Where Is Kilmar Abrego Garcia? (w/ Update)

trump's ongoing war against legal immigrants - and basically any American who isn't White Rich and/or Male - has taken the darkest turn yet. His street-level bullies among ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) are grabbing people who are innocent of any criminal activity - without presenting ANY evidence of wrong-doing in a court of law as required by Writ of Habeas Corpus - and still shipping them overseas to a private-run prison to avoid any accountability to the federal courts back home.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the most clear example of these brazen attacks on our civil rights (via Ben Finlay at AP News):

Abrego Garcia grew up in El Salvador’s capital city, San Salvador, according to court documents filed in U.S. immigration court in 2019. His father was a former police officer. His mother, Cecilia, sold pupusas, the nation’s signature dish of flat tortilla pouches that hold steaming blends of cheese, beans or savory pork.

The entire family, including his parents, two sisters and older brother, ran the business from home, court records state. Abrego Garcia’s job was to buy ingredients from the grocery store and make deliveries with his brother.

“Everyone in the town knew to get their pupusas from ‘Pupuseria Cecilia,’” his lawyers wrote.

A local gang, Barrio 18, began extorting the family for “rent money” and threatened to kill his older brother Cesar — or force him into their gang — if they weren’t paid, court documents state. The family complied but eventually sent Cesar to the U.S.

Barrio 18 similarly targeted Abrego Garcia, according to his immigration case. When he was 12, the gang threatened to take him away until his father paid them “all of the money that they wanted.” They still watched him as he walked to and from school.

The family moved 10 minutes away, but the gang threatened to rape and kill Abrego Garcia’s sisters, court records state. The family shut down the business, moved again and eventually sent Abrego Garcia to the U.S...

Abrego Garcia fled to the U.S. illegally around 2011, the year he turned 16, according to documents filed in his immigration case. He joined Cesar, now a U.S. citizen, in Maryland and found work in construction.

About five years later, Abrego Garcia met Jennifer Vasquez Sura, a U.S. citizen, the records say. In 2018, after she learned she was pregnant, he moved in with her and her two children. They lived in Prince George’s County, just outside Washington.

In 2019, Abrego Garcia went to a Home Depot looking for work when he was arrested by county police, according to court filings. Detectives asked if he was a gang member. After explaining he wasn’t, he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Abrego Garcia later told an immigration judge that he would seek asylum and asked to be released. Vasquez Sura was five months into a high-risk pregnancy.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, however, alleged that he was a certified gang member based on information that came from a confidential informant used by county police, records state.

According to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys in his current case, the criminal informant had alleged that Abrego Garcia belonged to an MS-13 chapter in New York, where he has never lived...

Again, our legal system relies too much on "confidential informants" who can't be verified and tend to provide erroneous claims. Just the simple fact that this "informant" put Abrego Garcia with a gang in a completely different state makes no sense and should have been put under stronger scrutiny.

In October 2019, an immigration judge denied Abrego Garcia’s asylum request but granted him protection from being deported back to El Salvador because of a “well-founded fear” of gang persecution, according to his case. He was released, and ICE did not appeal.

Abrego Garcia checked in with ICE yearly while the Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, his attorneys said in court filings. He joined a union and was employed full time as a sheet metal apprentice.

He and Vasquez Sura were raising three kids, including their 5-year-old son, who has autism, is deaf in one ear and unable to verbally communicate, according to the complaint filed against the Trump administration. They’re also raising a 9-year-old with autism and a 10-year-old with epilepsy.

Everything about Abrego Garcia says he's a family man, raising kids, working a solid job. Nothing here screams "street gang." For whatever he'd done to come into this country, Abrego Garcia was going through the legal motions to stay here on work permit, doing everything by the book.

And still trump's ICE thugs seized him, relying again on those dubious gang claims and immediately shipping him to El Salvador without a hearing, without a judge's say-so, without any of the due process our legal system is supposed to employ.

Abrego Garcia was pulled over March 12 outside an Ikea in Baltimore with his son, according to court records. An agent called Vasquez Sura and said she had 10 minutes to retrieve their son or ICE would request child protective services.

Abrego Garcia called his wife from jail and said authorities pressed him about MS-13, according to court documents. They asked about a photo they had of him playing basketball on a public court, and his family’s visits to a restaurant serving Mexican and Salvadoran food.

“He would repeat the truth again and again — that he was not in a gang,” Vasquez Sura stated in court documents.

In the mad rush under trump's call to deport as many "illegals" and "criminals" they could, ICE was under pressure to round up any suspected "gang members" even when the existing paperwork and judicial rulings said otherwise.

Everything that happened to Abrego Garcia was so outrageous, unethical, and arguably illegal that even ICE officials admitted this was "an administrative error," the legalese spoken to try and avoid liability for any criminal or civil charges aimed their way.

You would think then in a sane respectable legal system that when the officials admit they've made a mistake like this, they would work hard to undo said mistake and return their victims back to their lives. Instead, trump and his DOJ lackeys are mocking any effort to recover Abrego Garcia, basically telling the judges to get bent (via Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney at Politico):

The Trump administration insisted Sunday that it has no legal obligation to arrange for the return of a Maryland man illegally deported from the United States, arguing that a Supreme Court ruling last week only requires officials to admit him into the country if he makes it back from a high-security prison in El Salvador.

Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge that they don’t interpret the Supreme Court’s Thursday ruling — that the administration “facilitate” Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release — as obligating the administration to do anything more than adjust his immigration status to admit him if El Salvador’s government chooses to release him...

The DOJ lawyers sadists are claiming this is all on El Salvador now, even though it's trump whose migrant-bashing policies illegally sent an innocent man to that prison, and even though trump is supposed to be a President with vast executive powers. This is pure gaslighting bullshit.

The administration’s position suggests officials do not view the Supreme Court’s order as compelling them to seek Abrego Garcia’s return. The Salvadoran native entered the country illegally around 2011 and had been living in Maryland. The Trump administration has admitted it deported him to El Salvador in violation of a 2019 immigration court order barring his deportation to that country. Though Abrego Garcia was denied asylum, a judge found he could not be sent to his home country because of a legitimate fear of persecution by a local gang.

The administration continued Sunday to flout a Friday order from Judge Xinis to deliver “daily updates” to the court describing its efforts to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. Sunday’s update from Evan Katz, the assistant director of removal operations for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the administration had “no updates” for the judge. A day earlier, in a similarly threadbare update, the administration turned to Michael Kozak, the State Department’s senior bureau official in the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, who said Abrego Garcia was still alive in El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

The administration is also bucking demands from Abrego Garcia’s attorneys that officials detail the arrangement to ship hundreds of foreign nationals to a notorious prison in El Salvador. One of the Sunday filings insists those details are classified and could be subject to attorney-client and state secrets privileges...

What this all boils down to is: trump believes he has Absolute Authority as President Sadist-In-Chief - thanks to that Supreme Court ruling that granted presidents vast executive powers without checks or balances - and this is his attempt to bully and break our federal judiciary into utter uselessness against his grand scheme to rule as Dictator For Life.

This is a severe Constitutional Crisis, far greater than anything we've witnessed since Watergate or the desegregation showdowns of the Civil Rights movement. trump - and the sadists serving at his pleasure not to their Oaths of office - refuses to obey legal court orders from the Third Branch of our federal government, daring the judges to cross a line - something like holding Justice Department officials in contempt of their courts - that could trigger terrible retributions from a quisling-esque Republican Congress or trump's own brute squads.

If trump succeeds here - if Judge Xinis or any of the other judges fighting these deportations that are clear violations of our constitutional rights crumples here, if they allow Abrego Garcia and hundreds of others who were accused of criminal behaviors without proof in the courts of law - this would be a green light for trump and his lackeys to escalate their war on the rule of law and start denying our rights to more groups of Americans trump and co. would want broken and/or removed.

You think trump and Stephen Miller and half the Republican leadership will just stop at going after "illegals"? They're trying to get rid of Birthright Citizenship, something that protects ALL of us - Latino, Black, Asian, Native, Women, Gays/Lesbians, Trans, even other Whites - from losing our protections under the Constitution.

That "When they came for..." poem wasn't exaggeration. When the fascist bastards take over a government and start their purges, they'll keep removing anybody they despise/fear/hate until they get their bloodied, ashen, and morally bankrupt Utopia. trump and the Republican wingnuts are not going to stop. They will go after Latinos. They will go after Blacks. They will go after Chinese and Indians and Japanese and other Asians. They will go after people registered to vote Democrat. They will go after women who aren't already beholden to their patriarchy. They will go after anyone who offends their evangelical hate-filled faith.

We are all on that list destined for those privatized prisons, for the elimination of our citizenry, for the end of any rights - to vote, to own property, to fight for good wages, to cherish and share our lives with those we love, to speak out in protest - we've taken for granted the last 200-plus years.

We are all going to end up like Kilmar Abrego Garcia if we don't fight back.

We all need to speak out about where Abrego Garcia is, and why he isn't home with the family that loves and misses him.

Where Is Abrego Garcia?

He's in a hell that a broken, corrupt sadist sent him to. This is all on trump, and that bastard needs to answer for his crimes (again).

Update 4/15: As a helpful guide, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick drew up a diagram to follow regarding Abrego Garcia's situation and the dubious arguments trump and his thugs are using to claim the man guilty without trial.

Reichlin-Melnick btw is a fellow at the American Immigration Council, graduate from Georgetown Law, who comments on immigration policies on social media.

An Anecdote Involving Air Conditioning

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio for sharing this blog at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! Just remember to save up your pennies, kiddos, 'cause trump's tariff rollercoaster ain't done yet.

Last week, I needed to replace my air conditioner.

The unit was as old as the duplex, built in the mid-1990s. I bought the place - with my parents help, as I was still recovering from long unemployment - in 2014 with the understanding that things were 20-plus years old and at some point will age out and die on me.

The AC compressor had been a problem for years, barely generating enough air to cover the two-bedroom place. The far ends of the house - which happened to be the master bed and bath - wasn't getting much air at all the last five-six years. The AC repair guy told me the last two annual checkups that the compressor was doomed sooner rather than later. This winter, it finally doomed.

The repair guy came out and checked, and showed me the points of failure in the compressor that meant getting a replacement. Problem is, the whole unit was thirty years old, and replacement parts - even compressors - were no longer available. The whole thing needed switching out.

And the cost was going to be around $7500.

