“If Trump can disappear them, he can disappear you.”—Robert Reich
America, you got fooled. Again.
For starters, the war on illegal immigration was never just about illegal immigration.
If you fell for that, chances are you’re still falling for the government’s oldest trick: manufacture a crisis, identify an enemy, frighten the public, declare an emergency, and then use the resulting fear to justify another expansion of government power.
Terrorism. Crime. Drugs. National security. Illegal immigration.
Different threats. Same playbook.
Take a legitimate problem—or inflate it into an existential menace—and suddenly constitutional safeguards become inconveniences, extraordinary powers become necessities, and anyone who questions the government’s methods can be accused of siding with the enemy.
Immigration is a perfect example.
A highly charged issue that pushes all of the knee-jerk, polarizing buttons when it comes to deep-seated fears and prejudices, immigration has been the perfect vehicle for the Trump administration’s political fearmongering and authoritarian power grabs.
Trump has repeatedly described illegal immigration in the language of invasion, criminality and national-security emergency.
Yet a closer look suggests a far more complicated reality.
A 2026 Cato Institute analysis of Census data found that undocumented immigrants were incarcerated at a rate of 674 per 100,000 people in 2024, compared with 1,195 per 100,000 native-born Americans. Legal immigrants had an even lower incarceration rate of 303 per 100,000. Cato concluded that both legal and undocumented immigrants are less crime-prone than native-born Americans.
So, what is the government’s end game?
We’ve been so fixated on the overt cruelty, unapologetic authoritarianism, thuggish brutality, and blatantly unconstitutional abuses of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown that we missed the larger menace taking shape behind it.
While the country fights over who should be allowed in, who should be kicked out, and who can participate in a pay-to-play scheme that benefits the oligarchy, the government continues building the infrastructure of a prison state.
This is the real power grab.
The government is using its so-called war on illegal immigration to normalize something far more dangerous: a system in which due process can be bypassed, people can be detained and moved beyond easy public scrutiny, government agents can wield extraordinary enforcement powers with minimal accountability, and constitutional protections can be treated as optional whenever the government invokes security.
Immigration is the testing ground.
The precedent being established and the tactics being trotted out and normalized are the real danger. Because once the government establishes that it can suspend the Constitution’s safeguards for one disfavored group, there is nothing magical that keeps those powers confined to that group.
We are all at risk.
Be warned: the literal and figurative walls being erected in the name of national security should concern the people already living inside them. The machinery being built to find, track, identify, seize, detain and disappear immigrants can just as easily be redirected toward the population at large.
That is how a police state becomes a prison state.
Immigration enforcement is the dress rehearsal in anticipation of the government’s ultimate muscle flex.
To round people up on the scale envisioned by the administration, the government first has to know who people are. Where they live. Where they work. Where they drive. Who they associate with. What they look like. What databases contain information about them. Where they were yesterday. Where they are today. And where they might be tomorrow.
That requires surveillance. Lots of it.
Biometric databases. Facial recognition. License-plate readers. Flock cameras. Data brokers. Location tracking. Artificial intelligence. Phone extraction tools. Government databases linked to still more government databases.
The Brennan Center for Justice reports that the Department of Homeland Security has committed more than $2.9 billion in recent years to surveillance, data collection and analytics technologies used in the interior of the United States, including more than $1 billion for biometrics. Those systems include tools capable of tracking phones and vehicles, collecting facial and other biometric data, purchasing commercial information and combining records from multiple databases to create detailed profiles on individuals.
Then comes enforcement, masked agents, raids, checkpoints, detention centers, private prisons, transfers, rendition—all wrapped in the reassuring language of public safety and national security.
For now, immigration is the convenient scapegoat to justify the crackdowns and loss of liberty, but the machinery of oppression being assembled does not know how to discriminate and differentiate.
A surveillance camera does not know whether or not you are a citizen. A license-plate reader does not know how you voted. A biometric database does not care why your face is being searched. A location-tracking system does not distinguish between following an undocumented immigrant and following a political protester.
