Can we draw the line at concentration camps?
Trump shipped 261 Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious forced labor camp in El Salvador without due process on Saturday, ignoring a judge's order to bring them back. This is fascism.
Hello readers, and happy St. Patrick’s Day. The Irish rap group Kneecap reportedly paraded the missing decapitated head of a King George V statue on stage at their show in Melbourne Friday night, which is the phase I wish we we could fast-forward to with our current dictator.
Instead, the Democrats blew a critical opportunity to stand up to Trump on Friday, despite having enough votes in the Senate to block a government funding bill that has now ceded unprecedented spending power to Trump and Musk amid a constitutional crisis. House Democrats voted almost unanimously against the measure, putting up the kind of strong, united fight against an authoritarian government takeover that the base clearly wants to see. But New York’s own Chuck Schumer, for some reason, then convinced nine of his colleagues to betray his party and country and help Republicans pass the bill, delivering Trump a win at the worst possible time.
As the entire Democratic Party, from Nancy Pelosi to AOC, screamed at Schumer and essentially called for his resignation, the Senate Minority Leader tried to explain his reasoning in a pair of interviews with Jake Tapper and the New York Times. Forcing a government shutdown by blocking the bill would have been worse, he insists, because Trump would have taken the opportunity to indiscriminately fire half the federal government. (As if he’s not…already doing that.) Plus, Schumer says, he works out at the Senate gym with some Republicans who tell him privately that they will eventually join him in the fight against Trump, or something, if he only humiliates himself and his party a few more times.
“The Republicans would like to have some freedom from Trump, but they won’t until we bring him down in popularity,” Schumer told NYT. “That happened with Bush in 2005. It happened with Trump in 2017. When it happens, I am hopeful that our Republican colleagues will resume working with us. And I talk to them. One of the places is in the gym. When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican, a lot of the inhibitions come off.”
My god man, we did not need that visual.
Of course, Schumer’s capitulation has already aged like warm milk. Trump thanked him for the assist in a mocking tone, and one of his “gym buddies” across the aisle put out a press release gloating about having “dogwalked” the Democrats who caved.
Trump then wasted no time issuing a late-night order eliminating seven federal agencies “to the maximum extent” allowed by law, including the one that helps fund museums and libraries in all 50 states. And the following day, the administration rounded up 261 Venezuelan immigrants that they deemed to be “gang members,” without evidence or due process, and flew them to a notoriously inhumane forced labor prison in El Salvador that keeps people in windowless cages all day and basically operates as a concentration camp. Trump used the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—last invoked during WWII to justify the internment of Japanese-Americans—to justify the mass deportation. And when a federal judge ordered him to turn the plane around almost immediately after it took off, he simply ignored the order, claiming that that the aircraft was already over international waters and therefore no longer subject federal court rulings.
Trump’s press secretary then gave an absolutely terrifying statement essentially declaring Trump above the law on immigration matters. “Federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President’s conduct of foreign affairs, his authorities under the Alien Enemies Act, and his core Article II powers to remove foreign alien terrorists from U.S. soil and repel a declared invasion,” said Karoline Leavitt.
So what has essentially happened is that Trump waited until the very moment Democrats caved to him, helping to normalize his increasingly autocratic regime, and then stepped on the gas. He’s deporting legal residents to countries where they’ve never even been and don’t speak the language. He’s claiming the power to call any undocumented immigrant a “gang” member and send them to a work camp until they die. He’s defunding pediatric cancer research and changing the mission of the Environmental Protection Agency from one that protects the environment to one that makes it cheaper to buy cars and heat homes, at the expense of the planet. And he’s declaring himself above the law as a certain kind of elected Democrat continues to insist that we’re fine to hang on til the next election cycle because the courts will keep his power in check.
It’s safe to say that we are long past any hypotheticals about fascism taking hold in this country. It is here. We are squarely at the concentration camp phase of authoritarianism, as even concentration camp scholars are saying loudly and clearly. If the Democrats can’t get it together to become a real opposition party and fight like our lives depend on it at this point, I would love to know where the hell that line is. Chuck Schumer has got to go.
The more our country slips into autocracy the better & more honest Laura’s writing becomes and it was already great to begin with.