Trump's Creeping Authoritarianism Hides Behind His Cruel Policies
I know I sound like a broken record on this, but I find the creeping authoritarianism from the Trump administration and the kind of grudging acceptance of it as just being part of what we have to live with under Trump to be highly disturbing.
Beyond the brazen and blatant lies that everyone in the administration has told about the policy of child separation, from Kirstjen Nielsen’s briefing to lying to airlines about separated children on their flights, there has been an absolute refusal to provide any information or access to not only the media but also elected officials.
The government has provided no information about where the separated children are actually being held and has refused access to both the press and elected officials at various detention facilities. Even when reporters are allowed in, no cameras are permitted in a failed effort to make sure the government controls all the visuals around the policy. Similarly, separated children, some as young as 8 months old, are being transported in the dead of night in order to avoid scrutiny. Children are sent all over the country with no notification given to local officials. Incredibly, we are being forced to rely on crowd-sourced reporting to learn where these separated children are actually being held.
In addition, HHS is not allowing state officials, who actually license some of these facilities where the children are being held, to monitor the conditions under which these children are held, claiming that those facilities’ contracts with HHS are separate from the licensed facility. This is presumably the same rationale that keeps members of Congress from also inspecting these facilities, even if they are state-licensed and/or non-profits. These are, essentially, federally run secret prisons at this point. And the government has, as far as I know, provided no legal rationale for why state officials, Congress, and the press can be prevented from inspecting them.
The administration has at least finally released the number of children that have been separated but it is unclear whether they actually have sufficient details on them, especially the very young, to match them back up with their parents. In fact, in court hearings for the parents, government prosecutors are actually objecting to questions about the status and whereabouts of the children who were also seized. As one judge noted, “If someone at the jail takes your wallet, they give you a receipt. They take your kids, and you get nothing? Not even a slip of paper?” Not anymore in Trump’s America.
Having taken the children hostage, the government is now forcing these parents to choose between being separated from their children or being able to reunite with them by signing a “voluntary” deportation order. Tell me how this is that much different from the “voluntary” confessions we see under totalitarian regimes.
The President’s executive order is actually knowingly going to violate the Flores agreement and, according to the Washington Post, Trump actually wanted the executive order to rewrite immigration policy in its totality before being persuaded out of that approach by White House lawyers who were forced to “explain” that he could not just unilaterally change existing law. Now, the administration is basically asking the courts to discard the Flores settlement and allow families including children to be detained indefinitely in unlicensed facilities. In addition, there apparently is a request to use military bases to imprison over 100,000 immigrants and their children.
Yesterday, the President tweeted, “When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came”. Of course, since the “border” is really the 100 mile zone from the actual physical border and that area contains two-thirds of the US population, most American citizens would be able to be plucked off the streets and deported with no due process whatsoever.
We see a similar dynamic with the Trump’s tariffs. Trump’s rationale for the steel and aluminum tariffs varies from punitive, to crack down on Chinese imports, to coercive, to force better trade deals from China, Mexico, Canada and the EU. But neither of those can actually provide the legal rationale for imposing the tariffs. So the administration invents the legal claim of national security out of whole cloth, despite the fact that the Department of Defense clearly states that it already gets enough US steel and aluminum to fulfill its needs. And now Trump is threatening to put even larger tariffs on European cars, again invoking this bogus national security claim.
Today, at least, there is a broad pushback against Trump’s desire to eliminate due process at the border, and rightly so. It is also understandable that the focus should be on the results of these policies, the child prisons, the long-term damage to those children, and, in the case of tariffs, the harm to existing American businesses. In addition, the clear illegality of some of these policies make them easier to challenge in court, just as with the Muslim ban. The violation of the Flores agreement will be litigated as will challenges to the tariffs at the WTO.
Inevitably, but worryingly, that focus on the results of these horrific policies detracts attention from the authoritarian means by which the policies are put in place to begin with. The refusal to allow certain facilities holding the separated children has no legal basis. The restrictions on media access is designed to force them to rely on the governments visual propaganda. The executive order violates existing law on its face, not to mention that Trump had to be dissuaded from using the order to clearly and illegally rewrite immigration law in its entirety. Forcing these refuges to choose between not seeing their kids ever again and signing a “voluntary” deportation order is essentially a forced confession. There is no real legal basis for any of Trump’s tariffs. The policies are horrible but perhaps the larger danger is how they were enacted.
This kind of creeping autocracy actually further emboldens the President and is exactly what leads to further attacks on our democracy and the slippery slope of proposing the elimination of due process for most Americans. It will not stop there.
