When Your Silence Becomes Complicity in Trump's America
What 1943 Berlin teaches us about fighting back today
When Fear Becomes Policy
During my recent visit to Berlin, I carried a list of historic places I wanted to visit related to the history of Nazism. I wrote about several of them for The Planet—the Reichstag, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the site where Von Stauffenberg was executed. But one location on my list remained unvisited: the Block der Frauen, or Women's Block, on Rosenstrasse.
In February 1943, this unremarkable street became the site of something extraordinary. Around 1,800 Jewish men married to non-Jewish women had been arrested for deportation. For over a week, in freezing winter conditions, approximately 6,000 people—mostly their wives and relatives—protested in shifts outside the building where the men were held. They demanded their release. And incredibly, in Nazi Germany, it worked. The regime relented. The men were freed.
The Rosenstrasse protest stands as one of the few examples of successful mass public dissent against Nazi policies. It proved that even under the most totalitarian conditions, collective action could force authoritarian power to retreat. Such victories were rare—the Nazi state had effectively banned public demonstrations and suppressed dissent through fear and violence. But when people stood together, publicly and persistently, they could win.
Yesterday, I watched videos from Los Angeles that looked like scenes of a brave population resisting an autocratic regime. ICE conducted coordinated raids across the city, hitting clothing factories, Home Depot stores, donut shops, and day labor centers. They came in tactical gear with armored vehicles, using flash-bang grenades and pepper spray. Forty-four people were detained.
But this time, the community fought back. Hundreds of protesters immediately rallied outside the Federal Building and detention centers, attempting to block ICE vehicles. Mayor Karen Bass condemned the raids as tactics that "sow terror in our communities." Eleven city councilmembers called them "indiscriminate targeting of children and families." As one council member put it: "When they come for one of us, they come for all of us."
I thought about those brave women on Rosenstrasse this week when I watched a video that I cannot forget.
In Times Square, a Chilean woman named Javiera Montero, a permanent resident, was walking with her 12-year-old daughter when people fleeing police knocked them both down. When Montero approached officers for help, they tackled and handcuffed her instead. The video shows what happened next: as they lead her to an unmarked car, she screams, "Mi hija, mi hija, mi hija," my daughter, my daughter, my daughter. You can see the child in the background, crying. A bystander shouts to the officers, "Excuse me officer, this is her daughter!" But they ignore both the man and the crying child, and drive away.
Montero spent eight hours in detention. No charges were filed. It was, officials later said, a "mistake" and a "misunderstanding." But her daughter was left alone on the streets of New York for those eight hours, abandoned by the very people who are supposed to protect and serve.
But unlike in 1943 Berlin, today there is resistance. I have seen videos of ICE agents retreating when confronted by crowds of protesters. Cases that generate enough public attention often result in releases, like Rumeysa Ozturk, the Turkish doctoral student at Tufts whose detention sparked such outrage that a federal judge temporarily halted her deportation. The tools of documentation and protest that were impossible under Nazi rule are available today.
The question is whether the American people will use them.
I scrolled through more videos. Mothers torn from their children outside schools. Workers grabbed during their lunch breaks. Often by unidentifiable agents in masks, operating from unmarked vehicles. Each clip more disturbing than the last, each one a reminder of how quickly a democracy can slip into a totalitarian state.
The raids have names now. "Operation Aurora," targeting Denver and other cities. The uncertainty is part of the strategy. Local officials don't know when the raids will come, what form they will take, or who will be swept up. Will they raid schools, churches, hospitals? Will they target only those with criminal records, or will they arrest anyone without papers, including those with temporary legal status? The not knowing is the point.
In Nashville, ICE agents joined with Tennessee Highway Patrol to pull over drivers in immigrant neighborhoods, making five times more stops than normal in a single shift: one stop every two minutes. As one state senator observed, "That's not a 'public safety operation.'" It's a hunt.
The president calls these people "animals." Dehumanizing groups in society by those in power is always a prelude for worse, sometimes unimaginably worse, to come.
The images I watched several times are still with me. I hear the woman's voice, I replay the horror of someone being torn from their normal life and brutally abducted for no reason at all. This shows the power of video on social media—my words describing this scene will never have the same impact on you as watching it unfold in real time.
