My adopted US homeland should be wary of making the same mistakes.

Though the electorate at this moment is sensibly focused on achieving a victory that will grant some reprieve and solace, such an urgency should not postpone the need for an overdue reckoning with the dark imperfections in our history and national character that generated the conditions for the republic to be in such dire peril.

Those conditions, enabled by those who enabled Trump and ignored his danger, his nastiness, his serial mendacity, will probably endure well beyond the day (if it comes) when he leaves the White House. We will be left to contend with the worst traits of the US’s past that he exalted and exacerbated: the imperial arrogance, the nativism and misogyny, the ecological degradation, the assault on minority and workers’ rights, the myth of exceptionalism.

That is the somber lesson that Chile yesterday and today whispers to us from afar. Only a profound and painful self-examination of our identity, what the splendid guardians of this experiment that started 250 years ago are demanding, can help to stave off the ominous possibility that years from now the country will be facing a repetition of the current terrifying crisis.

ICE must be abolished.

That’s the conclusion we at Amnesty International have reached after documenting the chilling pattern of human rights violations across the US during immigration enforcement operations.

ICE’s record of violating human rights has been documented for more than two decades, but our latest findings show that the abuses go well beyond a series of incidents. Instead, under the Trump administration, there is a clear pattern that has reached a new and dangerous scale.

For the past year, Norma had parked her brown-and-beige camper van outside [Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey]…most weekends. Converted into a mobile clinic, it was stocked with sutures, glucometers and trauma and CPR kits, and offered health checks to families and protesters. That day, the clinic was busier than usual.

“Can you come over here?” someone asked.

Norma followed, thinking a person may need first aid. Instead, she encountered a wall of two dozen ICE agents in paramilitary vests, carrying batons, tasers and firearms, most of their faces masked.

… Norma looked down and saw a federal agent dragging a young woman across the ground, her bright pink shirt ripping off, until she was down to a black bra.

“Help me!” the young woman shouted. Decades earlier, as a psychiatric nurse, Norma had watched colleagues reach for restraints and sedatives when patients became violent. Her instinct was different: “No, let me talk to him.” She would sit beside them and try to calm them down.

Now that same instinct kicked in: de-escalate the situation and help the woman being dragged across the ground. Norma felt herself going into “mom mode”, moving closer.

That’s when someone from behind yanked her up. An ICE agent in a cap, black facemask, and gloved hands reached for her arms from behind her. She felt her body fling through the air.

“Just as Germans who backed Hitler and the Nazi Party after 1933 were fully aware of what they were joining, so Christians who have backed Trump and the MAGA movement a second time know and bear responsibility for what they are now endorsing…

“This dehumanising language, talking about immigrants as vermin, and this racial purity language, like they’re ‘poisoning the blood of our country’. What does that mean? If they’re poisoning the blood, what’s the pure blood? We know where that story goes,” he said.