The Trump-El Salvador Scandal Deepens
As President Trump prepares to fête brutal far-right El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele in DC on April 14, the scandal involving a vile new international slave trade between the two men is growing.
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Introduction
“We need to get better at treating [mass deportations] like a business—like Amazon Prime but with human beings.”
— Todd Lyons, Donald Trump’s Acting ICE Director (April 9, 2025)
When one lives in a failing democracy, which the United States now appears to be, an abiding fear is that domestic matters will take such a turn for the worse that innocent civilians start getting plucked off the street by their government and “disappeared.”
According to an emergency ruling by one of the most powerful federal courts in the United States—the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit—that’s exactly what the second Trump Administration has begun doing.
The court, in unanimously (3-0) upholding a lower-court order demanding that Trump and his agents return wrongly deported American resident Abrego Garcia to the United States by midnight on Monday, likened what the administration had done to Mr. Garcia to “an official kidnapping,” according to a report in the New York Times.
It also termed the administration’s actions “unconscionable,” echoing a lower court’s finding that the action ICE had taken with respect to Garcia was “wholly lawless.”
In response, the Trump administration, as is its wont, doubled down in every respect, including elements of its justification for kidnapping Garcia that are so troubling they couldn’t be addressed by the federal judiciary in advance of its now-passed midnight deadline. These elements are discussed, and in exhaustive detail, in this Proof report.
Most notably, one of the two Trump agents and advisers primarily responsible for the now-confirmed-illegal Trumpist deportation scheme (Stephen Miller; the other is Trump “immigration czar” Tom Homan) confirmed on social media that the official position of the Trump Administration is that any person it deports to El Salvador, including a person it now admits it arrested for no reason and deported without justification even under existing handshake agreements with El Salvador, is now in the physical and legal custody of the far-right dictator of that nation—Trump and Elon Musk friend Nayib Bukele—and cannot be returned under any circumstances.
This statement—that only the President of El Salvador can issue dispensations as to an American resident the Trump administration has deported into his custody under cover of darkness and without due process—comprises a constitutional crisis, as it’s a claim by the Trump administration that it will refuse to honor a federal judicial ruling regarding to the return of such a person to the U.S. on the grounds that honoring that ruling would be logistically impossible as a matter of international relations.
This lie serves as the starting point for this massive new Proof report on the Trump-El Salvador Scandal.
The Venezuelan Hoax
It turns out that the Trump administration kidnapping innocents off American streets and trafficking them to a fascist dictator for cash is just the tip of the iceberg.
Before there was Abrego Garcia and the Trump-El Salvador Scandal, there was what we can now charitably call the Venezuelan Hoax—which, it turns out, is necessary to understand if one wants to understand either the plight of Mr. Garcia or the rapidly expanding contours of the former scandal.
Readers must keep in mind, as we discuss the Venezuelan Hoax, that the two issues—one domestic and one foreign policy-related—that enabled Donald Trump to narrowly (by 1.4% in the popular vote) regain access to the White House were: (1) the blowback against what MAGAs mislabel as “gender ideology extremism” (in fact, merely the uncontroversial premise that trans persons have a right to exist); and (2) immigration by undocumented persons, which began spiking in the final half-year of the first Trump administration but which Trump was able to convince U.S. voters was strictly caused by former president Joe Biden.
In both cases—and as is usual for him and his party—Trump relied on isolated, non-repeating, exaggerated anecdotes to incite anxiety and fear among the American voting population with respect to both trans persons and illegal immigration.
For instance, Mr. Trump implied that there was a growing epidemic of trans women competing in women’s sports in the NCAA. As it turned out, there are “less than ten” trans women out of “more than 520,000” NCAA college athletes.
Just so, Trump spent the entirety of his 2024 U.S. presidential campaign regaling fans, rally-goers, and even interviewers with a bizarre fake chart that showed him leaving office in his first term in January 2020 rather than January 2021—before the COVID-19 pandemic hit—as a means of convincing unsuspecting U.S. voters that a massive illegal immigration spike did not begin during his presidency (as it in fact did).
Blinded by hatred of immigrants and trans persons, and susceptible to sensational one-off anecdotes, American voters fell for Trump’s con. This much is unsurprising, given Trump’s career of fraud, deceit, and (once he entered national politics) pulling prejudice-fueled fast ones on America. But if readers further understand that the main vehicle for Donald Trump prospectively seizing authoritarian power in the United States—as he’s long planned to do—will be the invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807 on the fraudulent grounds of a supposed “invasion” by “foreign terrorists” (this being Trump’s facially preposterous gloss on what’s actually market-propelled cross-border migration), it becomes clear how vital it’s been and will continue to be for the Trump administration to scam voters into believing America has a serious problem with acts of violence committed by immigrants.
It does not.
Immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes than citizens.
If all of the United States were made up of immigrants rather than citizens, our crime rate would plummet by “60%,” according to a Northwestern University study. While of course it’s always possible to find shocking anecdotes on any topic—from violence committed by an individual immigrant to Donald Trump filling an adult diaper with his feces in the middle of a taping his NBC reality show The Apprentice—anecdotes are not Big Data, cannot spot long-term trends, and are often deceptively reductive.
Of course, even Trump’s anecdotes from the 2024 campaign trail turned out to be lies.
For instance, Trump told voters that an apartment complex in Colorado had been invaded and completely taken over by an armed Venezuelan gang. The claim, which he repeated ad nauseam throughout the election season, was untrue. In turns out that in the city of Aurora (pop. 395,052) there are only ten persons who are even members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (and that fact alone has nothing to do with whether these men are violent, invaded an apartment complex, or threaten neighbors).
Yet the Aurora Hoax turned out to be a successful dry run for Trump, reassuring him that—evidence-free—he could convince Americans that an “invasion” of the United States was being coordinated by the leftist government of Venezuela, with Tren de Aragua members are spreading out across the United States to rape and murder white people.
Obviously this claim is nothing more than a racist fantasy, but it’s consistent with the ideological garbage Trump has successfully sold his whole political career—so it was gobbled up as avidly in 2024 as it had been in 2016 and (only slightly less successfully) in 2020.
The italicized words in two paragraphs above are particularly important, however.
The reason Trump chose the nation of Venezuela for his pre-election hoax—a hoax he would explore not just during the campaign but aim to expand, post-election, as part of an apparent run-up to seizing authoritarian control over the United States (see infra)—is because Trump detests its leftist leadership. Readers must remember here that The Waldron Plot, under which Trump quite nearly declared martial law in December 2020, during his first term (before deciding to instead simply incite an armed rebellion at the United States Capitol in January 2021) was dependent on a wildly false claim of Venezuela infiltrating U.S. voting machines. That claim has now been fully recanted.
For this reason—and for the additional reason that the Venezuelan Hoax could now lead to a reinstitution of the international slave trade in the United States—breaking down exactly the terms of this particular hoax is essential. This breakdown also carries the benefit of explaining why what happened to Abrego Garcia happened, and how we ended up in a Trump-El Salvador Scandal that seems to be expanding by the day.
The 238 Venezuelan migrants Donald Trump trafficked to the far-right government in El Salvador were said to be the “worst of the worst” undocumented persons—and specifically Venezuelans—the Trump administration would be deporting as part of its historically encompassing mass deportation scheme (a scheme whose projected total cost to the United States will be trillions of dollars over fifteen years, and bring with it the likely collapse of America’s domestic labor force, which is 5% undocumented migrants overall but as high as 14% in certain industries long crucial to our economy).
To hear Trump and his top advisers tell it, these individuals were and are of such vile character that they quite reasonably could be used by U.S. voters as a proxy for all who would come after them. In short, if these 238 Venezuelan migrants weren’t the killers and rapists and terrorists that Trump, Musk, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt have long insisted they are, it would give the lie to every current and future atrocity—both domestic and overseas—that Trump is planning to build on the back of that lie (see infra). One could argue that the supposed value proposition of there even being a second Trump administration would vanish.
So here's the truth about those 238 Venezuelans.
According to a major investigative report by CBS News that looked at both the U.S. criminal-record system and the Venezuelan criminal-record system, of the 238 men Trump kidnapped off the streets of America and without due process trafficked to another country,
75% had no identifiable criminal record in either the United States or Venezuela;
17% had a non-violent criminal record that involved only minor property offenses;
3% had no locatable record of any kind (meaning ICE likely lacked one too); and
only 5% had the violent criminal record Trump falsely claimed 100% of them did.
{Note: It’s worth observing that this last 5% included only a dozen men—and only some of the crimes located for these dozen men were life felonies like homicide or felonious sexual assault. That is, CBS News also found offenses that would be mere misdemeanors in the United States, like Assault—an offense that doesn’t always result in a jail sentence—or Kidnapping, which does always result in a prison term, but more likely a five- or ten-year sentence rather than the far longer ones the men convicted of Seditious Conspiracy for January 6 received, which far greater crimes and far longer sentences Trump casually commuted without doubt or concern.}
When confronted with this irrefutable hard data, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman was, apparently, shocked into incoherence. She told CBS News, which had made very clear to her that it looked at foreign criminal records also, that many of those without criminal records “are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more; they just don’t have a rap sheet in the United States.”
In other words, the Trump administration had no meaningful response available when confronted with the truth.
So what did journalists do? They went up the chain of command and confronted AG Pam Bondi with the CBS News findings. Incredibly, her reply was even less coherent.
