Around the time of the “No Kings” demonstrations earlier in June, I saw the following sign on social media:

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their home. Families are torn apart… Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared.” Anne Frank, 1943

What Anne Frank described is going on now. For anyone who has been paying attention to the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has been on an out-of-control rampage rounding up thousands of immigrants all over the United States. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has demanded that federal agents arrest 3,000 people a day. It is called Operation At Large.

In the process of attempting to meet the quota, ICE has been creating an anti-democratic police state. ICE has entirely junked any concept of law or due process. There has been a race to arrest as many as possible as quickly as possible.

ICE and Customs and Border Protection have been terrorizing Latino communities, especially. People are so terrified of the federal government they are afraid to leave their homes. This includes residents who have lived in the Unites States for decades. ICE has been turning formerly thriving business communities into ghost towns. People are afraid to go outside out of fear of being kidnapping by ICE.

The lawlessness could not be more apparent. Masked, unidentified ICE goon squads in unmarked vehicles have been disappearing people from workplaces, churches, farms, street corners, high school volleyball practices and even their citizenship hearings. The masking and lack of identification is an obvious problem particularly in light of the shootings of the Minnesota legislators by the guy who dressed up like a cop. How do those being detained even know if they are being taken away by any lawful authority?

Those taken are often removed to faraway concentration camps compromising any right to counsel. Just finding and reaching a detained person can take days. As we have seen, some of those gobbled up by ICE are next located in an unreachable gulag outside the country where they have been transported with no due process.

No longer is there any attempt to focus on those with alleged criminal records. Now the focus is on anyone with a brown skin, regardless of whether they have any criminal history. ICE wants to put them on a plane out of the country as soon as it is feasible. It doesn’t matter if the detained person is married to a U.S. citizen or has small children and is breast-feeding.

The Trump administration has ordered immigration judges to quickly dismiss cases by denying asylum seekers a hearing. They have entirely short-circuited asylum law. The stories have been piling up of fast-tracked removals from the U.S. as well as stories of American citizens being improperly detained and even removed from the country.

ICE facilities throughout the country can accommodate 41,500 people but are currently holding more than 56,000. It is forgotten that being undocumented in the U.S. is a civil infraction, not a criminal offense. The Trump administration will never acknowledge that as it cuts against their demonization agenda.

This is all taking place before our eyes but no one has a full picture of what ICE’s secret police force is up to. We can only see bits and pieces of their operations. ICE always says it is deporting “the worst of the worst,” but invariably it is people who have lived in the U.S. for decades and have been contributing members of society who are detained. ICE data shows a staggering increase in the number of those arrested who have no track record of being charged with or convicted of a crime.

Trump’s budget bill includes $75 billion in supplemental funding for ICE, an enormous increase. He wants to deploy 10,000 more ICE agents to conduct more monstrous raids. ICE’s budget in 2024 was $9 billion. If the budget bill passes with the ICE increase, expect a tsunami of more deportations.

This is the gravest threat to civil liberties in my lifetime. The public reaction has not been commensurate with the threat. The ‘No Kings’ demonstrations were tremendous, but our institutions need to respond. The Democratic Party has failed to sound the alarm.

I would suggest we need a public investigation and hearings that thoroughly expose the actions of ICE. ICE operations are conducted in secrecy, and they are hiding what they are doing from the public as much as possible. The Department of Homeland Security is imposing new limits on visits by members of Congress to immigration enforcement facilities. This is contrary to federal law, which explicitly allows members of Congress to make unannounced oversight visits.

There are many questions that need to be answered: How many have been deported? What kind of process did they receive? Who is getting a hearing before an immigration judge? What are the living conditions of those being held in ICE detention? Are those being held getting adequate nutrition, living space and medical care? Are consent decrees the government previously agreed to such as those around family separation being adhered to? Why are ICE agents masked and why are they arresting people without a warrant? Is ICE doing racial profiling? How are they deciding who to detain and who to deport?

How many have died in ICE custody and under what circumstances? How many American citizens have been detained and how many have been deported? What were the circumstances in those cases and what steps were taken to protect U.S. citizens? What are the financial arrangements around ICE prisons and concentration camps? Is there a financial gain that is motivating an increase in the number of detentions?

If the Democrats in Congress cannot figure a way to investigate ICE, I think some kind of independent investigatory tribunal should be created to explore ICE’s many crimes. While it may not be the best analogy, I am old enough to remember the Russell Tribunal created in 1966 by Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre to examine America’s war crimes in Vietnam. We need a tribunal like that to study and report on the Trump regime’s immigration-related crimes.

A tribunal featuring pubic hearings to increase public understanding would help the American public come to a better appreciation of how ICE is replacing due process with a system of repression. We must not passively sit by and watch rights being stripped away.

It is a horrifying commentary that many people are so afraid of the federal government that they are afraid to leave their home.

Jonathan Baird lives in Wilmot.