Posts Tagged ‘Donald Trump’

America’s Most Lawless Agency: ICE Is the Prototype for Tyranny

Posted: June 25, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”—Justice Louis D. Brandeis

While the U.S. wages war abroad—bombing Iran, escalating conflict, and staging a spectacle of power for political gain—a different kind of war is being waged here at home.

This war at home is quieter but no less destructive. The casualties are not in distant deserts or foreign cities. They are our freedoms, our communities, and the Constitution itself.

And the agents of this domestic war? Masked thugs. Unmarked vans. Raids. Roundups.

Detentions without due process. Retaliation against those who dare to question or challenge government authority. People made to disappear into bureaucratic black holes. Fear campaigns targeting immigrant communities and political dissenters alike. Surveillance weaponized to monitor and suppress lawful activity.

Packaged under the guise of national security—as all power grabs tend to be—this government-sanctioned thuggery masquerading as law-and-order is the face of the Trump Administration’s so-called war on illegal immigration.

Don’t fall for the propaganda that claims we’re being overrun by criminals or driven into the poorhouse by undocumented immigrants living off welfare.

The real threat to our way of life comes not from outside invaders, but from within: an unelected, unaccountable enforcement agency operating above the law.

President Trump insists that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is focused on violent criminals, but the facts tell a different story (non-criminal ICE arrests have surged 800% in six months)—and that myth is precisely what enables the erosion of rights for everyone.

By painting enforcement as narrowly targeted, the administration obscures a far broader dragnet that sweeps up legal residents, naturalized citizens, and native-born Americans alike.

What begins with immigrants rarely ends there.

According to the Cato Institute, 65 percent of people taken by ICE had no convictions, and 93 percent had no violent convictions at all.

This isn’t targeted enforcement—it’s indiscriminate purging.

What ICE—an agency that increasingly resembles a modern-day Gestapo—is doing to immigrants today, it can and will do to citizens tomorrow: these are the early warning signs of a system already in motion.

The machinery is in place. The abuses are ongoing. And the constitutional safeguards we rely on are being ignored, dismantled, or bypassed entirely.

When legal residents, naturalized citizens, and native-born Americans are swept up in ICE’s raids, detained without cause, and subjected to treatment that defies every constitutional protection against government overreach, this isn’t about immigration.

It’s not about danger. It’s about power—unchecked and absolute.

This is authoritarianism by design.

Here are just a few examples of how ICE’s reach now extends far beyond a criminal class of undocumented immigrants:

This pattern of abuse is not accidental.

It reflects a deliberate strategy of fear and domination by ICE agents acting like an occupying army, intent on intimidating the population into submission while the Trump Administration redraws the boundaries of the Constitution for all within America’s borders, citizen and immigrant alike.

This is how you dismantle a constitutional republic: not in one dramatic moment, but through the steady erosion of rights, accountability, and rule of law—first for the marginalized, then for everyone.

When constitutional guarantees become conditional and oversight is systematically evaded, all Americans—regardless of status—stand vulnerable to a regime that governs by fear rather than freedom.

We’ve seen this playbook before.

It’s the same strategy used by fascist regimes to consolidate power—using fear, force, and propaganda to turn public institutions into instruments of oppression.

ICE raids often occur without warrants. Agents frequently detain individuals not charged with any crime. Homes, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and courthouses have all become targets. Agents in plain clothes swarm unsuspecting individuals, arrest them without explanation, and separate families under the pretense of national security. In many cases, masked agents refuse to identify themselves at all—creating a climate of terror where the public cannot distinguish lawful enforcement from lawless abduction.

This is not justice. It is intimidation. And it has become business as usual.

ICE has even begun deputizing local police departments to carry out these raids.

Through an expanded network of partnerships, ICE has turned routine traffic stops into pipelines for deportation. According to The Washington Post, immigrants stopped on the way to volleyball practice, picking up baby formula, or heading to job sites have been detained and, in some cases, sent to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador.

This is what politicizing and weaponizing local police looks like.

Even members of Congress attempting to exercise constitutional oversight have been turned away from ICE facilities. As The New York Times reported, ICE now claims the authority to “deny a request or otherwise cancel” congressional visits based on vague “operational concerns”—effectively placing its operations beyond democratic scrutiny.

Beyond the high-profile arrests, the abuse runs deeper.

Julio Noriega, a 54-year-old American citizen, was snatched up off the street and detained in Chicago for 10 hours without explanation. Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a U.S.-born citizen, was detained because ICE dismissed his REAL ID as fake. Cary López Alvarado, a pregnant U.S. citizen, was handcuffed and arrested for challenging ICE agents who had followed her fiancé to work. Children, veterans, and immunocompromised individuals have all suffered under ICE’s dragnet.

These are not outliers. They are the product of a system that operates without meaningful checks.

ICE agents are rarely held accountable. Internal investigations are ineffective. Congress has abdicated oversight. Directives from the Trump administration—including those authored by Stephen Miller—have turbocharged deportations and loosened any remaining restraints.

From boots on the ground to bytes in the cloud, ICE’s unchecked power reflects a broader shift toward authoritarianism, fueled by high-tech surveillance, public indifference and minimal judicial oversight. The agency operates a sprawling digital dragnet: facial recognition, license plate readers, cellphone tracking, and partnerships with tech giants like Amazon and Palantir feed massive databases—often without warrants or oversight.

These same tools—hallmarks of a growing surveillance state—are now being quietly repurposed across other federal agencies, setting the stage for an integrated surveillance-policing regime that threatens the constitutional rights of every American.

This isn’t about safety. It’s about control.

These tools aren’t just targeting undocumented immigrants—they’re laying the digital scaffolding for a future in which everyone is watched, scored, and subject to state suspicion.

Quotas over justice. Algorithms over rights.

ICE’s operations have little to do with individualized threat assessments. What drives these raids is not public safety but bureaucratic performance. Field offices are under pressure to meet arrest quotas, creating a system that incentivizes indiscriminate sweeps over focused investigations.

As Jennie Taer writes for the NY Post:

“The Trump administration’s mandate to arrest 3,000 illegal migrants per day is forcing ICE agents to deprioritize going after dangerous criminals and targets with deportation orders, insiders warn. Instead, federal immigration officers are spending more time rounding up people off the streets… Agents are desperate to meet the White House’s high expectations, leading them to leave some dangerous criminal illegal migrants on the streets, and instead look for anyone they can get their hands on at the local Home Depot or bus stop.”

Predictive algorithms and flawed databases replace constitutional suspicion with digital hunches, turning enforcement into a numbers game and transforming communities into statistical targets.

Constitutional safeguards are being replaced by digital suspicion.

We now live in a nation where lawful dissent—especially from immigrants or those perceived as outsiders—can place someone under state suspicion. The line between investigation and persecution has been erased.

Fear needs fuel.

And ICE finds it in propaganda: just as the Gestapo used propaganda to justify its cruelty, ICE relies on the language of fear and division. When the government labels people “invaders,” “animals,” or “thugs,” it strips them of humanity—and strips us of our conscience.

This rhetoric serves to distract and divide. It normalizes abuse. And it ensures that, once targeted, no one is safe.

