This is an adapted excerpt from the April 15 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Donald Trump does more talking than any president I’ve ever seen. However, if you actually listen to him, you might notice something he almost never talks about. It’s something Republicans usually love talking about: freedom.
Sure, Trump uses the word. Just last week, he signed an executive order on water pressure and said it would “restore shower freedom.” You get a lot of that, but you never really hear him talk about freedom and liberty in any meaningful way, like as the ideals this country was supposedly built upon. That’s because those ideals are just not that meaningful to Trump.
Trump’s administration is working to take away the liberties at the core of the American experiment.
If anything has been brought into clear focus in these first few months of the Trump administration, and particularly the last few days, it’s that the president is acting as an enemy of freedom. His administration is working to take away the liberties at the core of the American experiment. He’s waging an assault on freedom and liberty in any sphere he can.
In the span of a couple of months, we have become a country where people are being grabbed off the street and sent to a foreign gulag without any of the normal American freedom stuff like due process, or evidence, or even charges.
The most egregious, chilling example is that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who first came to the U.S. in 2011 as an undocumented 16-year-old sent by his mother because he had been pressured to join a violent gang in his native El Salvador. In 2019, an immigration judge gave Abrego Garcia a protected immigration status, saying his life would be in danger in El Salvador. Since then, Abrego Garcia has lived and worked here legally. He married an American woman, and they started a family together in Maryland.
But last month, after picking up his 5-year-old son, who has special needs, Abrego Garcia was grabbed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Within days, they had shipped Abrego Garcia off to the Terrorist Confinement Center, the Salvadoran gulag known as CECOT, along with hundreds of others caught in Trump’s roundup.
He has never been charged with any crime. ICE has maintained that he’s a member of the MS-13 gang, but it has offered no proof in any court. He and his family say he has no ties to any gang. And now that family is left to wonder if they will ever see him again.
“I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive,” Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez, pledged outside a U.S. district court in Maryland on Monday. “Kilmar, if you can hear me, stay strong. God hasn’t forgotten about you. Our children are asking when will you come home. And I pray for the day I tell them the time and date that you’ll return.”
Inside that courthouse, Judge Paula Xinis wanted to know what, if anything, the government was doing to bring Abrego Garcia home and comply with the Supreme Court order requiring the government to “facilitate” his release from that prison in El Salvador. The government’s answer: It’s El Salvador’s problem now. The judge was not buying that and later ordered depositions of several high-ranking homeland security officials. Xinis also says holding Trump officials in contempt is not off the table.
It’s not at all clear that the Trump administration will comply. It hasn’t so far. It seems full speed ahead on expanding this operation. In fact, the Trump administration is now quite openly talking about sending American citizens to the overseas gulag.
On Monday, when Attorney General Pam Bondi was asked if that was legal, she refused to answer. “These are Americans who he is saying who have committed the most heinous crimes in our country,” she told Fox News. “And crime is going to decrease dramatically because he has given us a directive to make America safe again.”
This is already the most egregious assault on personal liberty that we have seen in American political life, certainly in my lifetime. They’re targeting colleges, where a government task force, most of whom the government has not publicly identified, citing potential security risks, has demanded that research universities essentially install political commissars in academic departments and make admissions and hiring more favorable to conservatives for “viewpoint” diversity.
Everything this administration is doing is in complete opposition to this nation’s founding principles.
Harvard University said “no” to this effort, and in return, the Trump administration announced it would freeze more than $2 billion in federal grants to the university. More colleges have joined Harvard in resisting the government. That’s a welcome sign. People and institutions are coming together to fight for actual freedom against a president who hates it.
Trump hates our freedom of speech that enables critics, so he attacks students exercising that speech and the schools that enroll them. He hates the freedom of assembly and association that lets law firms hire people who prosecuted him, so he writes executive orders essentially extorting those law firms into submission.
This is a vision of American life in which everything is controlled by a single ruler. It’s not an exaggeration to say that this is the absolute nightmare of our founders. Everything this administration is doing is in complete opposition to this nation’s founding principles.
The tricky part is that for the vast majority of Americans, in their day-to-day lives, it doesn’t feel that unfree, at least not yet. But that’s what this administration is banking on: that it can take advantage of that sense of normalcy to take away all of our liberties. And that is exactly why the fate of Kilmar Abrego Garcia should matter to us all.
