The Dystopia Is Here

We stand at the brink of despotism.

“Homegrown criminals next. . . . I said homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places.”

Donald Trump said these words in the Oval Office to El Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele. As an American citizen, I don’t know how to say just how stabbed in the back I felt when I heard Trump’s words or how chilled to the bone I felt when officials in his administration broke into laughter, signaling their willingness to go along with this despicable, despotic proposal.

Trump now proposes to deport American citizens, “homegrown criminals,” to foreign prisons. He stated that intent even before reporters while he sat beside Bukele in the Oval Office. Presumably, if he gets this power, Trump will use it with as little regard for the constitutional rights of due process and habeas corpus as he’s shown so far in his handling of immigrants.

Why send citizens to prisons beyond our borders? If you’re zealous of your rights, you must suspect the purpose is to put us — the citizens — beyond the reach of our courts, our laws, and our rights.

That’s what Trump has already done to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to El Salvador against a U.S. immigration judge’s order explicitly stating he was not to be deported to El Salvador. Despite lacking evidence to prove it, Trump and Bukele insist this man is a gang member and “a terrorist,” and now he’s being held in El Salvador’s CECOT prison, reported to be a place where prisoners are routinely tortured, under a contract with the U.S. government. He has been there for a month.

Abrego Garcia was never proved guilty of a crime or even charged with a crime in any court. He never had the chance to plead his innocence before a judge and jury. He was simply presumed guilty and imprisoned. Thus, he was deprived of due process.

In the Oval Office, Trump and Bukele played a shell game with Abrego Garcia’s life. Despite the fact the United States is paying El Salvador to imprison Abrego Garcia as well as many more people, the presidents of both countries claimed to be powerless to release him. Though the Supreme Court ordered Abrego Garcia to be returned to the U.S. and given due process, Trump and his administration chose to read its ruling to mean “do nothing” and to pretend this is only a matter of “foreign policy” where they have total discretion to do as they please.

It’s awful enough to have committed such a gross injustice against any human being, whether he entered our country legally or not. It’s even worse to have committed it against hundreds of people.¹ But now Donald Trump has said he wants to do that to American citizens — to us. And he’s trying to justify this step by citing horrific crimes some citizens have committed, as if what they’ve done and not what he’s doing is the issue. To be clear, Trump’s wanton disregard of constitutional rights is the issue.

Whatever any American citizens have done or whatever they merely stand accused of, they are in plain and simple fact citizens. We are responsible for what happens to our fellow citizens. That’s the price of admission to our citizenship. It’s the social contract created by the U.S. Constitution: We the People, with power to govern ourselves, must honor each other’s rights — all of them — and each other’s equality before the law. As it says on the West Pediment of the Supreme Court:

EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW

Neither rights nor equality nor justice can be had when people are placed beyond the jurisdiction of courts and thus beyond the law.

If Donald Trump has proved anything in his second term as president — even proving it before the term began — it’s that he perceives himself to have enemies among the American people and he goes after these people any way he can.²

Imagine being one of Trump’s enemies. Or just imagine yourself accused of any crime. Imagine being deprived of any or all of your constitutional rights. Imagine you can be spirited away to a prison overseas without due process — without notice or hearing, without trial, judge, counsel, jury, or verdict. With no court to determine your guilt or innocence, it doesn’t matter at all whether you’re rightly or wrongly accused. With no rights, you are the plaything of the state. You can be subjected to any cruel treatment, any abuse, any torture, and you can even be murdered — all on one man’s whim.

That is the lawlessness Donald Trump is proposing. That’s the land he proposes we all live in, the land he proposes to rule. If his proposal doesn’t make you feel betrayed and terrified, you only lack imagination.

“Oh, but Trump wouldn’t actually go that far, would he?” you may object. “Isn’t this all just a bit overblown?”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit doesn’t think so. Ruling unanimously to deny a motion by the Trump administration to stay a district court’s order in Abrego Garcia’s case, the appeals court wrote:

It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting the right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.

This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear. . . .

The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would lose its meaning.

In short, the judges fear Trump will go exactly that far. They foresee lawlessness. They used that very word — “lawlessness” — to describe what rule of law will be reduced to.

On Sunday, in Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson explained why the absence of due process matters to us all, regardless of who’s lost it:

Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.

In other words, without rights, all you have left is fear.

Whatever your politics, wherever you may stand on any issue, you should not want to live like that, nor should you want to live in a land where anyone lives like that.

Written 16-17 April 2025

For many more details about Abrego Garcia’s case, I recommend Ezra Klein’s “The Emergency Is Here.” At the end, Klein asks crucial questions.

For the last two weeks, I’ve lived in a state of growing anxiety, alarm, and dread. It’s been mentally paralyzing, and I haven’t been able to focus at all while trying to revise the next chapter of Quibble — which really needs it — and the second part of “Social Media Made Me an Asshole” for publication. Dear reader, I apologize for the wait.

When the news broke on Monday that Trump asked Bukele to build prisons to house American citizens in El Salvador, my anxiety peaked. I knew then that, even though many other people are talking and writing about this issue, I had to write about it, too. So the next day, on Facebook, I wrote a short draft of this post.

Fittingly, when we last left Quibble, she’d learned the fate of her mother Quiddity and she was in the throes of an anxiety attack. The next chapter will pick up there. Also fittingly, just a few chapters further on, the full scope of dystopian horror in Quibble’s world will come to light.

More soon. In the meantime, dear reader, now that explicit threats to our liberties and rights have been made, I implore you to take them seriously! Make a lot of noise! Call your representative and senators in Congress. Write to them. If possible, meet them in person. Make your expectations of them and your stance on our constitutional rights clear, and demand to know what they will do about it. Be fearless! Be fierce!

1. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “No person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Fourteenth Amendment uses the same language. In both cases, the Constitution says “person,” not “citizen.” All persons in the United States have the constitutional right to due process. That is the law’s plain reading.

This isn’t an irrelevant quibble. As a group, “all persons in the United States” certainly does include “American citizens.” Therefore, if we allow Trump to deprive anyone of due process, we have tacitly given him permission to deprive American citizens of due process. If we do not stop him now, we will set a historical precedent he can later cite to defend despotism.

2. Just before the 2024 election, I wrote a post entitled “You Can’t Appease Fascists!” in which I gave a warning:

Donald Trump has signaled to us all, loud and clear, that he believes the U.S. military can and should be used against the people he calls “the enemy from within . . . radical Left lunatics.” He’s put members of Congress in that category. For years, he has called the free press “the enemy of the people.” It’s not hard to work out whom he means: the people who oppose and criticize him. Anyone, potentially. . . .

It’s how dictators operate. Raising the specter of deploying the military against the American people — any of the people, for any reason Trump likes — is only the last in a long line of tip-offs that he really wants to be a dictator.

Trump’s actions since taking office — for instance, targeting law firms and even individual citizens with executive orders — have only further demonstrated his desire to be a dictator.