The Tip of the Iceberg

The Topography of Terror, Berlin

1.      The families of Los Angeles

As ICE rushes to fill quotas of arrests, they detain untenable numbers of people: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/jun/23/trumps-deportation-machine-hits-stride-ice-arrests-detention-set-new/

 They are well beyond their capacity to fulfil their duty of care for them – including for families with children, the elderly, and the infirm: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/11/la-ice-raids-immigration-conditions

They are also breaking the law by refusing to allow members of Congress to inspect their facilities.

Customs and Border Protection are participating in stops and arrests, highlighting the long-known travesty of the law which allows them to conduct warrantless searches within a hundred miles of the border – which, including the coasts, encompasses an enormous percentage of American’s homes. One wonders what basis their stops are made on; it is hard to imagine it can be anything but racial profiling, clear-cut discrimination.

2.      Kilmar Abrego Garcia

Garcia has been returned to the US from El Salvador, but the matter of his case is now working its way through the courts. In a response to the government’s motion to stay his release order, we find this remarkable admission from the Department of Justice, in which they ask Garcia not be released, because ICE might deport him, preventing the prosecution of DOJ’s case against him. In effect, the Department of Justice is claiming that its work will be sabotaged by the Department of Homeland Security, as if these are somehow not two agencies in the same executive branch, and capable of coordinating. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.tnmd.104622/gov.uscourts.tnmd.104622.54.0.pdf  

In an order written by the judge in Garcia’s case, the DOJ is further humiliated, as its accusation, sourced by promising early release to convicted criminals if they testified, is dismissed as bordering on physical impossibility.

3.      Narciso Barranco and burgeoning brutality

Narciso was beaten, pepper sprayed, injured, and arrested and held without food, water, or medicine. We know this from the testimony of one of his three sons – all of whom are American Marines. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-shock-and-awe-deportations-will-get-worse-supreme-court-trump-israel-iran

Here is an article from a local paper: https://santanero.org/2025/06/21/landscaper-violently-detained-by-agents-has-three-marine-sons/

There are many other cases of federal agents behaving with a rapidly increasing disregard for basic human decency.

Abandoning its duty to justice, the Supreme Court has chosen rather to blindfold itself, allowing the administration to rapidly deport migrants to countries which they are not from, without a hearing – in effect, without the chance to make the point that they may not be safe in these countries to which they are sent (the first country on the list of recipients is South Sudan).

4.      Sae Joon Park

A legal permanent resident had his status abruptly terminated, using the excuse of charges related to drug possession and failure to appear in court 15 years ago – but this man is hardly what Trump described when he painted a picture of dangerous gangster invaders. Sae Joon Park came to the United States when he was 7 years old, 48 years ago. He served in the US Army and was shot in the spine in Panama in 1989, for which he received the Purple Heart. After this he struggled with a drug addiction related to his untreated PTSD. He served his brief time in prison for his offense, and otherwise has been an upstanding member of the community. But now, he has been forced to leave his home and his family and return to a country he barely remembers.  https://www.npr.org/2025/06/24/g-s1-74036/trump-ice-self-deportation-army-veteran-hawaii

5.      Ward Sakeik

Ward was brought to the United States from Saudi Arabia when she was 8 years old. Her family were from Gaza, but she is legally stateless – she has no citizenship anywhere, and thus, through no fault of her own, has no other country to which she can claim the right to reside. She recently married an American citizen, but on the way back from their honeymoon, she was arrested and detained for months. Last week, the government attempted to deport her and dump her at the Israel border – thankfully she was not ultimately sent to that war zone, but only because the flight was cancelled due to the outbreak of aerial war between Israel and Iran. https://abcnews.go.com/US/newlywed-brides-honeymoon-ends-months-ice-detention-prospect/story?id=123036280&cid=social_twitter_abcn

Before going on their honeymoon, the couple checked with ICE to make sure that it was legal for her to travel, and confirmed that they would be allowed to re-enter. However, the Department of Homeland Security now blames Ward for believing the lie they told her.  

 6.      Paola Couatre

Adrian Clouatre is an American citizen and a veteran of the Marine Corps. He has two children, a 2-year old son, and a 3-month old daughter who was still breastfeeding – until his wife, their mother Paola, was taken by ICE. She was brought to the country as a child, and was in fact arrested when she was at an appointment, with her husband, to secure a green card. The order for her removal was issued years ago, without her knowledge and not because of anything she had done, but because her mother, who brought her to the US, had missed an immigration hearing. https://apnews.com/article/ice-detains-marine-veteran-wife-clouatre-802305fe0a364ef86a7cb61805129ee1

In fact, the government is now actively betraying our troops, turning the instruments used to help them earn legal status for their loved ones against them:

You will note again the typical callous response from DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, who over the past few months I have become unfortunately aware of as one of the cruelest and most evil people on this planet.

7.      Andry Hernandez Romero

Andry, a Venezuelan makeup artist living in the US was sent to the brutal concentration camp run by the El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele. It has now been over a hundred days since Andry was taken, and we have not heard from him. There is no way of knowing if he is alive or dead. https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/28/americas/romero-venezuela-deported-us-salvador-intl-latam

I ask myself, has America forgotten? You should ask yourself, have you thrown someone in a cell, and then forgotten about them? If you are an American, what exactly are you doing to save this man imprisoned in your name.

