https://truthout.org/articles/robin-d-g-kelley-what-were-experiencing-right-now-is-fascism/
Robin D. G. Kelley:
What We’re Experiencing Right Now Is Fascism
Technologies from Israel have turbocharged surveillance by ICE, Border Patrol, and the Department of Homeland Security.
by Sonali Kolhatkar
September 15, 2026
SevenStoriesPress
Technologies from Israel have turbocharged surveillance by ICE, Border Patrol, and the Department of Homeland Security.
by Sonali Kolhatkar
September 15, 2026
SevenStoriesPress
PHOTO: ICE agents detain a woman after pulling her from a car on January 13, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.Stephen Maturen / Getty Images
[NOTE: This article is an adapted excerpt from Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism by Sonali Kolhatkar. This text was published by Seven Stories Press in September 2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.]
MAGA’s ongoing fascist assault on the nation’s residents echoes past eras of U.S. enslavement, racial terror, dispossession, segregation, and exclusion. Historian and political analyst Robin D. G. Kelley, distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has written several books examining this history, including his seminal 2003 book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. With his finger on the pulse of contemporary social justice movements, including global struggles for liberation, Kelley offered a sharp analysis of the federal assault on U.S. cities and the resulting resistance during this conversation, which took place in February 2026, for inclusion in Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism, my new book of interviews with over a dozen movement organizers, lawyers, artists, labor leaders, and scholars, which was released today.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Throughout U.S. history, policing has been used as a tool of repression, and as a way to preserve racial capitalism. We are now in an era where immigration enforcement, in terms of resources and personnel, seems to be approaching what we spend on police forces. Where does immigration enforcement fit in and how does it differ from policing?
Robin D. G. Kelley: That’s a great question. First of all, immigration enforcement goes back to right after World War I. In 1924, the U.S. Border Patrol was established to police the southern border, but also the border with Canada. The oceans were also monitored, the Pacific especially, the Atlantic less so.
The idea of enforcing immigration through the definitions of citizenship is old. It’s part of a system of both domestic and international policing. Driving these policies was the state’s fear of radical insurgency. After World War I, sedition — that is to say left-wing, anarchist, socialist, and communist movements — were policed, especially those coming from Asia and Europe, and certainly those from the southern border. Border Patrol wasn’t just developed to keep so-called Mexican migrants out — though this was land twice stolen, first from Native American people and then from the sovereign nation of Mexico. It was also about keeping the Mexican Revolution on the other side of the border and ultimately destabilizing it.
[NOTE: This article is an adapted excerpt from Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism by Sonali Kolhatkar. This text was published by Seven Stories Press in September 2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.]
MAGA’s ongoing fascist assault on the nation’s residents echoes past eras of U.S. enslavement, racial terror, dispossession, segregation, and exclusion. Historian and political analyst Robin D. G. Kelley, distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has written several books examining this history, including his seminal 2003 book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. With his finger on the pulse of contemporary social justice movements, including global struggles for liberation, Kelley offered a sharp analysis of the federal assault on U.S. cities and the resulting resistance during this conversation, which took place in February 2026, for inclusion in Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism, my new book of interviews with over a dozen movement organizers, lawyers, artists, labor leaders, and scholars, which was released today.
Sonali Kolhatkar: Throughout U.S. history, policing has been used as a tool of repression, and as a way to preserve racial capitalism. We are now in an era where immigration enforcement, in terms of resources and personnel, seems to be approaching what we spend on police forces. Where does immigration enforcement fit in and how does it differ from policing?
Robin D. G. Kelley: That’s a great question. First of all, immigration enforcement goes back to right after World War I. In 1924, the U.S. Border Patrol was established to police the southern border, but also the border with Canada. The oceans were also monitored, the Pacific especially, the Atlantic less so.
The idea of enforcing immigration through the definitions of citizenship is old. It’s part of a system of both domestic and international policing. Driving these policies was the state’s fear of radical insurgency. After World War I, sedition — that is to say left-wing, anarchist, socialist, and communist movements — were policed, especially those coming from Asia and Europe, and certainly those from the southern border. Border Patrol wasn’t just developed to keep so-called Mexican migrants out — though this was land twice stolen, first from Native American people and then from the sovereign nation of Mexico. It was also about keeping the Mexican Revolution on the other side of the border and ultimately destabilizing it.
