Night and Fog

The Machine Has Been Refueled

The machine whirs in the dark.

It takes Kilmar Abrego Garcia in the night, bundles him onto a plane, and deposits him in a country where a court has already determined he faces persecution. When caught, the government shrugs. "This removal was an error," they say, before adding the knife twist: nothing can be done to bring him back.

(See: nothing will be done to bring him back.)

I want you to eschew images of cattle cars or midnight knocks from your conception of what the darkest time in America will be comprised of.

I promise banality.

I promise bureaucratic "errors" that somehow always target the politically inconvenient.

I promise evil that can barely keep your attention span.

This, my friends, is Nacht und Nebel - night and fog.

You are living it.

Can you feel it clinging to your skin?

Are you brave enough to see in the dark?

Another One

Garcia’s case is not incidental. It is predictable now. How many names do you already recognize from the headlines? Mahmoud Khalil, Rasha Alawieh, and countless others, turned into a vanishing act that tests another boundary, stretches another limit of executive power.

Each name etched in their visage’s silence at the slowly emptying dinner table.

Garcia was deported despite a judge's explicit order barring removals. His deportation flight took off after Judge Boasberg demanded flights like it be stopped. The plane flew anyway. The law spoke, and the administration simply covered its ears.

The Machine Runs Fast and Quiet

We like to imagine America wrapped in constitutional guardrails, protected by judicial review and public outrage.

But what happens when courts become suggestion boxes?

When judges issue orders that are treated as optional reading material?

The administration didn't appeal Boasberg's ruling. They didn't contest Sorokin's order to keep Alawieh in the country.

They simply did what they wanted and betted that all we would do is be horrified.

Their bet is paying off.

This isn't accidental. I must make that clear.

The machinery of disappearance is being built methodically, in plain sight Senior Justice Department officials openly admit: "Our end game is all hands on deck, trying everything" and "Everything we're doing, we're gaming out how the Supreme Court gets to decide."

This, my friends, is what a governmental siege looks like.

Stifle Yourself

"But it's just immigrants," the comfortable will say, as if rights are a luxury for citizens only. Yesterday it was campus activists negotiating for protesters. Today it's Garcia, whose wife recognized him in a video of shackled prisoners being paraded by Salvadoran authorities.

Who's next when the machinery runs this smoothly? Can you really expect that you would be able to evade the well-oiled gears?

"Constitutional protections will save us," the optimists insist. But history whispers a darker truth: constitutional protections shine brightest in law school casebooks and dimmest in moments of actual crisis. By the time courts find their backbone, the damage is done. Don’t believe me? Ask the people who grew up in Manzinar how worthwhile ideals are.

What makes Garcia's case the tipping point is the government's brazen admission. They acknowledge the "error" while simultaneously claiming powerlessness to fix it. The mistake is admitted; the remedy is denied. The machine runs on its own momentum now, beyond the reach of courts, beyond the reach of apology.

Historical parallels to Nacht und Nebel are impossible to ignore: targeted removals of political opponents, disappearances without due process, deliberate obfuscation, isolation from legal help, and the creation of an atmosphere where fear does the censorship work for free.

Tell me, where do you seriously disagree with this comparison at this point?

This is not a rhetorical question.

The Fog is Rising

If Garcia remains in El Salvador, where the administration found he would likely face torture or persecution, then the precedent is set. The night will have fallen because we will admit that the machinery of disappearance works, and it requires no secret police or midnight raids to process humans into paperwork and judges into spectators.

The fog will have become a cloud that we are all blinded by, rising not from marshes but from unmarked government vehicles, immigration detention centers, and airports.

The only question left is who will vanish into it next.