This editorial was originally published by The Houston Chronicle and was distributed by The Associated Press.
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“How can I be under arrest? And in this manner?” Franz Kafka’s famous fictional character, Josef K, asks the two men who show up at his apartment early one morning.
“We don’t answer such questions,” the men tell him.
“You’re going to have to answer them,” K responds. “Here are my papers, now show me yours, starting with the arrest warrant.”
Actually, the two agents who have arrived at his door to take him away do not have to answer. And they don’t. In “The Trial,” perhaps the most “Kafkaesque” of the celebrated Czech author’s early 20th-century novels, Josef K goes to his eventual death by execution without knowing how or why he got caught up in a bewildering bureaucratic nightmare. Neither does the reader.
Kafka himself died a century ago, but in recent weeks he’s come back to life, so to speak. For that, we can thank President Donald Trump and his plans to carry out mass deportation. Designed by White House advisor and anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller and implemented by Trump’s border czar, Tom Holman, who prefers the brutalist approach to immigration-law enforcement. “I don’t care what the judges think, I don’t care,” Holman has said. Due process, as far as this trio is concerned, is pretty much an afterthought.
Consider a real-life Josef K, a Salvadoran native living in Baltimore, legally, who on March 12 fell into the clutches of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. On a Wednesday afternoon, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a sheet metal worker, left work as usual and drove to his mother-in-law’s house to pick up his 5-year-old son, an autistic child who has a hearing deficit and is unable to communicate effectively.
On the way home, an unmarked vehicle pulled Abrego Garcia over. According to court documents, men identifying themselves as ICE agents with Homeland Security Investigations told him his “status has changed.” Within minutes and without a warrant, he was handcuffed and detained in one of several ICE vehicles on the scene. The agents gave him 10 minutes to call his wife to collect the mute and terrified little boy watching everything from the backseat. Otherwise, they told him, his son would be handed over to Child Protective Services. She arrived to find her husband distraught and in tears. With no explanation for why or where he’d be taken, Abrego Garcia was promptly hauled away.
Shuttled between detention centers from Maryland to Louisiana to Texas, Abrego Garcia managed only a few disoriented calls to his wife, his confusion palpable. He was being accused of gang affiliations. Both Abrego Garcia and his wife pleaded with ICE, explaining that he had fled gang threats as a teenager, earned U.S. protection and had already disproven baseless accusations of ties to MS-13, the notorious Salvadoran gang. According to court filings, ICE repeatedly assured him he’d get his day in court.
Then, from a detention center in La Villa, Texas, came Abrego Garcia’s final, urgent call. He was being sent to El Salvador, to “CECOT,” he told his wife. The next day, a news photo showed men kneeling, heads shaved, arms locked overhead — faces hidden. But she recognized those scars, those tattoos. There was her husband. Exiled to a hellish mega prison for terrorists, shoulder-to-shoulder with the “worst of the worst ” in the country he’d worked so hard to escape.
Abrego Garcia has no criminal record, has no known connections to a gang and checked in with ICE regularly as part of his protected status. His wife and child are both U.S. citizens. As Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, in their filing, put it: their client “sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafkaesque mistake.” He ended up behind bars, even after a U.S. district judge told the Trump administration to halt flights of detainees to El Salvador, an order the administration ignored. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, a Trump acolyte, offered up a callous response on social media: “Oopsie…Too late.”
Literature, like history, is replete with warnings about human nature and our inclination, if given the opportunity, to wield unchecked power mercilessly. Machiavelli, Orwell, Solzhenitsyn and, of course, Kafka — they all saw it. So did the Founding Fathers, who built constitutional guardrails to stop tyrants, real or aspiring. They anchored us to the rule of law, not the rule of a future Trump and his 100-plus (and counting) executive orders, or the world’s richest man or some concoction called DOGE.
Trump and company, either ignorant of the Constitution or disdainful, have smashed guardrails. They don’t care that due process is an essential building block of democracy and that without it, it’s not only a foreign-born resident like Khalil who can be deprived of life or liberty. It’s also the rest of us.
Fortunately, Americans seem to be shaking off a stunned period of post-election hibernation in protests, town halls, election booths and financial markets. Although Kafka’s hapless Josef K could not control his fate, we the people still can.
