Following five months of incredible cruelty and rapidly solidifying authoritarianism under the second Trump administration, people across the United States are starting to show signs of resistance. Many around the world may be wondering, what took so long?
In Los Angeles, protesters took to the streets peacefully, until they were confronted by a militarised police force and then the actual military. New York City has erupted in protest after witnessing New York City public school children being disappeared into unmarked vans by masked men.
In El Paso, Texas, my hometown on the US-Mexico border, people have also come out to denounce the silent procession of women and children being escorted into white vans by federal agents, in denial of their most basic legal rights.
What began as scattered demonstrations against increasingly hostile roundups of suspected undocumented immigrants by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has grown into a nationwide movement. This comes as the Trump administration has set a quota for ICE to detain 3,000 people per day. And yet, something feels off. Rehearsed. Expected. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the trap closing.
The protests of recent weeks have not surprised the people in power. They were anticipated and provoked.
Trump, the Republican Party, the state and federal agencies now under their sway, and an eager right-wing media ecosystem are not flinching, they are filming. They are gathering content for a campaign narrative, counting on being able to drum up enough outrage and fear to justify the next wave of crackdowns and the suppression of rights.
The imagery of students being arrested with zip ties, flags burning, police cars pelted with rocks, tents being cleared from university lawns will be used not just to animate Trump’s base, but to validate his authority.
This is the oldest authoritarian move in the book: provoke the people, film their resistance, criminalise their passion, and promise to restore “order”. This playbook wasn’t invented by Trump. It was first put into action in the US by Democratic governors and mayors – liberal leaders who deployed riot gear against protesters, cleared encampments, and treated dissent as public disorder.
And it’s working as intended.
Selective rights from both sides of the aisle
In theory, the US constitution guarantees all people, regardless of race or belief, the right to free speech and peaceful protest. But in practice, those rights are applied unevenly.
Trump maintains that anyone who disrespects the American flag or ICE should face jail time. But that threat is not extended to demonstrators waving Israeli or Ukrainian flags – or to politicians on both sides of the aisle who proudly display those flags in their offices. That’s not patriotism; it’s a racialised hierarchy of who is allowed to dissent, and who must be punished for trying.
What makes the situation all the more dangerous is that it predates Trump. The foundations for this moment have been laid by politicians on both sides of the American political spectrum who have painted some protests as legitimate democratic expression and others as national threats.
The most recent and glaring example of this is the way that protests in support of Palestine have been deemed dangerous, hostile, and anti-semitic by both Democrat and Republican politicians who have supported the use of force by police to bring them to heel, even in some of the most prestigious university campuses. It’s a short journey from there to Trump now calling in the National Guard and the Marines to suppress anti-ICE protests.
Amid Trump’s authoritarian theatrics, what is not being discussed is the fact that his election rival, Kamala Harris, promised to be tougher on the border than him. Or that Barack Obama deported more than three million people during his two terms in office. Basically, both of America’s two dominant political parties set the wheels in motion for this long ago.
A global colonialism
It’s no wonder, then, that many Americans are feeling defeated. Worn down. Disillusioned. How do we begin to pull ourselves out of this moment? Perhaps part of the answer is by beginning to shift our perspective from a narrow national frame to a global one.
This is not just about Trump, although he is central. Voter suppression, court-packing, culture war hysteria, militarised policing is part of a global pattern. From Hungary to India to Israel to the US, democratically elected leaders are increasingly governing like kings.
In all of these cases, colonial structures (borders, citizenship regimes, racial hierarchies) continue to define who deserves protection and who can be erased.
In Pakistan, millions of Afghans who have been in the country for decades are being driven out and back into a Taliban-controlled homeland many have never seen. In Iran, critics of the Islamic Republic are making racist claims that Shi’a Afghans are being brought in to change the voting demographics of the country. In Türkiye, similar claims are being made about Afghans and Syrians being used to bolster support for President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
In Latin America, the US has found allies like President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, who has ramped up the incarceration and deportation of migrants with no criminal records, often accusing them, without evidence, of ties to organised crime, particularly the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
For years, EU countries have also been militarising their borders, stripping away asylum rights, and sending money to support security forces in neighbouring countries, despite well-documented cases of abuse, to clamp down on migration. In many ways, the EU is also gearing up to try to carry out its own campaign of mass deportations.
None of this is all that dissimilar to the policies of Trump and his ilk in the US. In all of these cases, colonial structures (borders, citizenship regimes, racial hierarchies) continue to define who deserves protection and who can be erased.
Don’t let peace simply be order with fear
Around the world, people have lived through decades of authoritarian rule, many supported or propped up into power by former US administrations. Others are just beginning to feel that shift now. Either way, we are not alone. We have communities across borders, languages, and continents who have wisdom, resistance strategies, and solidarity to offer. We must reach out, learn, and build together.
What’s happening in our cities, in our courts, and in our schools is not isolated, it’s global. But our response must begin with truth. With care. With resistance that is grounded in clarity, not chaos. Grounded in relationships with our neighbours, the people we see every day and can impact beyond the headlines and social media feeds.
I’m reminded of the words of Kwame Ture, formerly Stokely Carmichael, a global Black liberation leader and one of the most influential voices of the US civil rights and Pan-African movements. Ture drew a clear distinction: “Peace is the white man’s word,” he said. “Liberation is our word.”
That line cuts to the heart of our moment. “Peace”, as it’s being invoked now, is not the absence of violence, it’s the presence of order maintained through fear. It’s the quiet that follows the vanishing of your neighbour. It’s a silence that coexists comfortably with cages, with courtrooms that serve as traps, with a public too afraid or too exhausted to speak.
What the protesters are demanding is not peace. It’s liberation. But to achieve that, we have to learn from those who have tread this path before us, both inside and outside of the US.
The trap that is being laid is real. The repression is real. And if we fall into it blindly, we may not be able to climb out again for we may have already torn apart the fabric that holds our communities together. But if we look outward, and link arms across struggles, we just might weave something stronger in its place.
Edited by Ali M. Latifi and Eric Reidy.
