Elimination of powers
The Trump administration comes at you fast.
I planned this week to write about the widespread destruction of post-secondary education in the US. Top-flight research universities like Columbia, Berkeley and Harvard are targeted by investigations, advancing the MAGA agenda against "wokeness" and "DEI" and freedom of thought in the US. Students and faculty have been threatened with deportation, discouraging new scientists from choosing careers in the US. Research money has been slashed, leading to the cancellation of awarded grants. Project 2025 believes that science should be driven by politics, not by experts working at the frontiers who best understand the opportunities and risks before us. Trump administration cuts have caused at least one major US medical school to cancel new graduate student admissions for the coming academic year.
Beginning in World War II scientists moved from the East to the West, fleeing repression for freedom. Many of the generation's best minds came to America. For nearly eighty years, the brightest students in the world have followed that path, coming to the US to begin or to advance their careers. Fundamental innovations – nuclear physics, signal processing, computational systems, advances in medicine and energy and space flight and more, happened here because we got the smart kids early and they stuck around. They wanted to work with the best people in their fields. They wanted to do meaningful work. They made America a scientific and economic powerhouse.
Now we're pushing them away.
The impact of that batshit-crazy, America-last policy will unfold over the coming decades. It's not just this year's students who can't or won't work here. It's the next generation of the world's best scientists who won't trust American institutions to allow them to do their research, to fund their work for a PhD or post-doc or faculty appointment. The smart kids will choose to work elsewhere.
How do we measure the lost value of scientific advances that don't happen or that happen somewhere else? How do we account for a cancer cure we could have had but don't? What if there were no internet, no mRNA vaccines, no CRISPR? Could we, in that poverty, imagine what we had lost?
But that's not the most important thing that happened this week. That draft remains in the can. Maybe I'll get to it, maybe I won't. This week brought us a different and hotter fire.
I wrote a week ago about the administration's illegal arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil. Freedom of speech demands that we protect not only those with whom we agree, but also those whose ideas we dispute, even despise. The Trump administration arrested and imprisoned a US permanent resident who had led pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University in New York. The administration argued that the President had the authority unilaterally to deport anyone espousing ideas that he, alone, without Congressional or judicial review, deemed anti-American.
I worried about the case and the precedent it might set. We don't yet know how the courts will rule in the Khalil case. In an awful sense, though, it really doesn't matter, because – did I mention? – the Trump administration comes at you fast.
Trump and his enablers in government built on the extra-judicial momentum they established with Khalil's arrest last week to arrest and deport a large group of people in the US this week. They were rounded up by immigration officials supported by state and local law enforcement. They were shackled and loaded onto aircraft with celebratory videos posted on right-wing news sites. They were flown from the US to El Salvador, a country that has agreed to imprison anyone delivered by the US government for a $20,000 per-year, per-head fee, before corruption (so you can imagine the conditions under which they are held). None of the arrestees had been convicted of a crime or had the opportunity to consult counsel. Arrest to disappearance was a matter of hours.
We don't know who they were. No one except the cops who arrested them and the INS officials who shackled and boarded them has spoken to them. I'm sure there were bad guys! But maybe some innocent folks caught up in the dragnet, taking care of kids in the apartment when the door was kicked in? Ought we not to take a minute and check?
Nope. They were all taken to airports in shackles, onto planes.
Lawyers for the arrested filed lawsuits to stop the proceeding. Judges heard arguments and ruled that the Administration had broken the law and had to return the people to courts in the US. Planes in the air had to turn around.
The Trump administration lied to the judges. It refused to obey legal orders. It delivered those people to Salvadorean prisons without due process and in open defiance of the courts. They're gone.
I hate rapists and murderers and drug traffickers. We should arrest violent criminals and deport them when we can. We have to protect our borders. But deciding guilt and innocence is a job for the courts, not for street cops and especially not for a would-be autocrat.
When we cede the rule of law, we cease to be a functioning democracy. I worried when I wrote the piece on Khalil about how the Trump administration might further undermine the courts.
A week later, we know.
Also: It's worse than that. Trump spiced up deportation week with a rambling speech at the Justice Department where he threatened to expose his enemies. He signed executive orders criminalizing law firms that he dislikes. He targets judges and lawyers and the laws that protect the rights of ordinary Americans.
I expect more breathtaking illegality from the Administration in the weeks to come. It will violate the civil rights of more people, steadily less offensive to the population than Palestinian agitators and brown-skinned drug runners. It will try hard to normalize its disdain and disregard of the American legal system, slipping us down that slope. It will, step by step – at a sprint! – assert that one man has the authority to ignore the will of the people, the authority of the Congress and the plain language of the Constitution.
Donald Trump is ignoring the rule of law.
We must fight to preserve it. Lawyers must argue. Courts must rule. We all must demand justice for all – for arrestees accused of violence, for Presidents who hold themselves above the law.