Why You Should Be Scared

Noah Smith: “First, there’s the obvious: Trump is going around arresting innocent people, and sending them to foreign torture-dungeons, apparently for the rest of their lives. Bloomberg reports that about 90% of these deportees had no criminal records in the U.S., and most have not been charged with any crime…”

“Some were arrested simply because they had (non-gang) tattoos. Others didn’t even have any tattoos, and were arrested for no apparent reason.”

“It’s not clear why the Trump administration is doing this. Perhaps it’s to scare immigrants into leaving the country by making an example of a few. Perhaps it’s to simply assert power, or to test the boundaries of what they can get away with… Who knows. But what’s clear is that this is brutal and lawless behavior — the kind of arbitrary arrest and punishment that’s common in authoritarian regimes.”

“The second thing that should scare you is the lawlessness… In practice, the administration is arguing that as soon as they arrest someone and ship them overseas, U.S. courts have no right to order their return — ever. That means that Trump could grab you, or me, or anyone else off the street and put us on a plane to El Salvador, and then argue that no U.S. court has the right to order us back, because once we’re on foreign soil it’s the domain of foreign policy.”