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Trump wants to imprison Americans

Chris Brennan   Paste BN

Has America become a country where one political party gleefully shreds the rights of people perceived as their “enemy” while holding power in the White House and Congress, only for another political party to later win control of those institutions and do the same?

Let’s put that another way: Are you a supporter of President Donald Trump, giddy about his administration’s trampling of due process while violating an immigration judge’s order by sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a hellhole prison in El Salvador?

This is widely popular with the segment of Americans who don’t really care about policy or governing and really just live to aggravate people who don’t think like they do. Call them the Own The Libs Caucus.

That’s who is cheering the “administrative error” that sent Abrego Garcia down a deep, dark hole, despite an immigration judge’s 2019 order that should have prevented his deportation. That’s the crowd that loves it now when Trump pretends he can’t do anything to fix his administration’s screw-up, despite instructions from a federal judge and the U.S. Supreme Court to find a solution.

The Own The Libs Caucus is seriously short-sighted. If you endorse Trump deporting people, based on zero evidence of wrongdoing and a total lack of due process, then you are also supporting the power of a future president to do the same to you.

My latest: More than 1 million PA voters aren't allowed to vote in primaries. I'm one of them. 

Trump, during a White House meeting with El Salvador’s president this week, goaded him to build more hellhole prisons and then told him – and later Fox News – that he wants to imprison Americans there too. Trump was talking about criminals, but he and his administration have repeatedly called Abrego Garcia a criminal and terrorist while offering no evidence at all.

If you think none of this could impact you because you’re not a criminal, well, who cares? You embrace an approach to deportation that couldn’t care less about the facts. 

Trump is now 78 years old. He’ll be 82 when the next president takes office in January 2029. He’d like that to be his third term. The U.S. Constitution makes that illegal. And, despite his 2028 campaign flirtations, I think America will be more than done with Trump by the end of his second term, if not sooner.

So what happens to the Own The Libs Caucus if a Democrat wins the White House in the 2028 election? Should Trump’s supporters wait for a knock at the door or a rush of federal agents on the street? Will they be shackled and hooded, shuffled off to some far-away detention center and then flown to a foreign country willing to warehouse America’s politically undesirables for a hefty fee?

That’s what is happening now here and in El Salvador. If you’re pleased by that, you’re not looking far enough into the future. If you love this rupture of the rule of law, you have no justification to hope the rule of law will someday save you.

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