An American Gulag in the Making

Things are getting very bad, very fast

U.S. President Donald Trump meets with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador in the Oval Office of the White House April 14, 2025 in Washington, DC. Trump and Bukele were expected to discuss a range of bilateral issues including the detention of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who has been held in a prison in El Salvador since March 15. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Before I get into today’s post, I wanted to let everyone know about an exciting event taking place at the 92^nd St. Y in New York City tomorrow night (April 15) at 6:30pm. My dear friend and teacher Mark Lilla will be in conversation with New York Times columnist David Brooks about Mark’s latest book, which I wrote about here. If you live in the New York area, I hope you’ll consider attending in person. If you don’t, you should buy an online ticket to watch the stream. The conversation is bound to be deep, provoking wide-ranging reflection about the human condition.

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Between the spring semester wrapping up, our ongoing real-estate saga, and a lengthy writing assignment I’m working on (which every subscriber here will be able to read, when it appears, with a gift link), I don’t have the time to craft a lengthy and elaborate post today. (I’ll be back with a more typical post later in the week.) Instead, I’m going to point briefly to a couple of recent pieces I hope you will read and ponder and respond to in whatever way seems appropriate.

Both essays are from the Bulwark’s Jonathan Last. I’ve been linking to and plugging his work a lot lately. That’s because, since Trump’s inauguration, Last has been on fire, bringing his sharp intellect, merciless analytical skills, and moral passion to the task of examining where we are, and where we’re going, with an aspiring tyrant in the White House. His daily post, titled “The Triad,” was essential daily reading for me throughout the Biden administration, and it’s become even more crucial since January 20, 2025.

The first of the essays appeared last Wednesday under the headline “Concentration Camps and the Deportation of American Citizens: There is no limiting principle for disappearing people into the Bukele gulag.”

The second essay was published Sunday night, the latest of several “Emergency Triad” posts he’s done over the past few weeks. The title this time is, “Bukele, Abrego Garcia, and Red Lines: Emergency Triad: Are we now a country of political prisoners and gulags?”

Long-time readers of mine will recall how often since early 2017 I’ve talked about the importance, when attempting to make a measured assessment of Donald Trump’s actions as president, of distinguishing between normal, abnormal, and truly alarming words and deeds from the commander in chief. My assessment of the first Trump administration included some things in each category. It was a mixed bag, with some of it truly alarming, but much else broadly continuous with what we would expect from a more normal, or even somewhat abnormal, Republican in the nation’s highest office.

But from the very start, the second Trump administration has been one truly alarming thing after another. This has been true on multiple fronts. Trump has asserted unprecedented executive powers in a multitude of areas. He’s shattered the security architecture the United States has been building since the end of the Second World War. He’s damaged the international trading system by (incontinently) imposing draconian tariffs on much of the world—doing so under a specious declaration of national emergency. He’s used outright harassment against some of the country’s most powerful law firms to punish them for representing his critics and to exact concessions meant to bring them to heel. He’s set about deporting people, including permanent residents of the United States, without due process.

And then there is the topic Last is writing about, which is the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in particular. He’s a man the Trump administration deported (along with a few hundred others) to a Supermax prison in El Salvador without due process. Abrego Garcia’s case is uniquely bad because the administration admits it made an error in sending him to El Salvador in violation of a court order meant to keep him in this country. Instead of responding to the revelation of this mistake by immediately requesting or demanding the government of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele return Abrego Garcia to the United States, the Trump administration has told a federal judge, and now the Supreme Court itself, that it will be doing no such thing.

In the two posts to which I link above, Last lays out the gory details of this case with admirable clarity. It may well end up being the first example of the president outrightly defying the Supreme Court. But I’m just as worried about it serving as a test case for a truly alarming Trump administration policy. We are apparently paying Bukele to take American deportees and imprison them. And our government’s official position, at this moment, is that once a person has left the territory of the United States, they not only have no recourse to American law, but the American president can do nothing to reverse an injustice concerning one of the imprisoned deportees, even in a case where the administration admits its own error.

Once the administration puts someone on a plane to a foreign prison, he or she has no way out.

And our president says he “loves” the idea of sending American citizens there as well.

Is this not an American gulag in the making? For immigrants, primarily. But why not also for political prisoners—like the two men (Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor) Trump ordered the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security to investigate last week? Last rightly asks, if you were them, would you stay in the country, confident your innocence would be vindicated? Or would you flee to a foreign country, seeking asylum in a nation that remains a liberal democracy and continues to abides by the rule of law?

Less than 100 days into the second Trump administration, those are perfectly reasonable—even necessary—questions to ask about the United States of America.