Having first illegally renditioned Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a notorious prison in El Salvador, the Trump administration is now seeking to abduct him yet again—this time, reportedly, to Uganda—a country to which he has no prior connection—and where the administration itself seems to believe that his life and freedom will be in danger (and that's precisely why—in their infinite, gleeful sadism, they are trying to send him there).
As you may recall, they first brought him back to the United States to face transparently bogus criminal charges. But now, even they seem to have lost confidence in their ability to railroad him on this basis. They don't seem to have any interest at this point in actually trying to convict him—probably because they know their charges against him are a sham. So—according to his lawyers—they have held the threat of deportation to Uganda over his head in order to coerce a plea deal.
There are still Democrats who think it's a strategic or tactical error to talk about this case, seeing it as a trap. Earlier this year, Gavin Newsom reportedly called it "Orwellian" that Democrats are concentrating so much on the Abrego case, because it's playing into Trump's hands. Trump wants the conversation to be about all the people he's deporting (the argument goes)—because immigration is his strongest issue in public polling—and so long as people focus on it, he can distract from issues where he's weaker—like the tariffs.
But regardless of Newsom's advice, there's something about this case that has lodged in the public consciousness. To be sure, Abrego is far from the only person the administration illegally abducted to El Salvador earlier this year. But Trump's goons have outdone themselves in the unique inventiveness and relentlessness with which they have persecuted this one man across multiple continents and at least four different countries at this point (El Salvador, the United States, Costa Rica, and Uganda have now all played a part in his story).
There have always been Newsoms in such moments. I'm sure some French leftists at the turn of the century thought it was a mistake for Émile Zola and Anatole France to focus so much on the Dreyfus case. By identifying the socialist left with the defense of a stigmatized minority, didn't they risk costing themselves votes in the next election? But—from the longer view of history—Zola and France were plainly in the right. Why? Because the Dreyfus case crystalized the moral issues of the moment: justice for the individual versus the supremacy of the state.
So too, today—what Newsom was not seeing is the reason why the Abrego case has caught fire in the public mind in the first place. It epitomizes the political debate of our moment: do we believe in truth and due process and the human rights of the individual person? Or do we believe—as the people running our federal government appear to—that all of that—all of it—must be sacrificed every single time on the altar of proving Trump right, refusing to admit the slightest error, and flattering his puny ego?
Back in the 1850s, the anti-slavery Free States of the North had a debate among themselves about whether they should accept the Fugitive Slave Act as a necessary compromise in order to preserve the Union. Politicians like Daniel Webster chose to swallow this pill (however bitter)—and thereby covered themselves in disgrace.
Intellectuals like Emerson, Thoreau, Whittier, Parker, and Lowell were unsparing in their criticism of Webster for it (see, e.g, Emerson's essay on the fugitive slave law, and Whittier's poem "Ichabod"). But Webster's defense of his own actions was frankly political, and not entirely un-Newsomlike—public opinion was not on their side, he said. They had to make this compromise with the slave power because otherwise they would find themselves in an even worse position.
As Emerson put it, in his address on the Fugitive Slave Act:
The plea on which freedom was resisted was Union. I went to certain serious men, who had a little more reason than the rest, and inquired why they took this part? They answered that they had no confidence in their strength to resist the Democratic party; that they saw plainly that all was going to the utmost verge of licence; each was vying with his neighbor to lead the party, by proposing the worst measure, and they threw themselves on the extreme conservatism, as a drag on the wheel: that they knew Cuba would be had, and Mexico would be had, and they stood stiffly on conservatism [...] only to moderate the velocity with which the car was running down the precipice. In short, their theory was despair; the Whig wisdom was only reprieve, a waiting to be last devoured.
Newsom's advice to us to stop talking about Abrego Garcia reads as another such counsel of "despair"—a "waiting to be last devoured." Indeed, this has been the "moderate," David Shor–style argument throughout the Trump era: stop talking about Trump's human rights abuses—the argument goes—because by doing so, we only make those abuses worse.
To which Emerson's response is still relevant to us today. The political minority in his time—just like ours—wondered why they were so powerless to resist the forces of injustice. Why did they have to compromise all their moral principles and let injustice have its way with the clountry? "Why have the minority no influence?" they asked; as Emerson puts it. To which he answers: "Because they have not a real minority of one."
