To me, one of the most obvious tells that the Trump regime and all of its minions are fully aware that the slow motion, ethnic cleansing operating they're currently conducting as part of their "mass deportation" program is both morally unconscionable and flat out illegal, is the insistence on operational secrecy all throughout the horrifying fascist deportation machine. ICE Gestapo thugs hit the streets in pulled-up neck gaiters, fascist governments work to obscure who is getting paid to build concentration camps, and the DHS refuses as many oversite visits by political officials to ICE facilities as they possibly can; even going so far as to arrest two Democrat politicians in New Jersey who got sick of getting the run around and just went to the migrant cages themselves. If this was, as the Trump regime continues to insist, a totally legitimate, strictly constitutional law enforcement or public safety matter, it wouldn't be necessary for ICE goons to be running through our streets dressed up like members of a CIA-funded death squad or obscure the names of contractors to "protect against [expected] reprisals."

To place another piece of evidence on that specific pile then, let's look at this recent Intercept investigation into a couple of very unusual immigration court hearings involving migrants. Why were they unusual? Because in multiple instances the judges running these "courts" agreed to keep the name of the government's immigration attorney, aka "the prosecution," secret.

https://theintercept.com/2025/07/15/ice-lawyers-hiding-names-court/

ICE Lawyers Are Hiding Their Names in Immigration Court

"Inside a federal immigration courtroom in New York City last month, a judge took an exceedingly unusual step: declining to state the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement attorney pressing to deport asylum seekers.

“We’re not really doing names publicly,” said Judge ShaSha Xu — after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers. It was the first of two separate instances The Intercept identified in which judges chose to withhold the identities of the attorneys representing the Trump administration’s deportation regime.

As ICE agents across the country wear masks to raid workplaces and detain immigrants, government attorneys need not cover their faces to shield their identities. Legal experts who spoke to The Intercept agreed the practice of concealing the lawyers’ identities was both novel and concerning."

Alright, let's start with the obvious: as the article clearly notes, no, this is not normal. In fact its so abnormal that I don't think anyone knows if it is legal or not because this simply doesn't happen. This is primarily because without a named attorney, it is impossible to identify, investigate, and hold someone accountable for prosecutorial misconduct, and while the Intercept doesn't highlight that as the obvious reason for doing this, I'm more than happy to.

If, as I and others have argued, these mass deportations are clear violations of constitutional and human rights, then ICE lawyers working to ram every brown person they can through via legally dubious methods (like say, declaring that a fake invasion by a Venezuelan gang nobody has ever heard of means you can ship ppl to foreign gulags without due process) would be legally accountable for their role in perpetuating these crimes. If you know what you're doing is illegal, because you're a lawyer, "I was just following orders" has a pretty poor track record as an excuse in court. So you can understand why it might behoove immigration judges, who literally work for Trump's executive branch, not the judiciary, to hide the names of government attorneys doing the legal legwork for a fascist ethnic-cleansing project that probably represents a real as fuck crime against humanity if several international scholars are to be believed, right?

While the Intercept reporting here could have emphasized that point better, I will give them credit for identifying at least one of the ICE lawyers facilitating criminal migrant expulsions, a one Cosette Shachnow - who I sincerely hope becomes as infamous as she clearly deserves to be. Cosette (jfc I hate bougies) aside, I think it's important to understand this is a real problem for Trump, the Gestapo, and Stephen Miller's pet project to re-whiten American demographics for generations to come no matter how many brown lives that costs. Although it's not being reported all that much, DHS and ICE have faced numerous resignations and early retirements in their immigration law divisions because even those ghouls didn't sign up for fascist mass kidnappings and crimes against humanity. The regime needs lawyers to help slap a legalist veneer on all this ethnonationalist bullshit and they're working to make it easier to hire replacements for folks who accidentally grow a conscience along the way - even if they have to build a Star Chamber to do it.