As mass raids, secret deportations, and arrests of public officials escalate, the rule of law is being dismantled in plain sight
The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia reveals a chilling truth: due process is no longer guaranteed
My April 2025 piece entitled “Trump’s Dirty War Has Already Started” cited Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson’s March 15, 2025 opinion which pulled the alarm bell on the current administration, confirming Trump has asserted the right and used the power of the government “to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.” He noted that “This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.” Finally, he set out that “The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.”
And what have we learned since then? Well, President Bukele of El Salvador stated on April 14, 2025 in the Oval Office meeting with the President that he didn’t “have the power to return [Kilmar Abrego Garcia] to the United States.” On April 29, 2025, the President told Terry Moran in an Oval Office interview that he “could call up the president of El Salvador and say ‘Send him back,’ right now.” Then, on May 21, 2025, the DOJ charged Abrego Garcia in Tennessee on one count of conspiracy to transport aliens and one count of unlawful transportation of undocumented aliens, resulting in the resignation of the head of the criminal division in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Nashville, Ben Schrader. And despite the statements of both Presidents to the contrary, they effectuated Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. on June 6, 2025, to face the newly filed criminal charges.
During the six-hour detention hearing on June 13, 2025 it was revealed that the Homeland Security Investigator did not begin investigating Abrego Garcia’s 2022 traffic stop in Cookeville, Tennessee, which is central to the two criminal charges, until April 28, 2025 (after the U.S. mistakenly sent Abrego Garcia to El Salvador), and that one of alleged conspirators’ testimony that Abrego Garcia typically took his family with him on smuggling runs across the country, which he allegedly did three times a week, amounting to 140 plus hours of driving, despite the fact that two of Abrego Garcia’s children are autistic. Counsel noted: “I think the idea that he’s taking them on cross-country road trips multiple times per week is ridiculous.” And the 237 Venezuelans sent with Abrego Garcia without due process to El Salvador’s CECOT on March 14, 2025 remain there.
Meanwhile, reports of U.S. citizens and residents being raided, kidnapped, or arrested by sometimes masked and unidentified men purporting to be law enforcement officers or ICE agents continue throughout the country. They have even arrested elected officials and judges. Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested in April for allegedly “knowingly concealing a migrant.” Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested May 9, 2025 for allegedly “trespassing” at Delaney Hall in Newark, but the charge was dismissed. Another notable incident in May involved a raid at a popular Italian restaurant in a San Diego neighborhood by agents in tactical gear wearing face covering and carrying assault rifles, which was followed by a similar scene at a Mexican Restaurant in Minneapolis the next day. This after masked officials surrounded and stuffed Turkish Tufts graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk into an SUV in Boston. Senator Alex Padilla was manhandled, forced to the ground, and handcuffed on June 12, 2025 for attempting to ask a question of the Homeland Security Director in a Los Angeles federal building. He was not charged. And on June 17, 2025, New York City Comptroller and Mayoral Candidate Brad Lander was manhandled and arrested for asking to see a judicial warrant. He was released after several hours without charge.
While ICE agents are reportedly using a new mapping app set up by Elon Musk to try to track down and deport undocumented immigrants, some media are attempting to maintain records of U.S. Citizens being detained and deported. Tracking, compiling, maintaining, and publishing lists of these arrests is of utmost importance and urgency to demonstrate the arbitrary and capricious nature of the current enforcement efforts, and to keep track of those disappeared from U.S. streets. Indeed, statistics indicate that both Obama’s (1.57 million and 1.49 million in his two terms) and Biden’s (4.6 million between January 2021 and November 2024) administrations effectuated more removals than Trump (2.1 million) in his first term, and in the first several months of his second term, Trump’s numbers are still averaging about 11% fewer on average per day than during 2024, although the Trump administration has been criticized for lack of transparency and leading immigration experts have speculated whether Trump is manipulating numbers. Regardless, the chilling use of masked governmental agents to inflict chaos, cruelty, conflict, confrontation which is a feature of Trump’s enforcement activities were absent during the Obama and Biden administrations while their administrations’ efforts were actually more effective and efficient than Trump’s masked thugs. These continued activities constitute the clearest signal yet that enforcement is not Trump’s main goal. Rather, the chaos, cruelty, conflict, and confrontation are. Trump’s Dirty War rages on.