Let It Burn: What an Immigration Raid on Washington Firefighters Can Teach Us About MAGA Fascism

This past Wednesday, the Seattle Times reported that Customs and Border Patrol agents interrupted two crews of firefighters working to control the Bear Gulch wildfire. They lined them up, checked IDs, and ultimately arrested multiple men. 

The scene is galling—firefighters sitting on logs as federal agents prevent them from doing the crucial and courageous work of fighting Washington’s largest active wildfire. The treatment reported by the crew is enraging. Here is the report, from Seattle Times reporters Isabella Breda and Conrad Swanson:

In a FaceTime video call from the other firefighter to The Seattle Times, firefighters in their gear were seen sitting on logs in front of federal officers. Some firefighters were dismissed back to their vehicles.

One firefighter attempted to walk over to his company vehicle to get something to drink and appeared to have been called back by federal officers.

In images shared by firefighters from the scene, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicle is parked nearby. Officers wearing "Police" vests are seen arresting a firefighter, while another appears to be restrained.

According to one of the firefighters, they were denied the chance to say goodbye to the detained crew members. "I asked them if his (family) can say goodbye to him because they're family, and they're just ripping them away," the firefighter told the Times. "And this is what he said: "You need to get the (expletive) out of here. I'm gonna make you leave.'"

I think this incident offers insight into the values that structure Trump’s regime and MAGA politics more generally. And I’d like to explore them here. 

Viceland

We have been inundated with stories over the last few months of federal agents, often masked, refusing to identify themselves or provide any explanation as they detain, interrogate, and arrest terrified people across the country. In this story, the malice and indifference are heightened by the fact that these agents are accosting firefighters in the midst of controlling an enormous blaze. 

Firefighters are one of the most quintessential figures of heroism in modern life. Children dress up as them for Halloween, and local firefighters deliver safety talks to schools. In New York, where men like the ones detained Wednesday raced up the Twin Towers as they burned, the fire department proudly declares its members to be “New York’s bravest.”

There is a fascist logic at play here. It’s not merely rule by the worst but an active assault on virtue wherever it exists. Trump and MAGA have turned the country over to the cruelest, most rapacious, and least honorable among us and directed the force of the state against firefighters, aid workers, civil servants, and children. And DHS  is now spending millions to expand its numbers with the sort of individuals eager to do such ignoble work. 

As Robert O. Paxton notes in his essential work, The Anatomy of Fascism, himself citing Thomas Mann:

The novelist Thomas Mann noted in his diary on March 27, 1933, two months after Hitler had become German chancellor, that he had witnessed a revolution of a kind never seen before, "without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice." The "common scum" had taken power, “accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses.”

Today we are also witnessing a takeover by the meanest of us, and it’s not simply that we are beset by those of middling and low talent. Their baseness of character is the most important quality they possess. 

Pete Hegseth—a lecherous, rageful, and bigoted drunkard—demands straight male “warfighters” for Trump’s military even as he prepares to use it to subjugate American cities like Washington, D.C. and  Chicago. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a ghoulish and conspiratorial failson, is attempting to send American public health back to the 19th century. It all goes on like this. Where malice and zeal are lacking, indolence fills the gaps. To call this kakistocracy almost feels like it understates the crisis. 

We are a nation with a bully-in-chief, an ogre of hate and pettiness who feeds off of the suffering of others. The tools of rule are violence, humiliation, and fear. And the only people who can now make careers of government work are those willing to ply this trade. 

Never enough

But it isn’t just that this administration has turned America over to bullies, thugs, and thieves. It has also drawn a hard line around the entire aspirational ideal of becoming American. That is, after all, the central premise and promise of immigrating to this country—the idea that you can make a new life here and be, no matter who you are or what your name is, an American by virtue of choosing to become one. 

An action like this, against men risking their lives to protect American citizens and American nature, sends a clear message: nothing you do will ever be enough to truly belong here. If being a firefighter, essentially a kind of everyday superhero in modern life, is not sufficient to earn you a place in American society, what is? If it’s not even enough to afford you a modicum of respect from the goons enforcing our new immigration regime, who can hope for kinder treatment? The answer is obvious: no one. 

We also see this sentiment reflected in the actions taken against immigrants outside courthouses and federal offices, as they attempt to follow the very rules we have set up for them to be here legally. 

ICE agents stationed at New York City’s 26 Federal Plaza, where immigrants must come to manage paperwork and other processing requirements, have repeatedly arrested individuals who have come for the explicit purpose of filing the proper forms or attending hearings. 

In May, ICE agents arrested a mother, her daughter, and her six-year-old son after they presented for an asylum hearing in Los Angeles. The boy, who has leukemia, was sent along with his mother and sister to a detention facility in Texas. They were returned to Los Angeles in July, but that can hardly compensate for the trauma of agents separating the family and standing indifferently as the young boy cried and wet himself out of fear or the missed medical appointments related to his cancer. 

These stories put the lie to the argument that this is about illegal immigration. The real message is that these people are unwanted in their essence. It doesn’t matter if they try to follow the rules or do things the “right way” because there is no “right way” for such individuals to become American. In the view of MAGA hardliners like Stephen Miller, they can never become American. They are forever outside the bounds of citizenship and fellow feeling that this country once promised to anyone willing to come here and build a new life. 

How far gone?

Every moment, the federal government is being remade in the images of Trump and figures like Stephen Miller and Pete Hegseth. Dutiful civil servants are purged and replaced with ideologues and lackeys, and others are cowed into towing the new party line. Moreover, the country itself is being refashioned. America is now a society in which an administration that is engaged in naked abuses of power, the desecration of our public health institutions, the betrayal of our foreign allies, and carnivalesque displays of corruption still polls in the low-to-mid-40s. 

We are now a country that offers military honors to someone killed in the act of insurrection. 

Fascism, and Trumpism in particular, force us into a kind of upside-down where the ideas and values that order daily life and the means by which citizens advance are inverted. After a decade of Trumpian politics, a great many Americans seem to have re-oriented themselves and learned to walk on the ceiling. 

The boundaries being imposed around who is and isn’t an American are internal as well as external. Trump and his ilk aren’t only keeping immigrants out, they’re setting up a new social hierarchy that places the most predatory, bloody-fanged among us at the top and seeks to subordinate caution and compassion wherever they’re found. 

It’s a real question whether and how we can come back from this. Even in a world where Democrats win back power in 2026 and 2028, which are far from certain outcomes, it does not make sense to assume America will snap back the way many had hoped it might after Trump’s 2020 defeat. The federal government has been too greatly altered. But, more importantly, the American electorate has been changed. A generation of young people now know Trumpism as a normal aspect of American political life. And many others have found a pleasure in the new politics on offer that the old world of Obamas and McCains could never give them. 

To get out of this, our project will by necessity be one of remaking national life. We will have to present new and positive definitions of what it means to be American and to revive the commitments to pluralism, tolerance, decency, and service that enable liberal democracy to flourish. 

Featured image is Fascism, by Harry Sternberg