Another heartbreaking story about the abject cruelty of Trump’s stormtroopers. This is how Fox News reported the tragedy.
“Mentally, I have never been worse,” Wael said in the video. “My father was always my hero, my safe place. He did everything for me, 24 hours a day, and ICE took him for no reason.”
Wael was pronounced dead at the hospital, having never been reunited with Maher.
“Up until Wael’s last conscious moment, he continued thinking and talking about his father.”
The father had done nothing wrong, had no crimes, had no missed papers or appointments. His son died a preventable death while he was held hostage, and now ICE even refuses to let the father go to the funeral of his son.
The Minneapolis execution of Pretti, an ICU nurse for veterans, fits this ICE pattern. Trump is specifically targeting, detaining and killing Americans who care for others, as the Nazis did.
This isn’t incidental. The gratuitous denial serves the same function that Nazi bureaucratic cruelty served to demonstrate total power by Trump over victims to deter others through public grotesque witnessed suffering. The worse the suffering, the more unpopular the dictator, the more power he believes he is justified to amass by force.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
The father had been checking in with the ICE field office in Dallas every year to retain his legal status. For thirty years, he was told he is compliant. Trump suddenly criminalized him as “alien” to kill his son.
What happened to Wael Tarabishi is known as Hannah Arendt’s concept of administrative murder. A death caused not by direct violence but by bureaucratic Nazi machinery operating with deliberate indifference. ICE didn’t execute Wael by sitting on him and shooting him in the back. They simply removed his 24/7 caregiver, detained him through an interminable process, and let the obvious and predictable biological consequences unfold, for the slow deliberate torture of caregiver father and his son.
The Nazi Aktion T4 euthanasia program was exactly this, directly attacked care relationships. Trump understands that those who provide care represent alternative social bonds competing with total state loyalty to him and him alone. Care workers are also more likely to intervene to protect others, exactly what Pretti did and why he was publicly executed. Bystander videos showed Pretti trying to help a woman who had been violently knocked to the ground by federal agents.
Pretti was kind, he helped others. ICE killed him for it. Wael was cared for, they detained his kind father for it.
Trump is announcing that disabled people’s lives are contingent on state approval of their care relationships. Under Hitler’s T4, the state decided disabled people were unworthy of the resources required to sustain them. The killing was framed as releasing burdens.
What’s identical between Hitler and Trump is that Wael’s life depended entirely on a care relationship the state could sever at will, with full knowledge of the consequences. The bureaucratic machinery didn’t need to pull a trigger because it just used deadly paperwork.
The denial of funeral attendance is also cruelty-as-function. It demonstrates that the state’s power extends beyond death, that it now controls grieving itself.
The Trump pattern of kill the caregiver and then transform them with disinformation and lies to appear an aggressor served Nazi SA/SS operations similarly. It’s not just covering themselves to get away with crimes against humanity, it’s a warning to others who might dare to intervene or have compassion.
What distinguishes fascism from ordinary state violence is the systematic quality and the ideological targeting. The pattern of Trump isn’t random, it’s not unique, it’s the well known tactic of viscerally destroying social bonds and care networks to replace them with slavish devotion to a dictator.