Let’s take stock of what the Trump administration has actually done. The slippery slope Trump’s critics warned about when he started targeting visa holders and even permanent residents with deportation quickly became a landslide when, less than a week later, he invoked the centuries-old Alien Enemies Act to deport hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to a notoriously dangerous and abuse-ridden prison in El Salvador, whose self-proclaimed “dictator” he’s paying to keep these people imprisoned.

Except that’s not quite what happened. Because we very soon found out that at least dozens of these men were not only legally in the country through asylum claims but weren’t gang members at all or didn’t even have criminal records besides a few low-level offenses. One is a gay makeup artist who loves theater. Another is a nineteen-year-old whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents acknowledged was not the person they were looking for as they arrested him. Another is married to a US citizen and has three citizen children.

They were snatched and shipped away to a prison, then packed onto a plane and condemned to a living nightmare in the city of San Salvador for entirely fraudulent reasons: on the unproven accusation of a disgraced former police officer; because they had tattoos paying tribute to autism, their favorite soccer team, or their parents; for wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie; or simply for having happened to be there. The Trump administration itself has openly admitted in court that it deported one of the men by mistake.

All the while, the Trump administration has been pushing against the limits of the law and basic decency to not just keep being able to carry out these kinds of disappearances but do them to more people. When a federal judge ordered a halt to the deportations, the administration first argued he had no jurisdiction because the planes were already over international waters, and the president has since called for the judge’s impeachment and removal from the case. The White House has then asserted, in both court and public comments, that having thrown these men into hell, the whole thing is now out of its hands, even as Salvadoran authorities recently indicated to a visiting US senator that it is Trump who is calling the shots on what happens to them.

The administration is now all but outright refusing to abide by a unanimous Supreme Court decision ordering it to bring one of the men back, and two judges are weighing holding Trump officials in criminal contempt for ignoring the courts. Meanwhile, the president was caught saying, and has since officially confirmed, that he is now trying to find a legal rationale to do this to not just immigrants but American citizens, as El Salvador’s leader works to double the size of the prison at Trump’s urging.

This should all be deeply disturbing, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, or independent, conservative, centrist, liberal, or socialist. It’s why even the most conservative Supreme Court in generations — six of whose members were appointed by Republican presidents, three of them by Trump himself — ruled 9–0 against him, why a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan called it “shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

Which is why it’s stunning to find commentators urging people not to criticize or talk about any of this.

Trump was “setting a trap for the Democrats, and like usual we’re falling for it,” one House Democrat told Axios anonymously, complaining that “rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy . . . the thing where his numbers are tanking, we’re going to go take the bait for one hairdresser.” On Twitter/X, CNN commentator Chris Cillizza made a similar “case for why Democrats should *not* keep talking so much about Kilmar Abrego García,” one of the men disappeared in El Salvador, asking readers to think about “which issue is better, politically, for Democrats: Immigration or tariffs?”

“Everyone should think about which topics they want to raise the salience of and why,” tweeted influential liberal pundit Matthew Yglesias, paired with a chart showing immigration to be Trump’s strongest issue.

This is mistaken on multiple levels. On principle, it’s not an exaggeration to say that if the administration’s actions here are allowed to stand, both Trump and any future president will have the power to banish anyone they want to a foreign torture dungeon, US citizens included. The administration is trying to prove that as long as it accuses anyone, however spuriously, of whatever crime might justify this, and manages to stick them onto a plane over the ocean before a judge has time to rule on it, the White House can cheerfully admit it made a mistake — or simply keep lying about the person in public — and there will be no consequences.

You can imagine this or a future administration making that mistake again. You can imagine them making it over and over, and even conveniently doing so with people they consider political enemies.

Consider two things that happened just this week. In Florida, ICE arrested a Georgia-born man who crossed state lines, and though the judge acknowledged the birth certificate she had been shown was genuine, she said she was unable to release him because ICE wanted him held (he was eventually released). And in at least two different states, multiple US citizens, two of them immigration lawyers, received out of nowhere a Department of Homeland Security notice to leave the country. There seem to be a lot of mistakes happening right now.

