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On Friday, President Donald Trump delivered an unusual speech at the Justice Department. Between fulminating against his political adversaries and long digressions about the late basketball coach Bob Knight, Trump declared, “We’re restoring fair, equal, and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

Then his administration spent the weekend proving otherwise.

People who believe the press is overhyping the danger to rule of law posed by the current administration have pointed out that although administration officials have repeatedly attacked the judicial system, the White House has not actually defied a judge.

But that may not be the case anymore, or for much longer. On Saturday in Washington, D.C., Judge James Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order barring the federal government from deporting Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador, which it was seeking to do using a 1798 law that bypasses much due process by declaring an enemy invasion. Nonetheless, hundreds of Venezuelans alleged by the administration to be connected with the gang Tren de Aragua landed in El Salvador, where authoritarian President Nayib Bukele has agreed to take them. Separately, a federal judge in Massachusetts is demanding to know why Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese doctor at Brown University’s medical school, was deported despite a valid visa and a court order temporarily blocking her removal.

The White House insists that it did not actually defy Boasberg’s judicial order, but its arguments are very hard to take at face value. “The Administration did not ‘refuse to comply’ with a court order,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist [Tren de Aragua] aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory.” She’s trying to have it both ways—the order is unlawful, but also we didn’t ignore it. “The written order and the Administration’s actions do not conflict,” Leavitt said.

Although Boasberg’s written order did not specify, the judge told attorneys during the Saturday hearing that “any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.” Politico reports that the plane left during a break in the hearing, as though the government was angling to get out just ahead of any mandate. During a briefing today, Leavitt also questioned whether the verbal order held the same weight as a written order, which is a matter of settled law. During a hearing early this evening, Boasberg seemed incredulous at the Justice Department’s arguments, calling one a “heck of a stretch.”

In the Boston case, a Customs and Border Protection official said in a sworn declaration that the agency had not received formal notification of the judge’s order when it deported Alawieh. CBP said in a statement yesterday that “arriving aliens bear the burden of establishing admissibility to the United States.”

The statements of Trump administration officials elsewhere make it even harder to take their actions as anything other than attempting to defy judges. Salvadoran President Bukele posted a screenshot of a New York Post story about the judge’s order on X with the commentary, “Oopsie … Too late” and a laughing-crying emoji. Chief Bureaucrat Elon Musk replied with the same emoji, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared Bukele’s post from his own account. “Border czar” Tom Homan appeared on Fox News this morning and said, “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”

These actions should be terrifying no matter who is involved. The fact that Tren de Aragua is indeed a vicious gang doesn’t nullify the law—the administration’s claim that the U.S. is contending with a wartime invasion is ridiculous on its face. Even more important is whether the White House decided to snub a ruling by a federal judge. Nor do customs officials’ claims in court filings that they found “sympathetic photos and videos” of Hezbollah leaders on Alawieh’s phone, or that she told them she had attended the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah’s funeral, mean the law doesn’t apply. For all we know, her actions may well justify her deportation. (Of course, we have little way of assessing any of these allegations clearly, because the administration has sidestepped the usual judicial proceedings in both cases. A lawyer for Alawieh’s family hasn’t commented on the allegations.) What matters is that the executive branch acted despite a judge’s order.

This is what we might call the Mahmoud Khalil test: No matter whether you think someone’s ideas or actions are deplorable, once the executive branch decides it doesn’t have to follow the law for one person, it has established that it doesn’t have to follow the law for anyone. After Khalil was arrested, Trump said that he was “the first arrest of many to come.” No one should have any illusion that the list will stop with alleged Tren de Aragua members. Throughout his career, Trump has tested boundaries and, if allowed to do so, pushed further. His actions at the start of this term show that he is more emboldened than ever, and traditionally institutionalist figures such as Rubio seem eager to abet him.

Watching Trump’s DOJ address, supposedly about law and order, offers some ideas of who else he might target while ignoring the law. So do his social-media accounts. This morning on Truth Social, Trump claimed that former President Joe Biden’s pardons of Liz Cheney and other members of the House January 6 Committee were not valid. “The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen,” Trump wrote. “In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them!”

Trump wouldn’t bother with this if he didn’t hope to prosecute the people involved. Although Biden’s pardons were controversial because they were issued preemptively, the idea that an autopen, which allows the user to sign remotely, would invalidate them is concocted out of thin air. (Nor has Trump provided evidence that Biden did in fact use an autopen in these cases.) The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a justification for the practice in 2005, and presidents have been using them to sign legislation since 2011, without serious incident. The Supreme Court could conceivably rule in favor of Trump’s view—the justices have adopted other long-shot Trump claims—but it is hard to imagine, and would be a real departure.

