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Notes -
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.
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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