Jonathan Baird lives in Wilmot.

When you are a law student, you don’t have to be far into your studies before you start reading opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court. One case that every law student reads is the 1803 case of Marbury v Madison. The case established the principle of judicial review and gave the Court the ultimate authority to interpret the law. That power includes deciding whether laws passed by Congress or actions taken by the President are constitutional.

Given the conduct of the Trump regime, you might think the Court doesn’t have the power to decide if presidential actions are constitutional but it still does. Defying the decision of the Court to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was a brazen act of Executive branch lawlessness. Abrego Garcia had been abducted off the street and disappeared out of the country with no due process.

This disappearing people is a practice that has become more widespread this year. In terrifying fashion, masked unidentified individuals in unmarked vehicles take people to places unknown away from family and friends. Think Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk or Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil. Somehow the focus got away from removing criminals to removing graduate students.

This is the behavior of a fascist regime. We are witnessing kidnappings. In the case of Abrego Garcia, he was abducted to a foreign torture chamber where no one has gotten out, ever. It is essentially a death sentence. Abrego Garcia’s meeting with Sen. Chris Van Hollen is the first witnessing of the insides of CECOT. No one has yet told the world what it is like on the inside.

No court sentenced Abrego Garcia to this fate and, like the Venezualans renditioned to El Salvador, no one ever received notice or a hearing. It must not be forgotten that the Immigration Court in 2019 ruled exactly against the result the Trump regime imposed – removal to El Salvador. That court worried that, if returned, Abrego Garcia would be a victim of gangs.

The Trump regime has tried hard to obscure facts about Abrego Garcia. One legal fact that has been entirely overlooked is the fact the government failed to appeal the 2019 decision of the immigration court judge who ruled in favor of Abrego Garcia and granted him protection from deportation. If the government believed Abrego Garcia was so dangerous, they could have appealed that decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals but they did not.

During Trump’s first term, it was a common practice for the then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appeal to that Board. Attorney General Sessions frequently appealed cases the government lost.

The fact that the government did not appeal in 2019 speaks volumes. Why is Abrego Garcia more dangerous now than he was then? Over the last six years Abrego Garcia has a record of no criminal convictions but without any evidence, they assert he was a gang leader.

We have seen Stephen Miller, Pam Bondi. J.D. Vance, Karoline Leavitt and Marco Rubio all make that assertion. Press Secretary Leavitt mocked Abrego Garcia calling him “a foreign terrorist and an MS-13…illegal alien criminal who was hiding in Maryland”. It would appear the Trump strategy is to repeat the term “terrorist” and “gang member” as many times as possible.

With people like Miller, Bondi, Vance, Leavitt or Rubio, words have little meaning. It doesn’t matter to them that there is no reality behind the use of the terms “terrorist” or “gang member.” The words are used to create an impression to justify a result. It a person can be dehumanized then the person deserves mistreatment.

This is the language of tyrants when words become meaningless. Words mean what the fascist leader says they mean. The labelling is fundamentally about denying the humanity of the other to justify punishment.

The mega-prison, CECOT, where Abrego Garcia has been held has a capacity for 40,000 inmates. Each of the 256 cell houses average 156 inmates with metal bunks with no mattresses or sheets and only two toilets and two sinks for the entire group. Artificial lights stay bright 24 hours a day under hyper-surveillance. Prisoners are restricted to their cells 23.5 hours daily with 30 minutes per day for exercise in a windowless corridor. They get no utensils to eat their under nourished meals.

On social media, I saw CECOT accurately described as a concentration camp. Quoting from the U.S. Holocaust Museum:

“What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process.”

The method the Trump regime has chosen to speed up mass deportations is to bypass judicial process for as many people as possible. In the Oval Office Trump talked favorably about sending “home-grown” Americans to El Salvador. He asked President Bukele of El Salvador if he could build five more prisons like CECOT. If you can abduct people like Abrego Garcia with no due process, what is to stop the regime from doing that to American citizens?

In the Abrego Garcia case, the government admitted it made an “administrative error” but at the same time they are saying it is fine to send him outside the country to a living nightmare where he would rot for the rest of his life. Where is the proportionality? How about recognizing the mistake you made and doing the right thing? What happened to any sense of decency?