The new DHS rule (effective December 26, 2025) authorizes CBP to photograph all non-citizens at every entry and exit point, with photos retained for up to 75 years in the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT). It targets anyone crossing at airports, seaports, land borders, and even people using private airfields and marinas.

…DHS retains certain records for up to 75 years, which is necessary to support the holding of biometrics of subjects of interest in immigration and border management or law enforcement activities.

Now every technical prerequisite is in place for… what, exactly? This system can process millions daily, track individuals for life, integrate across enforcement agencies, and operate with minimal oversight for an entire generation.

The 75-year retention detail seems to be the key, a loud dog whistle, as it makes no sense for border management. It makes perfect sense for… race-based multigenerational population control.

This is as good a time as any to highlight that Hitler’s men modeled their “immigration” systems on American President Woodrow Wilson’s “border control” in Texas, with each stage justified by “administrative efficiency” and “public safety.” Nazi chemist Dr. Gerhard Peters published in 1938 his photographs of the El Paso delousing chambers, advocating Texas-like Zyklon B use in German camps.

Peters later managed the company that supplied pesticides to death camps, and was convicted at Nuremberg. Wilson however still escapes proper scrutiny for what in 1916 was called El Holocausto, so here we are again.

This oven-like tragedy of “deloused” Mexicans being burned alive in 1916 was around the same time Americans were documenting how they piled up and burned bodies, including those forcibly disarmed and dragged from inside their homes.

This Bisbee tragedy expanded further in 1917 to industrialized efforts at ethnic cleansing.

The event itself has become known as the Bisbee Deportation. On July 12, 1917, roughly 1,200 copper miners, who’d been striking for better wages and safer working conditions, were rounded up at gunpoint, some by their own relatives, and sent via cattle car to the New Mexican desert, where they were left to die.

Forced at gunpoint into cattle cars, left to die in a desert, bodies stacked and burned… in America.

So you see, Nazis studied the “America First” platform of President Wilson, because it showed methods of roundups and concentration for the purposes of mass executions. Elaine, Arkansas 1919 was literally federal troops sent to open fire on civilians, killing hundreds who had dared to be Black and ask for higher wages.

The Nazis didn’t invent the genocide infrastructure they built, they copied the America First platform. Hitler praised American immigration law in Mein Kampf as a model of “scientific” race policy. German legal scholars cited American anti-miscegenation statutes when drafting the Nuremberg Laws. Henry Ford’s antisemitic rantings became required reading in German schools. America demonstrated first that industrial-scale racial oppression was administratively possible. The Nazis studied and imported the American methods. It was no coincidence Ford, IBM, Standard Oil and even Coca Cola were implicated in facilitating a Nazi Holocaust.

The question is not: whether unitary-executive genocidal capability exists in America, again. It does.

The question is: What prevents moving from the concentration to elimination phase, again?

With a $45 billion detention plan underway since July, the United States has been in the concentration camp building stage, and now is flexing the technical and procedural infrastructure to increase numbers detained.

The Five Prerequisites for Genocidal Infrastructure

Component	Nazi Germany	DHS Today
1. Comprehensive Identification	Census identified 500,000+ Jews, using IBM punch card systems	Biometric database 100M+ non-citizens. Facial recognition, fingerprints, iris, DNA. Real-time, automated, immutable.
2. Permanent Records	Paper IBM cards, manual updates	75-year digital retention. Biometrics cannot be changed. Distributed, cloud-backed.
3. Agency Integration	Census to Gestapo to SS to Railway to Camps. Physical transfer.	Real-time: CBP, ICE, USCIS, FBI, NSA, state/local. API access. International sharing IBIS.
4. Legal Framework	Nuremberg Laws (based on Arkansas, like 1919 Elaine) stripped citizenship. Property seizure. Exclusion from professions.	Non-citizens have minimal constitutional protections. Plenary power doctrine. National security exemptions bypass due process.
5. Minimal Oversight	Totalitarian state. No independent judiciary. No free press.	HART designed to shield DHS from scrutiny. Reduced redress mechanisms. National security classifications limit disclosure.

Technical Capabilities

Capability	Nazi	DHS
Population enumeration	Manual census	Real-time automated
Identifiers	Documents, could be falsified	Biometrics, cannot be changed
Record retention	Paper files	75-year digital
Speed	Days to weeks	Seconds
Scale	Thousands daily	Millions daily

Historical Escalation Pattern

Stage	Nazi Germany	United States
Infrastructure	1933 census. 1935 classifications. 1938 registration.	2004 border security. 2017 exit verification. 2025 comprehensive collection.
Identification	Census data. ID cards marked J. Property registration.	Biometric collection at borders. Mandatory photography. 75-year retention.
Exclusion	Exclusion from professions. Property seizures. Ghettoization.	Travel bans. Enhanced vetting. Interior enforcement. Workplace raids. Arrests at churches, schools, courts.
Concentration	Kristallnacht. Forced relocations. Deportation to camps.	July 2025: Congress allocated $45 billion for new detention centers. Capacity doubled to 110,000 beds. Family detention reactivated. Fort Bliss military base tent camp holds 5,000. South Texas Family Residential Center reopened 2,400 beds. Karnes County facility reopened 830 beds. At least 13 deaths in ICE custody since January 2025. Conditions described as “hell on earth”. Medical neglect. Overcrowding. Pregnant women detained. Families separated. 125 facilities opened or expanded in 2025.
Elimination	Wannsee Conference 1942. Genocide.	TBD

