When the first Trump regime ICE raids began in 2026, the news media covered the rows of marching, masked, and heavily armed troopers as a normal event, part of the federal Homeland Security program.
But it was definitely not a normal event.
The sights of masked gunmen walking down residential streets with fearful residents wondering what a military gang was doing in their neighborhood didn’t make it into the news stories.
What were the squad movements of men dressed in full military gear with their faces covered?
At this initial stage alone, the media and politicians should have questioned the authoritarian takeover of civilian neighborhoods.
After all, public and media perceptions of the police in America are that they are mostly friendly, generally honest, protect average citizens, uphold law and order, and are a force for good against evil. That’s the sanitized version of cops in American culture. But in a year, Trump has totally obliterated that old image.
Instead, the media and politicians sought to normalize the sight of a gang of thugs dressed in combat military gear, pepper-spraying people, throwing them to the ground, smashing windows, yanking people out of their houses, and shooting people point-blank, and then framing the chaos as a normal federal police action.
Normalizing this is the first stage towards authoritarianism. Gangster federal policing happens when the media is conditioned to believe everything police say. This routinely happens for to journaists for practical reasons, since the police control the facts and their release. It also happens because editors and reporters are too lazy and intimidated to confront the armed gang and its leaders. 
This fact-control is commonly manipulated by the police, and it puts journalists at the mercy of cops. Since the state determines what constitutes a crime and what actions are legal, even when they harm people, reporters have to go with “the official version of events,” even when they are fabricated or half-truths.
As civil rights attorney Alec Karakasanis writes in the book, “Copaganda: How the Police and the Media Manipulate d the News,” the “punishment bureaucracy” controls how and why people are detained, processed, handled, given court access, and incarcerated. The state determines what’s legal and why certain types of criminals are punished. If an ICE cop arrests someone because they have an accent, there is nothing they can do about it. Ivanka Trump has a strong accent, but she is a white woman and will never get arrested.
In his book, Karakatsanis notes that 90% of people prosecuted for crimes are “very poor.” This contrasts with the fact that no white-collar investment people were prosecuted for the 2008financial crisis or for torturing those caught in the 9/11 attacks. It also explains why Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump were not prosecuted when Epstein’s crimes were discovered almost 20 years ago, and have remained inert through the four presidential administrations of George Bush, Barack Obama, Trump (two terms), and Joe Biden.
“Copaganda” is sophisticated propaganda that involves programs run by police unions, prison guards, the for-profit prison industry, attorneys general, real estate developers, right-wing groups, right-wing media (FOX, New York Post), the CIA, DEA, bailbondsmen, probation companies, private debt collectors, and misguided civic organizations that think they are promoting “Officer Friendly.”
Consider the cases of the CIA and the DEA. As Karakasanis writes, the DEA paid Hollywood producers in the 1990s to insert anti-drug plot lines into their scripts. The CIA also sponsored the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the 1950s to help shape editorial topics.
As ICE shows, these examples are not the work of a force designed to build positive and transparent community relations.
The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) even has standards on police wearing face coverings while on duty. Unless it is for health reasons, the IACP states that:
“It is important to treat all individuals with dignity, respect, and empathy, regardless of the officer’s personal views on wearing a face covering. These values should guide all interactions with community members.
”The IACP goes on to say: “Clear communication is imperative. Members of the general public may be intimidated or fearful of officers wearing face coverings, which may heighten their defensive responses.
“Face coverings block facial expressions, which makes verbal communication more prone to misinterpretation.
“When interacting with a member of the public in an outdoor setting, consider stepping at least six feet away to remove your own face covering and introduce yourself, then replace your face covering and continue interaction from a closer distance.
“Supervisors should also closely monitor department operations to detect and address biased enforcement activities.”
While these standards obviously do not apply to ICE and its Homeland Security affiliates, the media and politicians should have sounded the alarm as soon as masked thugs began roaming the streets and violating citizens. ICE began wearing masks in March 2025, during the Biden administration, but this did not elicit a public outcry.
