CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What are our politicians and oligarchs up to?”)
❧ The story of the week has been the Trump administration’s open defiance of the Supreme Court to keep a man, with no criminal charges against him, in a notoriously abusive Salvadoran prison, which is fast approaching a constitutional crisis. The administration has acknowledged that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported because of “an administrative error.” The Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling, stating that the administration had to make efforts to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return. But instead of complying, Trump instead held a truly nauseating Oval Office press conference with El Salvador’s dictator Nayib Bukele, where both insisted, through shit-eating grins, that they were somehow both unable to bring Abrego Garcia home. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, just outright lied about what the Supreme Court said, claiming that it ruled in his favor when it didn’t.
Abrego Garcia, it should be emphasized, has not been convicted or even charged with a crime. The administration has claimed that he was a member of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang, but the strongest piece of evidence they have is that cops identified him in a Home Depot parking lot wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie they deemed “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture.” The other piece of evidence comes from a confidential informant who claimed Abrego Garcia was a member of MS-13 in New York, a state where his lawyers say he’s never lived.
This is all a bit beside the point, because the Trump administration’s main contention is that, because it shipped Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, the responsibility to bring him back is now out of their hands. If this is allowed to hold, it is essentially the end of the rule of law in America, such that it exists. It would mean that so long as the president ships someone off to a foreign prison before the courts can intervene, there is essentially nothing that can be done. But that seems to be the goal: Trump has said publicly that he wants to send American citizens to El Salvador next, and was even caught on a hot mic telling Bukele to “build about five more” concentration camps so he can send “homegrowns” there next. Trump has said the camps will be reserved for the “worst of the worst” American criminals. But he said that about the immigrants sent there, too, and most of them have proven to be entirely innocent. Moreover, the administration is making it very clear that it intends to charge its critics as terrorists, as “counterterrorism” official Sebastian Gorka said in a Newsmax interview. Speaking of Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen, who bravely traveled to El Salvador by himself to advocate for Garcia’s release, Gorka said that people who oppose his imprisonment were “on the side of terrorists” and suggested they were “technically aiding and abetting” criminals in violation of the law.
The decision to take the massive step of defying a Supreme Court order is clearly not about Abrego Garcia himself. There is a larger purpose here: To test the idea that the government can jail anyone they want for any reason. The courts may well declare Trump in criminal contempt, but without the ability to enforce that order, there is basically nothing that can be done. The only thing that remains is for Congress to act, which seems unlikely since it’s Republican-controlled. In that case, it’s on all of us to take to the streets to forcefully exercise the rights that are being threatened.
Senator Chris Van Hollen (right) traveled to El Salvador and met with Abrego Garcia yesterday, in a rare example of an elected Democrat doing something principled and useful. (Image: Sen. Van Hollen via Facebook)
In other news...
❧ Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has carried out a sweeping censorship campaign of pro-Palestine content at the direct request of Israel. According to data obtained by Drop Site News, Meta has complied with 94 percent of takedown requests coming from Israel, which made far more of them than any other government. Many of the posts were removed virtually automatically after Israel requested it and nearly 39 million were either removed or suppressed using automated takedowns. Most governments request takedowns for content made by their own citizens circulating in their own countries, but in Israel’s case, most of the content it had taken down was made by citizens of other countries including many Middle Eastern countries and even the United States.
So Meta was complicit not just with censorship, but cross-border censorship designed to limit exposure to any content remotely critical of Israel or sympathetic to Palestinians. Many of the employees in charge of this censorship effort have direct ties to the Israeli government, like Jordana Cutler, who is an adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu. She directed employees to review content mentioning the author Ghassan Kanafani, a spokesman for the Palestinian nationalist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who is considered one of the pioneers of Palestinian literature.