Critical Questions

Question	Answer
Are there substantive structural differences?	No. Both systems provide comprehensive identification, permanent records, agency integration, legal framework for reduced rights, and limited oversight.
If genocide were the plan, is DHS ready?	Infrastructure is in place. All five prerequisites exist.
What prevents genocidal use?	Political factors only. Declared intent does not exist. Democratic constraints present but eroding.
Why 75-year retention?	Visa overstays resolved in weeks. Immigration violations in years. 75 years covers birth to death. Multigenerational tracking.
What’s required to activate?	Redefine target population. Expand interior enforcement. Activate detention at scale. No new technical capabilities needed.

The speed of American democracy failure seems apropos for the man who repeatedly went bankrupt faster than anyone in history, and the playbook feels familiar.

Once he established that norms don’t constrain him, and he fatigued the accountability systems, the violations naturally escalated and expanded rapidly. “Grab’em by the pussy” was his subtext, yet actual campaign slogan.

Financial corruption → legal system weaponization → extrajudicial killings → unauthorized military action. Each step tests whether anyone can stop Trump from groping, grabbing and raping like he’s some kind of Epstein pervert.

For years I’ve had lawyers, true experts in democracy far more intelligent than me, tell me that an information warfare history perspective doesn’t account for the complex control frameworks of American government.

That to me has always sounded like the horse manure industry will somehow pivot to diesel emissions investigations. I predict the opposite. Indeed, we see clearly now how all these vaulted democratic “accountability mechanisms” that handled the Watergate-era crimes (at best) aren’t doing much today:

• Investigative journalism exposing hidden wrongdoing
• Congressional oversight responding to discrete violations
• Public outrage mobilizing around clear transgressions
• Courts adjudicating specific legal violations

Exactly none of them scale into Steve Bannon’s explicit “flood the zone with shit” warfare strategy of simultaneous transparent corruption across dozens of vectors. A militant planned and distributed denial-of-service attack on democratic accountability itself is in full swing. And there’s a bizarre lack of response to the accelerated velocity, volume and variety (Big Data Three Vs) of breaches.

I suppose it’s kind of like being told by lawyers in the 1960s that foreign assassinations of state leaders by America would never happen at home, because of accountability, right before JFK and MLK were shot dead. So many Americans assassinated, so little accountability. Mondlane was American, right?

By the by, America still won’t release the files on who assassinated the UN Secretary General Hammarskjold in 1961.

Does anyone in America care about why the assassinations weren’t prevented? They even hit the UN leader. I mean does anyone even remember an “Ace of Spades” was found on the wreckage of his passenger plane after it was shot down?

America seemingly now borrows directly from Russian information warfare doctrine: the goal isn’t to convince people of some alternative truth, it’s to just curate rapid confusion and exhaustion that drives people to disengage entirely while being unable to leave or even look away. Physical presence, complicity, comes without the usual mental clarity that should tell people to fight or flee. First they came for A, and we did nothing…

Apathy becomes acceptance

Scandals are being operated now by Trump like his true currency: infinite supply creates dangerous hyperinflation for intentional destabilization of legacy systems. Watergate unfolded as an accountability mechanism as it was so singular and digestible. The public and institutions could focus their investigative resources, media attention, and political capital on one clear violation. The GOP spent decades picking apart what went wrong and how to avoid being caught again. Then came the racist bankruptcy con artist king Donald and his wrecking balls.

And that’s how being an historian suddenly puts me in a better position of describing and predicting moves in… what amounts to an information civil war:

• Attention fragmentation: Human cognition can’t process details of 42 simultaneous scandals. Each new outrage displaces the previous one from the news cycle before accountability mechanisms can engage. By the time Congress schedules a hearing on the calendar, there are twelve new more pressing crises.
• Normalization through repetition: The first pardon for a crypto billionaire would have been shocking. The fifteenth financial conflict of interest barely registers. You’re essentially boiling the frog but at TikTok and Zoom velocity of doom scrolling.
• Weaponized uncertainty: With so many claims flying, the average person can’t distinguish between:
  • Actual corruption (Qatar plane, UAE chip deal).
  • Hyperbolic partisan attacks
  • Outright disinformation

  So they default to tribal affiliation for filtering. “My side good, their side exaggerating.”

• Exhaustion as strategy: This isn’t accidental. Making resistance exhausting is tactical. Activists, journalists, investigators, prosecutors—everyone operates with finite energy. Keep them racing from fire to fire and they can’t extinguish any single blaze completely. I haven’t met a single person, not even in Austria, who understands that the Nazis lit over 100 buildings on fire in Vienna for 1938 Kristallnacht. That’s a ground-based bombing run impossible to fight, long before the threat of VBIED and… Tesla.

