualification for pardon consideration. At least 8 people to whom Trump granted clemency in his first term have since been charged with a crime. That is also true for a number of the January 6 rioters who have again gotten into trouble with the law.

One irony is that there are many people rotting in prison serving long mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenses. They deserve consideration for a pardon but get passed over.

Americans of whatever political stripe have been conditioned to expect the office of the Presidency is about serving the national interest. Trump follows a different autocratic tradition rooted in looting. He is about serving himself by using the office to maximize personal and family wealth. This is the tradition of strongmen like Putin, Pinochet and Mobutu. The nation becomes an entity to be exploited for private gain.

In Trump corruption schemes, the DOJ deserves special mention. They have degenerated into a tool of the regime and the stink of corruption is all over them. Instead of prosecuting cases that demand investigation like Tom Homan’s potential bribery, they close investigations of their political ally while pursuing regime opponents. If there is ever accountability, many of these DOJ lawyers deserve disbarment.

The only thing we can be sure of is that while this regime remains in power, corruption will continue and repression will worsen. It is a law of life with autocrats.

We have been living through a frightening and depressing time. It is like the realization of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here. In his novel, a charismatic and demagogic politician becomes President, hordes power by promising to restore American greatness and systematically dismantles democratic institutions. The resemblances to our time are uncanny.

Trump 2.0 is the American version of fascism. With Congress neutered and reduced to a nonentity and with the Supreme Court almost a rubber stamp, power has been flowing to our wannabe monarch. All the Trump promises to help working people deal with the cost of living have evaporated as he shows himself to be a benefactor to the billionaire class, only.

Trump has shown it can happen here which is why the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City is so momentous. Mamdani has provided a roadmap not just for winning elections but for defeating fascism. He did this at a time that the popularity of the Democratic Party has been at all all-time low.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this summer showed nearly two-thirds of Democratic Party voters believed “the leadership of the Democratic Party should be replaced with new people”. The overall favorability of the Democrats in September was 37%, not a better number than Republicans’ favorability.

Many Democrats have been disgusted by the weak fightback elected Democrats have displayed to MAGA fascism. It doesn’t matter how awful and extreme Trump is. The Democratic leaders like Schumer and Jeffries say almost nothing memorable in response. They play dead and exhibit de facto capitulation.

Building a mass movement to oppose fascism is essential but the Democrats have been tangential to the massive No Kings demonstrations, including the October 18 protest. They roll over when bullied as exemplified by the cave-in of the moderate Democratic senators who folded on the government shutdown. They let down over 20 million people who will now face skyrocketing premiums making health care unaffordable.

About the Democrats, I am reminded of the line from the Bob Dylan song: “Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, Do you, Mr. Jones”.

Mamdani bucked the unfavorability trend by running with an unshakable focus on the issues of affordability. He ran on stabilizing out-of-control rents, free public buses, lowering child care costs, creating city-owned grocery stores, raising the corporate tax rate and imposing a millionaire’s tax. Mamdani’s message was pure economic populism, directed at helping working people and he delivered the message brilliantly and creatively, especially on social media.

Mamdani won because he excited people and he gave simple, clear and persuasive reasons to vote for his candidacy. Young people who normally ignore elections came out to vote for him in droves. He appealed by taking a bold anti-establishment stance as a democratic socialist.

This message, also championed by Bernie Sanders and AOC, flies in the face of the Democratic Party leaders who offer no message besides opposing Trump. It is hard to inspire voting when your message is mush.

To oppose fascism requires a vision of an alternative society that puts people before profit. Working people are getting slammed now by the cost of living whether it is housing, health care or food. Democrats can win back many working class voters they have lost by addressing basic economic needs. There is no magic to this but Democrats must be unafraid to criticize the billionaire class that is hogging wealth.

In 1936, about the business and financial monopolies, Franklin D. Roosevelt said,” They are unanimous in their hate of me – and I welcome their hatred”. Democrats need that spirit.

Elections now are not just about winning. They are about how we can fight burgeoning fascism and gross income inequality. I think Mamdani’s vision of democracy and socialism provide such an alternative.

Billionaires spent millions slandering and misrepresenting Mamdani in attack ads but it didn’t work. The race was the highest turnout in a mayoral election in over 60 years. The Mamdani campaign had a network of 100,000 grassroots organizers, canvassing for him to turn out the vote.

The Mamdani example could be replicated. There are many moderate Democrats saying this could only happen in New York City and they could not be more wrong. The issues around affordability are universal. Democrats can win elsewhere by translating the message in ways that speak to specific localities.

Centrist Democrats argue that they can win moderate Republican voters in the suburbs by moving to the center. Invariably that means watering down any strong message. The centrist Democrats want candidates who will avoid confrontation with wealthy donors who bankroll them. They minimize the threat of fascism and act like we are in a normal election cycle. Many of us wonder if there will be any elections or any fair elections in 2026 and 2028 because of the fascism.

Trump can say we are living in a golden age but prices don’t lie. I am surprised people are not having heart attacks at check out counters.

