Trump’s lawyers claim they’ve found a loophole that will allow Trump to ship immigrants overseas to be tortured.
Federal law states that the United States shall not “expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” This law implements a treaty, known as the Convention Against Torture, which the United States ratified more than three decades ago.
Federal regulations, moreover, provide that even after an immigration judge has determined that a noncitizen may be deported to another country, that judge’s order “shall not be executed in circumstances that would violate Article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.” And those regulations also establish a process that immigrants can use to raise concerns with an immigration judge that they may be tortured if sent to a specific country.
The Trump administration, however, claims it has discovered a loophole that renders all of these legal protections worthless, and is now asking the Supreme Court to explicitly give it the authority to make use of that loophole in order to enact its immigration policies.
People really don’t want to believe that there is no electoral solution anymore. People really don’t want to believe that it’s too late to save the illusion of peace any longer. This is a late af wake up call to how incredibly fucked we are, and many people will still hit snooze.
For what it’s worth, speech doesn’t mean as much anymore, as we now live in a time where violence is the dominant form of power. For this reason, peaceful protests will do little, and mass riots can easily help the oppressors escalate even further. Fighting the incredibly militarized federal and local governments is practically untenable. Over half a century of cowardly libs empowering anti-riot forces has made this a nightmare scenario for resistance.
There is so little recourse at this point that the best thing we can do is prioritize not dying so we can outlive Trump’s reign. We’ll need luck and cooperation to survive the infectious diseases, natural disasters, and economic devastation that the state will do less than nothing to mitigate. It’s up to us to support each other, because there is no social contract left.