Here Comes the Gulag
Trump comes for American citizens
Please take a moment to read today’s newsletter and then call your senators and congressperson to protest this. Do not wait — because if you wait, this newest Trump outrage will be socialized and it will be too late. There are some things that must be nipped in the bud immediately and I cannot think of one that is more important than this.
Last week, I wrote that Donald Trump would not stop his deportation efforts at undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers or foreign students. Eventually, he would come for the rest of us — so if we didn’t speak up now, there would be no one left to speak up for us later.
I predicted that Trump would move on to naturalized citizens next. That was a failure of imagination. He is, in fact, coming for every American citizen who will not bend the knee.
It all began on Sunday. Here’s USA Today:
President Donald Trump says he loves the idea of sending American inmates to El Salvador's prisons but needs to know more about it.
Trump responded to a reporter's question about El Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele offering to take prisoners.
"I love it," Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Sunday. "If he would take them, I'd be honored to give them. I don't know what the law says on that, but I can't imagine the law would say anything different ... If they can house these horrible criminals for a lot less money than it costs us, I'm all for it."
Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, floated the idea again yesterday:
The president has discussed this idea quite a few times publicly. He’s also discussed it privately. You’re referring to the president’s idea for American citizens to potentially be deported. These would be heinous, violent criminals who have broken our nation’s laws repeatedly. These are violent, repeat offenders on American streets. The president has said, if it’s legal, right, if there is a legal pathway to do that, he’s not sure — we are not sure —if there is. It’s an idea that he has simply floated and has discussed very publicly in the effort of transparency.
Let’s be very clear about what is happening. Like every other Trump outrage that seemed too crazy to be true (until it wasn’t), this one is being socialized as an “idea” first. We’re just spitballing here about deporting Americans to a foreign gulag, you see. All in the interest of transparency.
In what used to be our constitutional republic, due process applied even to people the government alleged were violent, repeat offenders. If they were indicted and found guilty by a jury of their peers, they were sent to American prisons, which have to treat their inmates within the confines of what American law allows.
But this is not about locking up a future Unabomber or John Wayne Gacy. This is about Trump putting the fear of God into any American who might dare to cross him. It is about outsourcing Trump’s version of justice to a third-world gulag, where American citizens would no longer be subject to any constitutional protections.
On March 15, Trump deported 238 Venezuelan migrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, a mega-prison in El Salvador. CNN toured CECOT in November and described what life is like for the prisoners there:
The men are inside these cells for 23½ hours a day. They do not work. They are not allowed books or a deck of cards or letters from home. Plates of food are stacked outside the cells at mealtimes and pulled through the bars. No meat is ever served. The 30-minute daily respite is merely to leave the cell for the central hallway for group exercise or Bible readings.
For anyone who does commit “grave offenses” against other prisoners or staff, solitary confinement awaits — cement cells that hold inmates for up to 15 days. The rooms are pitch-black save for a small hole in the ceiling, two stories above, that allows in a sliver of light. A cement basin, a toilet, and a concrete slab for a bed are the only furnishings. Meals are passed through a door slot.
Visits from family or friends are never allowed. This is the same place Trump wants to send his fellow Americans.
In rendering these 238 men to CECOT, the administration claimed that each of them was a terrorist or a violent gang member. That is a lie.
A 60 Minutes investigation revealed last Sunday that 75% of all the migrants deported to El Salvador had no criminal record, either in the United States or in Venezuela. Almost all the rest have been convicted of non-violent offenses, such as theft, shoplifting and trespassing. According to CBS News, “only about a dozen are accused of murder, rape, assault and kidnapping.”
Yet Trump has deported all of them to a maximum security prison in a country not their own and has left them to rot, repeating the lie over and over that they are the worst kinds of criminals. Many of these men were not in the United States illegally but were asylum seekers who had been granted the right to remain ihere until their cases were adjudicated. The administration even acknowledged that one, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, was mistakenly deported.
Leavitt’s insistence that Trump will only deport American citizens to CECOT if “there is a legal pathway to do that” is also laughable. This is the same administration that has gone all the way to the United States Supreme Court to keep Abrego Garcia rotting at CECOT, even after admitting that he should never have been sent there in the first place. And so far, the court has failed to stop him.
On Monday, in what is surely one of the most shameful decisions in the court’s history, Chief Justice John Roberts temporarily blocked a lower court order directing the government to return Abrego Garcia to the United States by midnight. Roberts was presumably sleeping in his comfortable bed the night after unilaterally issuing this administrative stay. Abrego Garcia continues to spend his nights rotting away in a prison where he is not allowed to see daylight or hug his wife and severely autistic son.
This is also the same administration that has accused the deported Venezuelan men of membership in the Tren de Aragua gang simply because some of them had tattoos of a crown somewhere on their bodies. This week, the Supreme Court also cleared the way for these renditions to continue.
This administration does not care about legalities. It does not care about the constitution or due process, either. It is socializing you, ever so slowly, to accept that one day, one of your neighbors might disappear. You will be surprised to find out that he was a violent, repeat criminal, because all you ever knew about him was that he would go out to protest outside Tesla showrooms once in a while.
One day, you will find out that your wife was a violent, repeat criminal who has disappeared too. This will come as a shock to you because all you ever heard was that she told a fellow mom on the playground that Trump was driving the country into a ditch. How was she to know that this woman was going to denounce her to the authorities until federal agents knocked on your door and took her away?.
Think it cannot happen here because we Americans have a constitution to protect us? In 1936, the Soviet Union enacted a constitution of its own, which guaranteed freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. That very year, Joseph Stalin began the Great Terror, where he purged millions for being enemies of the people. At least 750,000 were executed in 1937 alone, although the number is likely much higher. Millions more were sentenced to the gulag.
Look at what has happened in the last decade. Trump has never floated anything that he has not tried to enact later, whether it is encouraging a violent uprising to end the peaceful transfer of power, smashing the Pax Americana or instituting ruinous tariffs to upend the nation’s economy. He has broken norm after norm, until the abnormality becomes the new normal. What was once inconceivable is now acceptable.
Legacy media has failed to cover this story with the urgency that it merits but that does not mean that it is not deeply urgent. While White House reporters are busy gossiping about the Elon Musk-Peter Navarro feud, the administration is planning to strip away the last of our civil rights under their very noses.
202-224-3121 is the number for the Capitol Hill switchboard. Demand that your elected officials raise holy hell about Trump’s plan to deport American citizens to a foreign gulag. Speak up about it now on social media to spread the word. Protest it in the streets. Make it painful for Congress to go along.
Do it before it’s too late.
Further Reading:
US Today: Trump on sending American prisoners to El Salvadorian prisons: 'I love that'
Olga Nestrova: Leavitt confirmed that the WH is working on deporting US citizens to El Salvador
CNN: Exclusive: Locking eyes with mass murderers in El Salvador
CBS News: U.S. sent 238 migrants to Salvadoran mega-prison; documents indicate most have no apparent criminal records
The New York Times: Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks Order Requiring Return of Wrongly Deported Migrant
CBS News: ICE claims tattoos tie migrants to the Tren de Aragua gang. Experts say they aren't reliable identifiers.
PBS: Supreme Court allows Trump to deport Venezuelans under wartime law, but only after they receive a court hearing
History.com: Great Terror
In other news, tRump just paused all tariffs except for China for 90 days. Apparently his $billionaire buddies had enough time to cover their short selling and do whatever long buying they had planned when they told him to impose them.
And now, an EO to go after 2 journalists who wrote "nor nice things" about vonshitzhispants