POLITICS (USA): This AmeriKa is UNBELIEVABLE

Trump’s real plan for America hasn’t been
derailed by his apparent walk back in Minnesota

By Justin Ling, Feb 1, 2026, Toronto Star

Donald Trump was always crystal clear about his most ambitious plan: He wanted to deport one million people from America each year. It was emblazoned on signs which followed the aging demagogue on the campaign trail: “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW.”

A year on, we’ve seen that plan put into action. Trump’s secret police prowl streets across America, abducting anyone they suspect of being a migrant. Federal agents and soldiers are dispatched to put down protests opposed to this abuse of state power. Hastily-built and overcrowded camps are overflowing with human beings, many of whom have committed no crime. Charter flights fly over the country, trafficking these migrants to destinations unknown.

Minneapolis has become the epicenter of the chaos. Regular people have stood up to these masked goons, and two have paid for it with their lives: Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

In the fallout of these killings, the administration appears to be pulling back. Gregory Bovino, the “commander-at-large” for ICE (who bears a striking resemblance to the psychopathic villain in the movie “One Battle After Another”) has been relieved of duty. The administration says some ICE officers will be withdrawn from Minneapolis. Republicans are talking seriously about reigning in ICE’s conduct.
[: These Republican congress have the cajones of earthworms. They are allowing T**** to do whatever he wants without throwing any obstacles in his way. He is destroying American democracy and these worms are letting it happen.]

But while some gullible Republicans and their sympathetic pundits might see this as a walk back, a recognition that Trump knows he went too far, experience tells us that it is no such thing.

Things will get worse, not better. Trump, and the fascist sycophants who surround him, want to make good on their promises. They want to deport at least one million people a year, and there is simply no way to do that legally and without violence.

These are the recruits to ICE
The storm troopers of this mission are the officers of ICE. Already a thuggish organization, the Trump administration has pursued such a frantic hiring spree that they have added at least 12,000 new officers in just a year. Not only do they lack adequate training, but research from the Ohio Immigrant Alliance reveals that dozens are allegedly violent criminals, charged with sexual assault, child sex trafficking, torture, amongst other crimes.

These men are told they are the foot-soldiers of Trump’s agenda and that their cause is more important than the law. They are told, by the president himself, that those who they arrest are dangerous and that those who resist are terrorists.

As my Star colleague Richard Warnica wrote upon returning from Minneapolis, Trump’s crusade is certain to leave more dead. This truth is underlined by the fact that the federal government is blocking Minnesota’s effort to investigate the killings.

The killings of Pretti and Good shocked Americans’ senses because they were so visible, filmed from every angle.

[: TGeraldo Campos, another ICE victim, had received little or no press because he’s the wrong colour. Americans pay lip service to eguallty. If you aren’t white, you’re of little importance]
But this crusade has had many invisible victims. At least 32 people died in ICE custody last year. Earlier this month, another death in a notorious ICE detention centre in Texas: Geraldo Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban migrant.

An ICE press release, listing every crime Campos had been convicted of, alleges he became “disruptive” and was put in solitary confinement. There, staff “observed him in distress.”

Campos’ autopsy tells a different story. The medical examiner listed his cause of death asphyxia due to neck and torso compression — homicide. Other inmates say they witnessed five guards pinning Campos down, with one officer wrapping his arm around Campos’ neck. “I can’t breathe,” he yelled in Spanish.

Only when Campos stopped moving did officers remove his handcuffs, the other inmates say in sworn affidavits filed with a Texas court. He was already dead.

The network of ICE detention facilities — which includes for-profit prisons — are overcrowded, violent concentration camps. The most galling is probably the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” — a cute name for a facility which Amnesty International says regularly tortures its inmates.

Despite only opening six months ago, the Florida facility is already subject to a litany of lawsuits. One was filed by a Colombian man who first came to America when he was nine years old with no criminal record — he is diabetic and says he has not been receiving insulin while incarcerated.

One lawsuit was brought by seven inmates who pleaded their case on a single sheet of paper: “There are thousands of innocent people detained,” they wrote. Some inmates have sat in the camp for months without an opportunity to plead their case and without knowing when they may be deported, and to where. Some of their fellow inmates, they write, are minors.

The inmates write that they live in a “concentration camp for torture.”

The miserable conditions in these American camps are still probably better than what awaits these migrants elsewhere. Since last year, hundreds of men have been deported to El Salvador — regardless of whether they were Salvadorian. They were, without due process and without even being accused of a crime, interned in the notorious CECOT mega-prison.

Ostensibly built to house terrorists and gang members, CECOT is a modern gulag. Those who have managed to leave the prison describe widespread abuses and torture.

These tales of horror are just a cross-section of America’s abuses, the ones we have — through leaks, investigations, and lawsuits — been able to witness.

America has done everything it can to make arrests and deportations as fast and ruthless as possible. It is indiscriminately rounding up people on the streets, often based on skin colour; it is secreting them away to makeshift camps and holding them incommunicado; it is sticking them on charter flights and dumping them in far-off lands which they may have no connection to.

And it is fighting to make sure that no journalist, activist, or judge can hold this system accountable.

Far from scaling-back this effort, Washington continues to expand it. Trump plans for a Pentagon “quick reaction force” of more than 20,000 soldiers, tasked with putting down civil unrest.

And, despite all this, it is still well short of its own grotesque target. While the administration is deporting an unprecedented number of people, it is still falling well short of its goal. The Department of Homeland Security says it deported 600,000 people last year — but there is reason not to trust those numbers. The Deportation Data Project estimates the real number is more like 300,000.

The importance of these deportations to the MAGA movement cannot be overstated. They believe both in retribution, blaming these migrants for all the country’s ills; and in the idea that these deportations can be the foundation of a new, more homogenous society.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security posted a recruitment ad for ICE. “We’ll have our home again,” it read, superimposed over an image of a cowboy beneath an American stealth bomber.

That phrase was taken from a song recorded by a white nationalist band, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Alleviating all doubt, the department even included the song when they uploaded the post to Instagram.

There is no ambiguity about the nation Trump and his gargoyles want to forge through these deportations. And he is already foreshadowing that he will not let free and fair elections impede his extreme renovation.

If Trump is going to accomplish this goal, he cannot lift his boot from the neck of America’s undocumented class. So he won’t, and it’s naive to think otherwise. And if the American people continue to protest and resist, as they well should, they can only expect more brutality in response.