Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador who came here, illegally, at the age of 16. In 2019, he was arrested as an illegal immigrant but granted “withholding of removal” status based on a judge’s evaluation that he would face murder at the hands of Salvadoran gangs if he were repatriated. He has lived and worked in Maryland ever since as a legal resident, is married to a US citizen and is raising three children.
A month ago, ICE agents arrested Abrego Garcia while he was picking up his son, claiming that his immigration status had changed. They asserted that he was a member of MS-13 based on … a hoodie and a confidential informant. Three days later, he was among those flown into El Salvador’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), an abusive overcrowded prison into which Salvador President Nayib Bukele has stuffed 14,000 of the supposedly worst criminals in the country.
Since then, Abrego Garcia’s case has become a cause celebre and a focal point of the Administration’s immigration policies. A federal judge had ordered the Administration not to fly the prisoners to El Salvador before a hearing, but they ignored him. Appeals Courts ruled that the invocation of the two-century-old Alien Enemies Act was inappropriate and required a hearing, but the Supreme Court bailed them out. The Justice Department has since admitted that he was deported in error but refused to make any effort to undo the error for a variety of reasons, including a claim that to do so would allow the Courts to run foreign policy. The Supreme Court has stepped in and since ruled twice that they should bring him back but the Administration is still refusing, fighting over technicalities in the rulings and delaying or ignoring lower court orders relating to the case.
Thing got even crazier on Monday, with Administration officials blatantly lying about the situation, claiming that the deportation was actually fine because Abrego Garcia once wore that infamous hoodie and, bizarrely, saying the Supreme Court ruled in their favor because they weren’t told to “effectuate” his return, only “facilitate” it.
All this culminated in the spectacle of Salvadoran President Bukele visiting the Oval Office on Monday, yukking it up with Trump about Abrego Garcia’s fate while Trump said he wants to massively expand the CECOT and deport American citizens to it. Attorney General Bondi, Bukele and Trump unleashed a blizzard of lies about the case, contradicting everything the federal government has been saying in Court.
There are other writers on this site who are more qualified than I to speak to the legal nuances. My read of legal Twitter/Bluesky is that the legal nuance is that the Administration are a bunch of lawless lying duplicitous bastards. They are breaking the law, violating the Constitution, flagrantly ignoring a court order, and giggling on Fox News about how clever they are.
But … I am not a lawyer, so I’ll demur from commenting on that.
My interests are a little bit different. Because while the legal shenanigans are interesting and important, I keep returning to this reality: the Trump Administration could get him back at any time just by asking. They have not hesitated to strong-arm Ukraine, Colombia, Canada, Mexico, Panama and, with the recent tariffs, the entire world, into doing their bidding. Even if they didn’t have a legal duty to bring Abrego Garcia back, they have a moral duty to do so. They mistakenly sent him into a central American gulag. This isn’t really in dispute, no matter what duplicities crawl out of Stephen Miller’s odorous liehole on Fox News. Maybe he’s a member of MS-13, but the evidence for that is thinner than Pam Bondi’s ethics. Any group of non-psychopaths, having found out they sent an innocent man to a death prison, would be falling over themselves to undo it.
So why? Why are the Trump people stubbornly sticking to this lie that there’s nothing they can do? I threw this question out on Blue Sky and we settled on a few possibilities:
- They are afraid that when he comes back, he will tell everyone how horrifying the conditions are in CECOT, which will turn the public against the idea. I find this idea interesting, but wanting. The Administration has shown zero interest in what the American public thinks about anything; they only care what their supporters think. And if Abrego Garcia comes back with horrifying tales, Trump’s base will love it. They’ll be boasting about how bad it is and putting cartoons on Twitter depicting crying brown people being dragged into CECOT. You can’t shame people who are incapable of it.
- Related to this is that they don’t want to establish a precedent for bringing people back. They firmly want a trip to CECOT to be a one-way ticket with no judicial review of any kind. This strikes me as a bit more likely.The Administration despises any kind of judicial review and is currently trying to advance the absurd notion that only the Supreme Court can stay their actions. And even when that Court rules against them 9-0, they can ignore it. If a precedent is set that someone can come back from there, it upends their entire plan of giving the President the unilateral power to disappear people at will.
- They are hoping that if they drag this out long enough, Abrego Garcia will die in prison, rendering the entire thing moot. Given the conditions in CECOT, that’s possible. Especially if Bukele has anything to say about it.
All of these are viable notions and may be the motivations behind some of the more repulsive minds in the Trump Administration. But in the end, I think it mostly comes down to sheer bloody-mindedness. They don’t want to bring him back because the “liberals” want them to. They don’t want to be seen as backing down or conceding error — remember the whole “never concede an election” thing? It’s oppositional defiance disorder with someone’s life in the balance.
The Courts have become increasingly assertive in telling Trump he has to bring Abrego Garcia back. And he’s ignoring them with delay, appeals and obfuscation, a side effect of having an Attorney General who sees herself as a toady of the President, not a servant of the country and certainly not bound by the Constitution. They know that the longer they can drag this out, the more likely they are to prevail from sheer exhaustion.
And once they’ve established they can do it to a legal resident, American citizens won’t be far behind. As Jacob levy noted today, we are in a crisis moment:
As much as I agree with him … well, I really don’t see what’s to be done. In the end, the Courts can’t enforce their rulings; they have always relied on the executive branch to respect the Rule of Law and the Trump people can’t or won’t. Congress could get involved but unless a meteor hits the Congressional bathrooms when a bunch of Republicans are in there, they’ll genuflect to Trump. We the people can protest against this but Trump does not care, thinks it’s all Soros astroturfing and will probably, eventually, start using CECOT as his favored destination for protesters.
