On Monday, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele joined Donald Trump in the Oval Office for a summit that will live on in national infamy. It will be remembered as the day Trump revealed the next phase of his attack on America’s bedrock legal principles.
“Homegrown criminals are next,” Trump told the assembled reporters. “I said homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places. I’d like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country.”
My fellow Americans, he’s talking about us.
The idea that Trump would deport U.S. citizens to specially built foreign mega-prisons outside the reach of the American justice system should cause a national shockwave. After all, Trump’s definition of a “criminal” deportable to such a place includes 179 men who may not have committed crimes at all.
If Trump can willfully violate a unanimous Supreme Court order and strip due process rights from legal non-citizens, there is nothing stopping him from doing the same to Americans. Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s unending nightmare is not some bizarre legal freak of nature. It is a warning that once a president has discarded the rule of law for some people, nothing stops him from discarding the rule of law for anyone.
According to the government’s latest arguments, the detainees sent to El Salvador exist in a legal black hole — unreachable by the courts, by Congress, even by Trump himself. That they were denied their due process rights is now a matter of Supreme Court record. That the White House doesn’t care is also a matter of public record. Soon we will see this same grim dance play out again. Next time it will likely be American citizens who are forcibly disappeared.
A word exists for a prison that “functions outside a judicial system” and where “prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.” According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the word for that kind of place is a concentration camp. On Monday, Trump pledged to dedicate taxpayer funds to the construction of even more Salvadoran concentration camps, with Bukele’s enthusiastic blessing.
Bukele’s sprawling CECOT mega-prison has earned a horrific reputation for violence and torture. Many legal migrants who have committed no crimes now live in fear of being black-bagged and shipped off to El Salvador. This is part of the cultural terrorism Trump hoped to inflict.
If Trump gets his way, American citizens could also soon find themselves cut off from the rule of law, trapped inside one of the world’s most brutal prisons.
We are facing one of the most acute constitutional crises in American history. As Jonathan Last at The Bulwark grimly and accurately argues, a failure of Congress and the courts to act would create “a de facto extralegal policy of imprisonment in a foreign gulag for enemies of the regime.” At that point, a detainee’s American citizenship becomes little more than a detail on the manifest of a prison plane bound for El Salvador.
The press are natural targets. Trump already views press criticism as tantamount to treason, and he’s actively urging the Federal Communications Commission to strip broadcast licenses from CBS, ABC and NBC for daring to report on his presidency. He routinely torches journalists as “enemies of the state” and calls for their imprisonment.
Liberated from the rule of law, nothing stops Trump from turning his war on the press into an official police action. Those reporters may not have committed any actual crimes, but neither did Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
That’s an idea that should give every journalist and every American pause. We are living through a profound criminalization of political opinion and a horrifying disregard of the courts. Republican lawmakers who swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution now stand passively mute as that Constitution is trampled in full view of the public.
This is what tyranny looks like. In a few months, this column could be enough to put me in a Salvadoran prison alongside a thousand other “disloyal” Americans.
We simply don’t know. That’s the terrifying part. Stripped of the certainty of the rule of law, we simply do not know what tomorrow will bring, or what mood Trump might be in, or what that mood might mean for a Palestinian student at Columbia or a legal migrant from Baltimore or a mouthy opinion columnist at The Hill.
We have committed a great sin by allowing Trump to replace the protection and certainty of laws with the chaos of caprice. If we don’t correct course now, we will suffer immensely for it in the weeks and months to come.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.