The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that ICE thugs have been following anti-ICE state legislators around in their cars and standing in front of their homes taking pictures, clearly intimidating threats.“They made a big show of pointing a camera way out their window so that I could see them taking pictures of my house,” three-term State Representative Brad Tabke told the newspaper. His child was home alone at the time, and the action, according to Tabke, frightened him. In an article written by Allison Kite, the newspaper added:“Tabke said he saw what appeared to be federal immigration agents outside his home at least a half dozen times, sometimes with binoculars.“Tabke is one of several Democratic lawmakers who said they were targeted or harassed during the Trump administration’s months-long immigration crackdown in the state. One DFL lawmaker told colleagues that federal agents hurled misogynistic epithets at her, even after she informed them she was an elected official. Another DFL legislator said an agent — with whom she had never interacted — greeted her by first name, while another said agents walked around her home taking photos.“‘It was all a way of threatening and being very menacing in a way that perhaps would inhibit us from advocating the way that we had been,’ said Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton.”One of the things I’ve written about both here and in several books over the years is how authoritarian movements don’t suddenly stand up and announce themselves. They never pop up with a manifesto that says, “Hello, we’re here to end your democracy!”Instead , they typically arrive on the scene complaining about a problem, one they’ve often manufactured or at least exaggerated themselves, and then offer a solution that — just by coincidence — happens to require them to have a little more power, a little more reach, and a little more presence in places they weren’t before.Then they do it again. And again. Until one day, the country’s people look around and discover the institution that was supposedly fixing a temporary crisis has become a permanent, unaccountable force operating everywhere, terrorizing the populace, and answerable to no one but the guy at the top. You could call it “creeping fascism”.That’s exactly what’s happening with ICE at America’s airports right now. And when Donald Trump told reporters this Monday, with evident pride, “ICE was my idea,” he wasn’t just taking credit for solving a sudden logistical crisis. He was telling us what kind of country he’s building and what kind autocratic of leader he’s become.A five-week Republican-caused partial government shutdown has left nearly 50,000 TSA agents working without pay. More than 480 have quit, thousands more call in sick daily, and airport security lines at Atlanta, Houston, and JFK have stretched to five hours or more. It’s a genuine crisis affecting millions of ordinary American travelers.And it’s a crisis Trump has had the power to end every day since it started by simply demanding and signing a clean funding bill, which Democrats have repeatedly presented to Congress and Republicans have repeatedly blocked.Instead, Trump and shadow-president Stephen Miller sent in their ICE thugs.ICE agents were deployed to more than a dozen airports on Monday, according to the New York Times, wearing vests with their agency’s name, standing near identification processing locations, walking through terminal halls, generally scaring and intimidating people.The Times notes that there was an obvious alternative if Trump actually wanted airport security help: U.S. Customs agents are already in airports doing security checks and passport verification, they’re trained for the environment, and deploying them to ID checkpoints would have been, as former ICE official Darius Reeves told the Times, “a less politically charged decision.”But Trump didn’t want a less politically charged decision: he wanted ICE, which has become, essentially, his own private army, as he told us himself.That’s because, as the Times makes clear in its reporting, Trump has been openly using ICE to pursue goals that go far beyond immigration enforcement.This past year, he’s sent officers into large Democratic-run cities like LA and Chicago in highly visible operations to wreak havoc and terrorize those communities. He most recently rushed teams to Minneapolis specifically to pursue Black Somali immigrants he’d been trash-talking in comments widely denounced as nakedly racist.And in a June directive he posted on social media, he told his masked, heavily armed ICE thugs that targeting Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York would “help Republicans” electorally, describing those cities as “the core of the Democrat Power Center, where they use Illegal Aliens to expand their Voter Base, cheat in Elections, and grow the Welfare State.”That’s not immigration policy: that’s political warfare.