A Mother, a Child and Niemöller’s Warning
Sid Shniad
Charlie Angus / The Resistance
Apr 1
News reports tell us of Canadian Tania Warner, age 47, being held in a Texas ICE detention centre with her seven-year-old autistic daughter.
She was stopped in an arbitrary traffic search while returning from a baby shower. Tania is married to an American and believed her papers were in order.
It didn’t matter. They took her away.
Tania is one of the thousands being held in ICE custody. She gave this message to the public from her detention cell:
“Don’t go anywhere near a checkpoint, and if your papers are in processing, just lay low. Trump meant what he said – he is trying to get rid of everyone, whether they are good or bad. The people in here are not criminals … They’ve had their dignity and their freedom stripped from them because they have their papers processing. You shouldn’t be putting children and families in jail. It’s unjust.”
There are so many cases like Tania Warner that it is hard to keep track of them: the Canadian wife of a Trump supporter dragged away after checking in on her green card; the Irish-American who had been married and working for 18 years in Boston, held in detention without charge for months; the British tourist held for six weeks despite holding a valid visa.
These are the ones that get attention. Less lucky are the thousands of Brown, Asian, and Latino people kidnapped from work or on the street. An American-born Latino wrote to me saying he doesn’t like to leave the house anymore.
The United States was once a nation known for its constitution, the independence of its courts, and the protection of citizens’ rights to fair legal process.
How quickly it fell.
But the road map was there from the get-go. It’s just that no one wanted to connect the dots lest they look like conspiracy nutters.
So, where to start?
First, let’s separate the white middle-class folks snared in the ICE nightmare.
Are they accidental victims caught up accidentally in the massive dragnet? No, they are simply lesser targets. They are victims of the policy of “border fascism” – a term coined by Brendan O’Connor in his book Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right.
It means an increasing militancy towards outsiders, creating the false notion that any foreigner, however benign, poses a threat to the American world.
The targeting of people of colour stems from a different and much darker source. This is the race war that the extremist right has been demanding since they came in from the cold and signed on with the Trump agenda. The visuals of men in masks throwing people to the ground provide the MAGA base with a pressure valve for the underlying violence of the movement.
Let’s begin with Donald Trump’s January 2025 inauguration speech, where he laid out his national priorities. That was also the event where Elon Musk gave a fascist salute.
Media apologists were quick to jump into the fray to defend him. The Anti-Defamation League (originally formed to fight all things Nazi and antisemitic) tried to make us think Musk was just being excited. They described the fascist arm salute as an “awkward gesture of enthusiasm.”
Musk responded by digging into Neo-Nazi rhetoric:
“Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations! Some people will Goebbels anything down. Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that coming,”
The Musk controversy was the perfect side show and detracted attention from Trump’s claim that his number one priority was deporting “millions and millions of alien criminals back to where they came from.”
Many heard this and thought it was Donald being Donald – over-the-top language that was really about targeting drug cartels and terrorism. But to the base, the dog whistle was clear.
In the world of MAGA, “aliens” (i.e., immigrants) are by their colour and land of origin - a criminal conspiracy against the American people. Trump was promising his followers a race war.
So maybe we need to go a bit further back to make sense of this claim.
In the run-up to the 2016 election, Stephen Miller, Trump’s most effective White House operative, engaged in hundreds of email exchanges with the extremist Breitbart News, where he laid out the ideology of MAGA.
Trump’s team were building a movement that welcomed extremist race conspiracists into the fold. As part of this, Miller praised the race-hate book The Camp of the Saints, a paranoid screed about celebrating the “next holocaust” by taking the race war to immigrants.
To win over the extremist right, Miller’s team were willing to embrace the theory of the “great replacement” - that powerful elites like Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama were trying to erase the White race through increased immigration.
This was music to the ears of extremist groups who were mobilizing to fight against a so-called “white genocide.”
Groups like the Proud Boys, the Boogaloo Boys, the Three-Percenters, “accelerationists,” and numerous hate groups had become increasingly focused on the notion of turning away from democracy to promote an open race war.
In the 1980s, the notion of an apocalyptic race war remained confined to the dark ravings of obscure tracts like The Turner Diaries. In this hate manifesto there was going to be a “Day of the rope” – a mass lynching of Blacks, immigrants and liberals. MAGA ideologues like Steve Bannon and online influencers brought this fringe hate into the mainstream of the movement.
The result was that the day of the rope was updated as the “great storm” of retribution promised by QAnon.
Trump used the phrase “the storm is coming” in his online media promotion during the election. A number of Republicans ran on the QAnon conspiracy ticket, and at one point, as many as 20% of American voters were buying into the QAnon message.
Trump’s people posed the proposition of racial retribution through the benign phrase “remigration” – the mass deportation of millions of people. In 2016, Trump was unable to make such promises a reality because he was constrained by the Constitution and those in various federal departments who would not go along with the necessary infrastructure of building concentration camps or erasing constitutional protections that would make remigration possible.
