Trump’s lawyers claim they’ve found a loophole that will allow Trump to ship immigrants overseas to be tortured.
Federal law states that the United States shall not “expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture.” This law implements a treaty, known as the Convention Against Torture, which the United States ratified more than three decades ago.
Federal regulations, moreover, provide that even after an immigration judge has determined that a noncitizen may be deported to another country, that judge’s order “shall not be executed in circumstances that would violate Article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.” And those regulations also establish a process that immigrants can use to raise concerns with an immigration judge that they may be tortured if sent to a specific country.
The Trump administration, however, claims it has discovered a loophole that renders all of these legal protections worthless, and is now asking the Supreme Court to explicitly give it the authority to make use of that loophole in order to enact its immigration policies.
The fact that the riots have only just started, and for something that has been going on for months, says a lot about the citizens of the US. I have no faith in any of you.
People really don’t want to believe that there is no electoral solution anymore. People really don’t want to believe that it’s too late to save the illusion of peace any longer. This is a late af wake up call to how incredibly fucked we are, and many people will still hit snooze.
For what it’s worth, speech doesn’t mean as much anymore, as we now live in a time where violence is the dominant form of power. For this reason, peaceful protests will do little, and mass riots can easily help the oppressors escalate even further. Fighting the incredibly militarized federal and local governments is practically untenable. Over half a century of cowardly libs empowering anti-riot forces has made this a nightmare scenario for resistance.
There is so little recourse at this point that the best thing we can do is prioritize not dying so we can outlive Trump’s reign. We’ll need luck and cooperation to survive the infectious diseases, natural disasters, and economic devastation that the state will do less than nothing to mitigate. It’s up to us to support each other, because there is no social contract left.
Reiteration that the US system is set up to quell citizen action by design. Also, relatively, what has happened in LA so far pales in comparison to riots in the past, it is mostly just protests with occasional flare-ups by agents provocateur or the random crazy. Media then takes the sound/video bites of that handful of events, and make it look like the whole thing is like that.
Notes:
It isn’t like what was seen in Germany or South Korea a while back where the country is small, travel is easy, and everyone can go protest without fear of losing their job/health/life just by acting upon their legal right to protest. If you’ve never driven on the ground across the USA, you have absolutely no scale of scope on how massive it is.
However the US ends up playing out, it will be vastly different from first-world nations. Speculating that things will have to get much worse before people have to start risking their lives to then risk their lives just to protest. By then, it might very well be fight time.
First-world nations should probably (and they are) just prep for the US not being available, or an ally, and probably leaning in on the US being an antagonist for the foreseeable future. This cancer is going to continue to be a rough ride for the entire planet. Don’t blame the US citizens though. Citizens are a pawn in this oligarchy. Even the ones that were deceived into voting for a senile potted plant. That delusion they teach kids that, “even you can be President some day!” are just words to make people think they have control in the current system, so they don’t try to find out they actually don’t.
Other tidbits:
Just to add to your point of the size of the US, I recently traveled from San Bernardino California to Salmon Idaho in my 2001 Toyota Tacoma. Even avoiding high traffic areas like Utah it was still rough, that’s with it being a more or less straight line through Nevada, only 20 fucking hours.
Honestly I suspect that this will be both a boon and a curse for resistance as time goes on, since it does heavily restrict how fast you can physically move people around. This means any response time by the feds is going to be decently lagged out.
I am also annoyed that those exact thoughts about boon/curse had to enter my brain, but storing it in long-term planning just the same.
As an American, I have no faith in any of us either.