The construction of a new ICE mega-prison in Florida—nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz” for its proposed moat and remote location—serves as a grotesque symbol of the Trump Administration’s mass deportation agenda: out of sight, beyond accountability, and surrounded by literal and bureaucratic barriers to due process.

And Trump’s shifting stance on industries that rely on migrant labor—one moment threatening crackdowns, the next signaling exemptions for hotels, farms, and construction—reveals what this campaign is really about: not security, but political theater.

It’s not about danger; it’s about dominance.

But the crisis isn’t just rhetorical. It’s systemic. Agents are trained to obey, not to question. Immunity shields misconduct. Whistleblowers are punished. Watchdogs are ignored. Courts too often defer to executive power.

This is not law enforcement—it is authoritarian enforcement.

And it’s not limited to immigrants. It’s creeping into every corner of American life.

When a government can detain its own citizens without due process, punish political dissent, and target individuals for what they believe or how they look, it is no longer governed by law. It is governed by fear.

The Constitution was designed to prevent this. But rights are meaningless when no one is held accountable for violating them.

That is why the solution must go beyond the ballot box.

We must dismantle the machinery of oppression that enables ICE to act as judge, jury, and jailer.

Congress must ban warrantless raids, end predictive profiling, and prohibit mass surveillance. It must enforce real oversight and revoke the legal shields that insulate abusive agents from consequences.

We must reassert the rule of law, not just through legislation, but through a cultural recommitment to constitutional values. That includes transparency, demilitarization, and equal protection for all—citizens and non-citizens alike.

This is not just a fight over immigration policy. It’s a battle for the soul of our nation.

ICE is not the exception. It is the prototype.

As I make clear in my books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the same blueprint is being applied across the federal landscape: to protest monitoring, dissent suppression, and data-mined predictive policing.

If we fail to dismantle the ICE model, we normalize it—and risk reproducing it everywhere else.

ICE has become the beta test—perfecting the merger of technology, policing, and executive power that could soon define American governance as a whole.

Make no mistake: when fear becomes law, freedom is the casualty.

If we don’t act soon, we may find that the Constitution is the next to be detained.

James Madison warned that “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

When ICE acts as enforcer, jailer, and judge for the president, those fears are no longer theoretical—they are the daily reality for countless people within U.S. borders.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/fc2ffn45

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

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John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge.

The Spectacle of a Police State: This Is Martial Law Without a Formal Declaration of War

Posted: June 10, 2025 in Uncategorized
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Reporter: “What’s the bar for sending in the Marines?”

Trump: “The bar is what I think it is.“

In Trump’s America, the bar for martial law is no longer constitutional—it’s personal.

Indeed, if ever we needed proof that Donald Trump was an operative for the Deep State, this is it.

Despite what Trump would have us believe, the Deep State is not the vast numbers of federal employees who have been fired as part of his government purge.

Rather, the Deep State refers to the entrenched network of unelected bureaucrats, intelligence agencies, military contractors, surveillance firms, and corporate lobbyists that operate beyond the reach of democratic accountability. It is a government within a government—an intelligence-industrial complex that persists regardless of who sits in the Oval Office and whose true allegiance lies not with the Constitution but with power, profit, and control.

In other words, the Deep State doesn’t just survive presidential administrations—it recruits them. And in Trump, it has found a showman willing to turn its agenda into a public performance of raw power—militarized, theatrical, and loyal not to the Constitution, but to dominance.

What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops federalized; and military weapons, tactics and equipment on full display—is the latest chapter in that performance.

Trump is flexing his presidential muscles with a costly, violent, taxpayer-funded military display intended to intimidate, distract and discourage us from pulling back the curtain on the reality of the self-serving corruption, grift, graft, overreach and abuse that have become synonymous with his Administration.

Don’t be distracted. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be sidelined by the spectacle of a police state.

As columnist Thomas Friedman predicted years ago, “Some presidents, when they get into trouble before an election, try to ‘wag the dog’ by starting a war abroad. Donald Trump seems ready to wag the dog by starting a war at home.”

This is yet another manufactured crisis fomented by the Deep State.

When Trump issues a call to “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” explaining to reporters that he wants to have them “everywhere,” we should all be alarmed.

This is martial law without a formal declaration of war.

This heavy-handed, chest-thumping, politicized, militarized response to what is clearly a matter for local government is yet another example of Trump’s disregard for the Constitution and the limits of his power.

Political protests are protected by the First Amendment until they cross the line from non-violent to violent. Even when protests turn violent, constitutional protocols remain for safeguarding communities: law and order must flow through local and state chains of command, not from federal muscle.

By breaking that chain of command, Trump is breaking the Constitution.

Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by civilian police, despite the objections of local and state leaders, crosses the line into authoritarianism.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

In the span of a single week, the Trump administration is providing the clearest glimpse yet of its unapologetic, uncompromising, corrupt allegiance to the authoritarian Deep State.

First came the federalization of the National Guard, deployed to California in response to protests sparked by violent and aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids across the country. Then, just days later, the president is set to preside over a lavish, taxpayer-funded military parade in the nation’s capital.

These two events bookend the administration’s unmistakable message: dissent will be crushed, and power will be performed.

Trump governs by force (military deployment), fear (ICE raids, militarized policing), and spectacle (the parade).

This is the spectacle of a police state. One side of the coin is militarized suppression. The other is theatrical dominance. Together, they constitute the language of force and authoritarian control.

Wrapped in the rhetoric of “public safety” and “restoring order,” the federalization of California’s National Guard is not about security. It’s about signaling power.

This is the first time in over half a century that a president has forcibly deployed the National Guard against a state governor’s wishes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s public opposition to the deployment was met not with dialogue, but with the threat of arrest from Trump himself—a move that evokes the worst abuses of executive power.

This is more than political theater; it is a constitutional crisis in motion.

As we have warned before, this tactic is familiar.

In times of political unrest, authoritarian regimes invoke national emergencies as pretexts to impose military solutions. The result? The Constitution is suspended, civilian control is overrun, and the machinery of the state turns against its own people.

This is precisely what the Founders feared when they warned against standing armies on American soil: that one day, the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them. Where the military marches at home, the Republic trembles.

And this is not unprecedented.

It is a textbook play from the authoritarian handbook, deployed with increasing frequency under Trump. The optics are meant to intimidate, to broadcast control, and to discourage resistance before it begins.

Fear is the Deep State’s favorite tool—it doesn’t just control the people, it conditions them to surrender voluntarily.

Thus, deploying the National Guard in this manner is not just a political maneuver—it is a strategic act of fear-based governance designed to instill terror, particularly among vulnerable communities, and ensure compliance.

As President Harry S. Truman observed, “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

Under Trump, the lines between a civilian democracy and a military regime continue to blur. American streets increasingly resemble war zones, where peaceful protests are met with riot gear, armored vehicles, and surveillance drones.

America is being transformed into a battlefield before our eyes.

Militarized police. Riot squads. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Stun grenades. Crowd control and intimidation tactics.

From federal law enforcement to local police, from border patrol to the intelligence agencies, the guiding doctrine is the same: treat Americans as suspects first, citizens second—if at all.

This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

This is the language of force.

This is what happens when the rule of law gets replaced by the rules of force: war becomes the organizing principle of domestic governance, law becomes subordinate to command, and liberty is reclassified as a liability.

