The $170 billion kidnapping machine is coming. Keep your town out of it.

We still have time.

But not much.

We made the classic blunder. We gave the wannabe dictator an exorbitantly funded yet almost completely unaccountable secret police.

No, it’s worse than that. We’ve funded a ‘Deportation Industrial Complex’ that could be with us the rest of our lives.

Margy O’Herron at Just Security explains:

The so-called One Big Beautiful Act allocates more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement, with a stated goal of deporting 1 million immigrants each year. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States. The bill adds billions of dollars to border enforcement. Still, the largest percentage increase goes to finding, arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S., most of whom have not committed a crime and many of whom have had lawful status.

How much this kind of kidnapping machine degrades and binds American life remains an open question; an open question will be answered too soon.

However, imagining it as just affecting our immigrant neighbors ignores how central the obsession with “purification” is to MAGA and Trump. Andrea Pitzer, the author of the global history of concentration camps One Long Night, has called that obsession “The Concentration Camp Tendency.” And while that tendency has manifested most directly in rounding up unfavored minorities to put them in camps, possibly forever, it also aims to infect every element of our lives, even more than it already has.

We also need to stare in the mirror at our past complicity with this sickness.

What may make Trump’s kidnapping machine so potentially effective is that it’s built on the scattershot ‘Deportation Industrial Complex’ America has been building for decades. That complex was supercharged at several points—including the aftermath of 9/11 and the terror attacks ISIS managed to inspire in the US.

And while America has been built by immigrants (including forced, enslaved immigrants), that construction was always mired by an exclusionary impulse, which you’d need to enslave humans. That impulse isn’t unique to America, yet has taken a particularly fearsome form at many points to counter the progressive forces that have always imagined an America that is just a bit more welcoming than our ancestors and co-inhabitants of earth.

Those two forces are squaring off now, again. And the troops of imaginary purification and racial hierarchy have never had a machine like what is being constructed around them now, on our dime, as we contemplate what it all means.

But we have time. A little time. And we know one huge thing we can do with it.

We can use the freedom we may still have—which is definitely not evenly distributed based on how targeted we are or how dependent we are on federal funding—to do everything we can to keep our towns from abetting the MAGA kidnapping machine.

ICE thrives when it’s working with collaborators in local law enforcement. And there’s a decent chance those cops are helping ICE even if they don’t have an official agreement to do so.

And local law enforcement still works for us—or their bosses do.

We can and should let them know that we expect them to protect our immigrant neighbors, not terrorize them.

It won’t be easy. But if we don’t do it now—when we have more freedom and time than we may ever have again—we may regret it for the rest of our lives.

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