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PaperclipPerfector  14d ago (text post)   32113 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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If the government managed to bring him back, sticks him before an immigration judge who says "Your asylum claims are no longer valid due to changed facts on the ground, assuming they ever were, it's fine to execute the deportation order to El Salvador", then is everyone who is upset about this going to nod sagaciously and be satisfied that due process was followed?

Yes, I think that would be amazing. The guy came to the country illegally, and he was also deported illegally, by the government's own repeated admission, given the withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador. If the government took steps to only send him to El Salvador after getting the withholding order revoked by due process, that would be a dramatic improvement to the current state of affairs.

If they get him out of El Salvador and dump him six feet across the border in Honduras, does that fix everything?

I think that would be also be a dramatic improvement, for obvious reasons.

Back to Garcia, what "options" remain after the government of El Salvador has declined to release him? Do the courts expect special forces to exfiltrate a foreign national from a foreign prison?

Given that we are paying El Salvador to hold him, presumably we have some say in this. For starters, we could stop paying.

I'm honestly baffled how people justify this to themselves as anything other than naked "rules for thee but not for me". Does it actually feel, inside, like standing on principle and not just grasping at any procedural trick at hand?

And I'm honestly surprised to read this, since I could say the same about those putting forward technical arguments in defense of the government. It frankly did not really occur to me that the government might actually believe in or care about the legal merits of its case.

Perhaps we can agree that the vast majority of people on either side of this are using legal arguments as soldiers, and that the real disagreement is about something else - something to do with whether we ought to have any sympathy for this man and whether the US has any obligation to him, morally.

Yes, I think that would be amazing. The guy came to the country illegally, and he was also deported illegally, by the government's own repeated admission, given the withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador. If the government took steps to only send him to El Salvador after getting the withholding order revoked by due process, that would be a dramatic improvement to the current state of affairs.

Is the number of people who think this way above 100 in the country? The judge who has issued many orders to Trump certainly is not in this camp. That judge intends, once Maryland Man is back in the US, to keep him here forever. As do his lawyers. His wife, maybe, maybe she prefers whatever monetary payment she thinks the judge will order for her. But still she doesn't expect the result you are talking about.

What everyone expects to happen is that, if this person returns to the US, he will never leave the US. Or, if he does, it will be after a decades long legal process where Amy Coney Barret and John Roberts issue multiple rulings where they clearly articulate that they are sick of hearing cases about Mr. Garcia, but also are completely unclear about the remaining portions of their ruling.

Is the number of people who think this way above 100 in the country?

I would also approve of this. I would also be perfectly content with the US government bringing him back, and then sending him to some other willing or bribed country.

Edit: so if there's already 2 in this tiny space, I'm guessing there are at least 10s of thousands of us.

Edit: so if there's already 2 in this tiny space, I'm guessing there are at least 10s of thousands of us.

Nah, this community is specifically a locus for principled civil libertarians - or at least it was before they started getting black-pilled by the isolated demands for civil principles. The presence of such people here is not indicative of their popularity in wider society.

Count me as a third. That many of our interlocutors are having trouble conceiving of this as a good-faith position is itself revealing of something about which I probably shouldn’t speculate.

I'm not having any such trouble. I can name a handful of people who hold this as a good-faith position, I just have huge doubts many people posting here are among them.

The thing it's revealing is a familiarity with the concept of "isolated demand for rigor". For example, if this were a truly good faith position, I might expect ameliorating statements along the lines of "Missing one administrative step in 100,000 cases is actually very impressive. Even with this screw-up, this is vastly better than expected for ANY government action."

The relevant sample size is "at least one of 278", not "at most one of 100,000". But honestly if it was "we fucked up on this one of 278, but we're making a good faith effort to fix our fuck up" I think that would be fine. It's the "we fucked up, we admit we fucked up, we totally could fix it, but we won't and you can't make us" that is getting people up in arms.

Why? This fucker is substantively guilty and the only reason this is an issue is a BS asylum claim.

If the government took steps to only send him to El Salvador after getting the withholding order revoked by due process, that would be a dramatic improvement to the current state of affairs.

So we can clean all this up with a quick Zoom call then? Don't even need to actually get him out of the prison.

Given that we are paying El Salvador to hold him, presumably we have some say in this. For starters, we could stop paying.

So judges have the authority to detonate international agreements like this? Our foreign policy is determined by any district judge who feels like weighing in?

So we can clean all this up with a quick Zoom call then? Don't even need to actually get him out of the prison.

Not necessarily.

https://www.justice.gov/eoir/reference-materials/ic/chapter-4/7

except that evidentiary hearings on the merits may only be conducted by telephone conference if the respondent consents after being notified of the right to proceed in person or through video conference. See INA § 240(b)(2), 8 C.F.R. § 1003.25(c)

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