The Memory Hole

I have edited this intro innumerable times because time keeps on moving too quickly and I’m trying to stay current. It's now April 19, 2025 and within the last few weeks, the self-proclaimed “world's coolest dictator,” popped up and did a press conference with higher ups in the Trump administration. They laughed about disappearing a man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and mused about doing it to Americans next.

In the recent few weeks the Supreme Court of the United States has been waffling about whether the United States government, under the authority of a president who has invoked the Alien Enemies Act, has the ability to deport anyone that they want to what is functionally a concentration camp called CECOT in El Salvador, although as of today. At first, their commentary seemed to say that if they wrongfully imprison someone, then that someone should just lawyer up and file a habeas corpus claim in the district that they’re held. There is no “district” there, of course. CECOT is a megaprison labor camp with a “Zero Idleness program” (i.e. absolutely batshit euphemism for slavery) run by the government of fucking El Salvador. The very same government of El Salvador whose justice minister said people held there would never return home. The very same prison camp that the U.S. government is paying the El Salvador government $6 million for the use of. Trump has said multiple times recently that he would love sending American citizens to this very same place. We are a few more weeks away from the administration acknowledging, in a court filing, in front of the whole world, that sent someone to El Salvador by mistake who had protected legal status. But oops! They can’t get him back because now he’s in the custody of the government of El Salvador. The government we’re paying. The government that has no intention of releasing anyone.

In the weeks surrounding this, the government has waged another vicious deportation campaign - this one, against immigrant scholars who had the audacity to question U.S. foreign policy around Israel. Some of these immigrants had green cards and various kinds of legal status. Many of them were doing important work in their various fields. One was detained by plainclothes agents who ignored his legal status and the pleas of his wife (Mahmoud Khalil). Another one disappeared from the Boston area and sent to Virginia by government agents who wore masks and refused to be identified (Rumeysa Öztürk). We are just a few weeks into a trade war, started by the United States government and its figurehead/president/dictator, that is upending economies across the globe. We’re playing footsie with tariffs. Are they on? Are they off? Nobody knows.

Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States is a lot of things. Upsetting, dangerous, ruinous, nonsensical, a ticket to disaster, the end of separation of powers as we knew it, and a thing that has put us into a constitutional crisis. It is all of those things, but it should not be surprising. Sadly, it is for so many of us, and not out of ineptitude or clumsiness or any other shortcoming of ours. This was all quite deliberate.

The purpose of this article is to dive into how these punches were telegraphed, and why so many reasonable, intelligent, and thoughtful people couldn't see them. Really, we've been inching in this direction for decades, but much like the frog in the pot of water that slowly heats to a boil, each incremental change in temperature doesn't feel like much at all, really. At least until it does. When you've lived through as much upheaval as we all have for at least the last twenty five years, it's hard to keep track of it all. Survivorship and normalcy bias make it hard to truly believe that we'd repeat history. To top it off, our collective memory is often so short, especially when things are intentionally made unclear by dishonest people.

The whole situation we're in brings to mind the Steve Bannon classic, “flood the zone with shit.” Put the country on information overload. Current OMB overlord Russ Vought, bearing the name of the evil corporation from (comic book and TV show) The Boys, said he would like to do this to the people who work for the federal government. He wanted to make them feel traumatized, afraid, and unable to act. So far, with the help of delusional billionaire tech bro dipshit Elon Musk, he's been pretty damn successful.

He, as many others within the intellectual sector of the right, understands a powerful principle: working memory is like juggling. Suppose everyone can juggle a little. Your average juggler, a couple of balls, no problem. Three, four..it's hard work, but it's doable! Start throwing in seven or more, then ten, twenty, and a hundred. People can't deal with the exponential increase in information. They start to have a hard time figuring out if they're juggling balls or bowling pins or knives. Your brain can only work with so much information at once, and if there's too much of it, you won't know which things to remember.

Keeping the balls in the air requires a little curiosity, a lot of media literacy, a broad knowledge base, and institutions dedicated to the truth, at all costs. Ulterior motives need not apply.

You all see where this can go wrong (every part of it).

There is, of course, another angle to this - Trump and everyone around him are known bullshitters. They do not care if what they say is true or not. Take Elon for example: he bluffs about everything under the sun, from his trades, to shitcoins, to his ability to play video games, to his weird baby compound in Texas, and all the way to his company’s strategies. He has said for over a decade now that we'd have Martian colonists in just a few years. His Hyperloop hype cycle was merely a distraction to keep California from investing in public transit, so that he could keep selling his overpriced electric shitboxes to rubes.

