American Fascism Has a Face

The masked men came at dawn in East Palo Alto. Dressed in black, faces covered, with no visible insignia. It is August 26, 2025, shortly after 7 a.m., when they approach the car in which Yenycey is just getting into the driver’s seat. The 47-year-old mother of three children is on her way to work, where she cleans houses whose owners are still asleep while outside the machinery of the new America has already begun its work. Her husband Oscar had just driven to relatives to get a ride to work. A Monday like any other for the couple - he a gardener, she a housekeeper, both part of that invisible army that mows California’s lawns, cleans its houses, looks after its children. Invisible until that moment when the men in black pretended to be police.

Oscar runs. It is not a heroic flight, it is the pure survival instinct of a man who knows what this encounter means. From a safe distance he pulls out his phone and films as they drag his wife out of the car. The shaky video shows how they force Yenycey to kneel on the cold asphalt. A woman’s scream can be heard. They handcuff her, and then - a dull thud - she collapses unconscious. The agents lift the limp body into their vehicle. Oscar follows his wife through the locator function on his phone while the black minivans circle the streets of Silicon Valley for almost an hour, as if they themselves did not know what to do with their human prey. Finally they stop at Stanford Medical Center.

The guards at the door

Julie happened to be there, at Stanford Hospital, when they brought Yenycey in. “You don’t believe it until you see it yourself,” she would later say. There they were: “Two masked bandits with an attitude, supposedly ‘ICE,’ but without any insignia.” They stationed themselves outside Yenycey’s room like guards from a Kafka novel. The family rushes in. Yenycey’s lawyer arrives. They are all turned away. “I confronted one of the ICE agents about why they were refusing to let her family or her lawyer visit,” Julie says, “and was simply ignored.”

At 6:56 p.m. it seems as if the tide is turning. The Stanford attorney, outraged at this presumption of federal power, tells Yenycey’s lawyer: “They do not dictate our visitation policies!” He instructs the nursing staff and the security staff to allow visits. But nothing changes. The masked men remain. The family remains outside. Minutes turn into hours.

At 10:11 p.m. it is over. ICE officially overrules Stanford. “We were told it had been escalated to DHS, which had the final say,” Julie reports. The Department of Homeland Security had spoken. One of America’s most prestigious medical institutions had to bow.

“These ICE men were young men in their twenties,” Julie adds, and you can hear the grief in her words. “Which breaks my heart for other reasons.” A generation raised in the land of the free now stands guard outside the hospital room of a terminally ill mother, denying her children entry.

The broken window

Three weeks earlier, on July 4, 2025 - Independence Day, what irony - a scene played out in California that made a mockery of every American claim to civilizational superiority. ICE agents smashed the window of a car in which a pregnant woman was sitting. “Three men pinning down a pregnant woman,” an eyewitness describes the unimaginable. “And she was lying on her stomach.” On her stomach. The unborn life, pressed between the asphalt of an American street and the knee of a federal agent.

The neighbors stood in their driveways, behind curtains, at fences. “There were people with masks,” one of them later stammered. “Who are they? Where are they taking her?” The questions echoed in the silence that followed after the black vans had disappeared. The woman would later be released with an electronic ankle monitor - a grotesque mercy for a pregnant woman. Her husband disappeared into the Camarillo detention center, where he remains to this day. A family torn apart on Independence Day.

The hell of Santa Rita

“Without a phone call, without the chance to contact a lawyer or anything,” Angelica Guerrero, a US citizen, speaks with the precision of a survivor. “They could have taken me anywhere - no one would have known until charges were filed.”

What she experienced at Santa Rita Jail in San Francisco defies any notion of a constitutional state: “Those holding cells are barbaric… The floor I was supposed to sleep on was smeared with feces and blood.”

Let those words sink in for a moment. A US citizen, held without charge, forced to sleep on floors smeared with excrement and blood. This is not Guantanamo. This is not Abu Ghraib. This is San Francisco, 2025.

The betrayal in the white coat

Kate Mobeen, ICU nurse at John Muir Medical Center in Concord, cannot forget the images. On July 29, ICE agents brought a man into her emergency room who had suffered a medical emergency during his arrest in front of the immigration court. “The atmosphere in that emergency room was something I have never experienced in my entire career,” Mobeen says. “There was a paralyzing silence. Everyone looked away. You could see that the staff felt bad.”

