Trump’s Fascist Actions as President: A Guide

Donald Trump’s return to the White House has been marked by a campaign of autocratic, verging on fascist action to match the brazen rhetoric from his campaign.

The president has sought to strip the citizenship of children born in this country by fiat, and declared the sexual identities of millions of transgender and intersex Americans to be invalid. He has targeted a legal resident for deportation — not for any criminal acts but for activism deemed contrary to state interests. In addition to recklessly detaining U.S. citizens, Trump’s department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, has allegedly “disappeared” dozens of undocumented immigrants from the streets and refused to account for their identities or whereabouts. He has deported migrants, apparently without due process, to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador. 

These disruptive actions run contrary to decades of settled law, and have provoked hundreds of lawsuits. In the face of this litigation, the administration keeps playing chicken with lower federal courts — at times disobeying orders from judges, and even calling for the impeachment of jurists who make rulings Trump disagrees with. 

The president’s contempt for due process has coincided with other actions that are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes: attempting to hollow out the nation’s civil service, specifically through Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE); intimidating universities; and targeting journalists while amping up a campaign of garish state propaganda against disfavored groups.

Below is a round up of many of Trump’s most disturbing actions to date:

MANHANDLING MIGRANTS

Deportations Defying Court Order

The administration defied a court in mid-March by deporting a plane full of hundreds of unadjudicated immigrants to a notorious, maximum security El Salvadoran labor camp. While their identities have not been released, Attorney General Pam Bondi called them “terrorists.” Many are Venezuelans, alleged to be members of the gang Tren de Aragua, and were removed after Trump invoked wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 — last used during the second World War, enabling Japanese internment. 

An attorney for one of the deportees insists her client is an LGBTQ+ asylum seeker with “benign” tattoos, who was mistakenly identified as a gang member; she called his exile “a dark moment in our history.” Family members of several other men shipped off to El Salvador similarly deny their involvement in any gang.

A judge — alarmed by the lack of due process for the detainees — ordered the planes turned around while en route. The administration flouted that order, later asserting in court that the judge’s verbal instructions weren’t enforceable, and that a subsequent written order came too late. The administration has further argued that Trump’s “Article II” executive powers related to military actions outside of U.S. territory — including, apparently, spiriting immigrants away to a Central American gulag — are beyond the authority of any judge.  

Status: As judicial wrangling continues, those exiled remain imprisoned in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center.

Disappearing ICE Detainees

On March 12, ICE touted the roundup of 48 undocumented immigrants in New Mexico — more than half of whom did not have criminal records. According to a complaint by the state chapter of the ACLU, the government “has not identified any of the 48 individuals apprehended,” nor disclosed “where any of them are being detained, whether they have access to counsel, in what conditions they are being held, or even which agency is holding them.” 

The ACLU describes these people as having been ”forcibly disappeared.” The claim is striking: “Disappearing” disfavored populations is a hallmark of deadly authoritarian regimes including those of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and Francisco Franco in Spain last century.

Status: The names and whereabouts of these individuals remain unknown. 

Shipping Asylum-Seekers to the Jungles of Panama

The administration sent some 300 deportees to Panama in mid February. They weren’t Panamanian; many of them had made a global trek from countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia to seek refugee status in the United States. Instead of turning them back at the Mexican border, the Trump administration instead flew them to Central America, where many refused to be repatriated to their home countries for fear of retribution. More than 100 were subsequently shipped to a jungle jail near the notorious Darien Gap. 

Status: Under international public pressure, these migrants were eventually released, and provided a 30-day visa to sort out next steps.

Turning Guantanamo into a Prison Camp

With considerable fanfare, the Trump administration revived a favorite strategy of the George W. Bush administration — turning the U.S. military outpost at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, into a legally nebulous jail facility for undesirables. 

But where Bush chose Gitmo to house irregular combatants and high-status captives from the War on Terror, Trump chose the island military base as a way station for deportees that his administration characterized as “the worst of the worst.” (In truth, many appear to have been asylum seekers or economic migrants seeking better lives.)

Status: Following a legal challenge from the ACLU, the administration suddenly changed course and evacuated Gitmo of all immigrant detainees, shipping them back to the mainland, while reserving the right to exile others there in the future.

FREE SPEECH CRACKDOWN

In one of the most chilling episodes of the new administration, authorities have seized and sought to deport a legal U.S. resident for his pro-Palestine First Amendment activity, under the guise of national security. 

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia University with a green card and an American spouse, was a leader of student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. In mid-March, he was arrested by ICE in New York and transferred to a holding facility in Louisiana, where he faced deportation under an order by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. 

The Trump administration has not alleged Khalil broke any law, insisting instead that his presence in the country is creating “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for the United States, and his residency can therefore be revoked. In a statement, Khalil has called himself a “political prisoner.”

Status: Khalil’s case is before a judge in Louisiana. The statute cited for his removal is largely untested, constitutionally. The case is sure to end up before an appeals court — the only question is which has jurisdiction: The arch conservative 5th Circuit, which handles cases from Louisiana where Kahlil is now held, or the more liberal 2nd Circuit in New York, where Khalil was seized?

