This spring, we editorialized against the US government’s attempts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a legal resident targeted for his political speech (“A disappeared activist,” May). Khalil’s case is ongoing. Yet mere months later, parts of that editorial—“Democracies don’t disappear people for thought crimes,” we wrote, “not even when they say them out loud”—sound almost quaint.
This fall, federal agents descended on American neighborhoods armed with zip ties, riot control weapons, and blatant racial profiling. Presumably they work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, though their plain clothes and masked faces can make it hard to be sure. Without warrants or probable cause, they have been conducting raids and mass arrests of people of all immigration statuses, including US citizens; when they encounter peaceful protests, they routinely respond with wildly disproportionate force (see “DHS is lying about us”). And they’re openly targeting people who are not White.
Like Khalil’s detention, this is anti-democratic. It’s also a dramatic escalation—enough so that it’s increasingly difficult to maintain that the United States is even a democracy anymore. We have entered an era of what political scientists call a hybrid regime: part democracy, part autocracy.
