Here are some of my bleak predictions for our country under the Trump regime:

Prediction 1: Trump has nominated the extreme right-winger Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Challenges to states’ restrictive abortion laws will backfire, leading perhaps to the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.

Only a handful of states will still have legal abortion clinics, that is until Congress passes federal legislation making abortion illegal.

Prediction 2: Millions of immigrants, undocumented and documented, will be deported.

This will be a radical departure from the previous administration.

Although Obama’s administration deported over 2.5 million people (not including “self-deportations” or people turned away at the border), more than any other presidency, his deportations largely focused on people with a criminal record.

In 2015, 91 percent of people deported had a criminal record, according to an Aug. 29, 2016 report from ABC News.

Prediction 3: If, God forbid, a major terrorist attack were to happen, it would serve as grounds for the Trump regime to strip people of their rights.

This is exactly what happened after 9/11, when the executive branch started a massive surveillance program that continues today. Hitler blamed the burning of the Reichstag on communists and used it as a pretext to strip people of their civil liberties.

People will be scared, and the regime will take advantage of that fear. Muslims will be targeted, registered and maybe rounded up.

The regime will look for a scapegoat and perhaps settle for Iran.

Maybe they will say that they violated the agreement on nuclear development brokered by President Obama and former Secretary of State John Kerry.

We will invade Iran and install a friendly government, and we will be bogged down fighting insurgents there for the next 10 years, continuing the state of perpetual warfare.

Prediction 4: The police will continue to kill people with impunity and without sanction. They may indeed be emboldened.

Jeff Sessions, the new attorney general, has a history of making racist or at least insensitive comments.

I don’t imagine he will go out of his way, as President Obama’s second Attorney General Loretta Lynch did, to uphold the law of the land and bring justice for the victims of racist police brutality.

Prediction 5: Trump will keep his promise to uphold “law and order.” There will be a renewed war on drugs, a crackdown on legalized marijuana and a renewed era of mass incarceration.

Those are my predictions. Sounds pretty bad, right? I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is Trump is still president, and he probably will be for the next four years.

The good news is it seems like the massive protests that have sprung up in response to his immigration ban have actually had the effect of tempering the ban.

Further, the holds that several federal judges have put on Trump’s executive orders show that our government is working in the way it was designed to: the judicial branch is checking executive power.

Unfortunately, the courts have no real power to enforce their orders. There have been several examples so far of agencies under Trump’s command ignoring the courts and proceeding with deportations.

I am skeptical of the power protestors have. On the one hand, I believe Trump is a creature of the media, and protests are a way of creating media events and therefore perhaps a way of influencing him.

On the other hand, I think protests are very good at accomplishing very little.

But the big protests might serve as a message that says, we’re watching, and we won’t be complacent.

Or maybe the protests are just one last gasp before our resistance collapses. I would not advocate armed resistance in this forum, but it’s something worth thinking about.

If that terrorist attack that I mentioned really does happen, it could serve as grounds to restrict our rights to freedom of speech and expression.

Are those things you think are worth fighting for? Or Women’s Rights? Or the right of every American to be free from police brutality?

I think we should resist “by any means necessary,” and at some point that might mean what it sounds like.

We must fight against our own complacency. We must fight all the harder.