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The crux of the Abrego Garcia controversy is a dispute about who "morally" counts as an American citizen.
The rallying cry of the pro-Abrego Garcia camp is: "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us." In other words, they see no meaningful difference between him and a legal US citizen, and so there is no Schelling Fence that can be drawn between the two. On other hand, the pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories.
The slippery slope argument (e.g. Laurence Tribe yesterday, and Justice Sotomayor's concurrence) is that if the government gets its way with Abrego Garcia, there will be no legal obstacle preventing them from treating citizens in the same way.
But the thing is, this is already the case. The US government's treatment of citizens abroad is already effectively unconstrained by the law. The government can negotiate for the release of a citizen imprisoned by another country, but nobody would argue that the government is legally obligated to do this, and it's absurd to imagine a court compelling them to do so, because that effectively makes diplomacy impossible. (The US government must be able to value the citizen's return at less than infinity, or else they lose all negotiating leverage.) On the other hand, the government can drone-strike a citizen abroad without due process, and while that may stir up political pushback here at home, there are effectively no legal repercussions.
This is because, according to the constitutional separation of powers, foreign affairs are a quintessentially "non-justiciable political question". In common parlance this means: If you don't like what the government is doing, the proper way to fix it is through advocacy and the democratic process, not through the court system.
To which the pro-Abrego Garcia camp will gesture around at the crowd of protesters they've assembled, waving "Free Abrego Garcia!" signs, and say "Great, come join us. Here's your sign!"
But of course the pro-Trump immigration hawks see no need to take it up, because even if these protests have no effect, this does not in any way diminish their confidence that if a citizen were to be treated in the same way, then the backlash would be swift, universal, and sufficient to compel the citizen's return - no court order needed. For them, it is simply obvious that the failure of the Abrego Garcia advocacy has no implications whatsoever for the success of the hypothetical advocacy on behalf of a fellow citizen, and this is no cause for cognitive dissonance because citizens and illegal-immigrant non-citizens are two entirely separate categories.
Prior to anything else in the political life of a nation, there must be near-universal agreement on who constitutes the body politic for whose benefit the government exists and to whom they are accountable. If there is factional dispute over this basic question, then morally speaking there is no nation, but multiple distinct nations that happen to find themselves all mixed up in the same land. But I'm sure this is no great surprise.
I don't understand your use of the word "morally" here. The question isn't who counts as an American citizen in some legal or moral sense, so much as what physically can happen to a citizen or non citizen. Facts are disputed, and even the worst cops get things right most of the time, but it is unclear to me where in the process the circuit breaker exists for me to avoid being deported to El Salvador. This is of course, incredibly unlikely: I'm a blond American and I've never lived anywhere north of the Narragansett or south of the Mason-Dixon. But assuming I was picked up, it's not clear at what point any of that becomes relevant. I don't get a hearing before deportation. Speaking English, or being white, are no guarantee of anything. Once I get to El Salvador, do they give me a hearing?
If there is no functional way for me to assert my citizenship, then my citizenship is of no value, and in order to protect my rights as a citizen I must protect the rights of anyone else from whom it is impossible to distinguish myself. I don't want to live in a country where I must carry an ID card at all times at risk of being sent to a foreign torture prison.
The moral core of the question in my mind is whether El Salvador is acting primarily as the USA's paid jailor, or are they acting as a sovereign choosing to imprison their own citizen. I'm not sure there is a clear answer there.
A little analogy...
I go over to BJJ tonight, an assistant coach is teaching class. During open mat after, one of the three guys at the gym named Tom rolls with me. Tom is a bit of a dirty fighter, and when we're rolling and he's trying to get out of a single leg, he hits me with the old oil check. I shout what the fuck, we yell at each other, I leave. The next day I come back for the morning class, and the gym owner asks me how the Tuesday night class was, I tell him the class was good but Tom fucking oil checked me and that's not why I come here, if it keeps happening I might have to quit. The owner says no, that's fucked, Tom is fucking banned.
Two scenarios from here:
The next day, Tom calls me, and says "Hey, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that, I got too worked up, I'm gonna work on myself and make sure that never happens again. Let me buy you a case of Yuengling as an apology, and maybe we can be friends again?" I might forgive Tom, or I might not, but I'm under no obligation to tell the gym owner to let Tom back in. After all, it's his gym, not mine, I can't make him change his mind, if he feels that behavior is unacceptable even once that's his right.
The next day, Tom2 calls me, and says "Hey, what the fuck dude, I didn't oil check you, I wasn't even there that night, you got me confused with Tom1!" At this point, I definitely have a moral obligation to tell the gym owner to let Tom2 back in, and explain the mistake, and that he shouldn't keep Tom2 out on my account. The gym owner could, of course, ban Tom2 for totally unrelated reasons. It's his gym not mine. But I'm obligated to tell him that he has the wrong Tom.
Which of these scenarios we are in makes the difference for me, morally.
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What I don't understand is why Trump doesn't just do the malicious compliance thing of bringing him back, let his AG vacate the deportation withholding order, and then immediately send him back after he gets his day in court. Presumably Trump is planning to send additional deportation flights to El Salvador, so him hitching a ride shouldn't require additional resources. It also assuages the fear of US citizens since the Trump administration can't unilaterally strip anyone of citizenship, and it takes the wind out of the sails of his enemies.
Win-win-win for Trump. But I guess it makes him look weak in the short term, or however long the courts drag it out. On the other hand, the facts are fairly clear cut and dry if he loses the deportation protection, so I can't imagine it would drag for too long. On the mutant third hand, maybe the length of a court case is something I shouldn't ever underestimate.
What happens when Garcia goes to the media and tells people about what the conditions are like in the prison?
A lot of would-be immigrants change their mind about crossing the border.
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If the man didn’t have a legitimate asylum claim before, he sure as shit has one now.
Does that even matter? The executive branch can make the determination that he's ineligible for asylum no matter the actual legitimacy.
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There is a shocking credulity here with Abrego-Garcia's claims. These are the facts:
A man willing to go to such lengths to break the law as his first act in a nation will also lie to the courts of that nation. Any sane judge should presume the testimony of an illegal alien of his circumstances as unreliable; I can't imagine what was going through the judge's mind to believe a man who had eight years to make that claim. I assumed they were handcuffed by the law to presume truthfulness in asylum claims but it turns out they're not, the judge just took his testimony at face value and thought nothing of him being a criminal or indeed criminally lazy.
MS-13 is active in the Beltway. I'd say it's a point to questioning the claim of his being associated with a New York clique but if the CI was making shit up why wouldn't they say DC or Baltimore? There's also the lack of tattoos, but more and more MS-13 members aren't getting tattoos(p.12). It's not the witch's bind, the lack of tattoos isn't evidence of anything, but anymore that's exactly it: it's not evidence of anything, for either side.
The US justice system at least nominally and certainly historically strongly, strongly weights the rights of innocents. That is to say, if there's a tradeoff involved where some other good outcomes happen, but it has a real and practical cost in weakening what happens to a conceivably innocent person, that's still seen as a not-so-good tradeoff in many cases. A lot of legal wrangling goes into the exact balance, but structurally the overall tilt of the table on which the weights are balanced is a given. The table is not flat. The original creators, and many lawmakers and lawyers since then, all thought this was a good idea and did this on purpose. "Fairness" is a little subjective, so opinions can vary over time, but I think there's a pretty strong case for the legal system to stay this way. As you can tell from my username, perhaps, I would point out that we're on to 250 years of this working out pretty well for most people involved, in spite the absurdity of legal fees. Ultimately, it's still at least partially a values thing too, but
This case is bad because here, forget "do not pass Go", the game just ended immediately on drawing a bad card, even if your poor finance situation made this possible. It might have genuinely bankrupted you (to continue the Monopoly analogy) so the game probably was over, but that's not an excuse to flip the board, you have to actually check and count the money and the debts before you end the game!
Legal systems acknowledge that sometimes, the facts are so clear there's no need to wrangle things for too long. "Motion to dismiss", "summary judgement", these are all real things. You seem to be talking as if they didn't exist. They do.
You might just accept that someone flipped the board once, and deem it not worth the effort to try and restore the game state to what it was, but if someone is consistently flipping the board, that's no good. Even if you're just another sibling, not the parent, you gotta nip that behavior the bud, or your kid is always going to think it's an option, and they might be right if they flip a more complicated game later, which cannot be restored. Deportation to a foreign state directly to a prison with a significant chance of literal death is a board-flipping move that cannot be allowed to stand. Not even once.
This is true, the purpose of the American justice system is to protect the accused. Mobs need no courts, the court exists as protection from the mob, for the man and for society.
Abrego-Garcia is not the accused, he is the guilty criminal. The question is his measure of criminality.
Courts should not assume just because he entered the country illegally that he would also join a notoriously murderous gang. Courts should assume that because he entered the country illegally, he would lie to remain in the country. Assuming he is lying, telling the truth would get him deported, but perjuring himself only might get him deported. Young children can follow these incentives.
Courts shouldn't take the negative inference, that would be presuming guilt. However, presuming he is a liar, or sufficiently motivated to deceit as to make sola testimony necessarily unreliable, is the only reasonable position. He had a decade to make that claim, this is not the behavior of a man in fear for his life. Where does that leave us? An El Salvadoran man who entered illegally, and that's all we know for sure. Okay, send him back.
To use the Monopoly metaphor, one player has an awful lot of fake-looking $500s, but when you call them on it they demand you prove each individual $500 is counterfeit while accusing you of trying to cheat. Why would they toss the board when they can just rig the game?
The whole point of a legal system is to take these assumptions and inferences, and then make them explicit, in court, rather than allow opinions to be made outside of the court structure. It defeats the entire point if judgement is rendered without recourse out of court.
Like, sure, if a Border Patrol agent apprehends someone at the border clearly trying to cross, my understanding is that it's fine to turn them around and send them right back. It's allowed, as a concession to being "reasonable", which is a thing in the legal world. Other people caught less immediately/obviously have to go through the court system, because the court system has a monopoly on appeals against state sanctioned violence, force, and punishment. That's one of its core jobs. There's obviously some wiggle room in the middle where plausibly, law enforcement (broadly defined) can just kick them out, but due process does kick in at some point. This guy has lived in the US for years, have kids who are citizens, have a wife who is a citizen, etc. Clearly, he needs to go through the normal process. If the process is short and somewhat perfunctory, okay whatever, that's fine. Even if we assume everything that comes out of his mouth is a lie, that doesn't change the fact that the lies need to be heard in court before they are officially declared lies.
If the Monopoly game is rigged, it's the job of lawmakers to write better rules to prevent counterfeiting. You don't even need to prove that they cheated, everyone can vote and say "yeah that's sus, you're kicked out" and that's fine, the standards don't need to be perfect. It's still unacceptable to flip the game board.
The court system does not have a monopoly on that force as it applies to foreigners. The sovereign possesses a priori, categorical, unconditional authority on matters of border control. The reason we have courts is because we first had a border within which to enact laws. Where it pertains solely to deportation, the foreigner is owed no due process, no hearing, and in fact no explanation whatsoever for their expulsion. The justification is supreme at "Because it is our right." Moreover, we are under no sovereign obligation to play host to refugees. The asylum system is a courtesy, an act of generosity that like all contemporary acts of government "generosity" are at least attempted to be gamed 100 times for every 1 legitimate claimant. Yet even still Abrego-Garcia couldn't manage it years into Round 1 of the "We're going to deport you" party president.
Courts have ruled illegal aliens and foreigners are due such rights. No they aren't. The foreigner by definition is not part of the social contract of the nation they visit and worse is the illegal who in entering and residing perpetually violates the social contract. The courts have chosen to protect those whose acts if universalized would render this country unto nothing. Their positions don't originate in law or reason, they originate in those judges who contrived precedent from authority because of their beliefs in what ought to be. They have made their ruling, I await the day when we demand they enforce it.
As for law and order. Yeah, where one side has to still play by the rules to correct the rampant rule-breaking of the other. Tell me, what happens in a game when one player is found to be cheating? They don't roll it back to a point when they're sure there wasn't cheating. They don't run everything by the cheater, requiring their sign-off. They disqualify the cheater and award the win to the player who wasn't cheating. Harder to do in politics, to be sure. For every citizen like you who holds your position earnestly and in good faith, who really believes in these principles, you aren't outnumbered but you are vastly outgunned by the people taking your position in bad faith. Who appeal to law and order and slow attempts at deportations because their goal is for there to be no deportations. What is lawful and orderly about heeding the cheater's demands?
There are >30 million illegal aliens in this country, and even if it's the 10 million I've been hearing since 2005, how do we have trials for all of them? We don't. So what, fait accompli? We have to live with the consequences? Tossing that board is sounding real nice. But no, let's not, for the sake of this I'll agree, we will play exactly by the rules. We will give every single accused illegal alien in this country--who requests--a full trial. But those will wait, because we're playing exactly by the rules, and that means we're not holding their trials first, because we're holding other trials first, the ones from this:
Trump declares martial law, federalizes the national guards of the entire country, and proceeds with the dissolution of the state legislatures of the following: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. Every single sitting or former city councilman or equivalent, mayor, state representative, senator, and governor who voted for or signed off on any policy or legislation that in any form would obviously aid and abet the continued residence of illegal aliens in their municipalities and states is arrested and charged with sedition, among other federal crimes.
This is playing by the rules. This is keeping the board. This is the moderate centrist option.
