It’s going to get a lot worse because now they know that they are able to deport/jail literally anyone without facing any resistance. If a case gets too big on the media, they can shift responsibility around in a circle, e.g. USA says it can’t do anything, El Salvador has to do something. And El Salvador says sorry can’t do anything. And so nothing is done, both USA and El Salvador get what they want and the justice system and the victims can’t do anything.
This will soon become routine because they will expand their list of “unwanted” persons constantly. First “gang members” and “criminals”, then sexual and other non-criminal minorities, then non-criminal political opposition, then potentially everyone who’s not super loyal to the fascist administration (aka cult).
What worries me is how fast it descends into madness. Any innocent American citizen should probably sooner, rather than later, be prepared to fight for themselves and their loved ones against injustice, because there might be no one left in the system doing it for them when the system itself has become unjust and/or dysfunctional. I hope that you somehow manage to turn the wheel around but when looking at the speed of Project 2025 and the Trump administration becoming increasingly more vile, I don’t think there’s much time left. Fascism is growing at insane speed, fueled by disinformation/propaganda and fake news on the web and social media, and backed by obscenely rich oligarchs who never really liked the previous government and laws anyway.
And this is all happening in a time when humanity should work together, rather than continue fighting among themselves. Instead, humanity chose the worst path forward possible, the path which accelerates the problems and has no solutions at all. So now we don’t have anything against climate change and this will cause massive problems and completely new wars world-wide over land, food, water. And it’s not far out. If you’re young today, you’ll probably live to experience it. It’s probably the right time to prepare for the worst and adjust to a pre-apocalyptic mindset. Because we’re definitely not solving this if we can’t even solve fascism in Western democracies in 2025.
An easy analogy that common users can understand is e-mail. E-Mail is also decentralized, everyone has an e-mail address but everyone uses a different e-mail host (the domain name after the “@”). So e.g. “john.doe@gmail.com” has an account at gmail.com but “jane.doe@mailbox.org” has an account at mailbox.org. Both are completely different, yet they can communicate with each other. There’s not one company controlling or storing every single e-mail account or inbox. It’s spread out and everyone can choose the mail provider they like or trust the most.
Then you use that as a bridge to explain Lemmy, or Mastodon, or other Fediverse social media platforms. And remind the listener that single companies having full control over everyone’s accounts is generally bad and opens the door for all sorts of abuse and manipulation or arbitrariness.