The Trump regime is arresting protesters now. This was the plan all along.

The knock on the door came at 6 a.m.

It had been more than a month since Bajun Mavalwalla II had taken part in a large and eventually chaotic protest in his hometown of Spokane, Wash., against the U.S. government’s efforts to deport two young Latino immigrants — one from Venezuela, one from Colombia — whose work permits were abruptly revoked.

Federal officers had warned protesters during the June 11 demonstration that they could be arrested for blocking a vehicle that was to transport the two men, and indeed, 30 people were taken into custody during two separate rallies that day. But the U.S. Justice Department of the Trump regime wasn’t going to let the matter drop, and so now FBI agents were knocking at Mavalwalla’s home.

“As soon as he stepped outside, he was arrested,” his father told a local news reporter. “We had no idea what was coming down the pipe.”

What was coming were federal felony indictments of Mavalwalla and eight other protesters, including Spokane’s former City Council president, Ben Stuckart, who’d taken to Facebook that day to call for others to join him in blocking the vehicle. The Spokane 9 are charged with engaging in conspiracy to impede or injure law enforcement, with two additionally facing assault charges. (If you can, check out the excellent coverage in the hometown paper, the Spokesman-Review.)

Tuesday’s arrests in the eastern Washington city, far from the glare of the national media, have not received a great deal of attention. But they should. It’s a major twist in a downward spiral as Donald Trump’s newly signed mega-bill authorizes $30 billion for hiring thousands of new masked officers under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and $45 billion for a gulag network of detention centers and camps that would hold the upsurge in arrests from these new agents.

The flood of new federal dollars for what the Trump regime calls mass deportation is essentially creating something once seen as antithetical to democracy: a national police force. And the arrests in Spokane — not the first time in recent weeks that the government has aggressively gone after anyone involved in resisting the ICE raids — are a window into how this police state plans to operate.

Even the recent surge of activity by ICE and allied federal agents at Home Depots, supermarkets, and other places where immigrants congregate isn’t likely enough to fill a gulag archipelago of “Alligator Alcatrazes” — MAGA’s cute name for what are essentially concentration camps. But more arrests create more unrest, and arresting protesters like the Spokane 9 will kill two birds with one stone for the Trump regime — locking up its most aggressive political opponents while sending a chilling message about dissent to any citizen tempted to join them.

» READ MORE: Inside Trump’s $75B ICE gulag nightmare | Will Bunch Newsletter

The timing of the Spokane arrests is interesting. Thursday is the fifth anniversary of the death of civil rights icon and congressman John Lewis, who was arrested some 40 times in the early 1960s fighting Jim Crow segregation, and was beaten a couple of times, most famously during Selma, Ala.’s “Bloody Sunday” in 1965.

The growing Trump resistance — which sent at least five million people into the streets last month for a “No Kings” protest, heavily motivated by opposition to mass deportation — is marking the anniversary with an event named after Lewis’ mantra, “Good Trouble,” that promises protests in 1,500 cities and towns. Plans for the event are centered mostly around rallies or direct action, and so far the movement hasn’t emulated Lewis’ strategy of civil disobedience. That could change as the Trump regime amps up its deportation drive and cements its authoritarian bent.

But there’s a big difference between the 1960s civil rights marches led by Lewis, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and others, and today. Back then, the oppression came from local officials in the segregated South, with the federal government increasingly supportive of the protests. Today, the various tentacles of a Trumpian police state — from ICE to the Justice Department, with allies in local law enforcement — have adopted what is close to a “zero tolerance” policy for anyone they think is standing in the way of mass deportation.

A typical episode occurred in Worcester, Mass., where a City Council member was charged locally last month, after the fact, with assaulting a police officer during an immigration raid under circumstances that were murky at best. According to news reports, body-cam footage shows Etel Haxhiaj pleading with ICE agents not to arrest a woman, then an officer pulled her away from a federal vehicle, and apparently, her hand touched a police officer. It was actually Haxhiaj on tape yelling, “Don’t touch me” — and yet she is the one facing charges.

In Los Angeles, a 32-year-old U.S. citizen, Andrea Velez, was arrested by ICE agents and charged with assaulting a federal officer after she apparently saw agents forcefully arresting her sister, also a citizen. In the best-known case, New Jersey Democratic U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver — caught up in a fracas during her inspection of an ICE detention facility in Newark in which her hand touched an agent — now faces a three-count indictment for impeding federal officers.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sought to justify the controversial use of masks by ICE and Border Patrol agents by claiming an 810% increase in assaults against ICE officers, although the raw number — 79 in little more than five months — is not large considering the upsurge in activity. More importantly, it seems like some — if not most — of the claimed rise in assaults are in fact under murky, disputed circumstances like in the McIver indictment.

“There are just laws and there are unjust laws,” King wrote in his famous 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” adding that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” He stated further: “Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

To many of the millions inclined to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, the rounding up of immigrants — increasingly from the ranks of day laborers or farmworkers who’ve committed no crime — poses the same moral quandary as segregation. That was certainly the case for Stuckart, the leader of June’s Spokane protest.

Stuckart had been working to aid one of the immigrants — a 21-year-old Venezuelan, Cesar Alexander Alvarez Perez — when Perez and the Colombian immigrant were detained during what was supposed to be a routine check-in. He immediately took to Facebook, writing: “[I]f you care at all about these illegal detainers you meet me at 411 West Cataldo by 2 p.m. I am going to set in front of the bus. Feel free to join me … The Latino community needs the rest of our community. Not tonight, not Saturday but right now!!!!”

Scores of people responded and did block the federal vehicle for a time. Now, Stuckart’s Facebook post urging resistance — and the actions of some who answered his call that day — are at the heart of the federal case that could lock them away for years. The Trump regime, still insisting it’s removing dangerous criminals from the country despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, doesn’t just not see mass deportation as an unjust law. They refuse to even let this idea take root.

“I’m outraged,” Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown said after Tuesday’s arrests. “This politically motivated action is a perversion of our justice system. The Trump administration’s weaponization of ICE and the DOJ is trampling on the U.S. Constitution and creating widespread fear across our community.”

It’s good that Brown and other Democratic leaders in Washington state are criticizing the charges, but that won’t stop this alarming cycle. The more secret police arrests — both of immigrants and demonstrators — the more protests there will be. Leading to more arrests. Rinse, repeat. The long-term goal is to crush all dissent, not just on immigration, but whatever the regime does, as autocracy deepens.

The risks are even greater than in the late 1960s, when claims of conspiracy against Vietnam War protesters — think the trial of the Chicago 7 — largely collapsed under the weight of massive government misconduct, including an illegal spying campaign called COINTELPRO. This time, the misconduct is more egregious, and the cases are more flimsy, but you can hear the echoes of that era.

Free the Spokane 9.

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