What an insane fan-fic reality that would be. At least you acknowledge that your position is at odds with the courts and thus ipso facto illegal. The lack of a typical social contract with an illegal immigrant does not immediately imply that all rights are forfeit, in fact the Framers explicitly rejected that notion. The idea is that the court should make at least a passing effort to assess whether deporting him to El Salvador specifically would seriously endanger him; rather, the courts already determined in 2019 this to be the case, so if he is to be deported, such an assessment much be overturned. This is at least superficially reasonable. There is a universal duty that the government not be party to reckless endangerment, even of foreigners. Until the process finishes, tough shit, the government can't do what it wants. It doesn't have to be a mega-detailed process, but it does have to happen. I'll say that personally, I don't find him super sympathetic. I also have mixed feelings about asylum laws in general - the country has a long history of welcoming people from countries in trouble, and prospering because of it, but just because a person's home country is a shitshow isn't a valid reason to illegally immigrate nor on its face create a substantial danger to return, and I do strongly resent the rhetoric of some on the left to this effect. Furthermore, I don't have that much sympathy for Republicans either because of how many torpedoed the last immigration compromise bill, which among other things would have hired a lot more judges so that cases exactly like this wouldn't drag on forever and consume government resources so much. The solution to policies you dislike is legislation, not intra-governmental disobedience. I'm pretty sure the legislature could curtail asylum laws, for example, if you so dislike them. Because remember, Garcia was both granted a stay on deportation AND the law also currently requires a certain process to be followed for such people to actually be deported. If you dislike this, the remedy is clear: change the law! The government is not, in fact, entitled to pick and choose which laws to follow, nor does your 'higher law' reasoning about social contracts supercede the actual laws.
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Dude was an illegal immigrant. No one objects. Necessary process was confirming dude was illegal. Once that happens deporting his ass is appropriate.
You just can't skip the necessary process step though! Fundamentally, the executive branch can't decide things on their own like this, even if they are ultimately correct. It's typically a fairly bright line.
It isn’t clear what process is needed but this guy went through two hearings which found (1) he was an illegal subject to removal and (2) was a member of MS-13 (though the second wasn’t needed).
He went through way more process than what was needed to effectuate removal. The only dispute was where he was removed to.
That’s a pretty nontrivial dispute in this case!
I think that is a bit more trivial to the broader narrative. No one is being wrongfully removed. They aren’t just snatching random people. There was very good reason to deport this person who received significantly more due process than I think is warranted.
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The inappropriate part was sending him to indefinite detention in a torture-prison that we are paying for and then, after admitting that it was an error, winking at the camera, chuckling “aww shucks sorry about that but there’s just nothing we can do… By the way, wouldn’t it be great if we could send citizens here too?”
Why do you have to lie about what the objection here is? Don’t let your animus overcome your faculties.
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This is a pants on head ridiculous take.
One crux, to me, is whether or not the administration has to obey a clear Congressional command (8USC1231 §241(b)(3)) deriving from a clear grant of plenary legislative powers (Art I, §8).
I have no moral qualms about throwing the guy out, provided that the administration either follows 1231 or, preferably, gets their own party in Congress to amend or repeal it. Otherwise that law stays on the books.
Yeah I agree with this, especially considering the Supreme Court ruling on the situation. There's issues with the Supreme Court as well of course, I don't think judges should serve for life, but Balance of Powers is still important.
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You seem to be missing the point entirely. If they can grab a person and send them off to a foreign prison for life without the system of due process afforded to US citizens to do things like prove they're a citizen in court, then they can grab a citizen and send them off to a foreign prison too because that citizen will simply not be granted the due process they're "supposed" to be owed. And once the citizen is out of the country and in a foreign nation, the government shrugs and says "well we can't do anything, they're elsewhere not here, we made a mistake sending a citizen but oh well"
And they're already making mistakes mixing up citizens with illegal immigrants
It violates the very concept of habeas corpus, a fundamental of modern legal systems. If we can just One Easy Trick around the basic structure of freedom and civil liberty in the country, then we have a major problem.
And it's not like it's a conspiracy theory the Trump admin plans this One Easy Trick on citizens, they literally say they're planning it.
This equivocation on "due process" is a motte-and-bailey because the amount of process required to establish whether or not somebody is a citizen is far simpler than, and falls far short of, the due process (trial by jury, assistance of counsel, confrontation of witnesses, right to appeal, etc.) which is constitutionally required in criminal trials. The fact that Abrego Garcia is not a citizen (and is an illegal immigrant) has never been disputed by him or by anyone else, even though he has been through several administrative hearings (which, again, do not count as "due process" in the legal sense because of the lack of jury etc.) at which he could have presented proof of citizenship if he had it.
I will start to worry about my own safety and that of other US citizens if it comes out that the "administrative error" that led to Abrego Garcia being sent to El Salvador was one that was just as likely to have caught up an American citizen. However, that doesn't appear to be the case here. The government picked up a bunch of people from a list of deportation orders from immigration judges, not realizing that in Abrego Garcia's case the order specifically excluded El Salvador. If he were a citizen, no such order would've existed and so he would not have been deported.
Again correct me if I'm wrong (since this is not purely academic but a matter of immediate self-interest for me to know correctly one way or the other if I'm in danger of deportation) but this has the appearance of a software bug where immigrants listed this attorney's contact info as their own and so a message meant for them was instead sent to the attorney. I don't think there's any realistic chain of events by which this attorney ends up being deported because of this.
He was not even afforded this small amount of due process required to establish citizenship. He was not deported as the result of any hearing. The result of the hearings was that he won the right not to be deported. They deported him anyway, accidentally and illegally. If they accidentally deported a citizen, at what point would that citizen be able to prove his citizenship before leaving the country? The current system would not put that person in front of a judge before getting deported.
I don’t think that’s correct. He was precluded from being deported to ES. I don’t think that is the same as saying he can’t be deported but I’m not an immigration lawyer.
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Suppose that El Salvador decides he is rightfully imprisoned and doesn't feel like releasing him? How far do you think the court can go to mandate foreign policy to effect his return? Economic sanctions? Military blockade? War?
Minimally, it should be able to tell the president to at least ask El Salvador to release him and to stop paying to have him imprisoned.
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I don't see why that would happen, we have Art of the Deal 4Dchess Trump in charge now. He put an end to the war in Ukraine and Israel in the first day, certainly he can work out a great deal like by doing things like uh, let's see here ...not literally sending Bukele and El Salvador money to keep them locked up.
In any rule following administration, they would receive a court order like this and a 9-0 ruling from the SC and make a good faith effort. Like say, the same thing of maybe not continuing to funnel El Salvador money for the explicit purpose of not returning them. The court isn't asking them to do sanctions or war.
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The Court doesn't need to decide hypothetical cases (and, indeed, is prohibited from doing so by Article III of the Constitution). The Court has to decide the instant case, where the prisoners are being held by El Salvador on the instructions and at the expense of the United States.
I was asking an interlocutor. They are not bound by judicial rules.
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This is disputed, however; the administration claims the Tren de Aruaga prisoners are held on the instructions and at the expense of the United States, but the other prisoners are not.
What I don't understand here is that even if that were the case, what the hell kind of remedy can the court even order?
They don't have the power to tell Bukele to do a thing, and even if they order the administration to stop, that order is toothless.
I'm doubtful they can even seize the payments to El Salvador.
Can't they arrest people for contempt of court?
Them and what army? Are the bailiffs going to start a shooting war with the feds?
Presumably, the police would be expected to follow a court order and not prevent someone from being arrested.
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The court can order the administration not to pay Bukele until he releases Garcia back to the US.
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The judge can order El Salavdor to comply. If El Salvador fails to comply, start seizing Salvadoran assets in the United States. Seizure of foreign nations' assets in the United States has been done before.
That would truly be a constitutional crisis where Art III starts basically making foreign policy decisions?
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What stops the president from writing more of those bullshit pardons like Biden did for unlimited and unknown crimes in several year blocks?
I don't think you can pardon a country.
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While removing an illegal who has not been convicted of any crime on a vague suspicion that he might be a gang member, with the full knowledge that he will face a life in prison on your dime under atrocious circumstances is utterly despicable, that is not the full extend of their misconduct.
In his case specifically, they violated a court order to do that. "Accidentally".
This scales much beyond this case. "Oh, we are sorry your honor, we honestly thought that you had authorized that no-knock raid against that (suspected) Tesla-burning terrorist. Anyhow, now he is dead, so there is nothing we can do about that misunderstanding. All's well that ends well, I guess."
Of course, we don't have to worry if Trump would also deport US citizens to the mega prisons, because he has just announced that he would.
Obviously the court doesn’t have jurisdiction to bring people back from the dead. Perhaps that case is instructive. Maybe the proper remedy is to find the officer who screwed-up and charge him with kidnapping?
It has the jurisdiction to punish people for committing murder.
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Thing is, this is already standard practice. And has been for many years. Second Amendment people have plenty of atrocity stories over ATF raiding the wrong house.
The resemblance is superficial. In this case, one or more people intentionally ignored a court order and can be held liable for that even if some of those involved in the deportation cannot. The planes were forbidden from taking the detained to El Salvador. If there is an example where the ATF is specifically instructed by a court order not to raid someone's house, and they do it anyway, and the recipient of that order is not held in contempt of court, in that case the comparison holds water. Not otherwise.
ATF is only authorized to raid houses that it gets a warrant to raid. ALL the other houses are off limits (subject to a few other exceptions). If they have a warrant that says they can raid 101 Elm Street, and they raid 103 Elm Street by mistake, they have done the same thing as was done here.
Note that in neither case did anyone intentionally ignore a court order, or at least evidence of intentionality has not been presented.
The matter here is that one or more people in the Department of Justice have violated 18 U.S.C. § 401(3) by ignoring a lawful court order, and criminal contempt proceedings are ongoing to determine exactly who in the department is to be held responsible.
The defendants had a responsibility to carry out the court order. There is indeed evidence of intentional disobedience, as I welcome anyone interested in the facts of the matter at hand -- and not irrelevant, separate grievances -- to ascertain in the ruling[1] issued today.
[1]https://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/athena/files/2025/04/16/67ffdc21e4b0cc0115773511.pdf
I see nothing there aside from the District Court throwing a temper tantrum about being overruled. They will be overruled again. The court's complaint is that the Trump administration did not obey its -- unlawful -- order in the time between it being issued and it being vacated. This will not stand on appeal, and the most likely effect of it is to narrow the doctrines upon which it is depending (which would be a good thing -- Walker v. City of Birmingham was a travesty).
The relevant order here is the earlier order for withholding to removal, and there is no evidence the violation of that order was deliberate.
You are wrong. If the Trump administration had not disobeyed the relevant TRO, then there would be no grounds for the contempt filing. The reason he is bringing contempt charges is that the defendants brazenly disobeyed a legal order. This has nothing to do with being overruled: Boasberg has the authority to issue TROs, which can be challenged and dismissed on appeal. Ignoring them is a criminal offense.
If we were to characterize some party as 'throwing a tantrum,' it would be the Trump admin who both 1. got their way on the decision in appeals and 2. called for Boasberg's impeachment, prompting the Chief Justice to make the statement:
No, the real matter here is that someone, likely multiple people, violated 18 U.S.C. § 401.
Yes. That is illegal and the filing is replete with evidence suggesting that it was deliberate. Moreover, the defendants do not even dispute that they did this deliberately.
The long-established blackletter law settled by a case in which the most sympathetic of parties lost, if you knew the first thing about it, is hardly the false pretense suggested by the word 'travesty'. None of the exigencies and circumstances on which the minority's argument was based in that proceeding obtains in this one, in fact it is the opposite. The dissenting opinion grants that the petitioners would have no case at all if
Indeed, the exigencies that obtain in Walker v. City of Birmingham in favor of the petitioners work exactly against the Trump admin in the case at hand:
If the Trump admin respected the authority of the courts and was confident in the constitutionality of their intended deportations, there is no reason why they could not wait for the appeal to resolve in their favor. Had they done this they would be protected from Boasberg's 'tantrum' as you put it, and as a bonus they may have not carried out any improper removals 'by accident.'
Far from being the sole case establishing that Americans are not entitled to ignore court orders, Walker v. City of Birmingham affirms that adherence to court procedure is so fundamental (the lower federal courts having been established in 1789 with exactly the power "to punish by fine or imprisonment, at the discretion of said courts, all contempts of authority in any cause or hearing before the same") that it indeed prevails even in some cases where circumstances make the contemnor's actions urgent. Again, not what we have here. There is no way in which it could have been decided which would have set a precedent for the current US administration's actions in disregarding the judiciary.
The TRO was not a legal order, which is why it was vacated. The District Court insists that the administration was still required to follow its unlawful order, using a precedent that was created to provide a "gotcha" against civil rights protestors. I stand by my characterization of a "temper tantrum".
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That's already how things work, and how they have worked for years. Ever heard of qualified immunity? I means if the cops get the address wrong and shoot you to death they just have to say "Whoops, our bad, sorry about that. Total mistake on our part" and they're good to go. The Supreme Court recently declined to overturn a cop's qualified immunity for having done exactly that. (Well, not exactly that: they only flashbanged them and held the family at gunpoint, but if they'd gone ahead and shot them it would be much the same).
There is substantial overlap between criminal justice reformers who take issue with the US' policy of extreme leniency towards police misconduct and people who take issue with sending people to Salvadoran gulags. Conversely, there is a generalized skepticism towards due process common amongst both hardline deportation advocates and tough-on-crime/back-the-blue types.
That aside, that's not how things worked. If the police violate your rights, you can usually at least get a court order telling them to stop doing that (and potentially scuttling any case against you), even if they can't return the lost time/reputation/emotional well-being. You can often obtain damages as well.
Qualified immunity is not what people seem to think it is. QI protects government staff from personal liability in carrying out their duties (shifting the burden onto taxpayers), even when they egregiously fuck up; it doesn't indemnify them from criminal charges. The bigger issue there is simply that the criminal justice system bends over backwards to give law enforcement officers accused of misconduct the benefit of the doubt. If a cop murders you, it's still murder, but it's exceeding rare for cops to get charged and even rarer for them to get convicted.
(For example, the notorious Daniel Shaver case, the city ended up paying about $10m in damages to Shaver's relatives even though the officer was acquitted)
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It's all play acting. Most of the American's that are "frightened" about this deportation don't actually think they are at risk for being deported. Where would they even deport actual Americans that didn't come here as looters? Most of em are from parts of Europe. You're gonna threaten someone by deporting them to the UK? Germany,? Scandinavia? Most of the left supposedly want that.
