So, how ominous of a sign is it when the white nationalist government that's openly violating the US Constitution to facilitate fascist mass deportations, decides to declare thousands of immigrants legally dead for all intents and purposes? This week Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (aka Cracker Fascist Barbie) and acting Social Security commissioner (and gammon-y human thumb) Leland Dudek, got together and "terminated" the "financial lives" of 6,000 immigrants the regime claims are "convicted criminals and 'suspected terrorists,'" by moving their Social Security numbers into the agency's "death master file."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-social-security-immigrants

'Outrageous Abuse of Power': Trump Weaponizes Social Security for Deportation Spree

"The Trump administration this week reportedly classified thousands of immigrants living in the United States as dead in a Social Security database in an effort to force them out of the country, a scheme that was met with furious uproar from advocates and lawmakers.

By entering the names and Social Security numbers of roughly 6,000 immigrants into Social Security's "death master file," the administration has revoked their ability to legally work in the U.S. and receive benefits in a bid to get them to "self-deport," several news outlets reported Thursday.

"This is an outrageous abuse of power," Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, said in a statement. "It will not only create extreme hardship, but kill people. Imagine, in one Trump administration keystroke, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more."

"If they get away with this, it would be no surprise if they then move on to marking their perceived enemies as dead—citizens and non-citizens alike," Altman added. "This is a total misuse of the dedicated revenue that workers contribute to Social Security, with every paycheck. Though Trump claimed he wouldn't cut benefits, he essentially is by diverting dedicated monies from their intended purpose of paying Social Security benefits to the immoral purpose of maliciously ruining lives."

First off let me start by noting that some, if not the majority of folks targeted by the Trump regime for financial termination are people with valid social security numbers, and while undocumented immigrants can pay into Social Security, they can't collect even when they reach retirement age anyway; so this has nothing to do with migrants stealing benefits, or preventing fraud. Additionally it should be pointed out that while we're being assured that those targeted are all "convicted criminals and "suspected terrorists," our source for that is the very same administration trying to deport student visa holders for traffic tickets and telling you anti-Tesla protestors are "domestic terrorists," so who the fuck knows what that assertion even means anyway; it appears that at least some of the targets are simply people "who were allowed to enter and remain temporarily in the United States under programs instituted by the US president’s predecessor Joe Biden" according to The Guardian.

Finally, it should be understood that this is about a lot more than collecting Social Security benefits in your late 60's; in modern American society you typically need a Social Security number to open a bank account, get a credit card, rent an apartment, obtain health insurance, access car loans, and so forth, so when Dudek says they're trying to "exterminate" the "financial lives" of targeted immigrants, he's only partially employing a metaphor here; the opponents of the plan calling this "digital murder" are absolutely right to do so. This is definitely going to destroy lives and get people killed, and as the article notes the regime is reserving the right to expand the list of targets to "others in the country without authorization," which sounds rather ominous when we're talking about a government that's taken to having Marco Rubio instantly revoke visas and legal status for student protestors before ICE kidnaps them.

All of which means that even if the regime's actions are taken in the best possible light, this is fascist bullshit designed to push a nativist, white nationalist agenda while harming folks the administration deems illegal primarily for their skin tone and place of birth. As both a target of the regime's ongoing anti-trans pogrom, and a student of history however, I can't help but notice an ominous déjà vu quality in all of this. Historically speaking, mass deportations have always lead to mass graves, and when a fascist regime declares you and folks like you legally dead, it's usually because they mean to eventually make that a literal reality.

Thanks to a Trump-appointed judge once again playing legal Simon Says, the Trumpenreich has taken yet another step towards a type of apartheid system and the mass deportation of migrants who overwhelmingly represent no threat to America. Ruling that the rights groups opposing the move have no standing to challenge it, Judge Trevor Neil McFadden has allowed the Trump regime to move forward with a requirement that all noncitizens register with a government hell bent on enacting mass deportations, and carry documentary proof of registration or suffer criminal consequences.

https://apnews.com/article/illegal-immigration-immigrant-registry-trump-homeland-security-329d9b1523792aaf5940f72948d8b48b

Judge allows requirement that everyone in the US illegally must register to move forward

"While questions remain about how the registration requirement will function, its impact is potentially far-reaching. The Trump administration — which has worked to make good on campaign promises of mass deportations — has said between 2.2 million and 3.2 million people could be affected.

One of the groups that sued, the National Immigration Law Center, called the Thursday ruling “disappointing” in a statement.

“This disappointing ruling unfortunately means that, for now, Trump’s scheme to force people into an impossible choice moves forward. As we weigh next steps in our case, we urge affected community members to consult with an immigration attorney to better understand the consequences of registering or not,” said Nicholas Espíritu, deputy legal director at National Immigration Law Center.

Homeland Security officials announced Feb. 25 that it was mandating that all people in the United States illegally register with the federal government, and said those who didn’t self-report could face fines or prosecution. Failure to register is considered a crime, and people will be required to carry registration documents with them or risk prison time and fines.

Registration will be mandatory for everyone 14 and older without legal status. People registering have to provide their fingerprints and address, and parents and guardians of anyone under age 14 must ensure they registered."

