Donald Trump’s most recent presidential campaign ran on vengeance. But as luscious as it was for his diehard supporters to fantasize about their leader getting his imagined justice, keeping his followers stoked required offering up more accessible targets. For these he dangled potential victims closer within their own reach: dark/er-skinned immigrants, trans people, socialists, and the “enemies of the people,” a derogatory reference to media workers by dictators like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao that Trump was all too happy to dust off.
Throughout the campaign, the faux populist billionaire raged about our nation being ripped off, victimized, and exploited by others—a message his followers could feel in their bones. It was motivational because it carried that gleaming kernel of truth: for decades the nation’s working class have been hemorrhaging as the wealthiest captured more and more of the nation’s wealth. Trump’s followers were being screwed. They knew that much.
Between 1989 and 2022, the top 1% of earners in the United States amassed wealth at a rate nearly 1,000 times over the spare gains made by those at the bottom, according to a new analysis by Oxfam.
“The wealth of working-class and middle-class families has not increased substantially,” the group found, while “the gains at the very top have been astronomical.”
But if Make America Great Again loyalists were expecting their lot would improve with Trump’s return to power, the “Big Beautiful Bill”—considered “the most massive transfer of wealth upward in American history” that also stripped food assistance from more than 22 million Americans and health assistance from millions more—should have provided final proof of their mis-spent hopes.
The budget bill was declared “the most regressive tax and budget law in at least the past 40 years—and possibly ever,” shifting vast sums upward, away from working-class families. It’s not incidental that this pillaging of middle and lower-income families has occurred as the climate crisis—itself the product of the same billionaires who profit off inequality—has careened off the rails.
As Deceleration frequently documents, human society today faces a “polycrisis”—deeply damaged natural systems, raging economic inequality, and political systems racing toward far-right autocracy—that together threaten the imminent collapse of industrial society. It is the recipe of destruction that has visited so many past empires, as documented in anthropologist Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse.
That means that folks living in the United States today are increasingly denied hope of economic stability—a home, a job, affordable health insurance—all while navigating the growing risk of displacement by climate disasters, the same ones driven by the same economic forces benefitting billionaires above all.
As we exit another disappointing round of global climate talks, consider:
- The richest 10 percent of people have caused nearly 70 percent of all global warming since 1990.
- Every 1.5 hours the 50 richest people on Earth produce more planet-warming CO2 than the typical person does in their entire life.
- The top 50 billionaires do as much damage to the climate as 155 million people.
But as much as Trump has railed about “insiders” and “the elite,” his presidency has rolled out the red carpet for the world’s most blood-soaked and filthy rich despots, as long as they help shift wealth his family’s way.
And yet we are still supposed to believe it is job-creating immigrants causing all the problems.
After the shooting of two National Guard members in D.C. by a former CIA-directed militant, Trump showed no trace of considering this as an individual act (a standard used repeatedly when judging school shooters, a phenomena of overwhelmingly white boys) but a crime of an entire group of people: that is, immigrants.
Trump moved, in response, beyond merely demonizing “illegal immigrants” to finally fully shifting to senior policy advisor Stephen Miller’s longstanding racist script, promising a pause on migration from “all Third World countries” and the deportation of even lawful permanent residents (ie. green card holders) who are deemed (by someone, to be determined) “non-compatible with Western Civilization.”
This shift signals a full-throated return to the white nationalism of the Naturalization Act of 1790, which limited naturalization at the time to “‘free white person[s],’ explicitly linking the capacity for republican citizenship with racial identity.”
Trump’s goal of an unprecedented 1 million deportations a year doesn’t materialize out of vengeful wishing alone. Before the ICE engine could fully rev, Trump needed cover, cooperation, and cash.
Cover came during the chaos of Trump 2.0’s opening months, which were largely spent dismantling federal agencies and programs to diminish their ability to resist the agenda laid out in Project 2025. This period included, notably, dismissing the top attorneys within the various military branches, those expected to ensure the Uniform Code of Military Justice is followed by military commanders.
Trump was only too happy to outsource much of this early wanton cruelty to Elon Musk, whose DOGE attacks on international programs assisting the world’s poorest people quickly resulted in more than 600,000 deaths (mostly babies and children) from the withholding of food and medical assistance, according to the public health researchers at Impact Counter. (The justification for the absolute brutality of DOGE’s actions? False reports of USAID-sponsored “transgender operas,” marking another win for culture war misdirection.)
Cooperation came as the deportation engine networked local and state police agencies around the U.S. into a “deportation army of local cops.” Agreements materialized in the form of what are called 287(g) agreements, which allow local police, essentially, to act as immigration officers in contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Then there was a matter of cash.
The same “Beautiful” bill that dragged millions off food and health assistance while shoveling money toward billionaires also smothered ICE with $75B, a sum so vast that it eclipsed the budgets of all but a handful of national militaries the world over.
A few weeks ago, after warring on so-called “blue” cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon, ICE finally flexed on San Antonio, sweeping up somewhere between “over 140” (U.S. FBI) and “nearly 200” (Texas Governor Greg Abbott) people into federal detention.
The press release Deceleration received the next morning from the local FBI office suggested it was a raid targeting gang activity and trafficking:
HSTF-South Texas is leading efforts to target sophisticated cartels, foreign terrorist organizations, and transnational gangs whose list of crimes include homicide, kidnapping, human trafficking, extortion, smuggling drugs across our borders, and money laundering. Some recent highlights include:
Disrupting Tren de Aragua (TdA) criminal presence in San Antonio, Texas on November 16, 2025, which also resulted in the arrest of over 140 illegal aliens from Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico and other South American countries, who were taken into ICE custody. This operation would not have been possible without the support of the Texas Department of Public Safety, whose work on the underlying state case led to the search warrant executed during the operation.