What they think is at risk, and correctly as this is what the actual fight is over, is the shadow government. By circumventing all the procedural nonsense and bureaucracy that the establishment has built to defend it's own interests Trump eats away at their power. The arguments they are posting here are the same sort of fake outrage and concern they were pushing about Elon gutting USAID or how social security was going to collapse and stop working if you audit it, or really anything touching any of the many other appendages of the shadow government.
Against my better judgement, I've decided to stop lurking and make this account specifically to tell you (at the admitted risk of being uncivil) that you are VERY fucking wrong on this- and that you should consider 'updating your priors', as the local lingo goes, in order to better reflect your hated outgroup's theory-of-mind accordingly.
I'll grant you this much; In the nightmare scenario that Trump does start deporting US citizens to El Salvadoran gulags, I'd probably be pretty far down the list of people to target; after all, I'm not a felon (at least, as far as I know), I'm white, I'm male, and otherwise generally inoffensive to MAGA sensibilities aside from my leftism...
...But a lot of my friends would be a lot higher-up on that list than me, as would most of my family (by virtue of being even more actively outspoken than I am), and if they do get targeted, I'm liable to quickly get a lot more radical- and thus a lot higher on the list as well.
El Salvador, of course. As Trump just clarified earlier today.
That particular bit of outrage and concern wasn't fake either. You should perhaps consider updating your theory of mind on that as well.
Consider the possibility when someone tells you they're against something, maybe they are, in fact, against it on the object-level, as well any other deeper levels you care to psychoanalyze.
And to respond to your and @The_Nybbler 's responses to @Amadan- ...It's not "play acting" or "method acting"** either. I assure you, I genuinely do worry about this.
I'm sure you genuinely believe that you think you can tell I'm lying by my "crocodile tears" & 'revealed preferences' over COVID measures, the January 6th protestors, and other perceived injustices from "our team"... But consider the possibility that the bespoke realities of others differ from yours, and the screen that you (and most of the other posters on TheMotte, seemingly) is showing a very different picture than the screen that I (and most other liberals & leftists in this country) are watching.
**To the latter poster- I'd respond that the most common way to 'Live the role of someone who believes Trump will deport US citizens for being political enemies' is to actually be someone who believes Trump will deport US citizens for being political enemies- which I believe he likely will unless he starts getting real pushback on this kind of shit real quick.
A bit of an aside, but how did you end up with a network of family and friends who arrived in the US illegally from El Salvador after having to leave due to pst affiliations with MS13?
Like that’s a very strange scenario, and I’m wondering what circumstances landed you in a situation like that?
I don't- I probably could've been more clear, but when I said that my friends & family would be higher up on nightmare-scenario government list of people to target, it'd be for different reasons.
In the hypothetical scenario where Trump & co start going after their perceived domestic enemies, I figure that trans people & outright socialists would be the next logical group to get hit after immigrants, and since I move in a lot of circles where both are highly over-represented, that concerns me by proxy. Several of my friends are already considering moving states, since the deep-red legislatures they live under have already made it exceedingly clear that trans people aren't welcome.
Oh… I know you’re not going to believe me, but I feel I have to say this for your mental health.
They will be fine. You have literally no reason to worry that Trump is going to deport them to El Salvadorian prisons. You have no reason to worry about anything other than that they may not be able to use their preferred bathroom or may not be able to receive hormones through Medicare anymore. Whilst I imagine those things matter to them, they’re not a big deal in the grand scheme of things and mirror the kind of frustrations that near all other people in the USA have to deal with from time to time.
Well, I hope you're right about that.
But while not every slippery slope has to be slid down, the sliding we've seen in the first three months alone doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.
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Calm your tits It's not happening, though now that I think about it, if it does happen it's probably not a bad thing. The left has become increasingly violent and anti-semetic, with the blm riots and polls showing most of them are okay with political assassinations, they are a very dangerous group, more dangerous than muslim extremists even. They really have only themselves to blame.
(that's not happening and it's good that it is)
You’ve really got to bring something to the table other than a rambling complaint about your outgroup. I guess it’s more restrained than the last time, so I’m going to go with a three day ban.
Lol, it's literally the same thing you praised the other guy for, just with opposite political valance
No, it’s not?
One guy is speaking for himself, maybe for his friends and family. The other is speaking for his outgroup. Even though they’re both claiming to explain leftists, their approaches are completely different.
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You do know the Cold War's over, right?Delusional**, paranoid fantasies about communist revolutionaries lurking in your closet are more fitting for 1925, not 2025.Less glibly, I guess this particular conversation's run its course, then.And ifis genuinely your stance, than any future conversations are probably futile as well.Should we just block each other and move on?**At least, from my own perspective. Your own bespoke reality is so far detached from mine we might as well be living on different planets. Who knows, maybe I'm the one with the deranged view of the present-day state of America; either way, though, with such irreconcilable perspectives, the odds of us being able to have any constructive discussion is nonexistent.EDIT: I stand by all this, though I'll admit that actually posting it was a mistake.
Please don’t antagonize other users. If you’ve got to block them, go for it, but skip the flouncing.
For what it’s worth, I thought your original response was very well-put, and I hope you stick around.
Fair enough; I suppose I should've known better.
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Back during Trump 45, pictures of kids in cages were posted to Twitter and Facebook to show the horrors of the Trump administration. People were horrified. Truly horrified. But it was a very strange sort of horrification, because when it was revealed that the pictures were in fact taken during the Obama administration, they did not become horrified at Obama. I am not claiming that the people scared now are like AOC, turning on the waterworks at an empty parking lot for political gain. I am claiming they are like those people horrified at the pictures of kids in cages during Trump 45. They want to be the sort of person who most effectively is scared and horrified by Trump. Thus, they self-modify to actually feel those feelings. That's similar to method acting.
I assume you are referring to when Jon Favreau posted a tweet containing pictures of detained children with the accompanying text reading, “This is happening right now, and the only debate that matters is how we force our government to get these kids back to their families as fast as humanly possible.” It turned out that the pictures were of children separated from their families by the Trump Administration, but of unaccompanied minors being held by the Obama Administration. Oops.
The thing is that, while supporters of family separation may have won that round, they didn’t do it by making a case that separating children from their families was morally acceptable, or by making a valid case that the Obama administration also separated children from their families. So it makes complete sense that learning the origin of the pictures didn’t cause opponents of family separation to change their minds on that point or to condemn the Obama administration for allegedly doing the same thing.
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I am not "they". I certainly was rather disquieted to learn that those dated back to Obama's administration- though given his deportation record, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Much like with his record on transparency, Gitmo, drone strikes (and various other expansions of the Bush-era "security" apparatuses), and others, I've soured on Obama in the years since he left office- and looking back, the borderline cult-of-personality surrounding him was probably a bad thing; it's for the best that he's now out of office and he keeps a relatively low profile nowadays.
I will say that at least the Obama administration had the minimal decency to regard this as a shameful necessity and not attempt to highlight and proudly boast about it. It's a low, low bar, to be clear, but it's one of the many the Trump administration couldn't.
If you run over your neighbor with a car while texting & driving down your cul-de-sac, immediately realize its your own fault, and then feel crushing shame over your carelessness, then I suppose we could call that "method acting" too.
But that would dilute the term "method acting" to the point of meaninglessness- as well as cheapen the rhetorical effect of dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as just being a 'method actor'.
Not aiming this at you specifically, but one thing I’ve very much seen is that people desperately want to be a ‘good person’ in whatever manner their society dictates.
I’ve watched sensible friends trying on a number of different post-hoc justifications for things that they wanted to believe. It was most obvious with trans stuff: they would try a number of historical justifications and get annoyed when I pointed out they didn’t work. It wasn’t that they disagreed with me, it was a ‘I want to feel justified fitting in, why won’t you let me have this?’
In a show of good faith I will point this at me too. This is basically how I am with Christianity a lot of the time. It’s also how I was with COVID vaccines and various non-COVID conspiracy theories - I had a very strong feeling of, “look, I believe enough heresy to get me in trouble already and I don’t want to go looking for more”.
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If you want people to "update their priors about their outgroup", you have to change your behavior going forward, not pinky-promise that you totally were "disquieted" way back when, with no trail to show for it.
This is the whole problem with treating social media as life-people base everything they think about their outgroup based on the most unhinged viral Twitter personalities, and if someone doesn't have a "trail" (i.e., a Twitter history or something) showing them getting into pointless arguments with trolls then how are you supposed to prove what you say and believe in real life? The idea that anyone who says "No, I don't actually believe the thing you say everyone on my side believes" has to prove it to you by showing their online posts from the Obama years is absurd.
I'll grant it's not a fair standard to apply to any particular individual you're having a conversation with. Maybe they really were one of the extremely few principled people all along, and after years of zapped accounts, or basic opsec, they can't provide receipts. Maybe they're too young to have participated in the culture war battles of the past to begin with. Hell, maybe they had an honest change of heart.
But come on, the idea that the mistake is treating social media as life is absurd. Crowds at anti-war protests dwindling to a chorus of crickets and 5 libertarians the very moment Obama got elected did not happen on social media. People moving on from pet issue to pet issue, pretending it's all a matter of principle, and then forgetting about those principles when a new pet issue contradicts them, is all just part of human nature.
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Credibility doesn't come from nothing. The modern internet is absolutely filled with false flag shit. It's assuredly automated, even. "I'm a Trump voter, but I'm so mad at him about Current Thing that I wish I'd voted for Kamala, darn tootin" is practically an entire genre of reddit post. And this week's thread has multiple brand new accounts claiming that they've definitely been long-term principled civil libertarians.
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Sure, 'actions speak louder than words', and all that- but what, exactly, would you propose I do to "change my behavior" going forward? Vote Republican?
(I'm aware that may come off as more than a little glib, but I'm being completely serious. I may be quite disgruntled with the Democrats, but what's the alternative? The Democratic Socialists? The Libertarians? Might as well just throw away my vote, and I'm not going to do that.)
Oh, nothing like that, just say something next time you're rather disquieted.
Well, I try.
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The trouble with this claim...
((well, the broader trouble. Specifically for Abrego Garcia, the man had a 2019 hearing at which he had an opportunity to demonstrate that he was a US citizen or lawful resident; this specific case clearly can't happen to citizens.))
... is that there's a surfeit of lurkers with absolutely no history on the topic always pouring out of the walls, and a deficit of actual principled people. The punchline to this post is that Kelsey Piper suddenly became quite outspoken on immigration policy literally the day of the inauguration, after literally years of ducking it as someone else's field.
I can make the argument that playing stupid games with legal technicalities is bad because I've done so for years, and I've called balls and strikes whether on 'my' team or against it. It's important enough that even as I don't have much time to do online stuff in general right now, I'm writing this, here.
Do you? Fine, you're a brand new poster, you're probably not going to write a ton of top-level posts given this. Do you have any examples of Democratic-friendly
figureheadswriters who actually were horrified, during the actual Obama presidency, about those terrible conditions? Anyone who looked into the conditions encouraged by Biden-era rules and noticed what the results were, on your side?Okay, immigration is not a field everyone spends all way writing about. Do you have any examples of any Principled Worried Person who panicked that COVID gamesmanship about religious services or with visas would Possibly Hurt People Who Count? That a state governor said "just arrest everyone"? Anything?
There's a fun philosophical distinction between whether someone 'really' does something because of their internal state, or because of what they do. I don't particularly care. If I can't tell the difference from outside between Kelsey and The People Who Really Care, it's not something that can change how I have to model your behavior, if Really Caring doesn't modify your behavior.
Notable ones? Not really, no. Critical voices certainly did exist, but they didn't get much national spotlight. As I said, the borderline cult-of-personality around Obama was probably a bad thing; I have to imagine that the desire to maintain Democratic unity under Obama likely had a chilling effect on people who otherwise would've criticized him from the left.
On this, I can confidently say there were, in fact, people on the left who noticed the lack of improvements under Biden- indeed, I was one of them. Unfortunately, since the Biden administration spent most of its existence being attacked relentlessly from the right (and towards the end, even from the center and even from some leftists!) about the perceived border crisis, and calls for harsher crackdowns on immigrants polled pretty well, it was, unfortunately, a pretty foregone conclusion that the Biden administration wasn't going to try and improve those conditions, for fear of giving further ammunition about being 'soft' on the border issue- and that the kids who were still in cages at the time were just going to be SOL.
There were a few times that other left-leaning people I knew personally expressed worries that there would eventually be a backlash to the lockdowns, and there's certainly no shortage of people who've come to view it as a strategic error after the fact...
...But on a broader level, no.
Because there's still quite a lot of us on the left who fundamentally dispute the framing of
I very much do not grant this!
Especially since, frankly, conservative anti-lockdown hysterics at least as good as they got, if not more. Certainly, where I live, "lockdown measures" were a total joke due to Republican-lead efforts to fight the lockdowns.
We're simply not going to see eye-to-eye on this particular topic.
On this, I'm not sure that we're really disagreeing?
It is kinda interesting that the two examples you brought up don't actually mention the conditions that brought serious controversy (eg Kelsey's family separation, 'kids in cages' conditions) during the Obama presidency. Instead, the objection is just that he wasn't maximally dgaf about illegal immigration, or to an extent wasn't able to be maximally dgaf because of legal restriction.
A claim presented without evidence can be dismissed... well, I'm not going to say as readily, because I'd like higher standards of discourse, here, but I'll again point to all the people who didn't complain even as things got -- often dramatically! -- worse have names or at least nom de plumes present before this week.
'It wouldn't have worked' is not a good argument, any more than it would have been a reasonable cause for me to duck out here.
I was (and to a lesser extent remain) a COVID hawk, if a bit more libertarian-minded a one ('changing hearts and minds' rather than arresting people has a lot to commend it!). Whether COVID measures were or were not 'right' is an entirely different question than what you're running into here.
