Our Constitutional Crisis

This is not a test

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a legal US resident — and an actual human being with feelings and thoughts — who was grabbed and taken to an El Salvadoran concentration camp where he is now said to be imprisoned for life, with no access to legal assistance or hearing, because of an admitted administrative mistake. The Supreme Court unanimously agree the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return. But they have done nothing.

Yesterday, I felt too sad to write or do much of anything. The situation with Kilmar Abrego Garcia is soul-crushing — a terrible harbinger of what’s coming, if we don’t find the path to meaningful collective action. I really think yesterday may have been the darkest day in American history, but of course I do not know what today or tomorrow will bring.

For those who haven’t paid attention, the Trump administration recently deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who had been granted legal protection from deportation by a U.S. court. A sheet metal apprentice, he married an American citizen in Maryland in 2019. They have one young autistic son, plus they raise his wife’s two other kids. Garcia was seized — no charges, no trial, no explanation — and sent to a concentration camp (not a prison, as it is outside the legal system) in El Salvador. The administration admits his deportation was a mistake, but Trump refuses to bring him back.

“It seems clear that if Trump actually does have the ability to arbitrarily send any American to an overseas prison with zero due process and zero oversight by any court of law, then we do, in fact, live in a dictatorship,” writes Noah Smith in “The authoritarian takeover attempt is here.”

The Supreme Court has unanimously — 9-0 — ordered Trump to “facilitate” Garcia’s return. Initially, Trump said he would comply. A few days later, he reversed his position, claiming that his administration lacked the authority to bring Garcia back from El Salvador. Meeting with Trump at the White House yesterday, President Bukele of El Salvador says his government lacks the legal authority to return Garcia. This is a total lie — we are paying El Salvador to house our prisoners. Bukele has previously returned multiple individuals at the U.S.’s request. Trump is now flouting his open defiance of the Supreme Court, which unanimously decreed that this innocent human needs to be returned to the U.S. (although using annoyingly vague language to do so).

As this goes on, Elon Musk’s DOGE is holding a “hackathon” this week. His agents are taking all of the stolen, private data of everyone in the U.S. and putting it into one system where Musk, Thiel, and their cronies can access it. “A whistleblower's disclosure details how DOGE may have taken sensitive labor data”, an important exposé from NPR, covers the potentially illegal stealing of data by DOGE, some of which may have been sent to Russia.

Day by day, we witness the dismantling of the U.S. as the country we knew, based on the Constitution and the putative rule of law, with a military and security state that protected American citizens. We are quickly replacing what we had — an imperfect pseudo-democracy — with something much worse: A Fascist dictatorship ruled by a vile buffoon, surrounded by narcissists and lackeys who must constantly praise the Great Leader or get cast out.

Now you might argue — as many Leftists do — that this just reveals the deeper truth of our society: This fascist undertone was always there, but hidden. I agree with this, to an extent. But there are, obviously, levels.

We are currently plummeting down many levels. We don’t see any bottom in sight. As a society, we somehow failed to protect the cognitive and psychological architecture of freedom and democracy. We built skyscrapers and iPhone apps but we forfeited our social adhesion and empathy.