Advertisement
What precedes the unprecedented?
Since 2020, the use of “unprecedented” increased in the English language. Six years after the World Health Organization declared SARS-Cov-2 a pandemic, the word continues to circulate in conversations about the Trump administration and its policies and actions, with University of Gothenburg’s Varieties of Democracy Institute announcing on March 18, 2026, that the “speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history” (italics added).
But just as SARS-Cov-2 has precedents—for example, the 1918–20 Great Influenza—so, too, do Trump’s policies and actions. At a time when so much of everyday life in the United States seems unprecedented, Fascism’s Building Blocks reveals the opposite: These multiple crises didn’t come out of nowhere. They build on a foundation of interconnected legislation that has de-democratized the United States for decades and helped build today’s emergent fascism.
We describe the fascism of our moment as “emergent” not because we’re hesitant to name today’s dangers. Instead, we use “emergent” to highlight just how much the political forces consolidating the power of the few are being resisted, and how many ordinary people are rejecting the division into “us” and “them” that fascism requires. This, of course, is why immigration constitutes a leading edge of fascism today: because it has become such a sharply honed weapon for dividing “us” and “them.”
But, as our project shows, immigration is also key to today’s fascist infrastructures because US immigration law, policy, and enforcement provide a deep reservoir of tools at the state’s disposal. For example, the Department of Homeland Security arrested Mahmoud Khalil for his political speech and activism against the Gaza genocide by deploying a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that enables the state to deem a person removable if their presence has “serious adverse foreign policy consequences.”
And, indeed, looking outward as we write in April 2026, we bear witness to a senseless and seemingly endless US-Israeli war against Iran and Lebanon. The war spreads the ruthless slaughter of the ongoing genocide of Gaza and threatens to pull the world into a global war. Following the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro and forced regime change in Venezuela, we bear witness to the slow strangulation of Cuba, with a US blockade culminating 66 years of embargoes. We bear witness to an entire world struggling under the weight of US misconceptions, delusions, economic domination, and widespread violence.
How is all this “unprecedented” devastation even possible? The answer is in the infrastructures of fascism that the United States has been building for decades.
At home, since the beginning of Trump’s second term, we’ve seen the US government directly attack the pillars of US civil society: media, higher education, law firms and legal institutions, sciences, public health institutions, and nonprofit and humanitarian organizations. We’ve also witnessed—and opposed—the violent occupations of cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles. All this destruction is aided by AI tech firms like Palantir, which increasingly, and inextricably, entangle themselves throughout military and intelligence services, handing over the state’s supposed monopoly over violence to corporations.
In these cities and others, the police and the military are executing a campaign of mass deportation, which not only launches tear gas and pepper bullets against journalists, pastors, and children, but also generates yet another prison boom as the government repurposes warehouses into crude cages for deporting countless people, “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
How is all this “unprecedented” devastation even possible? The answer is in the infrastructures of fascism that the United States has been building for decades.
To expose the cruel foundation for today’s political nightmare, we’ve organized our series around four major statutes and their anniversaries: the 40th anniversary of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA); and the 30th anniversary of the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). Our goal is to show how these seemingly disparate legislative acts helped create today’s infrastructures of fascism.
Indeed, these four statutes underlie the horror that we’re seeing today: raids, detentions, extraditions, deportations, and the decimation of the social good. In short, we aim to call attention to what preceded what’s often described as unprecedented.
Roots of Emergent Fascism
We don’t take the label of “fascism” lightly. Rather, we see elements of fascism consolidating, particularly the identification of internal enemies and the partitioning of “us” from them.” MAGA “retains the racial fantasy of national rebirth and the frantic circulation of a pseudo-class discourse,” in the words of Alberto Toscano. Today’s MAGA is a fantasy mobilized to continue and consolidate capitalist domination “amid a capitalist crisis of accumulation.”
Indeed, the definition of fascism—according to our first contributor, Justin Akers Chacón—is whenever elites of the capitalist class preserve their rule over the working class by deploying xenophobia and state and extra-state violence to divide workers from one another. Securing capitalist domination requires the deployment of policing, which is justified by criminalization. Targeting Indigenous, Black, transgender, or noncitizen people becomes legitimate and necessary when the state turns their actions and behaviors into crimes and their existence into problems to be solved through arrest, detention, removal, and even killing.
The seeds for this deployment of immigration law for fascist purposes grow from the very settler colonial foundations of the United States that built the nation on a foundation of white nationalism. As we noted in our series marking the centenary of the Immigration Act of 1924, Adolf Hitler admired US immigration policies of racist exclusion and the Nazi regime modeled its Nuremberg laws on the Jim Crow segregation in the US South, as well as laws that disenfranchised Indigenous and other colonized subjects who lived in US territories.
Yet while these fascist roots are as old as the United States itself, it is in the last four decades that the contemporary infrastructure of state terror was funded, justified, and consolidated. This shift was part of the rise of late (racial) capitalism and the neoliberal state, or what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “anti-state state: a state that grows on the promise of shrinking.” Stripping the welfare state of funding and services, the neoliberal anti-state state simultaneously increases funding and capacity in state violence, like policing, prisons, borders, and militarism.