❧ The House GOP passed a bill that could disenfranchise millions of voters. The SAVE Act requires voters to show a birth certificate or passport matching their legal name in order to register to vote—documents that millions of American citizens don’t have, and which are costly to obtain. It also makes it much harder to register, eliminating online or mail in registration and requiring you to travel to a physical office to get on the voter rolls. The stated reason for this is to stop non-citizens from voting, but this is basically a non-existent problem. The real goal seems to be keeping poor voters (who may struggle to afford a passport) and married women (whose birth certificates often don’t reflect their name changes) from the ballot box. (Washington Post)
❧ THIS WEEK IN RIGHT-WING POPULISM: Trump is getting rid of a rule limiting credit card late fees to $8. The rule, put in place by the Biden Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, was estimated to save households $10 billion per year. But under the stewardship of Project 2025 architect Russ Vought, the CFPB (which now apparently stands for “Corporation Financial Protection Bureau”) backed a lawsuit by the banking and financial industry. Now credit card fees may shoot back up to four times what they were under the Biden rule, and the Trump admin is hoping to next target its rules limiting overdraft fees. (New York Times)
❧ Following mass layoffs by the Trump administration, the FDA is reportedly ending routine food inspections and outsourcing their duties to states. The government claims federal inspections are redundant, but only about a third of inspections are done by states, and they tend to be the lower-risk ones. (CBS)
With the FDA no longer doing inspections, anything goes.
❧ The North Carolina Republican Party is openly trying to steal a Supreme Court election by throwing out legal votes. The election was held back in November 2024 and was won by incumbent Democrat Alison Riggs by just 734 votes. But instead of conceding, her opponent, Judge Jefferson Griffin, launched a flurry of litigation—targeting specifically the four counties where his opponent performed better (subtle). The state Supreme Court rejected his larger efforts to throw out 67,000 ballots of those who did not fully fill out their social security info. But the four Republicans ruled that 5,000 ballots cast by overseas military ballots must be thrown out unless each voter can prove their identity within 30 days, something they were never told they’d be required to do. Griffin has not actually demonstrated that anyone voted in this election illegally. But because the election was so close, throwing these votes out could make a difference between winning and losing. If it works (and probably even if it doesn’t), expect to see even more of these efforts by Republicans to just challenge every election loss in hopes that something breaks. (New Republic)
❧ Police in Idaho fatally shot a non-verbal autistic teenager. Victor Perez was 17 years old, and he had both autism and cerebral palsy. Earlier this month, police in Pocatello, Idaho responded to a 911 call that said he was holding a knife and staggering around his backyard, possibly chasing someone—but when they arrived to his home, it took them only 12 seconds to open fire on Perez, inflicting at least nine bullet wounds and putting him into a coma. On April 12, he died in the hospital. This is a terrible example of exactly why police in this country need to be disarmed and replaced with mental health workers who can help, not kill, people who call for them. (Associated Press)
In other news…
❧ New York is supposed to close the notorious prison at Rikers Island by 2027, but Mayor Eric Adams is dragging his feet. Despite claims by the mayor’s administration that they are “working tirelessly” to close the prison after a city council ordinance, its population has swelled, and five people have died there or just after leaving this year. Between this and AOC, it seems that the phrase “working tirelessly” means something different to New Yorkers than it does to everyone else. (Gothamist)
❧ A horrific video has spread of a grinning ICE agent in Massachusetts smashing an asylum seeker’s car window in order to arrest him while he was waiting for his lawyer. Not only was the man, Juan Mendez, in the U.S. legally with no criminal record and arrested without a warrant, his lawyer alleges that he wasn’t even the target ICE was looking for. (NBC)
In this acid-tongued satire from 1982, Joe Strummer and his fellow British punks issue a “Public Service Announcement, with guitar!” that sounds all too familiar as the Trump government shreds whatever remains of our civil liberties:
You have the right… not to be killed!
Murder is a crime!
Unless it is done… by a policeman! Or an aristocrat!
You have the right… to free speech!
As long as you’re not dumb enough to actually TRY it!