The war zone mentality—where citizens are treated like insurgents to be subdued—is a hallmark of authoritarian rule.

This transformation is not accidental—it’s strategic. The government now sees the public not as constituents to be served but as potential combatants to be surveilled, managed, and subdued. In this new paradigm, dissent is treated as insurrection, and constitutional rights are treated as threats to national security.

What we are witnessing today is also part of a broader setup: an excuse to use civil unrest as a pretext for militarized overreach.

You want to turn a peaceful protest into a riot? Bring in the militarized police with their guns and black uniforms and warzone tactics and “comply or die” mindset. Ratchet up the tension across the board. Take what should be a healthy exercise in constitutional principles (free speech, assembly and protest) and turn it into a lesson in authoritarianism.

We saw signs of this strategy in Charlottesville, Virginia, where police failed to de-escalate and at times exacerbated tensions during protests that should have remained peaceful. The resulting chaos gave authorities cover to crack down—not to protect the public, but to reframe protest as provocation and dissent as disorder.

Charlottesville was the trial run—California is the main event.

Then and now, the objective wasn’t to preserve peace and protect the public. It was to delegitimize dissent and cast protest as provocation.

Yet the right to criticize the government and speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

The government has become increasingly intolerant of speech that challenges its power. While all kinds of labels are now applied to “unacceptable” speech, the message is clear: Americans have no right to express themselves if what they are saying is at odds with what the government determines to be acceptable.

Where the problem arises is when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.

Which brings us to this present moment: there’s a pattern emerging if you pay close enough attention.

Civil discontent leads to civil unrest, which leads to protests and counterprotests. Tensions rise, violence escalates, and federal armies move in. Meanwhile, despite the protests and the outrage, the government’s abuses continue unabated.

It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the Deep State. The government wants a reason to crack down and lock down and bring in its biggest guns.

They want us divided. They want us to turn on one another. They want us powerless in the face of their artillery and armed forces. They want us silent, servile and compliant.

They certainly do not want us to remember that we have rights, much less attempt to exercise those rights peaceably and lawfully.

This is how it begins.

We are moving fast down that slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts.

This unilateral power to muzzle free speech represents a far greater danger than any so-called right- or left-wing extremist might pose. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

Watch and see: we are all about to become enemies of the state.

Today, California is being staged as the test site for the coming crackdown.

The Trump administration provokes unrest through inhumane policies—in this case, mass ICE raids—then paints the resulting protests as violent threats to national security. The answer? Deploy the military.

It’s a cynical and calculated loop: create the crisis, then respond with force. This strategy transforms protest into pretext, dissent into justification for domination.

There are disturbing echoes of history in these tactics, and they come with grave legal implications. We have seen this before.

It has been 55 years since President Nixon deployed the National Guard to put down anti-war student protests, culminating in the Kent State massacre. During the civil rights era, peaceful demonstrators were met with dogs, firehoses, and police batons. In more recent memory, federal agents cracked down on Occupy Wall Street encampments and Black Lives Matter protests with militarized force.

All of it under the guise of order.

Trump’s tactics fall squarely in that lineage.

His use of the military against civilians violates the spirit—if not the letter—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is meant to bar federal military involvement in domestic affairs. It also raises severe constitutional questions about the infringement of First Amendment rights to protest and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure.

Modern tools of repression compound the threat. AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing software, biometric databases, and fusion centers have made mass control seamless and silent. The state doesn’t just respond to dissent anymore; it predicts and preempts it.

While boots are on the ground in California, preparations are underway for a military spectacle in Washington, D.C.

At first glance, a military procession might seem like a patriotic display. But in this context, it is something far darker. Trump’s parade is not a celebration of service; it is a declaration of supremacy. It is not about honoring troops; it is about reminding the populace who holds the power and who wields the guns.

This is how authoritarian regimes govern—through spectacle. North Korea, Russia, and China use grandiose military pageants to project strength and silence dissent. Mussolini marched troops as theater in carefully staged public displays to bolster fascist control. Augusto Pinochet filled Chile’s streets with tanks to intimidate critics and consolidate power. All of it designed not to honor the nation—but to dominate it.

By sandwiching a military crackdown between a domestic troop deployment and a showy parade, Trump is sending a unified message: dissent is weakness. Obedience is strength. You are being watched.

This is not about immigration. It is not about security. It is not even about protest.

This is about power. Raw, unchecked, theatrical power. And whether we, the people, will accept a government that rules not by consent, but by coercion.

The Constitution was not written to accommodate authoritarian pageantry. It was written to restrain it. It was never meant to sanctify conquest as governance.

We are at a crossroads.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Strip away that consent, and all that remains is conquest—through force, spectacle, and fear.

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we allow the language of fear, the spectacle of dominance, and the machinery of militarized governance to become normalized, then we are no longer citizens of a republic—we are subjects of a police state.

The only question now is: will we rise up as citizens of a constitutional republic—or bow down as subjects of an authoritarian regime?

Source: https://tinyurl.com/y3vvk783

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge.

Trump Is Making America Constitutionally Literate—By Violating the Constitution

Posted: May 14, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“Donald Trump ran on a platform of relentless, thoroughgoing rejection of the Constitution itself, and its underlying principle of democratic self-government and individual rights. True, he never endorsed quartering of troops in private homes in time of peace, but aside from that there is hardly a provision of the Bill of Rights or later amendments he did not explicitly promise to override, from First Amendment freedom of the press and of religion to Fourth Amendment freedom from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures’ to Sixth Amendment right to counsel to Fourteenth Amendment birthright citizenship and Equal Protection and Fifteenth Amendment voting rights.”—Garrett Epps, law professor

If Donald Trump is remembered for anything, it may be his unintentional role in reviving public interest in the U.S. Constitution.

Indeed, few modern political figures have done more to prompt spontaneous national discussions about the Bill of Rights and constitutional limits on government power—if only because Trump tramples on them so frequently.

Through his routine disregard for due process, free speech, separation of powers, and the rule of law, President Trump has become a walking civics lesson.

From the First and Fourth Amendments to the Emoluments Clause, the Constitution has never had such regular airtime.

Ironically, this might be Trump’s greatest legacy: forcing Americans to learn what the Constitution actually says—by violating it.

Unfortunately, Trump himself remains constitutionally illiterate.

Days after issuing an executive order that openly hints at martial law, Trump made a mockery of his oath of office by confessing his complete ignorance about the Constitution on national television. When asked if he needs to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president, Trump replied, “I don’t know.”

This is the same man who appointed himself Chair of America’s 250th anniversary celebration but seems entirely unaware of what that history represents. Asked what the Declaration of Independence means, Trump called it a “declaration of unity and love.”

In reality, it’s a fiery breakup letter—a revolutionary indictment of unchecked executive power.

If Trump had been king in 1776, Jefferson might have named him in the first paragraph.

To be clear, Donald Trump is not the first president to stretch, sidestep, or outright violate constitutional limits—Democrats and Republicans alike have done so. But Trump is singular in the sheer scope, frequency, and brazenness with which he has stress-tested every clause, amendment, and founding principle of the U.S. Constitution.

His presidency has become a full-frontal assault on the rule of law.

The good news is that Trump’s constitutional ignorance has turned millions of Americans into more alert and informed citizens. In fighting off Trump’s excesses, the nation has reawakened to the rights and principles that many had taken for granted.