Trump derided these guardrails as proof of the “Deep state.”
Throughout the 2024 election, Trump promised his supporters he would get rid of these members of the Deep State. It was about clearing the deck to follow through on the hate agenda.
The mainstream media dismissed his raging about the immigrants who were “poisoning the blood” of America as just colourful Trump language. Or like when he used language stolen from Hitler to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
MAGA heard the message loud and clear.
Trump was signalling the militarization of society and the suspension of civil liberties. And if that included the white moms dragged into the vortex along with Latino cooks at the local Harvey’s, so be it.
The fascist playbook.
Within a mere two months of the inauguration speech, Trump’s war to bring about the forced migration of outsiders came swiftly, brazenly, and in broad daylight.
One of the first to be picked up was grad student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was stepping out of her apartment in Massachusetts to visit friends when she was kidnapped on the street by men with hoodies, masks and baseball caps.
It looked like a common street gang kidnapping. A bystander shouted at them to stop.
“We’re police,” they boasted.
“You don’t look like police,” the person said.
Rumeysa was pushed into the van and driven across multiple state lines to Louisiana, where she was thrown into a federal prison.
Ms. Ozturk is a Fulbright scholar and a PhD student researching ways to raise children in a positive environment. Her crime? She co-authored an article about the documented war crimes of Israel in Gaza.
This, it seems, was enough to mark her for abuse by the highest ranks of the Trump administration. Marco Rubio called her a dangerous “lunatic” and said he was determined to deport all such “lunatics” from the United States.
Homeland Security simply smeared her as being “Hamas.”
They wrote that she was involved with “a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans… Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated. This is common sense security.”
The accusations were outlandish.
Not nearly as outlandish as the claims by Steven Miller posted on X that denying legal process to people like Ms. Ozturk was necessary because the United States was at war and she was an enemy soldier:
“We were invaded and occupied. Entire neighbourhoods were conquered. Entire towns were subjugated. Our treasury was in the plundered. If every foreign trespasser gets to have their own federal trial prior to removal, then there is no liberation… The invading armies and trespassers will be expelled.”
Ozturk was a visible target and drew a great deal of media attention. As a Fulbright scholar, people came to her aid. But these highly publicized cases drew attention away from the mass actions against others. In the same month that she was detained, 285 men were deported to El Salvador without legal representation. They have now come forward to say that they have suffered “abuse, including beatings, humiliation, and sexual assault.”
As I learned of Ms. Ozturk’s kidnapping, I was reading the book How Fascism Works by academic Jason Stanley. He writes that the Nazi program of persecution was sold to the German people as a means of dealing with rising crime levels.
The German public liked the idea of being tough on criminals, but Hitler wasn’t talking about bank robbers and murderers. These types of crimes were part of his street thugs’ playbook. The criminal element that Hitler was targeting was Jews, Marxists, and Social Democrats.
Before Germans would accept the dehumanization of the Jewish people, they had to accept the false premise that Jews represented some kind of criminal threat to the German people.
Stanley knows this history intimately.
His grandparents were among the last of the Jewish families to escape Germany before the Holocaust. His grandmother, Ilsa, wrote a memoir of her work to try to help Jews who had been rounded up. She was deeply worried by the failure of her Jewish friends to comprehend the threat that was coming, because they didn’t see themselves as criminals. They were law-abiding and loyal Germans.
But as Stanley points out, once you label an entire people criminal, any crime against them becomes justifiable.
“A healthy democratic state is governed by laws that treat all citizens equally and justly, supported by bonds of mutual respect between people, including those tasked with policing them.
Fascist law-and-order rhetoric is meant to divide citizens into two classes: those of the chosen nation who are lawful by nature and those who are not inherently lawless…The National Socialists used what surely must be the most common method of sowing fear about a minority group – painting them as threats to order.”
This was how Ms. Ozturk was framed by the highest levels of the Trump administration. But how did we get from her to Tania Warner?
I have been thinking of the poem by Pastor Martin Niemöller that described vividly how the rule of law was taken apart in Nazi Germany. Growing up, I thought of it as a commentary on how people went along with the fascist takeover of Germany.
But I now see that he was laying out the playbook that leads us from a Muslim grad student to a mother with an autistic child. Along the way, hundreds of thousands of others can be rendered to concentration camps without anyone noticing.
Niemöller gives us a timeless warning about our obligation to be vigilant when the powerful beat down on the marginalized.
First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then 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 out for me.
Trump’s agenda is not haphazard and chaotic. On November 28, 2025, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted on X:
“The stakes have never been higher, and the goal has never been more clear:
Remigration now.”
The Courts have ruled that Trump’s administration has completely overstepped the law. He is ignoring them. One can always hope that the courts and common sense will prevail. But complacency is a dangerous luxury in these times.
Fascism is not just a creed; it is a playbook.
Niemöller laid the playbook out as clearly as possible. Americans and the rest of the world need to work full out to keep this playbook from reaching its conclusion.
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