Any homeowner will tell you things can get expensive - have been even before the housing booms of the 1980s and 1990s, and the housing market crash of 2007-08. It was still something above my annual income, and it was something I had to get further help from the parents, who were understanding because they knew I lived alone and had no other options other than an equity loan that would cost me a lot more later down the road. They had already helped to clear my mortgage, so replacing the AC was something they could help.

Also, this is the middle of Florida, heading into April and the goddamn heat wave that is April through November anymore (fuck you deniers, climate change is REAL). Air conditioning should not be a privilege, it should be a constitutional right in this state.

So I put in the repair order, the AC guys came out with a three-person crew, they worked on it early Thursday morning well into noon, finishing an hour early, and got the system turned on and pumping clear air. I checked: the new compressor is strong enough to get air to the back rooms of my duplex. At last.

While showing me that new compressor, pointing out what I need to look at in case there are any issues during the limited warranty period for it, the three AC guys all complimented me on spending $7500 on the whole thing.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because," the lead guy responded. "Next week, our company has to raise the price on these units by 20 percent."

Basic math told me 20 percent (.2) of $7500 (and change) was $1500 (and change) meaning a cost spike to $9000 (and change). THAT would have even made my parents give pause and suggest I just live with the ceiling fans on full blast for the rest of my life. 

I had to ask this. "Is this because of the trump tariffs?"

All three of the repair guys - where at least one of them had to have voted for that shitgibbon trump in 2024 - said "Yup!" while shaking their heads in discomfort if not alarm.

And this was just as trump unleashed his "liberation" Retribution tariffs on every country and territory on the maps - save for his buddies in Russia - to where we've started trade wars with the entire planet - again, save for Russia - even the islands populated solely by penguins (no, I am not making that up).

I could go into the illogic of trump - and his handlers' - math regarding how his tariffs are "fixing" any trade deficits we have with penguins and most of humanity, and I would argue that trade deficits we've had since the 1970s aren't damaging our economy the way trump claims. Hell, it's not trade deficits that have caused recessions, it had been reckless deregulation of financial markets; the upending of our housing markets; and a global pandemic that our political leaders - especially trump himself - barely took serious.

But I'm sticking to this anecdote as an example - that I'm certain is repeating across many households  this weekend - that right now, the American economy as we know it - our industrial capacity, our supply chains, our ability to provide goods and services, our ability to get reliable air conditioning - is doomed by trump's irrational and aggressive push for high tariffs.

The U.S. economy is not ready for any of this. And all the other damage trump and his lackeys are inflicting on us - the dismantling of our federal agencies, the theft of revenues, the growing job losses - is turning this all into the early stages of an economic depression. It won't even be a recession long enough to ease the coming fall off the cliffs.

Gods help us.

Get Yer Hands Off Us, trump and Musk

So today there was an organized national protest opposing trump/Musk's attacks on our federal infrastructure and our legal migrants called Hands Off, and a local event in nearby Lakeland FL was on the calendar for 1:00 PM so I decided to contribute with my presence for an hour.

Parking downtown was intriguingly tight today, so by that metric turnout seemed pretty good. I've seen the videoclips of the marches in the major cities like New York City, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, and... is that Salt Lake City? Did someone get video from Anchorage by any chance?

It's nice to witness that there's still more Americans siding with you against the corruption and stupidity of the trump regime. It'd just be nicer if the f-cking mainstream media will recognize that these anti-trump protests are bigger and better organized than those staged tea party ragefests the billionaires set up during Obama's tenure. /sigh

Anywho, here's a few photos and videos I took at the Lakeland rally.

I should have made a sign that noted NO ONE VOTED 4 ELON but I didn't think to do so, alas.

I hope your protests went well today.

Keep fighting.

trump Destroying Heroes

Update: Thank ye, Steve in Manhattan for adding this article at Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-up! Please remember to support your public libraries as trump and his lackeys are nuking library funding outright through shutting down the IMLS agency. (posted at my writing/librarian blog) /rage

If there's any good news is that millions of us are rising up in protest, if the turnout at the Hands Off rallies are anything (of course, the mainstream media barely paid notice).

There's been a lot of bullshit happening in this second round of trumpian destruction, but this is something that drew my ire. trump continues his war on American history - and on our education and literacy - by getting his fellow racists to purge our libraries to straight-up whitewash everything (via Lolita C Baldor at AP News):

The U.S. Naval Academy has removed nearly 400 books from its library after being told by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s office to review and get rid of ones that promote diversity, equity and inclusion, U.S officials said Tuesday.

Academy officials were told to review the library late last week, and an initial search had identified about 900 books for a closer look. They decided on nearly 400 to remove and began doing so Monday, finishing before Hegseth arrived for a visit Tuesday that had already been planned and was not connected to the library purge, officials said. A list of the books has not yet been made available.

As a librarian, this enrages me. NO LIBRARY - be it public, be it school, above all a university library - SHOULD EVER PURGE A BOOK ON POLITICAL ORDERS.

The Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the Air Force Academy near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, had not been included in President Donald Trump’s executive order in January that banned DEI instruction, programs or curriculum in kindergarten through 12th grade schools that receive federal funding. That is because the academies are colleges.

Pentagon leaders, however, suddenly turned their attention to the Naval Academy last week when a media report noted that the school had not removed books that promoted DEI. A U.S. official said the academy was told late last week to conduct the review and removal. It isn’t clear if the order was directed by Hegseth or someone else on his staff...