When at a presser Bondi was confronted with the 75% no-criminal-record finding—as to a group of 238 now-caged men previously presented to America as all having lengthy criminal records—Bondi appeared so flustered at being called out in this way that she immediately told not just one but three demonstrable lies: (1) that the 238 Venezuelan migrants “are not Venezuelan migrants,” a ludicrous proposition she defended by calling them “illegal aliens” instead (an overlapping, coextensive status that is, in this context, mere semantics); (2) that they “are committing the most violent crimes” (a falsehood contradicted by the hard data with which she had just been confronted, as in fact far from committing “the most violent crimes,” 75% of these 238 men had no records indicating they’d ever committed crimes of any kind); and (3) that “we don’t have to charge them with every crime, we can deport them and get them out of our country”—an attempt to imply that the migrants she and Trump trafficked overseas had already been found to have committed violent crimes the administration never reported.
Besides this last claim being both bizarre and false, was in any case contradicted immediately by Bondi herself with her next words, which included the claim that any Venezuelan migrant found to have committed a murder wouldn’t be deported but kept in the U.S. and charged: “If you committed a murder in our country, we’re going to keep you here and we’re going to seek the death penalty, we’re going to keep you in prison.” In other words, such persons would’ve had arrest records. Which they didn’t.
In short, every statement on this matter from the Trump administration appears to confirm that no part of its mass deportation scheme—which economists say will be as ruinous to the U.S. economy as Trump’s equally ill-conceived tariff war—has been thought out at all, and that to the extent any part of it vaguely was, it was only to (a) ensure the hoax involving Venezuelans would be as politically efficacious as the one from 2024 (the Aurora Hoax) that helped Trump regain the White House, and (b) find a way to justify it without any thought for due process or, frankly, any anticipation of future involvement by the federal judiciary (as AG Bondi’s repeated references to the idea that “we” can do whenever “we” like appear to refer to the executive branch only, not the federal government writ large).
Attempts by journalists to follow up with Bondi on her answers caused her to flee the presser posthaste.
So how does all this relate to Abrego Garcia? Well, the Venezuelan Hoax was so hurriedly and sloppily put together that it produced a series of cascading errors in ICE operations in February and March of 2025.
The Garcia incident wouldn’t have occurred had it not been seen as essential within the second Trump administration that the Venezuela Hoax become well-established in the minds of voters prior to the April 20 date Trump has set for declaring martial law on the basis of a Venezuelan “invasion” (again, keeping in mind how reminiscent this is of the December 2020 date Trump imagined for declaring martial law on the basis of alleged—but actually wholly illusory—Venezuelan election interference).
More broadly, the Venezuelan Hoax and the Garcia Scandal are related in that the legal theory devised by the Trump administration for both cases is exactly the same.
Which is exactly the legal conundrum the Trump administration is facing right now.
What the Administration will never be able to explain to any federal court is why it believes federal courts did have jurisdiction over Abrego Garcia when he was on U.S. soil, but lost that jurisdiction the moment he was put on a plane to El Salvador—with America, under the Administration’s theory of the case, losing its jurisdiction to El Salvador even as Garcia’s plane was still over U.S. airspace, and the U.S. continuing to not have jurisdiction over a U.S. resident it had had jurisdiction over for years and years as Garcia’s plane was still over international waters, and with that lack of U.S. jurisdiction continuing on as the plane was over Guatemala, and with that lack of U.S. jurisdiction then continuing on as the plane was in El Salvadoran airspace but not on El Salvadoran soil (keeping in mind that, per Trump and his team, America doesn’t have jurisdiction over its airspace). And needless to say, under the Administration’s theory of the Garcia case El Salvador’s almost mystical—and seemingly ubiquitous— jurisdiction over Garcia was also extant when Garcia arrived in a place he had no business whatsoever being: on El Salvadoran soil, the one place government officials were expressly forbidden to send him by U.S. courts across many years (see infra for why).
Should any federal court now adopt this Trumpist vision of a mystical and seemingly ubiquitous form of jurisdiction uniquely held by the nation of El Salvador—that is, jurisdiction that is triggered the second anyone is even put on a plane to El Salvador—where does that line of legal “reasoning” end, exactly?
Wouldn’t the same thing be true for any other person over whom the federal courts have jurisdiction, and who the federal courts have also long said can’t be sent to El Salvador to be incarcerated, like, say… the now-incarcerated U.S. citizens President Trump just publicly said he wants to put on planes to El Salvador as soon as possible?
Who couldn’t Trump agents kidnap off an American street and traffick to El Salvador in the dead of night, if they can do so to a Maryland resident and father of three like Abrego Garcia—whose U.S. residency status specifically precludes any transport to El Salvador, by written court order?
In other words, legally speaking, either all persons over whom our federal courts have jurisdiction are entitled to due process before they’re forcibly removed from America, or they don’t. While certain classes of persons may receive more limited due process than others, there’s no category of person in the United States who can receive none—and Abrego Garcia, who’s certainly not in the least-protected category of American resident, clearly received none.
So the now-formalized position of the Trump administration is that as long as it can get a person off American soil (literally off U.S. soil, i.e., even if it means only into U.S. airspace) before their case is reviewed by a federal court, that court can do nothing at all and that person is, and permanently, under the jurisdiction of the government that controls whatever country that plane flies to. If this position were to be adopted with respect to Abrego Garcia, it would likewise be true for, by way of example, any U.S. citizen who’s the minor child of undocumented persons; a legal permanent resident of the United States; someone who’s been granted asylum in the United States; and yes, even for U.S. citizens, too. The rule Trump proposes, if enacted, would have to apply to every person on U.S. soil, because it’s been framed as a way for the executive branch to evade the requirements of due process that every person on U.S. soil is entitled to.
If you doubt that this really is the position of the Trump administration, take a look at the words of the chief law enforcement officer of that administration, Pam Bondi:
Bondi makes clear that anyone deported by the Trump administration who ends up on El Salvadoran soil “will remain in El Salvador,” with the jurisdiction of the judiciary being “over” at that point. While she’s ostensibly discussing persons removed under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (the AEA), and is ostensibly speaking of the recent Supreme Court decision indicating that the 238 Venezuelan migrants deported to El Salvador without due process aren’t going to have their cases reviewed, Bondi’s legal reasoning has nothing to do with the AEA or those 238 souls. Per the interview above, her reading of the Supreme Court’s “loud and clear” ruling is that a federal district court judge has “no jurisdiction” over recent deportees because “that flight [is] in El Salvador” and “those inmates are in El Salvador.”
It is, in other words—at least according to Trump’s DOJ—the fact that a flight makes it to El Salvador that leaves federal courts without any jurisdiction, not what SCOTUS actually said: that going forward Trump deportees will be subject to federal jurisdiction before deportation.
If all this seems a little confusing, it admittedly is.
Five far-right Justices on the Supreme Court decided yesterday, without giving any reason for doing so, that they would not attempt to adjudicate the fate of the 238 Venezuelan detainees now in El Salvador—a group out of which, at most, only 12 could possibly belong there— but instead of doing nothing with this bizarre omission by the Supreme Court (see infra for the text itself), what the second Trump administration’s chief law enforcement officer did was frame this omission, a jurisprudential silence, as an indication that what saved the Trump administration from having the fate of those 238 people reviewed by the Supreme Court was the fact that they were successfully shipped to El Salvador.
By this logic, all the Trump administration must do now is ensure that it gets anyone it really wants to stay in El Salvador onto El Salvadoran soil before the Supreme Court gets wind of it.
If you’re thinking that the Supreme Court could have avoided this by making clear what it plans to do about those 238 mostly innocent souls now rotting in a supermax prison in El Salvador, you’re right. But five far-right Justices chose not to, and the result of that inaction is that, as of today, the Trump administration still believes in the aforementioned, almost mystical notion about El Salvadoran jurisdiction that it feels is triggered the second anyone is put on a plane to El Salvador and the plane takes off. (This needless confusion has now also caused two federal judges—one in Texas and one in New York—to rule, earlier today, in a way that seems to conflict with SCOTUS’ recent ruling.)
Someday, maybe very soon, the Trump administration will test this new license by seeing how close to deporting a U.S. citizen with no criminal record it can get under the “rule” as it now (per Pam Bondi) perceives it to be: just get your deportees aloft.
It’s almost hard to blame Bondi here, as opposed to the five Justices who well knew, on the public record and the record before them, that the Trump administration had sent innocents to die in El Salvador and still chose to do nothing about it. In the very moment the Court breached a longstanding legal precept—that everyone on U.S. soil gets due process before deportation, and that this fact doesn’t change just because the illegal deportation has already been accomplished—that precept could be seen to have been permanently and irretrievably pierced. This certainly seems to be the lesson that Pam Bondi took from the recent ruling.
As The Atlantic just wrote, “If federal courts cannot order the return of someone exiled to a foreign gulag by mistake, then the administration is free to exile citizens and then claim they did so in error, while leaving them to rot” (emphasis supplied).
Indeed—this is exactly the danger of Bondi’s “air-and-soil” reading of how to illegally exile someone from America and leave them to die in a Central American death trap.
The only question now is whether those government officials, like Bondi, willing to pierce the one-time core constitutional principle that no deportation can occur without due process will, in the future, act with malicious intent (as The Atlantic and this author fear). And of course anyone who watched the first Trump administration between 2017 and 2021 and is now watching this second one knows the answer is yes.
During his first term, Donald Trump infamously spoke of wanting to see his political enemies executed. During his second term, his co-president Elon Musk has just as infamously spoken of viewing those who oppose his political ambitions as terrorists. And Attorney General Pam Bondi—never one to seize integrity from the jaws of dishonor—has concurred with Mr. Musk on this. So these are exactly the fascists the Supreme Court should have been looking for when trying to determine what sort of government agents all deportees would in the future need to be defended against.
But the Court failed in its duty—per usual in dealing with Mr. Trump and his agents—and now hundreds of people with no business being in El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele’s “CECOT” supermax prison will be there for the rest of their natural lives.
Which is why we now need to speak, in excruciating detail, about what CECOT is.
