This Week In American Dystopia #1
When there's just too much for one single article.
Every day in America now is a race to see what fresh hell will be unleashed upon us. It is exhausting just trying to live in a country that is being flown into the ground by a despot economically while having our freedoms snatched away with minimum protest by the people who are supposed to be guarding them.
Welcome to American Dystopia.
A New Phase of Palestinian Genocide
Mohsen Mahdawi, who is a green card holder like Mahmoud Khalil and also a Columbia University graduate, was arrested while attending his interview for citizenship. Mahdawi has legally resided here for over ten years, and like Khalil, he spoke up against Israel’s barbaric assault on Gaza last year. For exercising his rights to free speech, he too is being declared a “threat to the foreign policy of the United States” and has been disappeared. The de rigueur method of the Trump administration is to try to immediately take whomever they’ve arrested across a state line to avoid a court’s jurisdiction, and hope they can do so long enough to dump whomever they’ve taken in another country.
Mahdawi, who already retained an immigration attorney because he had an ongoing application for citizenship, has had a habeas claim filed in the federal district court in Vermont, where he was seized, but per the usual playbook, his family and attorney cannot locate Mahdawi. He previously made a statement to The Intercept where he said that being sent back to the West Bank is tantamount to a death sentence, as Israeli settlers openly assault Palestinians and steal their land and homes without consequences, where the IDF has been bombing and bulldozing homes, and where men are often rounded up and thrown into prisons because they are men in Palestine.
Quite frankly, this is just a new phase of Palestinian genocide. Two Palestinian students protesting the bombing of their kinsmen affects our foreign policy how? Has Israel, of whom support is apparently the alpha and the omega of our foreign policy these days, lost support from our government? Nope. Have the protests hindered Anthony Blinken and Marco Rubio from regurgitating Israeli talking points? Nope. Has any nation explicitly said that protesting students will prevent them from dealing with America? Nope.
There has been too much latitude granted by the courts. If the Secretary of State cannot point to a discernible harm caused by these students exercising their rights, cannot prove in court that harm has been caused, then this is nothing more than deliberate cruelty towards a people that have already suffered grievous harm. Sending them to an occupied territory where their very existence is criminalized, stripping them of residency and any hope of citizenship, just to show you can, is to act in furtherance of a genocide this nation has already gone way too far in aiding.
Speaking Of The Courts…
The decision late last week by the Supreme Court was unanimous, but in what was likely too much deference to the executive branch (a choice that had everything to do with politics, given the lack of any deference the same justices showed to Joe Biden), they said that the President had to facilitate the return of the wrongly deported refugee, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, as opposed to immediately repatriating him. It’s a typical Roberts Court majority where it writes itself into holes, but it was also a 9-0 decision. A unanimous majority that recognizes the threat to the authority of the courts.
And yet, Donald Trump is blatantly flouting that decision.
He hosted his torture prison warden/El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office today. Bukele, for those who do not know, won election in 2019. The constitution of El Salvador prohibits running for re-election to consecutive terms. Bukele’s allies in the legislature removed and replaced the entire Supreme Court, which then “interpreted” the ban as non-applicable and allowing Bukele to run again last year, where he won 85% of the vote in what was surely a rigged election. Yes, he’s popular for stopping the gang violence, but has done so by incarcerating more of its population than any nation on earth.
That’s our partner. That’s our $6 million jailer.
At a meeting in the Oval Office today, Donald Trump and El Salvador president Nayib Bukele both claimed they didn’t have the power to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to the US, despite the Trump administration conceding in court documents that he was deported by mistake and in the face of the supreme court upholding an order to facilitate his return. US attorney general Pam Bondi said the decision was El Salvador’s to make, adding: “If they want to, we would provide a plane.” Baselessly labeling Abrego Garcia a “terrorist”, Bukele refused to order his return, calling the idea “preposterous”, and also ruled out releasing him within El Salvador.
“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it,” says Bukele. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
He adds he wouldn’t release Abrego Garcia into El Salvador either. “I’m not very fond of releasing terrorists into the country,” he says.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller went further, saying that even if El Salvador did send Abrego Garcia back to the US, the administration would deport him again. “No version of this legally ends with him ever living here,” he said. They all repeatedly referred to Abrego Garcia as an “illegal alien”, which he was not, and Miller insisted that the illegal deportation was not a mistake. Meanwhile, Trump reaffirmed that he is “all for” deporting naturalized American citizens to El Salvador, and urged Bukele to build more Cecot-style prisons so the US could deport “as many as possible”.
It is exhausting to deal with people who stare you down and lie so shamelessly. We are paying El Salvador for the lease of space in their torture prison. Surely, if we are paying for it, we can pay for the return. Bukele has been able to use this prison the way he has because the El Salvadoran legislature has extended the “state of emergency” a whopping thirty-six times. It has veered from one state of lawlessness to another, from the government having no control to the government turning the nation into one big prison. Instead, Bukele is like, I don’t have the power (bullshit) and I’m not keen of releasing terrorists (not a terrorist, more bullshit).
Meanwhile, Mango Mussolini waxes poetic about sending American citizens to El Salvador. The “worst of the worst,” which is his favorite phrase and one he deploys against anyone he considers an enemy, and once a citizen is sent there it won’t be the last. It is a direct challenge to the legal system, to the courts, to the Congress, and to us. An attempt to tell us we are powerless, they have the guns and the thugs and they will abduct who they want and send them wherever they want. And one day, the last stop won’t be a torture prison in a notoriously brutal Central American nation, but instead it’ll be someone opening up the cargo hatch on a military flight and kicking “undesirables” out of it for the thought crime of opposing these two-bit thugs in power.
The defiance of this order, the smirking at the cameras, says everything you need to know. Donald Trump does not fear anything now, and he is destroying the entire American project with metaphorical nuclear weapons. I hate to say it, but we are already over the cliff. If we can ever find our way out of this Kafkaesque nightmare, a number of Constitutional amendments will be needed to prevent this from happening again. We cannot go back. There is no returning to how we used to do things. We now have to view our democracy, our nation, as fundamentally having the same fragility as a carton of eggs.