Throughout History Tyrants Have Targeted Their Political Opponents—Señor TACO Has Started Doing That

How Long Before Trump Starts Imprisoning Democrats For Real?

Former New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez (D) is already begging Trump for a pardon... and the door to his prison cell only just slammed shut Tuesday morning. As crooked as they come, the 71 year old bribe taker— now known as No. 67277-050 at Federal Correctional Institution Schuylkill in Minersville, Pennsylvania— was sentenced to 11 years. I was overjoyed to see him sentenced and even happier to learn he had been locked up. I’m equally happy to know that crackpot Brazilian drag queen George Santos (R-NY) will start serving his 7 year sentence next month (July 25). Presumably Trump will pardon both of them after short, humiliating stints. Too bad.

Other sitting members of Congress who have been convicted and served at least some time in prison are

• James Traficant (D-OH)- sentenced to 8 years; served 7 

• William Jefferson (D-LA)- sentenced to 13 years; served 5 

• Rick Renzi (R-AZ)- sentenced to 3 years; served 2.5

• Michael Grimm (R-NY)- sentenced to 8 months; served 7

• Chaka Fattah (D-PA)- sentenced to 10 years; served 4

• Corrine Brown (D-FL)- sentenced to 5 years; served 3

• Stephen Stockman (R-TX)- sentenced to 10 years; served 2

• Chris Collins (R-NY)- sentenced to 2 years; pardoned by Trump after 2

• Duncan Hunter (R-CA)- sentenced to 11 months; pardoned by Trump after 1

None of them were charged because of political persecution, although they all claimed as much. All were criminals using their offices for self-enrichment. None are currently in prison. Two others, Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) and Trey Radel (R-FL), were sentenced to probation and served no prison time at all. That pissed me off. I believe that because officials are in positions of trust and power, they should get much harsher sentences and treatment than an ordinary schlub. Instead, they almost always get off more easily.

That said, I never doubted for a moment that Trump would do what all authoritarians do— lock up his political opponents on trumped up charges. He is slowly joining the ranks of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, Mao, Putin, Kim il-Sung, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi and others who locked up— and in some cases murdered— political opponents. It's how fascists and other dictators who identify the state with their own self— the way Trump does— handle opposition.

Locking up political opponents is very unpopular in the U.S.. But Trump is exploring what he can get away with. An Ipsos poll from April was already showing that only 31% of voters supported the way he was handling political opponents, basically just hardcore MAGAts. Since then his behavior has gotten much worse.

Senator Padilla (D-CA)

Yesterday, Jonathan Blitzer reported more about his and his allies’ crackdown on elected officials. After Senator Alex Padilla was wrestled to the ground by Trumpist thugs, handcuffed and (briefly) arrested, though neither charged nor booked, Blitzer noted that “the arrest of a U.S. senator in Los Angeles was the latest incident in a pattern of increasingly aggressive actions that the Administration has taken against elected Democrats and their allies. Each instance has been tied to Trump’s immigration crackdown. In late April, the FBI arrested and charged a Wisconsin county judge, Hannah Dugan, for allegedly aiding an undocumented immigrant in evading ICE officers at a local courthouse. (She has pleaded not guilty.) On May 9th, ICE agents arrested the mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, and LaMonica McIver, a U.S. congresswoman, outside an immigration jail in New Jersey. Baraka, who was accused of trespassing on private property, was held for five hours before being released; the charges were dropped, and, a few weeks later, Baraka filed a defamation lawsuit against Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal lawyer and the interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. (The suit cites a stream of misleading claims that Habba had posted on social media about Baraka’s actions, saying, among other things, that ‘he has willingly chosen to disregard the law.’) McIver was charged with assaulting a federal officer in the chaos surrounding Baraka’s arrest, and indicted on June 10th. ‘The charges against me are purely political,’ McIver has said. ‘They mischaracterize and distort my actions.’ If convicted, she faces up to eight years in prison. On May 28th, D.H.S. agents barged into the New York City office of the veteran Democratic U.S. Congressman Jerrold Nadler in pursuit of alleged rioters who had protested while ICE officers arrested immigrants outside a courtroom. Moments after the agents reached the door, they handcuffed a staffer, claiming that, when they had demanded entry without a warrant, she had physically impeded them. On June 17th, less than a week after Padilla’s arrest, ICE agents tackled and handcuffed Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and a candidate for mayor, as he accompanied a person outside an immigration court. ‘You’re obstructing,’ an agent told him, according to a recording. Lander, as he was being cuffed near an elevator, replied, ‘I’m not obstructing. I’m standing right here in the hallway.’ DHS later charged him with ‘assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer.’”

The incidents involving lawmakers all have something in common: in each case, video evidence directly contradicted or undermined the Administration’s account of what happened. The charges against Representative McIver are without question the most serious. Yet she and two other representatives— Rob Menendez and Bonnie Watson Coleman, both New Jersey Democrats— travelled to the facility on May 9th to exercise an uncontroversial prerogative: Members of Congress are allowed to visit and inspect immigration-detention facilities, unannounced, as part of their oversight role. The practice has become fairly common in recent years. The facility in Newark, called Delaney Hall, opened the first week of May, a few months after DHS signed a $1.2-billion contract with the private-prison company GEO to operate it. Baraka, who at the time was running for governor, had objected to the contract and raised questions about aspects of the building permit. When he had tried to visit the facility in the past, GEO employees turned him away.

