When a government ignores the law, and then lies about what the law says, the republic is no longer intact. The Trump administration’s refusal to comply with a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia marks a profound and dangerous break with constitutional order. It is not simply an administrative failure or a partisan overreach, it is a willful rejection of the rule of law and a signal that the executive branch now considers itself unbound by the other two branches of government. This is not the beginning of a crisis. It is its consummation.
Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident, was granted protection from deportation due to credible threats to his safety in El Salvador. Yet, in March of this year, he was removed anyway, an action the government initially called an “administrative error.” He now sits imprisoned in a maximum-security Salvadoran facility under anti-terrorism statutes, abandoned by the very system that promised to protect him. In response to a petition filed on his behalf, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Trump administration must “facilitate” his return. That word, “facilitate,” has since become the hinge on which justice swings, or is denied.
Rather than act to recover Abrego Garcia from foreign custody, the administration has chosen to interpret “facilitate” to mean little more than clearing domestic red tape. No diplomatic action. No direct request to the Salvadoran government. No accountability. The administration shrugs and insists its hands are clean, its duty discharged. And just to drive the message home, Stephen Miller, now Deputy Chief of Staff, stood in the Oval Office and claimed the Supreme Court had actually ruled in favor of the administration.
That lie, delivered from the seat of executive power, matters more than many may understand. It marks the transition from authoritarian impulse to authoritarian practice. The government is not just defying the Supreme Court, it is rewriting reality to justify doing so. The facts don’t matter. The ruling doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is what the administration says happened, and the institutional silence that allows it to stand unchallenged.
This is not a theoretical danger. It is not some distant Orwellian future. It is happening in real time. If a unanimous Supreme Court decision can be ignored with no consequence, what is left of the Court’s authority? If the executive branch can misrepresent binding legal rulings to the public without contradiction or enforcement, what is left of democratic transparency?
When the president or his proxies can say that black is white, that loss is victory, and that law is license, the government no longer depends on law at all. It depends only on power, and the willingness of the governed to accept its exercise without question.
The implications are chilling. If the courts are powerless to compel the executive to act, then legal protections become theoretical. If asylum status, residency rights, or even citizenship can be nullified through administrative sleight of hand and rhetorical obfuscation, then no one is safe, not immigrants, not journalists, not political opponents. The shield of law becomes an illusion.
Internationally, this case has already strained relations. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has refused to cooperate in returning Abrego Garcia, labeling him a terrorist and insisting the matter is closed. In normal times, the United States would lean on diplomatic channels, assert its legal findings, and seek justice. In this new order, the U.S. government doesn’t seem especially interested in that. One might even conclude that allowing a legal resident to languish in a foreign prison serves as a useful deterrent to others, a message that even the courts can’t protect you anymore.
The larger danger, though, is not just to individuals like Abrego Garcia. It’s to the very idea of a constitutional democracy. This administration is laying down a precedent: that it can ignore court orders, fabricate facts, and refuse accountability, and suffer no consequence. And if that precedent holds, it won’t be long before every legal decision that challenges executive authority is met with the same response: refusal, delay, denial, and disinformation.
We have long heard that democracy dies in darkness. But what if it dies in the light, while we all watch?
What we are witnessing is not just a legal controversy. It is a quiet, relentless campaign to hollow out democratic governance from the inside. Trump does not need to suspend the Constitution. He only needs to make it irrelevant, by ignoring the parts he finds inconvenient, and by convincing enough of the public that whatever he says is true.
In authoritarian regimes, the law is a weapon, not a shield. It is used selectively, manipulated, ignored, or rewritten to serve the interests of the powerful. This is what we now face. When the Supreme Court is rendered impotent and Congress too fragmented or compliant to respond, there is nothing left to restrain the presidency but public outcry, and even that, increasingly, is met with threats of force or dismissive contempt.
Make no mistake: if this is allowed to stand, it will not be the last time the Trump administration defies the Court. Nor will it be the last time it lies about the law to the public. The tools of constitutional government are still present, the robes, the gavels, the votes, but the substance is vanishing. What remains is power for its own sake, wielded with impunity.
We are past the point where “constitutional crisis” is an adequate term. A crisis suggests an anomaly, a break in normal operations. What we have now is a new normal, one in which the executive is supreme and the rest of government performs the motions of balance without the substance.
If we allow this to continue without outrage, without mass protest, without political and legal confrontation, then we are not just complicit in the erosion of democracy, we are witnesses to its end. And history will not absolve us for our silence.
Disclaimer: Jim Powers writes Opinion Articles. Views expressed in this editorial are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of Polk County Publishing Company or its affiliates. In the interest of transparency, I am politically Left Libertarian.
