Letters from an American - April 20, 2025

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

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April 20th, 2025. Yesterday, on the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, Americans across the country protested against President Donald J. Trump, his billionaire sidekick Elon Musk, and the administration in general. The decentralized 50-51 movement, which stands for 50 protests in 50 states on one day, was one of the organizers of the protests, planning more than 700 events. Spokesperson Hunter Dunn described 50-51 as a pro-democracy, pro-constitution, anti-executive overreach, non-violent grassroots movement.

Notably, protests have spread to small towns all around the country, including towns in Republican-dominated areas. One of the signs in Miami read, "'I'm here fighting for your due process,' a right the Trump administration has abandoned with its rendition of men to Seacat, a notorious terrorist prison in El Salvador. Today, Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat of Maryland, appeared on a number of news programs

explaining that his trip to El Salvador to make contact with his constituent, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration said it sent to CICOT through administrative error, was about defending the rule of law. I am not defending the man. I'm defending the rights of this man to due process," Van Hollen told Jonathan Karl of ABC News. And the Trump administration has admitted in court

that he was wrongfully detained and wrongfully deported. My mission and my purpose is to make sure that we uphold the rule of law, because if we take it away from him, we jeopardize it for everybody else. The right to due process is central to the rule of law in the United States and the Trump administration has ignored it since at least March 15th

when it spirited more than 250 men from the US to CICOT. It claimed the men were all dangerous gang members who had committed crimes but did not provide their names. Once news outlets got a list of the men, their investigations found the administration had lied about the men's criminal status. Bloomberg reported that 90% of the men sent to Seekot had no U.S. criminal record. Judge James Boesberg ordered the government not to deport the men, and if they were already in the air, to turn the planes around. But the administration went forward nonetheless,

and has appeared to taunt the courts ever since. After the men were landed and in Seacot, President Naib Bukheli of El Salvador posted on X, oopsie, too late, with a laughing emoji, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted his post. Last Wednesday, April 16th, Boesberg issued an opinion saying that the court concluded that probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt. On April 4th, Judge Paula Sinise ordered the administration to facilitate and effectuate Abrego

Garcia's return. Six days later, the US Supreme Court unanimously upheld Sinise's order. Last Monday, April 14th, in a staged meeting between Trump and Bukele in the Oval Office, Trump made it clear he would ignore the Supreme Court. The administration has maintained that the U.S. has no power to order Bukele to release Abrego Garcia, and in the meeting Bukele said he would not release the Maryland man. The administration appears to have tried to create a fiction whereby the US can spirit anyone out of the US without due process, render them to prison in another country, and then declare it doesn't have

the power to get the person back. Vice President J.D. Vance, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller were all present at the meeting. Miller mischaracterized the Supreme Court decision to say it had ruled unanimously in favor of the administration,

the exact opposite of reality. On Wednesday, Van Holl Holland traveled to El Salvador and tried to meet with Abrego Garcia, finally securing a visit on Thursday. This appeared to infuriate the White House, which posted on social media an image of a New York Times headline, Senator meets with wrongly Deported Maryland Man in El Salvador, edited with a red pen to read, Senator Meets with Deported MS-13 Illegal Alien in El Salvador Who's Never Coming Back. Over the image, it posted, Fixed it for you New York Times. Oh, and by the way, Chris Van Hollen, he's not coming back.

There is no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13. Indeed, he has never been charged with a crime, and a court had ordered that he must not be deported to El Salvador out of concern for his life. But as control over the narrative of their renditions is slipping out of their hands, influential podcaster Joe Rogan

has been defending due process on his show, administration officials appear determined to paint Abrego Garcia as a dangerous criminal. Yesterday, the White House posted on social media an image of a hand that has been very obviously altered by adding MS-13 over the knuckles. A social media post by Trump is superimposed on the image. It says, this is the hand of the man

that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States because he is such a fine and innocent person. They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he's got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles, and two highly respected courts found that he was a member of MS-13, beat up his wife, et cetera. I was elected to take bad people out of the United States,

among other things. I must be allowed to do my job. Make America great again. The White House account added, if he tattoos like MS-13, beats women like MS-13, and tramples the law like MS-13, beats women like MS-13, and tramples the law like MS-13, then he's probably MS-13. Except the image is clearly false. No courts found he was a member of MS-13.

And scholar of MS-13, Oscar Martinez, commented, I covered MS-13 for a decade. Its history, crimes, symbolism, cruelty, pacts with Salvadoran governments. I wrote a book about it. Never, ever did any of the hundreds of sources I spoke to say anything that would allow us to believe Trump's strange interpretation of tattoos.

