Trump creates ‘moral panics’ to make ‘villains’ of the demographics
A pair of University of Southern California sociologists claim in a recent article that President Trump is “laying the groundwork” to “contain” minority Americans and immigrants.
Professor Brittany Friedman and PhD candidate Raquel Delerme, self-proclaimed experts in “social control” and surveillance, write in The Conversation that governments historically surveil “specific groups — such as religious minorities, certain races or ethnicities, or migrants,” and then use what’s collected to “arrest” and “imprison” them.
“We expect Trump’s second White House term may usher in a wave of spying against people of color and immigrants,” the authors say, because the president “has vowed to target his political enemies” and could “weaponize” intelligence agencies to carry it out.
Friedman (pictured) and Delerme claim Trump follows the historical pattern in the U.S. of creating “moral panics,” such as declaring “crime is out of control” and “liken[ing] immigration at the southern border to an ‘invasion.’”
After such proclamations, minorities are deemed “villains” to justify mass surveillance.
That pattern began even before the U.S. officially became a state, via laws declaring Native Americans “savages” and “political enemies,” and the creation of slave patrols.
More recently, the 1950s saw FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s use of COINTELPRO to monitor figures like civil rights icons Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis; in the 1960s it was President Johnson’s “war on crime,” and a decade later President Nixon’s “war on drugs.”
MORE: 950+ law professors label Trump’s actions a ‘constitutional crisis’
Given Trump’s pledges to further militarize border enforcement and expand U.S. jails and prisons, we anticipate a rise in spending on fusion centers and other tools of mass surveillance under Trump. The moral panics he’s been stirring up since 2015 suggest that the targets of government surveillance will include immigrants and Black people.
Sometimes, victims of mass surveillance go missing.
The Guardian reported in 2015 that Chicago police had been temporarily “disappearing” people at local and federal police “black sites” since at least 2009. At these clandestine jails, under the guise of national security, officers questioned detainees without attorneys and held them for up to 24 hours without any outside contact. Many of the victims were Black.
Another infamous black site was housed at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba, where the CIA detained and secretly interrogated suspected terrorists following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Trump seems to be reviving the Guantanamo black site, flying about 150 Venezuelan migrants to the base since January 2025.
According to her personal website, Friedman “sees into the heart of our societal issues, exposes dirt, and reimagines what’s possible.” At USC she researches “cover-ups,” “institutional violence & economic predation,” and “black feminism.”
Delerme “uses qualitative methods to study race, gender, and class in the context of the criminal legal system,” according to her USC bio. Her PhD thesis looks at “the role of the climate crisis in California prisons.”
MORE: Professors: Axing bureaucrats, eliminating agencies means Trump is ‘aspiring strongman’
IMAGES: Tucker Carlson News/X; USC
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