Hegseth has aggressively pushed the department to erase DEI programs and online content, but the campaign has been met with questions from angry lawmakers, local leaders and citizens over the removal of military heroes and historic mentions from Defense Department websites and social media pages.

In response, the department has scrambled to restore some of those posts as their removals have come to light.

The confusion about how to interpret the DEI policy was underscored Monday as Naval Academy personnel mistakenly removed some photos of distinguished female Jewish graduates from a display case as they prepared for Hegseth’s visit. The photos were put back...

While the AP News weren't able to confirm in that story which books were getting removed, follow-up reports got out that some of the books under fire were biographies on Martin Luther King Jr, and WWII soldier - and major league baseball Hall of Famer - Jackie Robinson.

In short, Hegseth and trump and the rest of their anti-woke racists were desperate and eager to purge books on American heroes.

This is indefensible. Former congresscritter Steve Israel makes the case (via The Hill):

As a member of the House Armed Services Committee, I took on the issue of professional military education. It may not have garnered many headlines, but education was viewed as critical from the top echelons of the Pentagon to the remote operating bases I visited in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We sharpen our warriors’ effectiveness when we develop their skills in critical thinking, languages, cultures and history. But we are now going dangerously backwards.

The New York Times reported that the U.S. Naval Academy is identifying books in the school’s Nimitz Library that may be pulled from circulation because they relate to so-called diversity, equity and inclusion. Among the 900 potential offenders: a biography of Jackie Robinson, “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr.” and “Einstein on Race and Racism.”

The Chinese military is expanding. Russia is threatening Europe. But you can sleep better tonight knowing that the Navy is keeping its men and women safe from Jackie Robinson...

The irony in this move is rich. In the name of freedom, we mustn’t let our future leaders do things like, oh, read what they want to read. We must treat them like snowflakes, so brittle and sensitive that they must be protected from the offensive views of Robinson, King, Einstein and whoever else is on the blacklist of the Navy Blue and Gold.

Our warriors need body armor, not censorship. The best of them want to build their intellectual resilience. When I visited them in Iraq, Afghanistan and our military academies at home, many consistently told me that they fought better when they had time not only to drill, but to learn. To read...

It was a Marine who later explained to me why military education was so important: “If you know how to think, you realize you don’t have to kick in the door and start shooting; sometimes, you can find a safer way — for yourself...”

Instead of supporting our warriors with libraries that will give them an unvarnished telling of history, the Pentagon has decided to whitewash it. Instead of encouraging critical thinking skills, the Navy has decided to dull them...

There was nothing offensive in what Martin Luther King represents even as a man of peace who stood for civil rights. MLK may have spoke against the Vietnam War, but so did others of his era, and there is no shame in letting our military schools offer his biographies to highlight the man's overall commitment to justice.

There was nothing offensive in what Jackie Robinson represents even as a veteran of the Second World War - one of the few "good" or Just Wars humanity's ever known - who faced court martial during his service over refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus, and who broke the racial barriers in professional baseball to make it truly America's Game.

But these men - and many other men and women who impacted our nation's history over the centuries - offend trump and Hegseth and others among trump's ranks of hate-driven lackeys all because the likes of King and Robinson were heroes who dared to confront and bring an end to the institutionalized racism that scarred the United States since our nation's birth... and clearly still scars us to this day.

MLK offends the likes of trump because Reverend King dared to win the Nobel Peace Prize fighting for our nation's soul, sacrificing his own life in the pursuit of equality, justice, and economic fairness not just for Blacks but for the poor.

Jackie Robinson offends the likes of trump because Robinson suffered years of public attacks by haters while proving racists wrong that Black players were just as good as Whites, helping his Brooklyn Dodgers make playoffs and even a World Series championship. Jackie entered the hallowed Hall of Fame - notorious as one of the hardest sports halls to join - and his jersey number retired by all the major league teams in honor of what he endured.

King and Robinson and dozens if not hundreds of other American heroes - those who are Black, or Latino, or Natives, or Asians, or Women - offend trump and his ilk because King and Robinson and those hundreds of Blacks and Latinos and Natives and Asians and Women all defy the white supremacist myth that only White Men are capable and worthy of respect (that even the most mediocre White Man is superior to all others).

Rather than step away from an easily disprovable lie - that Whites can be mediocre and ought to live with the reality that We Are All Human capable of both greatness and failures - trump and the patriarchal racists would rather whitewash - literally - every fact and human face from our history books, from any form of information and knowledge that can inspire our generation and those who follow us.

trump will erase the fact we have heroes who aren't him - that there are heroes with different faces and different skins and different genders than him - just to make himself a false god.

Damn him.

Do not purge our heroes from the shelves, America.

Do not let these tiny, broken, hollow men erase everything good about our nation.

The Problem With Liberalism

(This is, by the by, NOT an April Fools prank. Sorry about the timing, I've been working on this for a month...)

(also wik, this is my 2,500th blog post. It's a question if any of us will be here for the 3000th...)

With all of the current chaos in the United States - with trump and his Far Right MAGA brownshirts rampaging through our federal government - there's discernable alarm among the Democratic faithful wondering why the hell their own party leadership - who ought to be opposing trump's smash-and-grabs more forcefully - is publicly playing nice with a conservative Republican party that keeps punching Dems in the metaphorical (and sometimes literal) face.