Even though the impact may be less in written text, it's shocking that this happened literally one block from the New York Times headquarters on Eighth Avenue—and the newspaper has not reported on it. One block. About 150 meters. This video has been shared worldwide across social media. There is global outrage about this and similar cases. Yet America's newspaper of record, located a two-minute walk from where Javiera Montero was arrested, remains silent.
To be fair, the New York Times has reported critically on ICE operations, examining the legal aspects and documenting the human pain that the administration's policies cause. But this specific incident—practically on their doorstep—a permanent resident wrongfully arrested while seeking help, her child abandoned on the street—apparently did not meet their threshold for coverage.
What does this silence tell us? Perhaps there is simply too much happening under Trump's administration—so many ICE raids, so many broken families, so many violations of basic decency—that even the New York Times cannot keep up. Or perhaps we are witnessing something more troubling: the normalization of lawlessness on such a scale that what would have been front-page news under Biden has become routine background noise under Trump.
Imagine if this exact incident had happened one year ago. A permanent resident seeking police help, wrongfully arrested, her child abandoned on the street for eight hours. Under a different administration, this would have been a scandal. The New York Times would have been all over it. Heads would have rolled.
But now? Silence. As if we have collectively lowered our standards for what qualifies as outrageous.
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The Machinery of Fear
The scope is staggering. Trump's team promises to deport millions, including those who actually have legal papers—temporary permits issued by the previous administration that the new government has simply declared invalid. More than a million people suddenly stripped of legal status by executive decree.
The Laken Riley Act, passed with support from dozens of Democrats, allows deportation of anyone merely suspected (not charged, not convicted) of crimes ranging from assault to shoplifting. The threshold for removal has dropped to suspicion alone.
But the latest escalation removes even that thin legal veneer. The Justice Department has quietly invoked the Alien Enemies Act, giving ICE agents the power to conduct warrantless searches of homes if they suspect someone of being an "alien enemy." No judge's signature is required. No probable cause. Just suspicion and the authority to break down doors.
Children will come home from school to empty houses. Workers will disappear mid-shift. Families who have lived in America for decades will vanish into detention centers that officials euphemistically call "temporary facilities."
These are the people who grow and harvest the food Americans eat, who wash dishes in restaurants and stock store shelves, who build the buildings where people work and clean them after everyone goes home. They are woven into the fabric of American life, yet they are being hunted like prey.
The uncertainty amplifies the fear. No one knows when their neighborhood will be next, what form the raids will take, and who will be considered a target. Parents drop their children at school wondering if they will be there to pick them up. The psychological warfare is as deliberate as it is effective.
Two months ago, I stood on the bridge at Remagen, looking across the Rhine River where American forces first established their foothold on German soil in March 1945. The original Ludendorff Bridge collapsed just ten days after its capture, but those ten days helped end a war and a regime that had perfected the art of making people disappear.
At the small museum housed in the massive stone pillar on the southern side (where the Americans arrived), I spoke with an elderly woman selling tickets. She recalled stories her parents had told her about how the Gestapo operated. Unmarked cars, unidentified agents, and sudden disappearances that left families shattered and communities terrorized. The parallels to what I watched on my phone are impossible to ignore.
The bridge itself is gone now, but the lesson remains: even the most terrifying systems of control can be dismantled, though the cost is often measured in decades and millions of lives.
Four Billion Marks for a Beer
My grandfather was born in 1900 and lived through nearly the entire twentieth century. In his old age, he told me about visiting Germany during the hyperinflation of 1923, when he paid four billion marks for a single beer. Four billion. The number was so absurd it stuck with me as a child, though I couldn't really grasp what it meant.
At school, we learned about the rise of fascism in Germany always with reference to economic desperation—the crushing burden of war reparations, the moral weight of defeat, people carrying wheelbarrows full of worthless currency to buy bread. And when the economy began to stabilize, came another blow: the crash of 1929, which for many took away the hope for a better future. The lesson was clear: democracy fails when people become desperate enough to trade freedom for the promise of order.
But that makes America's current situation all the more disturbing. There is no hyperinflation, no lost war, and no economic collapse that would explain why a majority of American voters willingly chose authoritarianism. The country that elected Trump in 2024 was not Weimar Germany facing impossible circumstances. It was the world's wealthiest nation, choosing fear over freedom not from desperation but from either preference or ignorance.
