The First Rule of Life in that survival book I keep quoting is “Be Here Now.” In the name of being here now, please watch this very short video. Four years ago there would have been a content warning, but we’re well past that. Content Warning: 2025.
These are the 261 people deported by the Trump Administration last Saturday; 137 of them under the Alien Enemies act. This video was not leaked, it was produced and released by the El Salvador presidential press office. It has multiple camera angles, fantastic lighting, and high production values. We are not watching a routine prison intake, but a choreographed spectacle played out specifically for the cameras. The imagery they use is deliberate and purposeful. You are familiar with it already.
After registration the prisoners were told to undress. They were then forced to have their head shaved, and forced to shower, usually in front of hundreds of other people and the SS guards.
Typically, their regular clothing was taken away and replaced by a striped uniform, although, again, this depended on both the camp and the prisoner.
This humiliating process was designed to remove any remnants of human dignity or personal identity.
I’m not saying this deportation is the same as the Holocaust; it is obviously not. I’m pointing out that this minute-long video features dramatic shots of prisoners unloaded from transport vehicles, shaved en masse, and displayed in formation surrounded by black-clad guards standing at attention. I’m not the one forcing this comparison. They are.
Who are the prisoners in this video? The Trump administration would like you to believe that these men are dangerous members of the Tren de Aragua gang, or “terrorist TdA aliens” in their parlance. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t. It’s hard to know for sure, because the Alien Enemies act allows deportation without due process and these men never had an opportunity to contest the charges. When reporters asked Karoline Leavitt how the administration determines gang affiiation, she said they use “intelligence, and the men and women on the ground in the interior of our country who are finally being allowed to do their jobs.” Translation: vibes, as perceived by ICE agents, which is less than reassuring, since we already know that the Trump administration recently deported people to Guantanamo Bay who have no criminal record whatsoever.
It gets worse.
You might have heard that Judge James E Boasberg granted a temporary restraining order (TRO) on Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies act. You may know that, while the prisoners were enroute to El Salvador, the judge ordered the administration to turn the planes around, and that the Trump administration ignored the command entirely. “Oopsie…Too late 😂” El Salvador’s president and “coolest dictator in the world” Nayib Bukele tweeted on Sunday morning.
What you might not have heard, though, is that Trump signed his executive order invoking the Alien Enemies act in secret — it went into effect Friday night but wasn’t announced until Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately for the administration, immigration lawyers noticed right away. They’ve been watching flight logs and ICE records since the inauguration in case Trump attempted exactly this kind of stunt, and when they saw signs that the administration was preparing to deport Venezuelan detainees otherwise ineligible for deportation, they sprang into action. By 2:00 AM on Saturday, they’d filed litigation on behalf of pre-selected plaintiffs: five Venezuelan detainees with legitimate concern that the administration might accuse them of being Tren de Aragua members without due process. At 9:40 AM, Boasberg granted the TRO against deporting these five men, then scheduled a hearing for 5:00 PM on whether to expand that TRO.
The Trump administration immediately appealed the order, in part because the lawyers filed suit “without hearing from the United States and relying on speculation about future Presidential action.” Yes, you read that correctly: the Trump administration claimed they did not invoke the Alien Enemies act twelve hours after secretly invoking the Alien Enemies act. Not until 4:00 PM — over six hours after Boasberg issued the TRO and nearly 24 hours after the act’s invocation — did the administration officially announce the executive order.
An anonymous official confirmed this blatant attempt to end-run the judicial system to Axios: "We wanted [the prisoners] on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out.” Deputy press secretary Harrison Fields confirmed the claim on NewsNation yesterday morning. “The president will always follow the law, but this judge was too slow. We played a little game of ‘catch me if you can,’ and guess what: the judge wasn’t able to catch us on this one.”
But Fields is wrong. The judge was not too slow. Per AP News:
5 p.m.: Boasberg convenes a hearing and asks the government attorney, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Drew Ensign, if the government plans to deport anyone under Trump’s new proclamation “in the next 24 or 48 hours.” Ensign says he doesn’t know and asks for time to find out, as the ACLU warns planes are apparently about to depart. Boasberg gives Ensign about 40 minutes to find out and recesses the hearing at 5:22 pm.
Four minutes later, the first deportation flight took off for El Salvador, followed by a second plane 20 minutes after that. Ensign continued to claim in court that he had no information about any potential flights. At 6:45 PM, an hour after the second flight took off, Boasberg verbally ordered the administration to order any deportation flights that may have already taken off to turn around, then issued a written order to the same effect at 7:26 PM.
A third plane went wheels up 11 minutes after that written order dropped. All of these planes eventually landed in El Salvador and handed their human cargo over to the tender mercies of CECOT, the Salvadoran “mega-prison” that is, by all accounts, hell on earth.
“Today, the first 238 members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, arrived in our country,” Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele posted 27 minutes after his “Oopsie” tweet on Sunday morning. “The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us. Over time, these actions, combined with the production already being generated by more than 40,000 inmates engaged in various workshops and labor under the Zero Idleness program, will help make our prison system self-sustainable.”
Zero Idleness is an incredible euphamism for slave labor. Someone should put it over a gate somewhere.
Here are some of the Trump administration’s justifications for refusing to turn the planes around and instead frog-marching nearly 300 human beings into El Salvador’s hell-prison without due process:
Because the airplanes were already over international waters by the time the order to turn around came down, the judge lacks jurisdiction. Any attempt to tell Trump what to do with these prisoners, they argue, would violate Article II of the Constitution, which grants the President full discretion over military operations outside the US borders. Law professors disagree, which is good, because if the federal government can void your rights by dragging you into international waters, we’re all one plane flight away from anything Trump’s demented mind dreams up.
