The hardening authoritarianism of the second Trump Administration has many faces, but the most chilling is one that can hardly be seen at all. Images of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in balaclavas, descending on migrant workers, pro-Palestine protesters, and random bystanders, have become the symbol of a new phase of state terror. That terror promises only to intensify: under the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ICE will receive more funding than any national law enforcement agency in US history. As of August 2025, an estimated 180,000 people had been deported since January, and almost 1,500 more were being removed every day.

The origins of Trump’s deportation crackdown are bipartisan. The pace of arrests, staggering as it is, is still lower than under Barack Obama, and in the first week of the new regime almost a quarter of Congressional Democrats voted to pass the Laken Riley Act, which mandates detention of undocumented immigrants accused of petty theft — part of the widening web of federal enforcement. Yet in its visual spectacle, openly racist aims, and lavish funding structure, the new repression marks a break even from Trump’s first term in office.

The following dispatches, all written between June and July 2025, confront the crisis from three sides. Yanis Varoufuckice’s report from a federal law enforcement career expo in Northern Virginia introduces us to the people doing the terrorizing, while Liv Veazey’s immigration court journal lingers with people being terrorized. Meanwhile, Jack Norton and Judah Schept’s account of carceral collaboration in rural Kentucky offers a glimpse at the infrastructure that makes it all possible. Their perspectives are necessarily local and partial, but all help us to see, with bracing clarity, the face of a new American fascism.

 — The Editors