For Fuck’s Sake Stand Up For Everyone
Innocence and errors aren't the point; upholding the Constitution is the point
There’s a debate going on — or an attempt to start one — over whether Democrats should defend Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the accused terrorist, gang leader, and human trafficker who’s been charge with none of those things.
The answer is Democrats — and Americans — stand up for everyone’s rights. Yes, terrorists. Yes, criminals. This isn’t hard or new or in doubt.
And yet, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has called the “debate” (there’s no debate) a “distraction.” And a trap.
“It’s exactly the debate they want,” Newsom said. “Because they don’t want this debate on the tariffs.” As if Pres. Donald Trump had a history of thinking ahead.
Fellow Substacker Evan Hurst has already savaged Newsom’s craven strategery. (His headline is “Gavin Newsom Is a Piece of Shit.”) But Newsom’s not alone urging Democrats not to defend Abrego Garcia, let alone the actual criminals.
As I mentioned last week, one unnamed House Democrat told Axios that “Rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy … we're going to go take the bait for one hairdresser," referring to Andry Hernandez Romero with despicable glibness.
Former CNNer and now fellow Substacker Chris Cillizza makes a similar case, minus the glibness. (Disclosure: I produced Chris back when we were both at MSNBC and like him personally.)
Cillizza makes roughly the same argument Newsom did: It’s the economy, stupid. Cillizza argues that the economic devastation of Trump’s tariffs caused political devastation to his poll numbers and so Democrats should stay with that.
Because we only have one dominant story at a time, Cillizza says, Democrats should do all they can to keep tariffs front and center.
But let’s consider their actual ability to do this. Cillizza himself concedes that “nothing has changed” on tariffs from the previous week. In other words, there’s no new news for the news to news. Which makes it hard to get them to talk about it!
Still, Cillizza implies that Democrats can shift the discourse back to the economy. He doesn’t say Democrats shouldn’t talk about Abrego Garcia at all, just that “they need to always be finding ways to pivot back to the economy.”
While Cillizza was on air, I was a producer, so I have a different perspective on what happens when someone pivots away from what the shows want to talk about. If it’s a soundbite, they edit out the pivot and everything after. They use what they want. Same goes for print.
If it’s a live interview, the anchor will pivot back. And the bookers/producers make a note that the guest in question tried to hijack the segment.
Put simply, if pivoting worked, Democrats would do it all the time and Pres. Harris would have spent today swatting away Doocy questions about why a transgender kid got to participate in the White House Easter Egg Roll.
But also, there are two attention-span reasons not to stick with tariffs over everything forever. One, the media have the attention spa—ooh pretty butterfly!—there’s no way in Hell they’d stay on tariffs from now through Election Day 2026. Which is good.
If everyone stayed laser-focused on it all the time, we’d all get bored. Tariffs would be the new normal before you know it.
The second way attention spans work for Democrats here is that tariffs losing out to other news stories for now means they subside for a bit. Which is great for their return. We want the reminders of our spending power to sting fresh and angry again and again.
Let tariffs subside in the news and then come roaring back with each price hike, factory closing, earnings report, and stock-market bloodbath. Drum beats work because of the spaces in between.
But also, no, people aren’t limited to one story at a time. And tariffs aren’t just a “news” story, they’re as personal a story as what’s in you fridge. Tariffs touch everyone.
We don’t need the media to keep tariffs top of mind. How could we escape them?
Even the vast majority of people — who don’t even watch the news — is getting the tariffs story every day no matter. It’s on the shelves and in IRAs and 401(k)s, bigger and stinkier than any headline.
TV does still matter, because it can drive political attention and ergo change. But there’s nothing super-urgent anyone can do about tariffs that isn’t already being pursued: Lawsuits, lobbying pressure, protests. None of those stopped due to Abrega Garcia getting air time.
And now even conservative judges are speaking out against the Trump administration on this shit. This issue is one where the politics of the moment — and of our TV news — can make a difference, if attention is paid.
Ask Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) whether anyone paid attention to his El Salvador trip.
Change happens because attention can lead to education. That’s why it’s worth talking about issues. People understand tariffs now. They don’t need a master’s degree.
