Outside It's 1933

Forget the economic bullshit, just for a second. Whatever you personally think is happening with the Trump tariffs — whether you think the president is insane, stupid, a business savant, intentionally driving us into a recession, or a lifelong liar that just pulled off the largest “pump and dump” market manipulation the world has ever seen — it pales in comparison to what you should be paying attention to. I know that might be a hard pill to swallow when your day-to-day life is most affected by the surging cost of eggs or if Steak ‘n Shake fries are cooked in beef tallow, but it is a pill you have to swallow nonetheless. I would much rather spend my time dunking on Elon Musk for finally admitting that DOGE won’t be able to save even 15 percent of its goal in government spending, or on the White House for losing its court battle against the Associated Press, but just because something is gratifying doesn’t mean it’s meaningful. So instead let’s talk about the ongoing demolition of due process and our constitutional rights.

If that sentence sounds alarmist to you, consider that our government is actively kidnapping people off city streets and from their homes. It happened to Mahmoud Khalil, it happened to Rumeysa Ozturk, and it happened to Kilmar Abrego Garcia. It’s happened to hundreds of others. In some of these cases, people are being detained following accusations of antisemitism, which is absolute bullshit given that antisemitism is protected speech under our First Amendment (not that I have to like it). In others, they are being forcibly ejected from the country without due process, and in some cases completely disappearing from public record. And it’s not just foreign nationals from particular targeted regions that now have to watch their backs, either — European musicians and researchers have been stopped at airports (including one Harvard Medical Center cancer researcher) and in some cases turned around, for no other reason than that they’ve been publicly critical of the Trump regime. Two German teenage girls were handcuffed and deported from Hawaii just because they landed on the island without a pre-booked hotel. Even American citizens are not safe from this kind of prejudiced and rampant profiling; New Hampshire real estate attorney Bachir Atallah got stopped returning to the country from Canada just this month, and DHS has repeatedly fucked up and “mistakenly” sent American citizens threatening emails telling them to leave the country. Another US-born citizen was arrested and detained by ICE for 10 days in an Arizonan jail, even after showing a judge his birth certificate, just because border patrol officers didn’t believe he was American.

Real quick, as a point of clarification: I’m using the word kidnapping here intentionally to make it clear that these are not arrests or deportations. They do not follow any established legal process. When a group of federal agents hiding their faces with balaclavas and refusing to identify themselves forcibly grabs a Tufts University student off a sidewalk, just for expressing her opinion in a written op-ed, that is a kidnapping. And it’s happening all over the country; this kind of flagrantly illegal behavior is now so commonplace that we’re seeing similar situations play out even in places like elementary schools in sanctuary cities like DC.

So the kidnappings are a problem, and just as much for the precedent they set as for their immediate illegitimacy. As many have pointed out, if the government can grab random people off the street and then immediately eject them from the country without respecting any of our established administrative or judicial systems, what is to stop it from doing that to you? Just because you’re not in MS-13 or Tren de Aragua doesn’t mean the White House can’t suddenly claim you are after they fuck up and throw you in an El Salvadoran gulag. And on that latter point, it is equally as problematic that the administration is subsequently claiming it has no obligation or responsibility to get Abrego Garcia back — we are paying to hold these people in a foreign prison, and that fact alone means that we should have the leverage to get people returned to the US. American historian and author Timothy Snyder put it especially succinctly on Bluesky the other day: “On the White House’s theory, if they abduct you, get you on a helicopter, get to international waters, shoot you in the head, and drop your corpse into the ocean, that is legal, because it is the conduct of government affairs.”