Inside CECOT—Where 238 Venezuelan Migrants and Abrego Garcia Are Being Held on No Grounds At All
We know that the intent of the Trump administration is to send every future Trump deportee to CECOT—not just the vanishingly small subset AG Pam Bondi likes to speak of while knowingly pretending its criminal count is 2000% larger than it really is—because another Trump official seemingly chosen for loyalty and telegenics rather than competence, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, has told America so. And she did it through one of the most despicable political ads that any U.S. political operation has ever aired:
Using prisoners as political props is grotesque enough, but to add insult to injury, Ms. Noem begins her ad by first pretending that the Trump administration has only sent to CECOT “terrorists” known to have enacted “violence” in American communities.
To be clear, not only is this a lie, but there’s no evidence that any of the Venezuelan migrants Noem sent to CECOT—or, for that matter, anyone else Noem has sent to CECOT—fit this description. Perhaps appreciating that she’s just told a lie, with her second sentence Noem changes her initial stance entirely and says instead that anyone who merely “comes to [the United States illegally….could face [CECOT]” as “one of the consequences.” While horrifying, and moreover unconstitutional, at least this latter confession—that the Trump administration doesn’t actually distinguish between undocumented persons when sending people to die in CECOT—has the minor benefit of being true. As CNN confirms, thus far all persons who have been deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador have been sent to CECOT and nowhere else.
(As the first report in this Proof series noted, El Salvador literally has no asylum system, so CECOT is the only potential endpoint for any U.S. deportee—including those with no history of gang membership and no record.)
In her final sentence in the ad, Secretary Noem reiterates this truism: “Know that this facility is one of the tools in [the Trump administration’s] toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.” While ordinarily a statement like this would mean only what it means on its face—anyone who enters America illegally and commits crimes could end up in CECOT—the fact that the Trump administration already makes no such distinctions and the fact that Noem, Bondi, Leavitt, Trump and Miller all use the fraudulent construction (“criminal illegal aliens”) to describe any undocumented person, even those who have only violated civil statutes regarding the documentation required for residence in the United States, we can be sure that one of the “crimes against the American people” Noem refers to here is—tautologically—simply entering the United States illegally. Again, this is usually only a civil infraction.
In case there was any doubt about her meaning, Secretary Noem has since posted this (note her attachment of an image of CECOT to the generalized threat she makes here):
So now that we know that any person who Trump, Noem, Bondi, Homan, and Miller deport to El Salvador is going to CECOT, what sort of hellhole are they being sent to?
Here are the basics about CECOT, via CNN:
All sentences are life sentences, meaning that if you enter CECOT the only way you are leaving is in a body bag.
100 men to a cell.
The men are kept in their cell for 47 out of every 48 hours, which is more extreme than the most extreme temporary solitary confinement procedures America uses.
While in their cells the men have “less than two feet” of living space, which has been described as less room than America gives to “livestock” (Financial Times).
The cells have no mattresses, pillows, or furniture of any kind.
The lights are never turned off.
There is no recreation time—ever.
The prisoners are never allowed outside.
There are no educational programs—or indeed programs of any kind.
Visitors are not allowed.
Media coverage is not allowed unless pre-approved by the nation’s dictator.
Prisoners are allowed no possessions of any kind.
Prisoners use an “open toilet” in full view of their 99 cellmates.
A cement basin is used for communal washing.
A common jug is used for drinking water, ensuring that if any inmate gets ill, all of the rest of them will, too.
The prison’s defenses include 1,000 armed guards, 19 watchtowers, multiple levels of electric fences, and eight discrete warehouse-like “sections” that the prisoners will never leave until, as noted above, they depart inside a body bag.
Proof will put aside, for the moment, that under the United States Constitution the foregoing would be deemed illegal in toto—a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment”—for even the worst criminals in American history: mass murderers, serial killers, serial child molesters, domestic terrorists, persons convicted of Seditious Conspiracy, or persons who have been credibly accused of over 25 acts of Rape and/or Sexual Assault, like Bill Cosby and Donald Trump.
What is perhaps more horrifying than any or all of the items in the list above is that they are applied to everyone in CECOT, which includes not just gang members with convictions for Murder but also:
Anyone awaiting trial in El Salvador, against whom absolutely nothing has yet been proven (and may never be);
innocent bystanders accidentally caught up in raids, uninvolved in even any allegations of misconduct (with El Salvador admitting to CNN that “several thousand” such persons have already ended up in CECOT in its 25 months of operation);
persons charged with nonviolent offenses that would be entirely noncriminal in the United States, such as having hair that’s too long, a tattoo a police officer deems objectionable, or involvement in what is mysteriously called “illegal gathering” (one New Yorker report detailed a man getting arrested for this while simply eating at a public restaurant with two friends);
permanent residents of other nations deported entirely by accident from their home countries, despite having no criminal record and being non-removable by law (e.g., Abrego Garcia);
individuals deported from the United States purely for being undocumented but without any criminal records at all;
individuals deported from the United States who were undocumented and had only nonviolent records; and
individuals deported from the United States under allegation of belonging to a gang, even in circumstances where no proof of gang membership was ever provided and the individual has since been confirmed not to be in a gang (e.g., Andry Romero).
It remains to be seen if Trump and his team will also attempt to send to CECOT foreign students whose visas get revoked—presumably, at a minimum those students who have their visas revoked but don’t immediately vacate the United States will be eligible for CECOT—and whether this treatment will also be afforded to asylum-seekers whose asylum the United States has now cancelled (again, with the caveat that Trump’s agents have made clear that anyone knowingly in the U.S. illegally could be sent to CECOT, so presumably an asylum-seeker who doesn’t immediately vacate the United States, possibly due to having nowhere else to go and/or no money to get there, could well end up in CECOT). And of course Trump has now made clear, repeatedly, that he wants U.S.-citizen prison inmates now in the United States to be sent to CECOT in order to save him money on their storage—with the sort of crimes Trump has referenced as being eligible for a transfer including everything from homicide to Simple Assault (a mere misdemeanor that is often punished with no jail time at all).
Yet as this author has found over the last few days while discussing CECOT with others online, the universal understanding of Trump voters and MAGAs writ large appears to be that every single person in CECOT is either a proven terrorist or a proven mass murderer. The Trump administration has worked extremely hard to spread this lie, with the predictable result being that MAGAs daily celebrate the fact that CECOT treats all its inmates worse than animals—on the grounds that, in their view, all of them are animals. Nor are these Trump supporters likely to ever accept any alternative narrative, as the whole premise of CECOT existing in the first place dissipates into nothingness if you accept that a huge percentage of the CECOT prisoners shown in popular images and video of that hellhole have absolutely no business being there.
Simply put, CECOT exists for only one reason: to enable a brutal far-right dictator both Donald Trump and Elon Musk are friends with to simultaneously (i) arrest and throw into a hole anyone who opposes him, (ii) appear tough on crime when in fact he’s known to be secretly negotiating with the very gangs he claims to be policing, and (iii) release high-production-value videos about what a badass he supposedly is.
CECOT has nothing to do with legitimate law enforcement, and certainly nothing at all to do with “terrorism” or “terrorists” (the “T” in its Spanish-language acronym).
Very few of those in CECOT belong in even a maximum security prison, let alone in a supermax, and none deserve to be treated worse than animals.
Trump voters like what they see when they look at photos of CECOT for the simple reason that Trump voters are afraid of the chief demographic we find at CECOT: young brown men (even some brown juveniles) with tattoos. These apparently look like very “hard” and “dangerous” creatures to many Trump voters, even though only a small percentage of them are actually so.
What Bukele has done is the one thing everyone in law enforcement in America knows not to do: put the most hardened criminals in the same living space as an even larger population of persons who may or may not have done anything wrong but certainly can and should eventually be returned to their home communities as potentially productive citizens. The reason Bukele can house pretrial defendants and political prisoners and total innocents and foreign asylum-seekers and nonviolent offenders alongside hardened killers is because he has no interest in any of them ever coming out alive.
In short, in American terms Nayib Bukele is a monster. CECOT is a Crime Against Humanity. And anyone who willy-nilly sends non-violent offenders to CECOT has likewise committed a Crime Against Humanity—and should be treated accordingly under U.S. and international law.
Perhaps one day they will be.
But this report is not about such people. This report is about people far worse than the people I’ve just described, because they’re selling humans to CECOT for two equally depraved reasons: (1) money, and (2) political power. Such persons can reasonably be accounted among the most dangerous, deranged, and devilish persons alive on Earth.
This is where Proof picks up the story of Abrego Garcia, who’s now in the hands of such creatures.
The Cover-Up Is Just As Bad As the Crime
Both the Trump administration and the Bukele administration have falsely—and we must also say grotesquely—justified what was done to Abrego Garcia by calling Garcia a member of an extremely dangerous Central American gang, MS-13.
This allegation is grotesque not merely because these same slanderers simultaneously admit, out of the other side of their mouths, that Garcia was deported from the United States by accident, but also because the legal status of Garcia inside America is that of…
…a victim of crimes perpetrated by MS-13.
That’s right: the above-alluded-to reason why Abrego Garcia was repeatedly found by federal courts to be non-removable to El Salvador wasn’t just because he’s attended all his U.S. immigration hearings as prescribed, or just because he’s a father of three who has lived in Maryland for years, but because the federal judiciary has explicitly found him to be in danger of being harmed (in the future as he was in the past) by MS-13.
So where did the Trump administration put him? In a foreign supermax prison with MS-13 members.
And how did the Trump administration excuse itself for putting this man in a position to be murdered? By falsely accusing this victim of MS-13 of being a member of MS-13.
