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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.
It's all play acting. Most of the American's that are "frightened" about this deportation don't actually think they are at risk for being deported. Where would they even deport actual Americans that didn't come here as looters? Most of em are from parts of Europe. You're gonna threaten someone by deporting them to the UK? Germany,? Scandinavia? Most of the left supposedly want that.
What they think is at risk, and correctly as this is what the actual fight is over, is the shadow government. By circumventing all the procedural nonsense and bureaucracy that the establishment has built to defend it's own interests Trump eats away at their power. The arguments they are posting here are the same sort of fake outrage and concern they were pushing about Elon gutting USAID or how social security was going to collapse and stop working if you audit it, or really anything touching any of the many other appendages of the shadow government.
Against my better judgement, I've decided to stop lurking and make this account specifically to tell you (at the admitted risk of being uncivil) that you are VERY fucking wrong on this- and that you should consider 'updating your priors', as the local lingo goes, in order to better reflect your hated outgroup's theory-of-mind accordingly.
I'll grant you this much; In the nightmare scenario that Trump does start deporting US citizens to El Salvadoran gulags, I'd probably be pretty far down the list of people to target; after all, I'm not a felon (at least, as far as I know), I'm white, I'm male, and otherwise generally inoffensive to MAGA sensibilities aside from my leftism...
...But a lot of my friends would be a lot higher-up on that list than me, as would most of my family (by virtue of being even more actively outspoken than I am), and if they do get targeted, I'm liable to quickly get a lot more radical- and thus a lot higher on the list as well.
El Salvador, of course. As Trump just clarified earlier today.
That particular bit of outrage and concern wasn't fake either. You should perhaps consider updating your theory of mind on that as well.
Consider the possibility when someone tells you they're against something, maybe they are, in fact, against it on the object-level, as well any other deeper levels you care to psychoanalyze.
And to respond to your and @The_Nybbler 's responses to @Amadan- ...It's not "play acting" or "method acting"** either. I assure you, I genuinely do worry about this.
I'm sure you genuinely believe that you think you can tell I'm lying by my "crocodile tears" & 'revealed preferences' over COVID measures, the January 6th protestors, and other perceived injustices from "our team"... But consider the possibility that the bespoke realities of others differ from yours, and the screen that you (and most of the other posters on TheMotte, seemingly) is showing a very different picture than the screen that I (and most other liberals & leftists in this country) are watching.
**To the latter poster- I'd respond that the most common way to 'Live the role of someone who believes Trump will deport US citizens for being political enemies' is to actually be someone who believes Trump will deport US citizens for being political enemies- which I believe he likely will unless he starts getting real pushback on this kind of shit real quick.
Back during Trump 45, pictures of kids in cages were posted to Twitter and Facebook to show the horrors of the Trump administration. People were horrified. Truly horrified. But it was a very strange sort of horrification, because when it was revealed that the pictures were in fact taken during the Obama administration, they did not become horrified at Obama. I am not claiming that the people scared now are like AOC, turning on the waterworks at an empty parking lot for political gain. I am claiming they are like those people horrified at the pictures of kids in cages during Trump 45. They want to be the sort of person who most effectively is scared and horrified by Trump. Thus, they self-modify to actually feel those feelings. That's similar to method acting.
I am not "they". I certainly was rather disquieted to learn that those dated back to Obama's administration- though given his deportation record, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Much like with his record on transparency, Gitmo, drone strikes (and various other expansions of the Bush-era "security" apparatuses), and others, I've soured on Obama in the years since he left office- and looking back, the borderline cult-of-personality surrounding him was probably a bad thing; it's for the best that he's now out of office and he keeps a relatively low profile nowadays.
I will say that at least the Obama administration had the minimal decency to regard this as a shameful necessity and not attempt to highlight and proudly boast about it. It's a low, low bar, to be clear, but it's one of the many the Trump administration couldn't.
If you run over your neighbor with a car while texting & driving down your cul-de-sac, immediately realize its your own fault, and then feel crushing shame over your carelessness, then I suppose we could call that "method acting" too.