HAMMERING CONSTITUTIONAL BEDROCK

On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an order purporting to end birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants — an action counter to a long settled interpretation of the 14th Amendment as well as federal statute.

Status: The EO has been blocked by at least three judges, resulting in a nationwide injunction. The Trump administration recently appealed to the Supreme Court asking the injunction to be narrowed or lifted allowing the order to go into effect while the courts wrestle with the constitutional issue.

TRYING TO ERASE A DISFAVORED MINORITY

Authoritarian regimes have long targeted disfavored minority groups as a first step toward broader repression. Trump’s top target are trans and intersex Americans. Trump has issued at least half a dozen executive orders targeting these sexual minorities, asserting, against science, a supposed “biological truth” that there are only two genders.

Trump has issued executive orders banning trans Americans from the military; banning trans athletes from girls sports; sending trans prisoners to prisons of the opposite gender; denying passport renewal to gender nonconforming Americans who chose to be designated with an X (rather than M or F); seeking to block gender affirming care for trans minors; as well as seeking to stamp out discussion of gender dysphoria in schools. Trump has also sought to block federal grants to nonprofits and other programs that welcome or serve trans Americans as part of his crusade against diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Status: Trans Americans have filed an array of lawsuits decrying discriminatory treatment by the federal government. Some medical institutions not bound by Trump’s executive order have nonetheless complied by ceasing gender care for minor patients. Several judges have ordered that trans female prisoners not be transferred to men’s prisons, but there are reports that such transfers are happening regardless. On March 18, a federal judge blocked Trump’s anti-trans military order from taking effect.

DEFUNDING HIGHER EDUCATION

The Trump administration has begun a campaign to attack the funding of higher education. It has made an example of Columbia University, stripping some $400 million in grants in apparent punishment for not being even more heavy handed in its crackdown on pro-Palestine student protesters, which the administration has characterized as fostering antisemitism. 

Through the administration of National Institutes of Health grants, the Trump administration also sought to create a broad federal defunding of research universities. Meanwhile, under the authority of a former pro-wrestling executive now running the Department of Education, the Trump administration has cut that department’s workforce in half, threatening the effective administration of federal student aid.

Status: The broad NIH funding cuts are on pause thanks to a judicial order, but research universities are already retrenching, with the medical school of the University of Massachusetts revoking placements for graduate students, for example, and Johns Hopkins cutting nearly 2,000 jobs. 

DISAPPEARING DIVERSITY (AND HISTORY)

Critics deride Trump’s campaign against “diversity, equity, and inclusion” as a neo-segregationist initiative. The administration has, in fact, eliminated requirements that federal contractors have integrated workplace facilities. Trump has also ousted the top female and Black leaders in the Armed Forces. 

Beyond that, federal agencies are purging mentions of minorities from their official websites. The federal Stonewall memorial excised mentions of trans people in the movement for gay rights, now officially known only as “LGB.” Materials celebrating Navajo Code Talkers — heroes of WWII who bedeviled the Japanese and offered proof positive that America’s strength is in its diversity — have been excised from military websites. A Black Medal of Honor recipient, celebrated for his heroism in Vietnam, briefly had his Pentagon webpage removed, with a portion of the url changed to “deimedal-of-honor.” 

Status: Public pressure has been somewhat effective in shaming the administration to be less racist and sexist. The Pentagon restored training materials honoring the Tuskegee Airmen, and female aviators known as WASPs, for example.

FASHY STATE MEDIA

The Trump administration is taking an expectedly hostile stance to America’s free press, which Trump has long derided using the Stalinist term “enemies of the people.” Trump has kicked the Associated Press out of his briefings, for its refusal to adopt Trump’s nationalistic rebranding of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” as AP style for global audiences. 

Top outlets including The New York Times, NBC News, and NPR have been shut out of work spaces at the Pentagon. And the administration has also cancelled subscriptions across agencies to publications like Politico and Reuters. 

In mid-March, the administration also moved to shutter government-run journalistic outlets like Voice of America, whose broadcasts are sometimes the only non-state media available in autocratic foreign regimes.

Meanwhile the White House’s social media team has taken a dark turn, routinely posting videos of migrants in detention, with one featuring the sound of shackles being prepared for a deportation flight and the caption: “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight.” Another featured the musical overdub of Semisonic’s “Closing Time” and the lyric: “You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.” (The band made clear they did not “authorize or condone” the use of their music.)

Perhaps most disturbing, Trump posted an elaborate video montage of deportees being received by authorities in El Salvador. The garish footage celebrated the harsh tactics of masked guards frog-marching the arrivals off an airplane, and then shaving the prisoners’ heads and beards.

Trump’s spokesperson Karoline Leavitt encouraged undocumented immigrants remaining in the United States to self-deport to avoid being featured in a future “fun video.” The administration is also spending $200 million on ads warning viewers without proper papers to leave the country, and thanking dear leader Trump for his anti-immigrant crackdown.

Status: AP has sued to regain access, but a judge has so far declined to intervene.