All it would take is a phone call from the White House, and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the thirty-year-old sheet-metal apprentice and father of three whom the Trump administration “mistakenly” detained as an alleged gang member and sent to an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador, would be back home with his family in Maryland. Yet after Donald Trump’s grotesque Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele, who calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” Abrego Garcia’s coming back to the United States seems increasingly unlikely—notwithstanding a 9-0 Supreme Court ruling declaring his removal illegal and ordering the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return.

Abrego Garcia himself has no way of knowing that his case has brought the United States, less than a hundred days into Trump’s second term, to a full-blown constitutional crisis. He, along with 237 others, mostly Venezuelan migrants accused by the Trump administration of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang, have been effectively disappeared at El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), where they have no access to lawyers and no chance to communicate with the outside world. Videos from inside the camp—circulated widely across social media at the encouragement of Bukele and U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—are nauseating. Prisoners there are tortured, starved, and deprived of adequate medical care; they are stacked like cord wood, seventy or eighty to a cell. According to Human Rights Watch, more than 350 of them have died in the three years since the beginning of Bukele’s state of exception, which suspended constitutional protections and granted more power to security forces. It is no exaggeration to call CECOT a concentration camp.

The Trump administration has already agreed to pay El Salvador $6 million to keep detained migrants at CECOT for a minimum of one year. This arrangement should sicken—and frighten—any American who cares about the rule of law and due process. The right of the accused to a fair hearing and speedy trial is a bedrock principle of American democracy, one that Trump himself has often taken advantage of but is now openly flouting. Among the other innocent men Trump has already consigned to CECOT without legal recourse are Arturo Suárez Trejo, a thirty-three-year-old musician, and Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist, hairdresser, and asylum-seeker whose only crime was a tattoo indicating not gang membership but participation in Catholic religious processions. 

Until now, Trump has promised to abide by Supreme Court decisions. But it is no longer possible to take him at his word. He and his administration have systematically misrepresented the Court’s decision in the Abrego Garcia case, and have obstinately defied the rulings of lower courts. Meanwhile, the ICE arrests and renditions have only increased in recent weeks, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has scraped personal data from the IRS and other federal agencies about where migrants live, work, and attend school. ICE agents have shown up at primary schools and lied to staff in an effort to interrogate the children of targeted migrants. 

This moment is a test of the courts, Congress, and our political system in the face of a lawless executive. But it is also a moral test of the citizenry. Right now, too many of us still seem to believe that what happened to Abrego Garcia could never happen to us. But at his meeting with Bukele, Trump teased the idea of sending American citizens to CECOT. We are collectively failing to notice what is happening in plain view—a full-scale authoritarian takeover of the federal government—because we have failed to imagine that something like this could happen here in the United States. Before we can stop this takeover, we must first stop fooling ourselves about it; our vision must be clear and our priorities in order. Among the many tragic ironies of this moment is that a momentary collapse of the stock market proved more threatening to the president’s grip on power than his unapologetic violation of basic human rights and his casual contempt for constitutional limits on his authority. One could be forgiven for wondering if Trump would be allowed to dismantle American democracy piece by piece as long as he didn’t upset Wall Street.