The Allure of Fascism (Vol. II), Part 16
El Salvador
In July 2025, Congress passed Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which he signed into law. The Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency—created as a post-9/11 security measure—received an enormous boost to its funding. After receiving approximately $10 billion in funding several years in a row, ICE received $85 billion in 2025, including $45 billion for creating detention centres across the United States that would allow the agency to “hold up to 100,000 people in custody daily.”1
Masked agents driving unmarked vehicles began to arrest and deport people from across America.2 Detentions of people with and without criminal charges surged.3 At the ICE facilities, allegations of unsafe conditions, as well as both physical and sexual abuse, soon emerged.4 Reports also emerged from Florida’s Alligator Alcatraz facility that hundreds of detainees had somehow vanished from immigration software systems after they were transferred out of the facility.5 The ACLU stated that an “unfolding humanitarian crisis” is occurring at the ICE facilities: in the 2025–26 period, there were over 1000 reports of human rights violations in ICE facilities, some including child sexual abuse and pregnancy.6 Despite this, the DHS took “steps to limit oversight”: ICE “repeatedly refused members of Congress access to the facilities, in defiance of the law,” taking some people “to court to prevent House members from visiting the camps as they are entitled to do.”7
Some of those deported by ICE have been sent to “third countries” that they have no ties to. According to Amnesty International, upwards of 15,000 people were “removed to third countries between January and December 2025 alone”: they were sent to one of the thirty countries that has agreed to accept US deportees, countries like Rwanda, the DRC, South Sudan, Mexico and Paraguay.8 Hundreds of Venezuelan individuals have also been deported to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Centre (CECOT). Many of them have alleged that torture and abuse occur at this facility, including “beatings, humiliation, and sexual assault.” “The guards,” one inmate stated, “told us that human rights did not exist in CECOTs.”9 Human Rights Watch later reported that some of the Salvadorean men deported by the US have been forcibly disappeared since their arrival in their home country.10 Trump has suggested to Bukele, El Salvador’s president, that he might deport US citizens to these prisons. “The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places,” Trump said to Bukele. “Yeah, we’ve got space,” Bukele replied.11
In March 2025, the US Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, visited El Salvador’s CECOT facility. Noem was formerly Governor of South Dakota, attracting Trump’s attention during the COVID-19 pandemic by refusing to enact lockdown rules and mask mandates.12 Wearing a $50,000 Rolex watch, Noem posed for photographs at CECOT in front of shirtless and confined prisoners whose heads had been shaved.13 “Those photos,” Michael Tomasky wrote, “of her standing in front of the nearly naked prisoners of CECOT with her Rolex prominently displayed might constitute the single most indelibly fascist image of this presidency.”14
Noem’s abject cruelty here would be matched, however, when she later accused “two American citizens of engaging in ‘domestic terrorism’” immediately “after they’d been shot at point-blank range by masked agents under her charge.”15 Neither Renée Good nor Alex Pretti—two of ten individuals murdered so far by federal immigration agents during Trump’s second term—had ties to any extremist organisation. While Pretti had a gun he had not withdrawn from its holster when he was shot, Good was unarmed when she was murdered.16 Earlier, Stephen Miller told federal immigration agents “You are unleashed…The gangbangers that you deal with, they think that they’re ruthless. They have no idea how ruthless we are.”17 Predictably, he supported Noem’s baseless claims of terrorism after those “unleashed” agents killed innocent people. “A domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement,” Miller wrote on X after Pretti’s death.18
The Prairieland ICE Protesters
In March 2026, the Department of Justice released a statement: “Antifa Cell Members Convicted in Prairieland ICE Detention Center Shooting.”19 “Nine North Texas Antifa Cell operatives,” that statement read, “were convicted today by a federal jury in Fort Worth, Texas for their roles in rioting, using weapons and explosives, providing material support to terrorists, obstruction, and attempted murder of an Alvarado police officer at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center on July 4, 2025.” The statement continued with a quote from Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization that has been allowed to flourish in Democrat-led cities—not under President Trump,” she said. “Today’s verdict on terrorism charges will not be the last as the Trump administration systematically dismantles Antifa and finally halts their violence on America’s streets.”
