Tren de MAGA

Inside the Criminal Syndicate Hijacking the U.S. Government—And What’s Coming Next

Every Sunday, I write something longer. Not just a news recap or a hot take—but a deeper reckoning. A way of making sense of the week’s headlines through the longer lens of history, the law, and my own two decades on the frontlines of immigration and human rights work. These pieces are meant to be more than reflections. They’re fuel for the movement we’re building together. Thought pieces meant to sharpen our strategy, deepen our understanding, and prepare us—collectively—for the work ahead. If you’re joining Monday night’s Firewall organizing call, consider this your briefing. If you’re just arriving at this conversation, welcome. What follows is the truth as I’ve come to know it. Hard-won. Lived. And offered with urgency.

Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of Defense, posted an image of his 'Deus Vult' tattoo on his Instagram account. (Uncredited)

“The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution. The most dangerous criminal is the one who has been made into a functionary and vested with power.”

— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1973)

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants… It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.”

— Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (1960)

When They Called Us the Criminals

There was no press conference. No headline. No indictment.

Just a phone call from my attorney.

It was 2019, and I had been subpoenaed to testify in a case brought by the State of Texas against the City of San Antonio and its chief of police. The city was under fire from the Texas Attorney General — accused of unlawfully harboring immigrants. Why? Because San Antonio police had rescued a dozen people trapped in the back of an 18-wheeler trailer, locked in without food or water by a human smuggler. And when they found them, scared, trapped, but alive, the police did something rare: they called me.

They wanted someone to explain these people’s rights.
To help them speak freely and safely.
To make it possible for them to cooperate with the investigation—to catch the smugglers, to hold them accountable.

That’s all we did.
We showed up.
We helped people talk to law enforcement.
We treated them like human beings.

And for that, I was now a witness in a politically motivated prosecution.
And according to my lawyer, I was being looked at for something more: criminal exposure. Under human trafficking statutes.

The charge? Not formally filed, not officially stated—but the implication was clear. By helping undocumented people navigate their rights, by assisting a police investigation while protecting the vulnerable, I — along with the nonprofit I led — was a suspect.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like it.

Years earlier, during the peak of the Trump administration’s war on immigrants, a national reporter had shared something with me — off the record. Someone inside DHS, they said, had been floating the idea of trying to strip my nonprofit of its tax-exempt status. Maybe even bringing criminal charges. Their rationale?

“We’re helping illegal people do illegal things.”

In reality, what we were doing was representing children in court. Reuniting families torn apart by state policy. Providing legal defense in a country that likes to brag about due process — except at the border.

In 2018, Trump’s government tore thousands of children from their parents’ arms.
They sent the parents to for-profit private prisons.
They disappeared the children into shelters and foster homes, without any plan to track who belonged to whom.
There was no system. No spreadsheets. No effort to keep records.
It was deliberate.

And then they made it our job — mine, my colleagues, our legal teams — to stitch these families back together. To find missing babies. To help parents who spoke no English make sense of where their child had gone, and why.

That was the crime we committed.
We tried to clean up what they did.

And when they couldn’t defend their policies, they did something else.
They turned the accusation inside out.

They called us the traffickers.

Not formally. Not publicly. But behind closed doors.
In courtrooms. In subpoenas. In whispers designed to send a message.

It wasn’t just projection.
It was a strategy.

Blur the line between human rights and criminal conspiracy.
Create confusion around who’s helping and who’s exploiting.
And make it dangerous — legally, personally, professionally — to stand between the regime and its targets.

That’s when I saw it for what it was.

This wasn’t about enforcement. It wasn’t about national security.
It was state-sanctioned disappearance.
Forced movement of human beings for political gain.
Psychological, physical, and spiritual coercion of the most vulnerable—mothers, fathers, children.

And the people doing it weren’t hiding in the shadows.
They were signing executive orders.
Holding press briefings.
Wearing flags on their lapels.

They were the traffickers.

And they weren’t acting alone.

This Is Human Trafficking. Just in a Suit and Tie.

We’ve been trained to picture human trafficking a certain way.

A windowless van. A border crossing at night. A tattooed cartel boss smirking behind stacks of cash.

