Summary
Donald Trump threatened to send American citizens convicted of vandalizing Tesla vehicles to El Salvador’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center, labeling the vandals as “sick terrorist thugs” deserving 20-year sentences.
This statement followed a major vandalism incident in Ontario, Canada, where around 80 Tesla cars were damaged.
Trump’s comments coincide with controversy over his use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants, halted by a court order.
The White House defended the deportation despite legal challenges, denying any violation of the court’s injunction.
Game it out.
Say he does this.
Say someone sues. Say they rule against Trump. Say it’s appealed, all the way to the Supreme Court, eventually, and say they actually take the case and rule against him in, at best, a narrow 5-4 ruling.
That’s pretty unlikely. And the defendant will have been in prison a long time, already. And he could just bring them back without much fanfare, as this is a hundred controversies back.
And say he defies the order, especially if the Supreme Court refuses to take it… Then what? Is congress going to harass him for a immigration case? That is political suicide, and the congresspeople would be at real risk of physical retribution too.
This is what populist, fascist dictatorships do. They can’t get away with everything, but they constantly push the envelope and game the systems, hence the orders he is already starting to push.
Obama, Biden, Bush, even Trump on 2016 couldn’t do this because the political support from a base wasn’t there, but now it is.
How will they sue when they have no access to a lawyer, they’ve been picked up off the street, held in black sites incommunicado and then sent to these slave labour camps, never having gone near to a lawyer, a phone or a court?
The people being sent there now have not been convicted of a crime. I wouldnt even be confident that the people sending them into lifetime slavery know who they are. There could already be US citizens kidnapped into slavery for all anyone knows.
That’s the point, the whole chain is extremely unlikely.
Even the first step ‘somebody sues’ is impossible, because you have to have access to a lawyer to sue. Someone needs to know where you are. This has already happened to a lot of people…