“We see you”, “We know where you live”, “We have your license plate” These aren’t quotes from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. No, these were comments from anonymous, masked, Immigration officers towards peaceful protesters for their involvement in an act of civil disobedience in the Frederick, MD neighborhood of Taskers Chance. An incident which involved a 40 hour siege and attacks on protesters with batons; where no judicial warrant had been authorized and no-one was ultimately arrested by immigration officials.
We’ve witnessed this before. In Minnesota, Chicago, Los Angeles, and many many other communities across this country. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly normalized. Masked federal agents beating protesters with clubs, spraying them in the face with chemical weapons, illegally spying on them and orchestrating a campaign of terror and cruelty on communities all across America - only to then falsely cite the very violence they perpetrate against them as the pretext they need to justify their ever-expanding police powers. To view the events in Frederick as an accident or as an isolated abuse of power by a rogue agency is to completely misread the moment we are living in. To borrow a phrase from political author Adam Serwer, “the Cruelty is the point.” What occurred in Taskers Chance wasn’t an accident, it is one data point in a highly calculated strategy by the Department of Homeland Security and ICE: Namely, the steady, legalistic erosion of constitutional rights under the guise of national security and immigration enforcement.
Robert Paxton and Legalistic Fascism
In his foundational work, “the Anatomy of Fascism”, political scientist Robert Paxton outlined how fascism rarely arrives via a sudden, chaotic coup. Instead, it takes root through an infiltration of an existing institutional framework. One of its most dangerous phases he points to is the weaponization of the legal system—using statutory authority, executive mandates, and administrative loopholes to systematically strip away civil liberties while maintaining a veneer of legality.
When ICE agents refuse to meet the basic legal requirements expected of local law enforcement regarding the production of a judicial warrant—an established restriction on police powers designed to force conformity to the Fourth Amendment’s protection against illegal searches and seizures—they are not acting outside the system. Nor are they acting merely as a rogue, lawless, and untrained police force - though evidence supports these characterizations. They are exploiting a parallel system of unchecked administrative power. By using administrative warrants to bypass the Fourth Amendment, federal immigration enforcement demonstrates how the state can legally shield itself from accountability, transforming residential neighborhoods into zones of military-style occupation.
A crucial tool giving rise to this legalistic corrosion of civil liberties stems from the weaponization of Federal code, 18 U.S.C. § 111, a statute which is ostensibly designed to protect federal officers from assault or impedance. In reality, under the purposefully broad and ambiguous interpretation of “impeding” or “interfering” with a federal agent, the law itself becomes a tool for political repression and state-sponsored violence. When a community member demands to see a judicial warrant, links arms and passively forms a human chain, or films agents to document abuses, their peaceful exercise of constitutional rights can be legally reclassified as a federal felony - creating a permission structure for state sponsored violence. Recent investigative reports from The New York Times corroborate this practice, highlighting how such tactics have become increasingly commonplace within the agency.
While this represents a clear connection to the writings of Robert Paxton, this stark warning about the rise of fascism is shared by many scholars specializing in the study of authoritarianism. In fact, in June of 2025, over 400 intellectuals, historians and experts on fascism - including Jason Stanley and Ruth Ben-Ghiat - signed a letter warning the public about this precise trend.
The shifting Overton Window
The violence in Frederick does not exist in a vacuum. It is a single data point in a broader fascist playbook designed to shift the Overton window—the boundary of what the public accepts as normal governmental behavior. This normalization relies on a series of interlocking mechanisms that slowly condition society to accept absolute executive control:
Palingenetic Ultranationalism and the “threat from within”: By promoting fear of “the other” and promising a return of a mythic past (e.g., Make America Great Again), the fascist state convinces the public of their need to make carve-outs exempting immigrants, minorities, and different ideologies (Islam) from the constitutional protections afforded to all of us, manufacturing consent to become a weapon against our neighbors.
Masked Raids & Mass Deportation: Deploying unidentified, poorly trained and wholly unaccountable tactical federal forces into domestic communities desensitizes the public to high-visibility militarization, transforming local neighborhoods into active enforcement theaters, creating an environment of fear.
Institutional protection and qualified immunity: Documented abuses of power get laundered into standard business practice and use of force qualifications by the state. This might be most prominently seen through the public statements from Kristi Noam and Gregory Bovino in the immediate aftermath of the Alex Pretti and Renee Good killings, and in the effort to circle the wagons around their officers and block local and state investigators after the fact.
Concentration Camps & Detention Infrastructure: The expansion of mass detention facilities relies on arbitrary legal designations to strip individuals of due process, establishing a precedent that human rights are conditional rather than inherent.
Flock Cameras & Total Surveillance: The integration of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and mass surveillance networks removes the expectation of privacy in public spaces, creating a permanent dragnet that tracks dissent and movement alike.
NSPM-7: The activation of National Security Presidential Memo-7 establishes a framework that explicitly labels political dissent, mutual aid, and anti-fascist community organizing as national security threats. By targeting the civil society networks and non-profits that defend marginalized groups, it criminalizes the exact type of community defense seen in Frederick.
“Election Security” Safeguards: Policies enacted under the guise of protecting the ballot box frequently serve as tools to restrict voting rights, purge registration rolls, and justify federal interference in local elections. Plans to execute these policies using the very same authoritarian measures creates confusion and a chilling effect around our democratic process.
The Frog in the Pot
Just as Hitler once famously suggested he would “use the constitution to destroy the constitution…”, each of the above tactics are intentionally designed to fit within a fascist legal framework, whereby the state is shielded from any immediate judicial restriction or injunction, while fundamentally undermining the spirit of the Constitution the system itself is based upon. By incrementally advancing these policies, the federal government alters the baseline of acceptable state power.
The 40-hour siege of Taskers Chance wasn’t simply an example of “bad immigration enforcement”, it was yet another test on the guardrails of democracy. It tested how far federal agents could go in terrorizing a community, threatening local citizens, and dismissing local police forces before facing structural pushback. If the public accepts the premise that “national security” and “immigration enforcement” demands the suspension of basic rights for one group of people, this very same legalistic framework will serve as a glide path to the suspension of those rights for everyone else. Fascism does not break the law; it rewrites it until the law itself becomes an instrument of terror and authoritarianism.
"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." By: Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller who was a German theologian and Lutheran pastor. He opposed the Nazi regime during the late 1930s, and was sent to a concentration camp