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. He had been checking in with the ICE field office in Dallas every year to retain his legal status. For thirty years, he was compliant. Then ICE suddenly criminalized him as an “alien”—with foreseeable lethal consequences for his disabled son.
His son died a preventable death while his father was detained. Now ICE refuses to let the father attend the funeral.
What happened to Wael Tarabishi is Hannah Arendt’s concept of Nazi administrative murder: death caused not by direct violence but by bureaucratic machinery operating with deliberate indifference. ICE didn’t shoot Wael. They simply removed his 24/7 caregiver, detained him through an interminable process, and let the obvious and predictable biological consequences unfold.
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. What’s structurally identical is that Wael’s life depended entirely on a care relationship the state could sever at will, with full knowledge of the consequences. The Trump machinery didn’t pull a trigger in this case, it applied deadly paperwork.
The denial of funeral attendance is a further cruelty-as-function. It demonstrates Trump wields power beyond death, that he controls grieving itself.
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
The Minneapolis killing of Pretti, an ICU nurse for veterans, fits within this pattern. Pretti was 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 so he would die. The enforcement pattern reliably destroys care relationships.
Care workers are more likely to intervene to protect others—exactly what Pretti did, what Wael’s father did. The gratuitous cruelty serves the same function that Nazi bureaucratic cruelty served: demonstrating total power over victims to deter others through witnessed suffering. The pattern of posthumously transforming victims into aggressors through disinformation—Miller called Pretti “an assassin”—served Nazi SA/SS operations similarly. It’s beyond cover for crimes; it’s a warning to others who might dare to intervene or show compassion.
What distinguishes fascism from ordinary state violence is the systematic quality and ideological targeting. The pattern isn’t random. It’s the well-known tactic of destroying social bonds and care networks to replace them with loyalty to the dictator alone.