The only thing we can do is ride it out, drag the proceedings out as long as possible and hope for an election to change things. Assuming we ever have another one.
But that’s another post.
You’d think our many many law and order supporters on OT would be up in arms about this. Sadly …Report
When the law is held in contempt, there will only be a scrambling for order.
This will end in divorce or war.Report
Why would this be any different?Report
So… you… agree?Report
I take this prediction of “divorce or war” exactly as seriously as I have taken your many previous predictions.Report
Oh, okay. Maybe it’ll work itself out. Muddling through and whatnot.Report
William Miller would like a word.Report
I’m pretty pissed about it. I’m also pissed about the years long shredding of credibility that’s made it impossible to stand up against this kind of thing without having a debate over why it is millions of people were encouraged to enter illegally (including this dude) under the faulty belief they’d be allowed to stay indefinitely, pending some political settlement that may or may not occur. These people, including Garcia have not been served well by any of this and while Trump owns his authoritarianism and the constitutional disaster this is shaping up to be, I still think anyone who has been arguing in favor unchecked illegal entry and/or sham asylum has their own ownership stake in this mess. I hope they’re happy with it.Report
I have to admit that, looking back over the last decade or so immigration seems to have been the real driver for trouble for everyone to the left of the wild restrictionists both here and in Europe. Virtually none of the other subjects the right inveigles about compares remotely in scale or size. Hindsight is painful on this one.Report
I take the positions I do on this subject not because I’m secretly some super restrictionist but because I think it’s the compromise that would serve to save everything else important.Report
That’s not unreasonable.Report
That assumes there was a compromise to be had. Hell’s bells, Republicans scuttled their own bill last summer to appease DJT and his ilk.Report
To be clear I’m really talking about taking the L and conceding the issue for the near future, with the only sticking point being humane treatment for those attempting to cross or who are caught internally as we send them back. There’s no compromise on the table right now and every time I look at polls the Democrats are rated almost as badly as Republicans are on abortion, so not the neighborhood we want to be in. Better to focus on other things and get back to immigration when the opportunity re-opens, as it will one day.Report
Yep. At some point (hopefully) someone’s going to have to say, “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”Report
Team Blue had a super majority at one point. There is no compromise with the xenophobes but everyone else wants to keep the issue alive to show they’re not xenophobes.Report
If you’re referring to the one that existed back in the early Obama years, it lasted all of 2 months, and there was a boatload of other stuff going on.Report
So it’s the fault of the Democrats that the Republicans are gearing up a campaign to systematically erase the Fifth, Eight, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights of people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, because the Democrats… spent well over a decade looking for compromises that would allow for normalization of status for guts like Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the people who decided to pay El Salvador to enslave him sabotaged every one to ensure that, someday, they would have the opportunity to to pay El Salvador (or some other fascist crony state) to enslave him.Report
You use the term “fault” but I’d say “they spent their political capital, which was limited, and by the time they needed some more, they hadn’t rebuilt enough”.
The good news: It looks like Trump is going to destroy the economy so the democrats won’t have to do much to look like the better option by comparison!Report
Garcia was granted withholding of removal. This meant that an Immigration Judge found that he had a well founded fear of persecution if returned to El Salvador and that Garcia had a right to stay in the United States but could be sent to any other country besides El Salvador if a third country was willing to take him in. He had legal status in the United States. Plus, I think future agreement to send back doesn’t include being sent to a notorious torture prison/forced labor camp in the country where the American government was not supposed to send him to at all.Report
I had been willing to assume extreme incompetence because of the shear chaos and incompetence that Trump has brought to the gov.
When Trump entered office he fired everyone he could, this included a large number of people whose jobs were to make stuff get done. There has been a massive loss of knowledge and a massive lowering of general competence of the gov. Every department in the gov is going to struggle to do basic things for years as those people are replaced and learn to do their jobs. One of the big things to suffer is due process because these people have zero experience with the process.
Here I think we’ve moved past extreme incompetence and into non-compliance so there’s that.
I view these public own-goals as a good thing because the voters need to throw these guys out.Report
The House should introduce some articles of impeachment.Report
After the next election maybe they will but this one certainly won’t. The general silence, downplaying and indifference of the “freedom and small government” right has been quite impressive, it really just was about lower taxes and will to power all along.Report
The dems just have to hold it together until then.Report
Fortunately, as you well know, the popularity that matters in this current time is Trumps’. If he’s disapproved of, and he is, more and more every day, then the voters will vote against him and his party. The Dems are not looking pretty on stand alone popularity but that’s because a very large portion of those “disapprovers” are disapproving because they want the Dems to push back on Trump more. If Trump stays at this level of popularity he’ll be wiped out in the midterms. If he keeps at his current trajectory of popularity change he’ll be landslided out in the midterms.Report
We’re a year and a half away and god only knows how bad the recession is going to be but the populist energy is still free floating around and the only people who seem to be able to attract it are Trump, Bernie, and AOC.
I’m not saying that Trump won’t be able to create a bigger mess that even Democrats won’t look worse than. Of course that is well within his capabilities.
So far, however, I’m mostly watching Newsom and Whitmer doing what they can to… be Newsom and Whitmer.Report
Okay but even if we grant your premise Trump won’t, himself, be on the ballot and has proven entirely unable to transfer his personal support into general election wins for other non-Trump candidates when he’s not on the ballot. So, nothing says any of that populist energy will redound to the GOP- especially if people are screaming “sh*t is fished up and sh*t and you fishers are in responsible.”
