For those not familiar with the term Kristallnacht, it is German and means the Night of Broken Glass, a pogrom against Jews executed by the Nazi Party’s paramilitary forces along with Hitler Youth and some German citizens in November, 1938. As described in the Wikipedia article:

Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed over 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms throughout Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht]

This was in many ways the logical and inevitable step in resolving what Hitler and other Nazis thought of as the “Jewish question.”

In the United States now, we have a related spectacle developing. The stories are multiplying daily of ICE kidnappings and assaults on the streets in various cities. Masked and armed men appear and snatch people walking on the street or at work in various, generally low-level, jobs. The men travel in packs, refuse to identify themselves, and are sometimes aided by local law enforcement. The chain of command, if there is one, is entirely opaque, as are their orders. There is no due process for their victims.

Contrary to the public claims of the Trump administration, the victims are almost never the “hardened and violent criminals” that were supposed to be the targets of the forced deportation program. In fact, there are multiple instances of U.S. citizens being taken, snatched away from children and other dependents, taken to undisclosed locations and detained in extremely harsh conditions sometimes for weeks.

The administration doesn’t care. In fact, I believe it is fair to say that these incidents are the logical and inevitable step in resolving what Trump and other Republicans think of as the “immigrant question.” So what if U.S. citizens are mistakenly swept up in the dragnet? The key is to instill fear in the immigrant population, a goal immeasurably aided by the majority of the Supreme Court that has allowed the deportation to countries from which the deportees have no historical relationship and which in some cases are on “do not travel” lists issued by our own State Department.

There is an internal logic to this type of activity. The longer it is allowed to occur, the more we will see. You get what you tolerate. The history of ethnic cleansing in other countries as well as our own strongly supports the likelihood that the conduct we’re seeing from ICE is only going to get worse. At some point someone is going to react violently to their activity and that will become the pretext for a hyper-violent response. Once it starts, it will not stop by itself.

Democrats making denunciatory speeches in Congress or on podcasts won’t stop it. ICE’s budget under the new Republican budget just passed is many multiples of the budgets of the other federal law enforcement agencies and larger than the funding of the FBI, IRS, Secret Service, DEA, SEC, and ATF combined. ICE is preparing for the time when it has a sufficient excuse to unleash its full force against the country, to eliminate people Trump considers to be either his enemies or who don’t fit his conception of “proper Americans.”

The capper to my prediction is the two-fold cleansing operation reflected in (1) the due-process-free-rapid-arrest-and-deportation to foreign prisons of whomever ICE “decides” should be summarily removed from the United States, and (2) the building of domestic concentration camps like the one publicly relished by Trump/Noem in the Everglades. Add to that the use of the military to assist ICE and otherwise suppress dissent in places like California and you have the perfect storm.

When the United States establishes concentration camps and the federal government celebrates their creation, the country is in the deepest trouble. The problem is compounded by the remarkable behavior of the Supreme Court that is writing both due process and the separation of powers out of the Constitution. The John Roberts Court is doing just what the Republicans want – facilitating the rapid transition of the country to a dictatorship.

So, I ask how long, absent a game-changing intervention, it will be before Trump concludes: “I am no longer restrained by law or the courts, and, as I have said many times before, I can do whatever I want?”