Collaborators

There’s a list, and a lot of people are on it:

A lawyer’s spring break trip to the Dominican Republic with his family ended on a troubling note at Detroit Metro Airport on Sunday: He was detained by federal agents, questioned about his clients, and asked to give up his cellphone, he says. . . .

According to Makled, here are the events that unfolded at Detroit Metro Airport after his family landed back home from a five-day stay in Punta Canta:

It was about 7 p.m. when the Delta flight landed back at Detroit Metro. Makled, his wife and two daughters exited the plane and made their way to the passport checkpoint for screening. Their photos were taken.

Mom and the kids got through with no problem. But when Makled’s photo was taken, a notification popped up and Makled said he heard one agent ask another agent: “Hey, are the TTRT folks around?”

“I thought, ‘What the hell is that?’ So, I Google that quickly,” Makled recalled of the acronym.

He quickly learned that TTRT stands for Tactical Terrorism Response Team.

Makled said his wife looked at him and asked what was going on, but he said he didn’t know. As the border agents let his wife and kids go, they took Makled into a small interrogation room.

What in the world could this be about anyway?

While in the interrogation room, Makled said, a man in plain clothes entered and began speaking to him. He said he recalls the man telling him: “We know you’re a lawyer. We know you take on big cases.”

Makled said he responded: “I said, ‘I’m not a famous lawyer. Let’s get to the bottom. What’s the issue here?’ “

One agent handed him a pamphlet about confiscating phones at the border. Makled, who is familiar with the law, said he was well aware that the government can confiscate one’s phone for a period of time and then give it back. But he said he told the agents he wasn’t going to let them have his phone because it contained privileged information with all of his clients.

So, he said, the agents asked for a list of texts that he believed to be privileged. Makled said he told them that that was impossible given his thousands of texts.

So they kept pushing.

Makled finally agreed to share his contact list with these goons, without disclosing who the people on it were, That was enough, this time, to get him released, as opposed to extrajudicially rendered to a Salvadoran torture prison or what have you.

Oh yeah what was this about again?

Makled views himself as a respected lawyer in his community of Dearborn, where he is a partner in a law firm of five lawyers. He helps people through all kinds of legal trouble, he said, whether traffic tickets, or civil rights issues, or serious injuries.

His latest high-profile client is Samantha Lewis, who is among seven demonstrators arrested last year following her involvement at a pro-Palestinian protest on the U-M campus. While the seven defendants face misdemeanor trespassing charges, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel also charged them with resisting arrest and obstructing police, a felony punishable by up to two years in prison.

Nessel has maintained that they used “physical force to counter” police who were trying to clear them from an encampment they had established on the diag. The students, however, have pleaded not guilty to the charges and maintain they were engaged in protected, free speech.

“I don’t know what triggered this,” Makled said of his ordeal at the airport. “I don’t know if it’s a result of civil rights cases, or First Amendment issues involving student protesters. They wouldn’t tell me what it is.”

I would like to think that all the Even the Liberal Jewish people who have been aiding and abetting the legal harassment and worse of people protesting for Palestinian rights are having some second thoughts about cozying up to Donald Trump, because he’s supposedly Good For the Jews. [Historical spoiler alert: Fascism is never good for the Jews].

Abductions by government agents; unexplained, indefinite detentions; the targeting of allegedly dangerous ideas; lists of those under government scrutiny; official proclamations full of bluster and bile — Jews have been here before, many times, and it does not end well for us. The rule of law and the right to freedom of thought and expression are essential safeguards for everyone, but especially so for members of groups whose ideas or practices don’t always align with the mainstream. As M. Gessen recently wrote in these pages, “A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others.” What our government is doing now is wrong in itself, but beyond that, it poses a bigger threat to Jewish people’s safety than all the campus protests ever could.

Speaking of collaborators, there’s more than one way to make a list, and one list that’s going to get very long is the one that’s going to have all the names of the prominent and semi-prominent people who collaborated with the Trump regime.

For example. this guy:

At a superficial level, I understand the district court’s order. The judge found that Garcia was unlawfully deported, and therefore sought the return of the alien. Isn’t this simply the sort of injunction that courts issue to the executive branch all the time? Not quite. Here, obtaining the return of the alien would require the President to successfully negotiate the release of the alien from a foreign leader. Even if the President makes this request, the foreign leader is under no obligation to comply. I am seriously doubtful this is the sort of power that the judiciary has.

The SG makes this argument quite forcefully . . .

This is mendacious bullshit in the form of sober legal analysis. It couldn’t be more routine for a federal court to order the executive branch to reverse an illegal act, and characterizing such an order as “forcing” the Trump administration to “successfully negotiate” with a foreign government, thus raising some sort of separation of powers issue, is farcical. (Especially, as several commenters have pointed out, given that the prisoner is being held at the request of the US government, which is paying for the costs of his illegal imprisonment). It’s the kind of frivolous argument that would have been laughed out of court until the rise of Trumpism and everything it entails required many Very Serious People to treat this kind of thing as worthy of careful consideration.

I’ve had friendly intercourse of various kinds with Eugene Volokh over the years, and I hope that he thinks long and hard about whether he wants to continue to platform somebody like Josh Blackman on his site at this particular historical moment.