CARTOON: Our Bill Of Rights Protections Are On Trump's Hit List

With every immigrant and fellow citizen illegally arrested (kidnapped) by ICE and Border Patrol and deported (trafficked) to El Salvador, the precedent for you and your family being next gets stronger

Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

— Our Constitutional Bill of Rights

Cartoon & Illustration by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink

By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (5/2/25)

Given Donald Trump’s wholesale attack on our Constitutional rights, it’s essential to understand what is at risk. From freedom of speech and assembly to due process and legal rights, Trump and his fascist goons are looking to eliminate it all. For many it has already happened.

The two articles below are excellent summaries of what is at risk. I urge you to take the time as a kind of refresher civics lesson (remember when that was taught in schools) of how our rights came about and the brutal repression from which they grew.

As Thom Hartmann notes in his commentary below:

“John Quincy Adams knew in 1841 what we must remember today: a government that can deny due process to anyone can eventually deny it to everyone. The rule of law either protects us all, or it ultimately protects none of us.”

With every immigrant and fellow citizen illegally arrested (kidnapped) by ICE, FBI and Border Patrol and deported (trafficked) to El Salvador, the precedent for you and your family being next gets stronger and stronger.

It’s time for a little homework to understand what our rights are, how they came to be and why they belong to all persons — not just citizens — in the United States and why injustice to one is injustice to all.

I urge you to pass along the cartoon and illustration and articles below, or create your own post. I don’t need credit, just — please — pass along the information.

Also check this earlier post and links for practical steps on keeping safe and protecting your rights at protests and home: RESISTANCE! Avoid Government Surveillance Of Peaceful Pro-Democracy Protest.

Join and support one of the free speech protection groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) or Foundation For Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)

Finally, note the final item in this post to see how all these threats to our rights impacts a family and understand: If this tragedy can be dropped on one family, it can be dropped on any family, including your own.

Resist
Persist
Don’t be complicit!

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“We are no longer Democrats or Republicans. We are either patriots fighting the regime or we are complicit in its tyranny. There is no middle ground.”

— Robert Reich, If Leaders Stay Silent, The US Won’t Survive Trump’s Next 100 Days

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HOME INVASIONS ON THE RISE: Constitution-Betraying Policing In Trump’s Fascist America

By John & Nisha Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute (4/30/25)

“One of the most essential branches of English liberty is the freedom of one’s house. A man’s house is his castle.”

—James Otis, Revolutionary War activist, on the Writs of Assistance, 1761

What the Founders rebelled against—armed government agents invading homes without cause—we are now being told to accept in the so-called name of law and order.

Imagine it: it’s the middle of the night. Your neighborhood is asleep. Suddenly, your front door is splintered by battering rams. Shadowy figures flood your home, screaming orders, pointing guns, threatening violence. You and your children are dragged out into the night—barefoot, in your underwear, in the rain.

Your home is torn apart. Your valuables seized. Your sense of safety, demolished.

But this isn’t a robbery by lawless criminals.

This is what terror policing looks like in Trump’s America: raids by night, flashbangs at dawn, mistaken identities, and shattered lives.

On April 24, 2025, in Oklahoma City, 20 heavily armed federal agents from ICE, the FBI, and DHS kicked in the door of a home where a woman and her three daughters—all American citizens—were sleeping. They were forced out of bed at gunpoint and made to wait in the rain while agents ransacked the house, confiscating their belongings.

It was the wrong house. The wrong family.

There were no apologies. No compensation. No accountability.

This is the new face of American policing, and it’s about to get so much worse thanks to the President Trump’s latest executive order, which aims to eliminate federal oversight and empower local law enforcement to act with impunity.

Titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America's Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” the executive order announced on April 28, 2025, removes restraints on police power, offers enhanced federal protections for officers accused of misconduct, expands access to military-grade equipment, and nullifies key oversight provisions from prior reform efforts.

Trump’s supporters have long praised his efforts to deregulate business and government under the slogan of “no handcuffs.” But when that logic is applied to law enforcement, the result isn’t freedom—it’s unchecked power.

Unraveling

What it really means is no restraints on police power—while the rest of us are left with fewer rights, less recourse, and a Constitution increasingly ignored behind the barrel of a gun.

This isn’t just a political shift. It’s a constitutional unraveling.

These aren’t abstract freedoms—they’re the bedrock of the Bill of Rights: the Fourth Amendment’s shield against warrantless searches, the Fifth Amendment’s promise of due process, and the First Amendment’s guarantee that we may speak, protest, and petition without fear of state retaliation.

