American Gulag
Trump wages war on the rule of law
"[A primary feature of the gulag or concentration camp is that]…the human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead and some evil spirit gone mad were amusing himself by stopping them for a while between life and death."
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
South Sudan.
There are few places on the planet more dangerous. Political violence. Gang wars. Murder. Crime. The Canadian government states that no citizen, under any circumstance, should attempt to travel through South Sudan.
And yet Donald Trump has decided that South Sudan is the perfect place to send people who have been arbitrarily kidnapped by ICE.
Trump is not deporting "undesirables" who were born in Africa. He is looking to dump people from Cuba, Vietnam and Mexico into a gang-war state.
A judicial order has temporarily halted the deportation flights to South Sudan, but Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court. He is demanding the right to remove the right to a hearing or legal representation for those who ICE has kidnapped.
The reason Trump likes South Sudan is for the spectacle, cruelty and abuse.
But it also means that people picked off the street will be rendered beyond the legal right of redress, regardless of guilt or innocence. They will have no passports or consular help in one of the most dangerous places on the planet. As stateless people, their lives will count for little.
The most famous case is Maryland resident Abrego Garcia, who was sent to an El Salvadoran prison camp on the false claim that he was a gang member. A Maryland congressman who travelled to El Salvador to check on the treatment of Garcia was denied access to him.
Trump continues to defy the courts on returning Garcia to the United States. He is staring down the courts because MAGA is determined to establish broad categories of people for whom the right to legal protection simply doesn't exist.
In 14 other cases that attempted to challenge the deportations, judges took a dive and dismissed the cases - even though these individuals were still awaiting a decision on their asylum requests.
The judges don't want to tangle with Trump.
"It seems the government's intention in dismissing these cases across the country is to complete the disappearance of people to El Salvador, to end their legal proceedings, and to act as though they weren't here seeking asylum in the first place."
- Lindsay Toczylowski, Executive Director of Immigrant Defenders Law Center
People are being disappeared. The courts look away. And all of this is happening as Trump establishes a modern American Gulag.
I have been reading Andrea Pitzer's 2017 book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. It makes for chilling reading. Especially now.
Pitzer defines concentration camps through the following criteria:
They are used to house those who had no real trial.
They hold people not because of some prosecutorial offence but largely because of their racial, cultural, religious or political identity.
The innocent and the guilty can be swept up without any recourse because the state has decided that they are somehow beyond the rule of law.
Detainees are held without any promise of release or access to legal counsel.
In a recent Globe and Mail article, Pitzer writes that Trump is creating a system of gulags beyond the rule of American law:
"If they [MAGA] can establish rendition and arbitrary overseas detention for one group… history shows that they will likely expand the categories of people they can subject to the same treatment.”
Trump has declared his desire to send American-born "criminals" to these camps in the global south. And at the same time, he is vastly expanding the scope of those who are considered a threat to White America.
Wired Magazine reports that the Trump administration has taken DNA samples of over 130,000 migrant children, some as young as four, and uploaded them into a criminal database that was supposed to be used for sex offenders and violent criminals.
In the racialized state of Trumpland, these children are considered part of a dangerous criminal class.
Once the state breaches the notion of basic legal rights, all manner of abuses and depravity become possible.
Consider the allegation that a Russian dissident in a US detention centre has been threatened with rape if he doesn't agree to deportation to Putin's Russia.
But what defines the Trump Gulag network is that it threatens to spill out beyond the confines of the marginalized, the racialized and those who are easy to vilify.
Authoritarian regimes have always relied on targeting dissent and threatening minorities. But they get buy-in from the rest of society, who don’t feel the need to worry that such abuses could happen to them.
But the free hand given to ICE is drawing more and more people into the nightmare vortex. There have been numerous cases of people arbitrarily pulled out of airport lines over VISA issues and questioned about their political views.
There are frightening stories of people being kidnapped and thrown into detention cells for no real reason.
Those who must travel to the United States are learning to bring burner phones to prevent ICE from finding some arbitrary reason to throw them in a detention centre.
I have spoken with many people who tell me they will not go back to their winter homes or visit relatives for fear of being pulled out of the line by ICE. They rightly fear that they may not have access to consular and legal protection if they are detained.
It is little wonder that state tourism campaigns encouraging people to come back to the United States to vacation are failing so badly.
A recent article in Rolling Stone reported a 90% drop in Canadian bookings to the United States, as noted by some travel agencies. The reason for not going has shifted from anger about tariffs to fears about arbitrary immigration policies.
After all, who wants to visit the United States knowing their vacation could end in South Sudan or an El Salvadoran concentration camp?
Mr. Art-of-the-Steal is attempting to destroy the rule of law, but in doing so, has turned the United States into a pariah state.
Standing up to this agenda will be hard, but as anyone who suffered the gulags or concentration camps will tell you, it is much easier to stand up to totalitarians when they are just getting started rather than waiting for them to consolidate their power.
To me, the scariest thing (among many) is that American courts seem to have no power to force Trump to comply with their rulings. In theory, they can charge him with contempt of court for refusing to comply and can have him arrested and taken to jail. In practice, they lack any tools for doing so; my understanding is that the departments (e.g., U.S. Marshalls) who could be asked to do this have been suborned by Trump appointees at the highest levels, so there is no longer any effective enforcement.
If this scares you as much as it scares me, write to your elected federal representative and ask them what they're doing to give Canadian law the teeth that American law lacks. We need to learn from the failures of the U.S. and put a system in place to protect our constitution against a future rogue prime minister.
How can we explain that the American population is not revolting massively to this? How can the ignorance and apathy be explained? Is the violence of Americans really this bad that this is acceptable or at the very least not worth a fight?