Border Patrol and immigration policing have always been political issues. We saw an escalation of this kind of domestic and border policing during the Cold War. In 1952, we got the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, limiting Caribbean immigration and making it easier to deport or deny entry to leftists, labor organizers, and so-called “sexual deviants.” Two years later, the Eisenhower administration launched a mass deportation campaign dubbed Operation Wetback targeting Mexican workers and initiating the process of militarizing the border. Under the guise of protecting national security, Operation Wetback was really an effort to discipline an increasingly organized Mexican working class with the threat of deportation while appeasing and disciplining the naturalized U.S. labor force by mobilizing xenophobia, nationalism, and support for U.S. intervention in the hemisphere — all under the guise of anticommunism.
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At the same time, the U.S. expanded legalized temporary labor migration through the Bracero Program, which ran from 1942 to 1964, in order to recruit low-wage labor subjected to monitoring and vulnerable to deportation.
And then finally, the post-1965 expansion of immigration opened the door to further border militarization during the 1970s and 1980s. And that’s even before Ronald Reagan. Reagan, of course, escalated it, but border militarization was promoted under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, a liberal Democrat.
What we’re seeing now is an escalation of border militarization, the internal domestic policing of those regarded as undocumented, and the targeting of people based on perceived racial differences. And in this case, I think what’s different is the level of terror and violence, and the scale of the attacks, which to me are intended as much as demonstrations of state power and authority as border enforcement.
And the border itself — its definition — has been expanded to include pretty much the entire country. That’s why we had Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, nowhere near the border, killing U.S. citizens. There’s been a steady march toward that. It certainly wasn’t something that just happened under Trump, but he’s taking advantage of that redefinition to deploy Border Patrol troops everywhere.
That is true. I want to give credit to Harsha Walia, who wrote this amazing book, Border and Rule, which talks about border externalization and border internalization. That is to say, the border is not really a place — a strip of land or a line — but that “bordering” is a governance strategy, either through, say, interdiction offshore (externalization) or through racialized surveillance (internalization). The border is always being policed internally within the United States, within Europe, within Canada, and elsewhere. We’re seeing a deeper militarization of internal border security.
U.S. violence against Haitians has been exemplary of this kind of militarized policing. Under Reagan, we saw the interdiction of Haitians who were hoping for asylum in Florida being thrown in detention centers in Guantanamo Bay.
But then you also have the targeting of Haitians within the 48 states of the continental United States who are being arrested, detained, and deported. We saw that the vicious attacks on Haitians who had temporary legal status ultimately helped lead to Trump’s victory.
In Ohio, Haitians were racialized and targeted. A military was unnecessary since anti-Black racism was enough to generate mass opposition and panic over their presence. I also think that the escalation of ICE and CBP attacks in Minnesota, as well as Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, and Chicago, was less about capturing undocumented workers than about generating terror within those cities. They targeted cities with either Black mayors or progressive Democratic mayors. They targeted protesters. It’s not an accident that the casualties include people who were legal observers or protesters.
That’s really important because they’re collecting personal information on protesters and creating a database. And these agents believe they have total immunity from prosecution — they are not trying to hide their acts of violence and brutality. The killing of Renée Nicole Good in Minneapolis was recorded by agent Jonathan Ross, the guy who killed her, because what they want to do is post those images.
While I hate to use analogies with Nazi Germany because they tend to be too simplistic, we must remember that the terror meted out by Nazi storm troopers was intentionally visible, designed to instill terror and generate national pride by targeting people considered to be not just illegal, but unpatriotic, racially inferior, or queer — which makes you innately unpatriotic under this particular regime.
What we’re seeing is something in excess of Border Patrol interdiction and detention. Much bigger.