But the law doesn’t care about imagery.
It cares about the act.

Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), the definition is clear:

“The use of force, fraud, or coercion to compel individuals to provide labor or services.”

That’s it. No need for tunnels. No need for passports.
Just coercion—the weaponization of fear, confinement, and control to bend vulnerable people to the will of the powerful.

And by that definition, what the MAGA regime has done is not just unethical.
It’s not just authoritarian.

It’s trafficking.

Let’s start with Kilmar Abrego García.

A longtime Maryland resident. Father of U.S. citizen children—including a five-year-old with special needs. A man protected by a federal court order since 2019.

And yet, without warning, ICE agents arrested him, shackled him, and forcibly deported him.
Where did they send him?

To President Bukele’s mega-prison in El Salvador—CECOT, a place under international scrutiny for torture and forced labor.
They dressed Kilmar in a prison uniform.
Threw him into a concrete cell.
Paraded him as a “gang member”—a political prop.

Why?

Not because of new evidence. Not because he broke the law.
But because his deportation served the Trump campaign’s narrative.
Because delivering Kilmar to Bukele allowed Trump to say, “See? I’m tough on crime.”

Never mind that Kilmar had no criminal record.
Never mind that a U.S. judge had ordered the government not to deport him.

They did it anyway.

And when that same judge ordered him returned, the Trump administration defied the court.
They didn’t say it was a mistake.
They said the judge had no authority.
That the law no longer applied.

That’s not immigration enforcement.
That’s a state-orchestrated kidnapping — for political profit.

And Kilmar is not the only one.

There’s Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University. Plainclothes federal agents arrested her without warning outside her home in Massachusetts. Her student visa was revoked. She was flown over 1,500 miles away and detained in an ICE facility in Louisiana.

Why?

In March 2024, she co-authored a student op-ed criticizing the university’s handling of pro-Palestinian activism. She was accused—without evidence—of supporting terrorism. And when her lawyers pushed back, the government stalled, evaded, and doubled down.

No hearing. No trial. No transparency.

Just seizure. Transfer. Isolation.
Her words—her dissent—became the rationale for her disappearance.

Then there’s Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University. A peaceful negotiator in campus protests. Lawful permanent resident. No criminal history.

Until the day ICE agents stormed his apartment building in New York City, revoked his green card without notice, and vanished him into the LaSalle Detention Center in Louisiana.

Why?

Because he criticized a war. Because he spoke Arabic. Because he was visible and unafraid.

This isn’t enforcement.
This is retaliation.

And it follows the same formula:
Take someone vulnerable.
Strip away their legal protections.
Move them far from public view.
Brand them as dangerous.
Hold them in silence.

That’s trafficking.

And behind them—beyond Kilmar, Rümeysa, Mahmoud—are thousands more.

Children disappeared into private shelters with no paper trail.
Refugees shuttled between government contractors like inventory.
Mothers coerced into signing “voluntary departure” while chained to benches, crying for the babies they were told they might never see again.

This is not a metaphor.
The United States government has used its full machinery — ICE, DHS, federal courts, surveillance, prison contracts — to detain, isolate, and move human beings for political gain.

And the perpetrators don’t wear ski masks.
They wear suits.
They speak at campaign rallies.
They smile on cable news.

They built this machine in public — and dared us to name what it is.

Well, I’m naming it now.

This isn’t immigration policy.
This is organized, state-sponsored human trafficking.

And it’s still happening.

Tren de MAGA — Racketeering from the Inside

This wasn’t random cruelty. It wasn’t incompetence. It wasn’t “bad apples.”

It was a pattern.
And in any courtroom worth its name, a pattern like this has a legal name: racketeering.

Under the RICO Act—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — a “pattern of criminal activity” carried out to advance a corrupt enterprise can make everyone involved in that enterprise criminally liable. Not just for what they did individually, but for the organization’s whole design.

It’s how prosecutors took down mob bosses who never pulled the trigger but gave the orders. It’s how the federal government cracked open cartels that ran on loyalty, violence, and silence. It’s how we understood organized crime — until the organization put itself in the White House.

Let’s look at the pattern.

