When a Government Becomes Illegitimate

An American resident—protected by a court order—was wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador. The U.S. government admits this was a mistake. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled he must be returned. Yet he remains in a foreign prison, and our government now claims it cannot bring him back.

This is not an error. It is a revelation.

The American taxpayer funds international prison contracts beyond our own legal reach. We fund ICE agents empowered to kidnap and deport. We fund a government that violates due process, then says its hands are tied. We fund a system that disregards law, morality, and the lives of its own people.

When a government uses our money to subvert our laws, what legitimacy remains?

This is not a partisan issue. This is not a technical glitch. This is a collapse of covenant between people and state.

Our government has quietly constructed mechanisms that allow it to operate outside the Constitution. It outsources accountability. It disobeys court rulings. It disappears people.

This is the architecture of authoritarianism—disguised in bureaucracy, rationalized by policy, and normalized by silence.

We must now ask the question that generations before us asked in darker times:

When a government becomes destructive of the rights it was created to protect, does it still deserve the consent of the governed?

We are not calling for chaos—we are calling for courage. The courage to rethink, to rebuild, and to remember that government is meant to serve the people, not disappear them.

If one man can be vanished and forgotten by the very nation that swore to protect him, then none of us are safe.

This is our line in the sand.

Bring him home.

Then bring the system to account.