We immediately reached out to a friend working in police accountability. They supported our initial caution when it came to questions surrounding a protest planned for that night. Was it the right response? Did we know, for example, this wasn’t a giant sex trafficking network that had been disrupted?
The mass raid on San Pedro Ave. and Basse Rd. in San Antonio was made possible by an agreement struck sometime between late October and early November, as Francesca D’Annunzio recently reported for the Texas Observer.
At that time, ICE and the Texas Department of Public Safety struck a deal “that will authorize some state police within DPS’s Criminal Investigations and Highway Patrol divisions to effectively operate as ICE agents,” she wrote.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott suggested more of the same is on the way.
In the absence of facts about this specific raid, we chose to attend and document based on what we could discern of ICE’s behavior to date. That was enough to warrant extreme skepticism.
Constantly couched within promises of weeding out the “worst of the worst” non-citizen offenders, the behavior of masked agents instead have revealed the very worst side of our nation, including rampant abuse, indiscriminate disappearances, and inhuman detention conditions.
Everywhere these masked ICE agents go leaves a trail of broken car windows, snatched parents, and abandoned children in their wake. The brutality has been shocking—and some say the brutality itself is “the point.”
Lawsuits and judges’ orders have painfully detailed inhumane conditions in ICE facilities in Illinois, New York, Baltimore, and California City, among others. A federal judge has since compared the facilities at Broadview, Ill., to a concentration camp.
There is little reason to extend the Trump regime or its agents the benefit of doubt when facts come into dispute. They lie. And lie. And lie.
Responding to routine, violent, and unjustified attacks on peaceful protestors in Illinois, a federal judge recently cited myriad examples of this duplicity, prompting the local ABC affiliate to report that “in nearly all of the examples Judge Ellis cited in her 200-plus page opinion, she says the Department of Homeland Security narrative contradicts the reality of what can be seen on agents’ body-worn cameras.”
How else but through a tangled web of more federal fabrications are we to make sense of ICE agent Charles Exum’s shooting of ICE-monitoring Marimar Martinez in Chicago this October? There were claims and counterclaims over who rammed whose vehicle (which seem to tilt in the victim’s favor considering the government has since dropped all charges). What isn’t in dispute is Exum’s subsequent unloading of five shots into the unarmed Martinez through her windshield before fleeing Chicago back to Maine where he apparently had his car detailed and scratches buffed out…all while bragging in a group chat to fellow agents that he “fired five rounds, and she had seven holes. Put that in your book, boys.”
With the ICE surge now reaching Texas, at least one unmistakable fact has emerged we must all now contend with: Trump’s deportation apparatus is deeply morally corrupt and chronically legally in the wrong.
We’ve since the warrant justifying the San Antonio raid was built upon an undercover operation and small baggies of drugs. But the justification to then sweep up somewhere between 140 and 200 people, which we have learned included children picking up late-night tacos, is purely MAGA racism, lies, and misdirection.
If we need to understand anything about the recent San Antonio raid, it was probably captured in the video of what appears to be an FBI agent using a picnic table to knock down a surveillance camera that had been recording the event. Just ask: Who fears evidence? The innocent or the guilty?
Here are a few facts that we’ve learned since the raid:
- More than 70 percent of those detained by ICE under Trump have no criminal conviction.
- More people have died in ICE custody this year already than any previous year since 2004.
- In spite of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s denials, nearly 200 U.S. citizens have been detained by ICE. (And probably many more than that have been detained, windows smashed, and later released.)
- While decades of crime data show that immigrants don’t cause crime but are “consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g., murder) and property (e.g., burglary) crime.”
- In fact, immigrants are 33 percent less likely to commit crime than native-born residents.
Even the arrests of the few immigrants with actual violent criminal convictions that ICE and Homeland Security have managed to catch are promoted in ways straining belief. Recently, for instance, ICE bragged about “Over 3,500 Criminal Illegal Aliens in Houston” supposedly captured “during the six weeks of the Democrats’ shutdown.” But the very first mugshot shared, however, was that of Leo Acosta Sanchez, whose arrest dates back to May 2024 with credit not to ICE but to the Splendora Police Department.
Logic suggests that the surge of violent detentions and deportations—including to known death camps in El Salvador (in spite of a court order intended to block them), where no one gets out alive—is less about crime reduction than the restoration of a white supremacist government by a regime that rejects the basic premise of multi-racial democracy.
There has been no apparent pause to assess who has been injured in these well-documented attacks, who has been unjustly detained, or even who has died in custody.
If there was any true concern for protecting the innocents from violent lawbreakers, the deportation project would be abandoned now. Instead, the Trump administration has chosen to label all those opposing ICE’s operations as “domestic terrorists” with pledges to train the same police violence on them next.
Any slowdowns to ICE have come not from any remaining sense of conscience on the part of the regime, but because of judicial demands backed up by elected leaders in a handful of Democrat-led cities or states. More frequently, they’ve come about through direct action by local communities. That’s why, thousands of U.S. citizens in cities around the country are volunteering for training and putting their personal safety at risk to help interrupt ICE operations.
If there is no accountability from those governing us, how should everyday people be organizing to keep themselves and their neighbors safe? Elected Democrats are frequently shut so far outside of power that their advice is increasingly not about the next election, but about deepening local networks of resistance right now.
“We need equal parts vigilance and caution. No one is going to save us but us,” Texas state Rep. Diego Bernal told Deceleration.
“I don’t want anyone hurt. I don’t want anyone in harm’s way. But informing and protecting our community, along with creating accountability—already difficult because of ICE’s absolute lawlessness and cowardice—is up to us.”
