What Are You Going to Do About It?

As the news breaks that Pete Hegseth and every other top security official was accidentally texting with the editor of The Atlantic (gift link) during a secret military operation (!), I wanted to write about something else.

Everything Tom Tomorrow mentions in this week's cartoon is real, except his future projection of Chuck Schumer's arrest in the final panel. Tourists and academics entering the country have been detained for hours and days, weeks, for thought crimes, from climate research to Palestine activism.

I've read several long threads on BlueSky describing the precautions people who must travel into the U.S. should do to make sure they are not detained. It's just like reading about traveling to the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War, updated to the smart phone age. 

Someone in the Trump administration has floated the idea of requiring social media passwords of anyone applying for a green card or naturalized citizenship.

As many others have said already, if anyone is deprived of habeas corpus rights, then none of us have habeas corpus rights. I wrote about this back in late September 2024, though I didn't use the term habeas corpus then, rather equal protection under the law. But it's the same thing. 

If the government can grab a person and take them somewhere else and say, What are you going to do about it?... What are you going to do about it?

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Update: I just saw Timothy Snyder post his version of this point on BlueSky:

If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary.