April 20, 2025
Yesterday, on the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, Americans across the country protested against President Donald J. Trump, his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk, and the administration in general. The decentralized 50501 movement, which stands for “50 protests in 50 states on 1 day,” was one of the organizers of the protests, planning more than 700 events. Spokesperson Hunter Dunn described 50501 as a “pro-democracy, pro-Constitution, anti-executive-overreach, nonviolent grassroots movement.” Notably, protests have spread to small towns all around the country, including towns in Republican-dominated areas.
One of the signs in Miami read, “I’m here fighting for your due process,” a right the Trump administration has abandoned with its rendition of men to CECOT, a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador. Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) appeared on a number of news programs explaining that his trip to El Salvador to make contact with his constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration said it sent to CECOT through “administrative error,” was about defending the rule of law.
“I am not defending the man. I'm defending the rights of this man to due process,” Van Hollen told Jonathan Karl of ABC News. “And the Trump administration has admitted in court that he was wrongfully detained and wrongfully deported. My mission and my purpose is to make sure that we uphold the rule of law, because if we take it away from him, we…jeopardize it for everybody else.”
The right to due process is central to the rule of law in the United States, and the Trump administration has ignored it since at least March 15, when it spirited more than 250 men from the U.S. to CECOT. It claimed the men were all dangerous gang members who had committed crimes, but did not provide their names. Once news outlets got a list of the men, their investigations found the administration had lied about the men’s criminal status. Bloomberg reported that 90% of the men sent to CECOT had no U.S. criminal record.
Judge James Boasberg ordered the government not to deport the men and, if they were already in the air, to turn the planes around. But the administration went forward nonetheless and has appeared to taunt the courts ever since. After the men were landed and in CECOT, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador posted on X, “Oopsie… Too late” with a laughing emoji, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted his post. Last Wednesday, April 16, Boasberg issued an opinion saying that the court concluded “that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.” On April 4, Judge Paula Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Six days later, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld Xinis’s order.
Last Monday, April 14, in a staged meeting between Trump and Bukele in the Oval Office, Trump made it clear he would ignore the Supreme Court. The administration has maintained that the U.S. has no power to order Bukele to release Abrego Garcia, and in the meeting, Bukele said he would not release the Maryland man.
The administration appears to have tried to create a fiction whereby the U.S. can spirit anyone out of the U.S. without due process, render them to prison in another country, and then declare it doesn’t have the power to get the person back. Vice President J.D. Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller were all present at the meeting. Miller mischaracterized the Supreme Court decision to say it had ruled unanimously in favor of the administration, the exact opposite of reality.
On Wednesday, Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to try to meet with Abrego Garcia, finally securing a visit on Thursday. This appeared to infuriate the White House, which posted on social media an image of a New York Times headline “Senator Meets With Wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador” edited with red pen to read: “Senator Meets With Deported MS-13 ILLEGAL ALIEN in El Salvador WHO’S NEVER COMING BACK.” Over the image, it posted: “Fixed it for you, [New York Times]. Oh, and by the way [Chris Van Hollen]—he’s NOT coming back.”
There is no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13; indeed, he has never been charged with a crime, and a court had ordered that he must not be deported to El Salvador out of concern for his life. But as control over the narrative of their renditions is slipping out of their hands—influential podcaster Joe Rogan has been defending due process on his show—administration officials appear determined to paint Abrego Garcia as a dangerous criminal.
Yesterday the White House posted on social media an image of a hand that has been very obviously altered by adding “M-S-1-3” over the knuckles. A social media post by Trump is superimposed on the image. It says: “This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such ‘a fine and innocent person.’ They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles, and two Highly Respected Courts found that he was a member of MS-13, beat up his wife, etc. I was elected to take bad people out of the United States, among other things. I must be allowed to do my job. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” The White House account added: “If he tattoos like MS-13, beats women like MS-13, and tramples the law like MS-13—THEN HE’S PROBABLY MS-13.”