And what did the Trump administration do when one of its agents candidly told a court the truth about all this? It put him on indefinite administrative leave. Indeed, it was so angry about the truth being told to a federal judge that it put the man’s boss on indefinite administrative leave also.
So as is customary for most statements Donald Trump and his agents, or Nayib Bukele and his agents, swear to be true, in fact it’s the opposite of their statements that’s true.
Abrego Garcia was in such danger of being killed by the extremely dangerous Central American gang Donald Trump claims to want to protect people from that he fled El Salvador, was given asylum inside the United States, and was repeatedly told by our federal judiciary that he would never be returned to El Salvador because of a very real possibility he’d be killed there. And that order would have been followed, except for the fact that Trump and Bukele had a Venezuelan Hoax they wanted to perpetrate on U.S. voters and El Salvadoran citizens alike—so in their rush to produce a Hollywood-style CECOT documentary showcasing innocent people (falsely framed as hardened criminals) being condemned to die in a hellhole, they trampled on Abrego Garcia and his family and the lives of hundreds of others (and their thousands of family members) and in the bargain will likely cause a number of innocent people to lose their lives.
And they feel great about it. They’re even going to hold a celebration for themselves in D.C. on April 14. Karoline Leavitt has said the purpose of this self-congratulatory meet-up will be to declare the Trump-Bukele partnership a “model” for the world.
Yes, really.
But Abrego Garcia’s story doesn’t end there. He may be a father who never missed a court date or scheduled immigration hearing in the entirety of his time in the United States who has now been placed in the perfect position to be murdered—with Team Trump doing all it possibly can to ensure he stays in that position—and he may also be a man with three kids and a clean record, but we know much more than this about the man and his situation.
And what we know makes his predicament even more of a nightmare and a travesty.
The reason attempts by the Trump administration to retroactively justify kidnapping Garcia by claiming that an anonymous source told ICE agents that Garcia is in MS-13 were immediately batted aside by United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Maryland Paula Xinis is that Garcia has never lived in the state where a supposed eyewitness claims he’s an active member of MS-13. But even more than this, Judge Xinis found that the actual reason ICE picked up Abrego Garcia was merely that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls jersey and had a tattoo that ICE agents didn’t quite like the look of (on the now-infamous ICE “points” sheet, a choice of shirt gang members appreciate and a suspect tattoo are enough for arrest).
That’s it. That was enough to put Garcia on a plane to CECOT and his own death.
As for the only person in this situation besides Garcia who did everything right, Erez Reuveni—the DOJ attorney who told Judge Xinis the truth about Garcia’s deportation—not only did this lawyer in good standing with his state and federal bars, who did exactly what the ABA’s Rules of Professional Conduct required of him, lose his job for precisely that reason (which tells us all we need to know about the sort of attorneys Donald Trump wants in his employ), but there appears to be no general outcry over that particular turn of events. This, despite the fact that, in previous eras of American political history, such an obvious attempt to cover up a Kidnapping and then punish a lawyer who, like a whistleblower, was doing his job honorably in reporting it would be a national scandal; some elements of the Watergate Scandal match this fact-pattern.
Unfortunately, in this era Reuveni is merely a footnote to a quickly widening scandal that major media is still significantly undercovering.
Even recent social media posts by the architect of Trump’s illegal deportation scheme, Stephen Miller, which appear to be intended to direct mass anger at Judge Xinis—opining, baselessly, that she’s a “Marxist” who intends to become more powerful than the “President of El Salvador”—have flown under media’s radar screen, though they at once constitute Defamation, seem bent on placing Judge Xinis’ life in danger, and serve as a confession that the Trump administration wants a foreign dictator to steal legal authority from American judges. This is surely one of the stranger reversals in recent American political history—and additional evidence of the persistent lack of loyalty to America and its institutions that seems to run throughout Trump’s camp.
The Supreme Court Spreads Its Corruption, Endangering the Life of Abrego Garcia
So now the clock is ticking on the life of Abrego Garcia.
Yet what no one on social media or in any court has yet heard from any member of the Trump administration is any concern for the life of Abrego Garcia, though all concede, now—albeit some only implicitly—that that life now under threat.
Indeed, because the very basis for Garcia ever being in the United States at all was a series of judicial findings to the effect that he would be killed if a government official did what Miller, Homan, Trump, and their agents in ICE have done by kidnapping him and sending him to El Salvador without due process, everyone must agree, as a matter of court record, that his life is now in imminent danger.
And in fact, it’s in even greater danger than any of those courts could have imagined.
Why? Because what American courts found over and over and over and over and over again with respect to Garcia is that his life would be in danger if he merely stepped on El Salvadoran soil at all. Yet what has happened here is exponentially worse: a man who is a target of MS-13 was sent to the one place worldwide where as many known killers from MS-13 as possible are being warehoused in storage facilities without individual cells. Had Stephen Miller and his agents simply driven Garcia up to the border of El Salvador and dumped him there, he’d be significantly safer than he is now. What they did, instead, was put him in chains and fly him directly to a locked room with 99 other men—some of whom may be MS-13 members.
There’s no good reason, in other words, to believe Garcia will leave El Salvador alive.
Certainly, if he’s to survive being caged in CECOT, every second counts. Each needless second he spends in CECOT is a second in which he could be murdered by precisely the sort of men the entirety of our federal government long promised to protect him from.
So in light of all this, what’s the Supreme Court doing? Dragging its heels.
And what’s the Trump administration doing? Dragging its heels.
We already know that the Court has no interest in saving the lives of anyone already in El Salvador. It made that clear (see infra) with how it handled the cases of the 238 Venezuelan migrants already consigned to CECOT and death—as well as 40 others who have since joined them, with an equal lack of due process or evidence of wrong-doing. The Court said there’d be judicial review for future such cases, but not old ones.
It certainly seems like the Trump administration is aware that Abrego Garcia’s life is in danger. In fact, it may even be dragging its feet for this very reason. After all, if Mr. Garcia dies, his case ends. And lest this seem to assign too much cruelty to Trump’s agents, recall that they summarily ended the government career of the one person in their cohort—the aforementioned Reuveni—who took any action to save Garcia’s life.
As already reported by Proof, El Salvador sees hundreds of prison murders a year. So given that Nayib Bukele knows that this case is ongoing—he’s tweeted about it on his Twitter account—why doesn’t he transfer Garcia elsewhere? CNN reports that in CECOT “U.S. deportees live in identical cells to convicted gangsters,” and quotes the warden of CECOT saying “there are no [special] privileges” for any inmate, so given that Bukele has already made “several thousand” mistakes in the first 25 months of his pride-and-joy supermax—meaning thousands of innocent El Salvadorans already suffered through being warehoused with some of this hemisphere’s worst killers—why hasn’t Bukele adjusted his policies to ensure that men like Garcia he knows don’t belong in CECOT aren’t put there in the first instance (or if they are, why doesn’t he then move them)? Again, it’s hard to attribute any reasoning to this besides Bukele knowing that one way for Garcia’s thorny situation to be “resolved” is for a CECOT inmate to kill him.
Certainly, the tone of tweets and interviews by top Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller with respect to Abrego Garcia has been nothing short of gleeful. This suggests the administration candidly doesn’t care if Garcia lives or dies, and is far more invested in convincing Americans that Garcia is a member of MS-13—which he manifestly is not—than in saving his life. Americans should presume that if or when the Trump administration starts sending American citizens to CECOT, it will exhibit exactly the same degree of carelessness on the question of whether these U.S. citizens get tortured or die as both it and its partner Nayib Bukele are exhibiting right now.
Okay, but what’s the Supreme Court’s excuse for dragging its feet?
Knowing all of the foregoing, both a federal district court and a three-judge federal appeals court panel moved quickly and unanimously declare that Garcia needed to be brought back to the United States by midnight on Monday (April 7, 2025). All four of these federal judges had heard uncontested evidence that Garcia was kidnapped for no reason, and they reacted accordingly. All four of those federal judges had heard uncontested evidence that Garcia was (and is) at risk of being murdered every minute he stays in El Salvador, and they reacted accordingly. All four of those federal judges had heard uncontested evidence that the Trump administration has now begrudgingly admitted making a mistake in its handling of Garcia—even if the admission came with significant professional consequences for its author—and they reacted accordingly. All four of these federal judges heard uncontested evidence that Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, complied for years with every immigration regulation in the United States, and was repeatedly found by federal courts to be non-removable to El Salvador. Upon hearing all this evidence these judges reacted appropriately, So why did Garcia’s case hit a wall the moment it reached the most politicized court in America, SCOTUS?
The question seems to answer itself, doesn’t it?
Indeed, the one remaining issue in the Abrego Garcia case is a purely political one. It is one that has little exclusively to do with the man’s life or freedom, so encompassing are its long-term ramifications: whether the second Trump administration is correct in arguing that the second it puts any person on a plane headed out of the United States—even if it puts that person on that plane under cover of darkness specifically to evade judicial scrutiny—no federal court can meaningfully review or in any way undo that asportation because the person so mishandled has already come under the legal custody of whichever foreign government that plane is headed toward. As The Atlantic recently put it, “The Supreme Court is about to decide whether the Trump administration can exile Americans to a gulag overseas and then leave them there.”
The problem is that this is at once a weighty question politically but also a very easy one legally—which fact casts a pall over Chief Justice John Roberts’ determination (which he signified, per Supreme Court precedent, by accepting the case for a full review by the Court) that at least four of his colleagues would deem the case worthy of extended consideration. Yet is political exile for Trump’s enemies actually on the table under the U.S. Constitution? Nervous Supreme Court-watchers see in this case the same potential for a shocking result as 2024’s Trump v. United States, when the issue on the table (whether a President of the United States is above the law) likewise seemed an easy one… but the answer returned by Roberts and his far-right colleagues was yes.