Indeed, the Brennan Center notes that DHS technologies acquired for border security and criminal investigations have capabilities that can be directed at anyone—immigrants, protesters, travelers and other members of the public.
The machinery simply does what it was built to do: find, track, identify, classify, control and, when ordered, detain.
We are watching the infrastructure of a prison state being assembled in plain sight.
Surveillance, however, is only the beginning. The real power comes when the government takes everything it knows about you and acts on it.
Find you. Seize you. Detain you. Move you. Cut you off from the people who might intervene on your behalf. Eventually, make it difficult for anyone outside the system to determine where you are at all.
This is where ICE becomes particularly instructive.
Not because every American is about to be deported, but because ICE demonstrates what government looks like when surveillance, databases, aggressive enforcement, detention and secrecy are fused into a single system.
As historian Timothy Snyder warns, “If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.”
Once due process ceases to be a non-negotiable right for one disfavored group, it becomes an optional privilege for everyone.
This is the slippery slope that eventually allows the government to make everyone disappear—citizen and immigrant alike—whenever they become inconvenient, or disfavored, or no longer useful to the powers-that-be.
People are already disappearing inside the United States.
Seized without warning, denied due process, and locked up indefinitely in a sprawling network of immigration detention centers, county jails, private prisons, temporary holding facilities and federal facilities, these individuals are being transferred from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, moved hundreds or thousands of miles from family and lawyers, made increasingly difficult to locate—they are being made to disappear.
Their whereabouts are effectively being scrubbed from public view.
On September 15, 2026, ICE stopped publicly listing the locations of many detainees with final removal orders in its online detainee locator.
Immigration attorneys told the Associated Press that clients suddenly vanished from the public system, making it harder to determine whether they had been transferred, remained somewhere in federal custody or were being prepared for removal. ICE defended the change as part of its effort to prioritize deportations of people with final orders.
There can be no understating what is at stake when the government acquires the power to make people disappear from public view.
This is disappearance by bureaucracy.
People disappear first from public view. Then from the practical reach of their lawyers and families. Then, potentially, from the database. Public records no longer reveal where some detainees are. And sometimes the next stop is another country entirely.
For now, it’s immigrants—our fellow workers, friends, family members, members of our communities, people who pay taxes, contribute to the economy, and once helped make America and its economy the envy of the world—who are being rounded up, designated as “unhuman” in order to deny them basic human rights and made to disappear, but they are just the warm-up.
Watch and learn: once these tactics have been refined and mastered, we’ll be the next targets.
The government has been perfecting variations on this machinery for decades.
After 9/11, the United States transported terrorism suspects—some never convicted of crimes—to secret CIA detention facilities beyond the ordinary reach of American courts and public scrutiny. Extraordinary rendition allowed government to outsource detention and interrogation into legal gray zones.
Yet disappearing people has never required sending them overseas.
Consider Homan Square.
For years, the Chicago Police Department operated a facility on the city’s West Side where lawyers and former detainees alleged that people were taken for interrogation before appearing through normal booking channels. Records later obtained by the Guardian documented more than 7,000 arrests associated with Homan Square over roughly eleven years, while documented attorney access was extraordinarily rare.
That danger is becoming harder to dismiss.
In September 2026, Amnesty International released a report alleging extensive human-rights violations in U.S. immigration enforcement. Amnesty alleges that the current mass detention and deportation campaign has subjected migrants, refugees and asylum seekers to a broad range of abuses.
Amnesty has called for ICE to be abolished.
Whatever the remedy, no government agency should be empowered to act lawlessly and make people disappear.
The Trump administration’s latest tactic for discouraging migration into the U.S. and instilling terror in the hearts of immigrants already here is the use of “third-country removals”: sending certain deportees to countries where they are not citizens and may never have lived.
We saw this in the wake of 9/11 under the Bush administration with their use of extraordinary rendition and remote torture sites.
