As Donald Trump’s alarming abuse of power has manifested itself across every aspect of the government, we’ve watched many of the powerful institutions we expected would resist, if only to preserve their own prerogatives, fail spectacularly. The most obvious is the Republican Congress which has essentially turned itself into a sad collection of dessicated potted plants, but it isn’t alone. Numerous universities, media companies, corporations, law firms even some of the states have abdicated their roles in our system of checks and balances. The notable exception so far has been the judiciary which has, for the most part, served as the necessary restraint on this out-of-control presidency. Unfortunately as cases have reached the Supreme Court it’s looking more and more like they too are going the way of the houseplants.
Most of the cases are slowly wending their way through the system but a number of the immigration cases have been taken up by the Supreme Court on an emergency basis. They made a few feints in the way of preserving the Constitution, by ruling that Trump cannot completely abandon the ancient concept of habeas corpus and instructing him to provide at least some rudimentary due process before throwing people into foreign gulags. But while none of the cases have been formally decided, the pattern of their decisions, often unsigned and without explanation, pretty clearly shows that they believe the president has the authority to pretty much do whatever he wants, even if it means defying the lower courts. In fact, their apparent reverence for the “unitary executive theory” is so intense you begin to wonder if they will decide that he has the right to defy them too.
The most recent decision came this week in the case of DHS vs D.V.D., in which the Court lifted an injunction that had prevented the government from deporting immigrants to “third countries” with which they had no previous relationship or experience and where they could face torture and death without giving them any ability to contest the decision. The administration said that they have already been deemed “deportable” so there’s no need to even tell them they are being shipped off to violent failed states like South Sudan or Libya.
The Court ok’d that monstrous policy in an unsigned order on its emergency docket. Perhaps they will change their minds if and when the case formally comes before them but it’s hard to see how that’s likely.
It’s also hard to imagine that they will overturn the recent order by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that found Trump probably met the legal threshold required by U.S. law when he federalized the National Guard in Los Angeles. It seems absurd that anyone with the smallest bit of common sense could say that Los Angeles was in such a state of chaos that the president had to intervene but apparently that’s at his discretion to decide. (It’s just that no other president before him has ever had the gall to use it this way.) We await the ruling of the lower court judge as to whether Trump’s deployment of active duty marines violates the Posse Comitatus Act but again, considering how they’ve supported the president’s prerogative to do whatever he wants, it seems likely that the Supreme Court lands on his side of the issue once again.
Meanwhile, all of that seems more and more performative and unnecessary by the day. Los Angeles is under siege but not from protesters and not from the National Guard or the U.S. Marines either. It’s the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) agents who are rampaging across Los Angeles county like a roving, violent gang out of the dystopian crime novel A Clockwork Orange.
We have all seen horrific footage of police beatings before. We watched them kill George Floyd before our very eyes. So it’s not that violence under color of law is unprecedented. What we have not seen, at least since the days of the Ku Klux Klan, are unidentified, armed, masked men in groups assaulting and abducting people without warrants in workplaces, homes and on the streets. The sight of it is truly terrifying. But that, of course, is the point.
Social media is inundated with videos of these raids from all over the area. This footage of 48 year old gardener Narciso Barranco being beaten mercilessly by what appear to be CPB agents has gone viral but there are dozens just like it.
Barranco has three American sons who joined the marines, two of whom are still on active duty. He’s been here since he was a child and has worked and paid taxes for decades. His oldest son, a marine veteran who served in Afghanistan, was finally able to see his father in the downtown detention center and learned that he was injured in the beating and was living in squalid conditions with meager rations in a cell with dozens of other people.
He is one of many.
People are finding out that their relatives, neighbors and friends have been taken when they see videos like these. They are otherwise simply being disappeared off the streets and nobody knows what’s happened to them. It’s up to the community itself to document what’s going on and get it out there. Groups like Union Del Barrio, he Santanero, Santa Ana Problems, LA Taco in LA, Siempre Unidos L.A. are out in the streets, following the raids and filming them. People come out from behind closed doors and stop their cars and try to form protective rings around the hunted men and women, failing more often than not but refusing to make it easy to abduct these people under cover.
The agents are all disguised by their masks and refuse to give identification so there can be no accountability for these individuals who are carrying out this grotesque policy. But there will be a record of what they did.
According to the LA Times, the vast majority of those detained in LA County have no criminal record. And that holds true across the country:
Average people with strong ties to the U.S., including American children and other relatives are being deported by the thousands to who know where. Their families and communities are being torn apart, the local economies left reeling. And for what? To demonstrate that President Trump has complete control over this country and can do whatever he chooses?
At this point we are all hanging on to the thin reed of hope that the Supreme Court is going to uphold our understanding of the Constitution which says that we do not have a king or even an elected dictator. I wish I felt more confident that they will come through. Letting it go on as they have shows that they are lacking the moral conscience that could give us faith that they will do the right thing in the end.
Salon