In Jose Saramago’s novel Balthazar and Blimunda, which takes place during Portugal’s 18th-century Inquisition, a prince stands on his balcony in Lisbon and practices target shooting by picking off sailors on deck in the estuary below.
Autocracy requires the suspension of other people’s humanity—indeed, of their existence as separate beings. The “body politic” is the body of the sovereign, into which every subject is subsumed. The targets of Donald Trump’s regime are not sailors (unless they are transgender). They are, for now, immigrants. But what they have in common with the prince’s mariners is their indistinguishability, one from another. From a distance, the man on deck is not tall or short, a captain or a ship’s carpenter. From the Oval Office, one brown immigrant with a Spanish surname is like every other brown immigrant with a Spanish surname: a criminal.
In fact, in Trump’s Oval Office only one person is entitled to full human autonomy.
Again and again, the president has admitted that if he wanted to, he could bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia from the brutal Salvadoran mega-prison to which he was spirited by “administrative error” on March 15. But, Trump said, he doesn’t want to, and doubled down on slandering Garcia, with no evidence, as a member of the vicious gang MS-13. Garcia is not “a gentleman,” Trump added—which reminded me of the New York Times’ characterization of Michael Brown, an unarmed teenager shot to death by a cop in 2014, as “no angel.”
The administration has flip-flopped repeatedly about its ability to release Garcia and return him to U.S. soil. Earlier this month Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem asserted that Garcia is not a U.S. citizen, so his fate is in the hands of his home country, El Salvador, and its dictator, Nayib Bukele. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, who built the administration’s immigration strategy with maximum cruelty in mind, called it “very arrogant” to usurp Bukele’s authority.
All this—the denials of a mistake immigration officers admitted almost immediately ; the backing-and-forthing, I can, I can’t, I will, I won’t—serves numerous ends, among them to stir maximum insecurity in immigrant communities.
But there’s another purpose: to protect Trump’s princely ego, which cannot tolerate being wrong.
Trump, of course, is famously never wrong. He uses his irrefutable correctness to unnerve his adversaries, keeping the press in thrall and everyone else off balance by claiming one thing one day, its opposite the next day, and the first thing the day after that. But it’s not just a political tactic. Indecision, and the perpetual redefinition of what is true, is a prerogative of autocracy.
Last summer, in Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority expanded that prerogative to define what is true to the privilege of deciding what is legal. In granting the president “presumptive” criminal immunity for anything he does as part of his official duties, it made him the only person in the country who is above the law—as one federal judge put it, a king. In effect, SCOTUS affirmed the presumption of Trump’s infallibility. A king is never wrong because, by definition, whatever he says is right.
It is one thing to toy with the truth when the subject is approval ratings or the price of bacon, however, and quite another to lie about a person whose life depends on the truth. Garcia was sheltered in the U.S. because an immigration judge determined he would be persecuted by gangs if he returned to El Salvador. CECOT, the prison where he’s incarcerated, is a colony of gangs. It seems likely that someone there has it in for Garcia. The longer he’s locked up, the shorter his life expectancy becomes—and the longer Trump and ICE keep changing their story, the longer Garcia will be locked up.
The same story, in one version or another, underlies the entire crusade of mass deportation, and the dangers Garcia faces are also faced by other deported migrants. We may never know the fates of the thousands, including children, sent back to Venezuela or Columbia or Haiti, who fled for their safety under threat from extortionists and drug gangs. And then there are the political exiles, the victims of religious persecution, the climate refugees, all forced to leave home, all in mortal danger should they be forced to return.
Garcia has one thing going for him. The world knows his name. If he is stabbed with a shiv while walking from his cell to the mess hall, the world will hear about it.
What we should also remember is that this innocent man remained in captivity because of the president’s fragile narcissism—the belief that his privilege to be right outweighs any obligation to do right.
"We may never know the fates of the thousands, including children, sent back to Venezuela or Columbia or Haiti, who fled for their safety under threat .."
In Australia, refoulement were standard under the last Liberal government. Its immigration minister who championed this,then PM, was Scott Morrison. After being kicked out of Parliament here, he. got a job in the US. Besides far right politics, he had a professional background in advertising and PR, so presumably, very employable.
Morrison's government refused to follow up refugees it returned. But if I recall correctly, one refugee organisation did .. large sample too.
Many got arrested at the border, others killed soon after, others just vanished.
So even if we don't know specifics for that individual .. the evidence is in, the picture clear
It's important to remember this study. As Kundera wrote .. sometimes the battle against totalutarianism .. , is the battle to remember . against pressure to forget.