On Saturday, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg tried and failed to block an agreement between the Trump administration and El Salvador that would pay the Central American country $6 million to imprison hundreds of people who were living in America. To make the deal happen, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, used most notoriously to justify the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. The act, in theory, can only be deployed in the context of war, but the Trump administration is using it as a weapon for a peacetime immigration clampdown. By claiming that Venezuelan "gang members" are invading the U.S., the Trump administration is attempting to bypass standard legal protections to quickly deport any immigrant whom they decide to say is associated with a gang.
Boasberg's ruling came after the ACLU sued on behalf of five people facing imminent threat of deportation. Already, however, the administration was sending hundreds of people on a pair of flights to Central America. While Boasberg verbally ordered the planes to be turned around so those on them could have a chance to be heard in court, the Trump administration refused, and instead took the opportunity to gloat about defying the order.
“Once they’re out of the country,” Boasberg admitted, “There’s little I could do.”
Upon arrival in El Salvador, the people on the plane were used for a fascist propaganda video that highlighted the brutality of their treatment. According to the Miami Herald, it was only through the video that some of their loved ones learned where they had been taken. Others in America are scanning the footage looking for familiar faces:
Gustavo Adolfo Aguilera Agüero, 26, from the Venezuelan Andes in Táchira, had been living in Dallas with his wife since December 2023. In early February, Aguilera Agüero was detained by authorities while taking out the trash, according to his wife. Authorities were actually searching for someone else, but Aguilera Agüero spent several weeks in detention, awaiting deportation to Venezuela. Now, his mother, Miriam Aguilera, fears her son may be among the Venezuelans deported to El Salvador.
There's no evidence that the people on those planes did anything worse than live in America, and the Trump administration consciously circumvented the legal avenues for proving criminality through due process in a public forum.
I think it would be an insult to your intelligence to argue at length why human beings should not be treated like animals. But here is a point I do want to emphasize: This is outrageous regardless of criminality. Even if any of these people have committed some as-yet-unknown, as-yet-unproven crime, covertly whisking them away to another country's torture chambers without due process is the kind of lawless cruelty that makes me want to believe in a retributive hell. Coupled with this administration's targeting of trans people, its antisemitism, its incarceration of Mahmoud Khalil for his support of Palestine, its insistence that "diversity, equity, and inclusion" are four-letter words, and its decimation of a federal workforce that has been a pillar of the black middle class, it's easy to see what the Trump administration is trying to build: a country where everyone outside the umbrella of Christian nationalist white supremacy is not only a potential target of the state, but also has no legal recourse to protect themselves.
We all need to stick up for each other. The 2024 election results damaged my belief that it's possible to score political wins by appealing to empathy, and it's clear that the ruling class has none, but it remains important to me that we do not lose our own.
