Forrest explains our taxonomy.

Damn it. They figured out our satellite strategy! Now we’ll have to think of some new way to thwart them. LOL.

​

By Erwin Chemerinsky and Laurence H. Tribe

Mr. Chemerinsky is the dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Tribe is an emeritus university professor of constitutional law at Harvard.

Of all the lawless acts by the Trump administration in its first two and a half months, none are more frightening than its dumping of human beings who have not had their day in court into an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador — and then contending that no federal court has the authority to right these brazen wrongs.

In an astounding brief filed in the Supreme Court on Monday, the solicitor general of the United States argued that even when the government concedes that it has mistakenly deported someone to El Salvador and had him imprisoned there, the federal courts are powerless to do anything about it. The Supreme Court must immediately and emphatically reject this unwarranted claim of unlimited power to deprive people of their liberty without due process.

That would seem to be the obvious response. It was Thomas Jefferson who called the right of habeas corpus to protect against unlawful detention one of the “essential principles of our government.”

Jefferson’s concerns are underscored by the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a lawful resident of the United States, whom the federal government admits it wrongly deported to El Salvador. He has been incarcerated in El Salvador along with some 200 Venezuelan migrants deported there last month by the Trump administration, which says they were involved in criminal and gang activity.

On Friday, Judge Paula Xinis of the United States District Court in Maryland ordered Mr. Abrego Garcia’s return. In a subsequent opinion issued on Sunday, she wrote that “there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention or removal.” His detention, she added, “appears wholly lawless.”

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. 

One might think the Trump administration would at least try to correct its grievous mistake by attempting to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release through diplomatic channels. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has been called “a great friend of the United States” by Marco Rubio, President Trump’s secretary of state.

But no, the Trump administration does not seem willing to lift a finger to fix the calamity it created for Mr. Abrego Garcia and his family.

Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, responded to Judge Xinis’s order by saying the judge should contact President Bukele because “we are unaware of the judge having jurisdiction or authority over the country of El Salvador.” Her suggestion that a federal judge play the role of a diplomat, rather than provide legal relief to Mr. Abrego Garcia, is unworthy of any presidential administration.

Why hasn’t the Trump administration acted to secure Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release? After all, he is there because of a government screw-up.

The answer can only be that it is using this case to establish a truly chilling proposition: that no one can stop the Trump administration from imprisoning any people it wants anywhere else in the world. In its brief to the Supreme Court, the administration argues that the only remedy available to a person in custody is a writ of habeas corpus, a court order that a person in custody be brought before the court to determine if the detention is lawful. But the administration also contends that federal courts have no authority to issue such a writ when the person is held in a foreign prison.

There can be no doubt about what this means.

There would be nothing to stop the government from jailing its critics in another country and then claiming, as it is now, that the courts have no jurisdiction to remedy the situation. Armed with this power, the government would know that Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the F.B.I. or any federal law enforcement agency could apprehend any people, ignore the requirements for due process and ship them to El Salvador or any country that would take them. These individuals would have no legal recourse whatsoever from any American court. The administration could create its own gulags with no more judicial review than existed when Stalin did the same thing in the Soviet Union.

Judge Xinis ordered the government to return Mr. Abrego Garcia by 11:59 p.m. on Monday. The Supreme Court paused that order on Monday to allow the justices to review the matter. But it shouldn’t take much time for the court to conclude that every minute Mr. Abrego Garcia is wrongly incarcerated is a minute too long.

The Supreme Court also handed down a ruling on Monday in a case involving the Trump administration’s mid-March decision to remove noncitizens in the United States who are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua without any hearing at all. Five Venezuelans went to court to block the president’s plan, and a Federal District Court judge did just that. But roughly 200 Venezuelans were deported anyway. The administration has argued that, if it needed any authority to take that action beyond the power inherent in the presidency, such authority could be found in the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

But as Judge Karen Henderson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit explained in a March 26 decision concerning the deportation of those roughly 200 Venezuelans, that 1798 law was limited to formally declared wars or imminent military invasions of the United States. Until the Trump administration, the law had been invoked only three times — during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, when it was used to intern Americans of Japanese ancestry. That action has since been all but universally condemned as a shameful overreaction to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

By invoking the Alien Enemies Act, the government claims it can circumvent the usual procedures for deportation, including due process.