When Trump speaks about law and order, he means it very narrowly. He believes in swift justice for his adversaries, with or without due process of the law; meanwhile, he believes his actions should not be constrained by law, the Constitution, or anything else that might cause him problems, and he has used pardons prolifically to excuse the actions of his friends and allies, whether Paul Manafort and Roger Stone or January 6 rioters. Plenty of presidents have been frustrated by the limitations of the law. Richard Nixon even claimed, years after leaving office, that any action by the president, as head of the executive branch, is de facto legal. But no president until now has so aggressively or so frequently acted as though he didn’t need to follow the law’s most basic precepts.

Back in November, my colleague Tom Nichols invoked the Peruvian politician Óscar Benavides. Though he’s little known in the United States, here are a few striking facts about him: He served as president twice, first coming to power not through a popular election but through appointment by an elected assembly. Some years later, he returned to the presidency as an unabashed authoritarian. (Hmm.) “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law,” goes a quote sometimes attributed to Benavides. It could be the motto of the Trump administration over the past four days.

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Today’s News

At least 42 people died after a powerful storm system hit central and southern U.S. states over the weekend, according to officials. The Energy Department, EPA, and NOAA started hiring back probationary employees after federal judges recently ruled that their firings were illegally carried out and ordered their reinstatement. Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are scheduled to speak on the phone tomorrow about a cease-fire with Ukraine. Trump said yesterday that he expects the conversation to include discussions about Ukraine’s power plants, and that there have already been talks about “dividing up” Ukrainian assets.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: “Buy, Borrow, Die”—this is how to be a billionaire and pay no taxes, Rogé Karma writes. The Wonder Reader: Finding love has never been easy, but this is a particularly tricky moment for romance, Isabel Fattal writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Marsell Gorska Gautier / Getty; naumoid / Getty.

Sex Without Women

By Caitlin Flanagan

What a testament to man—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties!—that he continued doing anything else after the advent of online porn. Plenty of women, of course, consume and enjoy or create and profit from porn—people of every sexual orientation and gender identity do. But the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (and the money) is heterosexual male desire for women. And here was porn so good, so varied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a generation of men who think of porn not as a backup to having sex, but as an improvement on it. They prefer it.

Read the full article.

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Experts warn that the sudden lack of funds may spur further migration of Venezuelans beyond neighbouring Colombia.

Their arrival comes less than 24 hours after a federal judge blocked a law Trump planned to use for the deportations.

A judge ordered a 14-day halt on deporting Venezuelans under a Trump order that declared them enemies.

In Ridley Scott’s Gladiator films, viewers are shown the savage, primitive Romans reveling in the grotesqueries of the arena, and are meant to be disgusted by their bloodlust, even as they themselves watch along. For the Romans, one can see how the spectacle itself would have reinforced their perception of a line between themselves and their captives—a process of mass socialization in which the subordinate status of those they saw as barbarians was reinforced by their deaths being made fodder for entertainment. If the gods wanted your suffering to matter, you wouldn’t be here for my amusement. Given that the film’s audience is watching and thrilling to the same scenes, the movie seem to be asking, how different are people today from the jeering mob in the arena?

We don’t have arenas with death matches anymore. But turning human suffering into spectacle did not die out in antiquity. Instead, we have social media and reality television, which allow even more of a remove from what the audience sees. The Trump administration is now trying to showcase its program of “mass deportation” as reality-show style entertainment, through which voters will rationalize their cruelty. And just like in the past, many people become numb to brutality when they perceive it as entertainment rather than oppression.

This approach became apparent when, in January, the Trump administration had the reality-show personality and Donald Trump sycophant Dr. Phil go along on an ICE raid in Chicago, enabling him to post a video of an arrest to Instagram. Later that month, on the social network X, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted photographs and video of herself on ICE raids in New York City while in “full glam,” wearing a bulletproof vest and announcing, “Here in New York City this morning we are getting the dirtbags off these streets.” Last week, the White House—the White House—posted a video to X captioned “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” showing ICE officials cuffing people who are being loaded on a plane, presumably to be deported, while a soundtrack of roaring jet engines and unfurling chains plays. (ASMR refers to a genre of videos that feature sounds people find soothing.)

This reality-show mechanism has worked before—it convinced much of the country that Trump was a very good businessman, after all. The reality-television shows Live PD and Cops, which were canceled amid the George Floyd protests in 2020, skewed audience perceptions about violent crime and police work while, many critics observed, portraying potential abuses as effective policing. The people arrested on the shows were a punch line, there to amuse the viewer—guilt or innocence was irrelevant.