Extortion. When Donald Trump retook the presidency, states that didn’t fall in line with his immigration policies were threatened with funding cuts. Cities that offered sanctuary protections were branded enemies of the state. Governors who resisted were publicly humiliated. Corporations were warned: toe the line, or we’ll use the regulatory hammer to crush you.

Bribery. While the Trump administration was disappearing children and tearing families apart, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump personally profited—earning up to $640 million in outside income during their tenure in the White House. That wasn’t just capitalizing on access. That was influence peddling at the highest level of American government. No meaningful disclosures. No blind trusts. Just cash flow — straight through the West Wing.

Fraud. The election lies. The fake elector schemes. The false fundraising drives that told small-dollar donors their money would “Stop the Steal” while it was redirected to Trump’s legal defense. That’s mail fraud. Wire fraud. Campaign finance fraud. All laid bare and still somehow allowed to continue.

Money laundering. MAGA-aligned super PACs. Shadow entities. Political nonprofits laundering dark money through consulting firms. In any other context, we’d call these fronts.

Human trafficking. We’ve covered it. Kilmar. Ozturk. Khalil. Thousands of nameless others who were detained, disappeared, exploited. This is not hypothetical. It’s policy. Backed by force. Protected by fraud. And designed to coerce labor, silence opposition, and generate profit.

Now name the enterprise.

Tren de MAGA

Like its namesake — Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang whose name Trump invoked to justify his unlawful power grab under the Alien Enemies Act — it functions through fear, force, and control. But unlike a street gang, it operates under the false legitimacy of the U.S. government. It has law enforcement powers. Diplomatic cover. Billions in contracts. Television time.

And unlike a foreign cartel, it doesn’t try to hide.
It campaigns. It fundraises. It runs candidates for office.
It wraps its criminal enterprise in the flag and calls it patriotism.

This isn’t a metaphor. It’s a structure.
And if we keep pretending we’re just debating policy, we’ll keep losing ground — until the ground is gone.

The thing about criminal syndicates is this:
They don’t stop on their own.
They stop when the people they exploit stop playing along.

Loyalty Over Law — The Collapse of Internal Oversight

Every criminal empire needs one thing above all else: protection.

Not just from the cops — but from the truth.
From anyone who might speak up, ask questions, hold the line.

In a functioning democracy, that’s the job of inspectors general. Watchdogs. Ethics officers. Independent prosecutors. The internal brakes on executive power. They’re built into the system precisely because the system knows what power is capable of.

Which is why the Trump administration got rid of them.

Seventeen inspectors general were fired or pushed out — without cause, without notice, without respect for the legal framework that protects them. They were investigating misuse of COVID relief funds, whistleblower complaints, abuse of foreign policy for personal gain. And then, one by one, they were gone.

When the State Department IG probed arms sales to Saudi Arabia? Gone.
When the Health and Human Services IG reported mismanagement of the pandemic response? Gone.

Not replaced. Not reassigned.
Purged.

And with them went the last remnants of independent oversight within the executive branch.

Meanwhile, regulations designed to prevent corruption were gutted. Trump’s DOJ weakened enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act — one of the last tools America had to hold U.S.-based companies accountable for bribery and money laundering abroad.

Trump didn’t want law. He wanted loyalty.

He said it out loud.
He told James Comey he “expected loyalty.”
He called judges who ruled against him “so-called.”
He demanded personal allegiance from civil servants, even when it meant defying the Constitution they swore to uphold.

And when they didn’t bend, he replaced them.
With cronies. Family members. Loyalists.
People who wouldn’t investigate. Wouldn’t prosecute. Wouldn’t say no.

That’s not democracy. That’s a cartel.

And like any cartel boss, Trump has built an inner circle of enforcers and fixers — people who know how to extract obedience and how to disappear anyone who resists.

What’s most dangerous isn’t just the criminality.
It’s the normalization of it.
The quiet nod that says, “This is just how things are now.”

But it’s not.
Not yet.

There are still laws. There are still people willing to defend them.
But that window is narrowing. Fast.

And what comes next — if we don’t act — will make the last seventy-five days look like the warm-up.