If we're supposed to care about process, it matter if the Biden administration paid attention to the process. It matters if the Biden admin told the Supreme Court, while trying to maintain a stay of a lower court decision holding a policy unlawful, said that they wouldn't extend the policy, and then just remade the same one with the serial numbers filed off. Left-leaning people here actually believed it (or at least pretended). It matters if Newsom gets to cancel Easter one year, get slapped down by SCOTUS for putting much heavier restrictions on religious organizations than bike shops, does the exact same thing a second year, gets slapped down a second time, and instead comes back with the same policy with the serial numbers filed off. In many other cases, state or federal regulations were pushed at length and then gamed through mootness so that they could not be challenged at all, either by revising the policy trivially faster than courts could react, or requiring behaviors in time periods that made judicial redreasability impossible.
Yeah, it'd suck if sometimes process leads to less-than-perfectly-ideal results! But that's what principles are; if they never cost you anything, they're just convenient slogans. Not least of all because no small number of your political opponents have different ideas of what those ideal results are!
It's not like COVID is alone, here; if you really want to draw some one-off exception to just that, I can give similar lists for (and, indeed, the "just arrest everyone" example above is unrelated to COVID!). The Saga of Defense Distributed likewise turns on 'oh, this settlement the federal government signed? Doesn't count, now'.
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It's not play acting. Many people really do believe Trump will try to deport his political enemies, to include US citizens and legal residents.
I am not sure whether this will happen; I do believe Trump would like to do that and would try if he thought he could get away with it. People like you who cheer for Trump "circumventing procedural nonsense" (i.e., ignoring laws and court rulings he doesn't like) show how it could happen. I think Scott's article "You Are Still Crying Wolf" was accurate for its time, but people are not crying wolf today.
It's play acting. The same people with the crocodile tears over this were laughing when people were getting locked up for protesting not being able to see their dying loved ones during covid and had no problem with the complete suspension of rights when it was their team in power or jan 6 protestors getting solitary for loitering. They regularly vote unanimously to extend the patriot act overreach, etc, etc, etc.
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It's still acting; it's just Method acting. That is, they are living the role of someone who believes Trump will deport US citizens for being political enemies.
No, you and @remzem are both wrong. I know these people; they are not play acting. They may be wrong or foolish (though daily Trump makes me less certain of this), but they believe what they say.
I also don't know anyone who was laughing at people being locked up over Covid, but I observe people on this forum who'd cheer if Trump actually does all the worst things they claim he hasn't and won't do don't be silly.
Perhaps the people you know are entirely sincere! Does that mean everyone is? On the other hand, "most people are ideologically-possessed hypocrites" isn't a particularly novel, charitable, or enlightening take.
HermanCainAward has almost 500K subscribers. You might not know people that laughed over that kind of thing, but it wasn't some vanishingly rare attitude, and that's a particularly ghoulish example. Surely less disgusting examples would have proportionally more adherents.
I'm certainly not claiming everyone is sincere, but I wouldn't judge sincerity based on performative outrage on social media. For any ridiculous and hysterical or ghoulish and terrible take , there will be some people who genuinely believe it and some who are just trolling.
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Again to date Trump hasn’t ignored court rulings (though he is getting close). Yes there is the plane case but the Trump admin complied with a literal reading of the written order.
This one is interesting but as I pointed out the district judge seems to ignore the breadth of what SCOTUS said so again the Trump admin is arguably acting technically legal.
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I have no idea why you think any concern about this issue is "fake outrage". You acknowledge that they actually think something importantly fought over is at risk, so the outrage is not fake then, no? I guess you're saying they're disguising the cause of the outrage.
The outrage is certainly not fake. What do you think all that bureaucracy (which you call nonsense) is supposed to stop? Is it not the very deportations you argue people don't think they're at risk for, and other similar injustices? If I see a lion in its enclosure pounding away at the glass 5 inches in front of me while staring me down and yowling aggressively, I will assume that once it breaks the glass it will attack me. That's what the glass is there to prevent, and there's a reason the lion doesn't like it. It's because it wants to bite people it's angry at.
If I'm in a crowd of 1000 people at the zoo when the glass breaks, my personal odds of getting eaten are very low, but I still don't want it to happen and would take measures to prevent it. I might even feel some fear if I saw cracks forming in the glass despite knowing my odds are good. This is all pretty normal human behaviour, not what you call "play acting".
There is no legal protection for any citizen without adhering to some forms of bureaucracy, and people get scared when they are not protected.
Also, its strange that you dismiss the threat of deportation to Europe. I guess you don't see a huge cost in forcibly having your life uprooted from friends and family and work? But again, doing the utmost to avoid such a thing and being worried about it when its use is actively threatened against citizens is pretty normal human behaviour, even if the countries are nice. If you truly would have no qualms about such a thing (which I do find a bit hard to believe, but I'll take you at your word) then all I can say is I think you are in a tiny minority.
In general, I have a hard time understanding the distinction you're trying to draw between people worried about the fall of this supposed "shadow government" and actual cuts to USAID, government departments, etc, none of which I would describe as "shadow organizations". It really seems to me like people are worried about exactly the thing that it says on the tin, the thing that both Trump supporters and his opponents agree he is doing: "circumventing the procedural nonsense" that our country's documents call laws and taking a tire iron to the parts of the government he doesn't like, and which the people he dislikes support.
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"Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is." No, I expect that if an American wanted to protest their local government investing its whole budget into 'Israel Bonds' that they would be at some risk of deportation. Or, if Israel wants a hand fighting Iran, America's lads might have to choose between the front and El Salvador.
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El Salvador, which the USA would pay to imprison them:
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-white-house-el-salvador-kilmar-abrego-garcia-ad338d6b4558a6aba80e8290fd3eece9
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You are not accurately modeling this view.
They absolutely see a difference between Garcia and a citizen.
What worries them is that the process afforded Garcia is not constructed in such a way that it must differentiate between Garcia and the citizen.
This is the thing daezor pointed out above. The process needed to show someone isn't a citizen isn't the same thing as the due process needed in a criminal trial. There's no serious dispute that Garcia isn't a citizen, and if he was one, he'd have been able to present the information by now.
I entirely agree that the "due process" we're talking about here is something very different than that at a criminal trial.
But what I think you're ignoring is that while Garcia is not a citizen, he also wasn't supposed to be sent to El Salvador and there was no opportunity for him to assert that. If he has no chance to say "Hey judge, this shouldn't be happening because I have a no-removal-to-El-salvador order" then I infer that I won't have a chance to say "Hey judge, I'm a citizen."
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The news keeps referring to him as a "Maryland man" who was "mistakenly sent to El Salvador." I would be shocked if more than half of those aware of this story knew he was an illegal immigrant.
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"pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories."
You are either ignorant or a liar. Which is it?
https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/trump-says-he-supports-deporting-u-s-citizens-237322821769
Literally from the man's own mouth in response to a direct question. He does not care about citizens that he decides he doesn't like. Maybe you or I will be next because we have a Hispanic name and tattoos.
This is throwing way too much heat. Even if you genuinely believe someone is being either disingenuous or dishonest, you are not allowed to just assume it and go on the attack like this.
Yeah, fair enough
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They said "ignorant or a liar" so the assumption is on your part.
Yes, new alt, I assume they are calling someone either disingenuous or dishonest because those are the words they used.
Their words:
your words:
Anyone who says these are the same is either mistaken or dissembling. My account is new but I am not an alt; I came in the wake of the new Scott post. Feel free to ban me, because I imagine it must happen sooner or later at the level of reading comprehension exhibited here.
I'm not going to ban you, but I think you're trolling and/or being very weird.
You were wrong and I pointed it out. It is not hard to predict the steady state of a forum where a mod thinks this is trolling.
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AP and Reuters reports about today's developments:
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-meet-with-el-salvadors-president-amid-questions-over-deportations-2025-04-14/
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-white-house-el-salvador-kilmar-abrego-garcia-ad338d6b4558a6aba80e8290fd3eece9
If Trump backs down, I wonder if ICE's fuckup will have ironically created the conditions for Garcia to make a valid an asylum claim in the US: Legitimate fear of persecution in your home country and the US being the first safe country you enter, following that threat. Bukele eliminated defendant's rights and personally called Garcia a terrorist:
Also, ???
He has legitimate fear of persecution in the US. Canada, or any country that wants to mock the US, could be rolling out the red carpet for him and his family and paying for Buekele to put him on a plane.
Whether Trump would persecute him, with no veneer of procedural legitimacy, in retaliation for a procedural fuckup being protested is an interesting question. I hope the answer is "no."
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If the US, by claiming he is a gang member, has caused El Salvador to persecute him, I would say they have indeed provided the basis for a valid asylum claim. I am not sure if this is true if he actually is a gang member, but given that the two pieces of evidence are a confidential informant and Chicago Bulls themed clothing (which the US claims is characteristic of both TdA AND MS-13... aren't gangs supposed to use DIFFERENT "colors"), I don't think that's been shown to any reasonable standard of evidence.
Yes, this is just Trump having made a deal with El Salvador about paying them to imprison gang members for him, and some underling having to find some "gang members" to deport in a hurry. "Oh, that guy was accused of being a gang member by someone without any credibility? Whatever, it will have to do."
I wonder how long it will take for the real gang members (if there are any being deported) to wisen up to the fact that murdering an ICE agent (or just a random civilian bystander) will immensely improve their outcomes (if they survive the encounter). Then they get a nice long trial in the US. Spending 20 years on Uncle Sam's death row before being fried likely has a much better QALY balance than spending the rest of your life in some El Salvador megaprison.
(This might also explain the selection. "This guy is suspected to run the local MS-13 chapter. He is investigated for three gang shootings, rape and drug trafficking. Should we round him up?" -- "Nah, that one might go out fighting, and I am not getting paid enough to take bullets. Uhm, I mean we might need him as a witness for gang-related crime later. Look, that one is accused of having a five-year-old kid with his American wife, and also wearing some clothing reminiscent of gang colors. He is probably not even packing and will never believe that we will haul his ass to some El Salvador prison complex before we have him cuffed.")
Why? Is there something that would prevent the U.S. from deporting immediately and letting El Salvador prosecute the case?
I don’t think it’s out of the question that a judge could rule that deportation to the current El Salvador regime is a per se violation of the convention against torture.
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6th Amendment:
Obviously the 6th Amendment does not apply if the government is not prosecuting them, and a deportation proceeding is not a criminal trial. Foreign nationals being tried by foreign courts have no 6th Amendment case with the U. S. Government.
The US government could deport an illegal immigrant without indicting them for crimes they are suspected to have committed while in the USA, but your question was if there is "something that would prevent the U.S. from deporting immediately and letting El Salvador prosecute the case" and the 6th Amendment is that thing.
Crimes committed abroad are often prosecuted domestically, murder is illegal in El Salvador so he can be deported and then tried there.
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It's the same thing, unless you believe that it is not possible for El Salvador to prosecute their national for a crime committed in the United States. I'm not an expert on Salvadoran law, but I would be very surprised if there was such a statutory limitation. The U. S. certainly has none.
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He was declared a gang member in 2019, long before the El Salvador deal, so I don't think this is Trump needing to find people to fill up Salvadoran prisons.
Nothing seems to have been done about the claim in the time since, though. I think the idea is that the claim was made and logged but everyone had long deemed it to be a nothingburger; and it was dug up again when files were scoured to find the requisite number of people to deport.
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When the conditions people sought asylum emd so should their stay in the US, El Salvador had a 1.9 per 100,000 murder rate. No one should remain in the US from that nation.
Do you have a source that the US granted anyone asylum just for "our general murder rate here is high, thus I might get killed?"
The very fact that El Salvador is willing to lock up citizens deported from the US without trial would be a basis to claim asylum in most civilized countries.
From here: https://migrants-refugees.va/country-profile/el-salvador/
Nearly all of those refugee claims are based on fleeing gaing violence and forced recruitment.
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If you define civilized countries as including those in Europe, they pay for other countries to lock up would-be asylum claimants before they reach said civilized countries.
If you do not include Europe amongst the civilized, I would be curious as to who you do.
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The entire asylum thing for people not fleeing an actual shooting war or a genocide (the actual kind, not the rhetorical kind) needs to end. What's Speaker Johnson doing about it?
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While there are other levels of disagreement, you're missing the one where Trump supporters might be confident that although some citizens may indeed be affected, it wouldn't be people like them but naturalized immigrants, children thereof, or at worst, shit-stirring far-left activists. In this, I fear they'd be correct, though it's an ugly thought.
What’s ugly about it? I straightforwardly don’t think there’s any plausible scenario in which I’d ever be considered for deportation, under the governance of whichever party you can imagine taking power in the United States. The same is true for basically everybody in this world whom I care significantly about. I think you and I both agree that it’s both unrealistic and unfairly-onerous to ask a person’s circle of concern to extend infinitely. Can you explain to me why I am obligated to extend it to everyone who has any claim to any level of authorization to live within U.S. jurisdiction?
What's ugly is that it amounts to "sure, the government can violate any citizen's rights at any time, but I support the regime, so I'll be alright", which is, you know, tyranny. The racial angle @sun_the_second mentions is part of it, but it's not the fundamental issue. It's the favoritism, the "one rule for the ingroup, a different rule for the outgroup".
I am certainly not saying you are obligated to extend your circle of concern to "everyone who has any claim to any level of authorization to live within U.S. jurisdiction". But I do think that if you care about justice and democracy and the Constitution, you are obligated to care whether two US citizens are being treated differently purely based on political affiliation. People on the left are, in fact, afraid that we're not far away from Trump using Salvadoran prisons as an all-purpose gulag for American citizens whom he finds some way to define as criminals and enemies of the state - pro-Palestinian activists, say - whatever their ancestry.
And when they voice those fears, they get the feeling that the MAGA crowd doesn't so much say "oh, that would be utterly unconscionable, and we're absolutely certain he won't do that; but don't worry, we'd turn on him if he tried". The vibe is more like "yeah, well, maybe he will and maybe he won't, but it's not our problem. have you tried not being an unpatriotic shit-stirrer?".
Which doesn't prove Trump will actually do it, but it doesn't reflect well on his base either way.
