You’re Alive. They Say You’re Dead. What Now?
The MAGA regime just added 6,000 living immigrants to the federal death list. That was the pilot program.
“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
— Hannah Arendt
“You’re a lawyer, and you’re either a social engineer or a parasite on society.”
— Charles Hamilton Houston
The Show Trials
A U.S. Senator flew to El Salvador this week to meet with a man our government labeled a terrorist, a gang member, a domestic abuser. That man, Kilmar Abrego García, was wrongly deported by the Trump administration in the dead of night, stripped of his lawful protection, and dumped into a foreign prison. What followed was a swirl of headlines, court orders, and presidential smirks. Trump held a press conference in the Oval Office where he and Nayib Bukele joked about “smuggling terrorists” into the United States. Senator Van Hollen showed up at the prison gates, surrounded by a press gaggle, cameras flashing.
This is what authoritarianism looks like when it wants your attention.
Flashy. Expensive. Theater.
Same for Mahmoud Khalil. Same for Rümeysa Öztürk. Each of them dragged from their homes, schools, families. Each case engineered to strike fear deep into the bones of every immigrant in this country — and to light up every news feed in America.
And it worked. The fear spread. The outrage, too. Cable news caught fire. Editorials poured in. Some rightly condemned these actions as unlawful and cruel. Some defended them as just the cost of “restoring order.” But all of them did what DHS needed them to do.
They kept the spotlight where it was designed to land.
On the spectacle.
Not on the system.
Because while the world watched these few high-profile arrests, DHS launched its second, far more devastating move. No flash. No raids. No body armor. Just a letter. Or an email.
The Real Operation: Letters and Silence
“It is time for you to leave the United States.”
That’s the top line. The first words you see.
Thousands of people across the country have opened that message in the last few days. Some are recent arrivals. Some have lived here for years. Some are U.S. citizens — immigration attorneys, even — caught in the dragnet. And all of them were told the same thing: your parole has been terminated. You have seven days. Leave or face the full weight of federal law enforcement. We’ll find you.
No hearings. No notice. No appeal.
Just: get out.
These are not the deportations you see on TV. There’s no masked agents in unmarked cars. No courtroom drama. No plane on the tarmac with a US senator jumping into the fray. These are deportations by default. Fear-based compliance at scale.
Because here’s the truth: DHS doesn’t want to deport everyone. It wants everyone to think they could be next. That’s cheaper. That’s faster. That’s how you push thousands of people to leave “voluntarily” without lifting a finger.
This is how the machine works.
First, you make a public example of the few — loud, brutal, unforgettable. Then you follow up with the real weapon: silence. Letters. Paperwork. Bureaucratic violence.
No deportation force required.
And this is not just happening to immigrants. This is the dry run for something bigger. Something worse.
Because while DHS is flooding inboxes with “time to go” letters, another agency — Social Security — is doing something even more chilling.
It’s declaring people dead.
And seeing who plays along.
What Happens When Everyone Pretends You’re Dead
Six thousand people. Alive, breathing, working. Now listed in the federal database as dead.
Their Social Security numbers flagged. Their bank accounts locked. Their employers notified. Work permits revoked. Some were dropped from payroll. Others were blocked from renewing leases. Some had their health insurance canceled.
They weren’t deported.
They were erased.
And this wasn’t a glitch. It was policy — crafted, executed, and now defended as a national security success. DHS didn’t flinch. They didn’t apologize. They rebranded the dead list as the “ineligible master file” and proudly inserted more than 6,000 living people into it. They called it counterterrorism. They called it modernization. But let’s be clear: this wasn’t about chasing criminals. It was about building a system where paperwork replaces prisons, where lives can be erased with a keystroke.
The message is clear. If institutions obey — if banks close accounts, if employers cut paychecks, if universities drop students — then the regime doesn’t need to swing a hammer. The fear does the work for them. The lie wasn’t that these people are dead. The lie is that this ends with them.
Deadlisting is the perfect autocratic tool. It costs nothing. Leaves no fingerprints. No ICE raids. No shackles. Just a silent nudge to the machine — just enough to see who obeys.
Will HR process the termination? Will payroll stop the checks? Will the bank freeze the account? Will the landlord evict the tenant?
This isn’t just about immigrants. This is about institutional behavior. It’s about complicity at scale. A regime doesn’t need to control everything — it just needs enough people and systems to go along with the lie.
And here’s the dangerous part: it’s working.
The New York Times and Washington Post barely blinked. Employers shrugged. Banks did what banks do. And no one asked the most urgent question:
What happens when this gets used on you?
Trump has already said he wants to send “homegrowns” — his term for U.S. citizens — to foreign prisons. He has every intention of using these same tactics on people he deems disloyal: journalists, judges, labor organizers, lawyers, trans advocates, teachers, women who had abortions. You think the “dead list” won’t grow?
They’re watching how you respond to this version of it.
So are we.
The Firewall Was Built for This
This is why we are building The Firewall.
Not just for protest. Not just for posts.
But for the kind of inside resistance that forces institutions to stop being polite about fascism — and start rejecting it with muscle.
On Monday’s organizing call, we’re going to talk strategy. Sector by sector. What does deadlisting look like in law, in banking, in HR? What can be done, right now, to block it? What will it take to make institutions say: No. We will not treat the living as dead. We will not comply with political fiction.
The Firewall Hubs are the place where this starts. Not because they’re powerful. Because they’re embedded. Because you, the people in them, are already on the inside.
And on Sunday, I’ll publish the long read laying out exactly what this tactic is, how it works, and how we expose it. That’s the next punch: truth, coordination, resistance.
But today, let’s start with this:
What You Can Do Before the Next Punch Lands
Ask yourself: If I got deadlisted tomorrow, would my workplace fight for me — or quietly delete me?
Forward this article to someone who works in law, HR, finance, or higher ed. Ask them if they’ve seen the memo. Ask them what they’d do.
RSVP for Monday’s Firewall Network organizing call. That’s where this moves from story to strategy.
Jump into the Chat. Tell us what you’re seeing. Share what you’re up against.
And if you work for an institution, ask the question that matters most:
Will we protect the truth?
Or pretend we didn’t see it die?
I wrote recently about the dead-listing of certain immigrants by removing them from the Social Security rolls. Jonathan Ryan takes it further and also reports on another disturbing recent development, that of the government sending people notices telling them that their "parole" has been revoked and they must leave the country — and he shows us how this is all of a piece. Thank you, Jonathan, for showing the connections and putting this all in the larger context. Turns out an authoritarian doesn't need tanks to take over a country. Manipulating the levers of bureaucracy will do.
This is stuff out of the book 1984! This so scary, wrong, insane and devastating on so many levels!!