Your MAGA Police State

All your rights are belong to us

Before we get to the casual violence of Donald Trump’s MAGA administration, let’s quickly review the administrative kind.

“President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape,” FCC Chair Brendan Carrtells told CNBC on Friday. “The media industry across this country needs a course correction.” Trump 2.0 means to “correct” CBS via its parent company, Paramount.

FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez accused Paramount of cowardice in its confrontation with the Trump administration. She accused the FCC itself of “never-before-seen controls over newsroom decisions and editorial judgment, in direct violation of the First Amendment and the law.”

Smell the fascism, indeed. The party that once abhorred government “picking winners and losers” is now an authoritarian movment intent on making losers of media outlets that dare criticize Dear Leader. It not only can happen here. It is happening here.

“You’ve got no rights here” in Florida

Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio, a U.S. citizen, was on his way to his landscaping job in North Palm Beach on May 2 when the car driven by his mother was stopped by the Florida Highway Patrol. The Border Patrol arrived soon after Laynez-Ambrosio’s two friends admitted to being undocumented.

Laynez-Ambrosio’s mother was driving the company van below the speed limit but on a suspended license. Laynez-Ambrosio does not know why they were stopped.

He was watching “a silly TikTok” and began recording the encounter. Footage captures the sound of officers using a stun gun on one of his colleagues, The Guardian reports:

Video footage of the incident captured by Laynez-Ambrosio, an 18-year-old US citizen, appears to show a group of officers in tactical gear working together to violently detain the three men*, two of whom are undocumented. They appear to use a stun gun on one man, put another in a chokehold and can be heard telling Laynez-Ambrosio: “You’ve got no rights here. You’re a migo, brother.” Afterward, agents can be heard bragging and making light of the arrests, calling the stun gun use “funny” and quipping: “You can smell that … $30,000 bonus.”

What happened next is becoming an everyday occurrence in the supposed “land of the free”:

Laynez-Ambrosio said that his friend was not resisting, and that he didn’t speak English and didn’t understand the officer’s commands. “My friend didn’t do anything before they grabbed him,” he said.

In the video, Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard repeatedly telling his friend, in Spanish, to not resist. “I wasn’t really worried about myself because I knew I was going to get out of the situation,” he said. “But I was worried about him. I could speak up for him but not fight back, because I would’ve made the situation worse.”

Laynez-Ambrosio can also be heard telling officers: “I was born and raised right here.” Still, he was pushed to the ground and says that an officer aimed a stun gun at him. He was subsequently arrested and held in a cell at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) station for six hours.

Audio in the video catches the unidentified officers debriefing and appearing to make light of the stun gun use. “You’re funny, bro,” one officer can be overheard saying to another, followed by laughter.

Another officer says, “They’re starting to resist more now,” to which an officer replies: “We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”

Laynez-Ambrosio’s lawyer alleges he was detained and charged with obstruction without violence in retaliation for filming the incident and refusing to delete the footage as police demanded.

You’ve got no rights in Texas either

The Vermont Asylum Assistance Project on July 24 issued a statement on the detention of another American citizen on his return from visiting family in Nicaragua:

On July 22, 2025, Winooski School District Superintendent Wilmer Chavarria—a proud U.S. citizen of color—was detained and questioned by federal agents for four and a half hours at Houston’s George  Bush Intercontinental Airport. Despite holding valid travel documents and a Global Entry pass, he was neither told why he was being held nor given any explanation when his pass was subsequently revoked by email. Read VAAP’s comments to Vermont Public here.

WMTW (Maine):

In the hours before he was released, Chavarria said he was told he had no rights while being threatened and questioned by at least five interrogators.

“When four of them were in front of me, standing while they had me sitting down, they said that I do not have rights, that my constitutional rights don’t matter at a port of entry and that I should stop talking about rights,” Chavarria said.

Better start memorizing phone numbers again. You know, like the good old 1950s.

When Chavarria asked to make a phone call, he was told “‘No, we’re not going to do that, give us a phone number,'” he said. “I said let me access my phone so I can give you a phone number, and they said ‘No, just tell us. Why won’t you tell us?’ But, like, people don’t just memorize their contact list.”

During the interrogation, Chavarria said the unidentified individuals attempted to threaten and manipulate him into giving them access to his professional devices, containing information about students in the Winooski School District.

“I was threatened with being referred to the FBI. The FBI was mentioned multiple times,” Chavarria said. “They also threatened to stain my record so I would never get a job again. They also threatened with an extended detention if I didn’t give them the passwords to the student information or to my district files.”

Chavarria said when he was released, a plainclothes officer “shook [his] hand and said that he admired [Chavarria’s] resilience and the fact that [he] was protecting student information.” Chavarria said he felt dehumanized by the comment.

Chavarria appeared Friday night with Chris Hayes on MSNBC.