Weaponizing the Treasury — Financial Repression as State Terror

It’s one thing to throw someone in a cage.
It’s another to quietly dismantle their ability to survive.

That’s what repression looks like in its modern form — not just boots and batons, but bank accounts and bureaucrats.
And the Trump regime understood this perfectly.

Under MAGA, the financial tools of government became weapons — deployed not for economic stability, but to coerce, punish, and starve.

Start with the IRS.

In March, reports broke that the IRS was finalizing a data-sharing agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), giving the enforcement arm of DHS access to taxpayer information that had traditionally been held in strict confidentiality. The move would allow ICE to mine tax records to identify undocumented immigrants — many of whom had complied with the law and paid taxes under Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs).

There is no credible tax enforcement goal here.
The only purpose is to punish.
To instill fear in communities that had dared to follow the rules.

Then there’s FEMA.

In state after state, federal emergency aid has been quietly denied to communities with high immigrant populations. This isn’t accidental. In Texas, for example, where local governments scrambled to recover from storms and floods, Republican officials used vague definitions of “cooperation with ICE” as a pretext to block FEMA reimbursements to counties that refused to detain immigrants.

This is disaster relief held hostage.

Next: public benefits.

Under Trump, “public charge” rules were redefined to criminalize poverty itself. Immigrants were told that if they accessed food stamps, Medicaid, or housing assistance for their U.S. citizen children, they could be denied legal status—or even deported.
This policy didn’t just chill applications. It shattered families’ sense of safety. People stopped going to the doctor. They stopped feeding their kids. That was the point.

And what about the private sector?

In 2018, Bank of America began asking certain customers about their citizenship status. When some declined to answer or provided non-citizen responses, their accounts were frozen — without evidence of any wrongdoing.

The bank claimed it was just following federal compliance rules. But immigrant communities knew better. The message was loud and clear: you’re not safe here. Your money isn’t either.

This is financial terror.
It’s not a metaphor. It’s not exaggeration.
It’s a strategy.

And the logic is brutally effective:
You don’t need to deport people if you can make them too afraid to exist.
You don’t need to imprison the opposition if you can bankrupt them into silence.

Trump and his regime didn’t just understand this. They practiced it.
This will not be the exception — it will be the template.

They will come for your funding.
They will come for your licenses.
They will come for your tax-exempt status, your permits, your infrastructure, your livelihoods.

And by the time they come for your rights, you’ll be too tired — or too broke — to fight.

Unless we act now.
Unless we organize with the understanding that power, in this country, flows not just through courts and elections — but through budgets, contracts, ledgers, and debt.

They’ve weaponized the treasury.
We have to build an economy of resistance.

Twenty Years of Practice — DHS’s Authoritarian Study Tour

I’ve been doing this work for over two decades — long before most Americans could locate El Paso on a map or pronounce “asylum” without sneer or suspicion. I’ve stood in detention centers as toddlers wailed behind razor wire. I’ve seen judges deport people who didn’t speak the language and never had a lawyer. I've represented the disappeared, the detained, the tortured.

And through all of it, I’ve seen one truth take shape in unmistakable form:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security hasn’t been fighting authoritarianism.
It’s been studying it.
And slowly, it’s been imitating it.

Ask any refugee why they fled.

They’ll tell you about secret police. About surveillance. About governments that targeted dissidents, silenced journalists, and disappeared neighbors in the dead of night.

Now look at how we treat them once they arrive here.

Migrants and asylum seekers are tracked by ICE, CBP, and private contractors through ankle monitors, facial recognition software, cell tower triangulation, and facial scanning kiosks.

Adults and children are jailed in privately operated prisons for months, sometimes years, without charges, without hearings, without trial. In 2020, ICE detained people for an average of 55 days, with thousands held far longer.

Asylum hearings are often conducted in secretive “tent courts” with no public access, where judges appear by video link and translators are unreliable. Decisions can be made in minutes.

Under the Trump administration, over 5,500 children were taken from their parents at the border — many without records to reunite them.

In 2020, whistleblowers revealed that women held at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia were subjected to non-consensual gynecological procedures — echoing the forced sterilization tactics of 20th-century authoritarian regimes.