If you’re trying to hunt for who the Democratic candidate is going to be in 2028, well that strikes me as a fools game since Biden basically reset the whole deck with how things went down in 2024- I don’t know if any of the previously rans will have any shot at contending next time. But a lack of a single standard bearer doesn’t bode much for 2026.
Now if you’re saying “I don’t see any sign that a party/candidate that is admirable to me is going arise.” well you’re probably right and, I sadly say, I may be in the same boat- though my standards are less exacting than yours. But we’re both not populists*, to put it mildly.
*Though you have a fondness for edge theories that codes populist so there’s that!Report
I hear the sirens and understand why they’re so tempting.
I know that they lie and Uncle Milty explained the way the world works back on PBS in “Free to Choose” and all of this was explained by Adam Smith a billion years ago.
But that’s not the same thing as having my ears stuffed with beeswax.Report
And then act on them, and the Senate should convict.
Of course, I said that about impoundment of already-appropriated military aid to Ukraine in exchange for a sham shakedown of Hunter Biden, and I said that about instigating the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. I was far from alone. Each time, insufficient numbers of Republicans in the Senate found their consciences. I hold but faint hope that this time will be different.Report
“Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”Report
Ah yes. The Roman solution.Report
Be careful what you normalize, lest we start having more essays open with “You’d think our many many law and order supporters on OT would be up in arms about this.”
“What? I thought you guys were opposed to setting mansions on fire!”Report
When the law ceases to function, lawlessness will take its place. If it were to happen, it’d be a self-inflicted wound.Report
Say what you will about that insurance CEO, but his wound was not self-inflicted.
And, technically, people have already tried to assassinate Trump, though I understand that some explain that it was a set-up and the blood was something that Trump learned from his time in the WWF.Report
I think the reality is that hes just as much of the scummy, un-American, nasty as*hole people, including those who know him best, have been saying he is for years. He doesn’t care about anything and he’s a huge danger to the country. People saw he was a monkey and handed him a hand grenade anyway.Report
The Framers built a single safeguard against that, and as discussed above, havibg seen itcrejected twice already, there is little reason to believe it will be used now.Report
After he’s gone we’ll have to pass a new Amendment, I’m not sure what it will say.
The core problem is his base disagrees on whether or not he should stay. Maybe him trashing the gov will change things enough.
If his base turns against him then he’ll be out in a month.Report
Being “nasty and scummy” doesn’t make someone unfit for office.
He’s unfit because he refused to leave office after having lost and then attempted to overturn the election. He’s unfit because he’s mentally ill, I assume he really does believe that he “won” the previous election.
He is presumably giving orders that are self conflicting which is a massive problem in terms of not breaking the government.
Because of all that he’s had to surround himself with cranks because serious and talented people have refused to work for him.Report
You really believe – after J6 – that they will allow themselves to be thrown out? And you are willing to endure whatever comes in the meanwhile?Report
Elections have consequences. The alternative to “enduring what comes” is worse than the alternatives. The Electorate needs to experience this to learn it’s lesson.
Will we have elections in a year and a half, yes we will.Report
I doubt it. Why would the GOP risk loosing its hold on Congress?Report
On Bluesky I teased Mike about mincing words here.
With sobriety, we have to try impeachment at this point, whether or not it is futile to do so.
One of the arguments against it will take the form of a character assassination of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. And the response to that has to be full-throated. The ONLY evidence he’s somehow dangerous comes from a local cop’s CI in 2019. You can’t cross-examine a CI. The CI’s information is now six years out of date. And what e aptly are the chances the CI was either in error (he identified Abrego Garcia as a member of MS-13’s New York cell; Abrego Garcia has never lived in New York) or corrupted as a result of, say, pressure to offer testimony requested by the police?
I don’t practice in this area of law, but the CI affidavit is certainly hearsay; what I don’t know is if in a District Court it would fall into the exception of FRE 803(21). An immigration court is allowed to consider hearsay evidence, as I understand it.
And that’s IT. Oh, the hoodie. Only bad guys wear hoodies, we know that. (See photo at: https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/briefs/what-will-happen-to-j-d-vances-ohio-u-s-senate-seat/) but it seems to me a guy who is a “prominent” member of the New York cell of an international gang purportedly acting as a catspaw for a malign foreign actor would have… committed some crimes at some point. Probably in or near New York, where allegedly, his crew runs. Rather than showing up to work every day in his unionized job as a sheet metal worker in Balitmore and sometimes taking his wife and kids out for dinner, which ICE has photographs of.
The point is, we have due process of law for a reason. Before we toss someone into a foreign gulag (and should we even be doing that at all, for anyone?) maybe we ought to pause at take a good look at the evidence justifying that. You’d want that much if you were accused of something and at risk of a catastrophic punishment like this. Due process of law exists in no small part to do exactly that.
That’s worth fighting for, even if the CI turns out to be right. Our Founders certainly thought so — what happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia is startlingly like some of the grievances against King George III in the Declaration of Independence.
But yes, let’s please try impeachment first, before we move on to contemplating that comparison further. I don’t know what else is left to us that’s lawful and peaceful when the President of the United States blows off a unanimous order of the Supreme Court.Report
Here is the problem with the whole appeal to the “process of law”.
You will be arguing against people who believe that the starting point is that Garcia should never have been here in the first place. From there, the deportation is rectifying an error.
“But we should have a process of law!”
“The process failed by allowing him here in the first place.”
It presents pretty closely to an isolated demand for rigor. Those will be received poorly by partisans and by people on the fence.Report
That’s a lie Jay. He presented to immigration authorities, applied for and received a legal status while his asylum application was working its way through the system, was granted asylum and continued to abide by all the conditions that status granted him. The people you purport to see as opposition are lying. Lying liars who lie. They need to be called out for lying and probably publicly mocked for lying. As lying liars.