Trump’s privilege has always been failing faster and more completely than institutional responses are willing to track. Six bankruptcies that would have destroyed normal businesspeople became proof of his “comeback” narrative because the legal and financial systems couldn’t process the velocity of fraud, opposite of survival. He gamed lag time between action and consequence, externalizing the suffering to his followers.

Now he’s showing how it can be done at constitutional scale, as if the corrupt liar Andrew Jackson is back in office, rounding up and killing Americans through false resource scarcity.

Lawyers live within a playing field that has law and order formalism, which makes sense if law and order can be enforced. They believe written rules and institutional architecture provide the field its protection, like engineering believes their code bugs are just delayed patches, rather than active exploits destroying the entire game.

Historians of information warfare, let alone hackers, however see how institutions are just people following norms, and norms have repeatedly collapsed under sustained attacks/pressure. Game over comes quick when the rules are unenforceable. The Constitution doesn’t enforce itself, and so a huge gap between written law and actual enforcement seems like where Trump’s authoritarian takeover happens regardless of law.

The Andrew Jackson tell

Jackson explicitly defied Supreme Court rulings (“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it”) and weaponized presidential power for ethnic cleansing (Trail of Tears).

The institutions existed, the laws were clear, but nobody stopped him commiting genocide. The formal architecture was irrelevant because America lacked the political will to enforce it.

Trump likely studied this, unlikely from history books, as he infamously was a child of a convicted Klansman. He understands Jackson’s adherents in the KKK have always celebrated moving fast to break things and maintainimg popular support within a tight coalition of secret militant groups. Unaccountable privilege for them was unlocked when enforcement mechanisms melted instead of congealed.

Remember Trump boasting “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” That reminded me of a blistering broadside during Jackson’s 1828 campaign to be president, which tells voters he is unfit for the office. It stresses how six men realized an error, returned voluntarily to camp, and offered to resume their service yet were murdered by Jackson instead. He is said to have “illegally and wantonly shed the blood of his countrymen and fellow soldiers” by ordering executions 21 Feb 1815 after a kangaroo military trial in which they were convicted for leaving camp, despite return. There are six engravings of coffins (two rows of three), with memorials to each of the soldiers murdered by Jackson, giving details of their lives and deaths: Edward Lindsey, Henry Lewis, David Morrow, Jacob Webb, John Harris, and David Hunt.

The formalist lawyer keeps talking about how intended behavior of the system will eventually form, like a bicycle rebalancing itself. The information warfare analyst in me instead describes actual behavior under attack conditions, pattern detection and prediction, like how to prepare and respond when a bicycle race competitor brandishes a pump to jam in your spokes and throw you into a ditch.

These are two completely different assessment skills. Lawyers saying attacks will be “judged harshly for cheating” aren’t very useful for those who actually want to keep riding in the race and avoid crashing, fatally.

Americans need to look immediately for how best to block the GOP taking any more big swings at democracy. “Preparedness” is literally what this was called in America just before WWI.

Think about an effective response to the parallel system setup by the GOP for their sustained, deliberate, high-velocity bad faith political moves destroying the country even faster than Trump ruined the people who invested in his business scams.

Democratic Institution	GOP Replacement	Purpose
Independent judiciary	Federalist Society	Capture courts
Professional journalism	Fox/OAN/Newsmax	Control information
Campaign finance limits	Citizens United	Legalize corruption
Electoral accountability	Gerrymandering	Lock in minority rule
Academic expertise	Heritage/Cato/AEI	Corrupt platforms and manufacture alternate “facts”

Trump is the first president operating entirely within this post-Watergate parallel system that was setup to ruin democracy; build a unitary executive with unaccountable power that Nixon (and Ford) could only dream about. The GOP doesn’t need or want the legacy institutions to work—they built a system of replacements that will never check the annointed King Donald.

Each step, lawyers say to me “watch and see, he will cross a line soon.” And after each step, when no line enforcement comes, the Overton window shift leaves those lawyers grasping for the next chapter in their Maginot-like playbook for “the walls of yesterday“.

France could have counter-attacked, could have rushed in and crushed Rommel’s ill-concieved, weak and overstretched logistics. But why, why did they not? Alas, the historian in me can’t help seeing the patterns…

The French had superior forces but got outmaneuvered because they were fighting the last war.

Trump’s operation is very vulnerable (he’s overextended, rife with squabbling, logistically weak, reliant on bluff), yet the institutional response is paralyzed by outdated doctrine. American institutions have superior resources (courts, Congress, media, public support in many areas) yet are thinking Watergate-style accountability, unprepared for the information war that I have warned about here since at least 2012.

This isn’t just about Trump’s bankrupt authoritarianism, it’s a social media putsch towards territorial ethnonationalism and theological hate, known since the late 1800s as “America First”.

By the time Trump’s constant disregard for law and order reaches predictable parallels with Nazi concentration camps, Nazi extrajudicial executions of civilians, Nazi racist Christian Crusade rhetoric, and ACTS 17 “lebensraum“, people still seem confused and apathetic about mounting an effective resistance to the diabolical offspring of Nazis.

Are you one of those confused people, or are you now able to understand?