This is an insane sentence to read in a story on a federal court ruling:

There is little to no evidence to support a “vague, uncorroborated” allegation that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was once in the MS-13 street gang, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis wrote. And in any case, she said, an immigration judge had expressly barred the U.S. in 2019 from deporting Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he faced likely persecution by local gangs. 

“As defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador — let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere,” Xinis wrote.

I’ll put this bluntly. There are many policy positions you can hold that — even if crazy — can fit inside the framework of American society and government prescribed by the U.S. Constitution. You can call different ideas “left-wing”, or “right-wing”, or talk about the importance of “liberty” or “security”, and in most cases that can fit inside some still-defensible idea of how the United States could/would work.

However, the idea that the executive branch can unilaterally declare someone removable from the country, provide no proof, ignore the laws and procedures that legally require them do so, send them to a prison in El Salvador, and then declare that the person cannot be returned because they are now outside U.S. jurisdiction is fundamentally incompatible with not only the U.S. Constitution, but the basics of western law and morality that predate the formation of the country. It is, with zero exaggeration, a blank check for the administration to do anything they want to anyone with no repercussions. They just have to say you are in this gang, and you can be whisked away and never seen again.

For America to function as you expect it to (whether you are aware of this or not), the executive branch absolutely must provide some justification for what they are doing, and there absolutely must be a defined, pre-described forum for providing it and allowing for some form of pushback or counter-argument from the person that it is being done to, and all of this must be overseen and adjudicated by someone who is not the executive branch. It doesn’t matter if the person is a citizen or not, because if the government isn’t required to do this for everyone, they can just declare that someone is not a citizen and do whatever they want to them, because in that world ICE or the Army or the State Department or the USDA or whoever would apparently have the right to simply take any action they want and then wash their hands of the situation because the person has been sent off to some godforsaken prison hundreds or thousands of miles away. 

This is so stupid and obvious I can’t even believe it needs to be stated. If you can’t understand this, I sort of feel bad for you, but mostly I am enraged you are such a useless, non-contributing member of our democracy, because it is so unbelievably uncomplicated that I struggle to see any reason other than willful, borderline malicious ignorance for not finding this completely outrageous and unacceptable. You absolutely do not need to be some political egghead to wrap your arms around the idea that the people and institutions who get the guns and the keys to the prisons need to have absolutely ironclad limitations placed on them and that those limitations cannot be defined or interpreted by them. If a bunch of farmers and shopkeepers and blacksmiths were able to figure this out and do something about it 300 years ago (at tremendous personal risk!), I feel like you can get there too.

And hey, if for some reason you can’t get around the idea of non-citizens having rights of any sort (that’s your problem to figure out, but I won’t die on that hill here), remind yourself that this is not about anyone’s positive rights, this is about fundamental restrictions on what the government can do. It’s a check on them, you dummies, not a perk of being a citizen, because if they can do this they can just take away your perks whenever they want and they don’t have to give a reason or explain anything about that reason to you, a judge, or your freaking family, who will never see you again.  

Good lord. I spent four years sort of lazily piling up credits and stumbling out of college with a political science degree, and for the most part I felt silly because it seemed like all I learned was “how America works”, which I sort of knew anyways, and which seemed like something everyone here would have to learn just walking around and living life, or else society would collapse. And maybe I was right, because now that most people don’t seem to know any of this, the Republic does actually appear to be in some form of collapse.