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Hippo: People getting picked up off the street and disappeared into detention or sent to a prison on foreign soil is scary but it's not really new here in America, land of Guantanamo, Jim Crow, the Red Scare, the War on Drugs, and the War on Terror. Hippo: What makes this extra scary now is previous administrations tried to find ways around the courts, looked for legal loopholes, and did their best to avoid cases where they'd get unfavorable rulings. Hippo: The Trump regime is actively challenging the courts to rule against them so they can ignore them. The Republicans spent years stacking the judiciary and decided they were irrelevant anyway.

NEW COMIC TWO OR THREE TIMES A WEEK, OR WHEN THE MOOD STRIKES

People keep talking about Kilmar Abrego Garcia's due process rights as if due process is the norm. We should all be clear that it's not the norm and never has been. Even in cases where people do get what passes for American due process most of them are railroaded anyway. The system is rigged, which should be obvious simply by looking at the Current Occupant (and maybe someday soon we can just check our currency). From slavery through Jim Crow and up through the War on Terror and the Patriot Act, most people in this country have not been afforded due process. Does anyone else remember when Obama ordered the assassination by drone of an American citizen and his teenaged son?

That said, the executive branch has still habitually attempted to conform to the law. For example, when the courts seemed to be considering requiring some detainees at Guantanamo to be given appropriate due process, they were transferred, or their status otherwise changed, to put them (again) outside the reach of the courts. The Bush administration generally didn't simply state that the courts had no power over them.

The Trump regime, meanwhile, seems determined to fuck up in the worst possible ways, so the courts feel compelled to intervene, just so the judiciary can be told to jump in a lake. Like, there's a world where ICE rounded up men who could credibly be claimed to belong to a gang, or they could've taken men who are already imprisoned for violent crimes, say, and shipped them to CECOT. Instead they sent off hairdressers and delivery drivers.

I want to make it clear that even mother stabbers and father rapers deserve due process. We all deserve due process, way more than we've gotten. But if your plan is to destroy what's left of due process, you'd want to make it plausible, wouldn't you?

I mean, I guess not.