This Is How Democracy Collapses: Trump Wants to Send Americans to Foreign Gulags

Trump is defying a Supreme Court order and making plans to send U.S. citizens to prison in El Salvador

For many valid reasons, everyone is focused on Trump’s disastrous tariff policy. How could you not be? The stock market has been crashing, the bond market is freaking out, and worries about inflation and recession are mounting. When watching your retirement account drop like a rock, it’s hard to focus on anything else.

But we are also amid an emerging constitutional crisis that could fundamentally reshape democracy.

Last month, the Trump Administration deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, where he is being held in the infamous CECOT prison known for torturing and starving inmates. Abrego Garcia is from El Salvador and was in this country illegally, but a judge ruled that he could not be sent home because the gangs there posed a threat to his life.

In court, several members of the Trump Administration admitted that Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador in error, but they refused to do anything to bring him back to the U.S. The case wound its way through the court system before the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, declared:

The order properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.

Yet, the Trump Administration refuses to abide by the court’s order. They claim that Abrego Garcia is under the control of El Salvador’s sovereign power and that they cannot bring him back.