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TRUMP IS ESCALATING HIS RENDITION OF DEMOCRACY  
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Chuck Idelson
May 14, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ Despite repeated legal setbacks demanding an end to these
autocratic practices, the Trump administration continues its assault
on the rule of law. For some of those snatched off the streets, the
ultimate destination is a foreign hellhole. _

Democratic Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested on May 9, 2025 at
Delaney Hall, a newly reopened immigrant detention facility in his New
Jersey city., Photo: Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman // Common
Dreams

 

For all the autocratic abuses that characterize U.S. President Donald
Trump’s second tenure, nothing more parallels the historic pattern
of dictatorships than the kidnapping of disfavored individuals by
armed agents of the state. Then concealing them in detention
facilities, including as a prelude for some to be renditioned to
horrific prisons in foreign countries. All while trampling on
constitutional protections of legal due process, often ignoring court
orders to stop it.

"The one power you cannot give the executive is the power to
arbitrarily imprison people who oppose the regime,” says Sen. Chris
Murphy
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“Today it may be an El Salvadorian immigrant or a foreign student,
but tomorrow it is you or me. The slope to despotism can be slippery
and quick.”

“In fascist states, individual rights had no autonomous
existence,” writes Robert Paxton in _The Anatomy of Fascism_.
“The State of Law vanished, along with the principles of due
process” for “guaranteed equitable treatment by the courts and
state agencies. A suspect acquitted in a German court of law could be
rearrested by agents of the regime at the courthouse door and put in a
concentration camp without any further legal procedure.”

For some of those snatched off the streets, at home, from their car
with children in the back, or in a courtroom, the ultimate destination
is a foreign hellhole.

Despite repeated legal setbacks demanding an end to these autocratic
practices, the Trump administration continues to escalate the assault
on the rule of law. Recent incidents illustrate the rising danger.

Federal agents have begun targeting judges and elected officials. In
late April, the FBI arrested sitting state court Judge Hannah Dugan in
Milwaukee on charges of obstructing immigration agents
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allowing an undocumented immigrant who had properly appeared for a
hearing to evade the federal officers who were waiting outside her
courtroom.

Judge Dugan was handcuffed behind her back
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her ankles later shackled, and publicly paraded outside. FBI director
Kash Patel celebrated the arrest by posting a photo on X in a display
obviously intended to intimidate other judges, as over 150 former
state and federal judges emphasized in a letter
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Attorney General Pam Bondi doubled down proclaiming
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is above the law,” apparently omitting her boss, Donald Trump
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Then, on May 9, federal agents arrested Newark, New Jersey Mayor Ras
Baraka for alleged “trespassing” when he, Reps. Bonnie Watson
Coleman (D-N.J.), Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) and LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.),
arrived to inspect a New Jersey Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) detention facility that Baraka says has operated in violation
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city and state certification of occupancy, inspections, and permits
laws. A Department of Homeland Security official menaced that arrests
are “definitely on the table"
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the Congress members, despite their oversight rights at federal
facilities, claiming they were “body-slamming” an ICE agent.

Persecution of judges and elected officials and warnings by Trump
prosecutors to other critics are designed to silence resistance, as
experienced in other dictatorial regimes. In _Strongmen: Mussolini to
the Present_, Ruth Ben-Ghiat quotes Spanish philosopher José Ortega y
Gasset reflecting on Franco’s murderous regime. “The threat in my
mind of an eventual violence, coercion, or sanction that other people
are going to exercise against me” bred conformity.

These steps coincide with the seizure of undocumented persons, foreign
students, and even U.S. citizens by ICE and other federal agents. They
are then hastily transferred to detention facilities in preparation
for deportation or rendition abroad, typically without evidence,
barring rights of due process, depriving them of contact with family
or legal counsel, in open defiance of court orders.

Due process is mandated by the Constitution’s Fifth and 14th
Amendments stating no “person,” not just citizens, can be
“deprived of life, liberty, or property” without legal protection
under law. Separately, the Constitution declares a right of habeas
corpus, the ability to go to court to ensure a person is not
improperly charged or unjustly imprisoned, as former Justice
Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann explained on _MSNBC_.

In its crusade for mass deportations and renditions, the
administration is “actively looking”
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formal suspension of habeas corpus, says Stephen Miller, Trump’s
White House deputy chief of staff and its most fanatical architect of
immigration policy. Georgetown University Law Center professor Steve
Vladeck notes
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"Miller doesn’t deign to mention that the near-universal consensus
is that only Congress can suspend habeas corpus—and that unilateral
suspensions by the president are per se unconstitutional.”