Because the litigants in this case were not themselves deported, they lack standing. As far as I can tell, the only people the administration believes have standing are the people already stripped of all legal rights and imprisoned without trial outside our borders (and therefore, according to the administration, outside court jurisdiction: see Justification 1). Fantastic Catch-22. Joseph Heller could never.
Because the judge issued the orders verbally, they don’t count. As you may recall, Judge Boasberg first issued instructions to turn the planes around verbally, then in writing an hour later, all while the Trump administration pretended to not know whether planes were taking off at all. I cannot find any legal guidance at all re: whether written and verbal court orders carry the same weight, only that when written and verbal guidance contradict each other, the written order takes precedence. Contradition would not matter if only the written order carried weight.
This innovative legal theory also can’t explain the plane that departed ten minutes after the written order came down, but the government now claims those deportees, specifically, were deported under other statutes. Boasberg has sensibly demanded proof of this, which the administration has refused to provide. Yesterday, they told the judge that releasing that information publicly endanger national security. Today, they refused to release the information to the judge privately because such demands constitute “intrusions into the prerogatives of the Executive Branch” (see Justification 1).Because fuck you, that’s why. Or, as border czar Tom Homan put it to Fox and Friends on Monday: “We are going to make this country safe again. I'm proud to be a part of this administration. We're not stopping. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care what the left thinks. We're coming.”
“There’s been a lot of talk about constitutional crisis, people throw that word around. I think we’re getting very close to it,” Lee Gelernt, an ACLU attorney for the plaintiffs, said in court on Monday. This, to me, seems like an understatement. We are “very close” to a constitutional crisis in the same way a car stalled on a railroad track is “very close” to a speeding freight train as the crossing gates descend.
For nearly two months now, the Trump administration has blatantly ignored court orders. They are not testing the limits of judicial authority, they are trolling the entire legal system, I suspect because they find it funnier to watch the alleged adults in the room running around screeching “this is highly irregular!!” than fully telling them to get fucked — yet.
It’s the “😂.” It’s “we played a little game.” It’s the ASMR deportation video and Musk’s constant childish tweets. It’s a victory lap. It’s a cat playing with a mouse before disembowling it.
What self-respecting sadist would turn down this kind of celebration? Trump’s approval ratings just hit an all-time high; the Dems an all-time low. That alleged opposition party has virtually collapsed into incompetence and infighting due to the incompetence. Trump loyalists have full control of the FBI, ATF, and DHS. They are actively purging the military of any officers who might fulfill their sacred oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. The Republicans believe they hold all the cards, and they’re having a great time.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that laws are words on highly flammable paper and binding only to the extent that people buy into them and the powers that be enforce them. That reality persists whether put into words or not, and pretending that our laws remain intact only provides cover to the people setting them on fire. That the world as it existed on January 19th is dead, and that it’s corpse is starting to stink. That our denial of these things increasingly violates that First Rule of Life: Be Here Now.
My inbox is filled with newsletters and op/eds that might as well be ripped directly from the Kansas City Chief’s locker room during the Superbowl halftime show. They have subject lines like “Here’s How We Win,” or “How To Fight the Trump Regime,” or “Don’t Give Up.”
It’s too late. We’ve already lost. Or at least, we’ve lost for now.
This not a statement of surrender, nor is it black-pilled doomerism. It’s a simple statement of fact, and embracing it frees us to lose in ways that most advantage the cause of anti-fascism as we enter this new era. If we have already lost, we can stop trying to knit the shredded fabric of our nation back together. We can stop pretending that we’re approaching a constitutional crisis instead of in the middle of one, or that the courts might save us if we play our cards just right. And, freed of these useless delusions, we can be here now and start reacting to the world as it exists today instead of the one that existed on January 19th.
The Democrats have been hesitant to push Trump too far out of fear that it will provoke an irreversible crisis. This is the worst possible move. Every day that goes by is a day where this new world order seems a little bit more normal. We need to provoke an irreversible crisis yesterday. We need to take this all the way to the Supreme Court as fast as possible, force the administration to stop playing with their food and swallow this country in front of God and everyone. We need to grind this government to a halt with every procedural weapon available and do everything within the realm of legality to provoke the showdown we’ve been dreading.
We are currently losing by inches, and that gradual attrition gives people time to adjust to this new normal. For over a month now, various Trump toadies have darkly and ever-more-overtly threatened to stop listening to the courts. As a result, we find this concept less shocking now than we did a month ago. People have had time to adjust to the idea, it no longer sounds like something America would never do. The more normal something seems, the harder it is to mobilize resistance against it. We’re seeing the same strategy with extralegal detention — it’s no accident that Trump invoked the Alien Enemies act mere days after the illegal arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, no accident that they’ve steadily ramped up the terrorist rhetoric against Trump’s enemies, journalists and liberals included. We don’t have much time left to shock the American people into seeing this reality. We have to lose faster than this.
This morning, I woke up to a slew of articles I’m very tired of seeing — we might be headed for a constitutional crisis, here’s why we’re not in a constitutional crisis, etc — and also the kind of headlines we should have seen weeks ago. “A Constitutional Crisis is here” (Mother Jones). Why Trump Decided to Engineer a Constitutional Crisis Now (Slate). Conservative former federal judge says Trump has ‘declared war’ on US rule of law (The Guardian).
You’re goddamn right, and it’s about time. Masks off. Let’s do this.
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
Put a memo on that, to treat Trump and Vance that way asap. The Republican legislators, too. What a glorious day that would be as follow-up to the most disgusting video I have ever seen.