Generally speaking, Democrats have it rough politically because it’s easy to assail their policies on putatively “common-sense” grounds. Of course we should cut taxes/ban gay stuff/punish Iraq for 9/11. Battling simplistic bullshit requires education, which is why it’s so vital to pay attention sometimes.
That’s what happened with civil rights. And women’s rights. And gay rights. It took years to educate people about Obamacare.
And we already have evidence that Newsom and Cillizza are wrong on the politics of this! Split Ticket’s Lakshya Jain flagged YouGov polling from before Van Hollen’s trip that showed Trump already losing on this issue.
Fifty-one percent of people, including 52% of Independents, oppose deporting international students who participated in protests supporting Palestinian rights. Sixty-one percent, including 62% of Independents, oppose sending immigrants with no criminal record to be imprisoned in El Salvador without due process, the chance to defend themselves in court.
Polling last month already found Trump suffering on immigration (h/t). Independents join Democrats in definitively opposing Trump’s handling of immigration. This is the center we’re always told to pursue!
Right now, only eight percent of people identify immigration as their number-one issue. So, how do we think they feel seeing Trump spend so much political capital on sending innocent sheet-worker dads to foreign gulags?
Remember that massive wave of Hispanic voters flooding voting booths for Trump? Polling from April 5-8 found that 64% of Hispanic voters saw Trump unfavorably. That rose to 68% last week.
How come? Because it’s not just MS-13 who dresses like and looks like Abrego Garcia and, um, apparently also goes to Home Depot. It’s also millions of other people.
Even before Van Hollen’s excellent adventure, Trump was underwater on immigration and among Hispanic voters.
The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper writes that, last year, in the absence of a counterweight to right-wing media, enough people bought Trump’s xenophobia to help him win the White House. But it’s only taken a few months for people to understand the results.
If millions of gang members were controlling American cities, why aren’t we seeing them swept up and deported? How would immigration officials even have the bandwidth to go after sheet-metal workers?
Poof goes Trump’s advantage — even with his media edge.
Given the rapid reversal, there’s a case to be made that Democrats should’ve focused more on immigration — and immigrants — before the election. Not buying into Republican xenophobia but doing the right thing and sticking up for this hard-working, law-abiding, political punching bag.
There’s also a case to be made that Abrego Garcia ought not be the focus of our attention — Democratic, media, American. Yes, it’s important to get him out. But he’s just one of hundreds!
Democrats should be pounding the drum not just for Abrego Garcia, not just for anyone “wrongly” deported. They should be standing up for the rights of actual gang members, assuming Team Trump managed to catch any.
The real traps here are slippery slopes and perfect victims. Denying due process to gang members isn’t wrong because eventually they’ll do it to oh noes white natives. It’s wrong and Democrats should oppose it because the Constitution doesn’t let the government decide when to provide due process. That’s it!
If anything, focusing on Abrego Garcia implies that there is some category of human subject to government discretion when it comes to due process. When, in fact, nope!
Gross, violent, rapey, genocidal, terroristic, human-trafficking drug-dealers “get” due process, too, not because they “deserve” it or someone decides they should have it but because the government is barred from even asking “Who wants some due process!”
And as we’ve seen — with mounting, Jordan Peele-ian horror — it doesn’t matter that Abrego Garcia’s innocent because the White House will smear anyone.
Vice Pres. JD Vance lied and called Abrego-Garcia “a convicted MS-13 gang member.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt lied and called him “a foreign terrorist.” And gang member. And human trafficker.
Dept. of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said on Fox, “The media would love for you to believe that this is a media darling, he’s just some Maryland father. Well, Osama bin Laden was also a father, and yet he wasn’t a good guy, and they actually are both terrorists.”
Except that Abrego Garcia was the victim of a hijacking. And it was Trump using planes to commit monstrous crimes.
In a particularly vile lie about the wife working her ass off to get him back, Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Fox, “That woman that he is married to and that child he had with her? They are safer tonight because he is out of our country and sitting in El Salvador where he belongs.”
