You Are Hurting People
I address this specifically to the supporters of the Trump administration and the Republican Party, not as it was a decade ago, not as it is in theory, but as it actually is now. Whether or not you mean to, there are innocent people suffering, and you are responsible.
As the Atlantic reported yesterday (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/an-administrative-error-sends-a-man-to-a-salvadoran-prison/682254/), the Trump administration itself admitted in a court filing that it had seized and deported a man with protected legal status, by mistake. They did not simply deport him, though: they have sent this man (again, taken by mistake) to an El Salvadoran concentration camp, where for two weeks he has been kept in abusive conditions. Having admitted that this was a mistake, instead of remedying the situation, the administration has said that courts have no power to compel it to return this wrongfully imprisoned man, because he is not currently on American soil – and the administration does not intend to free him.
Here you can read some of the most debased and spineless legal verbiage ever submitted to a court:
This is merely the latest and one of the most egregious human rights violations perpetrated as part of the administration’s immigration gulag, which has already swept up large numbers of people with no due process and thrown them in a foreign prison. And a plain reading of what the administration’s lawyers are now saying in court reveals exactly what this means for you and me.
It doesn’t matter if someone is here legally or illegally, if you committed a crime or are innocent – it even doesn’t matter if you’re an American citizen. The administration is grabbing people and imprisoning them in conditions none of us could likely stand, without even a hearing or a lawyer, and then arguing that no court can review this sentence. Any of us could be next.
This man was taken while he was picking up his non-verbal 5-year-old on his way home from work. His wife and son are American citizens, and they have not been able to speak with him sense he was kidnapped. His family discovered he was in El Salvador because he appeared in a photograph of prisoners released by Salvadoran caudillo and Trump lackey Bukele as he deliberately and cruelly taunted an American judge who had ordered a cessation of deportation flights to the country.
After this story was published, the Vice President who went to Yale Law and surely knows better, took to social media to defend the administration’s illegal disappearing of this man. To do this, he attacked his reputation by twisting the facts to claim the deportee was illegal and had been found to be a gang member. The former is untrue because of his protected status, which is a legal status, and the latter was based on exaggerating an unfounded claim. But more importantly, the Trump administration itself already admitted that he was not supposed to have been deported, that this was a mistake, and, in their view, this simply does not matter. Vance also cited the man’s traffic violations. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think running a stoplight should result in being indefinitely tortured without trial in a foreign prison.
And that is what this really comes down to. The Trump administration is claiming that illegal immigrant criminals do not get due process. The problem with this is that due process is precisely how we determine whether or not someone is legal, or a criminal. Without that, any of us can be taken simply by the bureaucratic whim of whoever is giving the orders at ICE, or in this case, by whoever is mistakenly bungling their execution.
Court papers (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/31/us/politics/us-deportations-tren-de-aragua-deportation-guidance.html?searchResultPosition=1) in other cases indicate that other people have been seized and deported with no process of law simply because the government decided they were in a gang because they had tattoos or dressed a certain way or looked a certain way.
An innocent makeup artist with a tattoo dedicated to his mother has been disappeared to El Salvador, something even influential right-wing blogger close Vance associate Rod Dreher was appalled to see (though clearly not all on the right share that human reaction):
The transcript of a prominent Fox talk show is instructive as to the level of seriousness the administration’s propaganda apparatus treats the prospect of someone innocent languishing in a Salvadoran gang prison:
What, you may be asking, is this prison like? It is not like a normal American prison (which, incidentally, one is meant to get a trial before going to). Here is what we know: https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-trump-prison-immigrants-4ab3fc3c0474efb308084604b61f8a37
Here’s The Guardian’s interview with an expert: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/20/trump-deportations-venezuela-prison
This is not a place anyone, even a guilty person, should be sent. Yet what now faces all of us here in the U.S. is the possibility that we could be taken by ICE without warning, with no hearing, no phone call, and thrown into this crush of suffering prisoners, and our families would not even know where we are. If you say that’s a ridiculous thing for me to say because I’m an American citizen, well, the government has no process in place to ensure that only citizens are deported, and has admitted to making mistakes it won’t remedy; and if you say it’s hyperbolic for a white middle class person like myself to make such a statement, that only concedes the racism of the administration and the peril to people who are my legal and human peers.
This is what the Trump administration is doing, in your name; this is what the Republican Party has enthusiastically worked to bring about. To those responsible, I can only say – Repent.
Repent, and fix what you have done.