These are not one-off scandals. They are systems — refined over years, normalized in policy memos, defended in court filings, funded by billions in taxpayer money.

And they’re not just used on immigrants.

They’re tested on immigrants.

The border has become America’s live-fire training ground for authoritarian tactics — where constitutional rights are suspended, surveillance goes unchecked, and cruelty is coded into every regulation.

What happens at the border doesn’t stay there. It moves inward.

The drones flying over migrant caravans now fly over Black Lives Matter protests.

The tent courts built for asylum hearings could be seen as models for mass processing of protestors and dissidents.

The legal justifications for “expedited removal” can become blueprints for due process rollbacks in domestic criminal law.

The coordinated smear campaigns used to demonize asylum seekers? You’re already seeing those used against journalists, teachers, librarians, and doctors.

They’re not hiding the playbook. They’re perfecting it.

Even before Trump returned to power, the infrastructure was already in place — ready to turn inward, against citizens, professionals, organizers, and anyone who dares to resist.

What we’ve allowed to happen to immigrants isn’t just a moral failure.
It’s a political miscalculation.

We thought they were coming for them.
We didn’t realize they were practicing for us.

A Chilling Prediction — The Return of “Unofficial” Violence

I know how this may sound.

Too grim. Too conspiratorial. Too much.

But sometimes, the greatest danger isn’t alarm—it’s denial.
The refusal to name what we already know.

We’ve seen this before.

We’ve seen what happens when state power erodes the boundaries of law, and something more diffuse, more dangerous, begins to rise in its place.
Not government thugs in uniform—but men with flags and firearms, acting on a signal that doesn’t have to be spoken.

And now, with Trump back in the White House, we are closer to that point than we’ve ever been.

He’s already moved to pardon January 6 conspirators—calling them patriots, not criminals.
He’s revoked security clearances and protection details from former officials and political adversaries.
He’s publicly humiliated judges, threatened civil servants, and cheered on lawmakers who parrot his threats.

And while the chain of command may still be intact on paper, the message being sent is unmistakable:

The people who oppose us should be afraid.
The people who defend us will be protected.

That is not democratic governance.
That is a protection racket.

We’ve seen how it plays out:

In 2018, when a man murdered eleven worshippers in a Pittsburgh synagogue, he used Trump’s language—claiming Jewish groups were helping “invaders.”

In 2019, when a shooter drove hours to El Paso and opened fire at a Walmart, killing 23 people, he published a manifesto warning of a “Hispanic invasion”—a direct echo of Trump’s speeches.

In 2021, when a sitting president incited a mob to descend on the Capitol, he didn’t need to issue explicit commands. He just pointed them in the right direction.

The line between suggestion and incitement is already thin.
But now, it’s disappearing entirely.

What comes next won’t always come with a hashtag. It won’t look like a riot or a rally.
It will come quietly. Sporadically. With enough ambiguity that no one can be held to account.

That’s the danger. Not just official violence, but unofficial violence—enabled, excused, encouraged.

A whisper of encouragement here.
A dropped prosecution there.
An unmistakable wink, televised live.

And when it happens—when protestors or immigrants or city workers or librarians are harassed or harmed — it won’t be called political violence.

It’ll be framed as an outlier.
A lone actor.
“No known affiliation.”
“Unstable.”
“Unconnected.”

But we’ll know better.

Because we’ve watched the dress rehearsals.
Because we’re living through them now.

This isn’t just a return to strongman politics.
It’s a movement building its own shadow enforcement wing.

A movement that doesn’t need to pass new laws—because it’s busy undermining the ones we already have.

This is how criminal regimes consolidate power:
Not just through overt repression, but by leaving enough space for others to carry out their violence unofficially.

And if we don’t name that now—if we don’t prepare for it, protect against it, call it what it is—we risk becoming the next headline someone else explains away.

Not because no one warned us.
But because we didn’t listen in time.

The Firewall Response — Our Counter-Syndicate

We’ve spent years naming the threat.
We’ve documented it. Grieved it. Fought it.
But naming alone won’t save us.

They’re building a syndicate.
We have to build a counter-syndicate.

Because when criminal power captures state power, only a movement grounded in clarity, solidarity, and strategy can hold the line.