[Read: The most consequential TV show in history]

The reality of these deportations has been ugly. Arrests and detentions of Native and Hispanic Americans have led to accusations of racial profiling. People with genuine fears of persecution are being deported to countries they’ve never been to and whose language they don’t speak.

Although the Trump administration has claimed that it is focusing on undocumented criminals, its actions suggest that it is defining criminality extremely loosely. Trump’s focus on individual horror stories of immigrants committing crimes notwithstanding, immigrants, including those who are undocumented, are less likely to commit crimes than citizens—not because they are inherently more law-abiding, but because they have greater reasons to want to avoid trouble. There aren’t enough undocumented criminals to justify a “mass” deportation on the scale Trump has promised. Noncriminals will have to go as well, which is what is happening. Frustrated with the low numbers of deportations—fewer undocumented immigrants have been deported under Trump than were under Joe Biden in a similar period—Trump has now ordered ICE to focus on expelling undocumented children.

The Trump administration has withdrawn humanitarian parole for hundreds of thousands of Haitians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans who were cleared by background checks and allowed to stay for “urgent humanitarian reasons.” These are neither immigrants who are here illegally nor criminals; they are simply people from places Trump sees as “shithole countries” who have incurred Trump’s wrath for not being the type of immigrants he wants, such as Scandinavians and white people from South Africa. Many Americans might want them to be treated fairly, with due process. But the Trump administration needs people to think they are all “dirtbags” so that treating them like human beings is unnecessary. The Deportation Show can convince people that those being shipped off are so insignificant, so beneath real Americans, that people may consume their suffering as entertainment. Maybe those mobs that once filled the Flavian Amphitheater weren’t so different from us after all.

For a moment on Sunday, the government of Colombia’s Gustavo Petro looked like it might be the first in Latin America to take a meaningful stand against President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation plans. Instead, Petro gave Trump the perfect opportunity to show how far he would go to enforce compliance. Latin American leaders came out worse off.

On Sunday afternoon, Petro, a leftist who has held office since 2022, announced on X that he would not allow two U.S. military aircraft carrying Colombian deportees to land. He forced them to turn back mid-flight and demanded that Trump establish a protocol for treating deportees with dignity.

Colombia had quietly accepted military deportation flights before Trump’s inauguration, according to the Financial Times. But the Trump administration began flaunting these flights publicly, and some deportees sent to Brazil claimed that they were shackled, denied water, and beaten. Petro saw all of this as a step too far, and reacted. He clarified that he would still accept deportations carried out via “civilian aircraft,” without treating migrants “like criminals” (more than 120 such flights landed in Colombia last year).

Trump responded by threatening to impose 25 percent tariffs on all Colombian goods (to be raised to 50 percent within a week), impose emergency banking sanctions, and bar entry to all Colombian-government officials and even their “allies.” The message was clear: To get his way on deportations, he would stop at nothing, even if this meant blowing up relations with one of the United States’ closest Latin American partners.

[Quico Toro: Trump’s Colombia spat is a gift to China]

Petro almost immediately backed down. He seemed to have taken the stand on a whim, possibly in part to distract from a flare-up in violence among armed criminal groups inside his country. The White House announced that Colombia had agreed to accept deportation flights, including on military aircraft. Petro gave a tepid repost, then deleted it.

For Trump, the incident was a perfect PR stunt, allowing him to showcase the maximum-pressure strategy he might use against any Latin American government that openly challenges his mass-deportation plans and offering a test case for whether tariffs can work to coerce cooperation from U.S. allies. For Latin America, the ordeal could not have come at a worse time.

Across the region, leaders are bracing for the impact of deportations—not only of their own citizens, but of “third-country nationals” such as Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans, whose governments often refuse to take them back. They are rightfully worried about what a sudden influx of newcomers and a decline in remittance payments from the United States will mean for their generally slow-growing economies, weak formal labor markets, and strained social services, not to mention public safety, given the tendency of criminal gangs to kidnap and forcibly recruit vulnerable recent deportees.

If Latin American governments are trying to negotiate the scope or scale of deportation behind closed doors, they do not appear to be having much success. Several leaders seem to be losing their nerve. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, went from expressing hope for an agreement with the Trump administration to receive only Mexicans to accepting the continued deportation of noncitizens—perhaps because Trump threatened to place 25 percent tariffs on all Mexican goods as soon as February 1. Honduras threatened to expel a U.S. Air Force base on January 3 if the United States carried on with its deportation plans. By January 27, Honduras folded, saying that it would accept military deportation flights but requesting that deportees not be shackled. Guatemala is trying to draw the line at taking in only fellow Central Americans.