As Justice Roberts sat down to review the emergency petition seeking to overrule both Judge Xinis and the Fourth Circuit—Roberts is in charge of being the first reader of federal petitions coming out of the D.C. area, including Maryland—he knew that the Trump administration doesn’t contest having a handshake agreement with a foreign dictator that it somewhat inexplicably deems binding (“inexplicably” because as a politician Donald Trump is infamous for reneging on most deals, demanding instant renegotiations, and working back-channels to create special carve-outs). Roberts also knew that the nature of that agreement was and is a financial arrangement by which the United States transfers human bodies to a foreign power in exchange for both financial and in-kind benefits; both Trump and co-president Musk have spoken at length of this financial benefit, which means that in effect both men have admitted to being engaged in an international slave trade: selling human bodies for profit.
Not only is this overtly unconstitutional (not to mention a simple fact-pattern that even a first-year law student could easily resolve correctly) but even its seemingly inevitable future devolution—a situation that would see Trump, Musk, and the GOP trading U.S. citizens’ bodies to foreign governments for money and the benefit of seeing their political enemies permanently exiled, caged for the rest of their natural lives, and possibly murdered in the most dangerous prison on Earth—is even more conspicuously illegal. There’s no legal issue in doubt here, and a man’s life hangs in the balance, yet Justice Roberts evinced no sense of urgency in his (mis)handling of a matter that showed up in his inbox as an emergency petition.
A Glimmer of Hope?
Proof by no means suggests that it’s unusual for a lone Justice of the Supreme Court to rule on an emergency petition asking for a stay of execution of a lower court order. As already noted, that’s exactly how emergency petitions to the Supreme Court work.
And this Court in particular does often accept for full briefing and argument, rather than resolution by a single Justice, legal arguments from America’s political far right that have no basis in either the court record or Supreme Court precedent. While not excusable, this far-right Court’s willingness to placate Donald Trump by listening to his cockamamie pseudolegal propositions is well-documented—and since at least two current Justices (Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito) are consistent in assenting to almost anything this president wants, Chief Justice Roberts is not wrong to think that that “magic number” of Justices desiring a full briefing and argument on any given Trumpism-related matter (four) is much easier to reach than it ever was previously.
On the other hand, continuing to indulge this president’s cockamamie pseudolegal propositions only encourages seeing more of them in the future. It only increases the odds that one of these propositions somehow finds the support of three or four of the most radical, precedent-ambivalent Justices in recent memory, giving Donald Trump just the rhetorical ammunition he needs to argue to the public—as he may well, one day soon—that he can blithely ignore a Supreme Court majority if “the good judges” (as he might style it) ruled in his favor. Even more notably, it creates needless delays on emergency issues, and these delays end up having real-world impact. During the 2024 U.S. presidential election, it was Trump v. United States that saved candidate Trump from his pending criminal cases by making it impossible to try any of them pre-election; here, a delay of that magnitude might well give a known sociopath who is also a foreign dictator all the time he needs to dispose of Garcia by other means.
Of course, we can’t yet know exactly what the Court is thinking on Abrego Garcia, as the case is now sitting with it and will stay in that status for some unknown duration.
What we can do is look at the recent Supreme Court order with respect to Trump’s Venezuelan Hoax.
{Note: If you want to skip to the analysis of the Court’s ruling, scroll past the images below.}
The glaring errors in the reasoning presented above are legion.
First and most egregiously—as this report already indicated, while illustrating how this infelicity in the ruling was exploited by Attorney General Bondi—the Court’s far-right majority lets the Trump administration off the hook for the several hundred innocent persons (at least 278 in total) it wrongly trafficked to Bukele and El Salvador, explicitly stating that it is only “after the date of this order” that the administration must start providing AEA detainees proper legal notice of what’s happening to them so that they can seek legal redress from the federal judiciary.
In other words, the majority tells the Trump administration that past offenses are now forgiven—which of course only invites future ones.
Second, by confirming to the Trump administration that the proper venue for all AEA claims lies “in the district of confinement”—in other words, wherever Trump agents kidnap their victim to, not where they’re kidnapped from—the Court implicitly aids and abets these kidnappings in the first instance. How? By (again implicitly) urging the administration to quickly get those they nab out of the jurisdiction they live in as quickly as possible, so that proper venue can vest in whichever locale the Trump administration selects. By comparison, if the Court had ruled that jurisdiction remains in the venue where the relevant constitutionally cognizable event occurred—i.e., the sudden seizure of a person by their government—it would have communicated to ICE agents that they should not remove any person from their home jurisdiction without providing them with due process first, as the case will eventually end up in that venue.
But this second error by the Supreme Court—if indeed it was only an error, rather than malevolence and spite on the subject of the rights due undocumented persons—is actually much worse than even this. Why? Because the jurisdiction(s) the majority implicitly urges ICE agents to remove their victims from are also the venues in which they have friends, family, financial resources, possibly an existing personal attorney, and familiarity with the local court system and local institutions. It’s in these “home” jurisdictions that ICE’s victims have the best chance of seeking legal redress before they’re trafficked abroad, not just because those jurisdictions are more likely to be left-leaning—though this is true; Trump is deliberately targeting purple and blue states more than states that voted for him handily in November—but also due to the fact that a person’s home jurisdiction is where most of the exculpatory evidence they can bring to bear before an immigration court resides.
In other words, by the time a detainee finds that their clock for a habeas petition is running, they not only have almost certainly been brought to whatever venue the Trump administration deems most hostile to the rights of detainees, but they’ve also been taken away, likely in the dead of night, from the place they know best. This not only traumatizes detainees at the very moment they need to be entirely cool-headed, but forcibly separates them from (a) eyewitnesses who could be brought before the court to substantiate their identity, their employment, and their lack of involvement with foreign gangs; (b) documentary evidence that would establish prior compliance with immigration orders; and (c) the financial and family resources a detainee would surely need to call upon as they’re experiencing terror, trauma, and a shockingly short turnaround time for all legal filings.
The majority in the case above has now ensured that none of this will be available to detainees—and even rewards the government for taking detainees as far from their homes and families as possible and doing nothing to alert those loved ones as to where their relative has been taken. If past is precedent, such detainees will be moved hundreds or even thousands of miles from their homes, and will go before judges who don’t see them as fellow residents of a given state, don’t sit in states Trump’s draconian arrests harm most, and do preside over courts where immigrants are habitually treated like chattel. Why would the Trump administration judge-shop their deportation cases to any other type of venue, after all?
Third, the Court explicitly doesn’t establish what constitutes “reasonable notice” in AEA cases, which means the Trump administration—whose bad faith in such matters should already be evident to the courts—will be permitted to play games almost in perpetuity with (a) how little notice is given, (b) how legally insufficient that notice is, and (c) how confusing and otherwise misleading the notice is.
Indeed, the Trump administration can manipulate almost every aspect of the context in which notice is provided, rendering that notice almost meaningless—especially to detainees who, as noted above, have been dragged far away from their homes and family and deliberately traumatized as much as possible. The Supreme Court seems almost to be urging many months or years of lethargic federal appellate litigation over matters it could have quickly put to rest with a clear order. And of course it is doing all this, unforgivably, at a time it knows lives are at stake overseas, not to mention the medium-term freedom of tens of thousands or millions of people living in the United states.
Fourth, on a matter of this significance every conceivable effort should have been made to ensure either a unanimous decision or something other than a 5-4 ruling. This sort of legal question is of such dire import to the future of America that jurists refusing to make an effort to form some sort of consensus feels utterly unacceptable.
The five Justices who brute-forced this almost flip decision even openly mock their four colleagues over the latter’s desire for this question to be resolved more carefully, more clearly, and over a slightly longer duration. Yet given that there’s no evidence that more than a handful of the individuals the Trump administration is deporting are actually dangerous—and even those who are are already in secure custody (and frankly probably removable without the AEA, putting them outside the scope of this case)—it’s unclear on what basis the Court could contend that there’ll be “irreparable harm” to the Trump administration unless it acts in its favor as quickly as possible.
The speed of the above pro-administration decision, as well as the partisan nature of it, therefore seems capricious—and heedless of the context in which the case arises (as well as some readily foreseeable downstream consequences).
Fifth, while some will hail the fact that even the conservative majority here admitted that AEA detainees deserve judicial review and must have it, the majority hastens to add that this review is “limited,” and that it’s specifically limited to the most basic of assessments—assessments that are almost tautological, as they require a federal judge to presume on the front end that the AEA rightly applies to those whom the executive branch of the federal government has already declared the AEA applies to.
To explain: President Trump’s invocation of the AEA—a statute intended to deal with foreign combatants on U.S. soil—is farcical as applied to (taking the case in the light more favorable to the Trump administration, for argument’s sake) “foreign-born gang members.” Foreign-born gang members aren’t “enemy combatants” unless they’re being directed by a foreign government, and the Trump administration has provided no evidence, to any court, that they are. (It also has a horrifying track record, as noted before, of lying about the Venezuelan government in particular for political gain; such lies led to death and destruction as recently as January of 2021.)
Just so, foreign-born gang members are not “terrorists” unless there’s evidence that they aim to engage in violent acts for political ends. The Trump administration has provided no evidence, to any court, that they are. So why is the majority’s discussion of what “limited judicial review” is to be afforded AEA detainees predicated on what is clearly an illegal invocation of the AEA? Given that, as noted above, Trump agents will be certain to send their detainees to the most conservative federal district court judges in the U.S. is, the majority’s blithe acceptance of the Trump administration’s invocation of the Act ensures that these invariably highly partisan judges will act just the same. Indeed, beyond a small number of basic documentary submissions from the government, the majority imagines very little of consequence happening at the AEA judicial reviews it’s here mandating. And given that the Supreme Court is well aware that this administration in particular has almost never had its documentation in order, and has even repeatedly passed on to federal courts erroneous documentation, and has, even worse, at times willfully withheld from federal judges information they absolutely must have to make informed decisions about a detainee, the majority deliberately creating an almost pretextual form of due process for AEA detainees really is unconscionable.