Consider some of the constitutional principles that Trump can be credited with bringing into the spotlight unintentionally during his time in office.

First Amendment (free speech, press, religion, protest and assembly): Trump’s repeated confrontations with the First Amendment have transformed free expression into a battleground, making it impossible to ignore the protections it guarantees. From branding the press as “the enemy of the people” and threatening to revoke media licenses to blacklisting law firms, threatening universities with funding cuts for not complying with the government’s ideological agenda, and detaining foreign students for their political views, Trump has treated constitutional protections not as guarantees, but as obstacles. Deportations and detentions based solely on political speech have shown the fragility of these freedoms when power goes unchecked. Even when Trump claims to be championing religious freedom for Christians, he skates close to violating the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits the government from favoring one religion over another.

Second Amendment (right to bear arms): Although often portrayed as a defender of the Second Amendment, Trump has shown an inconsistent and, at times, authoritarian approach to gun rights. He has publicly suggested confiscating firearms from individuals deemed dangerous—without prior due process—summed up in his infamous 2018 statement: “Take the guns first, go through due process second.” This disregard for constitutional procedure alarmed even staunch Second Amendment advocates. At the same time, Trump has encouraged the militarization of domestic police forces, blurring the line between civilian law enforcement and standing armies—a contradiction that cuts against the very spirit of the amendment, which was rooted in distrust of centralized power and standing militaries.

Fourth Amendment (protection against unreasonable searches and seizures): Under Trump, the Fourth Amendment’s shield against unreasonable searches and seizures has likewise become a focal point of concern. His expansion of no-knock raids, endorsement of sweeping surveillance tactics, sanctioning of police brutality and greater immunity for police misconduct, and the use of masked, plainclothes federal agents to seize demonstrators off the streets have revived conversations about privacy, unlawful searches, and the right to be secure in one’s person and property. Executive orders have embedded DHS agents in local policing. All of this under the guise of “law and order”—but without lawful justification.

Fifth & Fourteenth Amendments (due process and equal protection): Perhaps nowhere has Trump’s disregard been more dangerous than in his approach to due process and equal protection under the law. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee that neither citizens nor non-citizens can be deprived of liberty without fair procedures. Yet Trump’s Administration has repeatedly floated or enacted policies that sidestep due process, from the suggestion that he could suspend habeas corpus to the indefinite detention of individuals without trial, and openly questioned whether non-citizens deserve any constitutional protections at all. His immigration policies targeting lawful visa holders for dissent have pushed these rights to the edge of collapse. When asked if non-citizens deserve due process, Trump said, “I don’t know.” That chilling admission sums up his approach to the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments: treat them as optional.

Sixth (right to a fair and speedy trial) and Eighth Amendments (protection against cruel and unusual punishment): Even the Sixth and Eighth Amendments have found new urgency. Trump has promoted indefinite pretrial detention for protesters and immigrants alike, while presiding over family separations, inhumane detention centers, and support for enhanced interrogation techniques. Trump has also doubled down on his administration’s commitment to carrying out more executions, including a push to impose the death penalty for crimes other than murder. What once seemed like settled moral and legal territory is now back up for debate.

Tenth Amendment (states’ rights): The Tenth Amendment, which preserves state sovereignty against federal overreach, has been tested by Trump’s threats to defund sanctuary cities, override state public health measures, and interfere in local policing and elections. His efforts to federalize domestic law enforcement have exposed the limits of decentralized power in the face of executive ambition.

Fourteenth Amendment (birthright citizenship): No clause has been more aggressively misunderstood by Trump than the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. His push to strip citizenship from children born on U.S. soil to immigrant parents (birthright citizenship) ignores over a century of legal precedent affirming that citizenship cannot be denied by executive whim.

Article I, Section 8 (commerce and tariffs): Trump’s use of tariff authority provides another example of executive power run amok. Although the Constitution assigns Congress the power to regulate commerce with foreign nations, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on allies and used them as political leverage. These actions not only undermine the constitutional balance between the branches but also weaponize trade policy for political ends.

Article I, Section 9 (Emoluments Clause): Trump’s disregard for the Emoluments Clause—a safeguard against presidential profiteering—brought this obscure constitutional provision back into the public eye. By continuing to profit from his private businesses while in office, including his newly launched crypto companies, hosting foreign dignitaries at Trump-branded properties, and his reported willingness to accept extravagant gifts, such as a $400 million luxury plane from the Qatari government, he has raised urgent ethical and legal concerns about self-dealing, corruption and backdoor arrangements by which foreign and domestic governments can funnel money into Trump’s personal coffers.

Article I, Section 9 (power of the purse): Trump has also trampled on Congress’s exclusive power over federal spending, attempting to redirect funds by executive fiat rather than operating within Congress’ approved budgetary plan. Within the first months of his second term, Trump empowered Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to unilaterally slash government spending by reducing the federal workforce and dismantling whole programs. He has also threatened to withhold federal aid from states, cities, and universities deemed insufficiently loyal. These efforts to bypass congressional appropriations not only violate the Constitution’s clear separation of powers but set a dangerous precedent for future administrations to govern by fiscal coercion.

Article II (executive powers): At the heart of Trump’s governance is a dangerous misreading of Article II, which vests executive power in the president, to justify executive overreach and the concept of an all-powerful unitary executive. He has repeatedly claimed “total authority” over state matters, wielded executive orders like royal decrees in order to bypass Congress, and sought to bend the Department of Justice to his personal and political will. Trump’s use of executive orders—both in his first term and now again in 2025—reflects a belief in unchecked presidential power. He has declared “total authority,” fired independent watchdogs, pardoned political allies, and weaponized the DOJ. Such behavior undermines the balance of powers laid out by the framers.

Separation of Powers / Checks and Balances: This has also meant a sustained attack on the separation of powers. Trump has defied congressional subpoenas, pardoned loyalists implicated in wrongdoing, and threatened to jail political enemies. In doing so, he has tested—and often breached—the guardrails that prevent any one branch from overpowering the others.

Historical Emergency Powers and Legal Precedents: Beyond these standard constitutional provisions, Trump has also breathed new life into archaic emergency powers—tools that most Americans associate with authoritarian regimes, not a constitutional republic. His rhetoric and executive orders have invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify rounding up, detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants without due process. He has also threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops domestically in order to deal with civil unrest, raising the specter of martial law cloaked in patriotic language.

In routinely violating the Constitution and crossing legal lines that were once unthinkable, Trump—who appears to have no real understanding of or regard for the Constitution—is forcing Americans to confront what the Constitution truly protects, and what it doesn’t.

So where does that leave us?

Thomas Jefferson recognized that a citizenry educated on “their rights, interests, and duties” is the only real assurance that freedom will survive. As Jefferson wrote in 1820: “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of our society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power.”

Still, what good is a knowledgeable citizenry if their elected officials are woefully ignorant about the Constitution or willfully disregard their sworn duty to uphold and protect it?

Jefferson again has the answer: “In questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.”

For starters, anyone taking public office, from the president on down, should have a working knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be held accountable for upholding their precepts.