Ali Saidi, lawyer and director of Stand Together Contra Costa, was on site as part of the Rapid Response Network. “The hospital staff told me I could not see the detained patient, but his family could,” he says. “When the man’s wife then arrived, the rules had somehow changed, and they said: no family visits.” Maria, the wife - she wants to be referred to only by her second name - describes her despair in a statement: “My family and I went into the emergency room and we asked to see him and talk to him to make sure he was okay. The hospital staff would not let us see him and they gave us no information about what was happening to him. They did not even answer my questions.” When she insisted, invoked her constitutional right as wife, the hospital called the police. Not against the masked agents without badges - against the family.

“My husband later told me that he was so terrified that he fainted,” Maria says. The fear of having disappeared, without anyone knowing where to - it had overwhelmed him. Several emergency room nurses later told Mobeen that the ICE agents “were very aggressive with the staff.” “The staff were emotionally and physically upset afterwards,” she says. “It is horrifying not to be able to tell family members how their loved ones are doing, what their status is.”

The criminalization of conscience

On July 25, 2025, Ontario, California. A landscaper parks in front of the Advanced Surgical Center. ICE agents chase him on foot into the clinic. What then happens is captured on video and becomes the symbol of the moral collapse of American institutions. A crying man can be seen, held by a masked agent with “POLICE ICE” written on his back. Several staff in surgical gowns stand by, stunned, outraged.

“This is private property!” a staff member shouts.

Danielle Davila, one of the health workers, stands between the agents and the terrified man. “Take your hands off him!” she shouts. “You do not even have a warrant!” Jose Ortega, another staff member - both with Honduran citizenship, people living the American dream and now witnessing its perversion - puts a protective arm between Davila and the agent. “You do not have proper identification!” he says. The agent, his face hidden behind the mask, says to both: “You touched a federal agent.”

“I am not touching you!” Davila replies.

Days later both are charged with assaulting a federal officer and conspiracy to obstruct a federal officer. The message is unmistakable: anyone who stands between state power and its victims, anyone who asks for IDs and warrants, anyone who demands the law in a supposed constitutional state becomes the criminal. “They did what they had to do and what they had the right to do,” says Carlos Juárez, Ortega’s lawyer. “What I hope is that this does not have a chilling effect on other health workers.” Oliver Cleary, Davila’s lawyer, adds: “You cannot just come in somewhere where people are receiving medical care and drag them away. She did not know who these people were. They did not tell her who they were, and as far as she knew, this was a patient of the clinic.”

Glendale: the occupation

Fifteen days. That is how long ICE agents occupied the lobby of Dignity Health Glendale Memorial Hospital in July 2025. The photos circulating online show them standing behind the reception desk as if they were part of the staff. They were waiting for Milagro Solis-Portillo, an immigrant from El Salvador who had been admitted after a medical emergency during her arrest.

For fifteen days the entrance hall of a hospital became an outpost of the deportation machinery. Patients had to pass armed agents to get to their appointments. Children saw the masked men. Pregnant women. Elderly people. All had to pass by this demonstration of state power. Protesters gathered in front of the hospital, held vigils, organized press conferences. The hospital administration helplessly declared that they could not legally prevent law enforcement officers from being present in public areas.

After fifteen days Solis-Portillo was transferred to another hospital and then taken into custody. The lobby emptied. What remained was the realization that no place is safe anymore, no institution offers protection anymore.

The new collaborators

“This is nothing new for hospitals,” says Lois Richardson, vice president and legal counsel of the California Hospital Association with a coldness that frightens. “We constantly get inmates, detainees, arrestees, whether it is police, sheriff, highway patrol, ICE, whatever.” This normalization of the abnormal is perhaps the most frightening aspect of the whole situation. When hospitals become way stations of the deportation machinery, when medical staff become accomplices, when Hippocratic ethics yield to official orders - then fascism is no longer ante portas, then it is already sitting at the operating table.