❧ A Trump executive order to increase U.S. timber production by 25 percent may lead to all 18 national forests in California being partially cut down. Environmental groups have said the administration is ignoring legal protections and endangered species laws in order to line the pockets of the lumber industry. (Los Angeles Times)
❧ Meanwhile, a prominent scientist is in the sticky pockets of Big Maple! Navindra Seeram, a biomedical researcher and dean of the School of Pharmacy at the University of New England, has spent the last decades writing studies extolling maple syrup and pitching it as a miracle product: a “hero ingredient” and “champion food” that can ward off cancer, Alzheimer’s, and (hilariously) diabetes. It turns out he was being bankrolled by Canada’s maple syrup industry and both the U.S. and Canadian governments. (New York Times)
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Ecuador held the second round of its elections last weekend and the Trumpist banana magnate and incumbent president Daniel Noboa was re-elected, but not everyone is convinced the election was legitimate. Despite polls almost uniformly predicting a dead heat, Noboa defeated his progressive challenger, Luisa González, by more than 11 points. But Gonzalez did not accept the result, alleging that the huge disparity between what polls predicted and the final vote tally was a sign of “grotesque fraud,” though they have not yet produced concrete evidence. She also alleged that Noboa did not follow the proper procedures for running for office: Ecuador’s electoral law forbids a president from remaining in office while campaigning, but Noboa did anyway, and Gonzalez claims he used the levers of state power to distribute checks to poor constituencies in exchange for their votes.
Across Latin America, opinion is split among progressive leaders over whether to recognize the results. The presidents of Chile, Guatemala, and Uruguay all quickly congratulated Noboa. But Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum and Columbia’s Gustavo Petro have backed claims of fraud, with the latter also pointing to the presence of the military at election sites as a sign that the election was unfair. (People’s Dispatch)
For now, this guy and his huge book still have a firm grip on power in Ecuador.
❧ As Trump has begun torching America’s relationship with its trading partners, Chinese President Xi Jinping has smelled an opportunity. He toured Southeast Asia this week, meeting with leaders in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Cambodia—all of which just got slapped with tariffs by Trump—in an attempt to offer up China as a more stable trading partner than the U.S. At this moment, it’s hard to disagree with him. (Associated Press)
❧ The International Court of Justice is hearing a genocide case against the United Arab Emirates for its role in the Sudanese civil war. The UAE has been accused of being “complicit in the commission of genocide” for its arming of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militants, who have committed numerous war crimes against Sudanese civilians, including murder, torture and sexual enslavement of ethnic minority groups. If found guilty, the UAE would be forced to pay reparations and stop funding the RSF. This would be a major step towards ending this horrific conflict. However, it should be noted that the entity bringing the case against the UAE is the Sudanese government, which has committed its own fair share of human rights abuses. They must also be held to account. (The Guardian)
❧ And in some desperately needed good news, General Motors workers in Mexico just won a record pay increase, standing their ground even after the company attempted to use Trump’s tariff threats as a justification to lowball them. (Labor Notes)
CRAB FACT OF THE WEEK
Hermit crabs have a housing market just like humans…but the inequality is not nearly as bad as it is for us!
In 1986, social scientist Ivan Chase observed that when a hermit crab leaves behind its shell after outgrowing it, a new one quickly takes its place. In a 2019 paper, he explained that crabs have a very sophisticated process for exchanging shells. They operate using “custody chains”: One crab abandons its shell and a smaller one moves in, a smaller crab takes its shell and so-on, often for three or four crabs at a time.
Chase was curious whether crabs distributed “property” in the same way as humans. He took 300 crabs and allowed them to exchange their shells and then he weighed the shells they left behind.
What he found was that there was some inequality in how shells were distributed: The heaviest and largest shells were largely confined to a small crab elite—just 1 percent of the crabs controlled 3 percent of the total “shell weight,” while the majority lived in somewhat undersized shells. The New York Times covered this in 2019 with the headline “Even Hermit Crabs Have Wealth Inequality.” But crabs are practically living in a socialist utopia compared to humans—half of the global wealth in human society is owned by less than a hundred people. In other words, Chase did not find the “Crab Bezos” he was searching for, instead just a few petite bourgeois Mr. Krabses.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson,Lily Sánchez, and Alex Skopic. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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