Amsterdam      Yes, the harm from Trump’s petulant barrage of tariffs is very bad.  Yes, snatching people with valid visas off the streets seems other worldly, and absolutely not the America we knew and loved.  Yes, mass deportations without rhyme or reason to heinous prisons in El Salvador are outrageous, including the play-pretend of administration powerlessness.  The list seems endless, but the overall theme in one instance after another is that the current administration recognizes absolutely no limits to the ruthless exercise of state power.

I can remember a lawsuit we filed against the IRS to try to force them in the late 1970s to contact the few federal tax filers who admitted on their returns that they were paying a household worker or domestic staffer.  We wanted them to notify these people, small in number to the ones who followed the main course of simply never admitting they paid household workers, that they now had to pay their staff the federal minimum wage that for the first time included domestic workers.  It took forever.  They finally settled on the claim that they would do so, but of course besides their word, we would never know.  Now, the IRS is letting ICE, the immigration and customs enforcement folks in the door.

the deal agreed upon by the two agencies is that the IRS will only share information about undocumented immigrants who are already facing deportation orders or are under criminal investigation, including the crime of failing to leave the country, but many are wondering about the legality of it all.

Despite one resignation after another in the Social Security Administration, all of this highly confidential information is also being weaponized against immigrants, especially those that have legally acquired social security numbers.

the administration [is]pressuring some immigrants and others who had legal status to “self-deport” by effectively canceling the Social Security numbers they had lawfully obtained. The goal is to cut those people off from using crucial financial services like bank accounts and credit cards, along with their access to government benefits.

Essentially, the US government, using state power, is now trying to starve people out of the country, who are legally here.

Before founding ACORN fifty-five years ago, I was an organizer for the National Welfare Rights Organization.  Organizing in Massachusetts, I would hear stories of the intrusions of social workers into private homes looking for boyfriends and other supposed violations, which eventually were blocked by the Supreme Court, as essentially a warrantless search.  Now, there are once again no limits, including using the FBI,

The Department of Homeland Security has enlisted the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in recent weeks to conduct welfare checks on children and young people who came to the United States without their parents.

Health information is confidential under HPIAA privacy rules, but Robert Kennedy, Jr. now our unlikely health czar, is threatening to potentially deny health care to people who smoke or eat too many donuts, though I’m not sure how many cigarettes or donuts become your double death sentence.  Such a program is only possible if there is no confidentiality and no walls between the state power and individual health information.

There are no limits to what the administration and the president are willing to do to go after his enemies, to take control of universities, to eliminate security from disliked officials, to punish law firms, or to try to reshape and rewrite history.  All of the firewalls are coming down.

There seem to be no limits.  Some might say, hey, it’s about immigrants, but when the justifications are sometimes wartime laws from the 1800s or the 1940s, claims about terrorists, or diseases, or enemies in the thinnest of rationales, any claims to a right to privacy or confidentiality in America are gone. The courts are not protecting us.  Forget about that.

Wake up, Americans.  Precedents are being set.  Don’t kid yourself.  Immigrants now and people on the Trump revenge tour today, but it could be all of us or any of us tomorrow.  We have to put a stop to this now, before it’s too late.