Yet the build-up of the police state didn’t begin with Trump. What he has done is seize upon decades of bipartisan failure—and strip away the last remaining restraints.

For years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, policing in America has grown more militarized, aggressive, and unaccountable. At times, there were modest attempts to rein in the worst excesses—like curbing the flow of military surplus equipment to local police—but these efforts were short-lived, inconsistent, and easily undone.

Trump’s executive order doesn’t just abandon those reforms. It bulldozes the guardrails. It hands law enforcement a blank check: more weapons, more power, and fewer consequences.

The result is not safety. It’s state-sanctioned violence.

It’s a future in which no home is safe, no knock is required, and no officer is ever held accountable.

That future is already here.

Police terror in Oklahoma

Just a few days before Trump signed the order, that reality played out in Oklahoma City when ICE, FBI, and DHS agents stormed the wrong home and terrorized a mother and her daughters.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident.

In the 30 years since the first federal Crime Bill helped militarize local police forces, the use of SWAT teams has exploded. What was once a rare tactic for hostage situations is now used tens of thousands of times a year, often for nonviolent offenses or mere suspicion. These raids leave behind broken doors, traumatized children, and, too often, dead bodies. And yet, when families seek justice, they’re met with a legal wall called qualified immunity.

Under this doctrine, courts excuse even blatant misconduct by law enforcement unless an almost identical case has already been ruled unconstitutional. It’s legal sleight of hand—a get-out-of-jail-free card for government agents who trample on the Constitution.

We’ve entered an era in which federal agents can destroy your home, traumatize your family, and violate the Fourth Amendment with impunity. And the courts have said: that’s just how it works.

More than 80,000 SWAT raids now occur annually in the United States, most of them for nonviolent offenses like drug possession or administrative code violations.

Many are botched. Few are ever investigated.

In Martin v. United States, now before the Supreme Court, a heavily armed FBI SWAT team mistakenly stormed a Georgia home—armed with rifles, clad in tactical gear, and deploying a flashbang grenade—causing the family inside, with a 7-year-old son, to fear they were being burglarized.

The agents were supposed to raid a gang suspect’s house. Instead, they relied on faulty GPS and ended up at the wrong address, a block away from the intended target.

Only after detaining the family—forcing one family member onto the bedroom floor at gunpoint, and then pointing a gun in the mother’s face—did the officers realize their mistake.

The Rutherford Institute, alongside the National Police Accountability Project, filed an amicus brief urging the Court to deny qualified immunity for the agents. But if history is any guide, justice may prove elusive.

Just last year, the Court refused to hold a SWAT team leader accountable for raiding the wrong house, wrecking the wrong home, and terrorizing an innocent family.

In Jimerson v. Lewis, the SWAT team ignored clear differences between the actual target house and the Jimerson residence—missing house numbers, architectural mismatches, a wheelchair ramp where none should have been—and still received qualified immunity.

Era of lawless policing

These rulings aren’t exceptions—they reflect a growing doctrine of unaccountability enshrined by the courts and now supercharged by the Trump administration.

Trump wants to give police even more immunity.

Brace yourselves for a new era of lawless policing.

President Trump’s call for a new crime bill that would further insulate police from liability, accountability and charges of official misconduct could usher in a new era of police brutality, lawlessness and the reckless deployment of lethal force on unarmed civilians.

This is how the rights of ordinary Americans get trampled under the boots of unchecked power.

Even when SWAT commanders disregard warrants, ignore addresses, and terrorize innocent families, the courts shield them from consequences.

These SWAT raids have become a thinly veiled, court-sanctioned excuse to let heavily armed police crash through doors in the dead of night. Too often, they’re marked by incompetence, devastation, and death—leaving a trail of broken homes and broken lives, while law enforcement escapes accountability.

There was a time in America when a person’s home was a sanctuary, protected by the Fourth Amendment from unlawful searches and seizures.

That promise is dead.

We have returned to the era of the King’s Writ—blanket search powers once used by British soldiers to invade colonial homes without cause. As James Otis warned in 1761, such writs “annihilate the privilege” of privacy and due process, allowing agents of the state to enter homes “when they please.”

Trump’s new executive order revives this tyranny in modern form: armored vehicles, night raids, no-knock warrants, federal immunity. It empowers police to act without restraint, and it rewards those who brutalize with impunity.

Even more alarming, the order sets the stage for future legislation that could effectively codify qualified immunity into federal law, making it nearly impossible for victims of police violence to sue.