This one is a little complicated because the Trump administration has argued that this requirement has existed for decades, but just wasn't being enforced. As the article notes, there's some truth to that line of (motivated) reasoning, but the reality is that these rules haven't been enforced since almost immediately after they were introduced in the 1940's because by and large, migrants are *not* a criminal threat to the United States. Furthermore the requirement to provide fingerprints and carry documentation of registration or face *criminal* penalties is as far as I know, a new and disturbing wrinkle the regime has thrown in to make their arguments that they're only deporting "criminals" a de facto reality in retrospect. As any student of history can tell you, if law enforcement can demand "papers, please" and then lock you up for not producing them, what you're talking about is the criminalization of human beings in something akin to an apartheid system, and a racialized legal pretext to arbitrarily detain anyone who *looks like* (this is crucial) they might be a foreign national; since after all, the authorities won't know if you have "papers" until they ask, and not having papers will be treated as a crime until such a time as you can prove that you (even US citizens of the wrong complexion) aren't legally obligated to carry them.

Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum, and the reality is that no matter what the rules say, this is an openly white nationalist government that has falsely argued migrants don't have *any* Constitutionally protected rights, and have already begun the process of revoking legal status for hundreds if not thousands of people lawfully residing in the United States, while openly deploying deportation to engage in fascist ideological policing to target its perceived enemies. This is a regime that hates migrants, does not care if they "follow the rules," is willing to play legal Calvinball to deport literally anyone who isn't white and a natural born citizen, and has overwhelmingly targeted immigrants following the legal process to remain in the US as a sort of "low hanging fruit" to easily generate big numbers of deportations to brag about to its deeply racist base of support. They *are* going to use this registration system to locate and detain migrants for mass deportation, and they know full well you'd have to be some kind of crazy to willingly turn over your location and identity to a nativist regime dead set on bleaching the American population demographics through the force of law. What the administration is doing here is purposely criminalizing migrants to justify more and more repressive crackdowns on folks it has now effectively made truly "illegal."

I've spent much of the past eight and a half years avoiding unproductive arguments with people who insist that "you can't compare Trumpism to Hitler and the Nazis" despite knowing that those people rarely, if ever, have much understanding of what made the Nazis the definitive genocidal fascist movement in human history. At some point however, you have to stop relying on Godwin's Law to avoid naming the beast when the Trump administration continues to actively borrow policies and methods of operation from the actual Nazi Party; particularly when those policies ended in the literal fucking Holocaust last time.

To understand what I'm talking about, let's take a look at what Trump's Gestapo (ICE) Director had to say at a recent "border security" conference about his hopes to logistically optimize the process of snatching up migrants for deportation in the streets of America:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/todd-lyons-ice-amazon-prime

Trump's ICE Chief Craves Deportation Process Like Amazon Prime, 'But With Human Beings'

"While speaking a 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons outlined a chilling vision for how deportations in the United States ought to be carried out: with the swift efficiency of Amazon Prime.

"We need to get better at treating this like a business," said Lyons, explaining that he wants to see a deportation process that is "like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings." His comments citing the e-commerce giant's subscription servicewere first reported by the Arizona Mirror.

"This is a chilling example of drawing inspiration from Nazi Germany to deploy logistics for mass deportation and ethnic cleansing," wrote journalist Luis Feliz Leon in response to Lyons' statement."

Although this article doesn't mention it, other sources online (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/ice-todd-lyons-deporation-amazon) have revealed that part of what Lyons is talking about here is a plan to "implement a system of trucks that rounds up immigrants for deportation in a system similar to how Amazon delivers packages around the US."

First of all, this is nightmare dystopian fascist shit that absolutely mirrors the process of rounding up Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Additionally Lyons is implying that the US government intends to deport so many people, that it would make sense logistically, to requisition a fleet of trucks for that ongoing purpose. Finally, don't sleep on the fact that Lyons is talking about running ICE like a business and modeling its operations on Amazon, because for the people who own or invest in a private prison sector getting filthy stinking rich on anti-migrant policies and ICE detention contracts, this absolutely is a business; it might be costing the American taxpayer public money, but it's making a whole lot of nazis huge bank.

Ultimately however, I think the most important part of the story is what Common Dreams alluded to in its short article above; the employment of the government's extensive logistical abilities to streamline and optimize the mass deportation process and speed up the establishment of a white nationalist ethnostate, is more or less how the Nazis ultimately facilitated the Holocaust using the punch card computing system IBM helped them build for that purpose. Speaking frankly, what separates the Nazis and the Holocaust from other eliminationist campaigns by fascist governments in human history is the creation of an optimized system to apprehend, detain, and eventually exterminate whole classes of people; this was systemic fascist murder, and it ended in the deaths of millions of people, most notably but not exclusively over six million Jewish people from all over Europe.

If you look at the overarching theme of the Trump regime's employment of AI technology, mass surveillance, and the integration of data from all government sources into ICE databases, it becomes very clear that we're looking at systemic, logistically organized fascist repression that sure looks an awful lot like the Nazis under Hitler. You might say to me that I can't prove the administration is working itself towards an eliminationist program targeting migrants, but I'd respond by reminding you that mass deportations have historically been part of the process of genocide, bullets in the head are cheaper than airplane flights, and the very same systemic fascism this regime is now admitting is necessary for its mass deportations to function, can just as easily be purposed for mass executions when the time comes.