O P I N I O N
THE SOAPBOX
Stand up. Speak up. It’s your turn.
A year into Donald Trump’s second term, friends who live outside the United States still reach out in disbelief. Is it really that bad? Are you safe? I usually answer with a shrug. Not because things are fine — but because, like so many Americans, I’ve learned how quickly the unacceptable becomes routine.
Last week, a familiar press release crossed my inbox: another filing, another meeting, another unanswered question about the proposed federal immigration detention facility in New Hampshire. For a moment, I had forgotten about it entirely. That, more than anything, should alarm us.
Abroad, journalists describe the United States as a country building concentration camps. In New Hampshire, we are drifting toward becoming a state that hosts one — quietly, politely, without official comment. Our governor says she has no information. Our congressional delegation says little. The rest of us go about our business.
This is how normalization works.
We have become a country where people are disappeared by masked federal agents — seized from workplaces, homes, streets, even courthouses — and we no longer demand answers. Who has been detained? Who has been deported? Who is still missing? The lack of transparency would once have triggered outrage. Now it barely registers.
New Hampshire has not been spared this climate of fear. Immigrant communities here — in Manchester, Nashua, Concord, and rural towns alike — live with the knowledge that a knock on the door or a traffic stop could end everything. The Granite State’s small size does not protect us; it only makes silence louder.
We have become a country where federal paramilitary forces are deployed into civilian spaces under the guise of “public safety.” In other states, armed agents patrol cities. Here, the danger is subtler but no less real: the quiet acceptance that such deployments are normal, legal, inevitable — even welcome.
New Hampshire once prided itself on skepticism of centralized power. “Live Free or Die” was not a slogan about convenience; it was a warning. Yet today, we watch as federal authority expands unchecked — while our own leaders avert their eyes.
We have become a country whose government attacks universities, research, libraries, museums, and cultural institutions — and New Hampshire feels this acutely. Federal cuts ripple through UNH and Dartmouth. Humanities programs shrink. Research dollars vanish. The result is not efficiency; it is intellectual erosion. We are making ourselves smaller, narrower, less capable of critical thought.
We have become a country that treats the rule of law as optional. International law is dismissed. Courts are threatened. Judges are smeared. Protest is reframed as extremism. In another state, an ICE agent shot and killed a protester in broad daylight. Federal officials declared it justified. The message was unmistakable: dissent now carries mortal risk.
That message travels.
To be clear, none of this began with Donald Trump. The United States has long tolerated mass incarceration. Immigration enforcement has long been cruel. Executive power has been expanding for decades. But this administration has accelerated those trends at breakneck speed — and stripped away the pretense.
We are not merely continuing down an old road. We have crossed into new territory.
We still have civil society in New Hampshire. Lawyers challenge unlawful actions. Activists show up at city halls and statehouses. Neighbors protect neighbors. But civil society is already functioning under new constraints — financial, legal, psychological. Universities are more cautious. Nonprofits are more fearful. Protesters now calculate risk in ways they did not a year ago.
We still have independent media — but less of it, and under growing pressure. National outlets have settled frivolous lawsuits rather than fight them. Access is rationed. Loyalists are rewarded. The chilling effect is real, and local journalism, already fragile, bears the brunt.
We still have elections. But how free will they be?
Across the country, voter rolls are being purged, polling access restricted, election officials intimidated. Courts have allowed aggressive gerrymanders that dilute minority voting power. The rhetoric is unmistakable: the “enemy from within,” the threat of military deployment, the casual suggestion that elections can be postponed or invalidated.
New Hampshire has long guarded its election integrity — not through suppression, but through trust, transparency, and local control. That tradition is now under strain. Once doubt is seeded, once fear enters the process, the damage is done.
There is a term for systems that retain the appearance of democracy — elections, courts, legislatures — while hollowing them out: electoral authoritarianism. That is what the United States is drifting toward. New Hampshire is not immune.
Ask anyone who has lived through democratic collapse, and they will tell you the same thing: it doesn’t arrive all at once. The walls close in gradually. Space shrinks. Freedoms that once felt permanent become conditional, then disappear.
The United States is not Russia. New Hampshire is not Hungary. But the warning signs are not abstract. They are here — in the silence around detention centers, in the normalization of force, in the erosion of truth, in the quiet acceptance of what once would have been unthinkable.
The only antidote is action — now, not later.
Naming what is happening matters. Refusing to normalize it matters. Filling the remaining civic space with speech, protest, journalism, organizing, and accountability matters.
“Live Free or Die” was never meant to be passive.
If we do not claim the space that remains, it will close — and New Hampshire will not be able to say it didn’t see it coming.
Rep. David Preece serves Hillsborough District 17 in the NH State House.
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