But that would dilute the term "method acting" to the point of meaninglessness- as well as cheapen the rhetorical effect of dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as just being a 'method actor'.
Not aiming this at you specifically, but one thing I’ve very much seen is that people desperately want to be a ‘good person’ in whatever manner their society dictates.
I’ve watched sensible friends trying on a number of different post-hoc justifications for things that they wanted to believe. It was most obvious with trans stuff: they would try a number of historical justifications and get annoyed when I pointed out they didn’t work. It wasn’t that they disagreed with me, it was a ‘I want to feel justified fitting in, why won’t you let me have this?’
In a show of good faith I will point this at me too. This is basically how I am with Christianity a lot of the time. It’s also how I was with COVID vaccines and various non-COVID conspiracy theories - I had a very strong feeling of, “look, I believe enough heresy to get me in trouble already and I don’t want to go looking for more”.
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If you want people to "update their priors about their outgroup", you have to change your behavior going forward, not pinky-promise that you totally were "disquieted" way back when, with no trail to show for it.
This is the whole problem with treating social media as life-people base everything they think about their outgroup based on the most unhinged viral Twitter personalities, and if someone doesn't have a "trail" (i.e., a Twitter history or something) showing them getting into pointless arguments with trolls then how are you supposed to prove what you say and believe in real life? The idea that anyone who says "No, I don't actually believe the thing you say everyone on my side believes" has to prove it to you by showing their online posts from the Obama years is absurd.
I'll grant it's not a fair standard to apply to any particular individual you're having a conversation with. Maybe they really were one of the extremely few principled people all along, and after years of zapped accounts, or basic opsec, they can't provide receipts. Maybe they're too young to have participated in the culture war battles of the past to begin with. Hell, maybe they had an honest change of heart.
But come on, the idea that the mistake is treating social media as life is absurd. Crowds at anti-war protests dwindling to a chorus of crickets and 5 libertarians the very moment Obama got elected did not happen on social media. People moving on from pet issue to pet issue, pretending it's all a matter of principle, and then forgetting about those principles when a new pet issue contradicts them, is all just part of human nature.
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Credibility doesn't come from nothing. The modern internet is absolutely filled with false flag shit. It's assuredly automated, even. "I'm a Trump voter, but I'm so mad at him about Current Thing that I wish I'd voted for Kamala, darn tootin" is practically an entire genre of reddit post. And this week's thread has multiple brand new accounts claiming that they've definitely been long-term principled civil libertarians.
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Sure, 'actions speak louder than words', and all that- but what, exactly, would you propose I do to "change my behavior" going forward? Vote Republican?
(I'm aware that may come off as more than a little glib, but I'm being completely serious. I may be quite disgruntled with the Democrats, but what's the alternative? The Democratic Socialists? The Libertarians? Might as well just throw away my vote, and I'm not going to do that.)
Oh, nothing like that, just say something next time you're rather disquieted.
Well, I try.
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The trouble with this claim...
((well, the broader trouble. Specifically for Abrego Garcia, the man had a 2019 hearing at which he had an opportunity to demonstrate that he was a US citizen or lawful resident; this specific case clearly can't happen to citizens.))
... is that there's a surfeit of lurkers with absolutely no history on the topic always pouring out of the walls, and a deficit of actual principled people. The punchline to this post is that Kelsey Piper suddenly became quite outspoken on immigration policy literally the day of the inauguration, after literally years of ducking it as someone else's field.
I can make the argument that playing stupid games with legal technicalities is bad because I've done so for years, and I've called balls and strikes whether on 'my' team or against it. It's important enough that even as I don't have much time to do online stuff in general right now, I'm writing this, here.
Do you? Fine, you're a brand new poster, you're probably not going to write a ton of top-level posts given this. Do you have any examples of Democratic-friendly
figureheadswriters who actually were horrified, during the actual Obama presidency, about those terrible conditions? Anyone who looked into the conditions encouraged by Biden-era rules and noticed what the results were, on your side?Okay, immigration is not a field everyone spends all way writing about. Do you have any examples of any Principled Worried Person who panicked that COVID gamesmanship about religious services or with visas would Possibly Hurt People Who Count? That a state governor said "just arrest everyone"? Anything?