People who choose authoritarianism from comfort are harder to convince they have made a mistake than those who embrace it out of desperation.
Memories from Bad Godesberg
In 1998, I lived in a dreary furnished apartment in Bad Godesberg during my diplomatic posting to Germany. The place was a monument to 1970s bad taste—dark oak everywhere, hideous copper lamp hanging over a bulky dining table, and that painting on the wall that looked like it belonged in a doctor's waiting room. A sad little boy with a tear on his cheek stared at me from the cheap frame.
But it was there, in those long evening hours, that I first read extensively about the mechanics of authoritarian control. How fear becomes policy. How the unthinkable becomes routine through incremental steps, each one making the next seem reasonable.
I remember my evenings in that apartment, reading books about the psychology of state terror. I learned that the most effective campaigns of intimidation rely not on mass roundups but on visible, unpredictable actions that make everyone feel vulnerable. The goal is not just to remove specific individuals but to change the behavior of those who remain.
Watching those ICE videos, I felt that same chill I experienced in that ugly apartment in the autumn of 1998.
A German Woman's Warning
During my recent hiking along the Rhine, I met a woman who shared a story I have not yet published. She was born six weeks before the war ended in 1945. Her mother fled westward with her as a tiny baby when the Soviet troops arrived, while her father was taken prisoner. He did not return until she was ten years old, a decade of absence that defined her childhood.
We stood under a magnificent magnolia tree in full blossom as she told me about the many memories her mother had shared with her. "The thing about those times," she said, "is that it happened so gradually that people got used to it. First, certain people couldn't work in certain jobs. Then they had to register. Then they had to live in certain places. By the time the trains came, resistance seemed impossible."
She looked thoughtful before continuing. "What frightens me about the United States now is not just what your leaders are doing, but how many people are cheering them on. They think this will only happen to others, never to them."
Her words stayed with me long after I left Germany, and I remember writing them down later that evening in a draft story I still haven't published.
Growing Up with Latin American Nightmares
The ICE raids also bring back memories from my high school days in the early 1980s, when television news was filled with images from Latin American dictatorships. Chile under Pinochet, Argentina's disappeared, Guatemala's death squads. Every evening brought new footage of families destroyed by state terror.
I vividly remember the news of four Dutch journalists who disappeared in El Salvador in 1982. Koos Koster, Jan Kuiper, Joop Willemsen, and Hans ter Laag were working for IKON television when they vanished. Later, their bodies were found. For 43 years, their families fought for justice while the killers walked free.
Just this week, three of the men responsible were finally convicted for their murders. This week. After four decades of impunity. The intellectual author, former colonel Mario Reyes Mena, remains in the United States, protected from extradition.
Those images seemed impossibly distant from my safe Dutch childhood. We watched them like scenes from another planet, secure in our belief that such things could never happen in civilized countries like ours.
The tactics were always the same: unmarked cars, masked agents, people vanishing without explanation. The fear was the point. When anyone can disappear at any time, everyone modifies their behavior. They stop speaking up, stop asking questions, stop believing they have rights worth defending.
I think of Herman Wouk's novels "Winds of War" and "War and Remembrance," later adapted into a television series with Robert Mitchum. Mitchum played an American naval attaché in Berlin before the war, and what struck me about those scenes was how normal life appeared. People had dinner parties; orchestras played, and waiters served wine. Then suddenly, the orchestra would strike up a Nazi anthem, or an incident would occur that reminded you the normality was an illusion.
That nuanced portrayal challenged my teenage assumption that everything under fascism was permanently horrible. Of course, it wasn't. Otherwise, you don't get mass support for fundamentally evil systems. Life continues, people adapt, and freedoms are chipped away gradually like a sculptor with a chisel, removing small pieces until nothing remains.
The Border Between Worlds
Last March, I stood at the remnants of the Berlin Wall in Potsdam, running my hand along the cold concrete that once divided not just a city but entire ways of life. On one side, people lived under constant surveillance, never knowing who might be watching or listening. On the other, democracy allowed people to move freely, speak openly, and live without fear of midnight knocks on the door.