There's a number of theories why the modern Democratic Party seems so apprehensive in the face of historic destruction by Far Right Wingnuts. I'll throw this one hypothesis out here to give me the excuse to discuss yet another political philosophy (those -isms) of how Liberalism - as a core foundation of modern Democratic Party world-view - is the source of this seeming inaction and timidity.

Liberalism I would argue started as the American world-view, back when it wasn't confined to just one political party. If you look up the term in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (3rd ed, 2009), liberalism "is the belief that it is the aim of politics to preserve individual rights and to maximize freedom of choice." (p. 306) As a philosophical response to the shifts in the United Kingdom from absolute monarchism - the Divine Right of Kings argument that had led to Charles I's execution and then the end of Stuart rule with James II's expulsion in 1688 - the emerging Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and John Stuart Mill developed ideologies justifying the actions against the British kings that didn't want to play nice with others.

Locke in particular had a major influence on American political (liberal) thinking. In Locke's First Treatise of Government, he directly countered the Divine Right of Kings - posited in Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha - as a form of slavery (from York University's PDF archive):

To make way for this doctrine, they have denied mankind a right to natural freedom; whereby they have not only, as much as in them lies, exposed all subjects to the utmost misery of tyranny and oppression, but have also unsettled the titles and shaken the thrones of princes... However we must believe them upon their own bare words, when they tell us, “We are all born slaves, and we must continue so;” there is no remedy for it; life and thraldom we entered into together, and can never be quit of the one till we part with the other... (p.8)

Locke made this point, against the ill intents of absolute rulers:

The great question which in all ages has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of those mischiefs which have ruined cities, depopulated countries, and disordered the peace of the world, has been, not whether there be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it. The settling of this point being, of no smaller moment than the security of princes, and the peace and welfare of their estates and kingdoms, a reformer of politics, one would think, should lay this sure, and be very clear in it: for if this remain disputable, all the rest will be to very little purpose; and the skill used in dressing up power with all the splendor and temptation absoluteness can add to it, without showing who has a right to have it, will serve only to give a greater edge to man’s natural ambition, which of itself is but too keen. What can this do but set men on the more eagerly to scramble, and so lay a sure and lasting foundation of endless contention and disorder, instead of that peace and tranquility, which is the blurriness of government, and the end of human society? (p.69)

Having argued against Divine Right in the First part, Locke dug into the Second Treatise (same PDF source):

To this purpose, I think it may not be amiss to set down what I take to be political power. That the power of a magistrate over a subject may be distinguished from that of a father over his children, a master over his servant, a husband over his wife, and a lord over his slave. All which distinct powers happening sometimes together in the same man, if he be considered under these different relations, it may help us to distinguish these powers one from another, and show the difference betwixt a ruler of a commonwealth, a father of a family, and a captain of a galley... Political power, then, I take to be a right of making laws, with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury, and all this only for the public good... (p.106)

To understand political power aright, and derive it from its original, we must consider what estate all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of Nature, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man. A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another, there being nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another, without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty... (p.106)

That is where the basic element of classical liberalism - the rights of an individual compared to the power of the state - takes root. Locke does care to set limits:

But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence; though man in that state have an uncontrollable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any creature in his possession, but where some nobler use than its bare preservation calls for it. The state of Nature has a law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one, and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions... (p.107)

There's arguably a lot more I can quote from Locke, but I'll stop here because this is the point where we can see Locke's influence on Thomas Jefferson, whose work on the Declaration of Independence is the keystone of American political philosophy: From which we derived the belief "that all men are created Equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

You might notice Jefferson switches out "possessions" or "property" for "happiness", because that created back in 1776 a rather sticky moral conflict with America's UN-Equal system of chattel slavery on Blacks. Which does point to a more subtle yet still potent problem with liberalism as a political -ism that refers to the main problem overall.

What Locke - and Jefferson, and the rest of the liberal movement of the late 18th Century - aimed for was the establishment and reinforcement of the idea of The Social Contract (edited/cited by Alex Tuckness at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): 

Locke used the claim that men are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments...

The most direct reading of Locke’s political philosophy finds the concept of consent playing a central role. His analysis begins with individuals in a state of nature where they are not subject to a common legitimate authority with the power to legislate or adjudicate disputes. From this natural state of freedom and independence, Locke stresses individual consent as the mechanism by which political societies are created and individuals join those societies...

Into all of this Locke and other liberals built up the the concept of "The Rule Of Law": 

The Rule of Law comprises a number of principles of a formal and procedural character, addressing the way in which a community is governed. The formal principles concern the generality, clarity, publicity, stability, and prospectivity of the norms that govern a society. The procedural principles concern the processes by which these norms are administered, and the institutions—like courts and an independent judiciary that their administration requires...

In this, Liberalism subsists on a structured, procedural form of governance where the people as is their right elect leaders, the leaders create laws and enforce them, and the courts balance things out by defining the laws. If that system breaks down in any way, liberals - if any were in charge - would make changes to the laws and realign the administration and argue for judicial decisions to keep the system going.

This is how the Founding Fathers - balanced between more "conservative" world-views of business and class culture, with the "liberal" world-views of democratic/republic principles and legal stability - worked themselves from makeshift state-level confederations into a "strong" federal Constitutional system designed to provide the individual freedoms promised by their liberalism while guaranteeing that chaos/anarchy and the threat of European monarchism (the Absolutism of the day) did not threaten the American way of life. 