Also, while we’re talking about Abrego Garcia — I’ve seen the reports that he has suspected ties to MS-13, along with the allegations of domestic violence against his wife. Karoline Leavitt has also accused him of involvement in human trafficking. If I’m being honest, none of this actually matters, and most of it is demonstrably false. Abrego Garcia’s suspected gang ties are the result of him loitering outside a store looking for day labor and having the moniker “chele,” which is a common nickname in El Salvador. (As someone on Bluesky pointed out in a post I can no longer find, saying someone is part of a Central American gang because they have a widely used regional nickname would be like saying someone is part of the mafia because they’re Italian and their name is Tony.) But back to none of this actually mattering — the right to due process is not dependent on moral purity, and never has been. If you believe in the legal principle that people are innocent until proven guilty, and I assume most of us do given that it is one of the most foundational concepts our country stands on, then you are obligated to allow people the opportunity to make their case in the proper courts and channels. Abrego Garcia, and the so many other Venezuelan and foreign nationals forcibly evicted from the United States over the past few months under an improperly invoked Alien Enemies Act, have clearly been denied that opportunity.

I know I am blurring the lines between distinct issues here, but that’s because it is immensely difficult to talk about the unconstitutional abduction of foreign nationals across the country without also talking about the temporarily halted invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, or without also talking about the fact that the Trump administration is paying self-styled “world’s coolest dictator” Nayib Bukele to hold people removed from the US in an El Salvadoran mega-prison notorious for human rights abuses. This is all unconscionable, and it’s just the beginning if Trump has his way — at least per the comments he made recently floating the idea of also throwing “homegrown criminals” behind bars in CECOT, something that would likewise be blatantly illegal and unconstitutional. Not that those facts would stop our government, which is, again, already actively defying court orders both in continuing to bar the Associated Press from the White House press pool and in refusing to take any action whatsoever to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to his family and home.

Because we should be talking about that, too. ICE is literally abducting people, failing to do satisfactory vetting of these individuals before fast-tracking them out of the US into either arbitrarily assigned countries that these victims have no connection to whatsoever or into Guantanamo-esque concentration camps — a phrase that I as a Jewish man am using not lightly, but in recognition of the denotative differences between concentration camps and prisons, which are that concentration camps function outside of a judicial system and hold prisoners not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process. But arguably more concerning is the failure of our systems of checks and balances to remedy any of this. It’s as if the Trump administration thinks that by openly defying our court system and attempting to rewrite the narrative of what happened to Abrego Garcia, even after initially admitting an administrative error was made, it can exclude itself from being subject to our legal system. Which, of course, is the whole point of the Trump administration — to consolidate king-like power in the executive branch — but is not something the White House can be allowed to get away with. The administration can play whatever semantics games it likes, but it does not change the facts of the case, which is that it is facing criminal contempt for disobeying clear and direct orders from a federal judge and SCOTUS alike.

Even Bukele’s recent visit to the United States only served to obfuscate that point, though he also slipped up in a way. Bukele made headlines by mocking the idea that El Salvador could return Abrego Garcia, saying they would have to “smuggle" him into the country. But that coincidentally and inadvertently underscores the crux of the problem here; the phrasing just emphasizes that the Trump administration is not making any effort to fix its mistake. You don’t need to smuggle something into a place that welcomes it.

Consider all of this together, and it’s painfully clear why Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom have all issued travel advisories of a kind for those visiting the United States. The White House can attempt to hide behind its egregiously staged crusade to root out antisemitism everywhere except in the GOP, but if Republicans still had a backbone — just one piece of this larger “Constitution-in-tatters” puzzle would be grounds for impeachment under any other presidency, and it does not instill confidence in our two-party system that nobody has made serious moves towards that end yet. Sure, impeachment would probably fail given the current consolidation of congressional power, but it is an abdication of these elected officials’ responsibility to their constituents to not use every possible tool at your disposal to restore democracy in the country. Only AOC and Bernie Sanders seem truly up to the challenge so far, with Cory Booker, Van Hollen, and Ro Khanna just beginning to step up.

Plus, on the most selfish level I can imagine, the Trump administration is absolutely ruining the could-be glory of the 2026 North American World Cup, and I never in a million years will forgive any member of the current regime for that alone.