April 4 Friday roundup

This week’s “Next Comes What” delivers reporting from a Tesla Takedown protest in Northern Virginia, where I went to check out the latest Elon memes. I also took a look at some new research on Black Lives Matter and the surprising effects it had on the 2020 election, as well as how the Target boycott and Costco buycotts have been going. (Heads up: this episode was recorded just before the tariffs went into effect, so, as you may have noticed, the market has faced some Trump-induced setbacks across the board since then.) You can watch it on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts.

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I’ve been thinking all week of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadoran man living in Maryland without a criminal record who was deported to a supermax prison in El Salvador. His transfer happened despite an order in his file not to send him back to his native land, due to the high likelihood he would face serious harm there.

The government acknowledged that the father and husband had been deported to El Salvador by mistake but claimed Abrego was no longer under U.S. jurisdiction, saying it was too late to bring him back. The judge held a hearing today to decide what, if anything, to require from the government to fix its error.

Trying to imagine a human being rendered to the most dangerous place he could be sent, and a brutal government acknowledging it had messed up but claiming it was too late to do anything about it made me think of Nabokov’s novel Bend Sinister.

The book, written at the end of World War II, is one of Nabokov’s messier efforts. It’s heavy-handed in places and doesn’t quite hang together. But this story of a professor bullied by a totalitarian government has long haunted me because of one aspect of life under tyranny it evokes perfectly: malicious incompetence.

In the novel, a tyrant pressures philosophy professor Adam Krug to abandon his principles and support the government. Eventually, the leader finds a cudgel that will make Krug bend the knee: kidnapping his only child.

The professor agrees to give up his principles in exchange for his son’s freedom. But the boy the government returns to Krug is not his son. It turns out that the government failed to keep the hostage safe and—through both sheer indifference and clumsiness—allowed the child to be murdered by sadists.

In an attempt to keep its newfound alliance with Krug, the government offers to let the professor kill the men who murdered his child. But this is a consolation only for monsters; it is too late to bring the beloved back.

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As I write this today, Maryland federal Judge Paula Xinis has just ruled that Abrego was apprehended on no legal basis and removed to El Salvador illegally, without any due process. This afternoon, she ordered the government to return him to the United States.

Before her ruling, the attorney representing the government asked for more time to try to convince some higher authority (Trump himself? Pam Bondi?) to bring Abrego back without an order. But she refused to wait, calling for his return before midnight on April 7.

This decision will likely make our current constitutional crisis more stark, because the current administration isn’t one that admits error. Instead, Trump seems to imagine power as a series of punishments administered to people he’s named as enemies.

It’s a governing style as sloppy and vague as the one in Nabokov’s novel. Yet it has the same capacity to do harm through malicious incompetence.

Judge Xinis is surely aware of the risks of trying to force the government to follow the rule of law in this case. But she may also be the only person who can reverse the harm done before the government’s claim about it being too late to bring Abrego becomes true.

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