One way to ensure this? Require government leaders to take a course on the Constitution—and pass a thorough examination—before being allowed to take office. And if they violate their contractual obligations to uphold and defend the Constitution, vote them out—throw them out—or impeach them.

“We the people” have the power, but we must use it, or we’ll lose it.

Trump may have contributed to this revival in constitutional awareness, but as we warn in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, the challenge isn’t just knowing our rights—it’s defending them, before they’re gone for good.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/454khw2x

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

Facing Court Losses, White House Considers Suspending Habeas Corpus

Posted: May 12, 2025 in Uncategorized
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BURLINGTON, Vt. — In the wake of a string of court challenges over its arrests, detentions and deportations of university students engaged in political protests, the Trump Administration is threatening to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, a constitutional principle with roots in British law that assures everyone in the United States, including noncitizens, of the right to challenge a detention in court.

The White House’s admission that it is “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus came on the same day that the U.S. District Court for Vermont ordered the immediate release of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student who was seized on the street near her apartment by masked, plainclothes ICE agents; shoved into an unmarked car; and transported out of state to a detention center pending deportation. Although never charged with a crime, Öztürk was targeted by government officials for co-authoring an op-ed in a student paper a year earlier expressing support for Palestinian civilians during a time of heightened international conflict. The Rutherford Institute joined a coalition of civil liberties organizations (including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the National Coalition Against Censorship, PEN America, Cato Institute, and the First Amendment Lawyers Association) to file an amicus brief in Öztürk v. Trump challenging the legality of Öztürk’s arrest and detention through her petition for a writ of habeas corpus.

“This is not about public safety. This is about silencing dissent. The U.S. government is weaponizing immigration enforcement to punish political dissent,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “If the government can silence, detain, and deport individuals simply for speaking out on political issues, then no one’s speech is truly safe and we’re no longer operating under the Constitution. We’re living under a system of political policing.”

Öztürk, a Turkish national lawfully present in the U.S. on a student visa, is pursuing a doctorate in the Child Study and Human Development program at Tufts University. Unbeknownst to Öztürk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked her visa as part of a campaign by the Trump Administration to retaliate against those who publicly criticize Israel. Öztürk was detained without warning by masked, plainclothes agents on March 25, 2025, and transferred more than 1,500 miles away from her home in Massachusetts to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center. In its amicus brief challenging Öztürk’s detention as unconstitutional, the legal coalition contends that the government’s actions set a dangerous precedent in which political speech can be treated as evidence of threat, opening the door for officials to selectively punish individuals based on the content and viewpoint of their expression.

The implications reach far beyond Öztürk’s case. Since returning to office, the Trump Administration has increasingly targeted immigrants and legal visa holders for arrest, deportation, or visa revocation based solely on their political expression. In one case, a legal aid attorney had her visa canceled after attending a peaceful protest. In another, a university lecturer was denied re-entry to the U.S. over critical social media posts. Such tactics, the coalition contends, create a sweeping chilling effect for anyone who dares to speak out against government policy.

Ronnie London, Conor Fitzpatrick, Colin McDonell, Will Creeley, and others at FIRE advanced the arguments in the Öztürk v. Trump amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

Case History

May 01, 2025 • Civil Liberties Advocates Sound Alarm Over Arrest of PhD Student for Political Views

Source: https://tinyurl.com/22v9an5u

Martial Law Disguised as Law and Order: The Oldest Trick in the Authoritarian Playbook

Posted: May 6, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”—James Madison

We are being frog-marched into tyranny at the end of a loaded gun. Or rather, hundreds of thousands of loaded guns.

Let’s not mince words: President Trump’s April 28 executive order is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook: martial law masquerading as law and order.

Officially titled “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” this order is a “heil Hitler” wrapped in the goosestepping, despotic trappings of national security.

Don’t be fooled by Trump’s tough-on-crime rhetoric, cloaked in patriotic language and the promise of safety.

This is the language of every strongman who’s ever ruled by force.

The White House claims the order will “empower state and local law enforcement to relentlessly pursue criminals and protect American communities.” But under this administration, “criminal” increasingly includes anyone who dares to exercise their constitutional rights.

The order doesn’t merely expand policing—it institutionalizes repression.

It sets us squarely on the road to martial law.

If allowed to stand, Trump’s executive order completes our shift from a nation of laws—where even the least among us had the right to due process—to a nation of enforcers: vigilantes with badges who treat “we the people” as suspects and subordinates.

Without invoking the Insurrection Act or deploying active-duty military forces, Trump has accelerated the transformation of domestic police into his own paramilitary force.

With the stroke of his presidential pen, he has laid the groundwork for a stealth version of martial law by:

  • Expanding police powers and legal protections;
  • Authorizing the DOJ to defend officers accused of civil rights violations;
  • Increasing the transfer of military equipment to local police;
  • Shielding law enforcement from judicial oversight;
  • Prioritizing law enforcement protection over civil liberties;
  • Embedding DHS and federal agents more deeply into local policing.

Since taking office in January 2025, Trump has moved systematically to dismantle what little accountability remains:

  • Terminating the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database;
  • Halting DOJ investigations into abusive police departments;
  • Expanding immigration enforcement while eliminating oversight;
  • Dismissing internal watchdogs at DOJ and DHS;
  • Weakening civil rights tools and body camera requirements;
  • Suspending or eliminating consent decrees nationwide.

All of this has occurred without congressional debate, judicial review, or constitutional scrutiny.

Through it all, Trump has emboldened police forces to act with near impunity, reinforcing a trend long embraced by powerful police unions, bureaucratic cronyism, and laws providing for qualified immunity that shield misconduct from public consequence.

For years, we have watched as the government transformed local law enforcement into extensions of the military: outfitted with military hardware and trained in battlefield tactics.

However, this executive order goes one step further—creating not just a de facto standing army but Trump’s own army: loyal not to the Constitution or the people, but to the president.

This is the very danger the Founders feared: a militarized police force answerable to a powerful executive, operating outside the bounds of the law.

While the Posse Comitatus Act was intended to prevent the military from becoming a domestic police force, this administration has found a workaround: transforming civilian police into a paramilitary force armed and trained like the military, but without the legal constraints.

In doing so, the federal government has effectively sidestepped both constitutional checks and statutory prohibitions meant to guard against military rule on American soil.

This is martial law without a declaration.

The battlefield is here.

Law enforcement today is equipped like the military, trained in battlefield tactics, and given broad discretion over who to target and how to respond. But these are not soldiers bound by the laws of war. They are civilian enforcers, wielding unchecked power with minimal oversight.

And they are everywhere.

Armored vehicles on neighborhood streets. Flashbang raids on family homes. Riot police in small towns. SWAT-style teams deployed by federal agencies. Drones overhead. Mass surveillance below.

We are fast approaching a reality where constitutional rights exist in name only.

In practice, we are ruled by a quasi-military bureaucracy empowered to:

  • Detain without trial;
  • Punish political dissent;
  • Seize property under civil asset forfeiture;
  • Classify critics as extremists or terrorists;
  • Conduct mass surveillance on the populace;
  • Raid homes in the name of “public safety”;
  • Use deadly force at the slightest provocation.

In other words, we’ve got freedom in name only.

