Scenes from the Trump II Era
Over the past few months, certain moments in federal courthouses have lingered with me that I’ve been reluctant to share here because I haven’t wanted to over-personalize, or in some instances de-personalize, the stories of the Trump II presidency.
Yesterday it was Kilmar Abrego Garcia scarfing a Jimmy John’s sandwich in the hallway outside a Nashville courtroom while reporters, lawyers, and staff milled about during a break in the hearing on his claim of vindictive prosecution.
Last fall it was the pensive faces of James Comey’s wife and daughters and son-in-law stuck in the hall with a crowd of reporters and onlookers waiting for the Alexandria, Virginia courtroom to be unlocked for a hearing on his vindictive prosecution claim.
Last summer, it was Lee Gelernt, the ACLU lawyer, coming down to DC and single-handedly defending the original Alien Enemies Act detainees in a historic case that pits the executive branch against the judicial branch, before packing up his things and walking alone out of the courthouse for his return trip to NYC.
What makes each of these moments linger is their essential smallness and the basic fragility of the effort to confront the Trump II presidency. What confounds me about them is the challenge of conveying them to you without valorizing the participants or reducing them to stale archetypes. But it goes a little deeper than that.
In covering the Trump II rampage, I keep bumping up awkwardly against a comforting notion that so many of us have long harbored as a way of making sense of this complicated, dynamic, sprawling world: Someone must be taking care of that. At best, we use it to project a sense of order onto things, an order that simply does not exist. At worst, we use it to distance and excuse ourselves from unpleasantness.
Take the AEA case. I feel certain that most of you take comfort in the notion that the ACLU is out there fighting the good fight, marshaling resources, and serving as the tip of the spear against the worst civil liberties abuses of the Trump II presidency. And if not the ACLU then some other advocacy group. It’s true as far as it goes, but it just doesn’t go very far.
Like every advocacy organization, the ACLU is under-resourced and stretched thin. It’s a minor miracle that it even got into court before the AEA flights took off last March. In seeking class action status for the case, it cast a broad net to try to protect all of the potential AEA detainees, but in most instances it didn’t know who exactly these far-flung, diverse Venezuelan nationals were, and it didn’t have the means to quickly find out. After the detainees were freed from El Salvador’s CECOT and flown home to Venezuela, the ACLU then had to try to track them all down, with limited success.
You might protest: But the ACLU has someone in charge of all that. They must have a system in place. Someone must be taking care of that.
I’m not picking on the ACLU. I’ve written about Justice Connection, the advocacy group formed early last year to support current and recently exiled DOJ employees. Former DOJer Stacey Young, its founder and executive director, joined me onstage for last month’s Morning Memo Live event. I feel sure that when I write about Justice Connection and hold Young out as an expert on DOJ politicization, it conveys that someone is taking care of that. But Justice Connection, with all respect, is a threadbare, brand-new organization, with a paucity of full-time staff. They’re doing what they can, but they’re not under any illusion about their own limitations.
Another of the panelists at last month’s event was former DOJer Kyle Freeney, who works for another brand-new organization: the Washington Litigation Group, a nonprofit legal firm trying to fill the void left as Big Law pulled back on pro bono work in the most controversial Trump II cases. It didn’t just spring into being. The people involved — lawyers, former judges, funders — recognized that no one was taking care of that. So they started it up last summer.
A year ago Abrego Garcia was a union sheet metal apprentice in the Maryland suburbs of D.C. A whirlwind year later — ICE detention, deportation to prison in El Salvador, U.S. detention on criminal charges, and further ICE detention before his eventual release — he is a Trump world pariah and an internationally recognized figure. But none of what unfolded after his initial deportation would have happened the way it did without a retinue of lawyers in his immigration and criminal cases leaping in to defend him. A mix of pro bono and advocacy group intervention turned his cases into causes célèbres. No one had to take care of that but someone did.
I’ve not been able to shake the feeling that most journalism, my own included, reinforces the notion that someone is taking care of that even as so much of it endeavors to sound the alarm that no one is taking care of that. It feels especially pronounced in the Trump II era as institutions crumble and the challenge before us is laid bare. It’s just us.
ICYMI
My report from Nashville on the testimony of too-credulous federal prosecutor Robert McGuire in the vindictive prosecution hearing for Abrego Garcia and more on what went down in court here:
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That’s a Wrap from Nashville
I managed to catch a little live music last night in Nashville. So let me send you into the weekend with Chapel Bell, whose sound lured me in after a very long day:
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