Depravity and normalcy

Spring baseball, exciting TV, suspension of constitutional rights, and attacks on the independent judiciary.

Apr 27, 2025

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A child asylum seeker cries at the border in 2018 as her mother is taken into custody. - John Moore/Getty

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Now, on to the news…

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The Chicago Cubs are playing some pretty good baseball. There’s a lot of fantastic TV shows to watch right now, like The Jackal. A young man named Liam is making an impressive run on Jeopardy. The economy appears to no longer be balancing on the brink of collapse.

Life, in other words, can feel relatively normal if you look at it the right way. Meanwhile, the Trump regime — and it is a regime, by the very definition of the word — is behaving in ways that are very abnormal for a U.S. presidential administration. We’ve seen some of what is now going on here happen elsewhere, and with the lens of history have always understood those things to be bad. Evil is another word that has been used to describe the actions of authoritarian regimes in the less free parts of the world.

But most of us, for the moment, are free. So the actions of the Trump regime are obscured by the relative normalcy of this American spring — fun TV, good baseball, Jeopardy excellence. Take a look just under the surface of this obscuring calm, though, and there are signs that we continue to head down a path of depraved oppression.

On Friday, the regime utilized its most aggressive law enforcement agencies, DHS and ICE, in arresting a judge in Wisconsin and deporting three children — all U.S. citizens — in Louisiana. What would be the obviously illegal, unconstitutional and simply bad actions taken by the regime’s anonymous agents — their faces have been blurred in photos apparently released to friendly right-wing press — are somewhat obscured by the complexities of these two events. In Wisconsin, the judge allegedly facilitated the release of an undocumented immigrant that the regime’s officers wanted to arrest. In Louisiana, one of the three U.S. citizens deported, who were two, four and seven years old, is said to have been sent back to her country alongside her mother, at the mother’s own insistence.

That’s the story being told by the regime — a rogue judge in one case; a mother wanting to retain custody of her daughter in the case of the deported U.S. citizen children. The other side of these stories is that the judge lawfully refused to allow Trump’s agents to arrest a man who was not in court for anything related to his immigration status, and that the father of the 2-year-old objected to her deportation under the grounds that the child was born here, and therefore cannot be deported as a lawful U.S. citizen.

ICE agents allegedly ignored the father’s plea to allow his wife to speak to a lawyer, and deported the woman and her child to Honduras.

Fox News ran with this photo on the arrest of a judge in Wisconsin. Clearly obtained from sources within the Trump administration, the faces of government lawyers have been obscured.

This side of the story is the one that merits attention, because it represents a jarring escalation in the aggression and lawlessness of the Trump regime. Dig a little further, and you’ll see the abject inhumanity of the regime’s targeting of immigrants: one of the children deported was sent away without medication for a rare form of metastatic cancer they suffer with, which the regime’s agents knew about before sending the child into the night, according to the ACLU.

Such an act of senseless depravity makes me wonder, what else is this regime willing to do to innocents like children in order to prove their point on immigration?

Both cases — an immigrant in Wisconsin who allegedly beat his wife but was in court for the crime, and children in Louisiana who have done nothing besides being born to parents who are not citizens — shows that it doesn’t really matter what these people did or did not do. It’s not about their actions; it’s about who they are. And when you begin setting aside values and laws to go after a group of people because of who they are and not what they’ve done, well, history tells us where that can end up.

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It can be difficult to accept the twisted dichotomy of our current American life. Pay attention to all that we can distract ourselves with — baseball, TV, Jeopardy, or whatever your favorites are — and things can seem normal, even good, even peaceful. Pay too much attention to all the bad news and you can end up feeling very disheartened, even depressed, and often very angry. I understand that this is overwhelming. Lately, I have felt overwhelmed myself. That’s why it’s important for me to remember, as Timothy Beschloss wrote Saturday, that oft-overused metaphor — this is a marathon, not a sprint.

We are in a slowly-simmering constitutional crisis, which the episode of the arrested judge in Wisconsin makes clear. I’m no constitutional scholar, but when law enforcement agencies are battling judges and courts, I think that’s the definition of a constitutional crisis. Congress — made up of outnumbered Democrats and Trump-loyal Republicans — is unable and unwilling, respectively, to stop the Trump regime. Courts continue to stand in the way, although the arrest of the judge in Wisconsin feels like a major win for the regime in that ongoing battle.

More Doom on immigration

If the independent judiciary falls, I imagine our future looks something like law enforcement agencies loyal to Trump attempting to force his will on states and localities that refuse to do his bidding. That means law enforcement agencies facing off against each other, or clashing with military units deployed to enforce the regime’s demands. This would probably be enough for many Americans to take to the streets and make their own demands that this authoritarian madness come to an end.

We should actually be there now — we should be in the streets at this very moment, protesting the unlawful treatment of not just the undocumented migrants that the regime is targeting but, now, our fellow citizens who are children, no less. However, I understand why we’re not out en masse.

Widespread street protests, in my experience, require a single, galvanizing moment or cause — the killing of George Floyd, for instance. But with so much going on, and with the complexities involved in every act of authoritarianism like those we saw on Friday in Wisconsin and Louisiana, there is a lot of gray area and blurry lines. People need something black and white in order to mobilize in large numbers and try to send a message to the regime and its supporters that enough is enough.

We’re not quite there yet, but I have a feeling we will be. Something so obviously wrong, something that even some Trump supporters can’t stand by and dismiss or justify, will probably happen. If it doesn’t and if the courts fail us, Americans will have to overlook the blurred lines that have been crossed and take to the streets anyway.

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