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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.
It's not play acting. Many people really do believe Trump will try to deport his political enemies, to include US citizens and legal residents.
I am not sure whether this will happen; I do believe Trump would like to do that and would try if he thought he could get away with it. People like you who cheer for Trump "circumventing procedural nonsense" (i.e., ignoring laws and court rulings he doesn't like) show how it could happen. I think Scott's article "You Are Still Crying Wolf" was accurate for its time, but people are not crying wolf today.
It's still acting; it's just Method acting. That is, they are living the role of someone who believes Trump will deport US citizens for being political enemies.
No, you and @remzem are both wrong. I know these people; they are not play acting. They may be wrong or foolish (though daily Trump makes me less certain of this), but they believe what they say.
I also don't know anyone who was laughing at people being locked up over Covid, but I observe people on this forum who'd cheer if Trump actually does all the worst things they claim he hasn't and won't do don't be silly.
Perhaps the people you know are entirely sincere! Does that mean everyone is? On the other hand, "most people are ideologically-possessed hypocrites" isn't a particularly novel, charitable, or enlightening take.
HermanCainAward has almost 500K subscribers. You might not know people that laughed over that kind of thing, but it wasn't some vanishingly rare attitude, and that's a particularly ghoulish example. Surely less disgusting examples would have proportionally more adherents.
I'm certainly not claiming everyone is sincere, but I wouldn't judge sincerity based on performative outrage on social media. For any ridiculous and hysterical or ghoulish and terrible take , there will be some people who genuinely believe it and some who are just trolling.
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