Sixth, though this position is mocked by the majority, what the four dissenters here are specifically asking for is precisely the sort of guidance an honorable judge hearing an AEA detainee case would want. This would include some sense of exactly what removal notices must include; how much time and how much access to documents and/or live testimony a detainee must be afforded prior to a removal; and what sort of evidentiary standards and framework applies at such hearings. It’s well and good for the majority to say that the government must simply show that someone is indeed “an alien enemy fourteen years of age or older”—meaning, under the particular executive order these cases are being heard under, a Venezuelan citizen who’s over fourteen and a member of Tren de Aragua—but surely the Justices are aware that the third of these questions has already come under significant judicial scrutiny on the grounds that the Trump administration evidently has no capacity to determine who is or is not a gang member.
This administration simply hasn’t developed the source of human-source network required to make and substantiate such allegations in a court of law. In fact, in the rare instances in which this government has seemed able to establish a detainee’s gang membership, it’s relied on the sort of eyewitness testimony it will be hustling detainees away from to ensure that they don’t have access to rebuttal witnesses.
Likewise, questions of citizenship, age, and immigration status may in more cases than readers would expect depend on the provision of complex paperwork the Trump administration will now deliberately be separating detainees from, at the implicit urging of the Supreme Court. Under such foreseeable circumstances, this majority blithely congratulating itself for allowing “limited judicial review” for AEA detainees is something approaching nauseating.
Nor are these problems that only the attorney who authors Proof can see—or only problems lawyers generally can see. Anyone can see them.
Certainly, the dissenting Justices had no difficult doing so. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, admirably summarized in her dissent the situation the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has created—not just for AEA detainees but, in a possibly near-term dystopian future, one that could arrive as early as this year for many U.S. citizens:
On the other end of the spectrum, conservative lawyers who want to deliberately misconstrue the Supreme Court’s ruling are warmly invited to do so. And it’s not just Pam Bondi, either. Vice President J.D. Vance is also a lawyer, and after the ruling above he instantly took to Twitter to confirm that he’s taken from the Court’s ruling exactly what the ruling’s minority feared that most would (as did Elon Musk, who’s not a lawyer but provides a flag-waving peanut gallery to the contemptible post below).
So now we have two of the men atop the Trump administration pretending that (and also working hard to convince others that) the far-right Supreme Court majority just held that “judges…can[not] overrule President Trump’s immigration enforcement.”
Never mind that that’s not what the ruling said. It is what the ruling, seemingly on purpose, invited readers to think if they wished. And as it’s those partisan readers who will, in the first instance, be interpreting what “limited judicial review [for AEA detainees” looks like in real time, we can now be sure that they will find every way possible to make pre-deportation AEA judicial hearings all but meaningless.
Moreover, while what Vance and Musk are crowing here only applies to “immigration enforcement,” we must keep in mind that President Trump has explicitly contended that “terrorism,” “foreign policy,” and “international affairs” are in exactly the same camp as “immigration enforcement”—which means that a seventh problem with the ruling above is that the Trump administration may act, going forward, as though the law of the land is that “judges…can[not] overrule President Trump’s immigration enforcement” and that “judges…can[not] overrule President Trump’s counterterrorism enforcement” and that “judges…can[not] overrule President Trump’s foreign policy initiatives.” All of which means that, going forward, all the Trump administration must do to evade meaningful judicial review—in its own view—is declare that a given initiative constitutes counterterrorism enforcement or a foreign policy initiative.
And what is Trump’s newest criminal justice proposal? To deport U.S. inmates in El Salvador. Why shouldn’t he now term that a “foreign policy” initiative? And as Pam Bondi aggressively expands the definition of “domestic terrorism” to include any act of any kind that might be seen as being motivated by a progressive ideology (an idea that in essence criminalizes progressivism itself), how soon before Trump’s criminal justice policies are reframed as “counterterrorism enforcement” that lies outside the bounds of any meaningful judicial review? Indeed, redefining offenses against persons and property as offenses against the State (i.e., “terrorism”) is a ploy most neo-fascist governments use to repress citizens and expand government power. While thus far Donald Trump has taken the position that he intends to start deporting U.S. citizens to a prison no one ever leaves alive only if it’s “legal,” vague Supreme Court decisions like the one above will produce that outcome by dint of their own vagueness, which is exactly the foreseeable harm that Justice Sotomayor wisely warned of in her dissent.
Why Is the Supreme Court Being So Obtuse?
The law as a profession is culturally conservative. It doesn’t like or appreciate being put in the position of dealing with novel questions of law, as cases are always supposed to be decidable via precedent—and precedent can only exist if a given situation has arisen before, or if there’s a close analogy to the situation locatable somewhere in the past.
Every historical analogue for what the Trump administration is doing right now, both within the United States and abroad, cries out for the Supreme Court to be extremely circumspect of the Trump administration’s current exercises of power. But for some reason, the conservative majority on the Court is okay with simultaneously (a) wrongly treating the present situation as unprecedented, and (b) nevertheless being sanguine about it. For these two manifestations of judicial temperament to arise concurrently is an extremely unusual circumstance in federal jurisprudence, and among conservative Justices it is unheard of when the President of the United States is a Democrat. But for Donald Trump, the Court’s conservative majority is willing to make an exception.
But what we’re also seeing, unfortunately, are some very smart rank-and-file attorneys who are still willing to presume that the Court will be as culturally conservative as the legal profession writ large—meaning that the Court will, as it should, eschew every opportunity to delegate new powers to the federal executive branch, especially when those powers would be anathema to the continuation of American democracy. That’s no longer a particularly good bet.
For instance, former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, a frequent MSNBC legal contributor, wrote on Bluesky that while the Court did technically rule for the Trump administration in the AEA case, the “quick deadline [it set] for the government’s brief [in the Garcia case] shows a sense of urgency. The government’s argument under Article II of the Constitution [in the Garcia case] is nonsense. I think it’s highly likely that the Supreme Court orders [Garcia’s] return. If not, then all is lost.”
Proof certainly agrees with McQuade that the only rational judicial determination here is Garcia’s immediate return to the United States. It also agrees that if this is not the determination the Supreme Court makes, America has entered a new authoritarian nightmare—as Trump, Vance, and Musk are sure to take a win in the Garcia case as a green light to begin disappearing anyone in the U.S. legally, including U.S. citizens.
What Proof is less sure of than McQuade is is that the Supreme Court will issue a sufficiently broad and clear ruling in the Garcia case to make clear to the Trump administration that nothing like this can ever happen again. Consider, that is, the opportunity the Supreme Court just had with the Venezuelan Hoax: it could have ordered the return to the United States, for proper due process, of all 278 of the now-held CECOT deportees. It didn’t. It treated the unimaginable harm done to those persons as somehow water under the bridge. And as we’ve seen, the Administration immediately took that judicial ruling exactly as any notorious bad actor would—as implicit license to keep breaking the law.
Just so, the Court could find a way to try to ensure that Mr. Garcia continues to rot in CECOT—essentially condemning him to permanent incarceration at best, and death at worst—while wagging its finger at the Trump administration and telling it not to be bad boys and girls ever again. If that’s what happens, it will further confirm to the Administration that it is always better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission—and will almost certainly lead to a massive expansion of its illegal deportation scheme.
On the other hand, the Court could find some esoteric basis to demand Mr. Garcia’s return while creating no rule or precedent for future Trump administration conduct. This seems unlikely, however, as it would require the Court caring about Garcia’s life more than it does about its own authority, which this Court almost certainly does not.
Or the Court could declare that the administration must present evidence of attempts to bring Garcia home, while acknowledging that the decision finally rests with Bukele.
If it does this—thereby conceding that the federal courts can only order attempts to retrieve a wrongfully deported person who’s now in foreign custody, it will at once be placing Trump’s claims of executive prerogative on foreign affairs above all else and signaling to the Trump administration that as long as it starts ignoring the federal courts entirely and kidnaps and trafficks people in the dead of night, the Court will reward it for that lawlessness by never doing more than giving it a slap on the wrist.
This is surely the result the Trump administration is hoping for.
A final possibility, assuming that a Court this far to the right is unlikely to simply shut down the entire Trump deportation operation wholesale, is that a slim conservative majority could treat the Garcia case as an outlier, demanding his return even as it sets a new rule for deportations that’s quite nearly exactly what Trump wants. In that case, the Trump administration might even be willing to go to the mat to get Garcia back, as both it and Bukele would understand that much bigger gains lay behind such a minor and transient concession. In other words, the two ends of the new international slave trade between the United States and Central America would now be sure that—going forward from the Garcia case—matters between them will be just as they have long wished them to be.
In any case, the fact that Nayib Bukele is making a visit to the United States to meet with President Trump on April 14, right around the time we would expect the Garcia matter to finally come to a head, suggests that Trump and Bukele want to be able to strategize face-to-face a cynical end-around to anything that emanates from the Court.
A Glimmer of Despair?
If it can be believed, the above analysis is the hopeful version of our near-term future.
Sadly, there are indications that it may be too hopeful by half.
It is well established in American jurisprudence that in any request for a temporary “stay” of a lower-court order, the “moving party” (that is, the party requesting of a higher court that it put a pause on a lower-court ruling) must show that it will suffer “irreparable harm” if it doesn’t get the judicial “relief” requested. Because the Trump administration lost, in the Garcia case, at both the district court level and the Circuit Court level—lost unanimously, in fact—it’s the “moving party” in the case before the Supreme Court. So it’s the Administration that must show that it would be irreparably harmed if Garcia is returned to America.