Habeas corpus has been postponed just four times in U.S. history
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the Civil War, in response to the post-Reconstruction KKK terror
campaign in the South, amid an insurrection against the U.S. 1905
occupation of the Philippines, and after the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack
in Hawaii.

For some of those snatched off the streets, at home, from their car
with children in the back, or in a courtroom, the ultimate destination
is a foreign hellhole. By early May, Trump had already deported
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people, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

More than 200 were dispatched to the notorious Terrorism Confinement
Center (CECOT) in El Salvador, in flagrant disregard of court rulings.
One of them is Kilmar Abrego Garcia
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rejected a unanimous Supreme Court order he “facilitate” his
return despite the administration’s admission he was deported by
mistake.

Further, Trump has expelled hundreds of others to countries not their
own, including to Costa Rica, Panama, and the Guantánamo Bay prison
in occupied Cuba. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has made it clear he
is scouring for more rendition locations
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“We are working with other countries to say… will you do this as a
favor to us?... And the further away from America, the better.”

One plan near fruition this month, until blocked by a court order
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involved expelling
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Laotian, Vietnamese, and Mexican migrants to detention centers in
Libya, which Amnesty International
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depicted as a “hellscape.” Most, said Human Rights Watch
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are “controlled by abusive, unaccountable armed groups. Such
violations include severe overcrowding, beatings, torture, lack of
food and water, forced labor, sexual assault and rape, and
exploitation of children.”

Global Precedents of Fascist Practices

Beatings, torture, and starvation in CECOT and Libyan camps are
chilling reminders of the most brutal end game of death camps by
fascist dictatorships from Hitler’s Nazi Germany to Franco’s
Spain, Pinochet’s Chile, and others. “The global history of
(concentration) camps shows that most internees die from disease,
overwork, or starvation rather than from execution,” notes Ruth
Ben-Ghiat.

Within days of being appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler
established models other authoritarian regimes would follow. Hermann
Göring, second only to Hitler, was granted “extraordinary police
powers” to brutally assault and round up political adversaries
“with increasing ruthlessness,” writes Peter Fritzsche
in _Hitler’s First Hundred Days_.

Soon, after a fire ravaged the Reichstag, Germany’s parliament, the
Nazis enacted emergency legislation to fully unleash dictatorial
powers, to ratchet up arrests, press censorship, and repression.
Similarly, Trump has invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act
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is scheming to use the 1792 Insurrection Act
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other emergency laws to legitimize autocratic moves, despite not
meeting the constitutional requirements for either.

Fortunately, many Americans are aware of the history and what is at
stake, tens of millions have protested in the streets, and Trump has
failed to complete neutralization of the courts and political
opposition, not for lack of trying.

By late March 1933, the Nazis had opened their first of many
concentration camps, Dachau, near Munich, initially to incarcerate
communists, socialists, then social democrats, gay men, gypsies,
others labeled “asocials,” and eventually Jews. Notes Fritzsche,
the Nazis, aided by friendly press coverage, successfully painted
opponents as the “enemies from within” and racist and antisemitic
dehumanization of their enemies as “subhuman”—a practice Trump
has also employed.

“What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison,” states
the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
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“is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The major
purpose of the earliest concentration camps during the 1930s was to
imprison and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural
movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of
the regime.”

Fortunately, many Americans are aware of the history and what is at
stake, tens of millions have protested in the streets, and Trump has
failed to complete neutralization of the courts and political
opposition, not for lack of trying.

Victories have been won. One notable example is the court ordered
freedom
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Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk released from a
Louisiana detention center after she was frighteningly seized by
masked federal agents on the street for the “crime” of writing an
op-ed protesting the Israeli-U.S. war in Gaza
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build on that, and to never stop the pressure.

_[CHUCK IDELSON, retired, is the former Communications Senior
Strategist for National Nurses United, the nation's largest union and
professional organization of registered nurses with 225,00 members.]_
 

* rule of law
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* due process
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* Habeas Corpus
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* Donald Trump
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* Trump 2.0
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* Constitution
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* rendition
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* extraordinary rendition
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* Immigrants
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* ICE
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* DHS
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* homeland security
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* deportations
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* Fascism
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* Ras Baraka
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* democracy
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