The Trump administration is killing people in the streets, shrinking the electorate, and draining communities — and calling it governance.
Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero are dead. They are dead because ICE agents shot them. The government calls these killings “enforcement.” The government calls this “security.” The government calls this “order.” The government is lying. The government has killed eleven people this term with immigration officials’ bullets — eleven people who are now dead because the government decided that enforcement means killing. That is what “enforcement” means when the government does it. That is what “security” means when the government does it.
And while ICE agents shoot people in the streets, the same government is gutting the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court has already struck down the Voting Rights Act’s protections, and southern states have already redrawn their congressional maps to dilute the power of Black and brown voters. The Save America Act would ban mail-in ballots and impose new identification requirements on voters. The government is not protecting the vote. The government is shrinking the electorate. The government is deciding who gets to vote and who does not.
And while the government shrinks the electorate, the tech industry is draining communities of water and power for AI datacenters. The government is handing public resources to tech corporations and calling it “innovation.” The government is allowing the tech industry to extract from communities and calling it “progress.” Seventy-five datacenter projects worth more than $130 billion have been delayed or cancelled because communities are fighting back. The people are fighting back.
Three fronts. One enemy. The Trump administration, the partisan legislature, and the tech industry — all three are concentrated power grinding people down, and all three are shielded by the same rhetorical trick: framing concentrated power as public good.
The government’s ICE killings are not new. The government’s ICE killings have been happening for months, as immigrant rights groups mobilizing across World Cup host cities documented earlier this year. The government’s voter suppression is not new. The government’s voter suppression has been happening for months, as civil rights leaders planning the August march on Washington documented last week. The datacenter revolt is not new either — but it has now drawn a bipartisan coalition that is stripping the mask from the entire apparatus.
The government calls these killings “enforcement.” That is the frame-engineered relabeling technique — the deliberate substitution of one term for another, where the new term carries different connotations, to shift the cognitive frame within which the underlying issue is processed. The “enforcement” that killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero is the same relabeling the government uses when it calls voter suppression “election integrity” and datacenter extraction “innovation.” The technique works because the new term absorbs the old term’s connotations; the reader believes they have reasoned to the pre-loaded conclusion. But the government’s framing has nothing to do with the distributional reality. The government is killing people. The government is shrinking the electorate. The government is draining communities. The labels are lies.
And the lies follow a pattern the cui-bono trace makes visible. Who benefits from ICE violence? The private prison industry — GEO Group, CoreCivic — that profits from detention contracts. The political operatives who use immigration as a wedge to consolidate power. The administration that uses ICE enforcement as a tool of political control. Who bears the cost? The immigrants who are killed. The communities that are terrorized. The democratic norms that are eroded. The distributional reality is: concentrated power extracts from diffuse populations, and the public framing obscures who benefits.
Who benefits from voter suppression? The partisan actors who win from smaller, less diverse electorates. The political party that benefits from a smaller, older, more propertied electorate. Who bears the cost? The Black and brown voters whose power is diluted. The low-propensity voters who are excluded. The democratic process itself. The distributional reality is: concentrated power extracts from diffuse populations, and the public framing obscures who benefits.
Who benefits from datacenter construction? The tech corporations — Google, Meta, Microsoft, Amazon — that drain communities of water and power. Their investors — venture capital, private equity — that extract returns from infrastructure they do not build. The landowners who sell. Who bears the cost? The rural communities that are drained of water and power. The ratepayers who pay for the infrastructure. The environment that is degraded. The distributional reality is: concentrated power extracts from diffuse populations, and the public framing obscures who benefits.
Three issues. Three fronts. One pattern. The government and the tech industry are extracting from diffuse populations, and the same rhetorical trick hides every one of these harms: framing concentrated power as public good. The government calls ICE killings “enforcement” and voter suppression “election integrity.” The tech industry calls datacenter extraction “innovation.” The labels are not descriptive. The labels are the mechanism.
And here is the proof that the enemy is concentrated power, not any single party: the same conservative grassroots that cheers ICE enforcement is leading the fight against datacenters. Humans First — a conservative advocacy group — is organizing more than 100 events in 40 states this Saturday against the “unchecked expansion of datacenters.” Its chair says no issue “ignites anger among the conservative base more than the issue of big AI data centers.” These are people who support the administration’s immigration agenda. They are also people who recognize that datacenter construction is corporate welfare — the transfer of public resources to tech monopolies — and they are furious about it. The alignment is not ideological coherence. It is the class dimension becoming visible through partisan lenses. When material extraction crosses party lines, the cui-bono trace leads to the same place: concentrated power extracting from diffuse populations. The bipartisan nature of the datacenter revolt is not a contradiction in the thesis. It is the thesis confirmed.
King said in 1967 that the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism cannot be conquered separately. King’s 1967 Riverside Church address (“Beyond Vietnam,” April 4, 1967) is the argument we still need. The government’s ICE killings are the racism. The tech industry’s datacenter construction is the materialism. The partisan legislature’s voter suppression is the militarism. The three are one. The three are the same apparatus.
George Lucas said it: democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away. The republic is being hollowed by legalistic means — emergency powers, manufactured crises, procedural maneuvers, a legislature consenting to its own marginalization for the appearance of order. The Voting Rights Act is gutted, and southern states redraw their congressional maps to dilute the power of Black and brown voters. The Save America Act bans mail-in ballots and imposes new identification requirements on voters. The democracy is being given away.
And the government is treating these people as if they are not people. As if they are not persons with rights. As if they are not part of the community. The government is wrong. Star Trek made the point in fiction — a trial over whether a sentient being is property, and what it means to create “whole generations of disposable people” — but the government is making it real. ICE enforcement is creating exactly that: a population of disposable people, killed in the streets, treated as if their lives do not matter. The government is wrong because every person has the right to be treated as a person.
The people are not waiting for the government to get it right. This weekend, more than 70 ICE Out rallies are taking place across the country. Nearly 700 Good Trouble events are planned across three days. More than 100 datacenter protests are organized in 40 states. The government can kill, disenfranchise, and extract. But the people who are showing up are saying no.
This is the record this publication has been building: the government’s ICE enforcement is killing people, the government’s voter suppression is gutting the Voting Rights Act, the tech industry’s datacenter construction is draining communities. The record is not new. The record is documented. The record is the receipts.
And the people are pushing back. Thousands of Americans are taking to the streets this weekend — in big cities and in rural towns, in progressive enclaves and in red areas. The government can kill, disenfranchise, and extract. But the people who are showing up are saying no. The arc bends only if specific people push it. The people are pushing.
King said the arc bends toward justice. King was right and King was incomplete. The arc bends only when the apparatus that holds it straight is broken at the joints that hold it. The arc bends only if specific people, in a specific moment, push it. The people are pushing this weekend. The people are pushing because the government has left them no other choice. The people are pushing because the government is killing people in the streets, shrinking the electorate, and draining communities. The people are pushing because the government is calling it governance.