The laws we examine in this series showcase the multiple violences of this anti-state state. After all, these four laws ended “welfare as we know it,” while expanding mass incarceration and a deportation apparatus of manpower (cops of all kinds, guards, etc.), buildings (cages, offices, courts, warehouses, etc.), transportation (buses, planes, etc.), walls, and other infrastructures on which the deportation terror relies.
As it abandons its purpose of ensuring the good of the people, the neoliberal state requires an ideology built around “a perpetual enemy who must always be fought but can never be conquered.” This identification of internal enemies not only legitimizes the state but enables its drift toward fascism. “That’s where international militarization and domestic militarization meet,” Gilmore argues, “at this notion that there is the production of an enemy around which we organize everything, everything, not simply profit.” The infrastructure of fascism is also ideological, transforming people into enemies to be criminalized and subject to state terror.
Fascism’s Building Blocks
Our contributors show that the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA); Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA); Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA); and Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) make up the building blocks of our current political moment.
Tracing the relationship between fascism and anti-immigrant racism in the United States through its longer history, Justin Akers Chacón exposes the threads connecting the Ku Klux Klan to the Proud Boys, the Palmer Raids to today’s ICE raids. Turning our attention to the 1986 IRCA, Mariela Olivares debunks the myth that this legislation was pro-immigrant. Instead, it is a keystone for oppressive law and policy targeting immigrants, particularly immigrant and mixed-status families. In his original illustration Republicans Debate Amnesty, Alberto Ledesma—one of the approximately 2.7 million formerly undocumented immigrants who regularized under IRCA—addresses the relative dearth of narratives about this law, pointing to the spectacle that fascism offers in lieu of social change.
1996 marked a pivotal year for the building of a fascist infrastructure, as Bill Clinton sought to prove the new Democrats could win political power by demonizing internal enemies. PRWORA ended “welfare as we know it,” criminalizing the poor and, as Rahim Kurwa emphasizes, transforming the welfare state into an instrument of mass deportation. This evisceration of welfare worked hand-in-hand with the 1994 Crime Bill that fed mass incarceration, making the United States the most incarcerated country in the world. As Abraham Paulos and Nana Gyamfi make clear, the 1994 Crime Bill and IIRIRA formed a concerted attack on Black migrants, highlighting the centrality of anti-Black racism in creating the prison-to-deportation pipeline that would sweep away migrants of color overall.
Like the emergent fascism we see today, the IIRIRA and AEDPA didn’t appear out of nowhere. Patrisia Macías-Rojas calls attention to these laws’ precursors and how those precursors tested unchecked executive power over immigration. Even when a proposed law failed to pass, she points out, the ideas behind it lay in waiting, then emerged to consolidate into law later. Her intervention reminds us to remain vigilant against ideas that haven’t yet taken hold but that circulate, gaining respect and normalization.
“Counterterrorism” also plants seeds of fascism, William Youmans emphasizes, analyzing AEDPA’s expansion of legal exceptions that enabled those in power to increase their authority and erode the rights of all people in the United States. We see these exceptions in the widening allegation of “domestic terrorism” today: against people who openly oppose genocide in Gaza or defend their immigrant neighbors, as well as nonprofit organizations that support transgender and immigrant communities or that oppose fascism.
The roots of today’s emergent fascism run deep. So what is to be done? A return to a liberal status quo won’t save us. Indeed, this series shows that liberalism is fundamentally incapable of challenging fascism, because it coexists with, enables, and seeds fascism. Liberalism ultimately pledges fealty to supporting capitalist accumulation, not democracy. Even as mayor Jacob Frey told ICE “to get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” he dismissed outright calls to abolish ICE—even though doing so would dismantle one of the primary infrastructures of the emerging fascist state that attempted to overtake his city.
Perhaps other lines of liberation might be found in Alicia Schmidt Camacho’s focus on local sovereignty and the politics of sanctuary and abolition in the multiracial city. “Rights are gained by exercising them, she argues, not by asking for them.” As we’ve seen in occupied cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, ordinary people are exercising democracy from the ground floor: defending their neighbors, sharing resources through mutual aid, risking violent abuse and even death. They’re not waiting for large organizations or political parties to give them permission.
One way to thwart this emergent fascism from reaching its full potential is through solidarity.
While this series focuses on immigration as a leading edge of fascism, we’re already seeing how these forces are ensnaring anyone who opposes its regime. If its assault has not yet come to your community, it’s time to get ready. 
Local Organizing to Support
- Organized Communities Against Deportations (Chicago/Illinois)
- Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights
- Pilsen Unidos por Nuestro Orgullo (PUÑO)
- Midwest Immigration Bond Fund
- Monarca (Minnesota)
- Stand With Minnesota (Mutual aid funds serving Minnesota. Rent assistance especially needed.)
- Defend 612
- National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) (Los Angeles and National)
- Siembra NC (North Carolina)
- Schools Drop ICE (National campaign organized by a consortium of sponsors for college / university campuses)
- Free DC Project
- Grassroots Leadership (Texas; fighting ICE and detention centers for decades)
- Detention Watch Network (National; find local network partners fighting detention centers near you)
- Mijente (National abolition, migrant justice, Latine solidarity organizing)
- New Sanctuary Coalition (New York)
- Asian American Resource Workshop (Boston, deportation defense)
- Democracy Docket
