Add Portland and Memphis to a list that already includes cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston and individuals like Mahmoud Khalil, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and Rümeysa Öztürk.
It’s hard to rank what Trump’s worst acts are—so many are so horrible. But the scariest part of Trump’s presidency is the rapid creation of a mini police state, with the administration regularly deploying National Guard troops or a surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents or both in major cities, usually against the will of local officials. We are now a country where non-violent people are regularly arrested and detained with little explanation, and where the threat of armed troops coming to your city is constant. And this militarization keeps accelerating. America is certainly not a police state, but this is the most like a police state we have been in my lifetime, including in the months after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The administration is deploying around 200 National Guard troops to Portland this week to crack down on anti-ICE protests there, over the objections of Oregon’s governor. Around 150 troops are coming to Memphis under the pretext of addressing the city’s fairly high murder rate. But they are really there because Tennessee’s super pro-Trump GOP governor, Bill Lee, wanted to give the president a way to save face after the strong opposition from Illinois leaders spooked Trump from sending the National Guard into Chicago.
Chicago has hardly been unscathed though. The Windy City and Boston have been the subject of particularly intense ICE operations, in part to punish those cities’ leaders for being very anti-Trump and pro-immigrant. And as events in Los Angeles and now Portland are showing, the ICE and National Guard policies reinforce each other. In both cities, the administration has used protests against ICE actions as pretext to bring in the National Guard to allegedly quell violence and disorder.
“I feel like this needs to be said, as I don’t feel many Americans get this: THIS IS NOT NORMAL!!! No, not even for authoritarian leaders in nominally democratic regimes. In Hungary, Poland, even Turkey, authoritarian leaders do/did not regularly send the military into its peaceful cities!” wrote Cas Mudde, a University of Georgia international affairs professor who studies the far right, in a recent Bluesky post.
What’s so terrifying about these policies is not just the people who are arrested and deported, but the randomness of them and the resulting fear and uncertainty for everyone else. When news broke last Friday that ICE had detained Ian Roberts, the superintendent of Des Moines Public Schools, I (and I suspect liberals across the country) were worried that this was the latest example of the administration either targeting someone for their political views like Khalil and Öztürk or that it happened because of an enforcement mistake, like Abrego Garcia. In fact, there are indications that Roberts had a deportation order issued against him in 2024 (before Trump was in office) and improperly presented himself as a U.S. citizen. I am not sure those are strong enough grounds to detain a well-liked leader of a major public school system who had not committed a violent crime, but it’s not as egregious as Öztürk’s arrest.
Even if Roberts’s arrest is justified, the administration’s policies have created the impression that essentially any of the 28 million people living in the United States who aren’t naturalized citizens (those who are undocumented or on some kind of visa) can be detained and removed at any time, on any pretext. It’s hard to feel like you are living in a free country if close to 10 percent of the people really aren’t.
“It became clear soon after Trump took power that the First Amendment would simply no longer apply to foreigners … And as a foreign national, I increasingly felt my choice was to either continue to intervene publicly, at the increasing risk of making myself and my family a target; or to fall silent, accommodate, ignore the political reality,” German historian Thomas Zimmer wrote in a recent essay, explaining why he opted to move back home after living in the U.S. for several years.
My friends who teach in heavily Latino areas say that hosting big school events is very challenging, because undocumented parents are worried about ICE seeing those events as an opportunity for mass arrests. When it became clear that Trump was looking for cities where he could deploy troops instead of Chicago, I was terrified that the National Guard might come to Louisville, where I live. Kentucky Democratic Governor Andy Beshear would oppose such a deployment, but this state is full of ambitious Republican officials who would happily go on Fox News and cheer for troops coming to Kentucky if it meant they could appease Trump.
I understand that I am not likely to be shot by a member of the National Guard. Ditto that very few of those 28 million noncitizens will actually be deported. But the point is that there is an undeniable chilling effect. Non-citizens have to be nervous about criticizing this administration and being deported by ICE. Mayors and governors have to worry about ICE being deployed to their cities. Anti-ICE protesters must worry about ICE and the National Guard using tear gas and other weapons against them if they protest. People in cities with the Guard on the streets have to worry about any action that might irritate soldiers who are doing on-the-ground policing that they are not trained to do.
The other thing so scary about this moment is that the Democratic Party has clearly decided that immigration, crime, and policing are issues where Trump is fairly strong—so they are not leaping to the defense of those affected by ICE raids and National Guard deployments. We are in many ways on our own.
“The Trump administration’s threat to deploy troops in Portland is unlawful. Here’s a thought. Focus on protecting the healthcare of the American people,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote in a tweet after Trump announced the deployment, a message that I assume was not reassuring to people in Portland or any other blue city.
I don’t want to be fatalistic. Trump is both unpopular and often ineffective. America overall is far from falling into dictatorship. That said, the risk of any individual person being arrested, detailed, deported, beaten up, or killed by the federal government, on false pretenses, is higher than any time in recent memory. We still have democracy. I am not so sure we still have freedom.