But you just want o play games with people lives so granting liars equal status makes sense to you. It’s ugly Jay but sadly unsurprising.Report
I do not believe that that form of argumentation will work because it assumes moral authority on your part that is not particularly legible.
They will fall back on “he shouldn’t have been here in the first place and the deportation was rectifying an error”.
“But he followed the rules!”
“The rules Biden twisted in order to allow millions of immigrants entry. He wouldn’t have been here under the old rules that we agreed on in the first place.”
“WHAT ABOUT LAW AND ORDER?!?!?”Report
As I understand it he was granted something other than asylum called ‘withholding of removal.’ This is not my area of law and someone with more expertise can correct me. However as I read the facts of his case there is probably not a single person in El Salvador, other than maybe Bukele himself, who would not potentially qualify for this kind of relief.Report
Which is a great shame upon the nation of El Salvador.Report
If the time line is correct he was granted his legal status well before Biden came into office. Which means it’s a further lie to say it’s Biden’s fault.Report
Phil: If the time line is correct he was granted his legal status well before Biden came into office.
The “timeline” is 2011 Obama was President and Biden was VP.
It’s unclear how much influence Biden had in that administration but probably more than normal. More importantly we tend to lump the VP in there with the President when it’s politically convenient.Report
It’s not what he’s saying. It’s what people who’d advocate for his deportation would say.
As for mocking them for the positions they hold, don’t you think people who’d join the cult of personality surrounding a known grifter are pretty much impervious to mockery? DJT is the living embodiment of all the bitterness they feel and he’s their instrument for inflicting that on the rest of us.Report
And I will still happily call them liars. Because they are. And deserve to be mocked and derided as such.Report
You will be arguing against people who believe that the starting point is that Garcia should never have been here in the first place. From there, the deportation is rectifying an error.
This applies to literally any due process claim in any circumstance. It’s an immediate jump–no intervening slippery slope, you’re just there–to “criminals don’t deserve due process”, because the actual proof of the underlying premise, i.e., that this deportation is rectifying a legal error–is a critical part of that process, and one the Administration is ignoring
Unless, of course, the law itself has nothing to do with the error. In which case my assessment of those partisans and (LOL) fence-sitters is going to be even less sympatheticReport
Oh no! Not a slippery slope! We all know that those are fallacious!
Anyway, one of the problems with the appeal to Law and Order is the whole perceived “but we’re not orderly” problem.
When individuals are harmed by undocumented visitors? Well, that’s part of the tradeoffs involved with having a country that’s moral, isn’t it? That’s part of the tradeoffs involved with having law and order. Enjoy the food. It’s better than what your grandparents had to eat.
When an election is won/lost on the perceived lack of order and undocumented visitors start getting deported and we find stuff like “this guy was here for more than a decade?”, the appeals to the importance of law and order will ring hollow.
“The order was not there when (bad thing happened). Now you appeal to it?”
Your words will be heard as empty. Your moral authority is illegible.
Your assessment of partisans will be interesting to people who agree that you have moral authority. Not so much to others.Report
Anyway, one of the problems with the appeal to Law and Order is the whole perceived “but we’re not orderly” problem.
Yup. For instance, somebody might argue the State of Texas should officially endorse neo-Naz!s murdering law-abiding BLM protesters in the street because a DA decided not to prosecute shoplifters
There were always be a lack of “Law and Order” somewhere to justify Republican fascism, and if there isn’t, Republicans will simply invent some (“They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.”)Report
I don’t disagree with you in principle Burt but I think the solution is a little different. You’re also ignoring what will be the most important factors for those who support what Trump is doing. Those are (i) Garcia entered the country illegally and (ii) his permission to stay was based on a highly tenuous judicial interpretation of immigration law that has virtually no popular support and no basis in the higher law that is the constitution itself.
The way to correct this to avoid recurrence is for Congress to pass a law tightening things up so that people like Garcia are never allowed to stay in the US to begin with, and that the kinds of nebulous fears of criminal activity in their nation of origin are no longer sufficient grounds to be granted legal status.
Garcia is probably f-ed but the reason it happened is the abdication of duty by Congress. That void is what has put the executive and the judiciary on a collision course. Obviously it would be much better to have an executive with the sense and wisdom to understand the folly of that path but here we are.Report
And equally obviously a judiciary that wasn’t willing to give a sitting president a blank check.Report
You’re also ignoring what will be the most important factors for those who support what Trump is doing.
It is a good thing to ignore the opinions of the stupid and wickedReport
From wikipedia: Preference FalsificationReport
I don’t think that’s entirely right. The most important part of how we got here remains Congressional Republicans refusal to take deals multiple times they’ve been on the table because they preferred the issue to a solution. It’s a major factor in why the old guard lost their party to MAGA. Democrats don’t own that and an inconsistent willingness to defend rule of law on principle is better than unwillingness to ever do it at all. However the politics of this issue are what they are and the best way to fight back against the madness is to accept that and start pivoting accordingly. The courts are not able to save us from every bad result of an election and it was foolishness to think they could.Report
Oh, the Establishment Republicans were feckless af.
One thing I still haven’t seen is why “what have you conserved?” isn’t a devastating takedown of the Establishment.
And the Establishment Republicans were… well, MAGAed.
“The courts are not able to save us from every bad result of an election and it was foolishness to think they could.”
We’re not in a place where everybody agrees that every bad result is a bad result.
What’s an acceptable error rate? We gonna go with “every single error is a never event?”
