It Can't Happen Here - Part Three - Our Very Own 21st Century Manifest Destiny
Photo Credit: American Progress, by John Gast (1872)
About the painting American Progress
Since the November 2024 election, our lives have been ambushed, thrown into chaos, seemingly by surprise. But in reality, none of this was a surprise. The warning signs were there. We chose to look the other way. "It Can’t Happen Here" shines a spotlight on the quiet warnings we’ve ignored, revealing how the storm we dismissed now rages daily, its deeply seated unimaginable effect on our lives.
We flat-out discounted the never-ending rantings of a madman, Project 2025 and every MAGA ecosystem silo. The evil spewed was too dystopian, too far-fetched to ever happen here. This is the United States of America after all.
Six months into the Trump Administration, the United States of America is becoming unrecognizable. Not only can it happen here, it has and is.
The question is, what are we doing about it?
Images such as the one above, were commonplace when America was at war in other countries —- soldiers being deployed throughout the Middle East, specifically Iraq or Afghanistan —- in full military gear, uniforms camouflaged to blend in with the sands and brush of the deserts where war would be waged. And of course, outfitted to the teeth with weapons of war including long guns.
But what makes these images so absolutely chilling and horrifying today is that our government has sanctioned, given its blessing, to deploy masked, dark bespeckled Border Patrol/ICE agents and law enforcement officers unto American soil, in full military gear, confronting, attacking, slamming, beating, tasing, kidnapping disappearing and launching rubber bullets, tear gas and smoke grenades against its own, unarmed citizens. No identification. No warrants.
Our very own government has created a militarized militia, authorized not to keep its citizens safe, but rather to terrorize and bully entire communities, places of worship, places of business, childcare facilities, car washes, restaurants, eateries, food trucks, dairy farms, farmworkers, garment factories, construction sites and Home Depots —- controlled by and accountable only to the President of the United States.
When you’ve been instructed by the White House Deputy Chief of Staff to abandon your search for gang members and those who have committed the most heinous of violent crimes, but rather, cast your net to reach a ridiculous quota of 3,000 black and brown-skinned people per day, it becomes impossible to produce warrants because they’re not pursuing a specific person, the nabbings are random —- 1) what you look like; 2) the language you speak and 3) where you work.
Those are not my words or opinions, but those of Border Czar, Tom Homan. In a July 13, 2025 interview with CNN’s State of the Union host Dana Bash, Homan said ICE officers “only need ‘reasonable suspicion’ —- not probable cause —- based on their location, their occupation, their physical appearance, their actions” to briefly detain someone. With these as your parameters for ridding the country of the “worst of the worst,” you’re not conducting raids, you’re purging people based quite simply on the color of their skin.
If this were not the case, why then is ICE’s primary focus on immigrants who have say, overstayed their visas, worthy of deportation only from countries like Mexico, Central America, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, India, Haiti, Nicaragua, Brazil and a number of African countries, but not European immigrants overstaying their visas from places like Ireland, Scotland, England or Russia?
And yet, when Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan and Trump are questioned and confronted about their means justifying their ends, they look reporters straight in the eye and lie, spin, and deny what all of us are seeing with our own eyes and hearing with our own ears.
It will get worse. The bastardization of the judicial system, the abuse of power by law enforcement, legitimized by Trump and his administration ballooned 10-fold with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law. Tens of thousands more agents, thousands more detention camps, built in every state overseen by a nation-sized military budget. No oversight. No transparency. No accountability.
Almost no ink or air time has been devoted to the for-profit, no-bid contracts being awarded to MAGA donors from around the country, to construct for-profit detention camps for the hundreds of thousands immigrants awaiting their fate. All at taxpayer expense. No oversight. No transparency. No accountability.
And the gulags around the world? As American taxpayers, we are funding violent human rights abuses with the torture and rape of human beings, deported from our country, the overwhelming majority of whom, are being held without so much as a simple court hearing. More than 2/3rds have no criminal record and entered the country legally.
