If You Lived In Fascism, You'd Be Home By Now

It doesn't matter if day laborers and first-graders aren't violent criminals. They're all the 'worst of the worst'. And so are you.

It’s a good protest when somebody shows up in an inflatable dinosaur costume. Screenshot, June 6, 2025, KTTV on YouTube.

As Donald Trump tries desperately to leverage the LA protests against deportations into a pretext to advance his autocratic takeover, we were impressed by how the administration has gone Full Orwell in its rhetoric attempting to justify any and all violent action against undocumented people and against people protesting the mass deportation agenda.

It’s the old fascist two-step: Rail against the supposed existential threat posed by the Outsider, and then stomp out political opposition when people oppose the crackdowns. It’s almost whiplash-inducing how quickly the extreme claims made about the people ICE went after this weekend swerved and got deployed against protesters as well.

It got rolling Sunday with a press release from Homeland Security’s propaganda minister Tricia McLaughlin, which claimed in a ready-for-tabloid-media headline, “ICE Captures Worst of the Worst Illegal Alien Criminals in Los Angeles Including Murderers, Sex Offenders, and Other Violent Criminals.” The press release actually identifies just 11 people who had some kind of serious criminal record, out of however many scores of people were arrested by Sunday. As of this morning, ICE says that’s 118 total arrests, for which we need to deploy the National Guard and the Marines, and probably invoke the Insurrection Act.

McLaughlin excoriated Gov. Gavin Newsom and LA Mayor Karen Bass for supposedly caring “more about violent murderers and sex offenders” than protecting citizens, and followed that by insisting that the “rioters” in LA were “fighting to keep rapists, murderers, and other violent criminals loose on Los Angeles streets.”

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem followed that up on Fox News Tuesday, proclaiming that the raids were going after “the worst of the worst”:

NOEM: In LA, what we're been going after is the worst of the worst. They're murderers. They’re people who have been perpetuating (sic) assault and trafficking human beings, and drugs, and been devastating these communities for years.

Noem then broadened that rhetoric, while attacking Bass, to include the entire city of Los Angeles, declaring that “They are not a city of immigrants, they are a city of criminals, because she has protected them for so many years.”

And that’s how the fascism game is played, by turning statistical outliers into a Big Lie, by presenting opposition to extremism as criminal, by treating the Constitution as an annoyance that must be sidestepped.

About all those murderers: It was one guy. Of the 11 people whose crimes were identified in the press release, just one person, a 49-year-old man from Vietnam, actually had a murder rap, but it was a terrible crime: Cuong Canh Phan was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 15 years to life for participating in a 1994 mass shooting that killed two people and left seven injured. We can’t find any information on when Phan was released from prison, but as far as we can tell, he served his time.

Of the others, two had sex offenses, two had domestic violence convictions, three were convicted of assault, three had robbery or larceny convictions, and three had various drug charges (And there’s some overlap among those). One did 239 days in jail in New Mexico for “Conspiracy to transport an illegal alien.”

A second press release Monday identified another five people with serious criminal records, including one man convicted of child molestation and other crimes, and another convicted of vehicular manslaughter. Again, serious crimes, and some not so serious, like a guy convicted of EBT fraud.

So out of 118 undocumented people that ICE says were arrested in the raids, 16 had serious crimes, though two of those, the fraud and the alien smuggling, weren’t violent crimes. The Washington Post reports that “immigrant advocacy groups say they have collected information indicating that more than 200 people were detained and that many do not have criminal records.”

We aren’t making any excuses: People convicted of serious crimes should be deported, but only with due process, following the law, which has always been the case under administrations of both parties. But we also want to point out that native-born Americans have always had a higher crime rate than immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, no matter how many cherry-picked examples of serious offenses Trumpers put forward.

The vast majority of people here without papers have committed no other crimes, but of course their not having papers is for the far Right the most unforgivable crime of all, and it has nothing to do with crime statistics, actual laws, or even the imaginary line between “illegals” and good decent hardworking immigrants who did it right and are in the US legally.

For instance, see this Twitter post Saturday by “Derek Guy,” the pseudonymous online-famous menswear guy who pokes fun at the terrible fashion sense of rightwing jerks. Our link goes to “Xcancel.com,” which reproduces Twitter without direct traffic to the Muskoverse, so feel free to click and read it. Guy briefly notes his own history as an American in every aspect but the papers, recounting how his family escaped Vietnam to Canada, then came to the US when he was still a baby. His father overstayed his visa, and as a result, Guy is an undocumented immigrant:

I've been in the United States since I was a baby. My identity and roots are very much based in this country, no different from anyone else.

