This is not a drill
A repressive, arbitrary regime is taking shape before our eyes.
History, as the saying goes, has a way of rhyming. So it is worth noting that as the nation marks the 250th anniversary of the Revolution — that world-changing rebellion against tyranny and taxation that began in Boston, Concord, and Lexington — there are rumblings of discontent with President Donald Trump’s sweeping and erratic tariffs.
Polls suggest that even many Republicans are growing restive about the potential cost of what are effectively broad-based taxes on American consumers and businesses that depend on imports, which is to say almost all of us. But there is another Trump policy with equally haunting echoes of 1775.
It is an issue that doesn’t touch our pocketbooks the way taxes, tariffs, or the price of tea do. But it is one about which every American — particularly those who care about what it means to be an American — should be asking hard questions. That is: The use of federal force to arrest, imprison, and deport without due process foreign nationals accused, usually with scant or zero evidence, of being a danger to the country.
The president can fairly claim that he was elected with a mandate to reduce immigration, deport criminal aliens, and remove visa holders who pose a legitimate threat to the country. Yet time and again, reporting has shown that this is not what is happening in far too many cases. For every incident of an undocumented alien who is deported because of a demonstrable record of criminality or dangerousness, there are too many others whose visa cancellations and removals seem unsupported, capricious, or arbitrary.
° Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is an immigrant from El Salvador who entered the United States illegally. But in 2019, a federal immigration judge barred his removal to El Salvador on the ground that he had a credible fear of persecution there. Nevertheless, alleging that he is a member of the violent gang MS-13, federal agents arrested him in Maryland last month and sent him to El Salvador where he is now imprisoned in a notoriously brutal prison. Yet Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old father of three, has no criminal record in the United States, and the government has yet to produce evidence that he belongs to MS-13. It has also acknowledged that sending him to El Salvador was an administrative mistake. Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have found that his removal was improper and that the US should “facilitate” his return. Yet the Trump administration says the matter is out of its hands, though it has not bothered to request his return from El Salvador, whose president is a close ally of Trump.
°
Rümeysa Öztürk is a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University whose
arrest last month in Somerville by masked federal agents who handcuffed
her and hustled her into an unmarked SUV was captured on viral video. She was denied access to a lawyer and shuttled to multiple lockups before landing in a Louisiana jail where she has been denied bail.
Federal officials have cited her support for Hamas as the reason for
revoking her visa and detaining her, but so far their only evidence
appears to be an op-ed she wrote for a student newspaper that accused
Israel of genocide in its war against Hamas. A federal judge in Vermont
hinted that he may order her returned to Vermont for future hearings,
but also expressed concerns that the Trump administration would ignore
his order and prompt a “constitutional crisis.”
° Kseniia Petrova is a Russian biologist who was researching aging at Harvard Medical School when she was detained at Logan airport in February for failing to declare frog embryos that were to be used in her research, an infraction typically punished with a fine. Instead she was sent to a detention center in Louisiana and now faces deportation to Russia, where she fears imprisonment for protesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Immigration experts told The New York Times that violating customs rules is not grounds for revoking a visa and deporting someone. “I feel like something is happening generally in America,” she told the Times. “Something bad is happening. I don’t think everybody understands.”
These individual stories may seem just that — individual and therefore unconnected. But a pattern is forming, and it should worry anyone who understands how essential the rule of law is to our political system. The concept of due process is a cornerstone of Western democracy, dating back to at least the Magna Carta. It is also enshrined in the Constitution, where the Fifth Amendment states that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Protesting these unlawful actions by the Trump administration should not fall solely to Democrats, civil rights lawyers, or immigration advocates. Small-government conservatives and libertarians who worry about unmoored police power should be every bit as uneasy about the masked agents and unmarked cars; the dubious allegations of unspecified wrongdoing; the disregard for court orders. A good libertarian would not be faulted for detecting the sour smell of a budding police state. All that is missing are the black helicopters.
Many average Americans will be tempted to pretend that none of this has anything to do with them, or to believe that these migrants are getting what they deserve. Even if the visas that made them legal immigrants were rescinded overnight without clear cause. Even if they were whisked away to dank prison cells without evidence of wrongdoing.
But those people should remember that when a government disregards the law in its treatment of some, there is good reason to fear that it will disregard the law in its treatment of all. Leave it to Trump himself to open the door to that possibility.
“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places,” Trump said to President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador following a meeting at the White House, referring to more Salvadoran prisons to house US citizens, an illegal proposition. The Trump administration has already sent about 250 migrants slated for deportation to El Salvador’s largest prison, a “service” for which the United States is paying $6 million a year.
Lest anyone think that a joke, consider the case of Jensy Machado, a US citizen detained by federal agents in Virginia, who were looking to deport another man. After Machado showed the agents his Real ID driver’s license, they released him. But what if he had forgotten to carry his ID that day? How long might he have languished in a Louisiana lockup while administration lawyers denied the mistake?
Machado told a Washington, D.C., television station that he voted for Trump because he thought he would “just go after criminals.” Instead, he said, “They’re just following Hispanic people.”
On this weekend leading up to Patriots Day and the running of the marathon, Boston commemorates the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride, while Lexington and Concord once again reenact the famous battles at the Battle Green and Old North Bridge.
Battles, after all, are what people remember best about the Revolution. But it is the words in the nation’s founding documents and the ideas behind those words that have had the most profound and lasting impact: that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights.
This of all years is not the time to forget the meaning of those words, and the democratic system they spawned.