This is why when arguing about the nature (well, the sins) of Conservatism I disagreed with Frank Wilhoit's contention that Conservatism was the only American -ism. Wilhoit believed Conservatism - the modern, twisted version of it - had driven all other -isms out of the political landscape. My contention is that Conservatism - obsessed with seizing and maintaining political/economic/social control for the elite few - exists today as a counterpoint to Liberalism - the guarantees of individual rights within a shared community - which persists as a primary American ideology because the institutions it built - our entire Constitutional system of checks and balances - remain standing.

The problem with our modern Liberalism is how it has blinded itself to the perpetuation of that constitutional system, even as it is collapsing on itself from Far Right conservative misrule.

That Rule of Law that liberals insist on - believe still functions normally - is under attack as trump and his underlings both in the Executive and Legislative branches work to undo all of it: Either through attacking civil liberties of Americans and legal residents, or dismantling/shutting down federal agencies without following procedure or getting legislative consent as Locke intended. I've said this before: A lot of our constitutional federal system relied a lot on Good Faith, that all parties involved were acting for a common purpose or at least with genuine conviction to do the right thing. Without that, without the "unwritten rules" of governance that our nation's relied on for centuries to make things work within both the letter and the spirit of the law, the system's falling apart.

And yet, our current Democratic liberal leadership - that should be in active opposition to the damage trump and the radical Conservative Far Right are inflicting on that system - are still acting - almost deluding themselves - as though the political norms can still be upheld. They're so beholden to the Liberal ideology of the Social Contract that they're opening themselves to manipulation by their Conservative opponents to accelerate the constitutional system's collapse.

The likes of Minority Leader Schumer, and half the state governors planning to run for the Presidency in 2028 - as though a corrupt trump won't shut down elections altogether to seize power permanently - are going through the motions like the political norms they're used to will still be there after trump and the wingnut conservatives have burned it all down. They don't see the urgency or dangers of the moment, because they want to believe the liberal foundations of our nation will somehow survive even without action or defense on their part. They don't want to act in ways that would upset their understanding of that Social Contract: those unspoken norms, those natural rights.

The other problem with adhering to those norms of The Social Contract - that individual rights are upheld through the law, and with justice for all - is how uneven how unequal the enforcement of that Social Contract can be. Even as liberalism as an ideology demands equality for all as a right, in practice our liberal systems have a hard time enforcing or even defining those equal rights because even liberalism desires stability - a status quo - over change. 

You have to remember, even the liberal Founding Fathers compromised on the American system of Black slave labor to get the Declaration approved and the Constitution enacted. The liberalism of early American politics, business, and culture allowed slavery to thrive and spread to where it threatened our nation's well-being by the 1850s, and did little to stop the steady march towards Civil War when the spiritual and political harm of slavery could no longer be tolerated. It became the breaking point of the Social Contract, one that required a full Reconstruction and amendment reforms to repair... and which was left unfinished by the 1870s once the Social Contract (between White leaderships) was reimposed, leading to a century of Jim Crow inequality requiring another round of Civil Rights reforms by the 1960s to achieve even a modicum of justice under the Rule of Law. (All now threatened by a very anti-liberal trump regime undoing every Civil Rights act and social shift of the last 60 years)

Even as that Civil War allowed more left-leaning progressives among the liberal powers to enact major reforms involving education, agriculture, business, and law, and even as the Civil Rights movement attempted even further reforms, those reforms were not equally enforced to ensure the liberal system lived up to its own ideals. This is Liberalism's darkest flaw: It relies on a shared agreed-upon social order that bends too much to the corrupt world-view of more conservative, self-serving ideologues.

This is why there's a power struggle between traditional (classical) Liberals and more progressive (socialist) elements of the Democratic Party pushing for radical reforms and stronger equality for all to undo the damages of conservative elites eager to bring back Divine Right of trumps Kings to dominate us all: Liberals are wary of even incremental changes to the political system if it throws their understanding of the Social Contract into chaos.

There are other elements of Liberalism - such as the early adoption of Capitalism as an economic reform against the authoritarian corruption of mercantilism, without realizing how greed undermined Capitalism like any other economic -ism - that would require more discussion, but I've spent too long trying to hammer this essay out and I need to refocus on other outrages and observations of the current train wreck(s) we're enduring.

In short: Liberalism's problem isn't that it's weak, or vacillating when confronted by conservative or even fascist opposition. It's a genuinely well-informed, well-founded -ism compared to the other more destructive political beliefs that rise and fall with the cycles of history. Liberalism's problem is that it holds too much faith in a Social Contract that's too easily shredded and requires the same repatching over and over. At some point, our modern system of liberalism (neoliberal, I think) has to reposition itself on the chessboard and realize a more profound, truly just system of equality and opportunity has to be forged.

The Isolation

The way things are going, you'd think donald trump doesn't want any foreign policy at all. he's burning nearly every bridge the United States has to the world (via David E. Sanger at the New York Times (might be paywalled)):

In a span of only 50 days, President Trump has done more than any of his modern predecessors to hollow out the foundations of an international system that the United States painstakingly erected in the 80 years since it emerged victorious from World War II.