The lack of legal immigration has totally shaped my life. It has made every interaction with the law much scarier. It has shaped which opportunities I could or could not get. It has taken an emotional toll, as this legal issue hangs over your head like a black cloud.

It’s a terrific essay, in which Guy points out that in many ways he’s typical of most undocumented people: contributing to America economically but cut off from legal recognition, and shouldn’t we be able to find a more rational way to deal with this than pretending we can easily deport millions and millions of people who are not murderers or drug dealers or even EBT frauders? The responses are almost all the familiar cant: You must be deported, for you are an illegal. Trump is coming for you. Better brush up on your Vietnamese (Guy’s reply to that one: “I have something Vietnamese you can brush up on.”)

But he’s ILLEGAL!!! There’s literally no discussion possible past that point, because for the Trumpy Right, it’s the only demarcation that matters. You can point out until you’re blue in the face that crossing the border without papers is a federal misdemeanor for a first offense, and that overstaying a visa isn’t a crime at all; it’s a civil infraction that means you don’t have legal status, so you can be deported, but simply not a crime like, say, littering, to say nothing of filing false financial statements to cover up another crime, or unlawful possession of classified information.

But it’s the only crime (or civil infraction) that matters, to the point that people on the Right think we must not only kick out all the illegals, we also must make millions of people with legal status illegal, send preschoolers with deadly medical conditions to die outside the US, and while we’re at it, to eliminate birthright citizenship, ignoring the plain language of the Constitution. Those people shouldn’t have been legal in the first place, so their legal status doesn’t count, and we will kick them out too, no matter what the cost.

Now, the easy answer is that this is mostly (or entirely) racism, which we’ll readily agree is largely the case, but the nationalist paranoia of the deport-everyone mindset goes so much farther than that. It’s an almost physical revulsion at the Outsider, an antipathy so extreme that even conventional racist bigotry can sometimes be set aside (only temporarily) by white nationalists who deploy anti-immigrant rhetoric in hopes of getting Black Americans to turn on immigrants as well. They’re willing to delay the Day of the Rope a little while as long as it might mean more deportations.

And as we’re seeing this week, Trump supporters are even happy to toss out the rule of any law but their own version of immigration law in order to cleanse the country, because Los Angeles is a city of criminals. Other Americans who object to the deportation madness are also criminals, of course, but they’re all violent rioters and criminals, too. Send in the Marines, and never mind that it’s unconstitutional, because the Constitution isn’t for those people anyway.

But if there’s any hope in all this, it’s that the majority of Americans still aren’t falling for it. The majority of Americans do support deporting noncitizens who commit serious crimes, but once you start trying to insist that elementary school kids are criminals, or that Carol, the nice neighbor lady in Missouri who’s been here 20 years and works at one of the town’s few breakfast spots, is a threat to national security, they start to see through the lies, at least a little. And as Rachel Maddow reported last night, when people get angry and demand fair treatment for immigrants in their communities, those people have in many cases been released.

And despite the screaming that immigrants are the worst of the worst, Americans who aren’t already onboard the Trump Fascism Train don’t appear to be buying it: New polling today from YouGov shows that 47 percent of Americans disapprove of “deploying Marines to the Los Angeles area to respond to protests over the federal government's immigration enforcement,” while only 34 percent support it. The partisan divide is right there, too, as you’d expect:

Democrats overwhelmingly disapprove (75 percent) of sending in the Marines, 68 percent of Republicans approve, and independents mostly disapprove (50 percent) or aren’t sure (24 percent). Strikingly, “disapprove” has the edge in virtually all the other categories, with some interesting variations.

Saturday is the day to show up and tell Trump you aren’t standing for fascist crackdowns, folks.

OPEN THREAD

---

Relax! It's Only A Police State For Some Of Us! Who, Exactly? Oh, You'll Find Out!

History's Limpdickest Dictator. Tabs, Tues., June 10, 2025

LAPD Officers Shoot Journalists, Trample Protesters

---

[DHS Press release / WaPo / American Immigration Council / Derek Guy at XCancel / The Moral High Ground / Why We Dehumanize Illegal Immigrants / YouGov]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or help us out with a one-time donation.