By granting the administration’s petition this past Monday, Justice Roberts found that returning Garcia to America by Monday at midnight would cause irreparable harm to the interests of the United States.
But how could Justice Roberts have found this? What harm—what conceivable harm—could a government face in simply undoing what it already admitted was a mistake?
Consider the following facts:
It’s uncontested that Abrego Garcia is now facing imminent murder.
It’s uncontested that if Garcia had been returned to America on Monday night, he could still have been removed to CECOT once again—at a later date—if he were found, after some subsequent federal hearing affording him proper due process, to be removable.
It’s uncontested that Garcia has no criminal record, and that if returned to the United States he would remain in custody here—so there can be no claim by the Trump administration that Americans would be endangered by Garcia’s return.
It’s therefore uncontested that bringing Garcia back to the United States would not foreclose any future options for the Trump Administration.
Indeed, the only party who anyone has claimed stands to be harmed by Abrego Garcia being returned to the United States is…
…El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele.
If this seems confusing to you, it should! The Trump administration has no standing (a legal term denoting the right to raise a claim in a particular place and at a particular time) to opine about potential harms to Bukele in federal court on Bukele’s behalf; it’s not at all clear why any U.S. presidential administration would, in any case, care more about a foreign dictator than a Maryland resident with three American kids. This case presents no conceivable harm to Bukele that a federal court could take notice of in any event, with the Trump administration at most suggesting that President Bukele could face “humiliation” or “political damage” from Abrego Garcia’s return—which of course makes no sense, as Bukele didn’t erroneously send Garcia to El Salvador, Trump did. Also, not for nothing, but the whole point of being a dictator, as Bukele is at great pains to admit he is, is that you don’t have to care about the public’s opinion (there’s a reason Bukele calls himself a “king” in his Twitter bio). Even beyond all of this, Trump and Bukele have announced their partnership as one that will unfold over many years, so shipping back just one deportee for further hearings in the United States is not only not damaging to that long-term relationship but exactly the sort of administrative solve we would expect that relationship to sometimes require (remember that Bukele, in his own country and under his own steam, has had to release from custody “several thousand” people he erroneously put there—so why would he feel any embarrassment or experience any political damage at having to, for once, fix someone else’s big error?)
On the other side of the ledger is Abrego Garcia: a man being held in El Salvador in violation of a string of federal orders the Supreme Court has seen and who is now in imminent danger of being murdered by the very people the federal judiciary (which Chief Justice John Roberts is the leader of) promised to keep him safe from in writing.
And yet Justice Roberts found that the Trump administration faces irreparable harm.
This is a very, very bad sign for American democracy.
Worse still, there’s only one possible explanation for it that this attorney can provide.
Chief Justice Roberts must believe that at least four members of his Court are willing to adopt the morally, ethically, politically, and legally obscene doctrine the Trump administration is now pushing: that once any resident of America deported from U.S. soil by the Trump administration lands on El Salvadoran soil—or perhaps even once any person enters El Salvadoran airspace; or perhaps even once any person is put on a plane that has left the ground in the United States and is on its way to El Salvador—that person is in the custody of Nayib Bukele. If the Supreme Court is prepared to adopt this bizarre way of thinking, (a) it must believe that returning Garcia could indeed cause an international incident constituting “harm” to the Trump administration and U.S. interests, (b) it’s planning to pave with gold the road to a Trump administration program under which Donald Trump’s political enemies are permanently exiled and sent to die in CECOT, and (c) it is—without any precedent in American jurisprudence—designating the Garcia case a sort of bona fide international crisis, rather than seeing in it an own goal by a presidential administration already infamous for them.
So while there’s a glimmer of hope that the Supreme Court will move quickly to order the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States, this glimmer must remain, for now, only a glimmer. Not because it’s unlikely that five of the nine justices will rule for Garcia—the odds at this point are likely even—or even because Garcia is certain to be killed before the Supreme Court can rule (as in theory Bukele could either ensure that, or ensure its prevention, if he wished to), but for a far more troubling reason: it’s not clear that the Trump Administration will honor any adverse ruling from the Court.
Why? Because the moment Court stupidly concedes that this case is an international crisis, it provides President Trump with the rhetorical ammunition he needs to turn that international crisis into a constitutional crisis as well. In other words, if the Court admits that the Abrego Garcia case is an judicially cognizable international crisis, it’s implicitly encouraging President Trump in his belief that only he can resolve such a crisis because only he has been designated by the U.S. Constitution to handle foreign affairs.
In this way, the Court’s ongoing game of pattycake with Trump—always humoring his worst delusions, even when they’re grotesque and dangerous—could finally go off the rails completely, with Trump deciding that even a Supreme Court ruling that explicitly condemns his actions actually justifies them in the dicta (the legal term for language in a ruling that isn’t expressly related to the ruling itself) by way of conceding that this case falls into Donald Trump’s constitutional domain as President of the United States.
If that sounds like an obscure outcome, remember that it’s precisely the “theory of the case” that the Trump administration is currently proceeding under. At every turn, every Trump agent who has spoken about the administration’s deportation scheme has said that it’s entirely the president’s prerogative and shouldn’t be subject to any judicial review. Indeed, this is why the first nearly 300 deportees were kidnapped and trafficked abroad under cover of darkness: because Trump, Miller, Homan, and their agents in ICE didn’t think any court, including the Supreme Court, should have a say in it. Homan, the immigration czar for the administration, is even on record as saying,
“I don’t care what judges think. I don’t care what that judge thinks as far as this case. We’re going to continue to arrest public safety threats and national security threats. We’re going to continue to deport them from the United States.”
Could the Trump administration be any clearer on what it thinks its constitutional powers are, and how aggressively it will continue to pursue them, whatever courts say?
An International Crisis Becomes a Constitutional Crisis
So why is it so important to the Trump Administration to take the position that any person resident in America who it kidnaps and trafficks across national borders is no longer under federal judicial jurisdiction the very moment their plane lifts into the air?
And why is it not just important to the Trump Administration to take this position, but so important that it’s willing to risk the instant constitutional crisis that would result if it tells the Supreme Court—as its agents, including Miller and Bondi, have been saying they will no matter what the Court decides—that it cannot honor any order to return Abrego Garcia to America because that would be logistically impossible (as allegedly only Nayib Bukele can order such a result)?
Why, indeed, is it so very important to the second Trump Administration that all the above be the case that it has now adopted the previously reported-on Davis Doctrine, publicly asserting that all matters of “foreign policy” and “international affairs” and transnational-migration-related “terrorism” must necessarily fall outside the scope of even the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States?
Put more simply, why couldn’t the Trump administration just ask Mr. Bukele to return Garcia and end this entire standoff without loss of life, a constitutional crisis, or any more clearly damaging news coverage of the Trump administration’s authoritarian bent? If Donald Trump were to simply make a single phone call to Bukele, he would look like a man willing to admit an error; Bukele would be able to frame himself as a generous and understanding ally of America; Abrego Garcia would return to safety and his family and kids; and this whole matter would, at least in theory—if rather fraudulently—put a new face on what’s otherwise been a lawless deportation scheme.
Is it truly the case that Trump’s unwillingness to admit a mistake explains all of this?
That seems unlikely.
More likely is that all this is happening because President Trump very much intends to start sending all sorts of people to El Salvador who’ve no business being sent there, including many people whose claim to remain in the United States is even stronger than Abrego Garcia’s is. If that’s so, Trump would want to establish right now—before he uses martial law sometime in late April or May to achieve the same result, but by fiat—that he has Court-granted authority to do what he’s already planning to do. That is, if he can get the Court to “obey in advance” and bow to his authoritarian designs, despite there being no discernible legal basis for it, why not reach for that brass ring?
After all, if or when President Trump invokes the Insurrection Act over all matters relating to immigration and terrorism—consistent with the advice from Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard that he is expecting to receive on April 20 (and likely explicitly asked for in advance) pursuant to an Inauguration Day executive order—and if or when this false invocation is quickly expanded by the Trump administration’s adoption of the Davis Doctrine, wrenching it to include executive-fiat powers not only for immigration and terrorism issues but anything arguably falling under international affairs and foreign policy, not only will Mr. Trump effectively be a dictator in the United States (as his friend Nayib Bukele already is in El Salvador) but he’ll be able to sell his political enemies to Bukele at will without the intercession of judges in either country.
But wouldn’t it be even better if he did have their approval?
Hence Donald Trump’s approach to the Garcia case.
It would be far easier, both rhetorically and logistically, for Trump to do all this with the blessing of the Supreme Court. And given that this Supreme Court is as far to the right as any in modern American political history, and given its specific recent history of both granting Mr. Trump unprecedented powers and assuring him that he cannot be criminally charged for anything he claims is part of a core presidential function—see where this is going?—why not fish for language in a Supreme Court majority opinion that avers that immigration, counterterrorism, foreign policy, and orchestration of international affairs broadly writ is all part of the core job of a president? If the Court concedes this, Trump will have all the assurance he needs that even if he sends his political enemies into exile as supposed “terrorists,” and even if he somehow loses all his political power in 2028 or thereafter, Trump v. United States will protect him from a post-presidency federal criminal prosecution.
Either way, the unprecedented executive powers Donald Trump is now seeking—not in a month, not in a year, not at the end of his second term, not sometime in a still notional third term, but right now, as in this week—would put him in a prime position to start wrongly arresting, detaining, and permanently exiling his political enemies this year. He could move from ideation to execution, in other words, a process that his co-POTUS Elon Musk and Attorney General Pam Bondi have already begun on TV and social media, with all three of these radicals preposterously accusing opponents of acts of domestic terrorism. Trump could gain useful cover for his plan to tell voters that he had to send his enemies to CECOT in the middle of the night because it was part of his duty to safeguard the nation.
