The crisis of the American legal system

Just a reminder of who we’re dealing with:

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the immigrant who was wrongfully expelled to El Salvador in March and then brought back to face criminal charges, was detained again on Monday after the administration indicated that it planned to re-deport him to Uganda, his lawyer said.

The detention unfolded after Mr. Abrego Garcia arrived at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Baltimore and came only three days after he was freed from custody in the criminal case that was filed against him in Federal District Court in Nashville.

A lawyer for Mr. Abrego Garcia, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, said that the stated intention of the meeting with ICE was for an interview. “Clearly, that was false,” he said, adding that the immigration authorities did not say why Mr. Abrego Garcia was being detained or even where he would be taken.

Shortly after Mr. Abrego Garcia was taken into custody, his lawyers filed a legal action known as a habeas petition in Federal District Court in Maryland seeking to stop his removal to Uganda. The petition claimed that the Trump administration had re-arrested him without first giving him the opportunity to express “fears of persecution and torture in that country.”

Mr. Abrego Garcia should have a grace period of two business days from being deported again under a standing order issued in May by the chief federal judge in Maryland. The order automatically stopped the government from following through on expulsions of immigrants for 48 hours after they filed habeas petitions.

Over the weekend, his lawyers had accused the Trump administration of seeking to “coerce” a guilty plea from him on the charges of human smuggling that were brought against him in an indictment in June.

The lawyers said the administration had promised to send Mr. Abrego Garcia to Costa Rica, where he could live freely as a legal resident, if he pleaded to the charges and agreed to serve whatever prison sentence he eventually received. Otherwise, the lawyers said, Trump officials said they would deport Mr. Abrego Garcia “halfway across the world” to Uganda, where, the lawyers said, “his safety and liberty would be under threat.”

The arrest in Baltimore was the latest twist in a long-running saga that began this spring, when the Trump administration removed Mr. Abrego Garcia to a notorious terrorism prison in El Salvador, despite a court order that expressly barred him from being sent to the country. Then, after weeks of complaining that they were powerless to bring him back to U.S. soil, Trump officials did exactly that — not merely to correct their own mistake but to file criminal charges against him.

As he arrived for his immigration check-in in Baltimore on Monday, Mr. Abrego Garcia was greeted by the cheers of dozens of supporters at the federal building in Baltimore. His wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, and his brother, Cesar, were by his side. Speaking in front of the crowd, he thanked the people who had stood with him and delivered an emotional plea to immigrants and the immigrant rights community to keep up the fight and not lose hope.

“Brothers and sisters, my name is Kilmar Abrego Garcia,” he said. “And I always want you to remember that today, I can say with pride, that I am free and have been reunited with my family.”

I’m teaching a class this semester, the first session of which is this morning, on the current crisis of the American legal system. I see this as a crisis of meaning — what and how does the law mean? — a crisis of judicial legitimacy, closely related to the first — and ultimately a crisis of liberal democracy.

I plan to begin by announcing some bad news and good news. You can probably guess the bad news. The good news is that this is an extremely interesting topic, although perhaps most so in the sense of the proverbial (apocryphal?) Chinese curse.

An interesting meta-question is how one is supposed to go about teaching a class on this subject — which does seem to me to be something that ought to be touched on directly within American law schools at the moment — in a politically “neutral” way. It seems to me that political neutrality is something that’s both impossible and undesirable to maintain, in a situation in which questions such as “is liberal democracy collapsing in America?” are inherently political down to the last turtle.

We’ll see how it goes.