“St. George’s Kermis with the Dance Around the Maypole,” Pieter Breughel the Younger, 1627.

The dominant culture of the world teaches us that The Other is a threat, that our fellow human beings are a danger. We will all continue to be exiles in one form or another as long as we continue to accept the paradigm that the world is a racetrack or a battlefield.

– Eduardo Galeano

What if the remarkable string of federal court decisions against Trump’s policies (several rendered by his own appointees) isn’t evidence of an inept, blundering executive, but the intended result, where in the ultimate goal isn’t just to execute mass deportations, but to consolidate executive power by villifying and impugning the federal judiciary as an impediment to the popular will.

Indeed, this has long been the strategy advocated for years by Trump’s malevolent amanuensis Stephen Miller. As detailed in Jonathan Blitzer’s excellent book on the recent history of immigration from Central America, Everyone Who is Gone Is Here, during the first Trump administration Miller pushed for intentionally breaking federal laws and regulations and forcing the courts to rule against the administration, then ignoring the court rulings in the confident that the Trump-majority Supreme Court would ultimately rule in your favor.

But now Miller and his cohort are willing to go even further, by jailing members of the federal judiciary who stand in the way. This week, White House spokesperson Kathleen Leavitt even refused to rule out arresting Supreme Court justices who attempt to hold the Trump administration to account for constitutional violations.

Here’s a sample from MAGA Central…

JD Vance (like John Yoo, a Yale Law School Grad); “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power…If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general on how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal.”

Vance: “When the courts stop you, stand before the country like [early US president] Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

Vance on the jailing of judges: “What we are really doing is fixing 40 years of accumulated bogus bureaucratic BS. We’re fixing 40 years of judges thinking they rule the country instead of the American people. We’re fixing 40 years of judges telling the American president what to do… It had to happen and thankfully, we’re getting it done.”

AG Pam Bondi: “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me. I think some of these judges think they are beyond and above the law. And they are not.”

Fox News Sandra Smith asked Bondi, “So when you see these judges trying to obstruct your efforts to make this country safer, what is your message to them?”

“We are going to prosecute you, and we are prosecuting you,” Bondi vowed.

Fox News’ Steve Doocy asked White House spokesperson Kathleen Leavitt: “You guys arrested a Milwaukee County Circuit judge for allegedly helping illegal immigrants get away. As you guys look at other judges, would you ever arrest somebody higher up on the judicial food chain, like a federal judge or even a Supreme Court justice?”

Leavitt: “That’s a hypothetical question, again I defer you to the Department of Justice for individuals that they are looking at or individual cases. But let’s be clear about what this judge did: She obstructed federal law enforcement who were looking for an illegal alien in her courthouse. She showed that illegal alien the door to evade law enforcement officials. That is a clear-cut case of obstruction. And so anyone who is breaking the law or obstructing federal law enforcement officials from doing their jobs is putting themselves at risk of being prosecuted, absolutely.”

Stephen Miller: “This is the choice facing every American: Either we all side, and get behind President Trump to remove these terrorists from our communities, or we let a rogue, radical left judiciary shut down the machinery of our national security apparatus.”

Then there’s the popgun Congressman from New Orleans, Clay Higgins…

In a May Day ruling, Trump-appointed Federal Judge Fernando Rodriguez, Jr, of the Southern District of Texas, will permit those targeted by the Alien Enemies Act in South Texas to proceed with a class action against the government.

Two weeks after a family from Maryland moved into a new rental house in Oklahoma City, 20 armed ICE agents burst into their home. “I didn’t know who they were,” the mother later said. “It was dark. All the lights were off. I kept asking them, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening? And they said, ‘We have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”

“You can’t just walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Show me your papers,” said U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer L. Thurston, before issuing a preliminary injunction forbidding the Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration stops throughout a wide swath of California.

Federal Judge Brian Murphy has barred DHS from transferring migrants to other agencies (like DOD) in a backdoor effort to evade due process guarantees before deportation.

On Tuesday, a DHS official told a federal court that agency leadership diverted 10-20 employees to run 1.3 million names of international students through a database that tracks criminal charges. It took 2-3 weeks. There were fewer than 6,400 hits (0.004%). But thousands of those were for charges that never led to convictions or were dropped. These are the students who had their F1 status revoked by ICE, many of whom also had their State Department visas revoked. ICE put the blame on Rubio and the State Department.

As the New York Times reported this week, Trump’s original deal with Bukele was that El Salvador would only accept deportees with criminal convictions, whom he was willing to take for a fee in order to help subsidize his massive prison complex. Bukele told Trump that he couldn’t spin holding non-criminal deportees as being in the best interest of El Salvador. But after the first three shipments of deportees, it became clear to Bukele that 90 percent of the people deported by ICE to El Salvador had no criminal records at all.

Other than money, why was Bukele so eager to get MS-13 gang members out of the US court system and back to El Salvador? Because he feared they might expose his own deals with MS-13 before he imposed the State of Exception: “Both the Treasury Department and Justice Department have accused Mr. Bukele’s government of making a secret pact with MS-13, offering its leaders behind bars special privileges to keep homicides down in El Salvador.”

The deportation process was so disorganized and sloppy that eight women were among those flown to be incarcerated in the all-male Salvadoran prison…

Two weeks after a family from Maryland moved into a new rental house in Oklahoma City, 20 armed ICE agents burst into their home. “I didn’t know who they were,” the mother later said. “It was dark. All the lights were off. I kept asking them, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening? And they said, ‘We have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”

Flashing the warrant, ICE raided the house, seizing cellphones, computers, and the family’s life savings. While ICE agents ransacked the house, they forced the mother and three daughters to stand outside in their underwear. “We are citizens!” the mother screamed at the ICE officers. “You have guns pointed in our faces. Can you just reprogram yourself and see us as humans, as women?”

When she was allowed to read the warrant, the mother noticed that it referred to the house’s previous tenants. She pointed this out to the agents: “They were very dismissive, very rough, very careless,” she said. “I kept pleading. I kept telling them we weren’t criminals. They were treating us like criminals. We were here by ourselves. We didn’t do anything. One of them said, ‘I know it was a little rough this morning.’ It was so denigrating. That you do all of this to a family, to women, your fellow citizens. And it was ‘a little rough?’ You literally traumatized me and my daughters for life. We’re going to have to go get help or get over this somehow. I asked, ‘When are we going to get our stuff back?’ They said it could be days or it could be months.”

They didn’t even leave a contact card.

Defense attorney Andrew Fleischman: “It would be unfair to say that all ICE agents are dumb, thieving, perverts. But [in this case] they did break into an American home, steal everything that wasn’t nailed down, and force the daughters to stand outside in their underwear due to gross negligence and rank incompetence.”

A Trump administration memo disclosed this week urged ICE to break into homes in search of noncitizens to kidnap

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