There has been concern that President Trump’s immigration crackdown would one day extend beyond undocumented immigrants to target U.S. citizens. The arrest of Mohsen Mahdawi, a pro-Palestine activist and green-card holder who was detained by ICE agents last week at his naturalization interview in Colchester, Vermont, seemed symbolic of how close the administration has come to that threshold. “Homegrown criminals next,” Trump told his Salvadoran counterpart, Nayib Bukele, at a White House meeting that same day. He confirmed to reporters that his team is “studying the laws” to determine whether the hundreds of undocumented people he is paying Bukele to incarcerate at CECOT, El Salvador’s megaprison, could eventually be joined by native-born Americans.

Yet despite setting off alarm bells, there remained a sense that these musings were still a ways away from becoming reality. Trump and Bukele are expert trolls; even the most sober warnings from experts about their ominous but “obviously illegal” machinations have seemed to imply that they resembled “hopes” more than actual plans. In fact, the targeting of U.S. citizens by immigration agents is already being trial-ballooned. Local cops and ICE officials are functioning as a de facto laboratory for testing out what Trump can get away with, subjecting people they deem seditious or even just suspicious to a brand of law-enforcement terror that the president no longer pretends to reserve for “violent, predatory, and gang-affiliated criminal illegal aliens.”

The latest victim of this campaign is

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