Ben Drew, spokesman for John Muir Hospital, defends the cooperation with ICE: “If a law enforcement agency indicates that visits pose a security or safety issue, the hospital can restrict or deny visits to protect our patients, employees and visitors.” But whose safety is being protected here? That of the terminally ill Yenycey, whose children are not allowed to see her? That of the man who fainted from fear because he did not know where he was being taken?

Dr. Douglas Yoshida, emergency physician at Stanford Health Tri-Valley, puts it more bluntly: “Normally health workers have no reason to fear law enforcement. But we are in uncharted territory.”

The silence of the lambs

As early as July 16, 2025, there had been a glimmer of hope. ICE agents tried to enter St. John’s Hospital in Oxnard, California - but they were locked out and told to leave the premises. Some of their vehicles were even towed away because they blocked traffic and recklessly parked on private property.

A small victory. A hospital that resisted. But it remained the exception. Most institutions bow. They refer to protocols, to legal situations, to the necessity of cooperation with federal authorities. They become what Hannah Arendt called “desk perpetrators” - people whose bureaucratic compliance makes injustice possible in the first place. Adriana Rugeles-Ortiz, licensed nurse at Kaiser Permanente Modesto Medical Center, tries to prepare her colleagues. She leads “Know Your Rights” sessions at her hospital and in her community. “Personally I feel prepared,” she says. “I am not so confident that we were able to reach the entire staff at Kaiser to bring them to the level of trust to deal with it.”

The arithmetic of horror

122 documented cases in California alone between July and August 2025. These are not just numbers. These are 122 families torn apart. 122 times mortal fear in hospital corridors. 122 times the perversion of healing into a weapon of oppression. We have stopped counting. The estimate is over 2000 cases nationwide. “The increase from May to now is 100 percent.” A doubling within three months. If this rate continues, if normalization proceeds, if resistance falters - where will we be in a year? In two years?

Oscar describes the despair in simple words: “I want everyone to hear what they are doing to us, and at the moment she is in serious condition.” His wife Yenycey suffers from a blood disease for which she had already been treated at Stanford. Now she lies there again, guarded like a dangerous criminal. “Take those with a criminal background who have committed crimes. I am not against that,” says Izzy, a relative of the couple who asks not to be named. “But the contributors are the ones being taken. They hurt families. They tear families apart. They traumatize families.”

Fifteen minutes before Oscar and Yenycey were arrested, the same agents had already struck. They took the couple’s 29-year-old nephew, a construction worker, in front of the same house in East Palo Alto. He is now being held in San Francisco. Three people from one family, in one morning, all on their way to work.

The conspiracy of the willing

“What is currently happening in the USA is an increase from May to now of 100 percent. It is fascism in its purest culture. And European journalists are courting interviews with Trump, not to change anything, no, to have a story, preferably the kind where he makes himself look ridiculous, but those stories do not save lives.”

The bitter truth lies in this observation: while in American hospitals people are treated like cattle, while pregnant women are pressed onto asphalt, while children are separated from their parents, “countries like France, Germany, Spain” are courting the Trump administration. “The EU is practically ingratiating itself.”

“Nothing is happening,” it continues. “People are being taken away, it is called deportation in the USA, children are in some cases deported seriously ill and the cultivated West quietly ignores it.” This complicity through silence is not new. History has taught us that fascism does not arise in a vacuum. It needs the silent majority, the neighbors who look away, the allies who make business. It needs those who say: “It will not get that bad.” Those who say: “That is none of our business.” Those who say: “We have more important problems.”

“It is time, even if only for each individual product, to boycott the USA,” voices from the resistance demand. “Look for substitute items, you do not have to boycott every product, that is unrealistic, but what you think is replaceable, replace it. The USA must be hit where it hurts the most, and that is not buying the products. More action must be taken.” This is not a call for blind anti-Americanism. It is a call to defend the values that America once claimed to embody. Freedom. Justice. Human dignity. If these values are betrayed in America itself, then it is up to the world community to defend them - if necessary against America itself.

Julie, the eyewitness from Stanford, ends her report with words that are devastating in their simplicity: “I pray that this woman will be okay medically. I hope she can remain in the hospital until she is well. But what happens then, only God knows.”