To be clear, I don’t “support the regime”, at least not unconditionally. I’ve criticized Trump many times in this very forum, calling him an idiot, a retard, a fat Boomer braying incoherently. I voted for him in 2020 and 2024 because I believed he was best positioned to achieve the major policy goals I have regarding immigration and policing/jurisprudence, but I think most of the other things he does and says are somewhere between empty bluster and actively harmful.
I don’t believe I’m immune from deportation because I’m pro-Trump; I believe that there would be both no legitimate motivation for any regime (far-right or far-left) to deport me, and nowhere to deport me to, given my extremely deep ancestral ties to this country. Other than shitposting online under a nom de plume, I don’t participate in any political activity, and may even forswear voting in future elections. I’m a normal middle-class educated person, I pay my taxes, I don’t give the regime (or the previous regime) any grief. The vast majority of the people currently quaking in their boots about being sent to El Gúlag are similarly situated to just shut up and live a normal unobtrusive life, if they chose to do so. And Trump has shown no indications of wanting to take any political action against average citizens who are not themselves immigrants.
Yes, I believe that individuals whose families have lived here for multiple generations should be treated preferentially by the government, relative to those who are immigrants, even if the latter have obtained legal citizenship. I don’t believe that mere legal citizenship — let alone temporary residency — entitles one to be treated as precisely morally/legally equivalent to a Heritage American. This doesn’t mean I have any animus toward any given immigrant! There are probably a few million immigrants whom I would consider better people, and better contributors to this country, than millions of Heritage Americans are!
That is not what has happened, and I believe that there is zero compelling reason to believe that it will happen. There have been temporary residents who seem to have been treated differently based on political affiliation, and I think this is basically fine. I believe that immigrants to this country, and any other country, should basically be expected to act as apolitically in their public-facing lives as possible. If I immigrated to Japan, it would be absurd for me to believe that I should have any say in the political life of their country. My responsibility as an immigrant would be to present myself as unobtrusive. Not to attend public anti-government rallies, to accuse my host country of perfidy, etc.
I don’t care if immigrants are patriotic. I’m not especially patriotic. I think there are certain foundational ideas enshrined in the Constitution which are naïve and basically disproven by history. I don’t care about “our national identity”, I don’t subscribe to the “propositions” which supposedly define our “propositional nation”. I simply believe that immigrants’ obligation to their host country is analogous to a house guest’s obligation to his or her host. There are things I would say about people in privacy, behind their backs, which I would not say out loud if I were invited into one of those people’s homes.
Now, one potential outcome which I do think is plausible is something like: Trump offloads a large portion of American death row inmates, and even potentially prisoners with life sentences, to El Salvador’s prisons. There, they would be exempt from many of the onerous protections and endless appeals which they enjoy here in America, due to our absurd squeamishness about the remotest possibility of false conviction. This outcome would be ontologically good, but could potentially produce a massive backlash which would have the potential to permanently discredit the Law And Order coalition in American politics. While I believe this outcome to be unlikely, it’s at least more plausible than the outcome of Trump deporting liberals who criticize him on Bluesky.
That is perfectly fair, and I agree it's unlikely (though not quite out of the question for people who do more than post on Bluesky, on causes as sensitive as Israel/Palestine). But I am still uncomfortable with the MAGA base's unwillingness to denounce the scenario as beyond the pale. I think Trump - or Vance, or someone else who speaks for him - ought to be making the point clear. Ought to be actively pledging not to deport citizens. Instead, they're dodging the question. I think this is for PR reasons, to avoid looking soft, not because Trump actually intends to deport liberals by the plane-full. But it's still not a good look.
I think our other point of disagreement is that I see a much starker difference between someone with mere residency, and a naturalized citizen. I'm totally with you on temporary residents needing to abide by the rules of hospitality and remaining broadly apolitical. But as a matter of fact, I consider the most important part of citizenship to be that it's a license, and indeed an encouragement, to get involved in your country's politics. Involvement in the affairs of the polis isn't just a privilege, but also an expression of a citizen's civic duty. If we don't want an immigrant to get involve in politics then we shouldn't naturalize him in the first place.
And in a similar way, I think one of the things that go hand in hand with legal citizenship is the right to be tried and sentenced as a citizen. An immigrant who has earned American citizenship, then takes political action perceived to be against the American state and/or in the interest of a foreign power, is not a hostile alien. He is, instead, a member of the opposition so long as he abides by the law, an ordinary ciminal if he doesn't, and a traitor in extreme cases. But never again can these actions be judged as those an alien. (And of course, that's a double-edged sword! In many cases, actions which would be perfectly expected of a foreign national are despicable if they come from a traitor. But the difference is massive and meaningful.)
It's the difference between a babysitting gig and adoption. If you agree to babysit a kid and he's a bratty little hellion who breaks all your furniture, then with reasonable notice you get to send him home to his parents and refuse to take him in again. But if you've adopted the kid outright, however much he misbehaves, however much you regret your choice, that kid is now your son, and you would be culpable to treat him any differently from a biological child who misbehaved in the same way.
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This assumes we think illegal in migrants have much in the way of rights or that they are being violated.
Illegal immigrants don’t have a right to be in the US and they don’t have a right to an onerous process to remove them from the US.
This doesn't assume that; in fact, it doesn't assume anything whatsoever about illegal immigrants because it's not talking about them. Please reread my post. I am very specifically talking about Democrats' fear, whether unfounded or otherwise, that Trump intends to start violating the rights of citizens if they happen to be his political opponents, and treat them like he's started treating illegal immigrants. This is not the only reason people are upset about the Garcia case - they also care about the rights of illegal immigrants qua illegal immigrants - but it is the one we are talking about right now.
You might be worried about a canary in a coalmine dropping dead because you care deeply about birds, and think it's terrible that a bird has been needlessly killed by poison gas. Equally, you might find concern for the bird secondary at best to the sudden fear that you, yes you, are at risk of choking to death. I am talking about the second thing, and saying that, at the very least, Trump's rhetoric has been less than reassuring.
Yes I could worry about all sorts of things but that doesn’t make the worry rational. Worrying that an illegal properly removed but improperly given to a particular country is not close to improperly removing a citizen.
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What's ugly about it is that Americans who are not sufficiently white don't like the idea that their white coworker or whoever is basically fine with them being seized and deported to El Salvador just because they're a bit too far on his circles of concern.
Didn't Trump 2024 get more of the minority vote, particularly the Hispanic vote, than any Republican candidate in 20+ years?
If you're implying that since Hispanics voted for Trump his future policies couldn't possibly be bad for them, I refer you to Blacks voting for Democrats => shooting deaths in Black ghettoes.
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I can’t speak for Americans but an awful lot of people who are sufficiently white are very fed up with having foreigners and the children of foreigners dumped on them and being told, “these are your people now and so you must care about them”. No, they’re not and they never were. I know damn well who my people are.
Not to mention that the foreigners in question know perfectly well who their ingroup is and have spent the last ten years making it very clear that the ingroup excludes me. If we were having this conversation 15 years ago it might be quite different. But it’s way too late for that now.
All that's being asked is that you not send innocent people to prison in third world countries. I don't think it's reasonable to reject that. In some cases, foreigners are being invited to come to the US, and then being deported to El Salvador, a country they are not even citizens of. No one is asking for you to give up anything of value. You are being asked to not be inhumane.
Except that isn’t what happened here. The guy is an illegal immigrant from ES.
There have been cases of Venezuelans legally in the US being deported to El Salvador where hey we're imprisoned, with the US paying for it.
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Granted, and given ideal circumstances I agree with all of that.
What can’t and doesn’t work is having hundreds of thousands of people arrive every year and then having to follow an expensive multi-month process for every single migrant to get rid of them.
In short, how do you propose to square truly mass migration with giving each migrant due process, given real-world legal and financial constraints?
The government can hire more immigration judges. There are extremely few of them.
But you're missing the point. You can deport people without paying to have them imprisoned.
~700, which is roughly the same number as US district judges.
Taking the number of illegal immigrants as 8 million (no clue if this is accurate, but I've seen it tossed around a lot recently so just using it for ballpark math), assuming a one-hour hearing for each (longer than I think they usually get but let's be generous with "due process"), standard 8 hour work days, to process them in a single year would take 3000-3500 additional immigration judges, making them the largest group of federal judges by a huge margin if I'm reading the other numbers right.
Annual salary averages somewhere north of 150K, but using that for this lazy math would put this Immigration Judge Year at $450M in salaries. Not a crazy amount looking at DOJ's budget and other program expenses.
Obviously lots of other expenses, hiring them for a single year is a bit absurd, etc etc. Just thought it would be interesting to put some numbers to what a useful increase would look like.
If some country will take them for free. We don't have extra Australias laying around anymore.
Paying other countries to take them without strict imprisonment is also an option that seems to work somewhat for, ha, Australia.
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Well, for example, you could minimize damage by not sending deportees to foreign prisons. Just fly them out and let them off at the airport and don't let them back in again. Whether the country to which they've been returned wants them locked up is its problem and they'll have to arrest them by their own means and prove a case against them within the local justice system to do that.
Well - do we know, actually, that this isn't what happened here? I think it's pretty likely they did in fact fly to an airport and not directly to a prison, and that it's pretty likely they did in fact turn them over to El Salvadoran custody at that point. Or are you making the stronger demand that we not deport anyone who is likely to be imprisoned in their home country? Unfortunately this amounts to a demand that we provide sanctuary and extra privileges to the world's criminals, which is outrageous.
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Sure, I’m fine with that. I suspect the prison is an El Salvador requirement - one problem with deporting people (especially criminals) is that lots of countries don’t actually want these guys back. This gives El Salvador an excuse to demand payment and guarantees that the returnees won’t be a nuisance.
Unfortunately it doesn’t deal with the main problem though.
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Tough luck. The mood in the maga crowd (at least from my peers) is fuckem all. Some are even wondering how they are going to push the overton window enough to start denaturalizing citizens.
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That's the motte, where the bailey is that any individual instance of deportation is inhumane for one reason or another and the burden of proof is on the society that would like to deport the immigrants and that this proof is so onerously difficult to provide that deportations become so much more difficult relative to illegal immigrations that a positive net inflow of illegal immigrants is absolutely guaranteed.
You're the one employing the motte and bailey technique by literally changing what the argument is about when challenged. No one here is saying all deportation is inhumane. This is a distraction from the fact that the US government is sending people to foreign prisons without charge.
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They will be correct for the duration of Trump's term.
If the Democrats then take back the Presidency (and Trump's economic policy makes that likely), they might decide to keep the policy of deporting citizens to foreign prisons.
Sadly, I don't think they will have the balls to go for Trump himself, but all the J6 convicts which he pardoned would be prime candidates.
The thing about civility is that it might seem superfluous while you are in power, but you might not stay in power forever. And once a civilizational seal is broken, it is hard to reforge it. (Sure, it worked out well for the Nazis, who were given criminal trials by the Allies (and later very lenient West German judges), instead of the Allies simply rounding up everyone with a SS tattoo and gassing them (and their families, if you insist on evilness near-parity), but in general it does not.)
So I would very much prefer nobody getting deported to overcrowded foreign prisons (and especially not without a criminal trial!), as this seems to be the easiest boundary to defend.
Perhaps the previous administration should have thought of that before they threw all those J6 convicts in jail in the first place, and further went after Trump himself. Trump already knows the other side will rip right through that seal and do what they want while swearing that they aren't doing so; thus worrying about such retribution is no constraint on his actions.
It was juries and Article III judges who threw the J6 convicts in jail. They got their due process.
As I said, "will rip right through that seal and do what they want while swearing they aren't doing so. But when you're throwing people at a riot in jail for violations of a financial recordkeeping law, and throwing others in jail for "seditious conspiracy" (the words themselves evoke the Star Chamber, do they not?) related a riot that they were not even present at, the kayfabe is transparent regardess of how consistently you maintain it.
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"Due process", we got glowies pantomiming placing an explosive device backpack to shore up the RICO shit. They also had fbi glowies directing and inciting people to enter the buildings.
Without evidence, this sounds like so much tin foil.
Just saying. I'm not one to assume that any given justice system is impartial.
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What about the 20 or so people who refused to take plea-deals and and ended up being held without trial for four years until Trump re-took office?
Do you have a source for this? Both Grok and Perplexity say this claim is false.
Discussed in part here. And numerous other places more directly.
The Biden/Harris Administration's use of (or abuse depending on who you ask) of prosecutoral discretion to punish political opponents and reward allies has been a major GOP talking point for the last 4+ years.
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This sort of argument has been very common for the last decade. It's notable that the people making it seem incapable of understanding that if the argument is ignored, the thing they're warning about might actually happen, right now in the real world, and not remain forever a future hypothetical.
One is comforted by the assurance that if the dreadful things you warn of come to pass, people such as yourself will be right there, protesting them exactly as vociferously as you are now.
Or were to have to come to pass in the past.
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A crucial element of this that you're missing is that almost everybody, liberals included, wants illegal criminal gang members deported.
The reason why there's upset in this case is because there's supposed to be a robust and transparent process that validates whether or not they really are illegal aliens and criminal gang members. Such a process is so important that it's enshrined in the 5th and 6th amendments to the constitution.
They also want the Courts and Congress to prove that they're a check on the President's power. The President should only have as much power as the constitution says he should have. He should not be allowed to validate the 5th and 6th amendments by edict.
That is the Schelling Fence. The 5th and 6ths Amendments are the Schelling Fence!
They coerced the sitting president to apologize for referring to a murderer as "illegal." It's not at all clear they want anyone, no matter how violent, deported, and they certainly don't want them called illegal.
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Most sanctuary city or state policies I am aware of do not have any meaningful exceptions for criminal gang members as part of the nullification / sanctuary theories. As such, I am not convinced this claim should be taken as a basis of mutual understanding, or even shared values.
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That is not the argument. The argument is that if they deport people without due process and then once they're deported, claim they have no jurisdiction, then there is nothing stopping that from happening to American citizens. The argument is not that there is no difference between Americans and non-Americans. The argument is these deportations, specifically, can happen to Americans as well as non-Americans.
