For those interested in the blow by blow account of court battles over deportation, I recommend the David Kurtz summaries on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/tpmmorningmemo/p/trump-stonewalls-federal-judges-in?r=3psz7f&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email. The details of the actions of the Department of Justice lawyers in all these cases bring up an overwhelming question. The facts of all the cases seem certain. In several cases, the DOJ practically admits government wrongdoing. In one case, our president even says that the equitable remedy is simple, he has only to make a phone call. None of the cases are real issues of national importance. Then, why is our government spending so much of our money deliberately avoiding doing anything to resolve the issues? Why don’t they just bring these wrongly deported individuals back?
One might think that getting Congress to pass a law hidden in the Big Beautiful Bill doing away with contempt of court orders for these cases makes too big a deal over the deportation of a few individuals. See my previous post on justice: https://sierracountycitizen.org/justice-law-and-order/.
But what if it’s the other way around? What if doing away with contempt of court, completely getting rid of the court’s constitutional duty to judge the actions of government is the real target. The deportation cases may only have been set up in order to provide politically a hot-button issue to do that, to rid us of justice.
That answer would be stunning. It would have the feeling of acting for high principles. Some people with a great deal of control in this administration want to rid the country not just of the notion of justice — the idea that equity and equality can and should be the basis of American society — but to get rid also of the formal institutions that foster equity: courts, universities, and public debate, learning, and information (that is, publication). It’s a social theory that peaceful society is not attained by us fitting together but by uniformity, by all people being alike and living in shared sameness, by a community of the same race, the same language, the same thoughts, the same beliefs, the same life experiences, driving the same kind of cars (but with our choice of color), reading the same books, living in similar houses, with furniture and appliances that are similar. In one way or another, ridding America of what sociologists unwittingly termed “deviants” is the aim. They want only “normals” who follow the rules; that is the order of law.
It’s an old and simplistic vision, which inspires passion and fanaticism because it asserts self-superiority. It was the Zionist vision for Israel, and Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, learned it from the German nationalists in Austria when he joined a German nationalist fraternity. The US formally supports this vision of Israel because so many of us emulate it. Just because the unified national ideal is simplistic doesn’t mean its activist promoters are. The DOJ is not expending its energies and our money in these wrongful deportation cases just to get rid of a few individuals. Rather, these cases rally the large, public anger about immigrants, foreigners, and the paranoid perception of discrimination against European race and culture in order to push Congressional action, like stripping federal courts of the authority to order any remedies at all, to make courts purely a place to assess punishment, that is, a place of law and order. It’s a strategy, just as creating hot-button issues has been a strategy for decades to fan fanaticism and anger. Pragmatically, of course, all this delay in the present cases looks forward to the passing of legislation that would take down court orders retrospectively, making all present court cases moot. They knew that something like the anti-equity passage in the Big Beautiful Bill was coming down their pipeline. Our future has been planned for us, hidden behind the cries and passions for individual rights, our president’s blitherings, and the inane waving of catchword slogans.
Even if the courts manage to give the few individuals in these cases a fair hearing, the mass racial cleansing of “scum” from our big, beautiful country is ongoing. The future is here, a future in which name-calling (which we thought was just a failed style of persuasion) turns out to have almost an absolute power of coercion. See, for example, this breaking study of why and how hundreds of Venezuelan men are now permanently imprisoned in El Salvador: Trump admin knew most deported Venezuelans had no U.S. convictions | The Texas Tribune .
Thousands have been scooped up and tossed out, for no reason at all except that someone called them some unacceptable name. Remember that we deport not only foreigners but those who might think they are Americans. Foreigners just make an easy first target, but it always leads to genocide. See my earlier article on how Germany followed a slow, understandable path from isolating “scum” (wasn’t that what our president called all Democrats the other day?) to gassing millions at Auschwitz: https://sierracountycitizen.org/american-work-ethic/.