She Stepped Onto a Sidewalk in Boston — and Vanished Into Trump’s Shadow State

Masked ICE agents are now snatching dissidents off the streets like a scene from Stalin’s Russia. This isn’t speculative fiction. It’s happening right now, in America…

Image from Wonkette

This is how it begins.

Tuesday night, Tufts University PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk was going out to a restaurant to meet friends when masked federal ICE agents dressed in street clothes seized her off a public sidewalk and disappeared her. Her apparent crime was co-authoring an op-ed critical of Trump and Netanyahu.

Where is she now? At first, nobody knew. As her attorney told The New York Times:

“We are unaware of her whereabouts and have not been able to contact her.”

Then it was revealed last night — as the video of her kidnapping went viral — that she’s been transported to a violent ICE facility in Louisiana. Yeah, that place. Without any legal due process that anybody can identify.

Meanwhile, Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil remains in the hellhole of a notoriously brutal private prison in Louisiana for daring to speak out against the Israeli slaughter of Gazans.

And Columbia student Yunseo Chung, who’s been a legal permanent resident of the US since she was 7 years old, is in hiding while her lawyers sue to prevent her arrest for also speaking up about the violence Netanyahu is inflicting on people in Gaza.

Three people died in ICE custody in just one month: Genry Ruiz-Guillen, 29, from Honduras, Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, 45, from Ethiopia, and Maksym Chernyak, 44, from Ukraine. This is the highest number of deaths in ICE custody since Covid swept the camps in 2020.

ICE currently is holding 46,269 people in a series of mostly private concentration camps, well above its legal bed count of 41,500.

And, apparently, they’re the lucky ones.

Neri Alvarado was working as a baker in Dallas, caring for his 15-year-old brother who has autism. He even got a tattoo celebrating “autism awareness month” in support of his younger sibling.

So Trump — with no legal process whatsoever, in complete defiance of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights — kidnapped him and deported him to one of the world’s most notorious prisons in El Salvador, citing the tattoo as justification.

This morning, the world learned that Trump’s goons also shipped a married father with no criminal record (and no tattoos!) off to that same prison in El Salvador, again with no due process. The man had not committed any crime.

The goal of this sort of kidnapping and hellish incarceration isn’t to clear the streets of criminals or promote public safety or even prevent immigration: it’s to create terror. And it’s working.

This is a playbook as ancient as the world’s first kings. Defy the monarch, or even challenge the monarch, and your quality of life rapidly goes to hell.

From the Tower of London in the twelfth century to Stalin’s gulags, from the medieval Popes’ Palacio de la Inquisición torture chambers to Hitler’s concentration camps, from Xi’s Dabancheng Re-education Camp to Trump’s ICE agents snatching people off the streets, every tyrant throughout history has used the threat of arrest and imprisonment as a way to force public compliance with their regime.

But this is just one part of the larger strategy Putin, Xi, and Trump are using to wipe out democracy and divide the world into three camps, each run by an absolute ruler in his own respective sphere of influence.

Trump’s longtime enforcer Michael Cohen laid out the strategy in his own Substack newsletter this morning:

“Let’s talk about the concept of “The Sphere of Influence”. Historically, it’s a term ripped straight from the colonial playbook, when imperial powers carved up the world like slices of a pizza, deciding who got to dominate where. Now, in Trump’s warped worldview, this concept isn’t a historical relic; it’s a roadmap. A roadmap for unchecked authoritarian expansion, only this time, it’s not just Putin and Xi sketching out the borders of their empires. Trump envisions his own empire too. Canada and Mexico? Consider them new stars on Old Glory.”

Putin has long talked about a “multipolar world” with Russia controlling Europe, China controlling Asia, and Trump controlling the Americas.

Trump is echoing his rhetoric with his talk about taking Canada, Greenland, and Panama; if seizing Ukraine by force is acceptable, so are those. And Trump has already blamed Zelenskyy for Russia’s invasion, calling him — rather than Putin — a “dictator.”