In other words: if even one of them would be true to their real convictions, they would not be so lacking in power. It is because the Newsoms of the world want us to let Trump get his way on immigration and deportation that he keeps doing so—and we have no influence to stop him. Whereas it would not be so if we showed some courage in our own convictions.
I'm not saying the Trump administration's deportation policy is the exact moral equivalent of the Fugitive Slave Law. (Matt Yglesias was just complaining the other day on his blog about progressives over-using Abolition-era analogies to score points against moderates.) But, I say—it's not entirely unlike it either. Both involve capturing innocent people who have reached a place they thought was safe and requested asylum. Both involve renditioning people back into the hands of the persecutors they fled.
And indeed, in some cases—these deportations literally involve sending people to slavery. Black asylum-seekers from Mauritania are fleeing a hereditary caste system that imposes racial slavery on them because of their color. And meanwhile, one of the third countries the Trump administration has repeatedly floated as a destination for unwanted migrants is Libya—where deportees are known to be subjected to labor and sex trafficking in the country's hideous migrant detention camps. The ghost of slavery may not be as dead as we think it is...
And so, when Newsom—the heir apparent of the Democratic ticket and the party's most prominent elected official—tells us to stop talking about Trump's immigration abuses—I think it's not entirely unfair to compare him to Webster. Emerson observed of the latter that it was a sad state of affairs when "there was nothing better for the foremost American man to tell his countrymen than that Slavery was now at that strength that they must beat down their conscience and become kidnappers for it."
Of course, these kinds of deportations are not entirely original to Trump. The Biden administration also made their highly Webster-like compromise on the border, shortly before the election—pushing through a new administrative rule that would restrict access to asylum hearings when pressure at the border exceeded certain levels. This policy too involved sending people from freedom into the clutches of persecution—and I did not hesitate at the time to call Biden an Ichabod for it.
But Trump has obviously exceeded Biden in the outré horrors to which he has subjected asylum-seekers. Instead of merely pushing them back across the border into Mexico (which is quite bad enough, given conditions in the border towns (where gangs have made a cottage industry of kidnapping and extorting immigrants and recent deportees from the U.S.))—he has shipped them to black-site prisons. His kidnappings have also reached further into the U.S. interior than Biden's did.
It is this aspect of the scene too that accounts for the staying power in the public mind of the Abrego case. It hits closer to home.
Back in the nineteenth century, many intellectuals who opposed slavery in principle found it easy to ignore it so long as it was happening in another state. As Emerson writes in the essay quoted above: "I had never in my life up to this time suffered from the Slave Institution. Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like Slavery in Africa or the Feejees, for me." It was only the arrival of the Fugitive Slave Act in Massachusetts—the bill that "required me to hunt slaves, and [...] found citizens in Massachusetts willing to act as judges and captors," as Emerson puts it—that brought the horror of the institution home to him.
So too, people found it all too easy to ignore the evisceration of asylum rights at the border during the final months of the Biden administration. Believe me: I remember. It seemed at the time that no one even knew it was happening, much less had a negative opinion of it. No doubt, this is largely because it was happening far away. It was all the way at the border. Out of sight, out of mind—as American slavery was for Emerson, before the 1850s.
But Trump's abduction of a father of three from his home in Maryland—a neighbor, someone just like us—has made this one case catch in the public mind in a way that none of these prior sins against asylum-seekers ever did. No doubt—it's for the same reason the Fugitive Slave Act caught fire in the public mind in Massachusetts. It brought the issue to everyone's front door.
And it also thereby made it impossible to pretend any longer that we were not complicit in it. So long as Massachusetts could believe that it was a Free State—that its own hands were not contaminated by slavery (even as many of its most prominent citizens profited from the same)—its conscience could slumber. But the Fugitive Slave Law made this impossible—it enlisted Massachusetts bayonets on behalf of the kidnappers.
So too—Trump's policies today aim to make it impossible for any liberal state or city to declare itself a "sanctuary jurisdiction" and rest easy in the knowledge that—even if people are still being abducted somewhere, it is through no help of their own. Now, we have all been dragooned into Trump's "deportation force"—incentivized to rat on our neighbors and assist their captors in returning them to persecution and injustice.
But to that, we can only say—with Edna St. Vincent Millay (in her poem, the "Conscientious Objector"):
I am not on [Death's] payroll [...]
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp. [...]
I will not tell him the whereabout of my friends nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route to any man's door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.
No comments:
Post a Comment