The defendants told a different story. They were protesting the ICE detention facility in a disruptive but largely unplanned and non-violent manner. Originally a “noise protest” at the ICE facility, “the protest went awry when a group of protesters broke off and vandalized parts of the facility.”20 These breakaway protestors “spray-painted graffiti on employees’ cars and a security post, slashed the tires on a government van, and broke a security camera.”21 Then, when “a law enforcement officer responded to the scene and aimed his gun at the protesters, one protester, Benjamin Song, shot his own gun at the officer, striking his shoulder. The officer survived.”22 Song later said he had shot the officer to protect another protestor: the officer “had his weapon drawn and Song believed he was about to shoot a protester.”23
In June 2026, the defendants received their sentences. Song received a 100-year sentence for shooting the police officer. Six other defendants who attended the protest received between 50 and 70 years in prison for their actions. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, expressed satisfaction at the sentences. They “make clear that Antifa terrorists who attack law enforcement and federal facilities will face swift and uncompromising justice.”24
But chillingly, decades-long sentences were also given to individuals who did not attend the protest at all. “Another defendant, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada, did not attend the protest but was still convicted of corruptly concealing a document.” Sanchez-Estrada’s crime: moving some antifascist zines “at the request of his wife, Rueda, following her arrest.” He was punished with a 30-year sentence for merely moving a box of leftist literature. Another defendant who had left the protest before any guns were drawn, Elizabeth Soto, was convicted for “‘providing material support to terrorists,’ among other crimes.” Her other crimes? “[O]wning a ‘printing press’ used to print anarchist zines and being part of a leftist book club.”25
The Prairieland trial took place months after Trump’s administration had proscribed “Antifa” as a “domestic terrorist organization.”26 Violence “against what extremists claim to be fascism,” wrote Pam Bondi in a memo justifying that proscription, “is the clarion call of recent domestic terrorism.”27 During the sentencing, the judge apparently made it clear that the harshness was political. According to court observers, he said that “the prosecution and severe sentences would ‘send a message to anyone who shares a similar ideology.’”28 Cumulatively, the defendants received 450 years in prison for their actions.29 (For comparison, the “Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio” received only “22 years for orchestrating the seditious conspiracy of January 6.”)30
“In the Prairieland case,” Russell Payne wrote for Salon, “the terrorism convictions and the draconian sentencing… represent the culmination of decades of national security law turning inward to criminalize political dissent.” The sentences “bring the war on terror home,” Payne argued, criminalising left-wing activism even though the administration pardoned people convicted during the January 6th riots.31
As of July 2026, the administration’s counterterrorism efforts against “Antifa” are only just beginning. “Federal prosecutors,” PBS reported in mid-June, also “charged 15 people with impeding the Trump administration’s massive immigration crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year, accusing them of coordinating efforts to block arrests and deportations as part of a conspiracy against the U.S. government.”32 The Justice Department’s press release: “15 Members of Direct Action Minnesota, a Minneapolis-Based Direct Action Group with Antifa Ties, Indicted.”33 And in her memo, Pam Bondi instructed the FBI and other agencies to “investigate matters from the past five years that involved potential acts of domestic terrorism.” The FBI, she directed, “shall establish a cash reward system for information that leads to the successful identification and arrest of individuals in the leadership of domestic terrorist organisations.” The Trump administration has placed a bounty on the heads of leftist dissenters.34
July 4th, 2026
On the 250th anniversary of American independence, over 400 members of Patriot Front, a white nationalist organisation, marched through Washington DC.35 Patriot Front is widely classified as an extremist group by organisations including the Anti-Defamation League. Notably, it has not yet been described as a “domestic terrorist organisation.” According to George Washington University’s Extremism unit, Patriot Front are “a white nationalist and fascist organization that promotes the idea of a homogenous, white ethnostate in the United States. The group advocates for the preservation of white European culture, viewing multiculturalism, immigration, and diversity as existential threats to its vision of America.” In 2022, members of Patriot Front were charged with conspiracy to riot “for their planned protest of an LGBTQ+ pride parade. Most of those arrested were convicted of misdemeanor offenses, receiving varying fines and probation.”36 Despite their history of actual political violence, Trump’s Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, said their march on July 4th was merely an example of “free speech,” one of the “foundational principles of the United States.”
Later that day, Trump gave a speech in front of Mount Rushmore. Six years earlier, he had given a speech at the same location, warning America that they were under siege from “far-left fascism.”37 In 2026, Trump redoubled his claims about the “menace of communism.” “A generation after we fought and won the cold war,” he said, “there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land, including from newcomers to our country who embrace ideas totally opposed to our way of life and our great success.” Communism, he continued, is “the enemy of the constitution.” “Above all, it’s the enemy of July 4th, 1776… Communism is the exact opposite of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s death, tyranny and the pursuit of evil.” The “communist party,” he claimed, “is made up of illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.”38
In response to the threat of communism, Trump implored Congress to pass his “SAVE America Act,” which some have criticised as “a voter suppression bill” that hearkens back to the Jim Crow era of Black disenfranchisement. “The bill now before the Senate,” writes the National Urban League, “would prevent more eligible citizens from registering to vote than any legislation in American history. Its impact would fall hardest, as always, on Black Americans.” This, of course, is the Act’s point. If Congress passes it, Trump said, “we’re not going to lose an election for 100 years.”39