An immigration crackdown is emerging as the main instrument Donald Trump is using to impose a police state on America, complete with the by-now-routine arrest of opposition politicians. Most recently, Trump threatened to arrest and deport the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani.

USA Today provides the details:

Trump threatened to arrest Mamdani if as mayor he follows through on pledges not to assist federal officials enforcing immigration laws.

“Well then, we’ll have to arrest him,” Trump told reporters on July 1 while visiting a detention center in Florida. Trump said that he would “be watching over him very carefully on behalf of the nation.”

Trump also said “a lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” which is false. Mamdani is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Uganda, who immigrated to the United States with his parents—film director Mira Nair and Columbia University professor Mahmood Mamdani—at the age of seven.

Mamdani, a state Assembly member who won the nomination for mayor on a progressive platform, responded on social media that Trump is threatening him despite the fact that not cooperating with ICE doesn’t violate any law. (The Immigrant Legal Resource Center notes “There is no federal legal obligation for state and local jurisdictions to use their resources to help with immigration enforcement.”) …

Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tennessee, called for Mamdani to be stripped of his citizenship and deported and offensively referred to Mamdani as “little Muhammad” in reference to his Muslim religion.

Do not take this last threat lightly. The Trump Department of Justice just issued a memo “which advises prosecutors in the DOJ’s Civil Division to prioritize the denaturalization of various naturalized citizens over alleged infractions ranging from war crimes to ‘material misrepresentations’ in their citizenship applications.”

In a free society, the citizens decide who is the president. In Trump’s America, the president will decide who is a citizen.