We’ve been here before, of course, as witnesses of these abominations against humanity, of human rights atrocities.
Nazi German, beginning in 1933.
Right here in the U.S. of A., our government launched the construction and activation of internment camps to detain Japanese Americans in 1942, by an Executive Order signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, forcing the removal of Americans from the West Coast to “relocation centers.”
Japanese Americans’ internment was based 100% on racial prejudice, wartime hysteria and failure of political leadership. Most were second-generation —- U.S. citizens by birth. There was no evidence ever, of espionage or disloyalty.
And then President Eisenhower, responding to rising political pressure, executed a large-scale deportation program targeting Mexican immigrants in 1954 —- “Operation Wetback” (a little racial slur thrown into the title for effect). 750 federal agents were deployed primarily to California, Arizona and Texas to conduct mass raids in Latino communities, often with little regard for due process. Then as now, citizens and legal residents of Mexican descent were often swept up by mistake. It is estimated between 250,000 to 1.3 million were deported, many self-deporting due to fear and intimidation.
These taxpayer-funded, state-sanctioned militias are operating in secret. Members of Congress, whose job it is to provide oversight, are denied entry into these camps. In the off chance they are allowed, they are provided white washed tours and denied any access to the detainees.
Families, loved ones and legal representatives have no idea where their family member and/or client has been taken. There is no list detailing where they’re being held. There are no public records available of where taxpayer money is being spent and how. No oversight. No transparency. No accountability.
Those being held captive describe horrendous, inhumane living conditions —- crammed into chain link cages, insufficient/non-existent right to personal hygiene, no medical attention, one meal a day, sometimes with bugs, limited water, no change of clothes, no air conditioning under scorching heat, blazing lights left on 24 hours-a-day, no access to phone calls or legal representation, complete isolation to the outside world.
The Trump administration denies these allegations and will flippantly and callously respond—-“we didn’t create the Four Seasons.”
No one would argue that point. However, we, as a country, are complicit in the human rights abuses taking place every single day in these horrendous camps, housing human beings, black and brown-skinned human beings, who are being treated worse than animals.
We stand by. We watch.
Have we officially entered into the 21st Century’s version of Manifest Destiny?
Manifest Destiny, originally a 19th-century ideology justifying U.S. territorial expansion, is now happening in broad daylight and in plain sight, carried out as policy, by the Christofascist members of the Trump administration, giving their thumbs-up to the brutal treatment of black and brown immigrants.
The core ideology of Manifest Destiny centered around the belief that the United States was divinely ordained to expand its territory and spread its cultural, political, and social systems, inherently prioritizing a vision of America as white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, or in our present day, 21st Century version —- Evangelical.
In practice, Manifest Destiny led to the displacement, removal, and often brutalization of those labeled as “others” in the path of U.S. expansion.
As our government continues to beef up the use of militarized borders, mass deportations and high-profile raids, it’s impossible not to draw parallels between the 19th century version of Manifest Destiny and today’s modern-day expressions of the same logic that justified westward conquest: the belief that American identity and security are threatened by the “other” —- those menaces after all, that are black and brown.
And of course, this othering is only made worse with the inflammatory rhetoric of Trump, Miller, Homan and Noem, that our country is “under threat” —- it is not —- and in need of purging or protecting from non-white “illegal aliens,” drawing from the Manifest Destiny’s division of the country into those who belong and those who do not.
All of this is reinforced in political rhetoric, mainstream media, social media platforms and of course the MAGA ecosystem that immigration enforcement is critical in the defense of maintaining the historical purpose of the homeland —- dispelling, excluding, detaining and deporting people of color.
It is for all these reasons and more we will never see immigration reform. It would only undermine and defeat the purpose of the purge.
As human beings and citizens of this once great country, it is incumbent upon us to do all we can to dispel the myth of righteous expansion, built on the suffering and expulsion of all marginalized groups and that challenging that legacy is paramount to advancing racial justice.
Because if we don’t, WTF are we even doing.
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