Fifteen miles east of San Diego, on a street called Calzada de la Fuente, there is a sprawling immigration detention center in the neighborhood of Otay Mesa. It is situated at the base of a hill, up and down which snakes the double row of border fencing separating the scrublands from the sprawl of Tijuana. The area, along a remote stretch of Route 905, is a dumping ground for society’s despised: Within a few minutes drive of the immigrant concentration camp are a juvenile detention facility, a county jail, and a large state prison. There’s a large Amazon warehouse and a massive water treatment plant. It’s the sort of place, out of sight, out of mind, one doesn’t drive through by accident. I have, over the years, been to similarly depressing epicenters of incarceration in South Texas and in Arizona.

The Otay Mesa Detention Center is run by the private prison company CoreCivic, which states that the facility has a capacity to hold 1,358 inmates. CalMatters recently reported that there have been days when more than 1,600 people have been held there. Legislators, including Senator Alex Padilla, have been rebuffed in their efforts to gain entry to the site, but inmates who managed to throw notes detailing their conditions of confinement, taped to shampoo bottles and pads of deodorant, to the protesters, part of a group called Otay Mesa Detention Collective, who congregate on the street outside the facility every Sunday afternoon, reported diets that don’t meet basic nutritional needs, a lack of medical care, damp and cold cell blocks, minimal outdoor time, and rampant overcrowding. Women have reported that if they couldn’t afford to buy sanitary pads, they were left to bleed on themselves during their periods. “Every day, we were coming and they were throwing stuff over, but the guards would race us to the notes,” recalls one of the protesters, Arturo Gonzalez.

Eventually, CoreCivic’s staff responded to the messages from the detained by locking down the institution during the two-hour protests, so that inmates could no longer access the outdoor exercise pods from which they were throwing their pleas. But by then, according to one of the Collective’s cofounders, Tin-Lok Wong, the protesters had managed to secure the names and identity numbers (known as A-Numbers) for more than 300 inmates, allowing them to collect money that they could then put onto the inmates’ commissary accounts so that they could buy more food and place phone calls to friends, families and attorneys on the outside.

The Otay Mesa Detention Center, with its razor-wire fencing and its desperate detainees, is just one of many visible signs of sprouting authoritarianism around our borders. (As is the ICE presence at the San Diego Federal courthouse—the basement of which has been converted to a makeshift immigrant detention center for those ICE detains when they show up for their hearings. Last week, after monitoring ICE’s presence there since last spring, Detention Resistance observers, including a US marine who served in Afghanistan, were cited for “obstruction” by federal authorities.)

Even as more and more of the country is rejecting Trump’s snarling, lockdown vision for America and for the broader world, Team Trump is lashing out against immigrants in the US and foreigners overseas in every direction. Domestically, DHS issued a stark memo to agents in late February urging them to arrest and detain already-vetted refugees, in the country legally, who don’t yet have their green cards. And, of course, internationally over the past week it has embarked, at the urging of the Israeli government, on a preposterous, patently illegal, and potentially globally catastrophic war with Iran.

Trump is entirely contemptuous of the niceties of international law, the role of Congress in major decisions of war and peace, and the importance of public opinion (only 27 percent of Americans polled support the bombing of Iran). Rather than seeking to bring the public along before ordering the bombers into the air, he simply announced the onset of hostilities in a video on social media, and then spent the next 48 hours trying to get his own story straight about whether this was a regime change mission, an effort to stop “imminent” Iranian attacks on the US, or a campaign to wipe out the nuclear potential of a regime whose nuclear potential Trump claimed to have already “obliterated” during US bombing raids in June.

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Of course, congressional leaders are all too aware that wars are supposed to be authorized by Congress; and so, in language shockingly redolent of Putin’s description of Russian intervention in Ukraine, neutered Speaker Mike Johnson has gone out of his way to describe the wholesale aerial bombardment of Iran, the sinking of its navy, and the lethal bombing of a girls’ school not as being acts of war but as part of a “defensive operation.”

Having made the fateful decision to go to “defensive operation” against Iran without, apparently, consulting any allies other than Israel—and despite warnings from the top US military brass that the campaign would be a long and brutal slog, during which US air defense missile stocks would be depleted—Trump has, since the bombing began, spent his sundowning hours unleashing verbal tirades against the leaders of close NATO allies.

When UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer expressed initial reluctance at letting the US fly planes from British bases in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean (though he did subsequently allow Diego Garcia to be used as a launch pad from which planes could target Iranian missile sites), Trump rounded on him, saying that he was “not Winston Churchill.” Now, it is certainly true that, for many reasons, Starmer is no Churchill—not least that Churchill was far better at standing up to bullies and hoodlums such as Trump than Starmer has been ; but that is a judgment call for the British people to make, not for the American president to impose via social-media postings.

When the Spanish refused to authorize use of their bases in the “defensive operation” efforts, Trump made the extraordinary announcement that he would cut off all trade between the US and Spain—leading European Union officials and leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron to note that since the members of the EU operate in tandem on trade issues, Trump couldn’t target Spanish goods without targeting the entire trading bloc.

To reiterate: The Supreme Court has recently ruled that Trump can’t capriciously impose tariffs against countries and industries simply out of spite; yet now, barely a week later, in a fit of political pique, America’s faux-Mussolini is claiming the right to economically blockade a NATO ally.

None of this is how democracies do business, or go to war, or treat immigrants—but, in its capriciousness and its brutality, in its arrogation of power outside of constitutional limits and democratic constraints, it is exactly how countries falling to strongman governance go about interacting with the rest of the world.

Back at Otay Mesa, the protesters have seen through Trump’s snarling-at-everyone act. Each Sunday since November, dozens of people have shown up to bear witness. They drive in to sing protest songs, shout out, through their bullhorns, messages of encouragement to inmates, and chalk notes of resistance on the sidewalk. “Love the foreigner for you yourselves were once foreigners—Deut: 10.19,” is one such missive. Another is simply “Hands off our neighbors!”