In Minneapolis, in Maine, and in other places, we saw ICE agents occasionally arresting police — Black and Brown police. We’ve also seen police occasionally standing up to ICE. Although more often than not, in places like Los Angeles, police have enabled ICE by holding back protesters. But there have been a lot of calls from people to have mayors deputize police to arrest masked ICE agents. How do we clarify the role that ICE plays as being very consistent with the role that police have played, not just in enforcing racial capitalism, but also in enforcing white supremacy?
Absolutely. We sometimes have a short-term memory in moments of duress. Some of the very same tactics that we’re seeing practiced by ICE — including dragging people out of cars, shooting them when they try to drive away, beating people up, and falsifying official reports — are all standard police practice. It’s a pipe dream to believe that local police officers would arrest ICE agents. When it does happen, it’s only in the most egregious situations. In other words, it’s comparable to when police arrest other police officers. It has happened before as a result of internal affairs investigations into police corruption. It rarely happens, but of course, cops have arrested other cops — although almost never for violence against civilians. Rather, they are arrested for things like drunk driving, being caught in sexual scandals, selling drugs, and so forth.
The supremacy clause in the U.S. Constitution argues that federal agents and federal troops have supremacy over local agents and local groups. This provides a way for mayors and police chiefs to say, “Well, our hands are tied. I wish we could do something about it.”
California’s state legislature passed a law banning ICE and Border Patrol agents from wearing masks as they operate. But the LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell said he would not enforce it even before the law was overturned by a federal judge. His argument for not enforcing it was that it should apply to all law enforcement. That’s fair, I suppose. But it’s also beside the point. There’s always a workaround that will permit ICE and Border Patrol to do whatever they want to do. And why is that? Because if you can regulate federal agents to such a degree, it would also undermine police power. And that’s not going to happen.
When people say, “Abolish ICE,” and don’t say, “Abolish the Police,” it reveals deep limitations in our analysis. To do so ignores the similarities and practices shared by ICE, Border Patrol, and local police officers — not to mention the fact that for all of these agencies, the primary targets of police violence are people of color. I’m not saying that white people are not victims of police violence. Of course they are. But the disproportionate victims of police violence, aggression, and misconduct are people of color. Long, long before the current surge, Black and Brown people were the ones being abducted from their stoops as they’re standing outside just shooting the breeze, or being beaten in back rooms and hanged in jail cells.
People are disturbed about the fact that Keith Porter Jr., a Black man, was killed in the Los Angeles area, in Northridge, by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve 2025 — seven days before the killing of Renée Good, and a couple of weeks before Alex Pretti. And yet, Good and Pretti are regarded as the martyrs of this movement while Keith Porter is barely mentioned.
And that goes back to civil rights history, when white activists were murdered while standing in solidarity with Black activists, and the killing of whites generated the outrage that helped tilt things in favor of the movement.
Absolutely. And, to give credit where credit is due, Renée Good’s sister said as much. She said there are people who are victims of this kind of violence, who don’t look like us, who don’t look like my sister, and we have to pay attention to that too. So I think there’s an acknowledgment of it, but it’s still quite disturbing in many ways.
Some people have said the argument for not raising Keith Porter’s profile was that he was not fighting ICE when he was killed. That is immaterial. What is important about Keith Porter’s killing is how routine it was. In other words, it’s the routinization of the killing of Black and Brown people that makes it unspectacular.
What’s the first thing the Porter family had to do? They had to redeem his character. That’s a sad thing. Why did they have to prove that he was, in fact, a good person, that he was a “girl dad,” and that he made people laugh? To prove that he was worthy of living? No one had to do that for the white people who were killed. So what if Porter wasn’t out there fighting ICE? He was trying to celebrate New Year’s Eve like everybody else, and didn’t deserve to die.
The real story to me is the ICE agent who killed him, Brian Palacios, who has a history of using racist and homophobic slurs, and allegations of child abuse. That’s not to say that character is everything, but why did Porter’s family have to prove Keith’s value?
As a historian and a political analyst, how do you define fascism? Does our current political moment fit that definition?