…Robert Gottheim, Nadler’s chief of staff, was stunned by the government’s inflated descriptions of its confrontations with public officials. “You exercise your rights. They do what they want. Then you figure it out after the fact,” he said. The immigration court in Manhattan is on the fifth floor of the federal building at 201 Varick Street; Nadler’s office is on the sixth floor. On the afternoon of May 28th, ice officers had shown up on the fifth floor with photos of immigrants who were scheduled to appear in court. As the Administration has intensified its arrest operations at courthouses and at routine check-in appointments at ice offices, demonstrators and clergy have shown up to document the activity. Two members of Nadler’s staff had gone downstairs to observe and, when tensions flared, invited the activists upstairs to defuse the situation. Officers from the Federal Protective Service, a D.H.S. agency that guards government property and personnel, followed them to Nadler’s office.

The initial video of the encounter, shot on a witness’s phone and obtained by Gothamist, opens with the sounds of Nadler’s staffer sobbing as an officer cuffs her hands behind her back. “She pushed him back,” another officer says. Someone off camera says, “No, she did not. That is not what happened.” Nadler’s office later released additional security footage that shows more of the exchange. Two officers enter the outer vestibule of Nadler’s office, while a third, with a dog, stands by the door. There’s no sound on the video, but Nadler’s staffer appears to have a conversation with the two officers before walking over to an interior door leading into the office that requires a code to open. As soon as she punches it in, one of the officers grabs her.

The government initially threatened to charge the staffer with assaulting a federal officer. Gottheim was in Italy with his family at the time. He received a call from a ranking officer at the Federal Protective Service, who told him that a staffer had committed an assault. Gottheim said, “Where? In our office?” According to Gottheim, the officer then said that he could charge her with disorderly conduct instead. “I said, ‘You’re going to give her disorderly conduct while she was in our own office? I need to get the congressman on the phone.” The staffer, who has not been identified, was eventually released without charges. Publicly, D.H.S. claimed to have been investigating rioters on the premises. There was no mention of the alleged assault. “In the beginning, we were not sure what they were going to do,” Gottheim said. “Then they released the statement. It really angered us. It was a total fabrication.” Nadler later said of the Administration, “They’re behaving like fascists.”

The Administration’s political calculus seems aimed at punishing and intimidating Democrats who challenge the President’s agenda. Earlier this week, following a day of nationwide “No Kings” protests, Trump ordered ICE to increase arrests and deportations in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. “ICE Officers are herewith ordered, by notice of this TRUTH, to do all in their power to achieve this very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History,” he wrote on Truth Social. That D.H.S. personnel are unencumbered in targeting Members of Congress marks a further— and unprecedented— escalation. It also capitalizes on the fact that many protections against such retaliation are grounded in norms rather than laws; pushing the boundaries of acceptable political conduct is easier when those lines are inherently blurry. A senior congressional aide told me, “Members themselves have some limited or arguable protections under the Speech and Debate Clause. But a lot of those protections, mostly due to case law over the years, don’t extend to staff and don’t apply when staff or offices are doing immigration casework.” Such outreach generally falls under the category of constituent services, the aide said, “but we have no immunity in any of those situations.” (In a statement, a White House spokesperson said, “It’s alarming Democrats think they can obstruct federal law enforcement, assault ICE agents, or physically push law enforcement officers while charging a cabinet secretary, without consequence – it’s even more alarming that the New Yorker is encouraging this lawless behavior.”)

There are increasingly urgent reasons for congressional oversight of immigration jails, which have always been notorious for their abysmal conditions. Now, with the Administration expanding its enforcement operations in radical new ways, there are fifty-one thousand people in ice custody nationwide. On Friday, four detainees escaped from Delaney Hall, in the midst of rolling protests inside the facility among immigrants who described a persistent lack of food and sweltering heat. “People were desperate, breaking doors, banging on walls,” the wife of one of the escaped detainees told The Times. (A GEO representative said, “There has been no widespread unrest at the facility.”) Last week, as thousands of people marched in the streets of Los Angeles and New York, in response to immigration raids, five members of Congress, in California and New York, were barred from touring detention facilities housing those who had been arrested in the enforcement sweeps. “It’s a direct violation of federal law,” a House aide told me. Since 2019, annual appropriations bills have included a provision explicitly making funding for immigration jails contingent on the ability of congressional appropriators to check on their investment.

There are three months left in the current fiscal year, and, by some estimates, ice is already a billion dollars over budget. Last week, members of the House Appropriations Committee issued a report detailing its concerns. “ICE began spending more than its appropriated level shortly after the fiscal year commenced and operations now far exceed available resources,” the report says. The Trump Administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill, which passed in the House on May 22nd, would increase ice’s funding for enforcement by seventy-five billion dollars. The actions of ice and its partner agencies thus far have been extreme, but this would almost certainly supercharge their operations in the year ahead. One of the more surreal aspects of the Administration’s unapologetic aggression toward members of Congress is that Trump is also demanding their support to expand the very power that’s being used against them.“They’re targeting senators at the same time that these senators are being asked to triple the Administration’s enforcement budget,” Andrea Flores, the vice-president of immigration policy at the nonprofit FWD.us, and a former aide to Democrats in both the White House and the Senate, said. “They’re trying to criminalize legally protected congressional activity. It’s terrifying for any legislator trying to do their job right now.” The White House has called for the bill’s passage by July 4th.