The American Police State Has Arrived

by Andrew P. Napolitano | Jan 22, 2026 

Antiwar.com.

In recent days, the government in America has not only failed to protect the freedom of speech, it has attacked it. Like authoritarians throughout history, it has sought to silence the speech it hates and fears. But most authoritarians did not have a Constitution that was written as an intentional obstacle to them.

In Miami Beach last week, Raquel Pacheco posted a Tweet/X calling Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner a hypocrite for supporting the free speech of those who want Israel to take over Gaza, but opposing the free speech of those who want a Palestinian state. When she received a visit from two Miami Police detectives asking if she had placed that post, she politely declined to answer. Pacheco told them that she has the right to remain silent. When she asked them to leave the front porch of her home, they did.

Two weeks ago in Minneapolis, Susan Tincher was arrested for following ICE agents and persistently videotaping them. She was shoved to the snow on her belly and handcuffed behind her back. At an ICE detention facility, her clothes and her wedding ring were removed from her — the latter by a bolt cutter. After five hours of confinement, an ICE supervisor decided to release her. ICE agents returned her destroyed wedding ring but not her clothes, which they told a federal judge had been lost.

Also in Minneapolis, the Department of Justice recently announced that it has commenced criminal investigations of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, alleging that their encouragement of anti-ICE demonstrations constitutes obstruction of justice, for which they should be charged and prosecuted, and incarcerated if convicted.

Last week, FBI agents raided the Washington, D.C., home of a Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson. They seized all her electronic devices. She had been working on a story involving federal whistleblowers, 1,100 of whom had communicated with her. Raiding the homes of journalists is prohibited by federal law, unless the journalist is engaged in ongoing crimes — which the feds have said Natanson is not — or to save human life; also not the case here. This was chilling the speech of the whistleblowers — on steroids.

All of these events constitute the government evaluating the content of speech, determining what it hates or fears, and then either chilling the speakers or prosecuting them. The First Amendment protects the right to watch the government and video its agents, to assemble and curse the government and tell it to leave, to remain silent in the face of government commands and intervention, to investigate the government and even to encourage civil disobedience openly and notoriously.

Thomas Paine would have called all this the right to shake your fist in the tyrant’s face. All of these rights stem from our humanity. The First Amendment does not grant them, it insulates them from government interference.

At the time of the ratification of the Constitution, many ratifiers feared a large, overbearing and debt-laden central government — as we have now — and insisted that their votes for ratification were conditioned upon amendments to the Constitution that would prohibit the new government from interfering with natural rights.

Most of the Constitution’s ratifiers understood the concept of natural rights. That was, of course, the core of the Declaration of Independence, in which Thomas Jefferson wrote that we are all endowed by our “Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

How can a right be unalienable? Since rights are as personal and natural as our bodily movements, only a jury can take them away after the person from whom the rights were sought has been found to have voluntarily given up those rights by engaging in aggression against the rights of others.

That is at least the theory of natural rights. They cannot be impaired by legislative command or executive edict; rather, only by a judge and jury after meticulous compliance with due process.

The idea of conditioning ratification sprang from the view that a state could leave the federal government just as easily as it joined — by a simple act of legislation. James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, argued that the legislature or the highest state court in a state could nullify acts of the federal government that are facially repugnant to the Constitution. Jefferson and Madison secretly authored resolutions adopted by the Virginia and Kentucky legislatures that in those states nullified the Alien and Sedition Acts, in which Congress had criminalized speech critical of the government.

The Constitution is based on value judgments made by the Framers and accepted by the ratifiers. It has many defects, but its core value was and is the primacy of the individual over the government — state or federal.

By recognizing natural rights by name in the first eight amendments and by recognizing the existence of human rights too numerous to name in the Ninth Amendment — and by requiring the government to protect them — the Framers and ratifiers advanced a government, the essential purpose of which was unambiguously to preserve personal freedom; not government order or power, but personal freedom. The Revolutionary War was fought, Jefferson argued, to craft a government here that would protect natural rights, not assault them.

A police state is the antithesis of the constitutional scheme advanced by Jefferson and Madison. In a police state, the laws are written so as to appear to defend freedom; but they are enforced and interpreted so as to enhance the power of the government.

When the government tries to intimidate people into silence, when it brutalizes people who shake their fists at its agents, when it threatens to criminalize speech by public officials critical of it, when it terrorizes those who speak their minds — and gets away with these unconstitutional and stomach-churning acts — the American police state has arrived.


Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the US Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2025 ANDREW P. NAPOLITANO – DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

January 20, 2026HubMP2012

One year into Trump’s second term and the world faces ‘a human rights emergency’ – new report

A new report from Amnesty International analyses how the Trump administration is “cracking the pillars of a free society” – from attacks on press freedom to using the military and scapegoating minority groups.

Marking one year since President Trump returned to office, Amnesty International today ring the alarm bells on increasing authoritarian practices in the United States and a devastating erosion of human rights. 

In a 46-page report released today, Ringing the Alarm Bells: Rising Authoritarian Practices and Erosion of Human Rights in the United States, Amnesty document how the Trump administration’s escalation of authoritarian practices, including closing civic space and undermining the rule of law, is eroding human rights in the US and beyond. 

Kerry Moscogiuri, interim chief executive of Amnesty International UK, said: “A year into Trump’s second term and it’s never been clearer: this is a pivotal point in world history, and Sir Keir Starmer must use every tool at his disposal to confront Donald Trump’s seemingly out of control anti-rights agenda. 

“The Trump administration’s systematic dismantling of international human rights norms – from threatening to take over Greenland to the US’s withdrawal from the Human Rights Council, the WHO, and the Paris Agreement – is a terrifying attack on international justice. Trump and his Government must be held to account.   

“Starmer must also speak out on the US government’s support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Failure to oppose and stop the genocide has led us all to where we are now. Silence and inaction as the global human rights architecture is dismantled is not an option. 

“Leaders across the globe must wake up to the world they seem to be sleepwalking into – before it is too late.” 

Paul O’Brien, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, said: “We are all witness to a dangerous trajectory under President Trump that has already led to a human rights emergency.

“By shredding norms and concentrating power, the administration is trying to make it impossible for anyone to hold them accountable. There is no doubt that these authoritarian practices by the Trump administration are eroding human rights and increasing the risk for journalists and people who speak out or dissent, including protestors, lawyers, students, and human rights defenders.”

Rising tide of authoritarianism

The report comprises twelve interconnected areas in which the Trump administration is cracking the pillars of a free society – including attacks on freedom of the press and access to information, freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, civil society organisations and universities, political opponents and critics, judges, lawyers, and the legal system, and due process. The report also documents attacks on refugee and migrant rights, the scapegoating of communities and the rollback of non-discrimination protections, the use of the military for domestic purposes, the dismantling of corporate accountability and anti-corruption measures, the expansion of surveillance without meaningful oversight, and efforts to undermine international systems designed to protect human rights. 

As detailed in the report, these authoritarian tactics are mutually reinforcing: Students are arrested and detained for protesting on college campuses, entire communities are being flooded and terrorised with masked ICE agents, and the militarisation of cities across the US is becoming normalised. At the same time, press intimidation makes human rights violations and abuses harder to expose; retaliation against protest makes people afraid to speak; expanding surveillance and militarization increases the costs of dissent; and attacks on courts, lawyers, and oversight bodies make accountability harder to enforce. 

These tactics are clearly eroding human rights, including freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, freedom of the press, access to information, equality and non-discrimination, due process, academic freedom, freedom from arbitrary detention, the right to seek asylum, the right to a fair trial, and even the right to life. 

Part of a global pattern

Amnesty has long documented similar patterns in countries around the world. While contexts differ, governments consolidate power, control information, discredit critics, punish dissent, narrow civic space, and weaken mechanisms meant to ensure accountability. 

O’Brien explained: “The attack on civic space and the rule of law and the erosion of human rights in the United States mirrors the global pattern Amnesty has seen and warned about for decades.

“Importantly, our experience shows that by the time authoritarian practices are fully entrenched, the institutions meant to restrain abuses of power are already severely compromised.” 

In the report, Amnesty sets forth a comprehensive set of recommendations – to the United States Executive Branch, Congress, state and local governments and law enforcement agencies, international actors and other governments, corporate actors such as technology companies, and the public – aimed at reversing this embrace of authoritarian practices and preventing the normalisation of increased repression and human rights violations. It calls for urgent action to protect civic space, restore rule of law safeguards, strengthen accountability, and ensure that human rights violations are neither ignored nor accepted as inevitable.

O’Brien said: “We can, and we must, forge a different path. Authoritarian practices only take root when they are allowed to become normalised. We cannot let that happen in the United States. Together, we all have an opportunity, and a responsibility, to rise to this challenging time in our history and to protect human rights.” 

The full report can be read here.