The great secret of our world is that it is working people, not billionaires, who make history. Working people usually get screwed by the nobles, blue-bloods and Elon Musks of this world but as the Mamdani campaign illustrates that is not an inevitability. 45 years ago, the labor organizer John McDermott wrote this about the American working class:

“Our class is a very young class, going back only 200 years or so. As every conservative knows, it is the rowdiest, least governable, most idealistic, ornery, noisy, inventive, and disputatious class of people who’ve ever come over the horizon of history.”

The Mamdani win shows American workers want no part of fascist authoritarianism or an economy that serves only the 1%. The challenge for Democrats is to learn from this example.

It is not everyday that you see a President issuing an Executive Order directing the full weight of the federal government against an imaginary organization. Such is the case with Trump’s September order targeting anti-fascism. In the Executive Order, he designated Antifa a “domestic terrorist organization”. This was followed by National Security Presidential Memorandum – 7 that continued in the same vein.

The most peculiar thing about this initiative is the fact that there is no Antifa organization. The government cannot tell us who the leader of Antifa is and where that leader is based.

Antifa, which is short for anti-fascism, is an umbrella term for a range of people on the political left who oppose Nazism, white supremacy and sexism. They are a loose, decentralized collection of individuals who gained some notoriety in Portland Oregon five years ago during the George Floyd protests. Since that time, they have been dormant and out of the spotlight.

In the absence of any public display and in the aftermath of the Charlie Kirk assassination, Trump resurrected Antifa to be a “major terrorist organization”. At a presidential roundtable discussion on October 8, Trump referred to Antifa as “paid anarchists”. Again, specifics are never provided about who these people are and who is paying them. I was reminded of the many signs at the No Kings demonstration that said “Hey Trump, nobody paid us to be here! We all hate you for free!”.

Trump has asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to designate Antifa a foreign terrorist organization. Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff, has said that Antifa has extensive foreign ties.

At the presidential roundtable, far right influencer of Pizzagate fame, Jack Posobiec said Antifa goes back 100 years to the Weimar Republic before the Nazis ruled Germany. He compared the anti-fascists who opposed Hitler coming to power to the people opposing Trump today. If we step back for a moment and think about that comparison, Posobiec would appear to have no problem placing Trump into the position of Hitler. Both opposed anti-fascists. Forgotten is the reality that America fought fascism, not anti-fascism, in World War 2.

The Trump regime is intent upon creating an entire mythology and history of a non-existent organization.

The question inevitably arises: why is Trump scapegoating an imaginary organization? I think the answer is that such a designation would allow the Trump regime wide latitude to prosecute anyone liberal or left who opposes his policies. Stephen Miller has stated, “The Democratic Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization”. Miller says there is a large and growing movement of left-wing terrorism in this country that is well-organized and well-funded.

Nothing could be more ridiculous. As someone very familiar with the American left over the last 50 years, I can authoritatively state the left is overwhelmingly non-violent and rejects terrorism. The Trump regime is manufacturing an Antifa crisis to achieve other ends. Like other dictatorships, they want to repress all opposition to their authoritarian rule. This is of a piece with their putting troops in the streets when there is no rebellion or insurrection. They are the architects of the problems they allege they are solving.

Antifa is like a ghost. You can fill it with a grab bag of people you deem anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, anti-white or anti-family. The vagueness of pinning down who Antifa is allows for a fishing expedition. Antifa could potentially include anyone who could be painted as left wing or a dissenter.

Criminal liability aside which is no small thing, the threat here is to free exercise of First Amendment rights. Like happened during Red Scares in the past, fear of getting into trouble could become the great inhibitor of free speech. The regime is targeting speech, not action.

It is easy to imagine how this may play out both in social media and in university settings. We already have the shakedowns of major universities. To avoid the possibility of liability, the subject of anti-fascism and anything progressive would become taboo. Stool pigeons would reinforce conformity by threatening to name names.The effect would be chilling, a replay of McCarthyism.

The example of Professor Mark Bray illustrates how these issues have played out in the academic world. Bray teaches in the History Department at Rutgers University. He is an expert on Spain. In 2017, Bray wrote the book, Antifa: the Anti-Fascist Handbook. The book didn’t get much attention then. However, this fall, years after the book appeared and after Trump pushed to categorize Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization, Bray started receiving death threats. Somone published information about his family and his home address on X.

Even though he was a very popular professor, Turning Points USA, Charlie Kirk’s organization, circulated a petition labelling him “Dr Antifa” and calling for him to be fired. FOX reported the story also using the pejorative Dr Antifa in referring to Bray. The death threats escalated. Fearing for their safety, Bray and his family fled to Spain. Anyone who voices unpopular ideas could become the next Bray. What is considered acceptable speech could be dramatically narrowed by a new enforced norm.

Antifa is being used as a vehicle by the Trump regime to criminalize all dissent. All freedom loving people of whatever stripe, whether libertarian or on the left, must oppose advancing authoritarianism and the threat to free speech represented by the Antifa Executive Order.