The creation of a class of “others” can be a useful thing for a young, blooming authoritarian regime. First you decide some group or another deserves special scorn and vilification; next you create a special government apparatus to treat this group as chattel with little rights or human dignity; finally, you let the edges of this apparatus slowly blur into other parts of society, until the overstep is grudgingly accepted by the public and its remit is further expanded. That appears to be what’s happening in Trump’s America right now.

Trump’s immigration policies should be opposed, first, because he, like Obama, is uprooting and expelling breathtakingly large numbers of immigrant populations who have resided, set up lives, and even made families in the country, sometimes for as long as decades. But even if you’re not undocumented — even if you actually approve of all this — there’s another reason to be worried. Just as marginalized groups have historically been used as the canary in the coalmine for justifying greater and greater encroachments on civil liberties (the way George W. Bush pointed to Muslim terrorists while he built up the post-September 11 surveillance state), so the activities of the increasingly extreme deportation machine are bleeding ever more extensively into the rest of American life.

Last month, the NBC 7 television station in San Diego revealed that immigration agents with Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CPB), Border Patrol, Homeland Security, and the FBI had built up and were using a database of journalists, activists, and an immigration attorneys, all of whom were to be flagged for extra screening at the border. The lawyer and seven of the journalists are US citizens, and a number of them had reported getting extra scrutiny from border officials prior to the revelation of its existence.