This deserves more notice, and if the Democrats manage to retake Congress, they need to dismantle these stormtrooper outfits:

I see the evisceration of due process. I see detention centers being built where it is extraordinarily hard for lawyers and families to reach the people inside. I see men in masks refusing to identify themselves and pulling people into vans. I see armed U.S. troops in camo, some on horseback, riding through MacArthur Park in Los Angeles like they’re an occupying army. I see Trump sending in armed forces to take over the American capital.

What is going to happen when, predictably, a protester throws a rock at an agent? Or a Marine hears a car backfiring and thinks it’s a gunshot?

In an instant, this could all explode. You could have American troops firing on American civilians in an American city in a country-defining crisis. What happens then?

Because that’s the other picture I see — the one that keeps coming into clear focus. Not Trump cleaning up crisis or disorder but Trump creating crisis and disorder so he can build what he has wanted to build: an authoritarian state, a military or a paramilitary that answers only to him — that puts him in total control….

And here's the journalist Randy Balko (at the same link, above):

ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection have long been the most rogue, renegade and certainly pro-Trump police agencies in the federal government. So I think Trump sees those two as the most loyal to him. Also, obviously, the mass deportations are going to ensure that those two agencies remain relevant throughout his administration.

The F.B.I. has had a long, proud history and culture. There are a lot of stains on that history and culture, but it’s an institution that has prided itself on its independence. Same with the A.T.F., which is often bucked by Republican administrations. I’ve certainly had my problems with the D.E.A. over the years, but there is a separate culture and sense of independence there.

I think this an effort to build up the two federal policing agencies that Trump sees as most loyal and deferential to him….

The personnel numbers that they’ve set for ICE in order to meet the mass deportation figures, the goals that they’ve set — they’re going to have to hire a lot of people. And they’re going to have to lower standards, which they’re already doing.

But also, they’re going to have to hire the kind of people who are going to be looking at these videos that are coming out of ICE — terrorizing families, arresting children and pulling grandmothers out of their homes. They’re going to be hiring people who look at those videos and say: That’s what I want to do for a living.

Then we’re also seeing these pretty explicit appeals to white supremacy and white culture. I think in one of the social media posts, they had said something like: Defend the homeland — join ICE….

There’s another one of white settlers chasing Native Americans off the land and a kind of a white angel hovering over the landscape — which history books actually teach as an embodiment of the worst excesses of Western expansionism. They’re embracing these ideas that we’ve always looked at as kind of a regrettable part of our history.

Then there was another one where they explicitly refer to a textbook that was written by an unapologetic white supremacist. You have to know that name and that book to get that, but those are the people they’re appealing to. Why do you make that reference, if it’s going to be opaque to most people? You’re appealing to people who know what the reference is.

So anybody who is left in these agencies who still takes an institutional view of policing — the idea that police should be accountable, that they should serve these communities and not occupy them — they’re going to be overwhelmed by these new people. I think whatever culture of community service was left inside of these agencies is pretty quickly going to be overwhelmed as these new hires start to take effect….

The other thing we’re seeing is, obviously, the masks. And there’s an anecdote I’ve told a lot over the years about the writer Michael Ledeen, who around 2007 or 2008 was one of the neoconservatives agitating for war with Iran.

There was a series of photos of a cocaine raid in Tehran that came out, and all the officers in the raid were wearing masks. Ledeen wrote at the time: When the agents of the government hide their faces, it speaks volumes about the relationship between the government and the people. He was saying that this is a sign of a totalitarian state. And now it’s just routine. We’re seeing this all over the country.

So I think we’re in a pretty terrifying spiral right now….

What I think we are seeing right now is Trump is attempting to build his own paramilitary force. They want people whose first and ultimate loyalty in this job is going to be to the president.