Trump, however, is a different breed of bullshitter. He lies about facts, but rarely about his own motives. He spent the entirety of 2017-2021 trying to do horrible things and being thwarted by the minimal amount of ethical backbone left in guys like Barr and Mattis and Pence. These are people who agreed with his ideals, and the endpoints that he desired, but not his methods of getting there. When someone is continually thwarted the way he was, and when the people around him were so dedicated to disinformation that may have seemed transparent to some people, it became impossible to differentiate between malice, stupidity, or some terrifying combination of the two in the people running the show. No one without personal knowledge can really say who the grifters are, as opposed to the true believers. Some bullshitters become powerful enough to bullshit themselves, and at that point, whether or not they're genuine becomes indecipherable.

That's sadly irrelevant now. He's hired loads of sycophants. Surrounded himself with people that figuratively and literally refer to him as daddy. This has unleashed the rabid dog, America's own mad emperor Nero, to do what he wants with impunity this time. There are things that have been suggested that would upend so much more of the world than where we're at now, and we're already in what experts call “deep shit.”

Perhaps the most concerning element of what's going on today is the lack of due process, especially for people who aren't citizens. We'll start by taking a step back by a decade, to 2015. During the primary for the 2016 election, Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, and said some ”might be nice people”. That gave him the fig leaf he needed to go full-swing on pushing for human-rights violating mass deportations and deliberately cited that one specific government operation from the Eisenhower administration. You know the one.

He suggested deporting all undocumented people in the US within two years. At the time that amounted to roughly 11 million people.The ACLU, during that era, calculated that deporting people at that rate would mean deporting 15,000 people a day, all 365 days of the year. There were less than 300 immigration judges in the country at that time, which complicates matters. The ACLU was likely generous with the math there, and maybe their figures don't fully explain the scope of just how horrific this plan is, and what lengths people would have to go to in order to pull it off.

For each judge, in 2 years, they likely only work 5 days a week, and you've got 52 weeks, but probably around 20-30 days off between vacations and holidays. At most, we're looking at 480 work days over those two years, with that considered. Multiply that by the 273 judges they had, and you've got 131,430 working hours during that promised 2 year time frame. Split among the 11,000,000 (11 million) estimated undocumented people, and you're looking at 83 deportations per day, per judge, or just over 10 per hour. At just shy of six minutes of consideration for a case, no one reasonable can pretend that amounts to due process. Most court cases of this type take a number of hours. It's absurd to believe that appropriate evidence could even be presented in less time than that.

Editor’s note: this is napkin math from hell.

60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley rightfully told Trump, “There is something called ‘civil rights,’” in reference to due process on this topic at the time. Trump's retort was, “There's also something called ‘we have a country.’” That is not necessarily the most adequate response when someone is talking to you about civil rights.

In 2017 and literally every session of Congress (editor’s note: each one of those words is a separate link, one for each session) since then, one Republican congress person or another has proposed a bill called the “Criminal Alien Gang Member Removal Act,” and it does exactly what Trump has set out to do with the Alien Enemies Act. Trump’s administrations have supported this act. The “CAGMRA” is consistent with the platforms he ran on. The act states that a consular officer, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Attorney General “knows” OR “has reason to believe” that someone is or was a member of a criminal gang, as defined in the law, or participated in the activities of said gang, or things that might aid the gang.

That language is vague enough for the government to determine that any immigrant is part of a criminal gang, and therefore subject to deportation.

“Reason to believe” is an incredibly low hurdle to jump over, as being shown now, in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and many others. The administration has sent over 200 people to the aforementioned prison in El Salvador. Trump claims that they are Venezuelan migrants who were members of a gang called Tren de Aragua, unless they’re Venezuelan, and then he instead insists that they’re members of MS-13. They did not present evidence for why they believed this to be the case, except on limited cases, where the evidence was flimsy. Otherwise they’ve claimed that the evidence was privileged information for national security reasons, which of course was bullshit. A recent article from CBS found that criminal records could not be found for at least 75% of those sent to the prison in this way.

