Submitted by twovests in vote_satan
Trump's day-one priorities are to deport all the "illegal" / undocumented immigrants, and even if they only get 10% of them, we can expect that to take the form of internment camps.
The thing is that internment camps are an easy, extrajudicial way for an autocrat to corral any undesirable group. The United States always had "detention centers" for immigrants, but Trump famously ramped it way up, detaining US citizens as well.
A lot of these abuses require tedious surveillance work that can be meaningfully accelerated by AI, with no-one giving a fuck about the error rate.
I feel like this creates a lot of infrastructure that can be re-used. People I know and care about are immigrants, or their parents are, and I worry about "queer genocide", and I acknowledge that us trans people are an extreme minority.
Us trans folks also love Instagram. It's a fantastic, computer-consumable format for identifying trans people. They're one LEO request and data intern away from having a good first-pass of rallying up every trans American. On top of a "trans people are child abusers", you have a practical mandate of murder.
Take away 1% of the population, and what you get is a world that looks 99% the same. With a potential World War III raging, an article titled "More transgender Americans depart for Trump's 'citizen protection centers', drawing concern from the ACLU" might not even be front page. And that's assuming journalism is in a state to report on these matters.
Ten years ago, this might have sounded like the raved conspiracies of a terminally-online queer person. But now, "trans concentration camps" almost feels like something I can reach out and touch.
We're not there yet, and I don't mean to catastrophize. This is something that is a potentiality, something we can fight, while the United States is enabling a current genocide in Gaza. That genocide might be completed in the next year.
But the floor for how bad things can get is a mile lower than it has been before, and we're still walking on the same tightrope. I'm scared.