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I still remember back in 2002, when the Bush administration declared Jose Padilla an “enemy combatant” and deprived him of his legal right to trial. It was a national outrage, and rightly so. But now, 23 years later, the Trump administration is committing even worse violations of basic American civil liberties. Trump has rounded up and deported a number of Venezuelan citizens to brutal El Salvadoran prisons, accusing them of being in the gang Tren de Aragua based on nothing more than the fact that they have tattoos. In one case, makeup artist Andry Romero was deported based solely on the fact that he had a tattoo of crowns (which the administration thought was a gang symbol) on top of the names of his mom and dad.

But that’s hardly the worst case! The Trump administration also deported a man named Abrego Garcia to El Salvador completely by accident, then claimed they didn’t have the ability to bring him back:

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up…

Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is also a U.S. citizen, has no criminal record in the United States, according to his attorney. The Trump administration does not claim he has a criminal record, but called him a “danger to the community”…

He works full time as a union sheet-metal apprentice, has complied with requirements to check in annually with ICE, and cares for his 5-year-old son, who has autism and a hearing defect, and is unable to communicate verbally.

On March 12, Abrego Garcia had picked up his son after work from the boy’s grandmother’s house when ICE officers stopped the car…Within two days, he had been transferred to an ICE staging facility in Texas…Abrego Garcia’s family has had no contact with him since he was sent to the megaprison in El Salvador, known as CECOT…

“Oopsie,” [Salvadoran President Nayib] Bukele wrote on social media, taunting the judge [who had ordered the Trump administration to stop the deportation flights].

This sounds pretty similar to the beginning of the dystopian 1985 movie Brazil, in which an innocent man named Buttle is randomly arrested and killed in prison because of a typo on an arrest warrant for a man named Tuttle:

 

The error in real life isn’t quite the same as the typo in the movie. But what the Trump administration is trying to do — to seize a hard-working peaceful family man, who has not been accused of any crime, and to throw him into a hellish torture dungeon for the rest of his life — is very similar. Imagine, for a moment, that this was you, or your father. Now see if you can come up with a convincing argument as to why it never will be.

The Supreme Court, presented with the case, ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” Garcia’s return to America, but gave no deadline. The administration is arguing that there’s nothing it can do — that Garcia has to spend the rest of his life in that dungeon because of their mistake.

Is this the America you grew up in? Maybe if your awareness of current events started with Padilla and Guantanamo and the War on Terror, it might feel like the arrests of Garcia and Romero are simply a minor evolution in the saga of American authoritarianism. But I remember a time when this kind of thing felt unthinkable, and was the merely the plot of dystopian fantasies.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/Brazil

[ed. Not trying to turn this into an economics or political blog, but there's so much of both to wade through lately. I expect "doomscrolling' will be the word of the year in 2025.]