The Atlantic [no paywall] – A leader who uses military force to suppress his political opposition ought to lose the right to govern. “Trump came into office promising to carry out a “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants. Because of a degraded information environment riddled with right-wing propaganda, many Trump supporters came to think this meant he would target criminals whom the Biden administration allegedly was allowing to rampage freely throughout America. Instead, driven by Stephen Miller, immigration authorities have targeted workers, families, and asylum seekers—people who show up to their ICE appointments—for deportation. Agents have raided schools, workplaces, and homes—masked and out of uniform—methods more akin to secret police than civilian law enforcement in a democracy. Some deportees have been sent to a Gulag in El Salvador, while others have vanished or been expelled to third-party countries where they face dangerous circumstances. Predictably, these heavy-handed tactics have produced a backlash, most extensively in Los Angeles, where the Trump administration has sent detachments of Marines and the National Guard to discourage American citizens from expressing opposition to these methods…

…following the massive “No Kings” protests across the country, Trump posted on his social network Truth Social that he was directing ICE to “expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities,” which he called “the core of the Democrat Power Center”; he further described immigration as turning America into a “Third World dystopia.”…