They released a report — that they literally titled a bombshell report — naming Abrego Garcia as suspected of human trafficking, which it turns out consists of driving a truck with people in it so unsuspiciously that when Tennessee police stopped him for speeding they neither rescued Abrego Garcia’s victims nor took him into custody and instead cited him for … driving with an expired license.
The evidence of human trafficking? Insufficient suitcases. Here’s Abrego Garcia alongside his kidnapped and seat-belted victim, who apparently called shotgun:
And it goes beyond the smears.
Abrego Garcia lived in and made a life for himself and his family in Maryland. But here’s Bondi: “They keep calling him a Maryland man. He’s not a Maryland man.”
It’s not enough to take away your pronouns, now they’ll decide your proper nouns. Geography or genitals, they get to define you. Whatever category you think protects you is subject to their incompetent dictionary usage.
So let’s not worry about finding someone unsmearable. Perfect victims don’t exist and however close anyone comes they’ll still be bin Laden to these clowns. So make the fight about the principles that defend everyone by including the worst bad guys from the get-go.
And don’t tell me it won’t work: It’s being mealy-mouthed and tepid that doesn’t work. Trump didn’t meekly pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, he promised it and championed them.
Democrats shouldn’t shy from championing due process. Rapists like Trump get due process. Terrorists and genociders and Jan. 6 assholes and the stupid bastard who hypothetically raped and killed Mike Dukakis’s wife all get due process. Because the government doesn’t get to stop them.
And Trump’s incompetence isn’t the weakness many Democrats seem to think it is. It’s aggression, an assertion of their right to rule without question.
Doing things poorly advances the front lines of their power grab. (Elon Musk announced that “we will make mistakes,” which he’s fine with as long as he’s the one to make and correct them.)
And, yes, of course, their errors should be made known, but Democrats don’t have to make their stand on those mistakes. Hit them where they’re strongest. Their weaknesses will take care of themselves. What Democrats should have learned from Trump was how to turn strengths into vulnerabilities.
Trump’s saving America? No, he’s turning it into the kind of country immigrants are fleeing.
Trump’s protecting America? No, he’s undoing what makes it America.
(Remember, Vance argued last year that Americans love and defend America because that’s the dirt patch where they were born, not because of the principles it stands for. That profound misunderstanding of the country is a glaring weakness Democrats have yet to exploit.)
Even after just a couple weeks, much of the incompetence/lies/bullshit around the Abrega Garcia case is already memory-holed.
Not just the risible Tennessee traffic stop. Or the informant pegging Abrego Garcia to an area where he’s never lived. Or the hoodie-and-hat evidence of gang membership. Or the bonkers checklist for proving gang membership based on accusations and tattoos. Or the ham-handed attempt to plant “margaritas” at last week’s meeting. Or Trump sharing a doctored photo of Abrego Garcia.
On and on the clown show goes. There’s no effort to explain it away or fix it. Because they don’t see it as a problem.
Hell, they don’t even bother to get on the same page.
The deportation was “administrative error,” acting Field Office Director for Enforcement Removal Operations Robert L. Cena wrote. But the White House Twitter account crossed out the word “wrongly” from “wrongly deported.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said on Fox, “He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador.” Bondi even suspended a veteran Justice Department attorney who acknowledged the mistaken deportation in court.
And yet, the media keep reporting that Abrega Garcia was mistakenly or wrongly deported. I get the impulse — journalists understandably want to give readers a sense of the injustice. But all of those men were deported wrongly, because they were all denied due process.
The administration says they did it on purpose and suspended the guy who said otherwise. It’s time to take them at their word. And to take them on not for the ostensible mistakes but for the stated intentions.
Because right now, we’re having different debates. Trump’s critics think we’re debating justice. But Trump’s debating power.
And at the moment he’s only on the hook for Abrego Garcia. What about soccer player Jerce Reyes Barrios, who Maduro supposedly sent here but who actually fled here seeking asylum because he protested Maduro. The ACLU is suing on his behalf along with other alleged-but-not gang members. One who went to the same party as gang members. Another who found a “cool” tattoo online.
Out of the 238 initially sent to El Salvador, Bloomberg found that only five had felony charges against them in the U.S. And even those five were entitled to due process.