I can point to many formal definitions, but there is something to be said about the argument that we know it when we see it. Fascism is usually defined in terms of the “classical” kind that emerged in Italy in the 1920s in response to the crisis of capitalism. Classical fascism has three important elements: the repression of civil liberties, the creation of a scapegoat or enemy, and war — domestic or foreign.
But we can turn to Langston Hughes, to W. E. B. Du Bois, to Aimé Césaire, and others who trace the roots of fascism to the colonial order, and in some instances specifically to Turtle Island, to North America, back to Indigenous dispossession, slavery, and Jim Crow. All these things contain the elements of fascism.
What does that mean? It means the state holds a monopoly on violence in order to:
1) attack people’s rights and the press;
2) subordinate exploitable populations who are not regarded as fully human, and;
3) shore up white supremacy and a white nationalist solidarity against those populations.
Anti-Chinese exclusion was a form of fascism. Segregation — not just in terms of separation, but the actual denial of Black people’s access to goods, services, institutions, and jobs for which they actually paid taxes — was also a form of fascism. As has been the expansion of a carceral state and carceral violence, whether in the form of forced labor in the post-slavery era, forced labor among Indigenous peoples working in mines in the West, or people of Mexican and Central American descent working in agriculture. All these different forms of oppression and extraction of labor using state violence, or extralegal violence supported and/or sanctioned by the state, are all examples of fascism.
What was the height of symbolic expression of American fascism? It was the Ku Klux Klan, because it had all those elements, as well as tacit backing from the state, in that it was legal and had support through other policing functions. So we know fascism, we lived it. And as Langston Hughes said, “Fascism is a new name for that kind of terror the Negro has always faced in America. . . . This kind of terrorism is extending more and more to groups of peoples whose skins are not black.”
What we’re witnessing and experiencing right now is fascism at both the state level and the federal level. And it is part and parcel of the authoritarian rise occurring around the world. The U.S. is not an exception.
That’s a perfect segue to expanding our discussion globally. There is so much precedence for the kinds of things that we’re seeing today, particularly when it comes to demonizing or otherizing nonwhite populations. Trump and his allies have used genocidal rhetoric to describe immigrants, saying they’re “poisoning the blood of the country,” and calling Somali immigrants “garbage.” I wonder if you see parallels between Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and our anti-immigrant rhetoric. Those two may seem geographically different and disparate in terms of the contemporary scale of the actual killing and the proportion of land dispossession. But what about the rhetoric?
There are lots of parallels, and the parallels are not even new. They predate Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza since October 2023. They predate Israel’s 2014 war on Gaza, and even predate the first intifada. The idea of Israel, from its inception, was founded on the same frontier rhetoric of “we’re going to tame the land, and we’ve got Natives that we’ve got to deal with.”
What we are seeing now is a heightening of existing rhetoric. The thing that’s unique about Israel is its representations — not just of Palestinians — but of other immigrant groups within Israel itself. We’re talking about a nation that was forcibly sterilizing Ethiopian and Somali immigrants inside Israel, the so-called African migrants who were there working under a temporary status.
The other thing is that you can’t separate out Israel’s key role in the expansion of the surveillance and technology apparatus that ICE, Border Patrol, the Department of Homeland Security, and Frontex in Europe — which is really the equivalent of DHS for the European Union — are all using. All of these militarized agencies are using Israeli facial recognition technologies, tracking technologies, and drone technologies. The purpose of these technologies is to track people — whether it’s across the Mediterranean, within the 1948 borders of Palestine, or within the United States — who are considered pollutants, “illegals,” or people with no status. Of course, the irony is that we’re talking about people who are essentially native to the area, for the most part.
It is equally sinister that both Israel and the United States invite fascists and white supremacists into their midst. For example, the Trump administration is granting refugee status to white South Africans — Afrikaners — based on the ridiculous claim that they are experiencing so-called “white genocide.” Israel’s borders are open to Christian nationalists, many of whom believe in white supremacy. This kind of strange bedfellow has been part of Israeli political culture for a couple of decades, maybe longer than that.