Incidentally, this isn’t “deportation,” no matter how much Trump says it is. Deportation is when someone is sent back to their country of origin. This is “extraordinary rendition,” where people from one country are not sent back to their country of origin, but to a third country, to which they often have no legal connection or legal representation. If someone is brought out of the place where they intended to be to a place where no human rights laws truly apply, anything can happen to them. By “happen,” of course, I mean “be done,” because none of this is a passive process, despite what people who are “just following orders,” people who are giving the orders, or some of the more gutless members of the press would like you to believe. Atrocities must be committed by real people, and making them seem like naturally-occurring events is a way to make people feel helpless to stop them.

Extraordinary rendition is something that the U.S. government has done before, especially during the “War on Terror.” Guantanamo Bay, a prison and Naval base that the U.S. owns and operates at the Southeastern end of Cuba was filled with people who were renditioned, often from the Middle East. It’s incredibly important to state that people were sent to Guantanamo to be tortured during that time. Guantanamo’s peak inmate population at just under 650 in 2003, during the administration of George W. Bush. Its use was scaled back gradually over the years, to the point where it had only 15 detainees in January of this year.

Never missing an opportunity to hurt people who are foreign to him, Donald Trump has begun to send migrants to Guantanamo, as he vowed to do. This echoes the unhinged desires of the QAnon movement, which promised a time referred to as “The Storm,” wherein God King Trump would line up his enemies and send them to Guantanamo Bay. The enemies would be the Democrats and a cabal of pedophiles and human traffickers. People sent to CECOT, including very specifically Kilmar Abrego Garcia, are already being called traffickers. Maybe that's coincidental, but this administration knows how to play to their base, so I doubt that very much.

To reiterate, the precedent for all of this was set by the Bush administration. Many people back then were ridiculed as “terrorist-sympathizers” for suggesting that our use of extraordinary rendition was an affront to human rights. It should never go unsaid that Bush, and every administration since then, laid the groundwork for Trump’s deportation regime. After 9-11, surely a terrifying event for many people, it was easy to manufacture consent. Due process is easy to deny to “terrorists” captured in a war half a world away even if those terrorists are Uigher refugees or random shepherds. Reading through news articles from that era is like looking at a funhouse mirror: it's a little distorted, but fully recognizable.

In 2018, Trump brought Guantanamo-style assaults on human rights home. He very vocally called for not giving due process to undocumented immigrants. But that’s probably not what you remember. It’s more likely you remember the horrors of what was colloquially called “Kids in Cages,” the family separation policy. It was verified that this policy was the product of Trump’s advisor and speech writer Stephen Miller’s particular brand of cruelty. Miller has a long history of connections with the kinds of anti-immigrant thinking that are very specifically and explicitly championed by white supremacists and white nationalists. He sent white nationalist propaganda to other people in the administration, and fed into every racist, xenophobic, nativist impulse that Trump had. He was and is one of many devils whispering in Trump's ear, and perhaps the worst of them.

Miller’s involvement in the first administration was lost in the memory-hole for many people, including people on the left who rightly hated the policy. At the time a lot of reasonable people believed that Obama was responsible for the family separation policy, partially because Trump and everyone in his administration said as much, and partially because Obama deported more people than Trump, including on a per-unit-time basis (i.e. more per year).

The Miller origin of family separation points to the actual desires of the people doing it. It's not about “law and order.” It's about building an ethnostate and crushing dissent. It's about how cruelty and excessive force is an effective tactic at breaking the wills of people who might step out of line. But, in our terrifying adventures with the pandemic, the uprising against racialized violence from police, and January 6th, people forgot the details. The devil was there, for sure.

The thing that was forgotten in the Bush era, as it is now, is that the fifth amendment, in its text, says that “no person” shall be deprived of due process. It's not ambiguous. It doesn't say “no citizen,” or “no person with legal status.” It's clear and unambiguous, and the use of things like the Alien Enemies Act, or the exceptions for being within 100 miles of a border or at an airport or wherever else should have always been lawless. The constitution is lacking in so many respects, wrong in others, but this one thing should have been so clear so long ago. These kinds of policies led to the internment of Japanese Americans, Guantanamo, and so many other atrocities.

My proposal is two-fold: one, let us return to that stance, that no human being shall be deprived of due process, when interacting with anyone from the U.S., if it still exists in the future. Two, let's start to actually take some good notes, save articles, journal a bit, and try to remember the things that happen. Not every connection we draw will be correct, and we don't want to end up being like the meme of Charlie Kelly from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with all the strings on the board, but being able to understand cause and effect in politics is much much better than being swept up in the tides of chaos without so much as a clue how to swim. We can't keep letting the important details get sucked into the memory hole. We can't afford to forget things if these are the consequences.