Model of the Arc de Trump, Trump wants erected across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial. (Still from video posted to X by a CBS White House correspondent.)

In an era of spectacular commodities, Mussolini offered fascism for communal consumption, and his aestheticized notion of politics governed the organization of the show. Mussolini’s solipsism, his aspirations to omnipotence, his moral independence, and his disregard for individuals’ values informed fascism’s orientations and determined its direction.

― Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy

Maria Greeley was on her way to work at the Beach Bar in Chicago when she was accosted by three ICE agents. Fearing she might be targeted by ICE, Greeley, who is Latina, had her passport with her, proving she was an American citizen, born 44 years ago at the Masonic Hospital in Chicago. The Feds looked at Greeley’s passport and said it was fake because she didn’t “look like” her last name. Greeley explained that she was adopted by the Greeley family shortly after birth. “They said this [her passport] isn’t real, they kept telling me I’m lying, I’m a liar,” Maria Greeley told the Chicago Tribune. “I told them to look in the rest of my wallet, I have my credit cards, my insurance.” The agents still didn’t believe her and forced her hands behind her back and cuffed them together with zip ties. Then they interrogated her for more than an hour before releasing her, another American citizen subjected to federal cop abuse based solely on the color of her skin. “I am Latina and I am a service worker,” Greeley said. “I fit the description of what they’re looking for now.”

Maria Greeley is just one of more than 170 American citizens–many of them beaten, tackled, tasered, pepper-sprayed, and forcibly dragged–who have been arrested and detained by ICE and Border Patrol, caught up in Trump’s mass purge of immigrants, according to a report by Pro Publica. Many of the falsely detained have been held in miserable conditions for days. At least 20 of them were children, most of whom were kept from contacting their families or lawyers.

Pro Publica: “At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.”

ICE set up a raid outside St. Jerome Catholic Church in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago, forcing the priest to issue a special warning to the congregation during mass. Right now, nobody wants to come out, because they don’t want to be deported,” a parishioner said. After the warning, several people living nearby showed up to form a human chain outside the church to escort people home. ICE still managed to arrest one person. “I think they’ve been casing the church,” a neighbor said. “The Mass times are down.”

On Tuesday, Border Patrol chased a car at high speed through the east side of Chicago into a neighborhood before crashing into the fleeing vehicle. Angry residents streamed out of their houses and began yelling at the federal agents who’d brought potentially lethal pursuit to their street, where kids were playing and people were walking down the sidewalks. A teenager threw an egg at the immigration cops, prompting an eruption of government-sponsored violence with clubs, plastic bullets, and tear gas. Chicago police quickly arrived on the scene in an attempt to calm things down, but 13 of the cops were soon overwhelmed by the chemical gas that Border Patrol had saturated the neighborhood with.

ICE raided a Walmart on E. 106th Street in Chicago this week. One of the agents chased down a young black man in the store for “running” during the raid and tackled him to the sidewalk outside the building, as a woman yelled, “He’s a U.S. citizen! He’s American! He’s my brother-in-law!” While he knelt on the man’s back, the ICE agent barked at people filming the brutal takedown: “Get the fuck away! Get the fuck away!!” The store was shut down for several hours. A customer told a reporter for a local TV station: “This is crazy, he [the manager] said they’re closed for some ICE stuff going on. I’m just trying to get some dishwasher liquid.”

ICE is becoming more like the IDF every day: An ambulance was summoned to the ICE office in Portland to treat an injured protester. But when the patient was loaded inside, ICE officers became aggressive, refused to let the ambulance leave, and threatened to shoot the ambulance driver.

Dispatch: “Copy, your attempt to transport impeded by… protesters?”

Medic: “No, not protesters, just the ICE officers.”

Driver: “Threatening to shoot and arrest me and not allowing the ambulance to leave the scene—this is no longer a safe scene.”

The moment ICE arrested Robbie Roadsteamer for singing his version of Rod Stewart’s “Do You Think I’m Sexy” with the Antifa Frog at the ICE jail in South Portland…

If you hate brown people

And you are a Nazi

C’mon, ICE, leave Portland…

On Sunday, ICE arrested a woman who was playing her clarinet on the sidewalk outside the ICE detention facility in Portland. The agents slammed the musician, who is the mother of a three-year-old, into the mud, stepped on her clarinet and strong-armed her into the gated facility. Nine hours later, at 2 am, her partner received a call from ICE telling him that she had been transferred across the Columbia River into a federal prison in Washington state.

Quinn Haberl teaches Orientation and Mobility (O&M) at the Department for the Blind in Portland, where he instructs the visually impaired on how to navigate around town using a white cane. Like the people he teaches, Quinn is legally blind. This week, he was among the protesters outside the ICE facility in south Portland when ICE agents tossed a woman next to him from her wheelchair to the sidewalk and then turned on him: “Agents picked me up and threw me to the ground. One of the medics did a full workup on me to make sure I didn’t injure my head on the concrete wall.”

Last Thursday, Josiele Berto got a call from the Everett, Massachusetts, police station to pick up her 13-year-old son. But when she arrived, she was told to sit down in the waiting area. After half an hour, the police told her that her son, a seventh-grader at the local school in the suburban neighborhood north of Boston, had been turned over to ICE. Berto later learned that he had been transferred to an ICE detention center in Virginia, more than 500 miles away. “My world collapsed”, the distraught mother told the Boston Globe. Later, the boy called his mother in tears, saying that he’d been sleeping on a concrete floor with an aluminum blanket. He is being housed with adults. Berto has a pending asylum application. She and her son are legally authorized to live in the US.

On October 3, Subu Vedam was released from the Huntingdon State Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania, where he’d served 44 years for a crime he didn’t commit. His murder conviction had been overturned a couple of weeks earlier, when a court ruled that prosecutors had concealed evidence that would have proved his innocence. The DA for the county that convicted formally withdrew all charges last week. But before Vedam could taste freedom, he was picked up by ICE and is now slated for deportation to India, where he has lived since he was less than a year old.

Gil Kerlikowske, former head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection: “ICE agents don’t have the training or skillset to conduct law enforcement operations in cities.”

Speaker Mike Johnson: “Most recently, the most threatening thing I’ve seen yet was........

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