This is how constitutional protections are dismantled—not in one dramatic blow, but in a thousand raids, a thousand broken doors, a thousand courts that look the other way.

Let’s not pretend we’re safe. Who will protect us from the police when the police have become the law unto themselves?

The war on the American people is no longer metaphorical.

Government agents can now kick in your door without warning, shoot your dog, point a gun at your children, and suffer no legal consequences—so long as they claim it was a “reasonable” mistake. They are judge, jury, and executioner.

With Trump’s new order, the architecture of a police state is no longer theoretical. It is being built in real time. It is being normalized.

It’s not just the poor, the marginalized, or the criminalized who should be afraid. It’s every homeowner, every parent, every citizen who still believes in the Bill of Rights.

Militarized police forces

Nowhere is this threat more visible than in the unholy alliance between ICE and militarized police forces.

This is where the danger deepens: when ICE and SWAT join forces, no one is safe.

This is more than just a problem of policing—it’s the convergence of two of the most dangerous arms of the modern security state: the merging of federal immigration enforcement with militarized domestic operations, creating a volatile blend of ICE lawlessness and militarized SWAT-style brute force.

Together, they’ve created a government apparatus that acts first and justifies itself later, if at all.

What used to be separate spheres—immigration enforcement and local policing—have now, under the pretense of national security, merged into a seamless operation of nighttime raids, heavy weaponry, blacked-out uniforms, and unmarked vehicles.

Armed federal agents, often operating in plainclothes and without clearly presented warrants, storm homes in the dead of night.

The distinction between a SWAT raid and an ICE operation has disappeared.

ICE agents—often masked, plainclothes, and operating without judicial oversight—are executing aggressive home invasions indistinguishable from SWAT team raids. These officers operate in secret, detaining individuals without clear warrants, sometimes without charges, and often without informing families of where their loved ones have been taken.

This alliance of ICE and SWAT has turned the American home into a battlefield, especially for those deemed politically inconvenient or “suspect” by the state.

These raids aren’t limited to those suspected of crimes.

Legal residents, asylum seekers, and even U.S. citizens have found themselves disappeared under vague claims of national security or immigration violations.

It is policing by fear and disappearance. And it runs counter to everything the Bill of Rights was designed to prevent: punishment without trial, surveillance without suspicion, and power without accountability.

When ICE agents armed with military-grade equipment conduct predawn raids alongside SWAT teams, with little to no accountability, the result is not public safety. It is state terror. And it’s exactly the kind of unchecked power the Constitution was written to prevent.

The Constitution is supposed to be a shield—especially the Fourth Amendment, which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. But in this new reality, the government has nullified that shield.

All of America is fast becoming a Constitution-free zone.

What started as an exception—the so-called Constitution-free zone at the border—is fast becoming the norm across America, where due process is optional, and law enforcement acts more like a domestic army than a public servant.

The government no longer needs to prove its authority in court before violating your rights. It only needs to assert it on your doorstep—with flashbangs and rifles at the ready.

The only castle left may be the one you’re willing to defend.

The Founders knew the dangers of unchecked power. That’s why they gave us the Fourth Amendment. But rights are only as strong as the public’s willingness to defend them.

If we allow the government to turn our homes into war zones—if we continue to reward police for lawless raids, ignore the courts for rubber-stamping abuse, and cheer political leaders who promise “no more handcuffs”—we will lose the last refuge of freedom: the right to be left alone.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the Constitution cannot protect you if the government no longer follows it—and if the courts no longer enforce it.

The knock may never come again. Just the crash of a door. The sound of boots. And the silence that follows.

Link to story

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Do You Understand Just How Dangerous This Moment Is — How Far We've Drifted?

Once the government claims the right to strip anyone of due process, rights cease to be rights and become privileges, granted or revoked at the whim of those in power. That is not a constitutional democracy. That is the scaffolding of fascism.

By Thom Hartmann
Common Dreams (5/1/125)

It was a cold, gray morning in Oklahoma when the government came crashing through the wrong door.

Without warning, ICE agents clad in black tactical gear burst into a quiet family home. Guns drawn, boots pounding on hardwood, they moved like soldiers in hostile territory — except this wasn’t a war zone. It was a suburban neighborhood. A home where children did homework, parents made dinner, and everyone believed, until that moment, that living in America meant having rights.

They were wrong.

In the chaos, the teenage daughter — still in her underwear — was yanked from her bedroom and forced to stand, exposed and terrified, while armed strangers rifled through her belongings. Her screams went unanswered. The agents refused to let her or the rest of the family get dressed. They didn’t explain why they were there, didn’t ask questions, didn’t seem to care that the person they were looking for didn’t live at that address.

