Last month, I wrote:

The Constitution protects Mahmoud Khalil no less than it does me. And if it can’t protect him, then his mistreatment makes me—me personally, and everyone in America I know and love—all of us, it makes all of us suddenly unsafe. For the sake of their own stability and freedom, every American should know that Khalil’s fate is very much bound up in their own.

At the same time, the American government had deported—directly into a brutal El Salvador prison—hundreds of Venezuelan residents of the U.S., with no formal accusation of a crime, and no day in court. I had originally mentioned them in my post about Khalil, but I decided to keep my focus narrow, letting my wrongly imprisoned neighbor stand for the many unsubtle injustices of the new American carceral state. These also include the more recent broad-daylight snatching of Rümeysa Öztürk from the streets of Somerville, where I lived for 14 years, on similar flimsy grounds as Khalil’s detention.

And then it came to light that while none of the abducted men were captured and deported justly, one of them stood out as having the most grossly unjust case, by far: Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a legal resident of Maryland, who suffers in that El Salvador prison even as I write this because American authorities swept him up by accident. U.S. officials admitted as much—and then declined to bring him home anyway. The U.S. Supreme Court, last week, and in a shockingly rare unanimous decision, instructed the government to get a move on with it.

This afternoon, President Trump invited El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to the White House. Bukele told the assembled press that he was powerless to release Abrego Garcia from his own country’s prison, while Trump grinned with clear approval.

Bobby Kogan, a senior director of the Center for American Progress, wrote this in response:

You do not have any rights if the government has the ability to send you to prison forever without a trial and there’s literally nothing you can do about it.

This is as fundamentally opposed as possible to what society should look like.

It is your duty as a citizen to oppose this government.

And I’m going to let that speak for me, and help mold my present stance and future actions in defiance of this government. If you live in the U.S., whether you’re a citizen or not, it’s important to me that you take the time to understand the gravity of what’s happening, and that you establish the connections and community and resources that you need in order to best resist it, on a years-long timescale.