The Wall is gone now, but the mentality that created it persists in different forms. I see it in the ICE raids, in the masked agents, in the deliberate creation of a climate where people live in fear of authority rather than being protected by it.
Standing there on a grey March afternoon, I wondered what walls we are building now that future generations will struggle to tear down.
Many Americans today experience what is happening as something they see on their screens, something that worries them for other people, but they don't yet connect it to their own lives. They don't see how freedoms are being chipped away in a society where rights are constantly reduced, piece by piece, until nothing remains.
Yet all over the country, there are daily examples of people uniting in protests, scenes we never saw so widespread in Nazi Germany. Americans still have tools for resistance that were impossible under totalitarian rule. What we don't yet see are the kinds of mass protests in the capital that regularly occur in European democracies when fundamental rights are threatened.
The Real America
The America terrorizing immigrant families is not the America that shaped my childhood imagination. That was the America of Richard Scarry's colorful books, where yellow school buses carried children safely to schools where they learned about democracy and justice. It was the America that sent soldiers to liberate Europe from fascism, the America that welcomed the world's displaced and dispossessed.
Both Americas are real. Both are part of the same complex, contradictory country.
The question is which America will prevail. The one that builds walls and deploys masked agents, or the one that remembers why we fought against such things in the first place.
What Social Media Shows Us
I keep seeing these ICE raids documented everywhere online. The videos spread because they capture raw terror; there's nothing more powerful than watching a child abandoned while her mother disappears into an unmarked car.
These images become evidence of democracy retreating. Each video is proof of a country abandoning its founding principles for authoritarian efficiency.
Traditional media's reluctance to cover these stories with urgency is part of the problem. When institutions that should guard democracy treat authoritarianism as normal politics, the decline speeds up.
The Path Forward
I do not write this from despair but from hope born of historical knowledge. I have seen the remnants of walls that once seemed permanent. I have stood in places where terrible systems of control ultimately collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions.
The ICE raids will not last forever because systems built on fear always contain the seeds of their own destruction. They require constant escalation to maintain their effectiveness, and eventually, that escalation becomes unsustainable.
But the timeline matters. How long will this continue? How many families will be shattered? How much damage will be done to American institutions and America's standing in the world?
The answers depend on choices being made right now by millions of individual Americans. Choices about what to tolerate, what to resist, what to document, what to remember.
History will judge not just the architects of this policy but everyone who remained silent while it was implemented.
Looking Back from 2034
Ten years from now, Americans will look back at this period and ask themselves how they responded when their country began deploying masked agents to terrorize immigrant families. They will ask what they did when unmarked cars prowled their streets and children were left abandoned on sidewalks.
Some will remember speaking up. Others will remember looking away. Many will, over time, remember their own actions differently or will have formulated excuses that prevented them from bravery.
The tragedy is not just what is happening to the families being torn apart today. The tragedy is that America's pursuit of security through fear creates far more instability than any threat it claims to address.
Because in the end, a country that allows its government to operate in masks and unmarked cars is not protecting itself from anything. It is abandoning the very principles that made it worth protecting in the first place.
I have walked through too many memorials, talked to too many survivors, and stood at too many sites of historical reckoning to believe that this story ends any other way than with Americans eventually remembering who they are supposed to be.
The question is how much damage will be done before that memory returns.
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This is a moving and remarkable essay. The deep research you performed is clear. We know an incident experienced by Montero and her 12 year old daughter is based in cruelty and with this regime, cruelty is the point. Keep us frightened and quiet. I have lost friends to the shadows. The feud between the two psychopaths is not cause for celebration. It is fuel for their hatred and more innocents will suffer in retaliation. Media is now almost completely owned by wealth and can no longer be considered the Fourth Estate. We're on our own. Next Saturday, June 14th, is No Kings Rally and March. Google the name and your city for times and locations. Get involved. Take a stand. Be brave.
"These are the people who grow and harvest the food Americans eat, who wash dishes in restaurants and stock store shelves, who build the buildings where people work and clean them after everyone goes home. They are woven into the fabric of American life, yet they are being hunted like prey."
Your work here, this essay, is vitally important. I worry about the American people. There are many who have compassion and care for others and prove it. There are many who have become numb and prefer to shake their head and mutter something like, "that's horrible" and feel they've done their duty. I am curious as to how this unfolds.