What happens then, we all know. Yenycey will, as soon as she is medically transportable, be taken to a detention center. She will be separated from her three children. She will be deported to a country she may not have seen in decades. Or she will remain in detention for months while lawyers fight for her right to stay.

The last warning

“You do not believe it until you see it yourself,” Julie said. “There were two masked bandits with an attitude, supposedly ‘ICE,’ but without any insignia - and they dictated the policies of a mighty university hospital. This is not law and order, this is fascism.” She is right. What we are experiencing in these August days of 2025 is not a migration policy that has overshot its goal. It is not law and order being enforced a little too enthusiastically. It is the systematic destruction of the rule of law, the methodical dehumanization of an entire population group, the gradual establishment of a totalitarian system. When masked agents without insignia can abduct people from hospitals; when pregnant women are pressed onto asphalt on their stomachs; when health workers are criminalized for asking for warrants; when children are not allowed to see their terminally ill mothers; when US citizens are held in cells smeared with excrement - then the red line has not only been crossed. Then it lies so far behind us that we can no longer even see it. Is this really what AfD voters see as desirable? Do they want to live in such a state? And does the CDU/CSU, with its ever stronger drift to the right, really want to take part in the construction of such a system? Then the people should make it unmistakably clear to them what democracy means, or it lies so far behind us that we can no longer even see it.

Donald Trump, the man who in January 2025 was sworn in as president for the second time after defeating Kamala Harris, has kept his promise. He has made America “great” again - great in its cruelty, great in its contempt for humanity, great in its willingness to betray its own ideals. The young men in their twenties who stand guard outside Yenycey’s hospital room, about whom Julie says it breaks her heart “for other reasons” - they are the product of this new America. A generation that has learned that power overrides law, that command overrides conscience, that the uniform takes away responsibility.

The hour of decision

Oscar still stands outside Stanford Hospital. His phone tells him that his wife is still there, somewhere behind the walls, guarded by men without faces. His three children ask when Mom is coming home. He has no answer. Maria still waits for news of her husband, who has disappeared somewhere in the system after fainting from fear. “They could have taken him anywhere,” she says. “No one would have known until charges were filed

The pregnant woman still wears the electronic ankle monitor, while her unborn child grows in her womb - a child that will be born into a world in which its father has already disappeared. Danielle Davila and Jose Ortega await their trial, charged as criminals because they did what any decent human being would do: they stood protectively in front of a crying, frightened man. This is America in August 2025. This is the reality we can no longer deny. The question is no longer whether it is fascism - Julie has clearly named it, and the facts speak for themselves. The only question is: what will we do about it? “More action must be taken,” it is said again and again. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now. Because while we are still debating, while we are still weighing, while we are still waiting for the right moment, Oscar is standing outside a hospital waiting for them to pick up his terminally ill wife. A 29-year-old construction worker sits in a cell in San Francisco. A US citizen lies on a floor smeared with blood and feces.

“The feeling of helplessness is real, folks,” Julie said in her harrowing eyewitness account. But helplessness is a choice. Resistance is possible. History will not judge us by what we felt, but by what we did. We try everything to help many people, but we are also only human. None of us is a millionaire. What we can give, we give. What we can do, we do. But those who do not see or experience it can hardly imagine how dangerous it has become to stand up against this machinery in the USA. And yet there are many. Unmentioned by deluded right-wing US media, silenced by intimidated media houses, ignored by indifferent editorial boards - but they exist. They resist. Every day. Some courageous journalists, doctors, nurses, lawyers join this fight. The number of those who find the courage to stand publicly against it grows every day. The civil rights organizations give everything - they work to the point of exhaustion, often unpaid, always at risk.

This is a battle for democracy itself. A battle that does not end at the borders of the USA, that has already arrived in Europe. The same forces, the same rhetoric, the same creeping normalization of the inhuman. It is a battle for all our children and the next generations. For the world we will leave them. For the question of whether they will grow up in freedom or in fear. This battle must be faced. Everyone, as they can. Every small act of resistance counts. Every boycott. Every donation to aid organizations. Every sharing of the truth. Every refusal to look away, people who understand that silence means complicity. That looking away means complicity. That history will not ask us about our excuses, but about our actions.

The resistance is growing. Despite the danger. Despite the fear. Despite everything.

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