We're in it now

You’re probably familiar with the case of Kilmar Abrego García. If you aren’t, you need to be: He’s the Maryland man the Trump administration admits it mistakenly deported to a torture prison in El Salvador in March. It isn’t just that Abrego García has no criminal record. Since 2019 he has been legally protected from deportation under orders from a Trump-appointed immigration judge.¹ Last week, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld an order from a federal district judge compelling the administration to “facilitate” Abrego García’s return to the United States. The administration refused to comply, claiming in part that his fate was in the hands of another sovereign country.

Yesterday, the U.S. client dictator of that country, Nayib Bukele, visited the White House to pay tribute to the Don. Dressed in a T-shirt and sport coat, in front of an Oval Office mantle that increasingly resembles a set piece from Warhammer 40K, Buekele openly laughed at the idea that Abrego García would ever come back to the United States. Trump smirked along. Trump then lied about the Supreme Court decision — claiming, falsely, that the order merely compelled his aides to “provide a plane” if Bukele chose to release him. On the way into the meeting, Trump revealed his true threat: “Homegrown criminals next.” Meaning, he intends to start sending U.S. citizens to — including, by implication, those who are as innocent of any charges as Abrego Garcia.

“I said, ‘Homegrowns are next.’ Homegrowns,” Trump repeated to his aides, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, Marco Rubio, and JD Vance. He then turned back to Bukele. “You’ve got to build about five more places.”

“We’ve got space,” Bukele said, laughing.

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate where we are. The president of the United States — himself a convicted felon, credibly indicted of many more crimes, including more concerted attempts to subvert elections — has been informed by the Supreme Court, including three justices he appointed and two older justices who are somehow even more loyal to him, that he must return a protected immigrant from a foreign gulag to which he was “improperly sent.” Moreover, Trump’s own administration knows and has publicly admitted that the man in question should not be there.

And yet instead of complying with those orders, Trump’s attorney general placed the Justice Department lawyer who admitted the error on administrative leave. And now, as other legal immigrants are rounded up on street corners and homes and marked for deportation without the government so much as pretending to allege a crime, that same president is now threatening to do the same to citizens of the United States.

In fact, we know at least one U.S. citizen in the president’s sights: On April 9, Trump issued an official memorandum denouncing Christopher Krebs, the former head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, for having “baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen” and “suppressed conservative viewpoints” about COVID-19.³ This is totalitarian shit; pure Stalinism, in fact, shades of the show trials against the so-called Trotsky-Zinoviev Center. A accusation out of Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland: accusing a former bureaucrat of “baselessly denying” something that was in fact itself shown over and over again in court and repeated investigations to be completely made up. Ordering his minions to further “suspend any active security clearances held by individuals at entities associated with Krebs.” Accusing him of violating “the First Amendment and erod[ing] trust in Government, thus undermining the strength of our democracy itself” — even as the same said president arrests and tries to deport people for writing op-eds in college newspapers.²

Say Krebs finds himself on a deportation list in the near future. Say he’s snatched off a street corner in Kalorama⁴ and finds himself in the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo before anyone in the legal system even finds out about it. What recourse will he have? The Supreme Court could weigh in, but Trump will just ignore them. And in fact the same said Supreme Court already found that he’d presumably be immune from having committed any crime, given that the initial memorandum of denunciation was written as part of his official duties.

In other words, we are now in it. Ten years after first appearing on the national stage spouting fascist slogans, four years after trying to stage a coup d’état to remain in power, less than a year after pledging to use the presidency if he regained it to punish his political enemies and carry out massive human rights violations, we are now in a true constitutional crisis. And the constitution appears to be no match. In short order, if the Supreme Court, Congress or the people cannot effectively respond, we may have to conclude that for all intents and purposes the constitution is void, and that we will be in throes of unchecked authoritarianism the likes of which this country—for all the authoritarianism of its past—has never seen.

That not to say that all is lost. Maybe those in power and regular citizens alike can find ways to fight back and halt the machinery of repression and autocracy before it gets completely out of our control. But lord, it is getting late.

If you missed it I did a piece on the machinery of Trump’s deportation plan, including the use of Bukele’s CECOT, in Foreign Policy last month. You can read It here (gift link).

1  The Trump-appointed immigration judge, David M. Jones, explained in his ruling (see p. 46 of that doc) that the threat to Abrego García was from a gang who kept shaking down his family’s pupusa business, and threatened to kill Kilmar and his brother if they didn’t join their gang. (Pupusas are a flatbread dish, sort of like a big soft taco, and delicious.) Contrary to claims made over and over by JD Vance and others, Abrego García was never convicted of being a member of MS-13 or any other gang. In 2019, after being arrested for loitering at a Home Depot (his wife said he was there looking for work as a day laborer), another of the men arrested accused him of being a member of a gang. He was not convicted. Abrego García’s lawyers said the gang accusation was fabricated and no conclusive evidence has been presented of such an affiliation since. He is currently married to and the father of U.S. citizens.

2  Could have written a whole other post today about how a president who claims to be repeatedly violating the constitution to protect Jews responded to an arson attack on the room a Jewish governor (Josh Shapiro) and his family had just hosted a Passover seder in by focusing on whether the attacker was in fact a “fan of Trump” and dismissing him as “just some whackjob.”

3  Congrats again to Matt Taibbi & Co. for doing so much to push that bullshit narrative.

4  I don’t know if he even lives in DC, something about this scenario just makes me think of this.