America’s Shameful ‘No’ to the World
The risk of random, unaccountable detention and imprisonment is growing. Even Musk and Melania could have been detained under Trump’s rules.
A HISTORIC GEORGETOWN CHURCH recently mailed out flyers about its 2025–26 concert season, and I was drawn to the opening performance this fall: “Stellar Mexican quartet honors music of the New World on farewell tour.”
Cuarteto Latinoamericano is advertised as “Mexico’s flagship chamber ensemble,” returning to Dumbarton Church “by popular demand.” The program ranges from famous pieces by Americans George Gershwin and Samuel Barber, to Czech composer Antonín Dvořák’s American quartet, written in Iowa during a three-year U.S. stay, and the Tribute to the Americas quartet by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos.
An homage to two continents, indeed, and for a few minutes at my house, it was all Let’s do this! and Is this cool or what? Then, suddenly, the conversation darkened. Will it even happen? Will this quartet even show up? “I’d hire bodyguards and come,” I told my husband. “I’d cancel and stay home,” he replied.
This is the America we live in now. In Donald Trump’s America, if you look foreign or are foreign, or are even just a lawyer representing someone foreign, you can be detained for no reason or any reason—caught in a dragnet intended to generate high numbers, high profits, and viral moments that juxtapose cruel, beautiful people with cruel, ugly policies.
It started with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, hair, makeup and outfit camera-ready for her video shoot, posing as if for a kinky Vogue cover with a backdrop of shaven prisoners in a cage at CECOT, El Salvador’s giant torture prison.
On Monday came Trump in the Oval Office with El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, suave and tieless in a form-fitting navy suit and black t-shirt. Just a couple of dictators joking around about never releasing Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the wrongly deported Maryland father, from CECOT, and sending hundreds or even thousands more to hellholes yet to be built.
That includes Venezuelans and, Trump suggests, could expand to homegrown Americans, shipped out and held for as long as he wants, no matter who they are or aren’t, or what they did or didn’t do. Trump is reportedly paying Bukele $6 million for his gulag-style hospitality. It’s a nice profit center for El Salvador, and one trade deficit Trump doesn’t seem to mind.
IF YOU ARE LUCKY ENOUGH TO BE detained somewhere in America, and you have friends, family, and lawyers working to find you and get you out, you may eventually emerge—with harrowing tales of brutality and helplessness.
You can be a Canadian with a work visa, like Jasmine Mooney, and end up imprisoned and isolated for two weeks in detention camps. You can be a British graphic artist touring America, like Rebecca Burke, and end up shackled and detained for nineteen days—declared illegal because she’d been staying at homes and doing chores in exchange, with no work visa.
You can be a German tattoo artist planning to spend a few days with a friend in Los Angeles, and end up detained for six weeks—including eight days in solitary confinement—because you said you were going to tattoo your friend and immigration authorities assumed you were going to set up shop without a work visa. Except that it was a personal favor for a longtime friend.
In Trump’s America, which is also Elon Musk’s America, Musk himself could have been ambushed and detained, if today’s policies had been in force when he arrived. He came from South Africa on a student visa in 1995, the Washington Post reported in October, but he skipped graduate school and started a business instead. That was illegal. He had no work visa and didn’t get one until his freaked-out investors forced the issue.
The same goes for Melania Trump, who arrived on a visitor visa from Slovenia in 1996: She, too, might have disappeared into a detention camp. She took ten modeling jobs and earned over $20,000 that year before getting a work visa, the Associated Press reported on November 4, 2016, after she had insisted for months that she never violated the terms of her immigration status. Based on twenty-year-old documents obtained by the AP, the story came out four days before the 2016 election.1 It was too late to matter.
Back when Musk and Melania showed up, we were still a nation of immigrants and we welcomed their contributions to our economy and culture, from tacos to academic research. Now not so much, as students get ambushed and detained for having political views that Trump doesn’t like. That’s unconstitutional, and they are legal residents, but why should he care, right?
The administration has already admitted that deporting Abrego Garcia was an error, and Bloomberg reports that roughly 90 percent of the 200-plus men Trump deported to CECOT have no U.S. criminal records. But Trump is no newcomer to ruining lives. It’s what he does.
The guy who pardoned the January 6th rioters was never going to be President Due Process. In fact, unless it benefits him and people who genuflect to him, Trump is allergic to due process. We’ve known that since 1989, at the height of the frenzy against the Central Park Five—teenagers accused of raping a jogger in Central Park—when he ran an ad in several newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty. It was published May 1, 1989, barely ten days after the attack and months before the teens were tried and convicted.
They served years in prison until another man confessed to the crime and gave a DNA sample that matched. And it’s not over yet. Just last week, a federal judge refused Trump’s request to throw out a defamation suit that the five filed against him last year. They cited false claims he made about the case in his debate with Kamala Harris, including that they had pleaded guilty (they did not) and “killed a person” (no one died).
Trump has been politically immune to judgments against him, and that won’t change if he loses this defamation suit. He’ll be 79 in June, and his outlaw brand has done nothing but help him evade accountability his whole life.
If anything comes for him at this late date, it’ll be the demise of America’s global reputation accompanied by a tanked economy. And it won’t just be due to his tariff flightiness and bravado. It’ll be boycotts of American products, Canadians selling their U.S. vacation homes, plunging international tourism—all already happening. We can also expect foreign students, who have flooded our universities and often stayed to become job creators, to start avoiding us like the plague.
We might still see Mexico’s flagship string quartet risking a final farewell visit to the United States. We’ll buy tickets when they go on sale, and cross our fingers.
Correction, April 16, 2025, 12:23 p.m.: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that the AP story on Melania Trump’s immigration came out shortly before the 2024 election, rather than shortly before the 2016 election.
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