Because that’s going to go somewhere bad, too.Report
One out of two major parties is not going to be able to consistently persevere liberal democracy if the other one is ideologically committed to fascism, and willing to use every procedural mechanism available to bring it about, because purely electoral mechanisms have long been understood by, like, literally everyone to be insufficient on their own to prevent tyranny
The Democatic Party is, of course, unequal to this challenge because it is an institution that was built for well over a century to operate in an environment where black bagging people on the street for Constitutionally protected speech was regarded as a massive defection against lawful governance, and the Democrats winning a Presidential election wasn’tReport
I don’t see it that way and I think what’s happened to the Republican party cuts to the opposite conclusion in terms of how to behave. All Biden had to do to defuse this issue was leave Trump’s immigration EOs in place and use his bully pulpit to tell would be illegal entrants not to take their chances, and that the expectations of the Mexican government was a continued show of force, including remain in Mexico. You can probably do that and maybe still even get away with occasionally championing the cause of certain easy cases like the Obama admin did. Point being when youre facing an internal threat of the nature Trump poses the last thing you do is throw open the gates to a massive influx of irregular immigration.Report
All Biden had to do to defuse this issue was leave Trump’s immigration EOs in place and use his bully pulpit to tell would be illegal entrants not to take their chances, and that the expectations of the Mexican government was a continued show of force, including remain in Mexico.
All Biden had to do was make zero mistakes and he probably would have been elected except maybe not because of COVID backlash
And because he didn’t make zero mistakes, it’s his fault Trump was reelected, and certainly not the Republican Party that nominated him (twice!), the Republicans in Congress who voted to acquit him for committing high crimes and misdemeanors (twice!) or the Supreme Court who ruled that his crimes don’t actually count as crimes (only once, small mercies)Report
I hear you man but you still have to play the game well or at least well enough. And look at these people we’re up against. They aren’t geniuses and they aren’t even particularly great at blocking and tackling yet we’ve lost to them 2 out of 3 times.Report
And look at these people we’re up against.
I am. And every time I do, the response from tons of people, including many commenters here–for 3 out of 3 times–has been to deflect attention from them and onto the supposedly sympathetic views of an imagined member of the public who votes for them, when such a supposedly sympathetic view could only be held by someone who (willfully or through more innocent forms of inattentiveness) could only be held in ignoranceReport
I can’t speak for Jaybird or any other commenters but my goal is to defeat them. In sports losing to good teams is something that just happens but consistently getting beat, even narrowly, by the scrubs of the scrubs is a failure of leadership and organizational culture. IMO that is what we need to deal with and the only sure way to take out the trash.Report
I think the sports metaphor is a very bad one
To the extent that it holds, it would, I think, matter that the scrubs of the scrubs consistently cheat (by any measure) and that the institutions that should be acting as mediators and referees have consistently failed to hold up their end of the bargain, and instead deflect blame on the team that loses 1 time in 3 to the scrubs, on account of the most egregious cheating from the scrubs didn’t affect the outcome of the game in questionReport
“All Biden had to do to defuse this issue was leave Trump’s immigration EOs in place and use his bully pulpit to tell would be illegal entrants not to take their chances, and that the expectations of the Mexican government was a continued show of force, including remain in Mexico. ”
This is literally what happened, my dude. It resulted in a falling off of support for Biden (and Harris) among the Democratic base and convinced not one person that the Democrats were getting better on immigration.Report
It’s really unfortunate that quite so many Democratic leaders complained about the undocumented visitors who got bussed into their communities.
Remember the Martha’s Vineyard story?
(From what I understand, a couple of them moved back and now do domestic help for the people there.)Report
Yes, we all remember the made-up story that Republicans tried to make happen but the Democrats did not actually do, and yet how you still seem to believe it actually happened.Report
Martha’s Vineyard Trutherism.
I am in ecstasy.Report
Not when something within a stone’s throw of those views make up a majority of voters in a democracy. Those who have been broadcasting out into the world that anyone who makes it in has a good chance of staying indefinitely under some previously obscure loophole do not have clean hands.
It all starts with grasping that a combination of executive action, the judiciary, and the immigration bar, have succeeded in turning a bunch of laws written with the horrors of the middle 20th century in mind into a pretext for a de facto immigration policy so toxic to the public even the politicians who implicitly support it don’t dare say so. Trump probably isn’t possible without it.Report
Not when something within a stone’s throw of those views make up a majority of voters in a democracy. Those who have been broadcasting out into the world that anyone who makes it in has a good chance of staying indefinitely under some previously obscure loophole do not have clean hands.
Yeah, I mean they just… what, should have ignored the huge public opinion surge against immigration enforcement during the last Trump Administration, which was still less cruel, less brutal, and 100% less lawless than what we’re seeing now?
Or is backlash against unpopular policies only a a mitigating factor when it’s lawless Republican backlash against lawful but annoying Democratic overreach?Report
I think that’s a misread of the political dynamic. Cruelty and being vindictive will not play well, especially when it is so trivially easy to trot out the most sympathetic cases on the wrong side of it (and Garcia isn’t even one of those). The error is taking that as evidence that the American people are actually in favor of allowing any person from a country with law and order problems, which is basically all of them south of the Rio Grande, a pass to get in and stay indefinitely. The result is a whiplash of low enforcement to increasingly authoritarian enforcement from administration to administration. Which goes back to my original point that signaling to people that they should take their chances during a low enforcement stretch is not doing them any favors.Report
Cruelty and being vindictive will not play well, especially when it is so trivially easy to trot out the most sympathetic cases on the wrong side of it (and Garcia isn’t even one of those).
So aren’t the Republicans who engaged in that vindictiveness and cruelty during Trump 1.0, and thus created a public opinion backlash that Dems (incorrectly) interpreted as a mandate for lax immigration enforcement partly responsible for the backlash and the Democratic misread of same?