And, he’d add, now that they’re in the custody of Nayid Bukele, they can only return if he wills it… and you know what? Somehow (one imagines Donald Trump whispering in a stage aside) I don’t think he will.
These are the stakes in the Abrego Garcia case. That the Trump-El Salvador Scandal is far more serious than even the ongoing tariff issue that corporate media is focusing all its attention on should now be clear.
Conclusion
So what happens now? Well, we wait. And if past is precedent, the Supreme Court will move with exaggerated judiciousness—as it’s done in nearly every case it’s heard thus far involving Donald Trump.
For its part, the Trump administration will likewise try to drag its heels as much as possible—and, as noted above, possibly for the most disgusting reason imaginable.
The terrifying reality, here, is that the simplest solution, for both Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele, is for some CECOT prisoner in El Salvador to seek favor with his jailers, and perhaps even a clandestine release from custody, by murdering Abrego Garcia before the Supreme Court can issue its ruling. This would render the Garcia case moot, and save Trump and Bukele from the risk that America’s highest court conclusively rules that their cherished international slave-trading scheme is illegal.
If Garcia stays alive, it’s nevertheless the case that any decision the Supreme Court reaches this coming week or next will be moot once Trump adopts—as he’s expected to do—a recommendation from his two leading sycophants to the effect that he should immediately employ the Insurrection Act to legalize much of what he planned to do anyway.
And it’s here, at the conclusion of this harrowing narrative, that things must suddenly start to get more confusing.
Why? Because we must speak now of The Great Replacement Theory, the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Elon Musk has been obsessed with for years and has recently taken to once again spouting at every opportunity (after briefly acknowledging it as erroneous and antisemitic two years ago). Great Replacement Theory is relevant to the Garcia case because it represents the foremost attempt by the MAGA bloc in America to link Democratic Party politics—including the actions of Democratic politicians, Democratic protesters, and the Democratic Party domestic political agenda broadly writ—with mass immigration to the United States by undocumented persons, the very phenomenon Trump has recently reclassified as an “invasion” by “foreign terrorists.”
Musk’s near-daily-stated view is that there’s a vast left-wing conspiracy between the Democratic Party and its donors to aid and abet mass undocumented immigration to the United States. He says the plan is to ply these immigrants with government funds illicitly, then legalize them as grateful Democratic voters, and then use the changing demographics of the nation to ensure that “woke” ideology becomes an institutional fixture in America.
In the usual telling of this wild conspiracy theory, the donors behind all of this are mostly Jews—hence the entirely correct statement that Great Replacement Theory is just another antisemitic conspiracy theory about eldritch “globalists” secretly aiming to destroy us all.
In other words, the theory, as Elon Musk frames it, holds that powerful Democrats—in the Congress, in the media, in academia, in the Democrats’ donor class, inside the Democratic party apparatus—are actively aiding and abetting terrorism (as remember, Trump has officially reclassified conventional illegal immigration as a “foreign invasion” by “terrorists,” at once putting immigration in the realms of terrorism and foreign policy and international affairs, precisely the spheres of American life Trump says no court can oversee).
In this fashion, both Trump and Musk are workshopping the idea that their U.S.-citizen political opponents are in fact terrorists who can be permanently exiled to a death camp in El Salvador.
While Pam Bondi, the person who’d be executing such a dystopian vision of America’s future, isn’t quite there yet, she’s getting close. So far, she’s limited herself to “only” calling petty vandalism against Tesla vehicles “an act of domestic terrorism.”
But she’s well aware, surely, that the man she’s seeking to protect with her vitriol—Musk—has gone much further than this, publicly demanding incarceration over the “terror” caused by Democratic Party donors or Democratic Party-affiliated nonprofits that may have helped organize or fund peaceful protests against Musk companies and the Trump Administration.
{Note: You might expect that Musk distinguishes between peaceful protests against Tesla and attacks against Tesla property. He doesn’t appear to, on the grounds that both cost him money.}
Since Musk began taking this position, it’s become a common refrain among MAGAs on social media that any formalized organizing evident in or around leftist protests is somehow a criminal, even terroristic act. Of course, in MAGA-world this new standard applies only to their political opponents; any MAGA event can be funded or organized by whomever—for instance, the events of January 6, 2021, which resulted in death and destruction and were provably orchestrated with the aid of the Trump administration despite those events constituting actual violent domestic terrorism.
It’s against this larger backdrop that we now find the Trump Administration, and particularly its most radical figures—like Miller, Musk, Holman, and Trump himself—trying to establish the broadest imaginable authority for exiling to CECOT anyone in the United States they deem undesirable. (Recall that the grotesque policial ad linked to above, in which Secretary Noem broadly threatens anyone who enters the United States without proper documentation with permanent incarceration, is a new would-be carve-out in what would otherwise be illegal “cruel and unusual punishment.”)
Just today—Wednesday, April 9—White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt used exactly the same language in detailing the U.S. citizens Trump wants in CECOT that she previously has used to describe the 238 Venezuelan migrants Trump sent there.
The message in this is clear: Trump and his team will always claim that anyone they send to CECOT, whether an undocumented migrant or an American citizen, is a violent threat to America—a terrorist, even—and therefore deserving of being caged like livestock for the rest of their natural life. As with the Venezuelan Hoax, this will almost always be a lie. It will also be a lie Trump’s administration finds ways to ensure no court can review. After all, it apparently reasons, what can’t Trump do so long as he claims he’s ensuring “domestic tranquility”?
All that remains, now, is for an attorney who is known to be corrupt—Pam Bondi—to expand her current definition of “domestic terrorism” committed by U.S. citizens to include additional minor, historically non-terroristic (non-felony) property offenses that she and her Department of Justice, along with Trump lawyer Kash Patel’s FBI, can fraudulently treat as terrorism worthy of overnight, process-free exile to CECOT.
Yet incredibly, there’s an even broader context than this for the particularly dangerous three-week period American jurisprudence is in now.
After recklessly pulling out of the First Iran Nuclear Deal—not because it wasn't working fine, but because it’d been negotiated by a man he hates, Barack Obama—Trump has now given the Iranian government, which had formally committed itself (somewhat understandably) to no longer negotiating with a U.S. president who already reneged on a prior contract, a deadline of this Saturday to come to a new accord over its nuclear program. He’s implied that the United States could launch military strikes against Iran at any time if an agreement is not reached by this Saturday (April 12).
On the same day he issued this new threat against Israel’s sworn geopolitical enemy, Trump met at the White House with Israeli president and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, ostensibly to discuss (a) the modest tariffs Trump had levelled against the Middle Eastern nation and (b) recent events in Gaza (which candidly Trump has been disinterested in ever since his idea to ethnically cleanse Gaza and then turn it into a playpen for rich Westerners was universally derided), but almost certainly in reality to discuss how Israeli airstrikes against Iran last October carefully paved the way for a joint U.S.-Israeli air bombardment of Iran’s nuclear facilities sometime in the coming weeks.
Indeed, Trump darkly announced that Iran would be “in great danger” if it did not submit to him this week.
What Americans therefore have to look forward to in the coming days—essentially from today through the beginning of summer—is a period of time in which Donald Trump is likely to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law; either launch airstrikes against or even declare an unofficial war against Iran; and significantly expand an illicit exile program that he’s now defending before the Supreme Court.
Of course, predictions are silly. No one knows the future. So perhaps none of these things will come to pass. But if we look not only at what Trump and his agents are saying but what they are actually doing, it certainly appears that this is the series of near-term outcomes they’re presently preparing for.
Unfortunately, by granting a stay to the Trump administration in the Garcia case, Chief Justice Roberts has made clear that he not only has no idea whatsoever of who he’s dealing with, or what he’s dealing with, but that he’s insensate to the profound danger the United States is in in the run-up to its president almost certainly taking steps to establish himself as a dictator—or at least a dictator in the encompassing spheres of immigration, terrorism, foreign policy, and international affairs, spheres he and his agents are already busy redefining to the point that they touch on every aspect of American life. (Certainly, President Trump’s decision to leave the nation he leads utterly defenseless against foreign intrusions into our elections is a sign that he has little interest in seeing “free and fair” elections in the United States going forward.)
What was needed in the Garcia case was for the Court to quickly and unambiguously affirm every lower-court judge who’s heard the case, and bring the case to a head by midnight this past Monday—thereby averting the international and constitutional crisis Trump, Bukele, and Musk effectively conspired together to create. Chief Justice Roberts doing so would’ve put before the American people and the federal judiciary the urgent question of whether the second Trump administration is willing to recant its apparent intention to exile political dissidents and honor federal judicial rulings.
And it would have done so before any false invocation of the Insurrection Act of 1807.
Instead, with events in Iran, events in El Salvador, and increasing global instability caused by Trump’s untutored, whiplash-inducing handling of U.S. tariffs on foreign goods—and with the April 20 deadline for the Hegseth-Gabbard Report, which is almost certain to urge President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act—matters in the United States are fast approaching a rolling boil. It appears the Supreme Court will soon discover, along with the rest of America, just how much detention, death, and destruction the second Trump administration plans to provoke throughout 2025.
THIS is beyond detestable, beyond immorality and illegality, beyond any
notion of justice or the democratic
country we thought we were — until
Trump became our president. He must
go, we must be freed of this psychotic freak who makes Hitler seem rational.
Thank you for shining the light on the atrocities committed by the Trump regime. He’s a dark triad personality as referenced in another post and needs to be removed from office before he hurts everyone. No US citizen is safe with this sicko at the helm who has the nuclear codes. It’s important the the GOP senators understand that it’s not safe having a maniac running the country.