Disappearing bodies

News flash! You might have heard that I’ll be crewing a ship from the Netherlands up to northern Norway for the rest of the month, which means that Degenerate Art will go dormant for two weeks after this Friday’s post, starting up again the first week in June. I look forward to sharing images and lessons from my time away, as I think there will be a lot to explore.

And now to our regularly scheduled programming…

The US presidency makes the occupant of that office the most powerful person on the planet. If you’re someone whose deficiencies cry out for more submission and more adulation, how hard it must be to have so much power and yet be denied those few extra steps that would deliver you to full dictatorship. I think anyone could be a little vulnerable to losing perspective in that situation, but I also like to imagine that it wouldn’t be that hard to bring most people back to reality.

Unfortunately, the current president isn’t someone who tends to acknowledge reality, having lived somewhere outside it for many years now, maybe decades. As a result, the president is laying waste to vast parts of the federal government because he can act in ways that are tremendously harmful, yet he’s raging because he isn’t being allowed to act in ways that would be even more destructive.

We’ll set aside the inane game of randomly assigned, fluctuating tariffs that Trump has been playing, which is currently destabilizing the global economy. For this post, I’ll focus on what’s happening domestically, by looking at comments made by White House adviser Stephen Miller last Friday about habeas corpus—the right of an individual to appeal detention by the U.S. government and demonstrate that it is unlawful in their case.

Miller said to journalists, “The Constitution is clear—and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land—that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended at a time of invasion. So I would say that’s an action we’re actively looking at. A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”

I want to consider this idea of suspending habeas corpus, why it upsets so many people, and the history of how it’s been used at some key moments in the last century. It’s worth looking at how governments claiming to be saving their country have used these declarations to subjugate whole nations.

Defying due process

Why is Stephen Miller talking about habeas corpus? One one level, it’s because the courts for the most part won’t back up the administration, which wants to call fluctuations in immigrants crossing the Southern border an invasion. They want to do this in order to be able to take a warlike footing against immigrants and be able to treat them in any way they wish: to disappear them, to consign them to indefinite detention abroad, and to punish them as if they were convicted criminals, even if they’re guilty of nothing but being in the country without permission.

Typically, this power is given to the President by Congress, which had made no moves in that direction of late. In the meantime, the administration as a whole appears to be furious that the courts won’t do their bidding, and especially won’t let them get out of observing due process.

President Trump said last week,“ It's a very difficult thing with the courts, because the courts have all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they said, maybe you have to have trials, trials. We're going to have five million trials? It doesn't work. It doesn't work. You wouldn't have a country left.”

I’d like to suggest another reason the executive branch wants to suspend habeas corpus: to be able to detain its opponents indefinitely without having to justify its actions. But I don’t even have to be right about the president’s current intentions with regard to habeas corpus for it to be a threat. All you have to do is ask yourself whether, if Trump were given this power with regard to immigrants but would suddenly also find himself permitted to arrest anyone he wanted—including the journalists he has repeatedly called “enemies of the people”—would he stop at the detention and arrest of only immigrants?

Other recent actions also concern me deeply. The government last week declared a military zone around El Paso—the second such zone it’s created along the Southern border. Inside this kind of zone, the longstanding restriction on military involvement in civilian law enforcement activities is lifted. This measure was taken despite an 87% drop in migrant encounters in the El Paso sector between August 2024 and March 2025.

Even more alarming in recent days is the arrest of Newark mayor Ras Baraka. The mayor was arrested outside an ICE facility that he’s suggested doesn’t have the correct permits or inspections to be operating. Baraka has been released, but the government is claiming that he was trespassing and accused the U.S. representatives who accompanied him of “body slamming a female ICE officer.” Looking at videos of the incident, it’s hard to see how the government’s account holds water. Bonnie Watson Coleman, one of the Congresswomen present in the scrum, is eighty years old.

To get a bigger picture, I want to look at a couple of examples from history where a government used a spurious threat to institute or expand mass detentions and kept that power of arbitrary confinement in place for many years.

The birth of Nazi camps

The Reichstag fire is the gorilla in the room when it comes to examples of suspending habeas corpus. This fire took place just weeks after Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. The exact cause of the fire is still indeterminate, but there’s no question that the incident was used to pressure President Paul von Hindenburg to sharply curtail civil rights and give the government powers of detention via the Reichstag Fire Decree, ostensibly to protect the country from what was widely portrayed as the Communist revolutionary menace.

Opposing elected representatives were arrested before a Reichstag vote on the Enabling Act in March 1933. These arrests of political adversaries in the weeks after taking power provided the first Nazi concentration camp detainees, who were corralled into existing facilities on an ad-hoc basis, until more purpose-built camps could be established.