The Firewall was never just a publication. It was never just commentary.
It was always meant to be infrastructure — a system of resistance capable of withstanding what’s already begun.

And now, it must become exactly that.

We begin by organizing across professions.

The MAGA regime is waging war on civil society:
Journalists. Lawyers. Doctors. Teachers. Librarians. Technologists.
All under threat. All under surveillance. All potential targets.

We must forge a professional resistance network that cuts across sectors and specialties — sharing intelligence, offering protection, and building power. Our adversaries are coordinated. Our movements must be too.

We begin by building financial resilience.

They have weaponized FEMA, the IRS, bank accounts, and the tax code.
We respond by designing alternative systems:

Mutual aid funds that are fast, flexible, and discreet — capable of bailing people out, paying legal fees, or keeping the lights on for a movement under attack.

Alternative fiscal sponsorship for nonprofits that risk being stripped of their 501(c)(3) status.

Decentralized donation infrastructure that’s harder to freeze, easier to protect, and ready to reroute.

If their strategy is economic starvation, ours must be economic solidarity.

We begin by protecting targets before they become martyrs.

Every authoritarian regime follows the same steps: First they isolate the radicals.
Then the lawyers.
Then the reporters.
Then the teachers.
Then the judges.
Then it’s just you.

We must not wait until people are in handcuffs to defend them.
We must act at the first smear campaign.
The first subpoena.
The first online death threat.
The first agency audit.

We must surround them — digitally, physically, institutionally — with a wall of public solidarity and private defense.

That’s The Firewall.

We begin by defending truth with clarity.

No euphemisms. No hedging. No passive voice.

If it’s a deportation, call it what it is.
If it’s a disappearance, say so.
If it’s a trafficking ring backed by state power, name it.

Because when truth becomes dangerous, the dangerous must become truthful.

Our role as professionals is not just to serve. It’s to warn.
Our role as organizers is not just to care. It’s to act.

This is not just about protecting immigrants.
It’s about protecting us all from a regime that will not stop with borders.

It will come for your rights, your job, your agency, your oath, your conscience.

And if we wait until it knocks at our own door, we’ve already lost.

In The Firewall, we are not just reacting. We are rehearsing liberation.
We are remembering the movements before us.
The abolitionists.
The labor organizers.
The freedom riders.
The sanctuary defenders.
The truth tellers.

They didn’t wait for permission.
They didn’t ask if it was too late.

They saw the fire coming and built a wall to meet it.

So will we.

The Train Is Moving. But So Are We.

They called it Tren de Aragua.

A foreign gang. A fear tactic. A justification.

They used its name to scare Americans into giving up their values, their neighbors, their rights.

But they never told you about the train they were building here.
The one without tracks.
The one powered by lies and cruelty and unaccountable power.
The one that doesn’t stop at the border.

Tren de MAGA isn’t coming — it’s already here.

And it’s not just a political movement.
It’s a network of enforcers.
A shell company empire.
A propaganda machine.
A set of policies designed to terrorize, enrich, disappear, and control.

It operates through DHS raids and IRS audits.
Through defunded schools and flooded newsfeeds.
Through deportations, defamation, deregulation, denial.

It moves through the silence of people who think it won’t touch them.
Through the exhaustion of people who thought we’d already won.

It is headed for the Constitution.
For the rule of law.
For the profession you’ve built.
For the community you love.
For the people you swore to protect.

And it will not stop unless we stop it.

But here’s what they didn’t count on:

We’re building something, too.

We are teachers who refuse to be gagged.
Lawyers who refuse to be silenced.
Doctors who refuse to abandon patients.
Organizers who remember our ancestors.
Journalists who still believe in truth.
And immigrants — always immigrants — who know that freedom is not a gift, but a fight.

This is not a time for despair.
It’s a time to work.

If they’ve built a train, we’ll build a blockade.
If they’ve built a cartel, we’ll build a covenant.
If they’ve built a regime, we’ll build a resistance.

Because this time, we’re not going to wait for the history books.
This time, we’re writing them ourselves.

Subscribe. Share. Act. Organize. Build.

Join The Firewall.
Before it’s too late.