In both Russia and China, the courts have been brought under the control of Putin and Xi. Trump is trying to do the same, by setting judges up for threats to their and their families’ lives and intimidating lawyers and law firms.

In both Russia and China, the media has been brought under the control of Putin and Xi. Trump is trying to do the same by suing media outlets, attacking PBS and NPR, shutting down Voice of America and Radio Liberty, and threatening journalists.

In both Russia and China elections are rigged through selective voter registration rules so Putin’s and Xi’s power is never meaningfully challenged. Trump issued an Executive Order Tuesday that will prevent tens of millions of women (who changed their names at marriage without going through a court proceeding) from voting, along with giving Elon Musk the ability to purge additional millions of voters from the rolls in Blue states. If his EO is successfully challenged, Republicans in Congress have teed up the SAVE Act that will do the same thing just in time for the 2026 election.

In both Russia and China police have been militarized and courts routinely give draconian sentences to dissidents. Trump just threatened “20 years in prison” and “deportation to El Salvador” to anybody who dares attack a Tesla; this, five years after he’d asked General Mark Milley to shoot George Floyd protestors “in the legs.” ICE has now become his own special “protection squad” and are disappearing people with impunity; so far, they’ve only gone after non-citizens, but history suggests this is a mere interregnum.

Meanwhile, Trump is moving America closer to Russia and away from our traditional, democratic allies. He’s compiling a list of Biden’s Russia sanctions he can dial back, ordered the US Cyber Command to suspend cyber and information operations against Russia, opposed a UN resolution condemning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, has “dramatically slowed” delivery of US weaponry to Ukraine, and his Vice President recently trash-talked Europe in that notorious Signal chat about bombing Yemen.

Trump’s final step will probably take place later this year as demonstrations against him and Musk reach a critical mass. Unlike the BLM protests in 2020, he’s already made it clear that he doesn’t plan to tolerate mass civil disobedience; instead, this time he’ll invoke the Insurrection Act and declare a state of emergency, invoking martial law and suspending habeas corpus. America will quickly resemble Belarus, a country also run by a protégé of Putin.

In addition to ending the rule of law and democracy in America (and the territories America may seize), Trump’s invocation of martial law may well also trigger World War III. No longer threatened by an American embrace of democracy and democratic countries, Putin will almost certainly fully take Ukraine, Xi will attack Taiwan, and we’ll quickly move down the road into Putin’s multipolar world, a planet where dictators and oligarchs rule and average working people live their lives in quiet fear.

It's not too late to stop this train, although it gets more difficult with every day that goes by, every media outlet that rolls over and pays off, every law firm that grovels before Trump. The key — as it has been throughout history — is to mobilize public opinion and pressure politicians to act on behalf of traditional American values of freedom, liberty, and the rule of law.

History suggests that mobilizing 3.5% of the populace of a country is enough to produce change, although recent experience in Belarus and Israel suggests that may depend on how entrenched an authoritarian regime has become, particularly if their legitimacy is enhanced by an external attack (see Reichstag Fire, Moscow Theater, 10/7, and 9/11).

Nonetheless, there are things we can do right now:

— Support independent, progressive media.
— Show up for protests in your area.
— Post your opinions on social media.
— Share this and other like-minded newsletters.
— Reach out to your elected officials from the federal to state to local levels.
— Run for office yourself.
— Join your local Democratic Party and volunteer as a precinct committeeperson.
— Wake up everybody you know.

America is under assault from the Putin/Trump/Xi/Musk axis, and things have gotten far worse far faster than anybody expected. But we’re still here and still fighting. As Winston Churchill said at Britain’s last great moment of national danger:

“We shall never turn from our purpose, however somber the road, however grievous the cost, because we know that out of this time of trial and tribulation will be born a new freedom and glory for all mankind.”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.
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