Volume 5, Issue 68: Kaisha

"While I was in that coma something happened to me. I went to some place I think, but I know I don't ever want to go back there."

My upcoming novel, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, will be released on May 20—exactly one month from tomorrow. I believe you will like it. I hope you will pre-order it. Send me your pre-order receipt and I’ll send you a book plate and enter you into a contest to, like, hang out with me. Details here.

The other evening, I was at a celebratory business dinner with some new colleagues. (It was about this. We will get more into that news, and the fact that we’re a month away from the release of the new book, next week. We currently have more urgent matters.) After we did an initial cheer and exchanged some pleasantries, I, because I am so fun at parties, briefly made a comment about The Current Political Situation. One of the people at my table chuckled. “It’s always gotta come up at least once at everything, right?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s like all the side effects they say real fast in a pharmaceutical ad. We have to acknowledge it and get it out of the way so everybody knows we’re not pretending it’s not happening, even though we all still have shit to do.” Everybody at the table nodded, and then we went back to our dinner. After a few drinks, it came back up again. How could it not?

I have written, often, maybe too often, about the exhaustion of living through this moment in history, about how overwhelming it can be, how there is so much awfulness around that thinking too hard about all of it at once can legitimately make you feel like you are going insane. I know people who have been dragged down by it, to the point that they can no longer think about anything else, and I understand why. But I also understand why we also try to carve our places away from it, how we work to find our escapes, in entertainment, in sports, in travel, in simply focusing on the things in our lives that we can control, in surrounding ourselves with the people whom we love and who love us. Sometimes you worry that, by talking about it, you open the door to having it be all you talk about, because, again, how could it not be? And thus: We try not to talk about it. We try to make it through. Our lives are ours to live, after all. Why let the awfulness, and those responsible for it, take any more of our precious time on this earth than they already have? I understand all of it.

There are certain red line moments, however, in which something happens that’s so ghastly, so monstrous, so (the word has to be used) evil, that if we cross that rubicon, if we step across that red line, there is no returning. There are times when you have talk about it, and do something about it, because if you don’t, it will be too late. I have a book to promote. I have a family to spend time with. I have work to do. I have baseball games and movies to watch. I have so much of the world I want to take in, and write about, and absorb. We all do.

But we have to talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and what has happened to him and, many, many people like him. Because if we do not rise up about this—this, specifically—I am not sure we can come back.

This is Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He is a sheet metal worker in Maryland, a union member, a part-time student at the University of Maryland, where he is working toward a vocational license. He is married, with a five-year-old autistic child who is also deaf; he is the stepfather to two other children, one autistic, one who has epilepsy. He is from El Salvador and emigrated to the United States in 2011, when he was 16, because his parents, being extorted by a local gang, feared he would be murdered by them. He is not a United States citizen, but he is married to one and the parent to three, and he has regularly checked in with immigration authorities every year since he arrived, who have consistently affirmed his right to be here. (Including a ruling by a federal judge in 2019 that he belonged in the United States.) He works, he pays taxes, he raises a family. He has no criminal record, and no connections to anyone who does, despite desperate, pathetic attempts to pretend that he does. He is just a regular person, like you, like me, like just about everyone you know.

On March 12, according to The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, whose Thursday column on Garcia inspired me to write about this and which this newsletter will draw liberally from, Garcia’s car was pulled over by police, with his five-year-old child in the backseat. To quote Klein: “He was told his immigration status had changed. On March 15, in defiance of the 2019 court ruling, Garcia was flown to El Salvador and imprisoned at CECOT as a terrorist.” Garcia was illegally shipped, along with hundreds of others (who, like Garcia, have no criminal record), to CECOT, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, the infamous El Salvador prison decried for human rights abuses and about which El Salvador Minister of Justice and Public Security Gustavo Villatoro has publically boasted that “prisoners incarcerated at CECOT will never return to their communities,” even though most have never even faced a trial, let alone been convicted.