Vance made clear that their errors are part of the case he’s making to the public.
Of course the firefighters made a mess; they were fighting a fire. Of course the battlefield medic rushed the stitching; it’s war.
The missteps prove the emergency. They get caught erasing the facts that disprove the emergency — literally, the Justice Department ghosted its own link to a study about how law-abiding undocumented immigrants are — so they turn their fuckups into proof of how bad the emergency is.
Vance offered a lengthy, thought-out, horrific explanation devoid of and in stark opposition to basic American values.
To say the administration must observe “due process” is to beg the question: what process is due is a function of our resources, the public interest, the status of the accused, the proposed punishment, and so many other factors.
Step aside, folks, Yale Law grad at work! Of course, insisting on due process doesn’t beg the question of what process is due: The law defines what’s due. Not as a function of resources or “public interest” or potential penalty but as a right.
Vance creates a false binary, that the “emergency” of having millions of undocumented immigrants — wantonly lowering our crime rate and buoying our food and supply chains during the pandemic — forces such drastic action that administration mistakes are “inevitable”:
I accept the actual tradeoff: between not enforcing the law and enforcing the law. And I choose the latter despite the inevitable errors.
Except, of course, Vance isn’t choosing to enforce the law. He’s violating it. The law doesn’t prohibit just illegal entry into the country; the law far more robustly prohibits denial of due process.
Denying due process to Abrego Garcia violates the law more gravely than he allegedly has.
And Vance didn’t take an oath to stop crime. In fact, he doesn’t get to “choose” enforcing the law.
He took an oath to defend the Constitution, which ties his hands when it comes to fighting crime. Regardless of resources or public interest.
Choosing not to uphold the Constitution in order to secure for himself unchecked power under the law is choosing to violate not just the oath, but the literal purpose of the oath: To prevent tyranny by preemptively rejecting the exact justifications Vance cites now.
And it’s not just that incompetence fails to justify tyranny by proving an “emergency.” Because the problem isn’t how poorly they’re doing what they’re doing, it’s what they’re doing regardless of their competence.
Focusing on the mistakes also gives cover to those quietly applauding. Deborah Lipstadt, Pres. Joe Biden’s envoy for combating antisemitism, told the Jewish newspaper The Forward that “I don’t oppose many of the things that are being done” to international students now being kidnaped for supporting Palestinian human rights. “I just wish they would be done more deftly,” she said. (h/t)
Doing it deftly would defeat the point, which is that they maintain that they can do what they want. Homeland Security (sic) Secretary Kristi Noem was clear about the purpose behind many of the things that are being done: “We should only have people in our country that love us.”
They’re telling us out loud what this is all about. The minute they can get away with it, they’ll fly anyone who doesn’t love them over the Bermuda Triangle and hope for the best.
What we should be talking about is impeachment for gross, blatant, repeated violations of the presidential oath and the Constitution. Not just Trump’s. Every administration lackey and enemy of American constitutional protections should be on notice already by now.
Luckily, the point about the lawlessness is starting to break through.
Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-MI) said Friday he supports impeaching Trump for defying the Supreme Court order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. True, the order was only about one man — for now — but nothing about him and his case specifically drove the court ruling. Now it’s about the rule of law.
Which begs the question of whether Trump and Vance will uphold their constitutional vows. But also whether Democrats will.
Because the Constitution makes no allowances for “distractions” or politics. Members of Congress are obliged by their oath to defend the Constitution. And as Brian Beutler notes, it’s also the right thing to do.
TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
Fuck the motherfucking economy, how dare they defy a motherfucking court order, how dare they say "oopsie" and giggle about kidnapping people and selling them to a foreign dictator, how dare they make this about their stupid 401ks when people are literally being tortured?
Whether or not Abreu-Garcia is MI-13 or a domestic abuser is beside the point. If he is, he is, and he can be punished appropriately AFTER YOU PROVE IT IN COURT.
Otherwise we have a system where the executive branch determines what is a crime, who is a criminal and how they should be punished. All at once. No checks.
History calls that fascism. And we are there.
Wake the hell up