There were real Communist parties in the Weimar Republic, with elected representatives who were part of a functional government. And it’s also true that some violent extremists existed who were dedicated to overthrowing the Republic. But the Reichstag Fire Decree in combination with the Enabling Act, which was shoved through under duress, shattered Germany and assured its destruction and the death of millions at home and abroad, destroying the republic more completely than any Communist movement ever did.

Plan Z

Chile in 1973 is likewise a cautionary tale for the U.S. today. When the generals who led a military coup on September 11 were confronted with the challenge of justifying their arrests and executions, what emerged was known as Plan Z, a concocted story about a shadowy plan by the Left, which had fairly won the presidency, to stay in power indefinitely.

A 264-page white paper on Plan Z was published weeks after the coup, accusing leftists of plotting to transform Chile into a dictatorship. Those who supported the coup lapped up every invented detail, and the New York Times even reported Chileans claiming they had been on the list of those targeted for assassination and had therefore been saved by the generals who intervened. Thus, a supposed plot to establish a dictatorship became the rationalization for Chile’s generals to impose their own.

Chile’s dictatorship lasted 17 years. Pinochet’s grip lasted even longer—he didn’t relinquish military control until 1998, eight years after the ostensible return to democracy.

US suspensions of habeas corpus

As usual, the U.S. has its own rich history in this area. Habeas corpus has been formally suspended several times in U.S. history. In Hawaii after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, suspension was used to detain Japanese Americans. Before that, it was implemented in response to a 1905 uprising in the newly acquired territory of the Philippines (where the U.S. had imposed concentration camps not long before). Prior to that, suspension was allowed in nine South Carolina counties in 1871 to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Most famously, habeas corpus was once suspended without first getting the prior approval of Congress—during the Civil War, by Abraham Lincoln.

Though Congress gave its assent to all but one of these suspensions in advance, even this handful of instances had significant issues which continue to be debated as legal and ethical conundrums. That they remain controversial is a good reminder that standards ought to be extremely high any time a suspension is considered. (And remember that U.S. courts are, by and large, already rebuking the administration for considering immigrant arrivals any equivalent to war, rebellion, or invasion, though one judge so far has bought into this argument.)

Habeas corpus and Gitmo

Another frame in U.S. history to use when considering habeas corpus is the War on Terror detentions. I’ve talked a lot in various episodes about Gitmo, because it’s central to issues of detention from across the last few decades. And indeed, there’s a critical body of habeas corpus cases from Guantanamo. In 2008, in Boumediene v. Bush, the Supreme Court established that detainees at Guantanamo—even though they were suspected terrorists and not American citizens—had the right to habeas corpus, and that U.S. courts have jurisdiction. In 2022, more than a decade after that key court case and six years after Gitmo detainee Asadullah Haroon Gul filed his own petition, he was finally released and sent back to Afghanistan.

Looking at the situations or immigrants here on U.S. soil today, any simple recourse for unjust detention would be much harder to come by now than it would have been just a year ago. Prior to 2025, the U.S. had different services, including an Office of Immigration Detention Ombudsman, but Trump’s extensive actions to dismantle the federal government have essentially removed that avenue and others for immigrants to contest detention.

“Privilege” was the word Miller used to refer to habeas corpus. And though he made it sound like an indulgence given by the president, the word is actually in the text of Article One of the Constitution: “The Privilege of the Write of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

But I think Miller’s tone nevertheless misrepresents it. Habeas corpus isn’t a privilege that U.S. residents have to earn from the president or his minions. It’s a vital right granted by the Constitution to citizens, one that can only be suspended in dire conditions that threaten the existence of the country—and even then, only when public safety requires it. Over the centuries that right has been expanded by courts to cover any U.S. resident here with papers or without. It’s a core piece of what it means to live in America.

Next steps

Even more disturbing is that Miller’s statement suggests suspension might be the next move, but it “depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”

Asked about what Miller had said, U.S. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming would not give a yes or no answer to a reporter’s question, refusing to rule out supporting the suspension of habeas corpus if it were to come before Congress. I’d like to imagine that any effort to get Congress to throw habeas corpus out the window would meet with resistance, even among Republicans. But to date, they haven’t tended to object on ideological grounds to President Trump’s various assaults on established civil liberties.

This is why it’s critical to pressure your elected representatives on the issue of habeas corpus, but also on accountability in general—on the deliberate provocation of crises like planned cuts to Medicaid, as well as Republicans’ attempts to increase tax breaks for the ultrarich.

Keep calling and writing your representatives and senators, and remind them that their constituents are paying attention. They need be convinced that their political futures are jeopardized more by undoing the rights of Americans than by crossing a president who wants unlimited power.

You can take action in more direct ways, too, often right near you. It doesn’t just have to involve Tesla Takedowns! This week faith ministers used their bodies to block the entrance to the same ICE facility in New Jersey where Mayor Baraka was arrested, taking a stand against current U.S. immigration policy.

The long fingers of the Trump administration are working their way into every part of our lives. It’s up to us to say “Enough.”

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