Then they started taking things: cell phones, tablets, laptops — anything that might contain information or, perhaps more to the point, value. They seized all the family’s cash, their passports, their children’s devices. When the family demanded answers, they were met with silence and threats. No warrant was ever shown. No charges were filed. No receipts left behind.

ICE simply vanished, leaving the family humiliated, traumatized, and stripped of the basic tools of modern life. The agency has since refused to return the electronics or the money. There has been no apology, no accountability, no restitution — just a void where justice is supposed to live.

What happened to that family wasn’t an accident. It was a symptom — a glimpse behind the curtain of what the Trump administration has built: an unaccountable, increasingly lawless deportation regime that functions more like a secret police force than a branch of a democratic government.

If we let this continue — if we fail to act — we are complicit in the unraveling of the very idea of America.

And the targets aren’t just undocumented immigrants or criminal suspects anymore. They’re legal residents. College students. People born and raised in this country. Their only “crime” is voicing dissent, having the wrong skin color, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But some are pushing back, bringing us big news from the ACLU on Tuesday:

“The U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey ruled today that Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident and recent Columbia graduate student, can move forward with his lawsuit claiming the government is unlawfully detaining him for his political views. The court rejected the government’s attempt to shut down Mr. Khalil’s case before it could be heard.”

Khalil has committed no crime. He was in the U.S. legally. His only offense — in the eyes of the Trump administration — was participating in peaceful protests criticizing Israeli policy in Gaza. For that, ICE agents stormed his university housing and locked him in a detention facility, citing a vague national security justification that amounts to little more than “we don’t like what he said.”

This is not how a constitutional republic behaves. It is how authoritarian regimes operate: by making examples out of those who speak up, and terrifying the rest into silence.

To understand how dangerous this moment is — how far we’ve drifted from our foundational values — we have to reach back nearly two centuries. Because this is not the first time American leaders have had to grapple with whether the protections of our laws apply to those without political power, to people who aren’t citizens but are still human beings.

In February 1841, 73-year-old former President John Quincy Adams stood before the Supreme Court to defend 53 African men who had been kidnapped from Sierra Leone, sold into slavery, and transported aboard the Spanish slave ship La Amistad. These men, having seized the ship and attempted to return home, were captured off the coast of Long Island and jailed as property, their fates debated not as individuals but as commodities.

Protection under the law for all people

Adams — the son of a founding father and one of the last living links to the American Revolution — didn’t argue their case as a matter of political favor or foreign diplomacy. He invoked something deeper: the principle that all people, regardless of citizenship, nationality, or status, are entitled to the protection of the law when they are on American soil.

“By what right was it denied to the men who had restored themselves to freedom,” Adams thundered, “and why was it extended to the perpetrators of those acts of violence themselves?”

He insisted that justice must be blind to nationality or legal status; that due process, as encoded in the Constitution, must apply to persons, not just citizens. If the government could arbitrarily decide who deserved rights and who didn’t, then no rights were truly secure.

It was a radical argument for the time, but the Supreme Court agreed. Adams won. And in doing so, he helped define a cornerstone of American jurisprudence: that the rule of law exists to constrain the state, not to be selectively applied at the whim of those in power.

Fast forward to 2025, and that principle is now under direct assault.

The Trump administration, enabled by allies in Congress and the judiciary, has weaponized immigration law and executive authority in ways that Adams would have recognized and condemned. They are now detaining legal permanent residents, like Mahmoud Khalil, not for crimes, but for speech. They are targeting foreign students and legal residents — often young people of color — for deportation based on political views, often under the thinnest pretexts of “national security.”

The administration’s justification in Khalil’s case? That his presence in the U.S. could cause “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” That’s the legal equivalent of saying, “We’re deporting him because we want to.” It’s not just unconstitutional: it’s tyrannical.

And this isn’t isolated. Turkish graduate student Rumeysa Öztürk was grabbed off the street by masked agents for writing an op-ed critical of Israeli policy in a student newspaper over a year ago. In both cases, there were no warrants, no hearings, no evidence of criminal activity. Just black-bag operations targeting people for using their First Amendment rights.

Meanwhile, pro-Netanyahu political groups — many with direct ties to Trumpworld — are openly compiling lists of student activists and professors to target for deportation. And the administration appears to be acting on those lists.

John Quincy Adams would be horrified, but not surprised.

