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In the final hours of the Republican National Convention in 2024, they broke out the “MASS DEPORTATIONS NOW” signs. Stephen Miller and Tom Homan had orchestrated family separations in the first Trump term, and now they wanted to go to the next level. Their model was “Operation Wetback,” created by Joseph May Swing for the Eisenhower administration in 1954-55, which deported over a quarter of a million Mexicans from the US using military-style tactics. To justify the brutality, they promoted widespread racial stereotypes, portraying Mexican immigrants as dirty, diseased, and irresponsible. The desired figure of one million deportations used by Trump is based on a falsehood perpetrated during Operation Wetback (basically, counting the same deportees over again).
On January 31, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller posted this on social media: “Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class. The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare and the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship. In America, for generations now, the policy has been that anyone who would economically benefit from moving to the US can do so, exercise the franchise in the US and their children, the moment they are born, will be full American citizens with all the rights and benefits therein.”
In reply, Heather Cox Richardson wrote, “Miller’s white nationalism is not the concept on which this nation was built. The United States of America was built on the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the sweat and blood of almost 250 years of Americans, often those from marginalized communities, working to make those principles a reality.”1
And doing so through free and fair elections. But for Stephen Miller and Trump, the calculus is different. On February 2, Trump appeared on Dan Bongino’s post-FBI podcast to perpetrate this lie about immigrants: “These people were brought to our country to vote, and they vote illegally. . . . The Republicans should say, ‘We want to take over, and we should take over the voting in at least 15 places.’ The Republicans oughta nationalize the voting.”
What’s going on in Minneapolis and around the country now is only partly about the mass deportation of immigrants. It is also about future elections. The goal is to get Americans used to having an armed paramilitary force occupying their cities and menacing citizens, so that when this happens during the mid-term elections, it will have been normalized. But the people of Minneapolis are not standing still for this subterfuge.
Attorney General Pam Bondi told the Governor of Minnesota that if he was willing to turn over voter rolls to the Trump regime, this would make things go better for them. In her letter to Tim Walz on January 24, Bondi called on Walz to, “First, share all of Minnesota’s records on Medicaid and Food and Nutrition Service programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program data, with the federal government.” And then she demanded that Minnesota immediately “allow the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice to access voter rolls to confirm that Minnesota’s voter registration practices comply with federal law as authorized by the Civil Rights Act of 1960.”
Why does the DOJ want Minnesota’s voter rolls? Because redistricting and gerrymandering only went so far and then met resistance. Indiana just said no.
On January 28, Kash Patel’s FBI raided the Fulton County elections offices outside of Atlanta, and seized 700 boxes of ballots from the 2020 election (which Donald Trump continues to claim he won, based on a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory), while the Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard looked on. A senior Trump administration official claimed, “Director Gabbard has a pivotal role in election security and protecting the integrity of our elections against interference, including operations targeting voting systems, databases, and election infrastructure.”
The Trump administration is using the chief of US intelligence, whose job is to track threats from foreign enemies, to interfere in US domestic elections. And they are using the US government to build the infrastructure to be able to do that. And they have ten more months to accomplish it.
1. Heather Cox Richardson, January 31, 2026, Letters from an American, on Substack.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.