Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.
Though Trump has long admired foreign authoritarians, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s repressive regime is in some ways the beta test for Trump 2.0. Bukele calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator.” Trump said he would be a dictator on Day 1. And Trump has floated or deployed many of the same tactics Bukele used to consolidate power: removing judges, intimidating political adversaries, bypassing due process and evading term limits.
Now, Bukele is actively helping Trump sidestep court orders in the United States.
During a White House visit Monday in which the two leaders bantered like old friends, Bukele insisted on one thing: He will not release Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a native Salvadoran who was living in Maryland until the U.S. illegally deported him last month. The upshot of that declaration: It gives Trump cover to maintain that he is powerless to implement a judge’s directive that the U.S. “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s immediate return from a brutal El Salvador prison. The Supreme Court upheld that directive last week.
Lawrence Hurley at NBC:
If an immigrant who the government claims is a gang member can be deported to El Salvador without any due process rights, then why not a U.S. citizen?
That was the nightmarish scenario immigration advocates and constitutional law experts were considering on Monday after President Donald Trump again pushed a provocative plan to deport U.S. citizens who have been convicted of unspecified crimes.
Trump discussed the issue in the White House with El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has agreed to deposit people deported from the U.S. into a notorious prison.
“We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters,” Trump told reporters. “I’d like to include them.”
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"It is pretty obviously illegal and unconstitutional," said Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School.
