Prison yard, Alcatraz. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

[Apologies for more typographical chaos than usual in this edition of Roaming Charges, which was largely written and assembled by iPhone after the 8-week-old Australian shepherd chewed her way through the powerchord of the editor’s Macbook Pro.)

“During the Cold War, US allies used to deny the disappearances — the uncertainty was part of the terror. Now they just straight-up say they have a right to kidnap innocent people. The terror now is the fuck-you impunity these thugs claim.”

– Greg Grandin

In Kafka’s “The Penal Colony,” a man called only the Traveler visits an island penal colony of a country not his own. Or a country that he doesn’t recognize as his own. Why is he here? We don’t know. He seems to be on some kind of inspection, though who he might be reporting back to and what effect his report might have on what is going on here is unclear. The story opens with the Traveler being shown a new torture and execution device by someone called the Officer, a machine that inscribes the fatal sentence of the state on the flesh of the condemned, over and over again, slowly, on strip after strip of skin, for 12 hours, until the victim bleeds to death. The machine was designed by the Commandant, now deceased. Its use once attracted large crowds, mainly of women, who would toss handkerchiefs at the condemned, as the killing machine did its lethal work. The Condemned do not know they have been condemned. They don’t know they’ve committed a crime. Silent accusations are enough in this penal colony. Once accused, the accused is presumed guilty. He is never told he has been accused. He is never given the chance to defend himself. He only learns of his offense when it is written on his skin by the stabbing of needles: “Honor thy Superiors.”

Trump dreams of his own penal colony, a place where he can ship the accused without the trouble of a trial, a place where the imprisoned have no chance to defend themselves and, in fact, may not know why they are condemned or how they can find their way out, if there is a way out.

Trump’s Devil’s Island is the death-haunted country of El Salvador. If Trump is the crude Commandant, Nayib Buekele is his dutiful Officer, eager to perform any act of depravity to please his superior…for a price ($20,000 a person). The Travelers have been sent away from this prison state, denied any inspection of its torture chambers.

Trump’s ICEtapo has sent 238 people to El Salvador. A Bloomberg analysis shows that more than 90% of them had no criminal record. And of those with criminal records, only five had been convicted of felonies. This hardly matters. To be sent to El Salvador means you are guilty. You are a terrorist in the eyes of the state that deported you, even if the state’s highest courts have intervened on your behalf. There will be no return. Even two self-proclaimed Autocrats say they don’t have the power to make it happen. Only the machine writes the fate of the condemned.

This is merely the precedent. Trump wants to use the egregious treatment of noncitizens to break the legal system that protects citizens from abuses of state power. Trump is eager to deport American citizens to El Salvadoran prisons. He told Buekele to build more of his concentration camps for a coming flood of American “criminals” (aka, dissidents), who will be condemned as “terrorists” and stripped of their rights: “The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places.”

Supreme Court justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson on the 9-0 decision ordering the Trump administration to return wrongfully deported man from El Salvador: the government’s argument implies “it could deport and incarcerate any person, including us citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

Welcome to the “left-wing industrial complex,” Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas!

First, you get away with deporting non-criminal non-citizens. Then you try to deport non-criminal citizens whose ethnicity you dislike. Last week, Juan Carlos Gomez-Lopez, a 20-year-old Georgia man of Mayan heritage, was pulled over and arrested by Florida Highway Patrol for “being an undocumented immigrant over the age of 18 who had illegally entered the state of Florida.” There were just two problems. First, the enforcement of DeSantis’s punitive immigration law Gomez-Lopez supposedly violated, has been blocked by a federal court. Second, Gomez-Lopez is a US citizen. When Gomez-Lopez appeared for his arraignment before the local court, his advocates presented the judge with his birth certificate and Social Security card as proof that he is a natural-born US citizen. Leon County Judge LaShawn Riggins said, “In looking at it and feeling it and holding it up to the light, the court can clearly see the watermark proving this is an authentic document.” Riggins said there was no probable cause for his detention, but that her hands were tied because ICE had asserted jurisdiction and wants him sent to a detention center for deportation.

“It’s like this dystopian nightmare of poorly written laws,” said Thomas Kennedy of the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “We’re living in a time when this man could be sent to El Salvador because, what? Is he going to be treated as a stateless person?”

Meanwhile, in Boston: “Immigration attorney Nicole Micheroni says she was born at Newton Wellesley Hospital, grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts, and was educated at Wellesley College. So, anyone can imagine her surprise when she says she received an emailed letter from the Department of Homeland Security, telling her to self-deport within 7 days…”

Alec MacGillis, Pro Publica: “Kseniia Petrova left Russia in protest of Putin and found work at a Harvard lab, w/ a valid visa. She arrived with only a backpack. CBP stopped her recently at Logan for failing to declare frog embryos she had brought from Paris for her lab. This would normally come with a fine. Instead, she is in prison in Louisiana. “I feel like something is happening generally in America. Something bad is happening. I don’t think everybody understands.”

Trump’s “counter-terrorism Czar,” Sebastian Gorka, told Newsmax this week that political opponents of Trump’s mass deportations could be charged with “abetting terrorism.”

It’s really quite that simple. We have people who love America, like the president, like his cabinet, like the directors of his agencies, who want to protect Americans. And then there is the other side, that is on the side of the cartel members, on the side of the illegal aliens, on the side of the terrorists… And you have to ask yourself, are they technically aiding and abetting them? Because aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, after being refused any contact with his constituent Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador on Wednesday:

“The courts of the United States have said there’s no evidence to support the charge that he’s part of MS-13, so I asked the Vice President of El Salvador whether or not El Salvador has any evidence that he’s part of MS-13 or has committed a crime. So I asked the Vice President, ‘So, if Abrego Garcia has not committed a crime, and the US courts have found that he was illegally taken into the United States, and the government of El Salvador has no evidence that he was part of MS-13, why is El Salvador continuing to hold him in CEPOS. And his answer was that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador to keep him at CEPOS. I pointed out that neither the government of El Salvador nor the Trump Administration has presented evidence to support the claim that he has committed any kind of criminal act. So why not release Abrego Garcia today? And he said, what President Bukele said the other day at the White House, which is that “El Salvador can’t smuggle Mr. Abrego Garcia into the United States.’ And I said, ‘I’m not asking him to smuggle Mr. Abrego Garcia into the United States, I’m simply........

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