Garcia was—explicitly—here legally. Even the administration itself does not deny this, calling his deportation an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court ruled—9-0!—that the United States must “facilitate” Garcia’s return. (It actually ruled again, just last night, that no more else can be shipped there, though we will see if this ruling is honored. And by “we will see,” I mean “let’s see if America is still a thing after this.”)

The American court’s decisions led to this response from El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele.

Tweet here.

This week, Bukele, a man labeled “the world’s coolest dictator,” and wow, what a way to be known, was a guest of the White House. He sat next to the President of the United States, the country I have always lived in and always believed in, and they smiled and hugged and confirmed that their partnership—in which the United States illegally sends Americans to this murder prison without due process, and openly boasts and grins about it—is only getting started.

Before the meeting, the President of the United States whispered this to Bukele: "The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You've got to build about five more places." The President of the United States is not only refusing to bring back someone with a legal right to be in the United States, who has broken no laws, who was sent there mistakenly, from a murder prison … he is promising to send so many more people there, even “homegrowns” (which is to say, anyone who he decides is a political opponent) that Bukele will have to build some more.

The writer Timothy Snyder summed it up thusly:

The president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps. This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped. …

In the United States, we are governed by a Constitution. Basic to the Constitution is habeas corpus, the notion that the government cannot seize your body without a legal justification for doing so. If that does not hold, then nothing else does. If we have the law, then violence may not be committed by one person against another on the basis of namecalling or strong feelings. This applies to everyone, above all to the president, whose constitutional function is to enforce the laws. Trump spoke of asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to find legal ways to abduct Americans and leave them in foreign concentration camps. But by "legal" what is meant are ways of escaping law, not applying it. …

Asked on Fox News about the abduction of Americans and their transfer to foreign gulags, Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “these are Americans he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country.” If it comes down to what “he is saying,” then he is a dictator and the U.S. is a dictatorship. Trump spoke of the need to deport people who "hate our country" or who are "stupid."

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is an innocent person who did nothing wrong. He is surely surrounded by others. In response to this, any leader, any person, with a soul would say, “we must do everything we can to correct this.” Instead, the President of the United States isn’t just doubling down—including blatantly lying about Garcia—he is in fact expanding the (extremely illegal) program of paying a foreign dictator to imprison people so he does not have to adhere to his own constitution, to the point that it will soon be a place he can send American citizens, which is to say, anyone he decides he wants to see there.

Instead he is doing this:

(A credit to Senator Van Hollen, who understands that right now simply doing the honorable, decent and even obligatory—simply doing his job as a Senator for one of his constituents—thing feels like a cold drink from the most soothing stream … or even something like Braveheart’s speech.)

Right now the person this has happened to is Garcia, and anyone rounded up by ICE, rightly or wrongly. But if this isn’t halted, immediately, this is not where it will stop. It already has expanded to Chris Krebs, the man who, during Trump’s first term, headed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency before being fired by Trump for reporting, after an investigation at Trump’s behest, that the 2020 election was not, in fact, “rigged or stolen.” On April 9, just 10 days ago, Trump released an executive order titled, I swear to God, “Addressing Risks from Chris Krebs and Government Censorship.”

This executive order explicitly targets Krebs, claiming he should be investigated and that any company he might work for lose its security clearance. One week later, Krebs left the security company he had been working for. What will happen next? Jonathan V. Last addressed the elephant in the room:

If you are Chris Krebs and this week Bukele refuses to return Abrego Garcia and the Supreme Court decides to let Trump get away with it . . .

Would you stay in America? Or would you flee the country for your safety?

Let’s pretend, for a second, that you chose to leave. You show up at the Canadian border and file a claim of political asylum, alleging that you are fleeing political persecution in America and have reason to believe that remaining in your homeland would lead to indefinite imprisonment in a Salvadoran concentration camp.

What would the Canadian legal system make of such a claim?

Would they say that this was outlandish and unfounded?

Or would they believe it to be an accurate depiction of what America has become?

Now it is Krebs. Who will it be next? Here’s Klein:

If President Donald Trump decides that you are to rot in a foreign prison, then that is his right. And you? You have no rights.