Although Abrego Garcia's wife did file a temporary civil protection order against him in 2021, she has said she did it out of an abundance of caution after a previous relationship that had been violent. She did not pursue the order and says the two worked out their issues with counseling. Perhaps more to the point was author Chris Kluwe's point that a sitting president is using falsified evidence

to try and deny due process to a man who has committed no crime. Also to the point is that the administration's insistence that Abrego Garcia will never come back to the US flies in the face of the Supreme Court's nine to zero decision that it must work to get him back to the US. Early Saturday morning, the Supreme Court ordered the administration not to deport

another group of undocumented Venezuelans under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, but the court was in such a hurry to prevent the rendition of the men, who had already been loaded onto buses to head to an airplane, that it issued its decision

without waiting for them to finish writing. In his one first newsletter, legal analyst Steve Vladeck noted that the court appears not to trust the government's lawyers anymore. Vladeck saw the order as a sign that the majority of the justices have lost their patience with the procedural games being played by the Trump administration. Trump did not take the order well. On Saturday night he posted, Trump's best poll numbers ever. Thank you. After a religiously themed post this morning, he launched another attack on those he sees as his enemies, including

judges, and blamed the country's troubles on his predecessor, President Joe Biden. Then he posted, "'We are together going to make America bigger, better, stronger, wealthier, healthier, and more religious than it has ever been before.' Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America." Trump went on to post about the economy, including a post that said,

"'The businessmen who criticize tariffs "'are bad at business, but really bad at politics. "'They don't understand or realize "'that I am the greatest friend "'that American capitalism has ever had.'" About an hour later, he posted that, "'Many world leaders and business executives "'have come to see me asking for relief from tariffs. It's good to see that the world knows we are serious because we are.

It's hard not to read desperation in the last days of Trump's posts as Americans seem increasingly concerned about the loss of the rule of law, as Trump's tariffs upset the economy, and as Russia's President Vladimir Putin seems to taunt his US counterpart, who badly wants to end Russia's war against Ukraine as he promised to do with a single phone call, by declaring a truce over Easter

and then promptly violating it. That the administration seems to be reeling showed also in the news on Friday that the State Department has been torn apart by Secretary of State Marco Rubio's firing of Peter Morocco, the official who is dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID. Dasha Burns and Nahal Tusi of Politico report that Morocco is MAGA and was destroying the agency without advice from career officials. MAGA sees his firing as a sign Rubio is part of the establishment they want to destroy. Also on Friday, Michael S. Schmidt and Michael C. Bender of the New York Times reported that

the administration was suddenly claiming that the letter it sent to Harvard University on April 11th, withholding federal grants until the university handed administration officials power over the school students and programs, was unauthorized. Nonetheless, the White House was standing by the letter, which prompted Harvard to take a strong stand against the administration. Officials blamed Harvard for the standoff because they said university lawyers should have called

when they got such a dramatic letter. In response, Harvard pointed out that the letter was signed by three federal officials, placed on official letterhead, was sent from the email inbox of a senior federal official, and was sent on April 11th as promised. Recipients of such correspondence from the U.S. government, even when it contains sweeping demands that are astonishing in their overreach, do not question its authenticity or seriousness. It noted that it didn't know which statements the government was claiming were mistakes, but in any case the government's actions had real-life

consequences. Today, Greg Jaffe, Eric Schmidt, and Maggie Haberman reported in the New York Times that on March 15th, the same day he shared classified plans of a military strike against the Houthis in Yemen on an unsecure signal chat on which journalist Jeffrey Goldberg had been included, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth shared similar detailed information on a different signal chat. This one he began himself in January on his personal phone for strategizing with his closest allies and it brought together about a dozen people including his wife, his brother, and his personal lawyer. Four people with knowledge of the second chat group

spoke with Jaffee Schmidt and Haberman, suggesting that dissatisfaction with Hegseth in the department runs deep. Former Pentagon chief spokesperson, John Ulyot, resigned last week, and today he began an op-ed in Politico with a sentence, It's been a month of total chaos at the Pentagon. On Friday, Hegseth fired three of his senior staffers, and an official announced that his chief of staff was leaving. Ulyat wrote it was very likely that even bigger bombshell stories would come

this week. Finally, today was the deadline by which Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem were ordered to report to the President whether they recommended invoking the Insurrection Act to deal with conditions at the southern border. That law enables the president to use military troops as law enforcement officers inside the United States. While the two did not file their report today, Natasha Bertrand, Haley Britsky, Jake Tapper, and Priscilla Alvarez of CNN reported Friday that when they do, they will not recommend the president invoke the act. Letters from an American was written and read by

Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Devin, Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.