The rationale seemed to be that if you removed someone from the United States, the Constitution wouldn’t follow them.
Indeed, the Trump administration appears to be trying to move faster than the lawyers and courts in an effort to outrun judicial review and the Constitution.
Perhaps the destination is overseas. Perhaps it is another jail. Perhaps it is another prison right here in America. That distinction no longer matters: you do not have to leave the United States to disappear into the machinery of the prison state.
This is precisely why due process matters.
Due process is not a privilege. It is not a legal loophole. And it is not a technicality reserved for people the government considers deserving of special treatment.
Due process is what stands between accusation and punishment, between suspicion and imprisonment, and between government power and individual liberty.
At the heart of that protection is habeas corpus, which translates to “you should have the body.”
Dating back to the Magna Carta of 1215, habeas corpus allows someone imprisoned by the government to challenge that detention in court and demand that the government make the case for why they should be held.
The Founders considered habeas such a fundamental and necessary ingredient in guarding against government tyranny that they included it in Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 of the Constitution. As the Brennan Center explains, habeas “was conceived to guarantee protection from the king arbitrarily disappearing subjects to secret dungeons without just cause or due process.”
Despite what the Trump administration would have us believe, habeas applies equally to citizens and non-citizens alike within the United States.
The act of transporting someone outside the U.S. does not lessen that protection, but it does make it harder to enforce.
History has supplied enough warnings.
Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the Civil War resulted in arrests without ordinary judicial process. The internment of Japanese Americans during World War II demonstrated how quickly fear and prejudice can overwhelm constitutional safeguards. The post-9/11 rendition program demonstrated how easily government can try to place human beings beyond the effective reach of American courts.
Homan Square demonstrated that you do not have to leave American soil for that to happen.
And today’s immigration detention system demonstrates how these tactics can merge: masked arrests, county jails, private prisons, remote detention centers, repeated transfers, limited access to attorneys, disappearing locator records, expedited deportations and third-country removals.
Each scenario arose from different circumstances, but each also demonstrates what happens when government insists that extraordinary conditions justify extraordinary powers.
This is why the familiar refrain—if you are here legally, you have nothing to fear—misses the point. So does: if you are an American citizen, you have nothing to fear. And: If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.
That is the oldest sales pitch in the police-state playbook: “Just trust us.” “We’re only going after the bad people.”
But inevitably, the definition of “bad people” changes.
In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published It Can’t Happen Here, imagining authoritarian government taking root not in some distant dictatorship but in America.
Those four words capture one of the most dangerous assumptions a free people can make.
It can’t happen here. Not in America. Not to citizens. Not to innocent people.
Not to me.
Perhaps not. Perhaps the government will never put you on a rendition flight to a country you’ve never visited. Perhaps you will never disappear into a detention center. Perhaps masked agents will never come to your door.
But there are other ways for a free people to disappear.
Privacy disappears. Anonymity disappears. The freedom to move about without being tracked disappears. The freedom to associate without creating a digital trail disappears. The freedom to protest without being identified, catalogued and entered into a database disappears. The presumption that government should leave you alone unless it has legitimate cause to investigate you disappears.
Bit by bit, the boundaries separating a free citizen from a prisoner begin to disappear, too.
You are watched. Tracked. Catalogued. Scanned. Recorded. Flagged. Followed.
Your movements become data. Your associations become data. Your face becomes data. Your life becomes searchable.
All that remains is for someone in government to decide what the data means.
This is how “We the People” disappear.
Not necessarily onto rendition flights.
Not necessarily into secret prisons.
We disappear when we cease to live as a people presumed free and begin living instead as inhabitants of a country-sized surveillance state—watched constantly, tracked everywhere, our movements and associations increasingly subject to monitoring, cataloguing and government scrutiny.
That is the larger danger concealed by the immigration debate.
ICE is showing us what the machinery can do.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, eventually the prison built for someone else can become the prison imprisoning all of us.
ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