Without formally declaring a reversal of course or offering a strategic rationale, he has pushed the United States to switch sides in the Ukraine war, abandoning all talk about helping a nascent, flawed democracy defend its borders against a larger invader. He did not hesitate when he ordered the United States to vote with Russia and North Korea — and against virtually all of America’s traditional allies — to defeat a U.N. resolution that identified Moscow as the aggressor. His threats to take control of the Panama Canal, Greenland, Gaza and, most incredibly, Canada, sound predatory, including his claim Tuesday that the border with America’s northern ally is an “artificial line of separation...”

Mr. Trump has imposed tariffs on his allies after describing them as leeches on the American economy. And he has so damaged trust among the NATO allies that France is discussing extending its country’s small nuclear umbrella over Europe, and Poland is thinking of building its own atomic weapon. Both fear the United States can no longer be counted on to act as the alliance’s ultimate defender, a core role it created for itself when the NATO treaty was written...

trump is presenting a master class on how to alienate allies and punish innocent people. Not just with a trade war with his insane self-damaging tariffs - yes, trump's threatening 200 percent tariffs on European wines! - but with turning our visitation/visa policies into a straight path to prison as more people traveling to the U.S. are getting detained and harassed by our customs/border agents.

Balloon Juice collaborator Rose Judson - from what I can tell, she's watching all of this from the safety of the UK - is documenting these atrocities towards average Euro tourists:

Since the start of the new administration I’ve seen lots of UK- and EU-based folks wondering aloud on social media whether they should travel to the US. At first, this impulse was couched in a moral objection to Trump and Musk and everything they stand for. Now, this chatter has an edge of self-preservation, thanks to several recent news stories about tourists with minor visa irregularities vanishing into ICE custody for weeks at a time...

From the Guardian, “British tourist detained by US authorities for 10 days over visa issue”:

His daughter wants to leave the country and fly back to the UK, he said, but he feared the immigration crackdown in the US meant there could be a long delay before her case was dealt with.

“She’s in this orange prison outfit,” he said. “She just feels so isolated and desperate, you can imagine, she’s saying, ‘I want to come home’.”

She is safe, he said, but living “in horrendous conditions” and had not had access to legal representation. He was taking comfort from the fact that the other women at the facility, many of whom have been incarcerated for months or even years while fighting deportation, had “all been really nice to Becky,” Burke said.

But wait, there’s more!

Two German tourists were detained for more than 10 days each in separate incidents: a young man and a young woman. The young man, Lucas Sielaff, was traveling with his American fiancée from Mexico. He was held in detention for two weeks (his fiancée also alleges she was shackled and handcuffed and subjected to a body search)... 

Jessica Brösche, a 29-year-old tattoo artist from Berlin, will reportedly join Lucas Sielaff, 25, from Bad Bibra in Saxony-Anhalt, who is reported to have returned to Germany on 6 March, after being arrested at the Mexican border on 18 February before being detained for almost two weeks.

The families of the two tourists, who were detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), had compared their ordeals to “a horror film”...

Judson's conclusion?

If you have family or friends planning to come from abroad, ensure they triple-check their entry requirements with the US consulate in their country and that they send scans of their documents (passports, visas, etc.) to you before they travel. Or, better yet, rearrange your plans. This isn’t getting better anytime soon.

As a Floridian - whose state relies a lot on international tourism - this royally sucks.

And there's been no need for ICE to go overboard detaining people especially for weeks at a time. Most of these issues tended to be minor glitches in the paperwork, or misunderstandings that a good translator would negotiate down to a stern lecture about not doing that again. Now? The cruelty and sadism of the trump regime requires handcuffs, incarceration, harassment, intimidation, and psychological (if not physical) harm. Nobody's going to want to visit a nation where the law enforcement can lock you up over the slightest quibble and subject you to hellish, soul-breaking conditions.

Throw into all this how trump and his lackeys have killed off - literally - the international health and financial aid we've been providing to third-world nations for decades, and you can see how trump is creating an environment where most of the globe is going to hate America for the cruelty and stupidity we allowed to happen by voting for this sadist/asshole.

And if you look far enough ahead, you can see what the end result trump wants: he wants us tied - financially and politically and emotionally - to Putin's Russia.

Think I'm joking? Look at the recent UN vote - which was mostly symbolic as the United Nations has no way to enforce it - where the U.S. were the only nations alongside Russia, North Korea, and Belarus to reject a motion declaring Russia the aggressor in their war against Ukraine. We are now siding with the dictatorial nations we declared over the decades as the bad guys.

With all the tariffs and trade wars our nation will enact, we'll be cutting our business ties with all the major economic powers - not just the European Union or the UK, not just Canada and Mexico, not just Central and South America, but pretty soon Japan and India as well - we could rely on... leaving only Russia as a "trading partner" - more like "raiders" as Putin and the oligarchs vacuum up every bit of wealth our nation has left - to give Putin fresh lease on rebuilding a Russia he's broken through corruption and war. 

Think I'm exaggerating? Putin's already preparing for trump to lift as many sanctions as possible: While the other G7 economic powers will likely keep their sanctions in place, rebuilding any trade with the U.S. - the largest economy on the planet - will quickly repair many of Russia's losses over the past decade.

