The Government Doesn’t Want to Explain Itself Anymore
From Signal to ICE raids, the Trump administration is making power untraceable—and unchallengeable.
Two headlines have dominated the past two weeks—each disturbing on its own, but together, they reveal something more foundational: the quiet dismantling of legal accountability in America.
I speak, of course, of our nation’s sudden taste for disappearing people without process and our most senior intelligence and defense leadership doing business off-book. Let’s start with the facts on the ground, actions taken, names named, all very real:
Here’s the original Atlantic piece on Signalgate, and its follow-up with the full text of the exchange
Rumeysa Ozturk detained by masked ICE agents for writing an oped in the Tuft’s newspaper
Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, is snatched by ICE and set to be deported
By design, there’s a lot going on here. Things are moving fast and are difficult to follow. For as horrifying as some of the particulars are (and for as justified as some of the actions might arguably be), I want to focus on how things are happening. Because these aren’t separate phenomena—the deportations without due process and the use of Signal. They’re two faces of the same operation. One obscures the chain of command; the other short-circuits the legal system. Together, they make power invisible—and therefore, unchallengeable.
The administration is being systematic and smart about how it is proceeding. It is picking unsympathetic “victims” — violent gang members and pro-Hamas agitators. And if the men sent to El Salvador are indeed members of Tren de Aragua, have committed crimes in the US, have violated the terms of their visas or are here illegally, then yes: they ought to be deported. We’re not debating policy anymore; we’re debating whether the rule of law still applies. That’s how far gone we are. And because the people affected first are brown, poor, foreign, or politically inconvenient, most Americans don’t see it—or don’t care. But this is how it always starts.
This is why the how is every bit as important as the why.
As it stands now, the government has handwaved this away as, “they had tattoos and are bad people” or “Khalil sympathized with Hamas and helped lead illegal activity on the campus of Columbia.” Okay: maybe so.
Prove it. Show up to a court, whether an Article III court or an Article I immigration court. Present the evidence. Show that these men and women are who the government claims they are. If they are and the government has good reason to take these actions, it shouldn’t be hard to make the case. This is why we have courts. This is basic due process, the central tenet of our legal system going back to the Magna Carta.
To put it more bluntly: the government can’t just do whatever the fuck it wants. That’s not how this system is designed to work. We imbue the government with power and the right to enact violence on our behalf, and in exchange, we create processes to ensure that that power is not abused and is wielded according to strict rules.
If this seems pedantic and obvious: it should! This is the most basic shit imaginable.
There’s a longstanding joke that all the big First Amendment cases allow bad people to say bad things. Reading the case law is encountering Nazis, skinheads, draft dodgers, communists, fringe lunatic religions, etc. having their rights protected to share their spiteful, dangerous, and crazy ideas. Because if the First Amendment only protects favored speech, it protects no speech and it does not perform the core function of why we have free speech in the first place: a democracy only works with an enlightened electorate, and the only way to create an enlightened electorate is to allow a marketplace of ideas.
Now, due process is even simpler than that. If we now allow the government to disappear people whom the government claims without any showing beyond, “trust us” are terrorists, criminals, or even just unsavory, what on earth is to stop the government from showing up at your door and disappearing you?
“But I’m a citizen!”
Ah, but the government also claims you’re a terrorist, and maybe not really a citizen.
I bet you’d like your day in court to prove who you really are—and to force the government to confront you with evidence supporting its accusation?
On Monday, The Atlantic published the first piece that took me by surprise in a long time. The sheer stupidity of the thing, the Keystone Kops imitation our most senior defense and intelligence leaders performed…I knew these folks were not our best and brightest, but it’s grimly disappointing when they confirm your suspicions.
There’s been plenty of writing about OPSEC (there wasn’t any), about the stunning incompetence of inviting on Jeffery Goldberg, of all people, into the chat. About the intelligence boon it is to Russia and China to learn how these people speak about Europe, about making decisions. About whether this is a fireable offense for any or all of those involved.
That’s not what I want to discuss. What occurs to me as the most critical takeaway is this: not a single one of these people asked, “Hey, why the fuck are we doing this on Signal?” In fact, there’s a line early in the chat about pulling in people from another chat.
I propose this, which I think is obvious: using Signal is the way the Trump administration does business. It’s not that they don’t have access to SCIFs (every senior leader has one built into their house) or that there aren’t secure governmental communications channels.
It’s that they don’t want a record of what they’re doing. And yes, this violates all kinds of government recordkeeping laws. That’s bad, but that’s still missing the point.
How was the mass deportation of these supposed Venezuelan gang members planned? How were they identified and confirmed? How the hell did DHS hone in on a PhD student at Tufts who wrote an op-ed arguing against the treatment of Palestinians (not in favor of Hamas)?
The whole point is to keep this off the books, so even if the government winds up in court, there’s no record of their decision-making or of their diligence.
This is the behavior of a government that wants no checks on its power, that wants to vitiate the agreement between government and the governed. It is the clear assertion that the government does not answer to anybody.
We’ve seen this before. When I wrote about the administration’s attacks on lawyers and law firms, and Paul Weiss’s pathetic folding to the administration’s demands, it wasn’t just a sideshow, it was the same move. Discredit or intimidate the intermediaries of accountability. Undermine the people and institutions whose job it is to slow the process down, demand proof, insist on procedure. Because once you break the expectation that the government must explain itself—to the courts, to lawyers, to the public—it becomes free to act in darkness.
Signal threads, ICE raids, the demonization and taming of legal advocates—none of this is accidental. It is a pattern. A strategy. A message.
The process is the point.
If you think this stops with immigrants or dissenting students, you haven’t been paying attention.