Over the course of both Trump administrations so far, I've always felt that one of the easiest ways to spot the odious fascist inclinations of the regime is to observe the Trumpenreich's malevolent disdain for, and gleeful desire to harshly police, migrant children. No matter how wrong a person is about immigration policy, there's a demarcation of human decency line that should come into play before you decide to take out your nativist authoritarian fantasies on innocent children who're in the United States through no real fault of their own; yet in Trumpworld that line simply doesn't seem to exist.

Take for example the news that Trump's DHS and the ICE Gestapo have been tracking "unaccompanied alien children" with an eye towards deporting or prosecuting them, under the guise of benevolent "wellness checks" and yet another far right conspiracy theory about child trafficking.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/28/ice-unaccompanied-immigrant-children

Ice seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children to deport or prosecute them

"Although DHS is characterizing the welfare visits as benevolent, an internal Ice document accessed by the National Immigration Project advocacy group and then shared shows Ice is also seeking out children who came into the US alone as immigrants – and their US-based sponsors – for immigration enforcement purposes and/or to pursue criminal prosecutions. The recent operations and document confirm a February report from Reuters, that the Trump administration has directed Ice to track down and deport this group.

Meanwhile, in Donald Trump’s second term, legal services provided to unaccompanied minors have been slashed and funds are not flowing despite court intervention. And the federal agency monitoring unaccompanied immigrant children has begun sharing sensitive data with Ice.

The Ice document shows “ it’s not just about checking in on kids, making sure that they can account for them and that they’re not being exploited”, said Michelle Méndez, the director of legal resources and training for the National Immigration Project. “It shows they have other goals, and the goals are criminalization of the kid or criminalization of the sponsor. It’s backdoor family separation.”

Look, I don't know about you but I definitely remember a time when Americans were up in arms because Trump was separating migrant families in detention and essentially trafficking children to Christian American foster families. So for the Trump regime to be working on a backdoor way to deport unaccompanied migrant children under the guise of fighting a made up reactionary moral panic about stopping "child trafficking" under Joe Biden, is both nauseating and outrageous. I can think of dozens of more appropriate government agencies than DHS and ICE to monitor the welfare of what amount to child refugees, but it's irrelevant because the Trump regime's own internal documents say they picked the Gestapo because they want to deport literal children. I don't know who needs to be told that a government pretending it cares about helping and protecting migrant children while simultaneously slashing all the programs that would actually do that is lying, but clearly that's what's going on here. These people are fucking heartless animals; and I don't mean the kids.

It should also be noted that here again we can observe the same "inversion of purpose" the regime has been using to justify enacting other aspects of its authoritarian Christian Nationalist agenda; for example transforming the Department of Justice's civil rights division into a vehicle for state prosecution of white grievance, or arguing that illegally kidnapping anti-genocide protestors on behalf of our bloodthirsty client state Israel is actually "fighting antisemitism on college campuses," and so forth. I'm sure it amuses Stephen Miller, Trump's unofficial Secretary of Nazi Shit, to no end that he's able to weaponize the language of tolerance and equality to straight up do state-sanctioned white supremacist dictator shit and enforce mass acceptance of the regime's fascist "unreality."

Finally I would encourage folks not to sleep on the fact that ICE's own internal documents are instructing agents to target, um, children with “gang or terrorist ties/activities.” Even setting aside the fact that the regime is implying literal children might be a national security threat or in a nacro-terrorist organization, we already know the Trumpenreich is prepared to accuse anyone they don't particularly like of being in a terrorist gang so they can traffic them to a torture prison in El Salvador without due process. I can't say why the regime wants to mark again, literal children, as narco-terrorists but given the fascist bullshit they're already using that designation to accomplish, I can pretty much guarantee you it won't be anything good.