The evil at your door The deportation action as regime change -- Timothy Snyder
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-evil-at-your-door1. This violated fundamental rights enumerated in the Constitution. Everyone in the United States has the right to a fair trial with due process of law. People who say things along the lines of "enemy combatants don't have the right to due process" are wrong. And it is important to understand the implications of that position. Anyone can be named an "enemy combatant." More fundamentally, once you accept any exception to the general rule, you are just inviting executive power to always use that exception, or make up another one. If you are a citizen and you are casting doubt on the importance of due process, remember this: you need due process in order to prove that you are a citizen.
2. The deportation was done in violation of a court order, according to a plan to undo the rule of law. This means that the action was not only specifically illegal, but designed as a challenge to the rule of law as such. Naturally, the individuals who chose to ignore a court order carefully selected the moment when they would do so. They chose a situation that they could characterize as us against them, the Americans against the foreigners, the regular people against the criminals. They are deliberately associating the law itself with people, the deportees, who they expect to be unpopular. This is a tactic, and historically speaking a very familiar one. In this way they hope to get popular opinion on their side as they ignore a court order. But if they succeed in making an exception once, it becomes the rule.
3. You do not know who was on those two planes to El Salvador. The individuals who arranged the deportation claim that the deportees were "foreign alien terrorists," but we have no way of knowing whether this is true. They also claim that they were “monsters,” which is not true. We do not know the names of the human beings who were deported. We cannot therefore know whether they were foreigners or American citizens. As to whether they were terrorists: they were not convicted of any crimes, and so it is hard to know whether or how this would be true. There is no doubt that their rights were violated. But your rights have been violated as well. If you do not know the details about operations that forcibly remove human beings from the territory of the United States, you do not have a responsive government. And you are therefore at risk.
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Seven more of his points are in his post.
= new reply since forum marked as read
From Prof. Snyder:
4. Immigration and emigration are matters of legislation, the responsibility for which is delegated by the Constitution to Congress. In organizing a deportation outside the bounds of any particular law, and indeed outside the bounds of law in general, the executive is not only challenging Congress but disputing its purpose. The deportation action, in other words, is a direct blow not only to the judiciary but to the legislative branch of the federal government. It is an assertion of total executive authority that has no basis in law or tradition.
5. The individuals involved are declaring their power to define reality, independently not only of judicial but of all verification. There is no basis for this deportation beyond speech acts and keyboard acts. The words ("foreign alien terrorists," "monsters"
are doing the work. There are no procedures between the movement of mouths and the movement of bodies. If members of the executive branch are allowed to issue truth claims that have the consequence that human beings leave the United States, we are in a dictatorship. If we accept that the executive branch can simply deport anyone they call a "foreign alien terrorist," then none of us has any rights.
6. The language that is being used has a specific resonance, which, historically, has been used to change regime type. It is important that the rights of human beings were violated. It is important that the rule of law was ignored. It is important that the executive is trying to define reality. But beyond even the issues of right and wrong and reality and unreality is the issue of language and behavior. We must consider just how the words are selected and what they are meant to do to us. "Foreign" means that they are not us. "Alien" means that we should hate them. "Terrorist" means that we should hate them enough to allow a state of exception, a suspension of normal practices, a change of regime. There is a long history of this, all around the world, including Hitler in 1933 and Stalin in 1934.
7. In an Orwellian reversal, defenders of the law are being associated with crime. The whole point of the rule of law is that everyone has a certain human dignity, which requires that they get their day in court, consistent with certain procedures. We do not know who is a criminal and who is not without these acknowledgements and these processes. The executive is claiming that it can simply name people "criminals" or “terrorists” or "monsters"-- and then contend that the defenders of law associates of criminals or monsters. In this way, the individuals who are carrying out this dictatorial action smear those who defend the Constitution by associating them with crimes, and of course with the most corporeal and unpleasant crimes. This is a logic entirely foreign to freedom, and destructive of it.
Continues…
https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-evil-at-your-door
