In a tyrannical system, the accused’s guilt is determined by their being accused in the first place. If the government says someone is a terrorist, then they are dealt with accordingly. There is no appeal and indeed there is no formal process at all beyond the pronouncement: terrorist; guilty.
That is the system that the Trump administration would like everyone in America to live under — one where the word of a 78-year-old man and his underlings is enough to justify sending anyone to a foreign prison for the rest of their life.
To date, that goal has been largely implicit. Hundreds of men have been sent to a notorious detention facility in El Salvador where, according to the administration, they will spend the rest of their lives. All have been tarred as terrorists and gang members, but the vast majority have never been convicted of so much as shoplifting — in the United States or elsewhere.
Gay barber from Venezuela:
Among them is a barber from Venezuela, a gay man who was labeled a member of the gang Tren de Aragua based on the say-so of one former, discredited police officer who lost his gig in law enforcement after reportedly crashing his car, while intoxicated, into a family’s home.
19-year old in country legally with work permit:
Another is a 19-year-old who entered the country legally and had a permit to work but was reportedly grabbed by ICE agents during an operation that was targeting someone else.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia:
The most prominent case has been that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who a Department of Justice lawyer admitted was wrongly expelled from the country as a court had earlier issued him a protection from deportation order (that DOJ lawyer has since been fired for his honesty). The Trump administration has offered a series of post-facto excuses for why this father and union apprentice should be denied the opportunity to ever see his family again, centering on the claim that he was a member of MS-13; as with the barber, that too is an allegation that relies on the testimony of an unreliable cop — one who later pleaded guilty to giving confidential police information to a sex worker, according to The New Republic.
No real court would have sentenced Abrego Garcia to life in prison over such flimsy evidence (White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, apparently improvising, on Tuesday added another claimed offense, one that has never even been asserted in a legal filing: human trafficking. The lack of real evidence of any guilt, much less the kind that would argue for depriving him of liberty forever, is why he was never presented before a court — and it is why, presumably, President Donald Trump is defying a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return to the country, which would risk allowing him to speak freely about his ordeal and the conditions inside a prison that no one detained within has ever left, alive.
But one need not piece together from its actions what the Trump administration really thinks of due process and the rule of law. On Tuesday night, Vice President JD Vance made explicit that the intent is to defy legal principles that date back to antiquity, scolding those who insist on respecting the rights of the “many” undocumented immigrants who have “committed violent crimes, or facilitated fentanyl and sex trafficking.”