In an unsigned opinion, which the Supreme Court handed down on Monday, a 5-to-4 majority (with Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberals in the minority) said the Trump administration could continue to deport Venezuelan migrants using the 1798 law. But the court also said migrants fighting deportation in this case could challenge their detentions, though only through habeas corpus petitions, which it said needed to be filed in federal court in Texas, where they were held, not in Washington, D.C., where the government officials who made the decision on their fate are. The court said these individuals should be given notice and a hearing before being deported.

As for those who have already been deported to El Salvador and imprisoned there, it is troubling that the court did not speak to whether they can get any relief from the courts.

The justices did not answer critical questions like: Can the government use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 in this manner? Did the lower court have the authority to issue the order to stop individuals from being taken to El Salvador? Is there any legal basis for the Trump administration to put individuals in an El Salvador prison? And, crucial to Mr. Abrego Garcia’s pending case, will the court reject the Trump administration’s claim that no federal court can hear a habeas corpus petition of someone held in a foreign country?

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent, identified how much is at stake: “The implications of the government’s position” are “that not only noncitizens but also United States citizens could be taken off the streets, forced onto planes and confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress if judicial review is denied unlawfully before removal. History is no stranger to such lawless regimes, but this nation’s system of laws is designed to prevent, not enable, their rise.”

If the government can disappear any people it wishes, dump them in a Salvadoran dungeon and prevent any court in this country from providing relief, we all should be very, very afraid.

Meetup at the Clarity Café.

(Long post-LATimes)
Hiltzik: Annexation would be good for the U.S. - Los Angeles Times

Here’s Hiltzik’s tongue-in-cheek assessment of Felon 47’s quest to conquer more countries.

​

Vice President JD Vance arrives at the remote Pituffik Space Base in Greenland on March 28, 2025.

(Jim Watson / Pool Photo)

According to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, Greenland and Canada have everything to gain and nothing to lose from being annexed to the United States.

“Denmark hasn’t done a good job at keeping Greenland safe,” Vance said at America’s Pituffik Space Base in Greenland last week. Denmark, which oversees Greenland’s administration, hasn’t kept Greenland “safe from a lot of very aggressive incursions from Russia, China and other nations,” he added. 

Trump talks as though Canada’s becoming the 51st state would be an economic win-win for both countries.

We do not have uninsured or underinsured residents. We do not have different qualities of insurance depending on a person’s employment….All Canadians have health insurance and need rather than wealth is what drives access to care.

— Danielle Martin, expert on Canadian healthcare

Leaving these assertions aside, it’s proper to note that the influence exerted by annexed lands is a two-way street. 

And that’s why the U.S. should annex — needs to annex — both Greenland and Canada. Let’s start the process without delay.

The principal gain for Americans from making both countries part of the U.S. comes from their social policies. In both countries, they’re better than America’s in many respects. They cover more residents, provide greater benefits and have more support from political leaders across the partisan spectrum.

Let’s take a closer look at what Americans can learn from its putative new territories.

We’ll start with Canada. 

Like the United States, Canada provides old-age pensions, though unlike in the U.S. these are partially paid out of general tax revenues. Canadians also can receive unemployment relief and workers’ compensation. The difference between the effectiveness of the two countries’ government pension programs can be measured by comparing their poverty rates for residents ages 65 and over. In Canada it was 14.5% in 2019-2022, in the U.S. it was 23.1%.

There are several notable differences between the American and Canadian safety nets. One is a child benefit. Canada provides parents as much as $7,787 Canadian (about $5,438 in U.S. currency) per child for children through age 5, and $6,570 Canadian (about $4,600) for children ages 6-17. The benefit phases out for those with incomes over $67,000 (about $47,000).

The U.S. child tax credit is currently $2,000 a year per child and is scheduled to drop to $1,000 in 2026. It phases out for couples earning $400,000.