A lot of folks are suggesting that the way to take the country back is to ensure Republicans don’t retain power, and that means to ensure Democrats win the next midterms, impeach Trump, and make sure we run a really good candidate for the 2028 election. But I’m wondering if we can look beyond that. And I’d particularly love for you to share any lessons from the history of Black resistance that can help today’s movements go deeper than merely defeating Republicans and replacing them with Democrats.
Right. I’m wincing over that question. The idea that somehow the Democrats’ hands are clean turns my stomach, because much of the framework for some of the most draconian policies was put in place under Clinton and Obama. Certainly under the Bushes. This is not new.
We also have to remember — as you’ve reported many times — when Kamala Harris was on the campaign trail and spoke at the Democratic National Convention, she said that she was going to protect our borders and have an even more militant and draconian anti-immigration policy than ever before. She promised to work on a path to legalization — whatever that means. So the idea that a mainstream Democrat is going to save us is just a pipe dream.
We have to go back in the history of the Black freedom struggle to remember a time when there was a general critique of this kind of two-party system. Whatever Black liberation looked like, it was about more than just the right to vote. It was centered on a massive welfare state. And by welfare state, I mean a world in which there’s a social wage that cares for everyone. An abolitionist movement that comes out of the Black freedom struggle that says no one should be in a cage, and no one is illegal. One that did not kowtow to the Democratic Party as a way to defeat the Republicans.
I want to remember that period because a part of me is sad that there is a kind of Black liberal trend now to either say, “We’ve got to save ourselves by supporting Democrats,” or, “We’re just so tired, this is not our fight.”
And I hate to sound negative, but there’s a kind of liberal Black politics — which is not truly representative of the Black freedom movement — that’s become much more xenophobic, much less internationalist, and less concerned about the kidnapping, abduction, and detention of undocumented neighbors, many of whom are Black, than about shoring up their own economic and political power.
I think, to return to the militant spirit of the Black liberation movement, which was internationalist in every respect, is to actually critique a certain kind of Black liberalism today. And that’s not just about critiquing Democrats. It’s also about critiquing Democrat-friendly Black mainstream politics, which I think is steering us in a very dangerous direction.
What readings do you consider important for activists and organizers today that can help them chart a path toward liberation outside of electoral politics? There have been some incredibly impressive and inspiring formations we’ve seen in Minneapolis. But we’ve seen these sorts of things before, such as the Occupy movement. What are some readings you recommend for increasing the longevity of our struggles?
Too many to name. I would definitely suggest Border and Rule by Harsha Walia, which I mentioned earlier; Arise!: Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution by Christina Heatherton; Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States by Charisse Burden-Stelly. And, of course, Talking About Abolition, your book, is something that everyone needs to read right now. I’m not saying that because I’m on your show. I’m saying that because abolition is almost forgotten. “Abolish ICE” is not the same thing. It’s one aspect of a much larger question.
And for this reason, we must include Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation; Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You! Also Orisanmi Burton’s Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt.
There’s an amazing book by Clara Mattei called The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. It’s about the 1920s, but it speaks to our current reality. Her latest book, Escape from Capitalism, distills her main findings and directly informs today’s debates.
And there’s a brand-new book that Jonathan Rosenblum published called We’re Coming for You and Your Rotten System. In these times of such depression and disillusionment, it showcases a success story about socialism winning in the municipal arena. And so I think it’s uplifting to check out something like that.
And eventually, my book, I think, is going to be useful when it comes out. It’s called Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life. The book actually opens up with this question of federal violence, DHS, and the attack on undocumented working people, and argues that state violence is both an engine for capitalism and a fetter on local economies. If you look at Minneapolis, the federal attack has really destroyed the local economy. And yet DHS has made so much money for the tech industry. So someone’s getting paid.
ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:
Robin D.G. Kelley is Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA, a contributing editor at Boston Review, and the author of many books, including Race Rebels, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, and Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times Of An American Original, among many other titles, including the forthcoming Making a Killing: Capitalism, Cops, and the War on Black Life (Metropolitan Books, 2027). His writing has been featured in the Journal of American History, American Historical Review, Black Music Research Journal, African Studies Review, New York Times, The Crisis, The Nation, and Voice Literary Supplement.