Visa and green cards. Citizens next?
This subhead from The New Republic encapsulates where we are in this country and where Trump 2.0 is taking us: Even legal residents and tourists are being terrorized by Trump-emboldened officers at ICE and CBP.
The article discusses the cases of Fabian Schmidt, Mahmoud Khalid, and Rasha Alawieh who we’ve discussed previously, and notes:
You have, at some point within the last week, probably broken the law. You jaywalked or smoked in a no-smoking park or ignored a stop sign or any of a thousand other daily things that we hardly think about but which are on paper illegal. The reason you most likely weren’t arrested or even ticketed for these things is because it would not be possible for police to spot every single one of these violations, and because even if the cops did witness it, they decided that it just wasn’t worth the bother (or the paperwork).
But now Trump 2.0 is hunting enemies hiding in woodpiles to detain, arrest, and extrajudicially punish.
For a long time, certain populations in particular have been used to generally favorable discretion. Undocumented immigrants—in particular those from developing countries—never could expect much grace, but high-skill work visa holders, international students, European tourists, Canadian day-trippers, and others in this higher-status sphere enjoyed a lighter touch. Perhaps if there was confusion around their visa, they would get directed to file paperwork to fix it and sent on their way, or at worst merely turned away at the border. But now, it seems, immigration agents are increasingly using the full statutory powers that they always had, choosing to detain, abuse, and deport these tourists and workers instead of working with them.
At this point, traveling outside the country is a risk for holders of visas and green cards if the Trump administration looks at them sideways. And a tourism industry dependent on foreign visitors to the U.S. will begin to collapse. But that’s just the beginning.
Consider this report from NPR on Tuesday’s sparring match between Trump Department of Justice lawyers and U.S. District Judge James Boasberg over their ignoring his Saturday order to halt their deportation of 250 alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. The DOJ sent the detainees to a supermax prison in El Salvador without any court hearing to test evidence that each was associated with TdA as the DOJ claimed:
In court filings on Tuesday, the Justice Department complied with a judge’s order for a sworn declaration about how planeloads of alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang landed in El Salvador — hours after U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued emergency orders temporarily blocking the Trump administration from using wartime powers to quickly deport people.
The DOJ complied with Boasberg’s Monday order with a Tuesday “declaration from Robert Cerna, a top official at the U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement field office in Harlingen, Texas” on what happened and when on Saturday. But Boasberg was unsatisfied. He gave the Justice Department by noon ET on Wednesday to provide a more detailed account of these flights before declaring the DOJ in contempt.
In his Monday filing, Cerna claimed that ICE had vetted each “to ensure they were in
fact members of TdA,” but in effect asked the court to take his word for it. Now consider this part of Cerna’s declaration (brackets and bolding mine):
While it is true that many of the TdA members removed under the AEA do not have criminal records in the United States, that is because they have only been in the United States for a short period of time. The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their [alleged] association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are [alleged] terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.
I lack a criminal record and complete profile! Likely, so do you.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the scholar of authoritarianism, warns:
When moral deregulation advances because violence and corruption have been institutionalized, including in the behavior of national leaders, then a society can experience moral collapse. We hear about how authoritarians “hollow out” institutions by removing anyone not loyal to the leader and the party, but they also hollow out people to the point where they will participate in acts of violence, corruption and sabotage against their compatriots.
We are living through processes of moral deregulation and moral collapse in America today under the authoritarian government of President Donald Trump and unelected co-President Elon Musk. Their policies are wrecking a robust national economy, paralyzing government, allying with dictators, creating conditions for the spread of disease, and abandoning the rule of law.
The Trump administration is in open defiance of judicial branch scrutiny.
I don’t have to spell it out. The law no longer protects you.
Are the people who Trump sent to a Salvadoran prison actually gang members?
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