Suppose someone pointed out that Americans can have heart attacks just like non-Americans. Your argument is analogous to saying that this amounts to saying there is no meaningful difference between Americans and non-Americans. Just because two things are similar in one respect, that doesn't make them similar in all respects.
The problem is not that there is no legal obstacle. The problem is that there is no practical obstacle. It's not a slippery slope argument. They admittedly deported him by accident without any due process. There is literally nothing to prevent that from happening to an American citizen. It would be a slippery slope argument if they were saying they would target American citizens next. But the problem is that they are deporting people without regard to their legal status.
It doesn't matter if they are two morally distinct categories if there is no due process to determine under which category a given person falls. What do you even mean by morally distinct categories? I understand they are distinct legal categories, but to say they are morally distinct suggests they have different moral worth based on their citizenship, which strikes me as callous and absurd.
The US government is paying El Salvador to take, imprison, and abuse, not only its own citizens, but Venezuelan citizens as well. Of course there is a limit to what the US government should be obligated to do prevent such abuse, but it is totally reasonable to ask that they stop spending resources make the abuse happen for no benefit. The US government's treatment of its citizens (or non-citizens for that matter) is not actually unconstrained by law, but even if it were, that would not excuse its taking advantage of that fact to abuse people. One thing I find so shocking about this is, setting aside the legal questions of its responsibilities, the US government seems to have no desire to correct what it admits was a mistake. I don't understand why they are even taking up the position that they are taking, regardless of its legal merits.
I'm highly skeptical of this, but even if true, then the US government should not be deporting people to countries where it knows that people will be sent to prison without charge, nor should it be considering sending American convicts to prison in foreign countries. It's one thing to deport illegal El Salvadorans immigrants to El Salvador. It's another to deport citizens of other countries, legally resident in the US, who could be sent to a number of other countries or kept in the US. It's another to do this when it's known that they will be sent to a torture prison filled with gang members without charge. It's another to pay the El Salvadoran government to do this. It's yet another to invite them to come to the US from a safe third country and then send them to the El Salvadoran torture prison.
If you are going to argue for separation of powers, you should remember that the whole point of a democratically elected president is to avoid tyranny and to have certain powers reserved to an institution that represents the will of the people. They should be held to some kind of moral standard, if not a legal one. The point of the separation of powers is not to give carte blanche to the executive branch to do whatever it wants in its area of jurisdiction.
This is a bad system though. The US is supposed to follow the rule of law, not mob rule. That's the reason there are courts. That's the reason the law can only be changed through the legislature.
I know it's not a legal document, but I'll quote the declaration of the independence:
This is clearly inconsistent with the principle that some people are fair game to be lured into the country and then kidnapped and sent to torture prisons. The founding philosophy of the United States does not consider natural rights to be dependent on citizenship or physical location. They belong to all people. You will not get near-univeral agreement that the US government exists to deem 96% of the world's population to be without rights and free to be abused should they make the mistake of entering the reach of the US government.
See this comment in response to this point.
Whatever one may think about universal rights in an abstract philosophical sense, the fact remains that the US government is not an all-powerful deity sitting above humanity in judgement thereof, but is a collection of finite human beings who live in a particular time and place and have only a limited capacity to impose their will on the world. When the US goes around the world trying to spread democracy and human rights by force, it has generally not been very successful. It's not inconsistent to condemn human rights abuses abroad while acknowledging that the scope of the US government and its legal system ought to be limited to its citizens only.
But, returning to earth, it seems that Bukele's policies are widely approved by the people of El Salvador. On what basis can the American government (or, still less, an American judge) deny them?
Legally - not just morally - the US government's legal system is not limited to its citizens. Non-US citizens have rights in the US and the US prosecutes people outside of its borders, US citizens and non-US citizens alike.
On the basis that they are cruel and immoral. Popularity is not a justification. Moreover, if something is popular in the US and unpopular in El Salvador, it's popular in the two places considered together, since the US has 50 times El Salvador's population. If that shouldn't imply that the US gets to decide what happens in El Salvador, neither should the popularity of any given policy in either country justify the mistreatment of any minority there that objects.
But more importantly, you are ignoring the fact that the US government is paying El Salvador to imprison people that it is unnecessarily sending to El Salvador. It can stop doing either of these things at any time, yet it refuses.
The fact that the US is not all powerful is not an excuse for neglecting all moral and legal responsibilities to anyone who isn't a US citizen. The US government is not even trying to undo its mistakes. It would be one thing if the US government were taking all reasonable steps to undo the harm it has done to the people it has sent to El Salvador. Instead, it is doing everything it can to achieve the opposite.
We have Trump and Bukele sitting in a room together, amicably, with Bukele telling the press he can't force Trump to take any his prisoners and Trump telling the press he can't force Bukele to release any of his prisoners. Obviously, between the two of them, there exists the power to bring the prisoners to the US. There is no bona fide attempt on either of their parts to solve the problem. Everything you have said are excuses for subjecting people to inhumane treatment, not actual justifications for it.
Do you think Bukele’s policies were wrong?
Yes
I think you are evil in that case. For decades ES was a dangerous place run by gangs. Bukele was able to change that so now the average person can live a normal life. People aren’t being murdered left and right. They aren’t being extorted.
It seems incontrovertible to me that life is better in ES for the average person due to Bukele’s policies. So it would seem the argument is either: (1) violating so called due process is so bad that we’d rather society be a complete disaster or (2) the very few (ie probably less than 0.1%) innocently caught in the net via the policies are worth more than having a functioning society. I think we already reject the Blackstone formula in practice and while I’m willing to tolerate some process to protect the innocent it isn’t infinite and particular facts may argue against.
Now Bukele over time may turn into a negative authoritarian and at that time if criticize him.
It's been three years. The emergency for which their rights were suspended is long over. Why can't they start giving these people trials to determine if they belong in prison? Why don't they have habeas corpus? Why do they need to experience such high levels of abuse while in prison?
How could you possibly know what that number is?
That time is now.
https://apnews.com/article/bukele-salvador-crackdown-price-gouging-7e99374c444a81a4009ec09d94857d25
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If the alleged gang members had been treated more humanely (e. g. at or above the Geneva-Convention standards for POWs, long-term plan for their release following the dismantlement of the gangs), one would have been able to make the argument that the Salvadoran Government's actions were justified.
The actual conditions to which the alleged gang members have been subjected would not have been justified even had they been convicted beyond any doubt in regular trials, and were definitely not justified given the looser standards of evidence allowed.
Ok, ES tries a different, more humane method, BUT, for every gang murder above the current base rate, one Humane Prisons Advocate gets executed. You first.
Would you accept this deal?
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Why? These gang members made ES a living hell for the people. Why do we have such empathy for evil people but effectively zero empathy for good people who had to endure the wrongs brought about by evil people?
ES is a relatively poor country. They tried for decades applying “human rights” and all it got them was a country run by gangs. Now the average person can actually live a normal decent life. And the rate of mistake on gang members is incredibly low (thankfully for ES the gang members decided to cover themselves in specific tats making their appearance obvious).
I just don’t see the moral argument that ES ought to treat these gang members okay.
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Given that he was an El Salvadoran national, where else could he be removed to? Are there other countries stepping up to accept deportees on El Salvador's behalf? If the answer is a legal catch-22 where he gets to stay despite being eligible for deportation, then I have no choice but to reject the legitimacy of the process that produces that outcome.
He would have been eligible, if ICE had had its own immigration courts reassess the threat to him; the fuckup is that they didn't.
If the courts are ICE's own, this emphasizes rather than undercuts the legal catch-22 characterization. Then this is not an issue of lack of authorities or fundamental human rights, but merely misfiled paperwork. If the issue is merely misfiled paperwork, then it may be a fuckup but hardly the most egregious or the most damaging of the last half decade, or even the last half year.
Note- I do buy into to the Court's position on the process issues. I am speaking instead on the basis of the political reaction.
The political reaction is, of course, devoid of nuance. However, as was pointed out in many replies to the top level commenter, Trump and Bukele refusing to remedy the problem, despite it being very easy to do so, sets a genuinely dangerous precedent.
The district court is ignoring the SCOTUS ruling so I don’t see the problem.
In what way? Source?
My source is the opinion. If you read the SCOTUS opinion closely they didn’t say the ruling required removal to the US; instead they said facilitate removal from ES and then treat the case as if he was deported to that specific country. They then said she needed to carefully draw the ruling to not be over road or transgress Art II. It screamed “write a more narrow order.”
The district judge just said yolo I was proven correct. That isn’t true.
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Setting the side the question of how this fiasco, itself, affected his safety in El Salvador, I don't see a procedural problem with returning him to the USA, for the purposes of the "Article III" District Court investigating ICE compliance with court orders, followed by ICE having its "Administrative" immigration court reassess Garcia's original claim of threats to him in El Salvador and, if they no longer applied, re-deporting him. Bringing him back, so that ICE could follow the correct process to re-deport him would be embarrassing to ICE, but it's their fuckup, so...
Seems more embarrassing to your faction. "Look at this pointless waste of time and resources that we had to do because Other Team only cares about abusing the rules to help illegal alien gang members."
Do you really think this would generally serve to increase respect for norms around due process?
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Sure, but he's not under U.S. jurisdiction. I don't see that we have any obligation to bust him out of prison over the objection of El Salvador.
Inasmuch as El Salvador is acting as an agent of the USA's Executive branch, they should be willing to release him (were Trump and Bukele acting in good faith). It's not as though he was released as a free man, then arrested by local police for unrelated reasons.
It is not. El Salvador is a sovereign country, mate, not a Yankee colony.
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I'm surprised it's legal to physically remove someone from the US without a court hearing right before they get shoved onto a plane to at least confirm identity and that a legal basis exists to deport them.
I would expect the absence of this to make the judiciary pretty mad and for ICE agents to be found in contempt if they keep doing it after admonishment.
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In which case the proper remedy is legislation, not unilateral action.
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There are other countries in the world with provisions for accepting asylum seekers. Besides, Trump was already paying El Salvador to take him and the other deportees; if all else fail you could pay a different country to take the guy.
For the alternative to exist the alternative must be identifiable. Who else has agreed to take payment for American deportations?
I don't think it's reasonable to ask for a list of people who've agreed to an offer that hasn't been made. But I'd be surprised if Bukele was the only guy in the world willing to say yes. The US is very rich, most countries are very poor. I'm not saying "send him to Belgium", here. Send him to Nigeria or something. Bribing the relevant Nigerian authorities would probably cost less than the plane flight itself.
That's odd of you. On both ends.
Truly your understanding of the global south shines. If only the Europeans had such business acumen as you in their attempts.
What makes you think El Salvador is the only country in the world willing to take the deal? Why would it be? This is a wild take to me.
That would probably because you have wild takes on the reasonableness of justifying your own claims or knowing deportation politics in Africa (or Latin America).
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Well I think everyone accepts that this particular person was here illegally and subject to deportation. The argument is on where he was supposed to removed to. That seems very different from your concern.
No, you'd be amazed at the number of people who think he was legally here, including a right to work.
Wait, was he not granted a work permit? That is what I read, e.g., here
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Which probably explains the fear—I don’t have the due process concerns for people that are factually illegals.
We can’t as a country have a massive amount of process to remove people who willfully and easily crossed the border. I guess you can’t make it really painful to be an illegal but that will just make life more difficult for people who ought to be here.
In short, some process is due illegals but I don’t think it ought to be significant.
'Extensive' instead of 'significant', perhaps?
A chance to contest expulsion on grounds of citizenship isn't necessarily an extensive process (check key record databases), but it is significant.
The current state seems to be years of litigation.
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That just isn’t true.
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Specifically, the argument is whether he was supposed to be removed to El Salvador. This whole thing could have been avoided if they sent him somewhere else with no torture-prisons.
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I mean, anything could accidentally happen to anyone, sure. Do we abolish the police because police could accidentally arrest you? Or accidentally even kill you? Nope
We have probable cause, habeas corpus, the presumption of innocence, and the right to a quick and fair trial, which all serve to prevent such mistakes and to minimize their harms. The US government has a set up a system where there is no due process nor recourse for the people it deports, citizens or not.
Again, sounds like an issue for the legislature or executive branch to figure out
The courts have no jurisdiction on foreign matters. If you don’t like it, take it up with the constitution or perhaps El Salvadors government?
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We did spend an awful lot of time and effort making it harder for them to do so, yeah? From English common law to bodycams. Incentives matter, and the incentives for the federal government to avoid deporting citizens ought to be pretty strong!
The about-face on that one has been darkly humorous.
I’m not up to date on it. Was there a pivot after BLM? Or are you referring to the popularity of bodycam footage among a subset of the right wing?
Yeah, bodycams got a boost as one of the top 10 recommendations of Campaign Zero. On their archived website you can find that they've changed their mind because it doesn't reduce use of force (indeed, it tends to justify it) and mention that they previously tracked it as a positive move, but it's not mentioned at all on the new website.
The popularity of bodycam footage on the right is directly correlated to the turn against it on the left. Both are, frankly, gross.
What’s gross about it?
From the right, I find reveling in violence, particularly for Outgroup reasons, off-putting. Bodycams are a useful tool, but treating the footage as entertainment isn't healthy.
From the left, I find such clear rejection of reality disturbing.
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Good thing that didn’t happen then
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No, but we might want to reform it if they kept accidentally killing people, then saying "yeah, we weren't supposed to do that, sorry. we won't make any reparations or apologize or nothing, though. yeah, it'll probably happen again. no, we don't care".
Sure, reform it through the legislative branch then. The courts have no jurisdiction.
But beware what you wish for. Making it even harder to deport people when you’re already 20+ million behind in the docket is no bueno senior (although maybe that’s what you’re hoping for)
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If the police accidentally arrest you, they are supposed to let you out. If they accidentally kill you, they may have to pay out a settlement if they lose a court case. If you get deported when you shouldn't have been, apparently there's no takebacks and no remedy of any kind and none are even possible in theory.
