Bring. Him. Home.

Our cause is here; our time is now.

Reminder: I’ll be talking with Paul Krugman on Substack today, live at 12:30 p.m. Eastern.

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U.S. Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) (L) and Rep. Juan Vargas (D-CA) (R) hold pictures of Kilmar Abrego Garcia during a news conference to discuss Abrego Garcia’s arrest and deportation at Cannon House Office Building on April 9, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

1. Five Questions

We’re going to give elected leaders in the Democratic party a charge and then talk about how the public can rally. But first, I have some questions to consider.

(1) What are the terms of the U.S. government’s contract with El Salvador for imprisonment of individuals rendered?

(2) Where in the U.S. government do the funds paid to El Salvador originate from? And who, exactly, is the payee?

(3) What are the terms of the services being contracted for? How many meals per day for the prisoners? What are the healthcare arrangements? How are these provisions itemized and invoiced? What governmental body is monitoring the contractor (and who is the contractor?) for compliance?

(4) What rules or laws govern the “corrections officers” who work at CECOT?

But most important:

(5) What are the terms of the sentences for those incarcerated at CECOT? When will they be paroled or released?

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Do you believe that anyone from America who goes into CECOT will ever come out?

I do not.

This is not incarceration; it is liquidation.

Incarceration is a penal act. It is controlled by laws. There are well-understood mechanisms governing the length of terms, applications for parole, processes for release.

Liquidation is a political act. It is arbitrary, opaque, and unappealable. There are no controlling laws or processes. There is only power.

This is why Donald Trump cannot allow Kilmar Abrego Garcia to return to the United States.

And it is why the democratic opposition must go to the mattresses to bring him home.

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2. Dissident Mindset

In an authoritarian regime, the opposition needs symbols and stories. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is that symbol. His abduction in front of his autistic son and imprisonment in a foreign concentration camp is that story.

All of the opposition’s energy should be focused on him.

Why? Because Trump is in an impossible situation. He cannot allow Abrego Garcia to come home because (a) it would be capitulation to the Supreme Court, and (b) Abrego Garcia cannot be allowed to testify about what he saw and experienced at CECOT.

So Democrats must make Trump pay.

Chris Murphy and Chris Van Hollen get it.

Murphy laid out the stakes clearly yesterday after Trump and Bukele set the Constitution on fire:

Van Hollen announced that he will travel to El Salvador this week to seek Abrego Garcia’s release. That is a start. Here is what should come next:

An elected Democrat ought to be on the ground in El Salvador every minute of every day until Abrego Garcia is brought home. They should be in constant communication with the Salvadoran government and should make an endless list of demands.¹ In short: Congressional Democrats should do the job that Justice Department lawyers, in contravention of the Supreme Court, are refusing to do. They should take it upon themselves to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia.

In this role, Democrats should give daily updates to the public about their progress.² They should make themselves targets. And they should inflict political pain on Donald Trump.

This will require a paradigm shift for Democrats. They will have to act less like an American political party and more like Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s or Alexei Navalny’s People’s Alliance over the last decade.

But they should be under no illusions. The old American order is dead. It ended on April 14, 2025, when a Latin American strongman sat in the Oval Office and discussed sending U.S. citizens to foreign concentration camps with the American president while they jointly defied the Supreme Court.

Everyone who is not part of the authoritarian regime is a member of the dissident movement now. The sooner they realize it, the better.

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This is our reality and I do not see how, after yesterday, anyone in America could fail to see it.³

Actually, that’s not quite right. I understand not wanting to see it. God knows, I wish I could close my eyes or look away. I’ve felt physically ill since Sunday night when I saw the shape of things to come. But blindness is not a shield and avoidance is not a plan.

The only good news from yesterday is that some of our institutions seem to be waking up. Murphy and Van Hollen were great. Harvard stood strong. Judge Paula Xinis is doing the Lord’s work. But it’s going to take all of us.

No illusions. No capitulation. Stand with us.

I believe this with all my heart: The only way through is together.

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3. State Terror

Timothy Snyder understands what happened yesterday.

Yesterday the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.

This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped. . . .

In the history of state terror, the escape from law into coercion takes three forms, all of which were on display, incipiently, in the White House yesterday: the leader principle; the state of exception; and the zone of statelessness.

The leader principle, or in German Führerprinzip, is the idea that a single individual directly represents the people, and that therefore all of his actions are by definition legal and proper. In discussions in the White House and thereafter, we see this notion being advanced. Trump’s advisors claim that what he is doing is popular. The claim (as in legal filings) that the president is acting from a personal “mandate” from the people has the same problem. . . .

The second escape from law is the state of exception. In principle, the Soviet Union was governed by law. Before its greatest exercises of terror, however, the Soviet authorities declared for themselves states of exception. This meant that, on the territory of the Soviet Union itself, it was “legal” (in Bondi’s and in Trump’s sense) to abduct people and send them to concentration camps: authorities claimed that there was some sort of threat, and so protections could be withdrawn and procedures set aside. . . .

A simple way to escape from law is to move people bodily into a physical zone of exception in which the law (it is claimed) does not apply. . . . In the end, authorities can choose, as in Nazi Germany, to physically remove their citizens into zones beyond their own countries in which they can simply declare that the law does not matter.

This exploitation of purported stateless zones was the main line of the history of the Holocaust. Under Hitler, the Germans did have concentration camps on their own territory, and they did reduce Jews to second-class citizenship, and they did live under a permanent state of exception. But, in the main, the mass murder of German Jews was achieved by their abduction and forced rendition to sites beyond prewar German territory where, German authorities claimed, there was no law.

Read the whole thing and share it with everyone you know.

1. For instance: Democrats should demand to know the regulations governing external communications with prisoners. They should demand visitation rights. They should demand daily health checkups.

2. Democrats should publish a mirror-version of their progress reports every day at the same time that the government’s lawyers are supposed to file their reports to Judge Xinis.

3. People outside America certainly see it. This morning the Financial Times—which is neither liberal nor hot-headed—observed that America is half-way to being a police state.