Because early signals are strong that Trump 2.0’s deportation policies are courting a similar backlashReport
Because early signals are strong that Trump 2.0’s deportation policies are courting a similar backlash
That’s not my read on it.
There are a thousand things to be upset about regarding Trump. There are as many who are upset that Trump isn’t fulfilling his promises on deportation who are upset that there is an error rate to what ICE is doing.
The backlash will be about the economy.Report
this isn’t an “error rate”
sending him there and then asking him back might be (extremely charitably) described as an error, but they have not even asked for him back after admitting they sent him to a gulag by mistake?
why are you not only defending the trump administration for sending people to gulags, but actually repeating its lies?Report
“why are you not only defending the trump administration for sending people to gulags, but actually repeating its lies?”
I’m not.
I have no problem presenting other perspectives and looking at things from those perspectives, though.
It’s one of the things I do in order to test (however dinkily) whether I see an argument as likely to work or likely to fail.
I see the whole appealing to morality thing as likely to fail, by the way.
Your moral authority isn’t particularly legible.Report
you literally are
because that’s what you do when you present things from the (alleged) perspective of lying fascist scumReport
Yeah, still not used to that version of “literally”.
Eh, the “lying fascist scum” see your position as dishonest and deliberately so.
“What about law and order?”
“Why the hell are you appealing to law and order the second you’re not the one holding the whip?”
“You’re a fascist!”Report
Why should I care about their point of view?
Why are you deferring to their belief that I’m lying, and dismissing my belief that they’re lying?Report
Why should I care about their point of view?
Elections, preference falsification, that sort of thing.
Why are you deferring to their belief that I’m lying, and dismissing my belief that they’re lying?
I’m not deferring to it as much as taking it into account when I see your appeals that rely on your own moral authority.Report
I think Trump is setting the stage for a backlash on a number issues. My guess is that deportation of illegal immigrants will not in itself be part of it but highly publicized cruelty and defying the courts might well be.* In the mean time there are human beings caught in the middle of it and it has been bad for them and bad for the rule of law to use them in a kind of game of chicken, or as pawns in our own longstanding failure to fix the immigration system.
*If he succeeds in crashing the economy as he seems hell bent on doing all of the immigration stuff will be but a footnote in the comeuppance.Report
When an American Citizen gets murdered by an undocumented visitor, we agree that that’s *BAD*, but law enforcement can get involved and we can punish the person who, through no fault of their own, were involved in the kinetic event that resulted in the loss of life of a person.
When an asylee gets deported, that’s a Never Event.
You wanna see how long that equilibrium will hold?
In the real world, writing this comment would have taken longer than that equilibrium would have held.Report
When an American Citizen gets murdered by an undocumented visitor, we agree that that’s *BAD*, but law enforcement can get involved and we can punish the person who, through no fault of their own, were involved in the kinetic event that resulted in the loss of life of a person.
lol they don’t care about american citizens being murdered
who do you think you’re fooling with thisReport
I agree that they don’t care about American citizens being murdered. It’s just, you know, the cost of doing business.
That’s part of why Trump got elected.Report
Yes, Trump got elected because they believed, with some justification, that he was onboard with murdering the American citizens they want to see murdered, or at least with sending them to gulags, too, like he’s promised he’ll doReport
Oh, you’re using a different “they”.
If the fundamental issue is that there are multiple “they”s that don’t care when undocumented visitors are involved in kinetic events that result in the unintended loss of life of someone who won the moral luck lottery and was born in the right square of dirt, I could easily see a populist revolt that results in someone who pretends to care about that sort of thing.
I don’t even have to go particularly far out on a limb to see that one.Report
What is the actual point of having a venue of discussion where people sit around pretending to have reprehensible views in order to ensure that we are scrupulously fair to people who have reprehensible views while also being consistently and contemptuously dismissive of people who don’t have reprehensible views?Report
To give a stress-test to ideas and see whether they hold up under scrutiny and get an idea of whether they’ll hold up when they encounter “the real world”.
It’s not perfect, of course. But it’s good enough for a broad/flawed outline of the future. (You have to constantly re-evaluate, as well.)Report
But you never, ever, ever display any interest in stress-testing their ideas
It’s one “stress test” for the libs after another, even when the idea in question is something like, “It is bad for fascists to gun down BLM protesters in the street,” and there is, of course, always an excuse, whether it’s real, a half-truth built on some clips of people with blue hair that Chaya Raichik found on TikTok, or invented out of whole cloth by people who had a meltdown after hearing people speaking another language at the DMVReport
Oh, I do *THAT* at work with my co-workers who do stuff like “vote for Trump”.
Do we have any Trump voters here whose ideas you’d like me to push back harder on?Report
Koz Freamon would have been a nice startReport
Has he shown up recently? I admit, I kinda wrote Koz off back during Obama’s first term when he was arguing that Republicans were the only hope for fiscal sanity and wouldn’t address stuff like the TARP and the disastrous Bush administration.
But if he shows up and argues something like “you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs”, I’ll be sure to ask “what about law and order?”Report
For some reason the link I included to a piece he wrote in November endorsing Trump didn’t come through
I am not sure any of the comments you left on the piece constituted as “pushback” at all, though viewing it charitably, saying that the Democrats would refuse to learn anything from losing to Trump is perhaps pushback against Koz’ closing suggestion that a vote for Trump would be a vote for a restored public trust and a shared sense of American purpose
OTOH you spend a lot of time pressure-testing Chip et al. for pushing backReport
OH THIS ONE!
Yeah, you’re right. I didn’t say “Trump is not even lying, he’s going to disappoint you, he’s not going to give you what you want” and I should have.