We are not even 100 days into this administration, and we are already faced with this horror. And I can feel the desire to look away from it, even within myself. What all of this demands is too inconvenient, too disruptive.

But Trump has said it all plainly and publicly: He intends to send those he hates to foreign prisons beyond the reach of U.S. law. He does not care — he will not even seek to discover — if those he sends into these foreign hells are guilty of what he claims. Because this is not about their guilt — it is about his power.

And if he is capable of that, if he wants that, then what else is he capable of? What else does he want? And if the people who serve him are willing to give him that, to defend his right to do that, what else will they give him? What else will they defend?

This is the emergency. Like it or not, it’s here.

So who’s next? It could be someone very close to you. It could be you. It could be anyone. I have spent years and years writing about my fear about this time, the struggles of raising kids during this time, of wondering what there will be left for them to inherit, of trying to grasp how much they will have to fix.

But this world—a world that is being explicitly telegraphed, that may be leading to a battle with the Supreme Court that could cement it—is a world that there is no coming back from. This isn’t about politics. We’re not talking about tax policy, or regulation, or balancing the budget. We’re talking about fundamental human decency vs. evil here. I know people who voted for Trump. I care about people who voted for Trump. But if you really look at this, with eyes even slightly open, there is nothing any American, or human, can defend here.

There is so much going on. There is so much to take in. But Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a bright red line, because if we do not stop this from happening to him—if we do not get him home, if we do not stop this, instantly—we will not be able to stop it from happening to anyone. It is difficult to figure out what fights are worth going to the mat for, amidst all the chaos. It can be overwhelming. It is overwhelming.

But I cannot think of a fight more important than this one.

I do not believe that writing this will be the tipping point to securing the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, or any of the other people sent there without due process, or even that it will spur anyone to action. It is small—inadequate. There are much larger voices than mine: Klein’s, Last’s, Murphy’s, so many others. I’m not trying to win some sort of prize, or get any sort of pat on the back. It may well be futile—just reciting the small print for the side effects in a pharmaceutical commercial. But it is appalling, it is inhuman and, perhaps more than anything else, it’s completely fucking terrifying.

I know it is exhausting. I know there is a desire to turn away. I have this desire to turn away. But in this moment, even with so much else happening, it felt stupid and vacant, really, to talk about anything else.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. The Knicks Had a Good Season. Why Doesn’t It Feel That Way? New York. Ready for some playoff basketball today, go Knicks.

2. Who’s Going to Break Into the National League Top Six? MLB.com. Not the Cardinals, probably.

3. Looking at the Surprising OPS Leaders, MLB.com. People!

4. This Week’s Power Rankings, MLB.com. I find myself in a near-trance like Zen state of calm when I write these, as the world swirls out of control around us.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “Warfare,” “The Amateur” and “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

Morning Lineup, I had this week off.

Seeing Red, Bernie Miklasz and I enjoy these spunky Cardinals hitters.

HOW CAN I HELP?

As established, we’re compiling the stories of individual people who are trying to find ways to make the world a little bit better in whatever fashion they can, no matter how small. Send yours to howcanonepersonhelp@gmail.com. Today’s comes from Jimmy in Southern California.

I was really inspired by an aspect in Derek Thompson's "AntiSocial Century" ...both the Atlantic story and the podcast.....where a professor in Chicago found how much happier people were when they had interactions with other humans on the L rather than melting into their phones. So I have taken it upon myself to be more social with strangers. On the street, in elevators, in waiting rooms etc.

Please keep these coming. We need more—in this newsletter, and everywhere. Please send me yours.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“Trump is halfway to making America a police state,” Edward Luce, The Financial Times. Well, jeez, now those tree-hugging liberal leftie loonies at The Financial Times are saying it.

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Spangled,” Fust. Thanks to Steven Hyden for this recommendation. This song captures a … lot right now. “I’m feeling like a sparkler that’s been thrown off a roof.”

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

Also, there is an Official The Time Has Come Spotify Playlist.

Also, currently working on a Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride Playlist.

All right, so I will get into this next week. (There as a lot going on this week.)

Have a great week, all.

Best,
Will