What trump is doing is the standard practice of an abusive gaslighting narcissist - any cult leader - does in all relationships: he's enforcing his will on other people to make them reliant on himself and to any belief system he imposes. he's cutting us off from friends and families who are warning us of the dangers, who could provide sanctuary or rescue and end his control of us. he's going to isolate the whole nation from a western (liberal) culture we've been attuned to for centuries - a culture that we helped create - and force us to make friends with his fellow bullying authoritarians - and fellow uber-rich oligarchs like Elon Musk - so that we'll have nowhere to find relief.

There are a lot of Americans - even among the Republican voting base - who aren't fond of Putin or his spiteful world-view, and yet Putin's world-view - hating homosexuals and trans people, fighting border wars to build empires, letting only the rich and connected enjoy the fruits of everyone else's labor - is going to get shoved down our throats very quickly, very painfully.

Don't accept any of it, America. trump is pushing us over a cliff into inept, corrupt rule that tends to implode on itself every cycle of history. We're better than this. We should have been better last November, but that's in the past and we're fighting for our souls today.

Don't buy into the hate that Putin/trump/Musk sell us.

(P.S. This is the 2499th blog article at this site. We're coming up to 2500. I'll try to make it a special one)

The First Freedom Denied, The Chain Being Forged

Update: Thanks as always to Batocchio for including my blog at Crooks & Liars for their Mike's Blog Round-Up! Please, check out the whole blog, and if you're in Central Florida I hope to see you at Avon Park's Spring Book Binge local authors fair this March 29th.

With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.
-- Jean-Luc Picard, from the episode "The Drumhead"

The disappearings - the moment when authoritarians begin "arresting" others and hiding them from any transparency in the legal system - under the rule of trump (and Musk) have begun (via Ximena Bustillo and Adrian Florido at NPR):

Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate student at Columbia University and a green-card holder, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers over the weekend in what is likely one of the first high-profile detentions of a student who participated in the protests against the Israel-Hamas war.

The arrest follows through on one of President Trump's executive actions, which directed the government to use all its tools to punish those who have engaged in "anti-Semitic harassment and violence." The executive action cites the federal law that authorizes deporting a foreign national who "endorses or espouses terrorist activity."

The move is an escalation in Trump's effort to increase deportations from the U.S. and strip protections from those who violate the new administration's priorities.

In a social media post on Monday, Trump said the arrest was the first of many to come. He vowed that his administration "will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again..."

Khalil was one of the pro-Palestinian students who negotiated on behalf of the campus protesters who pressed Columbia to divest from Israel over its war with Hamas in Gaza.

Amy Greer, Khalil's attorney, told NPR that ICE officers arrested Khalil in the lobby of his university-owned apartment.

First, they told Khalil, who's of Palestinian descent, that his student visa had been canceled. But he's not on a visa; he's a legal permanent resident. His wife went to get his green card from their apartment, but officers said his lawful permanent residency had been revoked.

"I demanded to see a warrant or have a warrant shown to me or Mr. Khalil before they removed him, and the agent hung up the phone on me," Greer said. "Mr. Khalil was under the impression that as a lawful permanent resident, that he had some modicum of protection that may not exist for people who do have student visas or who are undocumented."

Notice how the arresting officers shifted their excuses when their first allegation didn't fit reality. It didn't matter what Khalil's legal status was; they were going to violate it, claim their scalp, and drag him off to parts unknown.

While trump's people are claiming he's endorsing/supporting terrorism, all that's certain is that Khalil was protesting - under First Amendment rights - inhumane acts of genocide by Israeli forces against Gaza residents in response to Hamas' terror attack on October 7th 2023. Nobody from ICE or Homeland Security has presented any evidence that Khalil had ties to Hamas in any way.

Adding onto the horror is that in spite of Khalil having legal representation, his lawyers haven't been able to contact him. They've got reports he's been transported to Louisiana, halfway across the nation and nowhere near his wife or his attorneys. Anything - especially any level of mistreatment if not straight-up torture - could be happening to him.

trump and his Far Right thugs are claiming they're doing this to defend American Jews from antisemitism, but all they're really doing is setting up an environment where anyone - not just Palestinians or Arabs but also Jews, Blacks, Latinos, anyone deemed "Other" or "UnAmerican" - can be grabbed off the streets and punished by the unfettered bullies that answer to the Top Bully in the White House. And there's a number of Jewish organizations who understand full well what's at stake here.

To quote friend Emily L Hauser from the Horde over at Bluesky:

Freedom of Speech - the right to peaceably assemble, which the protestors have done, and the right to redress grievances - ought to be universal among all Americans, natural-born and naturalized and legally here. It's a right being promoted and encouraged as protestors in New York City are marching right now speaking out for Khalil's rights.

While it's looking like the courts are intervening to prevent any further harm - at least stopping any deportation effort - there's still a major struggle to regain Khalil's immigrant status and his rights to stay here in America.

This isn't just for Palestinians in America. This is also for our Jewish-Americans, for our Asian-Americans, for our African-Americans, for our Latino-Americans, for our Native-Americans, for our Trans-Americans, for our Gay/Lesbian-Americans, for any and all Americans who want to express their displeasure at a trumpian leadership looking to deny our very rights to even be citizens. 

We're up against trump and his bullies looking to chain us all.

Don't let them. Your voice is your power. Speak up. Call Congress. Demand better leadership against trump's unconstitutional acts.

Break the chain.