If the police were allowed to shoot anyone they wanted with zero consequences, that would be bad.
Sounds like a problem for the legislative or executive branch to solve! These judges need to stand back and stand down
The executive branch deported this guy despite the fact that the executive branch said the guy can't be deported, which according to the law passed by the legislative branch, should have prevented him from being deported.
The entire function of the judiciary is to redress grievances of this kind.
Actually the judicial branch has no jurisdiction here, as they themselves have admitted
The Supreme Court certainly did not say that. They said the District Court overstepped, not that they had no jurisdiction at all.
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They did solve it. The order prohibiting removal to El Salvador wasn't an equitable remedy the judge made up on the spot; it was pursuant to US law. If the legislative branch wants to change the law, then fine, but until they do that, Trump should be making every reasonable effort to get the guy back.
Courts have admitted they can’t compel the administration on foreign matters. It’s up to El Salvador to release him now.
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There seems to be a big problem in the fact that the only reason that Abrego is in El Salvador is the United States government, of its own accord, sent him there. It’s not a case of him flying to El Salvador for vacation and being picked up in the commission of a crime (which happened to a WNBA player who flew to Russia and had drugs on her person during a custom inspection). It’s also not a case of an American in another country taking up arms against our country. Abrego, had the government not shipped him to El Salvador would be living in Maryland and raising his kids quietly. I’m not sure about the state of tge law here, but at least in the moral sense, if the US government is tge reason he’s in that prison, then there’s a good reason to think a judge can order tge government to provide due process and bring him back to face a judge in America. I’d even find it acceptable to send a judge, prosecutor and defense lawyer to El Salvador to have tge hearing there.
He was illegally present in the US. Had the government not shipped him to El Salvador, the government would have legally shipped him somewhere else (or cancelled the ban and then shipped him to El Salvador). He certainly wouldn't be in Maryland, unless the government ignored its own immigration laws.
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Given he illegally entered the US and is a Salvadoran citizen why shouldn’t the US govt be able to send him back to his native country?
Furthermore why wouldn’t this logic extend to any extradited foreign national who experienced conditions he / she didn’t like once returned to their home country?
They sent him to a prison they didn’t let him off at the airport. That isn’t just “conditions he didn’t like”, again this is a prison. And furthermore, this is at the behest of our government, and as such, the argument that “whelp, he’s in another country now, so despite the judge saying he gets a hearing and ordering us to return him, there’s nothing we can do.”
The Salvadoran government, his government, can release him whenever they want.
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Well generally if you’re “extradited” you’re not going anywhere but a court room or jail…
but I guess you could do what the UK does and not deport criminal aliens because they might get in trouble at home
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Because black letter US law prohibited it. An immigration judge issued a withholding of removal as regarded Abrego Garcia and El Salvador. If the Trump administration wanted to get that withholding removed there is a legal process, that they did not follow, to do that. The regional ICE field director submitted a sworn statement that his removal was unlawful. The government's own lawyer admitted it in a hearing before the judge. Whatever you think ought to be the case as a policy matter, the law straightforwardly forbade the Trump admin's actions.
What law specifically?
8 USC 1231(b)(3)(A). An immigration judge, using the Attorney General's delegated authority, found Abrego Garcia would be threatened if removed to El Salvador and granted a withholding a removal. There is not even an allegation by the government or anyone else that they followed any part of the procedure for revising this decision before they removed him. See also Johnson v. Guzman Chavez.
If authority is delegated by the Attorney General than it is ultimately the Attorney General's call whether Garcia can be removed. Someone should call Pam Bondi and inform her of the situation.
Yes. There is a process for Bondi to overturn the determination of an IJ and if that process had occurred before his removal, there is no question it would have been lawful.
Is that process defined by Congress, or by executive policymaking? Admittedly it could be some combination of both (policy specifically to implement details called out in law).
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That's not a law. You're stretching.
You want to sat precedent and a judgment, sure.
This is why things like the Supreme Court exists.
The U.S. Code is, quite literally, the law of the land.
A judge made a interpretation. Other parts of the justice system disagrees.
This isn't nearly as cut and dry as you're trying to make it out to be.
Please read the rest of my comment
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Can you tell me in what sense it is not a law? It was passed by Congress in 1952 as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act. If this isn't a law, what is?
I suspect a confusion between U.S.C and C.F.R.
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Is there any caselaw on this? If not, bringing the question to SCOTUS is the thing to do, and everyone should want an answer, because "Citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories" has no bearing on "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us."
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I’m not so sure that fits this particular case (it’s a better match for Mahmoud Khalil IMO). I think the deeper controversy is about what level of process is necessary to permanently remove someone from US jurisdiction.
Trump has dropped plenty of hints that he is thinking about sending American citizens to El Salvador prisons.
Until he makes any kind of effort at doing so, this seems much more likely to be a cruel taunt. Trump is much more understandable once you grasp that he's essentially a right-wing John Oliver type, but less stupid.
I am so frustrated by this argument. It's always "he's just joking/trolling/taunting, your TDS is showing" right up until he does it. Then, it's immediately "he's been saying this all along, what did you expect?! This is what we voted for." I don't know if this quotidian gaslighting is invisible to those who engage in it, or if they do so willingly because triggering the libs is fun. Either way, it's absolute poison to discourse and the sharing of sincerely held ideas.
You know what's poison to discourse? Being expected to take every bit of speculative, hysterical catastrophizing with more deadly seriousness than actual things that literally happened. Member when the president had a 16 year old US citizen murdered by flying robot assassin? I member. How does that compare to an off-hand comment that was immediately followed with caveats about legality? Is it a thousand times worse? A million? Are you going to take those caveats as deadly serious evidence of Trump's deadly serious concern for the law? Of course not.
I don’t think we’re going to find any common ground, but I apologize for calling you a sycophant. That was uncalled for.
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I don’t think you or any of his other sycophants have any place to call out “hysterical catastrophizing” after painstakingly justifying every abhorrent thing this man does. When the catastrophe actually happens, you’ll be here, typing away about how good and necessary it is.
Argue without the namecalling.
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The catastrophe has already happened. Nobody knows how big exactly the Biden cross-border invasion has been, but it probably will have effects for decades down the line. We've got literally violent foreign gangs taking over neighborhoods in the US. We've got tens of thousands of migrants sent to tiny towns where there's no chance they can be properly assimilated. We've got one of the major parties not only completely normalizing ignoring the law and brazenly bragging about "resisting" the law enforcement, but actively working to make the maximum amount of foreign violent criminals and sociopaths to stay on US territory, and willing to destroy any institution in the nation that stands in the way. We've got higher education institutions taken over by people openly advocating genocide, violently rioting without any consequences and physically attacking anybody who looks like a Jew. And that's only a small sample of the political violence we're seeing right now. That sounds a lot like something that I'd call a catastrophe.
As to the “cross-border invasion,” I don’t think we’re going to find any common ground, because this sounds to me more like a fever dream than any description of reality. I live in a border state and haven’t any kind of “invasion” like you’re describing.
As to your other examples of excesses on the left, I couldn’t agree more! I hate that shit too! I’m in academia and argue with my colleagues about it all the time. But I don’t understand the point you’re making. We can open up the file cabinet and pull out all the worst examples of political violence and extremism over the years, but those are in a separate category from the excesses and extremism coming from the President of the United States.
This is because you choose to ignore the reality for ideological reasons. People do that all the time, nothing surprising.
People lived in the Soviet Union and didn't see any lack of freedoms that the lying Western press was talking about. Moreover, I am sure there are a lot of people of North Korea which don't see any totalitarian regime, just the glorious rule of the Beloved Chairman. The key difference is: this has been largely done to them by somebody else, and they'd risk severe consequences if they waked up. You do it to yourself willingly and risk nothing but feeling a little silly. And yet...
In 2015, there was about 300K illegal migrant encounters on the southern border. In 2023, there were over 3.2 million. That doesn't count people being literally brought in the country by the planeload and released in random communities - without any vetting, proper immigration process (I know something about that, being a legal immigrant myself) or sensible oversight. That doesn't account for complete refusal of the collective left to acknowledge there even exists such a thing as immigration law anymore (just listen how Dem politicians spoke about illegal migration some 10-15 years ago - they were proper firebrands, nobody is above the law! Now they only remember this when they need to cook up another investigation against Trump).
I think my very first sentence was clear enough? We are already living in the catastrophical environment. The catastrope - at least for those people who are not willingly blind, like you are - has already very evidently happened and very perceivable. All that have been happening for the last decade-and-a-half is not normal. It is not what should be happening in a proper country, regardless of ideological differences.
Nope. To fix the catastrophe, you need to act unlike you'd act in a normal situation. If your neighbor parks their car somewhere that inconveniences you, the right way is to politely ask them to move their car. If your neighbor parks in front of a fire hydrant while your house is on fire, then the firemen would break the car's windows and run the hose through. Impolite, but necessary. Now imagine this neighbor actively impedes the firemen from extinguishing the fire, runs around spilling gasoline and brags about it because you are, in his eyes, an evil person whose house deserves to burn, and also there's nothing bad in a good fire, as long as the right people are getting burned. Would you try to handle this the most polite way possible? Likely not. What has been happening is not normal, and thus we get somebody who is not acting in a usual way to fix it. Because fixing it in normal ways has been tried and failed, many times over. So yes, these "excesses" are very much the same category - it's these excesses, continuing and multiplying for decades, what convinced people (including myself) that what has been done before - nominating and electing polite, smooth talking, consensus-seeking people who would try to solve things in polite, consensual, mutually beneficial ways - is not working, and actually threatening the society's very existence.
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A catastrophe like straight up murdering a minor citizen? Should I follow the other side's MO and just ignore inconvenient events like my augmented reality censors them away? Or an abhorrent catastrophe like deporting an illegal alien with a deportation order... to the wrong place?
You guys have been breathlessly, hysterically screaming about endless catastrophes, a new one every week, for literally every week the man has been in office. Remember when he was going to put all the gays in camps and legalize rape and Handmaiden's Tale and kill all the Muslims and start WW3 and start WW3 and start WW3? Of course not. Because remembering all the failed hysterical catastrophizing might offer some perspective.
Who is "you guys"? @cheesecake_llama calling "you guys" sycophants is not good, and neither is you generalizing right back.
There is nothing to be gained by an exchange consisting of little more than sneers about which side is more in denial and cultish.
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I criticized the “Handmaiden’s Tale” chicken little-ing on “my team” for years, because unlike the MAGA cult, I don’t feel any compulsion to twist myself into defending whatever insane bullshit “my team” decides to push any given week.
Nobody is crying about an alien simply being improperly deported, don’t be disingenuous. Administrative errors happen, I get it. The problem is that he was sent indefinitely to a torture-prison without due process, while the the government is arguing at the same time that 1: they want to send citizens to the same place, and 2: if they fuck up, there is literally no remedy.
I’d just like you to imagine if Biden or Obama were advocating this sort of thing. The people on this website would be calling for armed rebellion.
Well, you didn't do it here under that name. If you can link a single example elsewhere, I'll be thrilled to be wrong.
Sorry, just need to stop to clarify here. The prison you're talking about is the one that turned El Salvador from a murder capitol of the world to safer than Sweden, right?
Do you hate the El Salvadoran people? Do you want them to be tortured and murdered en masse by rapacious warlords and banditos? Victimized and preyed upon in even greater amounts? Or is this just the meme?
If not, then maybe that stark difference ought to be taken into account.
And even then, I still don't buy your take. Let's establish some facts. He was deported to his home country, and his own government imprisoned him, as they do with everyone affiliated with the rapacious warlords who murdered and terrorized a fuckton of their people. He already had multiple days in court before judges, and had a deportation order.
Imagine if the US government had caught the "not to El Savador" clause in time, then had a quick hearing where it was determined that his asylum claim was obviously false, and the grounds for the "not to El Salvador" clause were obviously voided by the changed facts on the ground (e.g. his mother no longer owned the business, and the gang he claimed would harm him no longer exists).
Would you suddenly be OK with him being deported?
If we deported him somewhere else, and that country then deported him back to El Salvador, would you be OK with that?
Because your actual logic looks a lot like "We can't deport this criminal, because his native country will do normal things they do to criminals to him", and that might be literally the most perverse logic I've ever heard. Again, it comes back to endless empathy for offenders, and none at all for the people they hurt. It's so fucked up I'm not even appalled. I hit some overflow error and ended up reluctantly impressed at the evil clown logic.
And again, NONE OF THIS justifies being worried about citizens being deported.
Per our prior correspondence, which you ignored, Obama did things many times worse (e.g. assassinating a minor citizen for fun) and I never heard anyone call for armed rebellion over it.
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How do you think abhorrent things a politician does should be addressed? Can you outline a few steps based on the brought up example of Obama executing an American citizen without a trial, and killing his innocent 16 year old son in the process, and provide a few links that show how you have followed those steps yourself?
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Frankly, it’d be great if we could send duly convicted violent federal inmates to El Salvador: cheaper, more pain for the inmate and therefore most just, and better deterrence.
With that said, I’ll stick with shipping a bunch of people out with limited due process. It can’t be that millions can come but it takes a hundreds of hours to deport one by one. You make a mockery of the law in that context.
Alright, I’m crossing the streams.
We need to take the regulatory shackles off of AMERICAN correctional institutions instead of shipping our prisoners overseas for cheap. Our national security is at risk if we don’t have a vibrant and flourishing prison industrial base. We cannot entrust foreign nations with our incarceratory needs forever.
The prison trade deficit with Latin America is enormous! The US is paying them to keep their prisoners, but they don't reciprocate and pay the US to keep their prisoners, leading to a prisoner trade deficit!
Frankly, they are ripping the US off, and the obvious solution is to slap on punitive tariffs on the "import" of prison cells until the US can provide the cheapest prison cells!
I think this is my favorite riff on this yet. You should make a meme of it.
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Lol. That’s funny. Not sure if you are serious though. I like the idea of offshoring jails.