There’s also the fact that the administration is making all of this deliberate policy. That the president says the only US citizens he would deport are the “violent” and “really bad people” shouldn’t be reassuring. His deportation program was originally sold as prioritizing violent criminals, and the reality has proven to be completely different. Meanwhile, he and his officials are rapidly broadening the kinds of Americans they lump under the label of one type of violent criminal, a terrorist: vandals, protesters, or anyone who criticizes the administration’s immigration policies.

This is by almost anyone’s standards a major and very dangerous overreach. You cannot say you’re deathly afraid for democracy and the Constitution, then turn around and demand silence about the president flouting court orders and asserting the right to disappear whomever he wants.

Put aside the principle. It’s not even clear that Democrats challenging the administration on this are on shaky political ground in the first place.

A Quinnipiac poll taken just before this controversy exploded found that Trump is underwater in public approval for both his handling of both deportations (42–53) and immigration issues more broadly (45–50). Other recent, better polls for Trump on this issue only put the public at more or less an even split, though these were all conducted before the El Salvador controversy came to dominate the headlines. Even one survey that recorded a particularly strong approval rating for him on the issue also found that approval had markedly declined over the past month.

When polling questions drill down into specifics, it’s clear the administration is on much shakier ground. Majorities oppose deporting visa holders and permanent residents for pro-Palestinian views. Nearly 60 percent think the government needs to provide evidence and a hearing before trying to deport an undocumented immigrant, and often sizable majorities of every group, including Republicans, say visa and green card holders should get the right to a fair trial, to present a defense, and to appeal.

There is a good chance, in other words, that as the press and national politicians focus attention on the administration’s excesses here — and the public realizes that Trump is using deportation powers to target not violent criminals, as he said he would, but law-abiding legal residents, political opponents, and even American citizens — people will sour further on his overall handling of immigration.

And whatever advantage Trump may or may not have on the issue, it’s nothing like that which George W. Bush enjoyed after the September 11 attacks, when he pushed some of the most aggressive, civil liberties–shredding proposals of his presidency. Bush’s approval ratings were in the seventies and eighties for months after the terrorist attacks and only started consistently dipping below 60 percent by late 2003, nearly two years later.

Even better for him, various polls over the course of months showed huge majorities of Americans — as high as 66 percent in the immediate aftermath of the attack — supporting sacrificing their civil liberties for safety. Similarly big majorities backed measures like trying suspected terrorists in military tribunals (six in ten), rounding up and interviewing Middle Eastern visa holders (79 percent) and detaining those who had violated immigration laws (nearly nine in ten), wiretapping suspects’ conversations with their lawyers (nearly three in four), indefinite detention of dangerous noncitizens (nearly eight in ten), and drastically heightened government surveillance (ranging from the fifties to the eighties and nineties, depending on the poll and idea — with support as high as 95 percent).

By September 2003, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found only 22 percent of Americans thought Bush had gone “too far” on this front (though that same poll also found the previous year that the public’s support for putting safety above civil liberties had drastically fallen from an even split to a minority view).

Mind you, none of this stopped then Democratic senator Patrick Leahy from challenging the administration on proposals like the military tribunals, efforts in which growing numbers of Democrats began joining him after a period of cowed assent. By early 2003, even as polls still showed majorities broadly in support of Bush’s anti-terrorism policies, Democrats rose up against and beat back Bush’s hyper-surveillance proposal, the Total Information Awareness program, and defeated his push to radically expand the powers of the Patriot Act.

From that year on, as the party picked a presidential candidate and campaigned to beat Bush at the ballot box, criticism of Bush’s disregard for civil rights and liberties became a regular part of Democrats’ rhetoric.

Trump today is in a very different position from where Bush was when all this happened. He is historically unpopular and only getting more so, and Trump has only had a net positive approval rating twice ever in his time as president, both at the very start of his terms, when presidents typically enjoy their best numbers. And as we’ve seen, even the best poll measurements of public approval for Trump’s immigration policies are on a knife’s edge, while others show them markedly out of step with US opinion. So there is no real argument that anyone alarmed by or opposed to what is happening should stay quiet as Trump takes far more extreme and unconstitutional measures than Bush did, while in a far more precarious political position to do it. If you feel the need to speak out against this, you’re on solid ground — morally and politically.