Most Latin American leaders will bend to Trump’s wishes on mass deportation rather than invite the strong-arm tactics he threatened to use on Colombia. One reason is that tariffs can really hurt the countries whose cooperation Trump needs most on deportations. Unlike most of South America, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador still trade more with the United States than with China. Only with Mexico, the United States’ largest trade partner, does the leverage go both ways, but even there it is sharply asymmetrical (more than 80 percent of Mexican exports go to the U.S., accounting for nearly a fifth of the country’s GDP).

Latin American countries could improve their bargaining position by taking a unified stand and negotiating with Trump as a bloc. But the chances that they will do so are slim and getting slimmer. Today, Honduran President Xiomara Castro called off a planned meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, a left-leaning regional bloc, to discuss migration, faulting a “lack of consensus.”

[Juliette Kayyem: The border got quieter, so Trump had to act]

Latin American presidents have relatively weak incentives to fight Trump on migration. The region is home to more than 20 million displaced people, millions of whom reside as migrants or refugees in Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and elsewhere—and yet, migration is simply not that big of a diplomatic political issue in most countries. That could change if deportations reach a scale sufficient to rattle economies, but Latin American leaders are focused on the short term, much as Trump is. Presidential approval ratings tend to rise and fall based on crime and the economy more than immigration, and at least for now, anti-U.S. nationalism is not the political force it has been in the past.

So Trump will likely get his way in more cases than not. But he shouldn’t celebrate just yet, because the short-term payoff of strong-arming Latin America will come at the long-term cost of accelerating the region’s shift toward China and increasing its instability. The latter tends, sooner or later, to boomerang back into the United States.

“Every South American leader, even pro-American ones, will look at Trump’s strategy vis-à-vis Panama, Colombia, and Mexico and understand the risks of being overly dependent on the U.S. right now. The majority will seek to diversify their partnerships to limit their exposure to Trump,” Oliver Stuenkel, a Brazilian international-relations analyst, posted on X in the middle of the Colombia standoff. He’s right. Latin American leaders, even several conservative ones, moved closer to China during Trump’s first term, which is not what Trump wants. Reducing China’s presence in Latin America seems to be his No. 2 priority in the region (see his threats to Panama over the Hong Kong company operating near its canal). Chinese investments in dual-use infrastructure and 5G technology pose long-term national-security risks to the United States. But Trump’s tariff threats and coercion could rattle Latin America and help China make its sales pitch to the region: We’re the reliable ones. The long-standing lament that Latin American conservatives, centrists, and leftists share is that whereas the United States comes to the region to punish and lecture, China comes to trade. Trump’s current approach gives that complaint extra credence.

[From the September 2024 issue: Seventy miles in hell]

Trump’s deportation plans threaten to destabilize parts of Latin America, which will have repercussions for the United States. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of people to countries without the economic or logistical capacity to absorb them could leave the region reeling. Consider that the Trump administration is negotiating an asylum agreement with El Salvador—a country with one of the weakest and smallest economies, and highest rates of labor informality, in all of Central America. If Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans are sent there, they are almost guaranteed not to find jobs. People deported to Honduras and Guatemala will also likely struggle to find work and face recruitment by gangs. And because remittances make up about a fifth of GDP in Guatemala and about a quarter in El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, large-scale deportations threaten to deliver a brutal shock to their economies. Mexico’s economy is bigger and sturdier, but economists have shown that large influxes of deportees there, too, tend to depress formal-sector wages and increase crime. The inflow of workers might still benefit economies like Mexico’s in the long run. But in the short to medium term, Trump’s mass-deportation plans are a recipe for instability.

The lesson of the past several decades—Trump’s first term included—is that Latin American instability never remains contained within the region. It inevitably comes boomeranging back to the United States. Mexican cartels didn’t gain far-reaching influence just in their country. They fueled a fentanyl epidemic that has killed more than a quarter million Americans since 2018. Venezuela’s economic collapse under authoritarian rule didn’t bring misery only upon that country; it produced one of the world’s biggest refugee crises, with more than half a million Venezuelans fleeing to the United States. Instability nowhere else in the world affects the United States more directly, or profoundly, than that in Latin America.

In the 1980s and ’90s, internal armed conflicts raged in Colombia and Central America, and Mexico confronted serial economic crises. Since then, the United States’ immediate neighbors have become relatively more stable, democratic, and prosperous. But slow growth, fiscal imbalances, and, above all, the growing power of organized crime have tested that stability in recent years. Trump is adding to the pressure with mass deportations—then hoping to contain whatever erupts by simply hardening the southern border. That’s quite the gamble.