I’m not against the idea of a penal colony, but sending prisoners into the hands of foreign sovereigns is inherently risky.
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Make Alcatraz Gated Again!
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No, that is literally Trump's position as of this morning.
I think plenty of people might argue this if the US government initiates and continues to fund a citizen's foreign imprisonment, after admitting that it was done in error.
Putting aside the merits of this in particular, there is an obvious difference between drone striking a citizen who is residing outside the United States to avoid capture, and the US government deporting a citizen from the United States to a different country and then killing him.
I eagerly await the "swift, universal" backlash to the President's comments this morning.
This entire post is completely backward, because you somehow miss that this is expressly not about factionalism. It is a legitimate concern over the exercise and limitations of executive power. The administration argues (explicitly!) that it can apply this power to anyone it chooses. That should concern everyone in the body politic, no matter who precisely you think comprises it.
Similar to "a country without borders isn't a country" and other such thought-terminating cliches, “...morally speaking there is no nation...” is an equivocation—confusing sociopolitical fragmentation with moral illegitimacy—to avoid confronting the actual argument being made here.
Someone convicted in a U.S. criminal court (and provided reasonable time to appeal) has been provided with ample due process.
Garcia was not.
Garcia was not in the country legally.
The interviewer asks Trump if he would deport someone who was in the country legally and he responds "if they are criminals, yes"
If it were just that it would be uncontroversial; criminal aliens are often deportable. But he said he'd deport American citizens also. Exile, last I checked, is not a lawful punishment for any crime.
Why? Eighth Amendment? A cursory search did not find any case law on the matter.
No crime specifies exile as punishment. I know of no law that purported to exile a citizen; Trop v. Dulles struck down forfeiture of citizenship as punishment, but that's not quite the same thing.
I would consider removal to a foreign prison, perhaps with access to petition the court via writing, to be a form of exile.
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Replying to myself that according to Grok it appears the Court has rejected denationalization only for natural citizens, but exile doesn't appear to have been discussed.
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Wait, I'm a little confused here: is the foreign country in this case holding him for any reason other than on the USA's request?
Well he’s a Salvadoran citizen so presumably they can do what they want with their own citizens….
Yep.
I still remain a bit confused as to why the onus remains on the U.S. to seek his release.
Even if a U.S. Judge asserts jurisdiction and El Salvador chooses to humor this, a non-U.S. citizen being held by a non-U.S. country is not something we'd expect U.S. Judges to devote resources towards without some strong U.S. interests at stake.
The actual basis on and circumstances under which he was arrested and removed might bear scrutiny, but let us say that the Judge does determine he was wrongfully removed. Seems like the remedy is to release him and he can find his own way from there.
If a foreign national is being held in an El Salvadoran prison, then their home country ought to be the one they're contacting to seek release.
The emotional component becomes clearer to me when I flip the script. Imagining some random U.S. citizen sneaks into, I dunno, Italy. They catch him but a judge rules he can't be removed for the time being, and he marries an Italian lady and has some young kids in the meantime, but never goes through the naturalization process.
Then the next Italian Prime Minister comes in and actively starts deporting migrants, but not necessarily to their home countries. If the U.S. Citizen ends up in an Albanian prison, do we actually expect him to cry to the Italian government to bring him back? Does anyone really feel like a U.S. citizen is entitled to activate the Italian Justice system to come to his rescue?
OR more absurdly if Italy ships him to the U.S. and has the U.S. agrees to hold him in prison, do we really, REALLY think he's going to succeed by asking Italian courts to intervene, rather than taking it up directly with the U.S. government to get himself released and, lets say, his wife and kids brought over here?
The weight of the argument in favor of bringing Abrego Garcia back seems to be
If we discard those arguments, if Garcia is released, only "LEGAL" positions (not really moral ones) that make sense are that he could try to return to the U.S. on his own dime and through legal channels, or he can return 'home' and bring his wife and kids with him to reunite the family.
The comparable scenario would be if Italy was paying the US government for use of US prisons and sent an American citizen who had illegally immigrated to Italy, due to a procedural fuckup, and Italy's judiciary told the executive they were procedually required to request his return. If it's an intra-Italian government procedural dispute and the US government is acting as an agent of Italy, rather than imprisoning the American of its own prerogative, what then?
Setting the side the question of how this fiasco, itself, affected his safety in El Salvador, I don't see a procedural problem with returning him to the USA, for the purposes of the "Article III" District Court investigating ICE compliance with court orders, followed by ICE having its "Administrative" immigration court reassess Garcia's original claim of threats to him in El Salvador and, if they no longer applied, re-deporting him. Bringing him back, so that ICE could follow the correct process to re-deport him would be embarrassing to ICE, but it's their fuckup, so...
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Well, okay, but, like. Bukele is a dictator and the prison is a human-rights-violating hellhole, right?
We're clear on that?
Because it feels relevant to the case. "Apologies to the guy who we mistakenly paid for Stalin to put in a Siberian gulag, our bad. However, being from the Baltics, he should really be seeking redress from the legitimate Soviet government for any wrongful imprisonment and torture, not from us" is… kind of a non-starter?
Like, I get the US Gov can't really acknowledge this point on an official, diplomatic level. Nobody wants to go to war with fucking El Salvador. "Third World prisons are horrible torture-gulags and the POTUS is still expected to shake the President's hand on camera when we need a trade deal signed" is a fact of life. But when it comes to ordinary truth-seeking citizens like ourselves discussing the ethics of the case, we should really drop the pretense that Garcia has a snowball's chance in Hell of getting genuine due process from Bukele's government. It's either help from the U.S. or he never sees his kids again. Let's be realistic.
No.
Not right. Partisan hyperbole squared, even, due to how much of the American media that carries that tune gets it in turn from Bukele's own political opposition. That political opposition in turn has its own partisan interests in characterizing their defeat as illegitimate, in hopes that a sympathetic US administration will overthrow the popularly elected leader to their partisan benefit.
There are people in this thread saying that they approve of the fact that it's a torture prison, that we should make American prisons more torturous, and even that getting a death sentence in the US is probably preferable to being sent to the Salvadoran prison. "The Salvadoran prison is awful" does not seem to be a claim exclusive to a left-wing media bubble.
To put the question another way - I mean - are you confident about your chances of seeing daylight again if you were thrown in jail by the Bukele government on vague, spurious suspicion of being connected to a gang in some way? I'm not sure there's enough money in the world to make me chance it.
Ah, but that wasn't your original claim now, was it? Nor was it even the only claim.
And thus we watch the retreat from the bailey to the motte.
Is there a reason to believe vague and spurious suspicions are relevant metaphors for this case? After all, the claim of being a gang member comes from the deportee, which was both the grounds of his non-deportation order but also non-asylum.
Yes it was. My original claim which you disputed was "Bukele is a dictator and the prison is a human-rights-violating hellhole". "The Salvadoran prison is awful" is a shorter way of restating the same thing: "awful" is short for "a human-rights-violating hellhole" and anyone who runs human-rights-violating hellholes is, ipso facto, a dictator.
…?? Source, please? I thought everyone here agreed that the claim that Garcia was a gang member originated with an anonymous informant for US law enforcement in 2019.
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If that's the position, careful about admitting that a human-rights-violating hellhole run by a dictator strongman can actually fix a country's crime problem with minimal side impacts.
And of course, the U.S. will negotiate the release of its citizens from Russia itself while Russia is public enemy numero uno, the Soviet example falls kind of flat.
And of course of course, the U.S. had its own secret impenetrable dictator prison for foreign nationals in Gitmo, so we should be showing just as much objection there, no?
Do you genuinely believe the self-declared "World's Coolest Dictator" enforcing a 3-years-and-counting "State of Exception" to defendants' rights (6 or 7 years after the homicide rate had begun its rapid decline) had "minimal side impacts?"
Yes.
I keep poking around for any indication that there's real repression of opposing parties or resistance to his regime from actually aggrieved groups. I come up empty. Happy to read firsthand accounts of abuse, but I really want to know if the country is doing 'better' or not in the aggregate.
The Wikipedia page for his most recent election doesn't even suggest that he had to fudge numbers to win overwhelmingly. There were active protests against him that didn't get arrested or repressed. No political opponents were arrested.
I don't know what 'side effects' you're suggesting came downstream of the crackdown, ESPECIALLY with regard to the average citizen's daily experience in the country.
And as stated, the U.S. has its own black spot in Gitmo, and the left has virtually stopped even mentioning these days.
I would accuse them of very, VERY selective criticism on this point.
On a purely practical basis, if your choices are between a 'tyrannical' gang that kills 4000+ people per year, or a 'tyrannical' president who imprisons the guys who were doing the killing, even if it sweeps up some folks who probably don't deserve it, what is the OBVIOUS choice for the citizen who has been terrorized by the former for years?
"oh no El Presidente might abuse all this power he's being handed, better to let the completely unaccountable and aggressively violent gang continue operating than risk a dictator!"
Am I suggesting that there's no in-between options? Nah.
I am suggesting that liberals have failed to present such a workable option and it is not surprising that the El Salvadorans have been delighted to have the gang problem solved.
What about this guy? Perhaps not directly related to the election... but perhaps had a chilling effect.
Some travelogues that may interest you:
Matt Lakeman's Notes on El Salvador
Snowden Todd's Sojourn
A video travelogue by an ethnonationalist or enthonationalist-sympathist (I don't care enough to figure out his precise views) who's even more adventurous than Lakeman (the website is a somewhat reliable proxy for youtube - if none of the backends are working, when you try it, there's a link to the youtube url, below the video)
My impression is that "the man on the street" considers "mano dura" to be a net improvement, but not an unalloyed good. What side impacts are major or minor is a matter of opinion, of course, so I don't care to quibble about the appropriate threshold.
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The initial sweep may be justifiable with "desperate times deserve desperate measures". But once the immediate murder-emergency is over, he should be trying to separate out anyone who just got caught up in it; of course he is not, saying anyone he put in CECOT stays there for life. And he certainly shouldn't be imprisoning someone who was supposedly in a gang in the US on the say-so of some US confidential informant; that can't be justified by the emergency.
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The side-impact is that you have torture-prisons. Torture-prisons are bad. We shouldn't have them because they are unacceptable in and of themselves to anyone with a conscience; not because they wouldn't work, or because they would have unacceptable second-order effects. As with most things in life, there is a classic British comedy sketch about this.
(Although as side-effects on non-criminals go, people who lived under Soviet regimes tend to agree that living with the gnawing fear that you might get thrown in the torture-prison yourself if an apparatchik thinks you gave them a funny look is a pretty heavy toll on any innocent citizen's everyday well-being.)
In any case this isn't meant to be an argument that we absolutely must free Garcia. Just that the oft-repeated "he should be petitioning the Bukele government, not America" thing is delusional at best and bad-faith at worst. If it's not America's responsibility to save some possibly-innocent Salvadoran from being tortured in El Salvador, fine. "There are plenty of other Salvadorans being tortured right now, Garcia should never have been allowed on US soil, once he's been sent back his fate will be the same as any other Salvadoran's and if we don't intervene to save the others we have no reason to intervene to save him; que sera sera" is a coherent position. But let's not pretend he has some other way out. Pleading for American help and hoping the US will bite is the only thing anyone in his situation can do, whether or not he's actually entitled to it.
The previous problem was having literally thousands of people murdered on a yearly basis.
Having literally thousands of people murdered is bad.
And probably worse than torture-prisons, since the people doing the murdering had even less accountability.
Convince me that moving from "unnaccountable warlords murdering innocents" to "warlords and their subordinates [and probably some innocents] getting tortured in a hellish prision" is actually NOT an improvement in pure utilitarian terms.
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I’m actually not sure. He is a Salvadorian National and a suspected gang member. The Bukele government might want him in jail anyways.
Might. I think it's relevant to ask if they do, independently of the Trump admin, want him in jail.
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Indeed: https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/nx-s1-5364502/trump-bukele-el-salvador-deportation
"The question is preposterous: how can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?" Bukele said.
And video, the quote goes longer: https://x.com/Osint613/status/1911845751606423938
"We're not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. You want us to go back to releasing criminals, so we go back to being the murder capitol of the world?"
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If the US government can extrajudicially murder you with a drone (Anwar al-Awlaki) who was an actual American citizen, then it's difficult to argue that its remit is constrained in alien nationals abroad.
Granted, the way he was removed was probably not good, procedurally, but once you're off American soil, questions of jurisdiction render that a moot point.
The US government in that case did go to the effort to confirm the individual actually was a member of a terrorist organization.
It was an act of war against an enemy combatant on foreign soil, not law enforcement.
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And the Obama administration's legal justification was criticized by people across the political spectrum for being extremely weak, at best.
Anwar al-Awlaki is sort of a foreign affairs Tony Timpa; it's a bit of a tribal indicator to bring him up or even be aware of the case.
What tribes do each indicate?
In my experience, there's an overlap in the Venn diagram of both indicates a certain kind of contrarian anti-woke type. The non-overlapping section for al-Awlaki would be anti-war leftists, and for Timpa more Online Right.
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Not by significant portions of either side. The ACLU criticized it, but I don't recall any other mainstream institutions on the left speaking out. And on the right it was only libertarian types, who no one has listened to for decades.
Within the small proportion of the population that cares enough about the rights of the worst scoundrels to read OWHC memos, the criticism was bipartisan/apolitical. Do you recall anyone publicly endorsing reasoning in the memo?
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Perhaps the federal government should be allowed neither to extrajudicially drone-murder its citizens, nor to arbitrarily deport residents without checking who they are.
Who's going to stop them?
Congress? (Ha!)
Seriously, I wish I knew how we (as a society) could push in that direction, but it’s hard to see it happening in reality. It’s a nice thought though, isn’t it?
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The barn door has been flung open and sent flying a dozen miles by the tornado at this point. Trump really should ask his critics whether or not they'd prefer him to send Reaper drones after illegal immigrants: maybe they can patrol the border and fire hellfire missiles at groups of people crossing the border at odd times of the day.
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