But, for what it’s worth, I still see Koz as the “the Republicans are the only hope for fiscal sanity” guy.Report
Ok, then by all means have at it then.
Fwiw, I think that post has aged very well. In fact, I may start quoting myself from it to say I told you so to various people.Report
How you feeling about the whole “Republicans are the party of fiscal sanity” thing given the tariffs?Report
Hmmm, there’s a few things to be said there.
First of all, in general prior to the Trump era, I was generally opposed to tariffs. During the Trump era, I have become more and more sympathetic to them.
But, I especially don’t like the various Trump tariff plans that have been haphazardly implemented and then suspended over the last 2-3 months.
I do think there is a world where we could implement (and enforce) tariffs in a way that would benefit the United States national interest, especially as a useful foreign policy tool that significant enough to force other nations to adapt in ways that we like but is still short of military conflict. The Trump tariffs are not that.
However, one good thing about President Trump is that he really does practice the adage of not throwing good money in after bad. Specifically he doesn’t fixate on his own bluster, unlike many in American politics today. Eg, his most rabid supporters who feel the need to defend whatever Trump says or does, or his adversaries who similarly oppose it.
Trump himself is willing to backtrack or make concessions when the situation requires, which is a very good thing imo. And is definitely much better than his predecessor, the hapless ex-President Biden, who not only opened the floodgates of illegal mass migration, he _kept them open_ for 3+ years
Specifically, in terms of fiscal policy, I think Trump is actually making very important progress there in a bankshot kind of way.
Specifically, the American voters have no interest at all in any kind of cost-saving reform of Medicare and/or Social Security.
It is likely over the coming years that this will change as the fiscal consequences of not reforming them become worse and worse, to the point of threatening the viability of economy as a whole.
And a necessary condition for that imo, is that the voters are going to have to see that things like USAIDs and mass migrations are over. This has to be done in order for grassroots-level Americans to believe there is a real actual internal social interest worth enough to make sacrifices for.
And related to that, nobody is going to believe that the American fiscal situation is truly dire while such things continue to be funded.
So even if we aren’t in the middle of partisan fiscal conflict as we were in 2011 or whatever, in present terms the Trump Administration is obviously not doing anything to help the situation. But I do think the Trump Administration is doing good things that we can realistically hope to benefit us down the road a few years.Report
So your opinion on the tariffs is immigration?Report
I’m still here, barely. In fact, I just submitted a guest post which hopefully we’ll see in a day or so.Report
Good news: David Hogg is on the case. A Top Democratic Official Plots to Take Down Party Incumbents.
“Less than three months after the young political activist David Hogg was elected as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, he is undertaking a new project that is sure to rankle some fellow Democrats: spending millions of dollars to oust Democratic members of Congress in primary elections next year.”
You want to take down Trump? You can’t do it with the people who are in there now.Report
Let the Blue on Blue battle begin.
Hogg is mostly known for being anti-gun so I’m guessing he’ll target pro-gun Democrats, also known as “Democrats who can win in Red areas”.Report
Eh, I see what he’s going for. If you’ve got a Principal-Agent Problem, one of the solutions is to hire much more reliable agents.
It’s how we got Trump, after all.Report
Point of order: They’ve already done this. There are American citizens that they have renditioned to CECOT already. (BTW: The word is REDENTIONED, not deported. Deportation ends with someone being free, just in another country.)
What’s that, you say? You haven’t heard about that?
If they are renditioned without trial, and without their names being made public, then how the hell would you know?
If your first response is ‘The Trump administration would not do that?’, first, where have you been, and second, without a trial, nothing is stopping them from doing that ‘by accident’.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/story/2018-04-27/ice-held-an-american-man-in-custody-for-1273-days
The errors reveal flaws in the way ICE identifies people for deportation, including its reliance on databases that are incomplete and plagued by mistakes. The wrongful arrests also highlight a presumption that pervades U.S. immigration agencies and courts that those born outside the United States are not here legally unless electronic records show otherwise. And when mistakes are not quickly remedied, citizens are forced into an immigration court system where they must fight to prove they should not be removed from the country, often without the help of an attorney.
Hey, you know what we don’t have anymore for those people? Those pesky trials.
It is almost certain that at least one person that the Trump administration has renditioned to the torture prison in El Salvador is a US citizen. By ‘accident’ in the sense they probably didn’t intent to do it deliberately, but by blatant reckless negligence, you know, the way ICE has always operated.
Hey, this is a fun article to read, and note he’s only in court because he was first detained in 2023 and in the courts already, otherwise he probably would have been shipped out already: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/man-detained-ice-claims-citizenship-rcna198012
Notice the extremely stupid thing being decided here, specifically US law allows minors who are immigrants and their parents become citizens to become citizens, but only if _both_ parents do it, unless the minors are ‘out of wedlock’, which is just a staggeringly stupid way of understanding things. And the US government already decided he was a citizen, until it decided, years later, he wasn’t.
The funniest part of this is the ‘UN Conventions on Torture stop of from deporting someone who will probably end up in a Salvadorian prison’ that a judge decided is just blithely stated in the article that was written March 27th, 2025, and the article just continues, ignoring the, uh, extremely obvious conclusion about some other news story that fact creates. Really feel like that should make the news more often.Report
A lot of people here are focused on the fact this is happening without a trial, which is bad, and not on the fact the US cannot legally send people to a prison in El Salvador _even with a trial_. And I don’t mean because of some obscure jurisdiction issues or something. I mean, straight up, if a man killed someone in El Salvador, fled to the US, we caught him, and we agreed with every part of that, we could not legally hand him back. Or, rather, if we tried, we’d fail in the extradition court.