Copaganda has shaped the way the media covers crime, punishment, and the entire policing process. If homelessness is deemed a crime, such as trespassing, and not as a problem related to affordable housing and drug addiction, then the media accepts homeless people as criminals.
Copaganda also determines who is deemed a criminal. Do large global banks that charge their customers excessive overdraft fees deserve more coverage than shoplifting or vandalism? Karakatsanis writes that approximately $1 trillion per year is lost to tax evasion scams, which is 1,672 times the value of all U.S. robberies combined. Tax fraud should increase dramatically during Trump’s term, given his convictions for tax fraud and his reduction in IRS auditors.
Copaganda also determines what is a “crime wave”, the perception that a city is more dangerous than another, “crime surges,” whether there is a cop “shortage,” or that cops are underpaid.
The news media and entertainment shows also share a bond that cop shows are reliable viewer magnets. Mystery novels first appeared in the US in 1841 when Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue was published in a magazine. This was followed by an English novel, The Moonstone (1868), and then the introduction of Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet (1887). These stories proved so popular that the entire genre was born. Writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane provided material that paved the way for Dirty Harry, Dragnet, Hawaii 5-0, Law & Order, Mannix, and Perry Mason.
The fact that crime sells books and shapes popular culture was not lost on politicians and the law-enforcement bureaucracy. That fact, combined with modern propaganda techniques and substantial budgets, has helped pave the way for ICE, the DEA, the FBI, the CIA, and numerous lesser-known police departments of varying ethical standards at the federal, military, state, county, and local levels.
ICE, The Bavarian Police, and the Gestapo
But under the Trump regime, policing has changed.
A similar change in administrative structure and policy occurred in the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior in the 1920s, when it appointed the Munich Metropolitan Police to act as Political Police. As cited in the book, “The Beginnings of the Gestapo System: The Bavarian Model in 1933,” Professor Shlomo Aronson wrote that in the early 1930s. A department in the Munich Police became a political intelligence center for all of Bavaria. With typical Bavarian attention to structure and duties, this soon expanded into seven departments in 1932, including surveillance, counterespionage, border patrols, press management, and the secret and uniformed police. 
The names of enemies of the state, at this time, included communists, labor organizers, journalists, the clergy, and anyone opposed to government policies.
When the Nazis took over Bavaria in 1933, this state police apparatus was absorbed into the Nazified Munich Metropolitan Police, reporting to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior. In March 1933, Heinrich Himmler, the police commissioner for Munich and Nuremberg, became the Political Police Commander of Bavaria. To establish this political police apparatus, Himmler was given five responsibilities. Among them was the fact that Himmler was the liaison between the political police, the SS, and the concentration camps.
What does this have to do with ICE/Homeland Security/the FBI, the surveillance state, secret incarcerations, arrests with warrants, the sleepy media, inert politicians, and the corrupt Trump legal bureaucracy?
The elements are all here. Trump has three more years in office and is following a daily schedule, seven days a week, of tactics designed to intimidate, terrorize, and upend norms to remake the nation into his own perverted vision. As a 78-year-old convicted criminal, Trump and his cronies ignore self-dealing prohibitions, subpoenas, public disclosures, and everything an average citizen would be jailed for if they ignored those laws and court orders.
Trump is above the law. If he wants to deport minorities based on race, their political beliefs, or criticism of his lawlessness, nothing has stopped him to date. The legal system grants a stay, then an extension, then hears more motions, then requires more evidence, and always more time. It’s no wonder that the courts are on autopilot when it comes to sentencing, despite the evidence that longer incarcerations do not deter future crimes, or that the US imprisons six times as many Blacks as South Africa did during apartheid, according to Karakatsanis.
ICE and Homeland Security are only phase one. The leadership of these agencies has been groomed to disobey norms, police standards, and the law. They are not negotiating to rent warehouses to jail 73,000 people, with no sign of stopping the arrests. Republicans have given ICE a budget of $45 billion, and it has plans to jail up to 135,000 people. So far, no one has stopped them.
So what do the Bavarian Police of 1933 have to do with ICE in 2026? They are following the same playbook.
Remember the saying: “It can happen here.”
