‘Donald Trump’s Disappearance of Abrego Garcia Is the Canary in the Coal Mine for American Freedom’

Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s counterterrorism adviser, recently declared on NewsMax that Americans should be sorted into two categories: those who “love the President” and those who are “aiding and abetting” criminals. His rhetoric underscores an increasingly binary worldview in the White House that may soon escalate dramatically – and that other authoritarian regimes have deployed before. 

By Sunday, officials in the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security are expected to recommend that President Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, a move that would deploy federal troops for mass deportations. Hina Shamsi, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, has called the proposal “unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful.”

The invocation of the Insurrection Act would further militarise an increasingly unconstitutional and authoritarian state of affairs. Already, Legal foreign students have had their visas revoked for protesting genocide, Armed ICE officers have stormed neighborhoods, hospitals, even elementary schools and due process for deportees has been effectively abandoned. Through it all, White House officials have denied, twisted, or ignored basic facts in service of an increasingly authoritarian vision of state power.

The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia became symbolic of Trump’s shift towards authoritarianism. Deported to a Salvadoran gulag without due process, Garcia has been stripped of the basic liberties guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment. 

The administration has made conflicting claims: that he’s a dangerous MS-13 gang member (a charge the Fourth Circuit Court ruled has “no evidence”), and simultaneously that his deportation was an “administrative error.” Despite a unanimous 9–0 Supreme Court ruling ordering the White House to “facilitate and effectuate” Garcia’s return, the US Government has made no effort to comply.

Instead, Trump met with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and ominously warned that “homegrown” American criminals may be next, suggesting Bukele might need to build “about five more” CECOTs. Bukele, whose Government Amnesty International describes as engulfing El Salvador in a “human rights crisis”, told reporters that to “liberate” 350 million Americans, you’ll “have to imprison some.” 

Legal analyst Chris Geitner has described Garcia’s detention as part of a broader strategy: “a Schrödinger’s box – quite literally, the CECOT prison is that box – where anyone can be sent under an agreement between the US and El Salvador, at which point the US Government can claim it no longer has any authority, because the person is in the custody of a foreign sovereign.”

“If they can get Abrego Garcia out of the box,” Geitner writes, “the plan does not work.”

Barbara McQuade, former US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, echoes Geitner’s concerns: “Like anyone in the territorial jurisdiction of the United States, Abrego Garcia is entitled to constitutional protections, including due process, which means notice and an opportunity to be heard before our liberty can be taken from us.”

“By spiriting him out of the country without either, he was denied that right. And if he can be denied that right, then so can any of us.”

Elora Mukherjee, a law professor at Columbia University, also puts it bluntly: “We are in a moment of constitutional crisis. What we’ve seen is an executive branch that is intent on pushing the bounds of its authority as far as possible – and now beyond the breaking point of our constitutional democracy.”

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned that the Government’s argument “implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including US citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of UC Berkeley School of Law and one of the country’s leading constitutional scholars, calls it the road to tyranny: “If there is a path towards authoritarianism in the United States, this is it.”

The precedent set by the Garcia case is stark: if the President can remove someone from US soil without charge, then refuse to return them by citing “foreign affairs,” the executive has essentially excused itself from the rule of law. 

These actions, taken together, paint a harrowing picture of how the Insurrection Act would be used, should it be invoked. Garcia’s case in particular sends a message to courts, to lawmakers, and to ordinary Americans: your rights are conditional, your protections are provisional, and if the regime decides you are the enemy, the law will not save you. Gorka’s assertion makes it clear how simple it is for that decision to be made. 

History offers cautionary parallels. Today in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos (Space for Memory and Human Rights) stands as a reminder of Argentina’s “Dirty War,” when the U.S.-backed military junta “disappeared” tens of thousands of political dissidents. Many of these political prisoners were abducted without due process, flown out over international waters, and dropped into the sea. 

Across Latin America to this day, a movement of ‘Madres de los Desaparecidos’ (mothers of the disappeared) commemorates and protests for justice for the countless innocent victims of state terror in 20th century dictatorships across the continent – including one large chapter in El Salvador. 

While the scale and methods differ, the underlying principle of disappearing detainees beyond judicial oversight is the same.

What Trump, Stephen Miller, Gorka and others are likely attempting is not a novel feat. Legal black holes where enemies of the regime can be cast and forgotten have existed before, and they carry consequences that last for generations. 

If the state can strip one man of his rights, it can strip them from anyone: protester or journalist, immigrant or citizen. Americans have a rapidly shrinking window in which to act to prevent this.