It’s Time to Protect America From America’s President

America has periodically faced great national tests. The Civil War and Reconstruction. The Great Depression. McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. And now we face another great test — of our Constitution, our institutions, our citizens — as President Trump ignores courts and sabotages universities and his officers grab people off the street.

I’ve spent much of my career covering authoritarianism in other countries, and I’ve seen all this before. The chummy scene in the White House this week with Trump and President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador was telling. “Trump and Bukele Bond Over Human Rights Abuses in Oval Office Meeting,” read Rolling Stone’s headline, which seemed about right.

With chilling indifference, they discussed the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a father of three who is married to an American citizen and who in 2019 was ordered protected from deportation by an immigration judge. The Trump administration nonetheless deported Abrego Garcia as a result of what it eventually acknowledged was an “administrative error,” and he now languishes in a brutal Salvadoran prison — even though, in contrast to Trump, he has no criminal record.

This is a challenge to our constitutional system, for the principal lawbreaking here appears to have been committed not by Abrego Garcia but by the Trump administration.

Appellate judges in the case warned that the administration’s position represented a “path of perfect lawlessness” and would mean “the government could send any of us to a Salvadoran prison without due process.”

Then the Supreme Court ruled that Trump must obey the district judge’s instruction to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Trump and Bukele effectively mocked our federal courts by making it clear that they had no intention of bringing Abrego Garcia home.