Perhaps the most significant difference concerns the countries’ government healthcare programs. Canada’s system is a single-payer program, with the government paying for most necessary care; households can buy private plans to cover services that aren’t part of the government system, such as vision and dental services and outpatient prescriptions. But all Canadians are covered by the government program.

American politicians have tied themselves into knots trying to find negative things to say about Canada’s universal single-payer healthcare system. 

A sterling example was provided by then-U.S. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who during a 2014 Senate hearing grilled Danielle Martin, a Canadian expert on healthcare policy, about the supposed shortcomings of the Canadian system. Burr homed in on Canadians’ most common complaint about their system: the long waits for some services, largely resulting from a shortage of primary care doctors.

“On average, how many Canadian patients on a waiting list die each year, do you know?” Burr asked Martin, with a smirk suggesting he had just unshipped a “gotcha.” Martin batted it right back: “I don’t, sir, but I do know that there are 45,000 in America who die waiting because they don’t have insurance at all.”

As Martin had said in her prepared statement: “We do not have uninsured or underinsured residents. We do not have different qualities of insurance depending on a person’s employment…. At substantially lower cost than in the U.S., all Canadians have health insurance and need rather than wealth is what drives access to care.”

The Canadian government pays for reproductive healthcare, including abortions. There are no gestational age restrictions, although most abortions are performed during the first trimester and those after 23 weeks require specialized care. There are no criminal penalties for performing abortions. 

Those are obvious differences from the American experience. By law, federal funds can’t be spent on abortions. Since the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision in 2022, individual states have imposed their own restrictions on abortion, sometimes by outlawing the procedure outright and even exposing those who perform abortions to criminal charges.

The consequences for maternal health in the U.S. have been horrific. In Canada, according to 2023 statistics, the maternal mortality rate per 100,000 live births was 12.22. The U.S. rate that year was 18.6. 

More worrying was a trend seen in Texas, among the states with a strict ban on abortions, where maternal mortality rose sharply to 28.5 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022, a year after Texas banned abortions.

The social safety net in Greenland is a bit harder to analyze. For the most part Greenlanders enjoy the benefits of Danish policies. 

Greenland’s social environment is also different from Denmark’s — its Indigenous population, which has its own social mores, is larger as a proportion of the population, and residents are concentrated in the giant island’s southwest. The island has a population of about 60,000, about a third of whom live in the capital, Nuuk.

Denmark’s social policies are among the most socially liberal in the world. According to a government website, tax-funded benefits for Danish citizens include paid parental leave that can total almost a full year, subsidized day care, a universal single-payer healthcare program with no copays except for prescriptions; dental care is typically provided by private plans. All medical and nursing education is free. 

Denmark doesn’t have a minimum wage law, but collective bargaining agreements have resulted in a standard minimum of about $15.57 (U.S.) an hour — more than in most jurisdictions in the U.S., where the mandated federal minimum is $7.25 an hour.

Denmark recently liberalized its abortion law, raising the right to obtain abortion upon request to up to 18 weeks of pregnancy from 12 weeks, beginning June 1. Girls ages 15 or over don’t need parental consent. Abortions are free, covered by the government program. 

The maternal mortality rate in Denmark is about 5 per 100,000 live births but may be higher in Greenland, where medical care is less accessible in remote communities. 

The political cultures of the U.S., Canada and Greenland (or Denmark, if you prefer) are also divergent. Those other countries don’t seem to have the same proportion of crass blowhards in their political structure as the U.S. That’s not the same as saying they don’t have any crass blowhards in politics — Canadians will remember the escapades of former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford or the efforts by former Quebec Premier Rene Levesque to have his francophone province secede from English-speaking Canada.

Once all these factors are considered, another question arises: Why stop with Canada and Greenland? There are other countries that have managed to score higher than the U.S. in terms of the happiness of their populace. 

The list has been led for years by Finland, followed by Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Norway, among others. On this roster, the U.S. ranked a dismal 24th in 2024, behind Mexico, Australia, New Zealand and, indeed, Canada. 

Think of it this way. Going only by which countries might teach us how to make our people happier, if we could only make them part of the U.S. — the number of candidates for annexation comes to 23, not just two. Trump and Vance need to get down to work.