It’s the same scenario nationwide: in big cities and small towns alike, militarized “warrior” cops—hyped up on power—ride roughshod over individual rights by exercising almost absolute discretion over who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

This nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence has already ensured that unarmed Americans—many of them mentally ill, elderly, disabled, or simply noncompliant—will continue to die at the hands of militarized police.

From individuals shot for holding garden hoses, to those killed after calling 911 for help, these tragedies underscore a chilling truth: in a police state, the only truly “safe” person is one who offers no resistance at all.

These killings are the inevitable result of a system that rewards vigilante aggression by warrior cops and punishes accountability.

These so-called warrior cops, trained to act as judge, jury and executioner, increasingly outnumber those who still honor their oath to uphold the Constitution and serve the public.

Now, under the cover of executive orders and nationalist rhetoric, that warrior mentality is being redirected toward a more dangerous mission: silencing political dissent.

Emboldened by Trump’s call to reopen Alcatraz and target so-called “homegrown” threats, these forces are no longer going to be tasked with enforcing the law—they will be deployed to enforce political obedience.

Backed by the full power of the state and unbound by meaningful accountability, these police state enforcers operate with the tactics of a military force but without its legal constraints. They are not soldiers governed by the rules of war. They are the foot soldiers of the police state.

And their numbers are growing.

This is not a theory. It is a reality unfolding before our eyes.

Battlefield tactics. Camouflage gear. Mass arrests. Tear gas. Strip searches. Drones. Water cannons. Rubber bullets. Concussion grenades. Intimidation. Laws abandoned at will.

We are living in a creeping state of undeclared martial law.

The militarization of police and federal agencies over recent decades has only accelerated the timeline toward authoritarianism.

The groundwork was laid long ago: the NDAA’s indefinite detention powers; court rulings that excuse shootings of unarmed citizens; the normalization of asset forfeiture, round-the-clock surveillance, and militarized drills in American cities.

This regime of lawless enforcement has been built over time—by legislators, courts, and a public too willing to look the other way.

Don’t be fooled: this is not law and order. This is constitutional demolition under the color of authority.

We are being trained to accept militarized policing, normalized surveillance, and injustice disguised as safety.

This is how freedom ends—not with a loud decree, but with the quiet, calculated erosion of every principle we once held sacred.

We’ve come full circle—from resisting British redcoats to submitting to American forces with the same disdain for liberty.

Our constitutional foundation is crumbling, and with it, any illusion that those in power still serve the public good.

Congress, for its part, has abdicated its role as a constitutional check on executive power—passing sweeping authorizations with little scrutiny and failing to rein in executive overreach. The courts, too, have in the past sanctioned many of these abuses in the name of national security, public order, or qualified immunity. Instead of acting as constitutional safeguards, these institutions have largely become rubber stamps.

Indeed, the president, Congress, the courts, and the police have come to embody the very abuse the Founders fought to resist. Only now are the courts beginning to show glimmers of allegiance to the Constitution.

This is not about partisanship. This is about power without restraint.

As tempting as it is to place full blame on Trump for this full-throttle shift into martial law, he is not the architect of this police state. He is its most shameless enabler—a useful frontman for the Deep State in its ongoing war on the American people.

As we warn in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, we are sliding fast down a slippery slope to a Constitution-free America.

We ignore these signs at our peril.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/27hd6ywk

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

No One’s Speech Is Safe: Trump’s Deportation Machine Targets Dissenting Voices

Posted: May 2, 2025 in Uncategorized
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BURLINGTON, Vt. — Warning that the U.S. government is weaponizing immigration enforcement to punish political dissent, The Rutherford Institute has joined a coalition of civil liberties organizations in challenging the arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University PhD student whose only alleged offense was expressing support for Palestinian civilians during a time of heightened international conflict.

In a joint amicus brief filed before the U.S. District Court for the District of Vermont in Öztürk v. Trump, the coalition—including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the National Coalition Against Censorship, PEN America, Cato Institute, First Amendment Lawyers Association, and The Rutherford Institute—argues that Öztürk’s arrest by federal agents and the attempt to deport her represent a dangerous abuse of power rooted in viewpoint discrimination and retaliation against protected political speech.

“This is not about public safety. This is about silencing dissent,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “If the government can silence, detain, and deport individuals simply for speaking out on political issues, then no one’s speech is truly safe and we’re no longer operating under a Constitution. We’re living under a system of political policing.”

Öztürk, a Turkish national lawfully present in the U.S. on a student visa, is pursuing a doctorate in the Child Study and Human Development program at Tufts University. She was seized on the street near her apartment on March 25, 2025, by masked, plainclothes agents who grabbed her as she screamed, handcuffed her, and took her away in an unmarked vehicle. Unbeknownst to Öztürk, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had revoked her visa, apparently in response to an op-ed she co-wrote a year earlier in which she criticized her university’s administration for dismissing student government resolutions which aimed to hold Israel accountable for alleged violations of international law in Palestine—views that diverge sharply from the Trump Administration’s. She was detained without warning and transferred more than 1,500 miles away from her home in Massachusetts to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center.

According to the brief, there are no allegations that Öztürk engaged in violence or illegal activity. The coalition contends that the government’s effort to suppress disfavored political views is flatly prohibited by the Constitution. Moreover, the government’s actions set a dangerous precedent in which political speech can be treated as evidence of threat or disloyalty. This, the coalition warns, opens the door for officials to selectively punish individuals based on the content and viewpoint of their expression. The implications reach far beyond Öztürk’s case. Since returning to office in 2025, the Trump Administration has increasingly targeted immigrants and legal visa holders for arrest, deportation, or visa revocation based solely on their political expression. In one case, a legal aid attorney had her visa canceled after attending a peaceful protest. In another, a university lecturer was denied re-entry to the U.S. over critical social media posts. Such tactics, the coalition contends, create a sweeping chilling effect—not only for immigrants, but for anyone who dares to speak out against government policy.

Ronnie London, Conor Fitzpatrick, Colin McDonell, Will Creeley, and others at FIRE advanced the arguments in the Ozturk v. Trump amicus brief.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/3ne6t5rw

Home Invasions on the Rise: Constitution-Free Policing in Trump’s America

Posted: May 1, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mvycd267

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

How a President Becomes a Dictator: By Executive Order

Posted: April 24, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.” — Ayn Rand

130 executive orders in under 100 days.

Sweeping powers claimed in the name of “security” and “efficiency.”

One president acting as lawmaker, enforcer, and judge.

No debate. No oversight. No limits.

This is how the Constitution dies—not with a coup, but with a pen.

The Unitary Executive Theory is no longer a theory—it’s the architecture of a dictatorship in motion.

Where past presidents have used executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements to circumvent Congress or sidestep the rule of law, President Trump is using executive orders to advance his “unitary executive theory” of governance, which is a thinly disguised excuse for a government by fiat.

In other words, these executive orders are the mechanism by which we finally arrive at a full-blown dictatorship.

America’s founders established a system of checks and balances to prevent the concentration of power in any single branch. To this end, the Constitution establishes three separate but equal branches of government: the legislative branch, which makes the law; the executive branch, which enforces the law; and the judicial branch, which interprets the law.

And yet, despite this carefully balanced structure, we now find ourselves in a place the founders warned against.

Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat, the president has no unilateral authority to operate outside the Constitution’s system of checks and balances—no matter how urgent the crisis or how well-meaning the intentions.

