There are, at this point, plenty of individual incidents to point to that on their own can function as a giant neon “FASCISM IS HERE” sign. The open defiance of a unanimous — if too broadly worded, perhaps intentionally — Supreme Court order to bring home a wrongly deported person from what amounts to a foreign concentration camp now sits atop that pile.
On Sunday, the Trump administration told the US District Court in Maryland that it had “no updates” regarding the case of Kilmar Abrego García. The Supreme Court previously issued an order that the lower court “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador;” Trump’s lawyers had essentially asked SCOTUS to make its disappearances legal. So far at least, the high court has declined to do so.
The administration has argued that while it admits it wrongly sent Abrego García to El Salvador, once he arrived there was nothing to be done to effectuate his release — that is a sovereign nation, and courts do not have power to tell the executive how to conduct foreign policy. This is just extremely ghoulish bullshit. El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, who will visit the White House on Monday, is quite obviously a Trump lackey at this point; he would do literally anything demanded of him. If Trump wanted Abrego García released and returned, he would be released and returned within hours; the obvious conclusion is that Trump and the white nationalist freaks running his fascist anti-immigrant playbook do not want him returned.
As the evidence mounts that virtually all of the hundreds of people so far sent to El Salvador’s gulag had no criminal record in the US — and as the number climbs and Marco “99-0” Rubio crows about it — it gets more and more critical to the administration’s project that no one gets a ticket back home. The stories they could tell. The argument Trump’s lawyers present to district courts or to the Supreme Court barely matters — they are proving willing to simply ignore court orders and the entire concept of due process. Who is going to make Bukele let any particular person go? Trump has created a pliant sub-state, outside of legal jurisdiction, where he can send literally anyone he does not like. It is the brightest the neon has yet been, and it is unclear who can turn the sign off.
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