A “way of perfect lawlessness”

This article was updated on April 7, 2025 at 8.40 p.m.

The Supreme Court is about to decide whether the Trump government will remain overseas in a gulag and then leave it there.

The Trump government wants everyone to believe that the case that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is in question in El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Concanto del Terrorismo or Cecot in order to deport the right of the government, undocumented immigrants or terrorists. But it is actually about whether the United States government will kidnap someone from the street and then neuter them in a foreign prison with little hope of the release maroon. Human rights groups have said that they have not yet found anyone who was freed by Cecot, and the Salvadoran government previously said that someone there was detained “never go”.

Today, the Trump government asked the Supreme Court to raise an order from the states that asked the administration to call up Abrego Garcia. This afternoon, chief judge John Roberts temporarily blocked the command. A short time later, the majority issued a decision per curiam in a separate case, which means that deportations according to the law on Alien Enemies can continue to be continued, albeit under judicial supervision.

As my colleague Nick Miroff reported, the Trump government confirmed in court that Abrego Garcia was deported due to an “administrative error”. Abrego Garcia has been in the United States since he was 16 after he had fled El Salvador and came to the USA illegally after gang threatened his family. He is married to an American citizen and has a 5-year-old child. In 2019, a judge gave him a protected status as a “withdrawal of the distance” and ordered the government not to send him back to El Salvador. The Trump administration has claimed that Abrego Garcia is a member of the gang MS-13 based on the word of a single anonymous informant six years ago, and the fact that Abrego Garcia Chicago Bull’s clothing.

Adam Serwer: Trumps Salvadoranian Gulag

In his majority opinion, which rejected the government’s argument, however, the judges of the fourth circle judge wrote that the recording “shows that Abego Garcia has no crime history in this country or somewhere else, and that Abrego Garcia has employment that has an acquisition company that has a law that has a law that has a law, and do not do so – At all, the trouble to try.

Although the Trump government has admitted that Abrego Garcia was accidentally deported, it is that federal courts cannot order its return. “A judicial order that forces the executive to deal with a foreign power in a certain way, let alone force a certain lawsuit by a foreign sovereign, are under constitutionally unbearable,” says a court registration. The effects of this argument may not be immediately obvious, but if federal courts cannot order the return of someone who is accidentally banished by a foreign gulag, the administration is free to banish citizens and then say that they have done this uneasy while they rot.

As the legal scientist Steve Vladeck wrote: “A world in which federal courts had the authority to command the government to take every possible step to attribute the government to the United States in which the government could send to the government in which the government could send Each of us To a Salvadoran prison without proper procedures, they claim that the misstep is a result of an “administrative error” and thus wash the hands of the responsibility for what happens next. If the Trump government is here, this could also disappear from an American citizen.

Deporting people without proper procedure is what is actually “constitutionally unbearable” because the fifth and fourteenth change guarantees a proper legal process. To disappear from the street from the street and enlarge them is “under constitutional law” for the same reasons. People who have never been convicted of a crime according to Cecot, a prison in which the lawyers claim that inmates are routinely misused, can also be “under constitutional law” due to the ban on the eighth change in the cruel and unusual punishment. But whatever your constitutional status may be, all of these things should be morally unbearable for every decent person.

Read: An “administrative error” sends a father in Maryland to a Salvadoranian prison

This should be one of these cases in which the judges are unanimous. If the obligations of the constitution towards proper procedures mean something, you should mean that the government cannot send people to be detained by a foreign nation without having committed a crime. The American “history and tradition” created a system that was rejected for such arbitrary powers with the conscious fear that “parchment barriers” would offer little protection against an “arrogant majority” that is ready to violate rights. Nevertheless, I have little doubt that someone will try to argue that the authors who wrote two clauses in the constitution actually loved to disappear into foreign prisons.

“The facts of this case thus offer the potential for a disturbing gap: namely that the government could stimulate foreign prisons in relation to court orders and then call against Articles II that it is no longer their custodian bank, and there is nothing that can be done,” judge Judie Wilkinson III, who became the bench of President of Ronald Ronald Reagan. “It doesn’t take a low imagination to understand that this is a way of perfect lawlessness that cannot tolerate courts.”

This is eloquent and correct, but this lawlessness happens because the nation’s highest court has in advance. The right-wing judges at the Roberts Court repeatedly rewritten the constitution to Donald Trump’s advantage, first the anti-entrepreneur clause in the fourteenth amendment and then by inventing an imperial presidential immunity that is nowhere in the text of the document. It is no surprise that Trump is now acting as if he is above the law. Finally, the Roberts Court gave him permission.

In the decision of the Law on the Law on the Law on Law on the Law on Law on the Law on Law, although the court unanimously decided that the prisoners are entitled to judicial review, the deported decisions must contest their prison sentences in the jurisdiction in which they are recorded. The risk of Justice Sonia Sotomayor found in her dissent in her dissent is that “people who are unable to secure a lawyer or not to calculate against a disadvantage in time for a disadvantage that the prospect of the dangerous conditions of El Salvador’s Cecot, in which prisoners suffer when the human rights fallen in disguised human rights.”

“The effects of the position of the government is that not only did not only take citizens, but also the US citizens from the street, were forced to airplanes and limited to foreign prisons without the opportunity to make amends if the judicial review is illegally rejected before removal,” wrote Sotomayor. “History is not a stranger to such a lawless regime, but the legal system of this nation should prevent and not enable its increase.”

The Roberts Court should not congratulate itself on this judgment. America remains on the way to “perfect lawlessness” that Wilkinson described, especially the judges.