This is what government by fiat looks like.

Where Congress was once the nation’s lawmaking body, its role is now being eclipsed by a deluge of executive directives—each one issued without public debate, legislative compromise, or judicial review.

These executive orders aren’t mere administrative housekeeping. They represent a radical shift in how power is exercised in America, bypassing democratic institutions in favor of unilateral command. From trade and immigration to surveillance, speech regulation, and policing, the president is claiming broad powers that traditionally reside with the legislative and judicial branches.

Some orders invoke national security to disrupt global markets. Others attempt to override congressional control over tariffs, fast-track weapons exports, or alter long-standing public protections through regulatory rollbacks. A few go even further—flirting with ideological loyalty tests for citizenship, chilling dissent through financial coercion, and expanding surveillance in ways that undermine due process and privacy.

Yet here’s where these actions run into constitutional peril: they redefine executive authority in ways that bypass the checks and balances enshrined in the Constitution. They centralize decision-making in the White House, sideline the legislative process, and reduce the judiciary to an afterthought—if not an outright obstacle.

Each of these directives, taken individually, might seem technocratic or temporary. But taken together, they reveal the architecture of a parallel legal order—one in which the president acts as lawmaker, enforcer, and judge. That is not how a constitutional republic operates. That is how a dictatorship begins.

Each of these orders marks another breach in the constitutional levee, eroding the rule of law and centralizing unchecked authority in the executive.

This is not merely policy by another name—it is the construction of a parallel legal order, where the president acts as lawmaker, enforcer, and judge—the very state of tyranny our founders sought to prevent.

This legal theory—the so-called Unitary Executive—is not new. But under this administration, it has metastasized into something far more dangerous: a doctrine of presidential infallibility.

What began as a constitutional interpretation that the president controls the executive branch has morphed into an ideological justification for unchecked power.

Under this theory, all executive agencies, decisions, and even enforcement priorities bend entirely to the will of the president—obliterating the idea of an independent bureaucracy or impartial governance.

The result? An imperial presidency cloaked in legalism.

Historically, every creeping dictatorship has followed this pattern: first, undermine the legislative process; then, centralize enforcement powers; finally, subjugate the judiciary or render it irrelevant. America is following that roadmap, one executive order at a time.

Even Supreme Court justices and legal scholars who once defended broad executive authority are beginning to voice concern.

Yet the real danger of the Unitary Executive Theory is not simply that it concentrates power in the hands of the president—it’s that it does so by ignoring the rest of the Constitution.

Respect for the Constitution means obeying it even when it’s inconvenient to do so.

We’re watching the collapse of constitutional constraints not through tanks in the streets, but through policy memos drafted in the West Wing.

No matter how well-meaning the politicians make these encroachments on our rights appear, in the right (or wrong) hands, benevolent plans can easily be put to malevolent purposes. Even the most principled policies can be twisted to serve illegitimate ends once power and profit enter the equation.

The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

We are approaching critical mass.

The groundwork has been laid for a new kind of government where it doesn’t matter if you’re innocent or guilty, whether you’re a threat to the nation, or even if you’re a citizen.

What will matter is what the government—or whoever happens to be calling the shots at the time—thinks. And if the powers-that-be think you’re a threat to the nation and should be locked up, then you’ll be locked up with no access to the protections our Constitution provides.

In effect, you will disappear.

Our freedoms are already being made to disappear.

This is how tyranny arrives: not with a constitutional amendment, but with a series of executive orders; not with a military coup, but with a legal memo; not with martial law, but with bureaucratic obedience and public indifference.

A government that rules by fiat, outside of constitutional checks and balances, is not a republic. It is a dictatorship in everything but name.

If freedom is to survive this constitutional crisis, We the People must reclaim our role as the ultimate check on government power.

That means holding every branch of government accountable to the rule of law. It means demanding that Congress do its job—not merely as a rubber stamp or partisan enabler, but as a coequal branch with the courage to rein in executive abuses.

It means insisting that the courts serve justice, not politics.

And it means refusing to normalize rule by decree, no matter who sits in the Oval Office.

There is no freedom without limits on power.

There is no Constitution if it can be ignored by those who swear to uphold it.

The presidency was never meant to be a throne. The Constitution was never meant to be optional. And the people were never meant to be silent.

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 time to speak out is now.

As our revolutionary forefathers learned the hard way, once freedom is lost, it is rarely regained without a fight.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mr2hvf3h

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. 

Refugee. Dissident. Enemy of the State. Would ICE Have Crucified Jesus?

Posted: April 16, 2025 in Uncategorized
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“Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places [like the CECOT prison]. It’s not big enough.”—President Trump on his desire to send American citizens to a megaprison in El Salvador, beyond the reach of U.S. courts and the Constitution

It has begun, just as we predicted, justified in the name of national security.

Mass roundups. Raids. Indefinite detentions in concentration camps. Martial law. The erosion of habeas corpus protections. The suspension of the Constitution, at least for select segments of the population. A hierarchy of rights, contingent on whether you belong to a favored political class.

This is what it looks like when the government makes itself the arbiter of who is deserving of rights and who isn’t.

Here is what we know: one segment of the population at a time, the Trump Administration is systematically and without due process attempting to cleanse the country of what it perceives to be “undesirables” as part of its purported effort to make America great again.

This is how men, women and children are being made to disappear, snatched up off the streets by press-gangs of plainclothes, masked government agents impersonating street thugs.

Presently, these so-called “undesirables” include both undocumented and legal immigrants—many labeled terrorists despite having no criminal record, no court hearing, and no due process—before being extradited to a foreign concentration camp in an effort to sidestep judicial oversight.

By including a handful of known members of a vicious gang among those being rounded up, the government is attempting to whitewash the public into believing that everyone being targeted is, in fact, a terrorist.

In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints, characteristics and behaviors that could be considered “dangerous.”

Thus, without proof, a sheet metal worker has been labeled a terrorist. A musician has been labeled a terrorist. A makeup artist has been labeled a terrorist. A cellular biologist has been labeled a terrorist. A soccer player has been labeled a terrorist. A food delivery driver has been labeled a terrorist.

Unfortunately, the government’s attempts to dehumanize and strip individuals of their inalienable rights under the Constitution by labeling them criminals and “terrorists” is just the beginning of the dangerous game that is afoot.

It’s only a matter of time before American citizens who refuse to march in lockstep with the government’s dictates are classified as terrorists, denied basic rights, and extradited to a foreign prison.

That time is drawing closer.

Indeed, Trump has repeatedly spoken of his desire to be able to send American citizens—whom he refers to as “homegrowns,” as in homegrown terrorists—on a one-way trip to El Salvador’s mega-prison, where conditions are so brutal that officials brag the only way out is in a coffin. His administration is currently trying to find a way to accomplish that very objective.

We’re not quite there yet, but it’s coming.

What we are witnessing is history repeating itself in real-time: the widening net that ensnares us all. In other words, it’s only a matter of time before anyone who is not fully compliant gets labeled a terrorist.

A prime example of how the government casting its net in ever-widening circles can be seen in the government’s sudden decision to target academics in the U.S. on work and student visas who have been critical of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 50,000 people (nearly a third of them under the age of 18), as threats to national security.

