As the Romans Did
By 
It’s pretty much inevitable that the Trump administration will deport an American citizen to El Salvador:
The US attorney general declined on Tuesday to say whether Donald Trump’s suggestion of removing US citizens to El Salvador was legal, in alarming remarks about what experts think is an obviously illegal idea.
Trump proposed the idea on Monday in the Oval Office during a visit with El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who has been accepting people deported from the US and imprisoning them in a gigantic facility notorious for human rights abuses.
The US president said “homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking” could be sent to El Salvador and imprisoned.
When it happens, the folks who currently claim that such a step is “unimaginable,” and a result of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” will nod their heads, stroke their beards, and comment sagely on the grim necessity of it all. Puts me in the mind of my favorite Cicero:
To this Verres replied that he had discovered that Gavius had been sent to Sicily as a spy by the leaders of the fugitive army, a charge which was brought by no informer, for which there was no evidence, and which nobody saw any reason to believe. He then ordered the man to be flogged severely all over his body. There in the open marketplace of Messana a Roman citizen, gentlemen, was beaten with rods ; and all the while, amid the crack of the falling blows, no groan was heard from the unhappy man, no words came from his lips in his agony except “I am a Roman citizen.” By thus proclaiming his citizenship he had been hoping to avert all those blows and shield his body from torture ; yet not only did he fail to secure escape from those cruel rods, but when he persisted in his entreaties and his appeals to his citizen rights, a cross was made ready – yes, a cross, for that hapless and broken sufferer, who had never seen such an accursed thing till then.
Does freedom, that precious thing, mean nothing? nor the proud privileges of a citizen of Rome? nor the Porcian law, the Sempronian laws? nor the tribunes’ power, whose loss our people felt so deeply till now at last it has been restored to them ? Have all these things come in the end to mean so little that in a Roman province, in a town whose people have special privileges, a Roman citizen could be bound and flogged in the market-place by a man who owed his rods and axes to the favour of the Roman people ?
And while we’re here, let’s give a thought to Merrick Garland:
For I reflected that to prosecute in court a man who already stood condemned by the court of humanity was a task very far from worthy of the toil and effort it would cost me, were it not that your intolerably despotic power, and the self-seeking that you have exhibited in more than one trial of recent years, were being engaged once more in the defence of that desperate scoundrel yonder. But as things now stand, since you take so much pleasure in all this tyrannical domination of our courts of law, and since men do exist who find nothing shameful, nothing disgusting, in their own wanton deeds and vile reputations, but appear to challenge, as though of set purpose, the hatred and anger of the people of Rome : I will declare boldly, that the burden I have shouldered may indeed be heavy and dangerous for myself, but is nevertheless such that my manhood and determination may fitly strain every muscle to bear it.
Anyway, Happy Tax Day to all of us who can’t go three minutes without thinking about the Roman Empire:
It may not have been the tax-evasion trial of the century — the second century, that is — but it was of such gravity that the defendants faced charges of forgery, fiscal fraud and the sham sale of slaves. Tax dodging is as old as taxation itself, but these particular offenses were considered so serious under Roman law that penalties ranged from heavy fines and permanent exile to hard labor in the salt mines and, in the worst case, damnatio ad bestias, a public execution in which the condemned were devoured by wild animals.
The allegations are laid out in a papyrus that was discovered decades ago in the Judean desert but only recently analyzed; it contains the prosecutor’s prep sheet and the hastily drafted minutes from a judicial hearing. According to the ancient notes, the tax-evasion scheme involved the falsification of documents and the illicit sale and manumission, or freeing, of slaves — all to avoid paying duties in the far-flung Roman provinces of Judea and Arabia, a region roughly corresponding to present-day Israel and Jordan.
Both tax dodgers were men. One, named Gadalias, was the impoverished son of a notary with ties to the local administrative elite. Besides convictions for extortion and counterfeiting, his catalog of misdeeds included banditry, sedition and, on four occasions, failing to show up for jury duty at the court of the Roman governor. Gadalias’s partner in crime was a certain Saulos, his “friend and collaborator” and the supposed mastermind of the caper.