This refers to all political dissidents - it does not matter whether they are organizations, political movements, or individuals. What they have in common is that they draw attention to the regime’s crimes and advocate for consequences or even criminal prosecution.

This is enough for autocratic regimes to declare them enemies of the state, allowing them to persecute them completely arbitrarily, since they view the state solely as a tool for carrying out their own crimes. Anyone who stands in the way is an enemy and will be mercilessly persecuted.

As a rule, it is always minorities, intellectuals, journalists, civil rights movements, unions, and such that are targeted first - precisely those whom the regime must silence to prevent the population from rising up.

This is already happening in the U.S., and ICE is the secret police carrying out the “purge” outside the bounds of the rule of law.

The next steps are historically very well documented: for various dictatorships that have emerged throughout history.

The most obvious example is today’s Russia, but the rise of the Third Reich is also a good example of what is happening in the U.S.

The mechanisms have hardly changed: gaining control of the media, infiltrating the legal system, establishing a heavily armed secret police force that spreads terror, eliminating political opponents, and violently suppressing the people, so that resistance means persecution or death.