It’s amazing to think that one of the reasons the people of New England and the other colonies bravely declared their independence from the king of England back in 1776 was that they objected to troops arresting people and shipping them overseas for trial on bogus charges (“for transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences”). We rebelled against a king who claimed the authority to do that.
And yet here we are. It is tyrannical for an executive to decide he can order the arrest, rendition, and perpetual imprisonment of anyone, without charges, without a hearing, without the right to counsel, and without the right to appeal, much less without any evidence beyond one’s ethnicity, sports insignia, and a tattoo. It’s grotesque for that same tyrant (who is paying a foreign dictator to keep people locked up) to pretend he can’t bring them back.
Fully 90 percent of the 238 people the U.S. shipped to a prison in El Salvador don’t even have criminal charges pending against them, and only five of those 238 has been convicted of a felony. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia had an explicit court order protecting him from deportation.
Patriot’s Day is this weekend. America was born as a nation by refusing to let anyone exercise this kind of arbitrary domination. If the president won’t abide by what our Constitution plainly says and what the Supreme Court has unanimously told him, his lawlessness puts everyone — including citizens who oppose him, journalists who question him, and businesspeople who refuse to accommodate him — at risk of rendition and imprisonment.