Most recently, Trump's secretary of homeland security issued memos providing for the expanded use of detention, wide-scale deportation and the immediate design and construction of a southern border wall all in the name of public safety.
It's clearest, perhaps, to put it this way: His detention has drawn much wider attention in China than the detention of Liu Xiaobo, a year before Liu won the Nobel Prize.
"What an amazing hypocrisy for the United States now to be castigating Iraq for putting U.S. soldiers on television," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a group in New York that has challenged the wide-ranging detention of of prisoners captured in Afghanistan at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Nor does it mean detentions that range wider than any coup might justify.
Anxieties about the detention centre are fuelled by wider concerns, he says.
Human rights groups believe Ai's detention is part of a wider crackdown in which scores of activists and dissidents have been detained, formally arrested or disappeared.
Now the present holder of the post, David Blunkett, proposes to reintroduce detention without trial on the wider stage of Britain's "war on terrorism".
Yang, who now cares for the couple's 21-month-old daughter, Shuangshuang, alone, flinches when asked whether she believes her husband's detention is part of a wider political campaign against those who speak out against the Communist party.
Ai Weiwei has long been a thorn in the Chinese government's side, but human rights campaigners see his detention as part of the wider crackdown that has seen activists, dissidents and lawyers detained or go missing.
The view that immigrant detention needs rethinking has gained wider traction in recent months, following the Obama administration's expansion of family detention.
The wide expansion of immigrant detention and incarceration has acted as a boon to private prison companies.