Because once the government claims the right to strip anyone of due process, rights cease to be rights and become privileges, granted or revoked at the whim of those in power. That is not a constitutional democracy. That is the scaffolding of fascism.

And sure enough, what began with undocumented immigrants is now creeping toward legal residents, foreign students, and even American citizens. The Trump administration recently floated the idea — with a straight face — of deporting certain American citizens to El Salvador.

Let that sink in.

The very notion should be constitutionally absurd. But like so many authoritarian moves, it’s being normalized through repetition.

First they came for the undocumented. Then they came for the legal immigrants. Then the student visa holders. Now, they’re signaling plans to come after naturalized citizens — and even people born here — if they hold the “wrong” political beliefs.

Trump’s January executive order made this shift brutally clear:

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you... I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.”

But who gets to decide what constitutes a “pro-jihadist protest” or who counts as a “Hamas sympathizer”? The Trump administration does. No court. No jury. No evidence required. Just guilt by association — and punishment without due process.

This is precisely how autocrats consolidate power: they redefine dissent as treason, criminalize speech, and strip away rights piecemeal until there’s nothing left to defend. It happened in Turkey under Erdoğan. It happened in Hungary under Orbán. It happened in Putin’s Russia. And now it’s happening here.

The echoes of the Amistad case are unmistakable. Back then, the federal government sought to hand kidnapped Africans over to foreign governments to appease diplomatic partners. Today, we are handing peaceful student protesters over to ICE and DHS to appease political donors and right-wing pressure groups.

The same disregard for humanity. The same corruption of justice. The same weaponization of government to serve ideology instead of law.

But just as Adams turned the tide in 1841 by reminding America of its founding principles, we must do the same today.

Because this isn’t about immigration policy. It’s not about border security. It’s about the foundational principle that all people — all people — have the right to due process, the right to protest, and the right to be free from government persecution.

John Quincy Adams knew in 1841 what we must remember today: a government that can deny due process to anyone can eventually deny it to everyone. The rule of law either protects us all, or it ultimately protects none of us.

That family in Oklahoma, whose lives were shattered by an ICE raid on the wrong house? They weren’t caught in the gears of bureaucracy. They were deliberately crushed by a system designed to instill fear, to dehumanize, and to render justice optional.

Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Öztürk are not threats to national security; they’re reminders of what democracy is supposed to look like: people using their voices to speak uncomfortable truths. That’s what authoritarians fear most.

And if we let this continue — if we fail to act — we are complicit in the unraveling of the very idea of America.

We must fight this on every front:

First, we need immediate legal challenges to every deportation that lacks due process. Constitutional rights don’t depend on citizenship: they apply to every person on American soil.

Second, we need massive public protest against these policies. Universities should, within the law, refuse to cooperate with ICE and protect their students. Communities should establish sanctuary policies. Legal organizations should provide pro bono representation to those targeted.

And finally, we need to reclaim the narrative. This isn’t about immigration policy or national security; it’s about the most fundamental American principle: that all people possess inalienable rights, even those who aren’t citizens or are accused of a crime.

John Quincy Adams knew in 1841 what we must remember today: a government that can deny due process to anyone can eventually deny it to everyone. The rule of law either protects us all, or it ultimately protects none of us.

The time for action is now. Contact your representatives. Support legal defense funds. Share this story. Join the fight.

Because if we don’t stand up for them today, there may be no one left to stand up for us tomorrow.

Common Dreams work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Link to story

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Have No Illusions, In Trump’s Lawless America, Your Family Could Be Next: "They Shattered Our Dreams"

Democracy Now! (5/1/25)

As May Day protests call for worker and immigrant rights, we talk to a New York father whose 19-year-old son Merwil Gutiérrez, with an open asylum case, was detained in the Bronx and then flown with over 230 other Venezuelans to a mega-prison in El Salvador, where he is being held incommunicado.

Witnesses to Gutiérrez's arrest say authorities were searching for a different person but, upon encountering the teenager, decided to arrest him simply because he is Venezuelan. He has no criminal history and no tattoos, the features Trump officials have used to accuse Latin American immigrants of being gang members and expel them from the country without due process.

Wilmer Gutiérrez says he fears for his son's safety. "We came here with a dream. We did not think that this injustice was ever going to happen … They shattered our dreams," said Gutiérrez. He is calling on the governments of the United States and El Salvador to facilitate his son's release. "My son is still a child. His mentality has not matured yet. And right now they are damaging his mind … They are violating all the laws and doing whatever they want."

17-minute video

Art From The Rutherford Institute