It appears to be official: the illegal operation that has sent at least 238 immigrants to El Salvador’s brutal and repressive Cecot megaprison will continue in defiance of the Constitution, human rights protections, and whatever remains of the rule of law. So will the Trump administration’s attempts to gaslight the world about the nature of its depradations.

The signal test case for the administration’s fascist plan to relocate millions of immigrants without any semblance of due process or a plausible mustering of evidence is the rendition of Maryland resident Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to Cecot. (Note to the national press corps: I’m not referring to Abrego Garcia’s case, or the other relocations engineered by the Trump administration, as “deportations” because they have not been accompanied by any formal deportation proceedings; neither should you.)

Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, despite the administration’s evidence-free claim that he’s a fully fledged member of the Salvadoran criminal gang MS-13. Indeed, after being in the United States without legal status for 15 years, he won an order protecting him from deportation on the grounds that he’d likely be targeted by criminal gangs on his return. Just how slipshod has been the administration’s handling of this case? This slipshod: The executive order seeking to justify these illegal roundups of immigrants cites an “invasion” by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; even if the administration could demonstrate that Abrego Garcia had any ties to MS-13—and, to repeat, it can’t—it’s an entirely different gang in an entirely different country.

Despite its attempts to slander Abrego Garcia, even the Trump administration couldn’t avoid conceding in court that his removal from the country was an “administrative error.” This would appear to be an open-and-shut case. But the government has disclaimed any responsibility for rectifying the mistake it admits it made.

Now that Abrego Garcia is in Salvadoran custody, attorneys for the government argue, the United States has no means of legally returning him; they also cite Trump’s “primacy in foreign affairs” over the concerns of Abrego Garcia and his family. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele—who likes to call himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and has fawningly done Trump’s bidding throughout the mass removal of immigrants to Cecot–completed the whole sick charade during his meeting with Trump at the White House on Monday. “The question is preposterous,” Bukele replied to a reporter asking about Abrego Garcia’s repatriation. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” (For good measure, he also smeared Abrego Garcia as a “terrorist.” No wonder Trump loves this guy.) One gauge of how seriously Bukele takes the issues raised by Abrego Garcia’s detention was his social-media response to the news that the immigrant had been mistakenly swept up in the Trump raids: “Oopsie,” the cool fascist declared on his X account.

Bukele’s disavowal amounted to a cry of olly olly oxen free for Trump and the ghoulish apparatchiks enforcing the abusive and illegal policies of the White House. After Bukele spoke on the case, Trump immediately leapt in to assail the reporters addressing the questions to him: “they’d love to have a criminal released into our country. They’re sick people.” He then announced that he had asked Bukele to expand his detention infrastructure for the massive influx of new immigrants expelled from the United States.

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“I just asked the president—you know it’s this massive complex that he built, jail complex. I said, ‘Can you build some more of them please?’” Trump told the press. “As many as we can get out of our country that we allowed in here by incompetent Joe Biden, through open borders.” He then suggested, in trademark garbled syntax, that the basic accommodations of the rule of law here didn’t apply here because the people in question aren’t actually people: “We have millions of people that should not be in this country that are dangerous—not just people, ’cause we have people—but we have millions of people that are murderers, drug dealers.”

Not to be outdone by the Great Leader’s lies—there are not anywhere close to “millions” of immigrant killers and drug pushers, for the simple reason that immigrants commit violent and drug-related crimes at a dramatically lower rate than America’s native-born population does—Trump’s advisers spun out more mendacious talking points on the Abrego Garcia case.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s longtime consigliere on flouting immigration law, chimed in with the head-spinning claim that bringing Abrego Garcia back to his family—including his 5-year-old son, who suffers from nonverbal autism, whom he was picking up from school when ICE agents detained him—would amount to “kidnapping” a Salvadoran citizen. Miller flagrantly lied about Abrego’s detention, saying, “He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador …this was the right person sent to the right place.” (For the millionth time, the government of which Miller is a part has already admitted that Abrego Garcia was the wrong person sent to the wrong place.)

Secretary of State–cum–MAGA chew toy Marco Rubio continued the pageant of legal illiteracy with a disingenuous claim not to comprehend the “confusion” surrounding Abrego Garcia’s case, sententiously declaring that “the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the president of the United States, not by a court, and no court in the United States has a right to conduct a foreign policy of the United States.”

This is an especially risible line of bullshit, since the effort to suture the Gulag detention brand of immigration policy rests on the plainly bogus equation of immigration gang activity with a military invasion in order to invoke the hideously authoritarian Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which for all its trespasses on basic civil liberties, still requires an armed attack from a foreign government or a formal declaration of war to be invoked. To claim that the lawless detention of Abrego Garcia has solemn implications for the sacrosanct conduct of US foreign policy is like staging the next Grammy Awards ceremony at the Fyre Festival.

Yet let there be no mistake: Trump is already planning to use the eager complicity of Bukele to vastly expand his growing sense of fascist prerogative. He also told the reporters covering the Bukele meeting that he’d like to arrange for native-born offenders to be detained at Cocet as well. “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem,” Trump announced, noting that Attorney General Pam Bondi is studying the laws “right now.” (Note to Pam Bondi: The laws don’t begin to allow anything like this.) “If they’re criminals and if they hit people with baseball bats over their head that happen to be 90-years-old and if, if they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island—Brooklyn. Yeah, yeah that includes them. Why do you think there’s [sic] special category of person? They’re as bad as anybody that comes in.”

In a more functional democracy, the opposition party would be marshalling resistance to these fundamental assaults on basic civil liberties on a massive scale. Instead, Democratic leaders have mostly complained that Trump blockaded the draconian Senate immigration bill that the GOP brokered in 2024, and have been distressingly AWOL on the rampant abuse of immigration law to stigmatize workers and stifle dissent. With Trump now blasting well beyond past abuses of executive power concerning due process and the rule of law, he—with enabling assists from lickspittle adjutants like Miller, Rubio, and Bondi—is laying the groundwork for the time when critics of his Caligulan grip on power will also be ticketed for the gulags.