Robin Hood, but modernized as a 21st-century hacker type so that he can cope in today’s world. But I’d still like him to look like he belongs in an edgy 90s movie, complete with green tights, for authenticity’s sake.

Due process is recognized as a human‑rights protection in almost all democratic countries and generally applies regardless of citizenship; it helps prevent arbitrariness and abuse of power.

The fundamental safeguard against arbitrary state detention is habeas corpus or its functional equivalent: a person detained must be brought before a judge so the lawfulness of the detention can be reviewed and so the detainee can be informed of the charges against them.

ICE denies detainees even this, for which there can be absolutely no excuse in any reasonably civilized country.

That’s my impression too. After everything the regime has done so far, I think it’s pretty clear that it can no longer be removed by legal means - the legal system already seems to me to have been infiltrated too deeply for that.

It also seems likely to me that MAGA will no longer allow free elections, because that would carry the risk of being voted out of office, which, even in the corrupt US system, could mean severe legal consequences for many of the regime’s followers and for all the misdeeds that have already been committed in less than a year. I don’t think MAGA will take that chance, especially since ICE is already set up as a kind of secret police force with a budget equivalent to the military spending of a medium-sized country. I mean, what else could an agency like this possibly need such an astronomical budget for other than as a private army loyal to the regime and thus a safeguard in case of resistance from the regular army or the police?

In short: I think the outlook is very bleak, and like you, I’m not convinced that the majority of US citizens are aware of how dangerous the situation is.

I am German and I am appalled by the behavior of our government: Instead of standing up to Trump and his henchmen and becoming independent from the US, they are kowtowing to him, even though it is completely obvious how little Trump cares about his so called allies—and since the US is nowadays blackmailing Europe with tariffs and so on, it takes a lot of imagination to still call them allies, especially when all halfway rational people are particularly disturbed by all the inhuman Nazi shit.

Unfortunately, however, the weak position of the current German government was already absolutely foreseeable before the last federal election, because the Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is actually more of a US lobbyist than a politician (among other things, he was chairman of the supervisory board of Black Rock Germany until 2022 and held various positions in business lobby organizations such as the Atlantik-Brücke – a conservative think tank). Nothing can be expected from these people, although I unfortunately also think that US citizens should not count on any external support anyway.

Does the US legal system still exist in any sense that it should in a democracy?

I ask because I don’t understand how all this is possible in a constitutional state: Masked brutes who arbitrarily kidnap people on the open street without even identifying themselves, people who are interned without due process and then often simply disappear without a trace in the administrative system, total surveillance without cause, and many other massive violations that the US legal system seems to enable rather than prevent, as it should.

All of this already looks very much like a dictatorship to me, i.e., an unjust state, as none of this can be possible with a democratic constitution - at least not with one that is actually upheld by the legal system.

M.C. Escher approves

Yes, you can set that up. But most news communities such as /world, /worldnews, /news, and others are very US-centric. I wonder why that has to be the case when it should be clear to everyone by now that the White House is employing troll tactics.