American Crackdown

Will there really be one moment when escape becomes prudent?  In a country of 320 million, I'm not sure you would really be able to see it.  By the time someone prominent gets arrested or murdered, the crackdown would have to have been working for a long, long fucking time.  This isn't Germany or Spain in the early 20th century, and the USA is a ginormous country in population and area.  If it does go full-on conflagration, with wall-to-wall atrocities and a rolling civil war being fought, February 2017 will later be understood to be way too late for most people to run.