Except the image is clearly false, no courts found he was a member of MS-13, and scholar of MS-13 Óscar Martínez commented: “I covered MS-13 for over a decade: its history, crimes, symbolism, cruelty, pacts with Salvadoran governments. I wrote a book about it. Never, ever, did any of the hundreds of sources I spoke to say anything that would allow us to believe Trump's strange interpretation of tattoos.”
Although Abrego Garcia’s wife did file a temporary civil protective order against him in 2021, she has said she did it out of an abundance of caution after a previous relationship that had been violent. She did not pursue the order, and says the two worked out their issues with counseling.
Perhaps more to the point was Chris Kluwe’s point that “a sitting US President is using falsified evidence to try and deny due process to a man who has committed no crime.” Also to the point is that the administration’s insistence that Abrego Garcia will never come back to the U.S. flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s 9–0 decision that it must work to get him back to the U.S.
Early Saturday morning, the Supreme Court ordered the administration not to deport another group of undocumented Venezuelans under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, but the court was in such a hurry to prevent the rendition of the men—who had already been loaded onto buses to head to an airplane—that it issued its decision without waiting for them to finish writing.
In his One First newsletter, legal analyst Steve Vladeck noted that the court appears not to trust the government’s lawyers anymore. Vladeck saw the order as “a sign that a majority of the justices have lost their patience with the procedural games being played by the Trump administration.”
Trump did not take the order well. On Saturday night he posted: “TRUMP’S BEST POLL NUMBERS, EVER. THANK YOU!” After a religiously themed post this morning, he launched another attack on those he sees as his enemies—including judges—and blamed the country’s troubles on his predecessor, President Joe Biden. Then he posted: “We are, together, going to make America bigger, better, stronger, wealthier, healthier, and more religious, than it has ever been before!!! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!!!”
Trump went on to post about the economy, including a post that said: “THE BUSINESSMEN WHO CRITICIZE TARIFFS ARE BAD AT BUSINESS, BUT REALLY BAD AT POLITICS. THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND OR REALIZE THAT I AM THE GREATEST FRIEND THAT AMERICAN CAPITALISM HAS EVER HAD!” About an hour later, he posted that “many World Leaders and Business Executives have come to me asking for relief from Tariffs. It’s good to see that the World knows we are serious, because WE ARE!”
It’s hard not to read desperation in the last days of Trump’s posts as Americans seem increasingly concerned about the loss of the rule of law, as Trump’s tariffs upset the economy, and as Russia’s president Vladimir Putin seemed to taunt his U.S. counterpart—who badly wants to end Russia’s war against Ukraine, as he promised to do with a single phone call—by declaring a truce over Easter and then promptly violating it.
That the administration seems to be reeling showed also in the news on Friday that the State Department has been torn apart by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s firing of Peter Marocco, the official who was dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Dasha Burns and Nahal Toosi of Politico report that Marocco is MAGA and was destroying the agency without advice from career officials. MAGA sees his firing as a sign Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy.
Also on Friday, Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender of the New York Times reported that the administration was suddenly claiming that the letter it sent to Harvard University on April 11 withholding federal grants until the university handed administration officials power over the school’s students and programs was “unauthorized.” Nonetheless, the White House was standing by the letter, which prompted Harvard to take a strong stand against the administration. Officials blamed Harvard for the standoff because, they said, university lawyers should have called when they got such a dramatic letter.
In a response, Harvard pointed out that the letter “was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official and was sent on April 11 as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government—even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach—do not question its authenticity or seriousness.” It noted that it didn’t know which statements the government was claiming were “mistakes,” but in any case, the government’s actions had “real-life consequences.”
Today, Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmitt, and Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times that on March 15, the same day he shared classified plans of a military strike against the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure Signal chat on which journalist Jeffrey Goldberg had been included, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared similar detailed information on a different Signal chat. This one he began himself in January on his personal phone for strategizing with his closest allies, and it brought together about a dozen people, including his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer.