Given Trump’s eagerness to take ownership of the Gaza strip in order to colonize it, build resorts and turn it into “the Riviera of the Middle East”—at taxpayer expense—it should come as no surprise that the Trump Administration is attempting to muzzle any activities that might stir up sympathy for the Palestinians.

Thus, the government is classifying any criticism of Israel as antisemitic and equating it with terrorism.

Under such a broad definition, Jesus himself would be considered antisemitic.

So you can add antisemitic to the list of viewpoints that could have one classified as a terrorist, rounded up by ICE, stripped of the fundamental rights to due process and a day in court, and made to disappear into a detention center.

Mind you, the government isn’t just targeting protest activities and expression that might have crossed over into civil disobedience. It’s also preemptively targeting individuals who have committed no crimes but whose views might at some point in the future run counter to the government’s self-serving interests.

This is precrime taken to a whole new level: targeting thoughts, i.e., thought crime.

The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American with an opinion about the government or who knows someone with an opinion about the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

As German pastor Martin Niemöller lamented:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

You see how this works?

Let’s not mince words about what’s happening here: under the guise of fighting terrorism, the U.S. government is not just making people disappear—it is making the Constitution disappear.

When rights become privileges, the Constitution—and the rule of law—becomes optional.

We are almost at that point already.

Trump’s list of “the enemies from within” is growing in leaps and bounds.

The list of individuals and groups being classified as anti-American gets bigger by the day: Immigrants, both legal and undocumented. Immigration attorneys. Judges. Lawyers. Law firms. Doctors. Scientists. Students. Universities. Nonprofits.

Given what we know about the government and its expansive definition of what constitutes a threat to its power, any one of us who dare to speak truth to power could be targeted next as an enemy of the state.

Certainly, it is easy to remain silent in the face of evil.

What is harder—what we lack today and so desperately need—are those with moral courage who will risk their freedoms and lives in order to speak out against evil in its many forms.

Throughout history, individuals or groups of individuals have risen up to challenge the injustices of their age. Nazi Germany had its Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The gulags of the Soviet Union were challenged by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. America had its color-coded system of racial segregation and warmongering called out for what it was, blatant discrimination and profiteering, by Martin Luther King Jr.

And then there was Jesus Christ who not only died challenging the police state of his day but provided a blueprint for civil disobedience that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.

It makes you wonder how Jesus—a Palestinian refugee, a radical, and a revolutionary—would have fared in the American police state under a Trump regime.

Would Jesus—who spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—have been snatched up in the dead of night, stripped of any real due process, made to disappear into a detention center, and handed a death sentence when he was delivered into a prison where the only way out is in a wooden box?

Consider that the charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious.

Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.”

After Jesus was formally condemned by Pilate, he was sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.”  The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry.

This radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, is not the politically mute, humble and obedient one whom Trump praised in his presidential proclamation.

Almost 2,000 years after Jesus was crucified by the police state of his age, we find ourselves confronted by a painful irony: that in the same week commemorating the death and resurrection of Jesus, a Palestinian refugee who was killed by the police state for speaking truth to power, the U.S. government is prosecuting Palestinian refugees who are daring to challenge another modern-day police state’s injustices, while threatening to impose widespread martial law on the country to put down any future rebellions.

President Trump has hinted that he could invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would allow the president to use the military on American soil.

This would in effect be a declaration of martial law.

Trump has already authorized the military to take control of the southern border, which puts parts of the domestic United States under martial law.

What comes next?

Trump has long speculated about using his presidential powers under the Insurrection Act to direct the military to deal with his perceived political opponents, whom he likens to “the enemy from within.”

As Austin Sarat writes for Salon: “The president alone gets to decide what constitutes an ‘insurrection,’ ‘rebellion,’ or ‘domestic violence.’ And once troops are deployed, it will not be easy to get them off the streets in any place that the president thinks is threatened by ‘radical left lunatics.’”

So where do we go from here?

History offers some clues.

Exactly 250 years ago, on April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began with a “shot heard round the world.” It wasn’t sparked by acts of terrorism or rebellion—it was triggered by a government that had grown deaf to the cries of its people.

What we don’t need is violence in any form—by the people or their government.

What we do need is a revival of moral courage.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we are desperately overdue for a reminder to our government: this is still our country.

Or, as Thomas Paine so powerfully put it: “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.”

Source: https://tinyurl.com/79x5nwbe

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

Publication Guidelines / Reprint Permission

John W. Whitehead’s weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge.

Retaliation by Executive Order: Trump Targets More Law Firms for Blacklisting

Posted: April 15, 2025 in Uncategorized
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — A broad coalition of legal and civil liberties organizations is once again challenging President Trump’s use of executive orders to retaliate against law firms that he perceives as political opponents, suppress opposition and chill lawful First Amendment activity.

The coalition, which includes the ACLU, ACLU of DC, CATO, Electronic Frontier Foundation, FIRE, the Institute for Justice, the Knight First Amendment Institute, the National Coalition Against Censorship, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, the Society for the Rule of Law, and The Rutherford Institute, filed two more amicus briefs (Jenner & Block and WilmerHale) asking a federal court to strike down as illegal and unconstitutional the president’s executive orders targeting the law firms of Jenner & Block and WilmerHale. The coalition filed a similar amicus brief in Perkins Coie LLP v. U.S. Department of Justice challenging the president’s executive order as a violation of the separation of powers and an unconstitutional infringement on the rights to free speech, advocacy and due process.

“That President Trump is weaponizing the government in order to wage a war against dissent, against due process, and against the very foundations of our constitutional republic should be a warning to all Americans,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “History shows that when governments claim the power to silence dissent—whether in the name of national security, border protection, or law and order—that power rarely remains limited. These threats against the legal community are just the beginning.”

In an effort to punish a number of major law firms and discourage others from challenging the Trump Administration’s ongoing efforts to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump issued Executive Orders directing the federal government to suspend the firms’ security clearances, cease providing all goods and services, terminate any contracts with the firms and those who do business with them, limit the firms’ access to federal buildings and employees, and refrain from hiring employees of the firms. The intent behind the president’s actions, per former advisor Steve Bannon, is to “put those law firms out of business” in response to the firms using the system of checks and balances to prevent the Administration from violating the Constitution.

Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale each challenged Trump’s Orders on grounds that they violate the separation of powers and the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments. Warning that Trump’s actions constitute a brazen attack on the independence of the legal profession and the judicial branch, the legal coalition’s amicus briefs in support of the law firms argue that Trump’s Executive Orders not only infringe the First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and petitioning the government, but also essentially give the government an unfettered veto over a person’s right to choice of counsel due to the government pushing for a cancel culture and creating a blacklist of firms, similar to what the NRA previously claimed was done to it by a New York state official. Moreover, if the executive orders are allowed to stand, they could set a precedent for future Administrations of either political party to suppress challenges to a president’s unconstitutional policies and actions and to deter lawyers from representing the president’s political opponents or any clients adverse to the Administration.

Cecillia D. Wang, Ben Wizner, Brian Hauss, and Arthur B. Spitzer at ACLU advanced the arguments in the Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block and WilmerHale amicus briefs.

The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties organization, defends individuals whose constitutional rights have been threatened or violated and educates the public on a wide spectrum of issues affecting their freedoms.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yc4ha5bh

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