Last week, the Supreme Court issued a 9-0 ruling ordering the Trump administration to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident mistakenly sent to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal, maximum-security prison, CECOT. But because the Court said the administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release—not “effectuate” it—they claim the Court ruled in their favor and they don’t have to lift a finger. This is the logic of a kindergartener—all in service of disappearing a legal U.S. resident and father of three young children, in alarming defiance of the most powerful Court in the country.
About a month ago, this—the constitutional crisis unfolding right now—was the red line that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Democrat, drew for the Trump administration. After passing a budget bill that empowered Trump and Elon Musk to continue their hatchet job on the federal government in March, Schumer told MSNBC he didn’t yet believe our democracy faced an existential threat, but claimed that would be the case if and when “Trump doesn’t obey the Supreme Court.” Should that happen, Schumer vowed “extraordinary action.” Now, here we are. And… nothing.
Every day of this second Trump era feels increasingly unknowable, volatile, impossible to predict—but one thing we can be certain of is that no savior is about to come bursting out of the feckless Democratic establishment.
Abrego Garcia’s case only reached the Supreme Court because the Trump administration defied a federal judge in Maryland who required them to bring Abrego Garcia home immediately. (The Maryland judge wrote that the administration has to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s release, while the Court wrote that the “effectuate” part of it was unclear.) Then, on Wednesday, a federal judge found “probable cause” to hold the administration in criminal contempt for willfully disregarding orders to stop transferring deportees to CECOT. According to the New York Times, of the 238 men the U.S. sent to CECOT, only 32 “faced serious criminal accusations or convictions.”
Initially, the administration admitted Abrego Garcia’s deportation was the result of a clerical error. But they’ve since done a 180. On Wednesday evening, Attorney General Pam Bondi declared that Abrego Garcia is “not coming back to our country,” releasing a document of equal parts recycled and debunked misinformation claiming he’s a gang member and domestic abuser. “Maryland is safer because he is gone. And that woman that he is married to and that child he had with her, they are safer tonight…,” Bondi said, not even naming Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, who’s publicly pleaded for his return.
To be clear, the gang affiliation claim is unsubstantiated and a federal court ruled in 2019 that Abrego Garcia can’t be deported to El Salvador, where his life would be at risk; and the administration’s claim that he’s an abuser appears to stem from a former protective order Sura once filed. “We were able to work through this situation privately as a family, including by going to counseling,” Vasquez Sura said in a statement through her lawyer. “Kilmar has always been a loving partner and father, and I will continue to stand by him and demand justice for him.”
Alas, every claim the administration has made about Abrego Garcia is neither here nor there: There isn’t a single allegation—especially if it’s just allegations—that would justify disappearing someone to a foreign gulag. Nevertheless, on Monday, the White House hosted El Salvador’s far-right president Nayib Bukele to baselessly smear him as a “terrorist.” Bukele, while sitting next to Trump, smugly asked, “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” It was an exercise in shamelessness: a vile power play akin to the behavior of an abuser, a smug challenge to see who would try and stop them.
Of course, despite Democrats’ chosen strategy of rolling over and playing dead, they very much could challenge Trump and Bukele. As the New Republic notes, Democrats aren’t powerless despite their tiresome, cowardly strategy of inaction. Meanwhile, in an Axios report, several self-identified “centrist” Congressional Democrats chastised other Democrats for caring about this and arguing that Trump is “setting a trap for the Democrats, and like usual, we’re falling for it.” Another said, “Rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy … the thing where his numbers are tanking, we’re going to go take the bait for one hairdresser,” seemingly referring to Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay immigrant man who appears to have been sent to CECOT for being brown and having “Mom” and “Dad” tattoos. The callousness of these comments is astounding. This—mistakenly sending a human to serve a life sentence in a maximum security foreign prison without due process—is nothing but a “distraction.”
DHS Secretary Noem threatens to terminate Havard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification if it doesn’t turn over student records.
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— Dan Bauman (@danbauman77.bsky.social) April 16, 2025 at 8:08 PM
Despite his once-upon-a-time promise to take “extraordinary action,” on Monday, Schumer only issued a comically boilerplate statement condemning Trump’s defiance: “Due process and the rule of law are cornerstones of American society for citizens and noncitizens alike and not to follow that is dangerous and outrageous. A threat to one is a threat to all,” he wrote. But his words were followed by… nothing.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) stepped up and went to El Salvador on Wednesday to speak with Abrego Garcia at CECOT. Initially, he was denied entry—despite right-wing influencers and Congressmen getting to tour the prison and pose for photoshoots. But on Thursday night, Van Hollen shared photos of himself meeting with Abrego Garcia at a hotel in San Salvador. Bukele manically tweeted that he’d “miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen.” But the NYT reported that a Bukele aide had purposely placed the two drinks in front of them. Earlier in the day, Van Hollen also said El Salvador’s Vice President told him that the Trump administration is literally paying them to keep Abrego Garcia in prison. He’s one of Van Hollen’s constituents, yes, but I’m shocked he traveled there alone—this is a constitutional and human rights crisis that affects all of us.
And if Democrats can’t step up now, then we’re surely fucked when Trump starts sending U.S. citizens to CECOT, too: “Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough,” Trump told Bukele in the Oval Office. The Wall Street Journal then reported that, per Trump’s orders, El Salvador is now preparing to expand its CECOT to hold up to 80,000 and expects “the U.S. to send enough to fill it.”
The timing of this sudden push to send “homegrowns” to a foreign torture camp seems pretty deliberate. This week, another Palestinian green card holder and Columbia student, Mohsen Mahdawi, was arrested by ICE for his peaceful pro-Palestine and anti-genocide student organizing. In a cruel twist, he was arrested during a meeting to finalize his citizenship. In the last month, as the administration escalates its war on international students who’ve expressed support for Palestinian human rights, hundreds of international students say their student visas were revoked without explanation. On Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threatened to revoke legal status from all of Harvard’s international students lest the university comply with its vast range of illegal, First Amendment-violating demands. So, there is a not-so-distant world where the Trump administration builds the grounds to send legal residents to CECOT simply for being peace activists.
Over the last year, we’ve watched Democrats increasingly validate the far-right’s broad dehumanization of immigrants, helping to cast them as criminal threats, and priming the country to shrug off their suffering. The Laken Riley Act, for example, allows any immigrant to be indefinitely detained for any crime, no matter how small, and even if they were wrongly arrested—it passed Congress with support from 12 Senate Democrats and 46 House Democrats. And, while it’s safe to say that Kamala Harris wouldn’t be rounding up immigrants and “homegrowns” to line a Salvadoran torture camp, her rhetoric on border security, pledging to be tougher than Trump on deporting supposedly criminal immigrants, helped pave the way for so many Americans to become desensitized to what Trump’s doing now—and for Democratic leaders to abdicate all responsibility on this issue.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala.), a Republican known for being a moderate and Trump critic, openly admitted that she and her colleagues “are all afraid” and “oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice because retaliation” from Trump “is real.” The threat of authoritarianism isn’t just a threat—it’s here.
At the beginning of this month, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) made history with the Senate’s longest filibuster, speaking alone for 25 hours. Aided by other Senate Democrats, together, they could collectively grind the Senate to a halt until their demands are met. Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are already traveling the country, drawing hundreds of thousands of Americans enraged at Trump—I’d argue they could add another stop in El Salvador. House and Senate Democrats alike could work together to obstruct every function of Congress, camp out at the White House, or similarly abandon all of the norms and civility that Trump and the GOP abandoned long ago—which is exactly how we got here.
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Still here. Still without airbrushing. Still with teeth.