Four people with knowledge of the second chat group spoke with Jaffe, Schmitt, and Haberman, suggesting that dissatisfaction with Hegseth in the department runs deep. Former Pentagon chief spokesperson John Ullyot resigned last week, and today he began an op-ed in Politico with the sentence, “It’s been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon.” On Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers, and an official announced that his chief of staff was leaving. Ullyot wrote it was “very likely” that “even bigger bombshell stories” would come this week.
Finally, today was the deadline by which Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem were ordered to report to the president whether they recommended invoking the Insurrection Act to deal with conditions at the southern border. That law enables the president to use military troops as law enforcement officers inside the United States.
While the two did not file their report today, Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britzky, Jake Tapper, and Priscilla Alvarez of CNN reported Friday that when they do, they will not recommend the president invoke the act.
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Notes:
https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/no-kings-protesters-across-country-march-against-trump-musk/12/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/04/19/anti-trump-protests-50501-movement-hands-off/
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/van-hollen-defending-man-defending-rights-man-due/story?id=120978764
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25899106/boasberg-contempt.pdf
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/16/politics/boasberg-contempt-deportation-flights/index.html
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/17/van-hollen-visit-kilmar-abrego-garcia-el-salvador-00298258
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/abrego-garcia-restraining-order/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/04/18/aclu-alien-enemies-deportations-trump/
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, April 18, 2025, 6:00 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, April 19, 2025, 8:08 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, April 20, 2025, 8:26 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, April 20, 2025, 9:47 a.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, April 20, 2025, 4:05 p.m.
Donald J. Trump, Truth Social post, April 20, 2025, 5:12 p.m.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/18/business/trump-harvard-letter-mistake.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/18/marco-rubio-peter-marocco-usaid-firing-00297812
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/20/us/politics/hegseth-yemen-attack-second-signal-chat.html
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/04/20/pentagon-chaos-ullyot-hegseth-00205594
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/20/politics/hegseth-second-signal-chat-military-plans/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/18/politics/pentagon-dhs-wont-recommend-insurrection-act/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/20/europe/ukraine-easter-ceasefire-violations-intl/index.html
X:
jonrainwater/status/1902151244564857324
nayibbukele/status/1908246809245315259
CronistaOscar/status/1913666653222580426
Bluesky:
annabower.bsky.social/post/3ln3wmityd224
carnage4life.bsky.social/post/3lnai4fnsfs2r
Heather well keeps reminding us our monster (or, monsters) has (have) many tentacles.
Timothy Snyder, however, reminds us, too, how these tentacles have one set of resemblances to each other. Yes, the U.S. rich gutted America – but centrally with help from Putin, to sink the American working and middle classes as Putin did Russia.
As Timothy Snyder’s “The Road to Unfreedom” says, “American and Russian oligarchs have far more in common with one another than they do with their own populations.”
One area of hurt, the U.S. working and middle classes’ massive housing crisis. As he says (p. 265), “more and more Americans are unable to change residences, which also makes better futures hard to imagine.”
Same page, he notes of U.S. health that, because it “lacks a functional public health system, inequality has brought a health crisis, which in turn has accelerated and reinforced inequality.”
And as he’s well in touch with the pain, he quotes from humanities, on p. 264 citing “Billy Joel’s 1982 song ‘Allentown,’ which . . . spoke of men of a second postwar generation without the social advancement attained by their fathers, of workers betrayed by narrow nationalism.”
Our schools, and thus all media, lost touch with the pain abroad the land – lost touch in that virtually no one has any reference to things like the Billy Joel song. That left us open to the oligarch predations.
After all this clears, can we restore our schools?
Another excellent Letter! I wanted to comment how beautiful and moving the YouTube of your speech at the Old North Church was. I appreciate it being shared.
Ten years ago I got to walk the Freedom Trail and felt such a vitality standing in that Church. You brought that back to me.