There's a fun philosophical distinction between whether someone 'really' does something because of their internal state, or because of what they do. I don't particularly care. If I can't tell the difference from outside between Kelsey and The People Who Really Care, it's not something that can change how I have to model your behavior, if Really Caring doesn't modify your behavior.
Notable ones? Not really, no. Critical voices certainly did exist, but they didn't get much national spotlight. As I said, the borderline cult-of-personality around Obama was probably a bad thing; I have to imagine that the desire to maintain Democratic unity under Obama likely had a chilling effect on people who otherwise would've criticized him from the left.
On this, I can confidently say there were, in fact, people on the left who noticed the lack of improvements under Biden- indeed, I was one of them. Unfortunately, since the Biden administration spent most of its existence being attacked relentlessly from the right (and towards the end, even from the center and even from some leftists!) about the perceived border crisis, and calls for harsher crackdowns on immigrants polled pretty well, it was, unfortunately, a pretty foregone conclusion that the Biden administration wasn't going to try and improve those conditions, for fear of giving further ammunition about being 'soft' on the border issue- and that the kids who were still in cages at the time were just going to be SOL.
There were a few times that other left-leaning people I knew personally expressed worries that there would eventually be a backlash to the lockdowns, and there's certainly no shortage of people who've come to view it as a strategic error after the fact...
...But on a broader level, no.
Because there's still quite a lot of us on the left who fundamentally dispute the framing of
I very much do not grant this!
Especially since, frankly, conservative anti-lockdown hysterics at least as good as they got, if not more. Certainly, where I live, "lockdown measures" were a total joke due to Republican-lead efforts to fight the lockdowns.
We're simply not going to see eye-to-eye on this particular topic.
On this, I'm not sure that we're really disagreeing?
It is kinda interesting that the two examples you brought up don't actually mention the conditions that brought serious controversy (eg Kelsey's family separation, 'kids in cages' conditions) during the Obama presidency. Instead, the objection is just that he wasn't maximally dgaf about illegal immigration, or to an extent wasn't able to be maximally dgaf because of legal restriction.
A claim presented without evidence can be dismissed... well, I'm not going to say as readily, because I'd like higher standards of discourse, here, but I'll again point to all the people who didn't complain even as things got -- often dramatically! -- worse have names or at least nom de plumes present before this week.
'It wouldn't have worked' is not a good argument, any more than it would have been a reasonable cause for me to duck out here.
I was (and to a lesser extent remain) a COVID hawk, if a bit more libertarian-minded a one ('changing hearts and minds' rather than arresting people has a lot to commend it!). Whether COVID measures were or were not 'right' is an entirely different question than what you're running into here.
If we're supposed to care about process, it matter if the Biden administration paid attention to the process. It matters if the Biden admin told the Supreme Court, while trying to maintain a stay of a lower court decision holding a policy unlawful, said that they wouldn't extend the policy, and then just remade the same one with the serial numbers filed off. Left-leaning people here actually believed it (or at least pretended). It matters if Newsom gets to cancel Easter one year, get slapped down by SCOTUS for putting much heavier restrictions on religious organizations than bike shops, does the exact same thing a second year, gets slapped down a second time, and instead comes back with the same policy with the serial numbers filed off. In many other cases, state or federal regulations were pushed at length and then gamed through mootness so that they could not be challenged at all, either by revising the policy trivially faster than courts could react, or requiring behaviors in time periods that made judicial redreasability impossible.
Yeah, it'd suck if sometimes process leads to less-than-perfectly-ideal results! But that's what principles are; if they never cost you anything, they're just convenient slogans. Not least of all because no small number of your political opponents have different ideas of what those ideal results are!
It's not like COVID is alone, here; if you really want to draw some one-off exception to just that, I can give similar lists for (and, indeed, the "just arrest everyone" example above is unrelated to COVID!). The Saga of Defense Distributed likewise turns on 'oh, this settlement the federal government signed? Doesn't count, now'.
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