8.      Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus, and her unborn child

Iris was arrested and detained by ICE. For three days, she begged for medical help which ICE refused her. Then her baby died. https://nashvillebanner.com/2025/05/27/iris-monterroso-pregnancy-loss/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

ICE Agents, the Department of Homeland Security, the entire Republican Party, and, ultimately, the United States of America destroyed this family, tortured this woman, and murdered her baby. And none of the people responsible have yet been brought to justice, not that that can ever repair what they have done.

If you supported Trump, how will you wash this child’s blood from your hands?

9.      The American Citizens

It will take longer to get all the information pieced together in the wake of the terror now spreading across the United States; but, in the absence of hearings and other administrative due process, and at the direction of a rabidly aggressive and slapdashedly unprofessional administration, determined to juice deportation numbers as high as possible, we should expect more, not less, mistakes than ICE has made historically – and they have made mistakes. If we look at the information we do have available, a Government Accountability Office report confirms that in the five years between 2015 and 2020, 70 people who in all probability (per the government) were US citizens – not illegal immigrants, not permanent residents, but US citizens – were deported. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-487

In a time when deportation could mean a surprise beating, mistreatment, the refusal of medical care, detention without a phone call or a lawyer, no hearing of any kind, and then a quick flight to a warzone or a brutal concentration camp – if citizens can be deported in these conditions, then no person now inside the United States is safe from the Department of so-called Homeland Security.

If you want to follow a couple of sources who have done the Lord’s work bringing these stories to the public eye on social media, I recommend https://x.com/ReichlinMelnick and https://x.com/David_J_Bier.

What is the Department of Homeland Security now?

Hannah Arendt, writing in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1950, and thinking of the very present fresh memory of both the Third Reich’s Gestapo and Stalin’s still-existent NKVD, presents us with a description of what role the secret police, in particular the paramilitary secret police, comes to play in a totalitarian society.

“Neither dubious nor superfluous is the political function of the secret police, the ‘best organized and the most efficient’ of all government departments, in the power apparatus of the totalitarian regime. It constitutes the true executive branch of the government through which all orders are transmitted. Through the net of secret agents, the totalitarian ruler has created for himself a directly executive transmission belt which, in distinction to the onion-like structure of the ostensible hierarchy, is completely severed and isolated from all other institutions. In this sense, the secret police agents are the only openly ruling class in totalitarian countries and their standards and scale of values permeate the entire texture of totalitarian society.”

“Criminals are punished, undesirables disappear from the face of the earth; the only trace which they leave behind is the memory of those who knew and loved them, and one of the most difficult tasks of the secret police is to make sure that even such traces will disappear together with the condemned man.”

“In totalitarian countries all places of detention ruled by the police are made to be veritable holes of oblivion into which people stumble by accident and without leaving behind them such ordinary traces of former existence as a body and a grave.”

“They [the Nazis] could change overnight the whole structure of German society — and not just political life — precisely because they had prepared its exact counterpart within their own ranks. In this respect, the task of the paramilitary formations was finished when the regular military hierarchy could be placed, during the last stages of the war, under the authority of SS generals…If the importance of paramilitary formations for totalitarian movements is not to be found in their doubtful military value, neither is it wholly in their fake imitation of the regular army. As elite formations they are more sharply separated from the outside world than any other group. The Nazis realized very early the intimate connection between total militancy and total separation from normality; the stormtroopers were never assigned to duty in their home communities, and the active cadres of the SA in the prepower stage, and of the SS under the Nazi regime, were so mobile and so frequently exchanged that they could not possibly get used to and take root in any other part of the ordinary world.  They were organized after the model of criminal gangs and used for organized murder.”

In Berlin, at number 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, there is a large field of gravel filling the ruined foundations of a former hotel, demolished by the Soviets just after the war. In the center of this field is a museum, the Topography of Terrors, which exists for the sole purpose of explaining the story of how the German public came to accept the development in their midst of an instrument of evil unparalleled in world history. The names and the locus of power of this instrument shifted over the course of the Reich. At first the power of armed street thugs beating up the Party’s enemies resided in the SA, the Sturmabteilung; then in the  SS, the Schutzstaffel; then finally, within the SS, in the Security Service, the SD, or Sicherheitsdienst. These organs, and the Gestapo with them, were integrated into the Reich Security Main Office, which occupied the address which has now become a permanent ruin.

My claim is not that the same degree of evils have transpired, or that history will take the same course; but once the state begins organizing an unaccountable secret police, which ignores legal guardrails and the moral limits which we rely on to keep it from metastasizing into something far worse, then the only sane course of action is to act as if we are indeed in the early, and hopefully as of yet indeterminate stages of a catastrophe the precise scope of which we cannot know in advance. All we can know is that it beginning, that it is serious, and that it is wrong – and that we have a responsibility to put an end to it. Otherwise, perhaps we shall one day have to make a ruin of the Department of Homeland Security’s main office, and build a memorial over it’s desecrated bricks.