Because we signed the UN Convention Against Torture: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-against-torture-and-other-cruel-inhuman-or-degrading
Article 3
1. No State Party shall expel, return (“refouler”) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.
2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.
That is a treaty signed by the President and both Houses of Congress, which makes it US law. I know that’s not really phrased how US law is, but it really is US law. (Treaties are kinda like the constitution. Parts of them tell the government to enact legislation, like the constitution says ‘Make a court system’ and this treaty says ‘You must outlaw torture under your jurisdiction’, which requires a bunch of laws, and other parts, like this, are more akin to the 1st amendment, which merely forbids the government from doing something and hence needs no enabling legislation to function.)
Who do you think the competent authorities would be here? Who do we think should issue determinations about other countries? I would like to propose…the United States State Department! The State Department in 2023 (The most recent report) said this about El Salvador: https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/528267_EL-SALVADOR-2023-HUMAN-RIGHTS-REPORT.pdf
c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and Other Related Abuses
The law prohibited such practices, but there were credible reports that government officials employed them.
Human rights organizations and media outlets reported complaints of abuse United States Department of State • Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and mistreatment of detainees by prison guards. On July 14, a coalition of human rights organizations at an Interamerican Human Rights Commission public audience stated they collectively interviewed more than 100 released detainees, many of whom reported systemic abuse in the prison system, including beatings by guards and the use of electric shocks. The coalition alleged the treatment of prisoners constituted torture.
I could quote some more of the document that lays out specific instances, but it’s rather horrible. I don’t think I need to document anything else here, I think at this point I just rest my case, the US government itself made it for me. They themselves believe there is a high risk of torture and abuse in Salvadorian prisons.
There’s an open question if we can deport someone to El Salvador if we _don’t_ think they’ll end up in prison, that maybe is okay, but we certainly can’t rendition people directly to those prisons!Report
Ah I knew I wouldn’t have to dive too far into the comments to find very concerned people who are in no way Trump supporters blaming the people who are truly at fault for the Trump Administration illegally trafficking a person who has not even been so much as charged with a crime to an El Salvadoran gulag: the Democrats who oppose illegally trafficking people who have not even been so much as charged with a crime to El Salvadoran gulags
I don’t really know why I would have expected better of the place that gave us, “It’s not anti-semitic to say that Adolf Hitler was right about Jews spreading dialectical hatred against the West, as long as you also say that Jews are stupid.”Report
Yeah, it kinda is interesting that a lot of people have focused on a really specific ‘This is being done without a trial’ and ‘Trump is threatening to expand this to citizens’ (Failing to notice that without a trial where you can prove you’re a citizen, there’s no distinction between citizen and non-citizen.), without noticing the other stuff this violates.
It is a violation of the US Convention against Torture, as the US government itself has decided, and I just pointed out. But those laws are state-level things and it would be, hypothetically, possible to argue people cannot be charged under US law with them. (Just taken to the Hague, but we’d never allow that.)
And it is also involuntary servitude. A thing which we do have laws about. That prison has forced labor. Which is involuntary servitude. (The difference between slavery and involuntary servitude is slavery also regards the person as property, whereas involuntary servitude is not and they can hypothetically retain some rights.) And I quote our constitution about involuntary servitude:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
You may notice a key phrase in that sentence, ‘duly convicted’. We are very used to prison labor, sorta ignore how horrific it is and how it is, literally, involuntary servitude, and we had to write an exception inside the anti-slavery law to allow it. But…that exception is pretty specific. You have to be duly convicted of a crime.
Now, is this involuntary servitude happening under ‘US jurisdiction’, which I will point out the amendment makes _very clear_ is not merely ‘within the US borders’ because it lists both of those things? Yes, they are. Because we have a law saying so: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1596 (That is the slavery/involuntary servitude/human trafficking part of the code.)
18 U.S. Code § 1596 – Additional jurisdiction in certain trafficking offenses
(a) In General.—In addition to any domestic or extra-territorial jurisdiction otherwise provided by law, the courts of the United States have extra-territorial jurisdiction over any offense (or any attempt or conspiracy to commit an offense) under section 1581, 1583, 1584, 1589, 1590, or 1591 if—
(1) an alleged offender is a national of the United States or an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence (as those terms are defined in section 101 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101)); or
If you traffic people, and are a US citizen or US national, the US explicitly asserts jurisdiction over the offense and can charge you with a crime even if you do it completely outside the US.
And _that_ makes the 13th amendment apply to all this:
18 U.S. Code § 1590 – Trafficking with respect to peonage, slavery, involuntary servitude, or forced labor
(a) Whoever knowingly recruits, harbors, transports, provides, or obtains by any means, any person for labor or services in violation of this chapter shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both. If death results from the violation of this section, or if the violation includes kidnapping or an attempt to kidnap, aggravated sexual abuse, or the attempt to commit aggravated sexual abuse, or an attempt to kill, the defendant shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or life, or both.
Before anyone tries to get into details if the 13th applies, trying to argue that jurisdiction over a crime is not the same as jurisdiction over where the crime is happening…note that isn’t actually important. The law still exists, regardless. It is just as criminal even if the 13th amendment doesn’t apply and this behavior could _hypothetically_ be legal.
People in ICE, all of who are presumably US citizens, transported people to a location (Called a prison, but prisons are used for law enforcement purposes. This is more properly called a ‘camp’.) where they are going to be forced to work, for free. Without being duly convicted of a crime. That is transporting someone into illegal and unconstitutional involuntary servitude.
Everyone who participated in this should be arrested and charged criminally with hundreds of crime, one for each person.Report