On the Ides of March, Saturday the 15th, a Maryland resident was put on a plane and deported to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was one of hundreds of Venezuelans and El Salvadorans flown to that prison—thanks to a sordid deal between Donald Trump and El Salvadoran strongman president Nayib Bukele—to be put to work doing involuntary hard labor.

Garcia wasn’t sent to CECOT because he had been convicted of a crime; a criminal conviction would have landed him in a US prison, with the legal rights accorded US prisoners. He was put on that plane and deported because of his alleged gang ties. In reality, however, it was because he was a Salvadoran asylum seeker in an era in which America’s leaders, the most powerful people on earth, have decided to make life for those fleeing poverty and violence a living hell.

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Making matters worse, immigration courts had already found that Garcia had a credible fear of being murdered by gangs who had targeted his family should he be returned to El Salvador. The courts put a hold on deporting him in 2019. Garcia’s removal to CECOT was, therefore, in total disregard of an existing court order.

Last week, the US government admitted that Garcia had been deported as a result of an “administrative error,” but then went on to argue, implausibly, that because he was now outside of US jurisdiction the American government had no power to return him to his family in the US. Federal District Court Judge Paula Xinis wasn’t buying it and ordered Garcia to be immediately brought back.

So far, however, that hasn’t happened. On Monday, the US government gained another few days to comply with the court order, when Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay so that the Supreme Court could have more time to consider the case—an ominous decision given that, the same day, the Supreme Court ruled by a 6–3 majority that Immigration and Customs Enforcement could keep deporting migrants to CECOT using the odious rationale that the country was being invaded by gang-affiliated Venezuelans and thus that the Alien Enemies Act could be used to fast-track deportations and to do an end run around due-process obligations.

On Thursday evening, however, the Supreme Court did come back with an unsigned, unanimous ruling, saying that the US government had to “facilitate” the return of Garcia to the United States. At the same time, however, the justices returned the case to the lower court and asked the judge to “clarify” her directive vis-à-vis the government action required. As of Thursday night, however, the government had not yet indicated whether—or how—it intended to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling.

“It’s completely outrageous,” Maureen Sweeney, a longtime immigration lawyer and current director of the Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice at the University of Maryland, told me. “It is an absolute violation of all of the Executive’s obligations under law, and a complete defiance of the law broadly. They [the Trump administration] are taking a position that would allow them to ignore every legal boundary in the immigration process and allow them to send immigrants anywhere in the world. This is just a completely unprecedented power grab by the executive. If the courts don’t stop that power grab, that’s the constitutional crisis that we are facing.”

No one has been held to account for the “administrative error” that led to Garcia’s deportation into forced labor (which we might also think of as slavery). In fact, when the DOJ attorney responsible for arguing the case expressed frustration about what had happened, he was instantly placed on leave for not showing enough loyalty to Trump’s deportation efforts. Meanwhile, far from apologizing for the mistake, Vice President JD Vance doubled down, going onto Fox & Friends to denounce Garcia for being a convicted gang member (he’s not been “convicted” of such an act), for having unpaid traffic violations, for not being “exactly ‘father of the year,’” and sneering at those Stateside who bothered to care about his fate. Essentially, Vance said that while the process may have been flawed, the end result—a deportation into slavery—was well merited.

In the early 1960s, a Yale psychologist, Stanley Milgram, published the findings of a remarkable experiment he had done, in which he had sought to understand whether ordinary Americans could be convinced to inflict pain on strangers —in the parameters of the experiment, escalating electric shocks—simply because a person in authority ordered them to do so. Milgram’s results were stark: It turned out that many Americans weren’t too different from the Good Germans of the Nazi era, in that they were quite capable of obeying clearly immoral orders and often remarkably incapable of resisting those orders.

More than 60 years on, the Milgram Experiment is being conducted not in a laboratory setting but on the United States writ large. And it is disconcertingly clear that people from high-level functionaries such as Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio down to low-level government employees just trying to keep their jobs in an era which DOGE is looking for excuses to fire them are more than capable of running with ghastly orders. In Trump’s fascist netherworld, there are a shockingly large number of Good Americans, people who seem incapable of rejecting unjust orders or understanding the moral implications of acquiescence in organized cruelty.

Let’s start with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who not too many years ago had a happy-go-lucky, youthful persona (if denizens of the hard-right can ever be “happy go lucky”). Back in 2016, when Trump repeatedly savaged him in debates, leading to Rubio’s ill-starred decision to imply on camera that his nemesis had a small penis, it was almost possible to watch the hapless Floridian and feel a twitch of sympathy.

Rubio has come a long way since 2016. Back then, he was an ardent supporter of USAID, arguing it was a vital part of the US’s national security strategy. He used to support the refugee resettlement program. He was even in favor of a limited pathway to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants.

Not anymore. Rubio has reinvented himself as one of the bully’s enforcers in chief.

These days, Secretary of State Rubio mocks asylum seekers; declares USAID to be unredeemable; justifies the cut-off of vital medical services to some of the world’s poorest men, women, and children; and looks for any and every way to cut programs like Temporary Protected Status for those fleeing endemic poverty, violence, and government dysfunction in countries such as Haiti. Rubio also has used the vast powers entrusted to him as secretary of state to go after hundreds of international students—not for committing crimes but for saying, writing, and thinking things that go against the Trumpian political grain.

Jowly and sullen, the reinvented Rubio has become a modern-day Torquemada.

For weeks now, Rubio has been waxing poetic about how he will root out from college campuses “lunatic” radicals from overseas and revoke their student visas. He has boasted that so far 300 students have had their visas yanked and that this process will continue unrelentingly. He has become a passionate advocate of the rollback of due process—of putting people on airplanes and summarily deporting them, of abandoning even the pretense of respect for habeas corpus and of vanishing academics into secretive immigration detention sites.

This isn’t new; it’s simply a savage variation on the threadbare old American theme of the “outside agitator.” In the 1930s, it was supposedly communist union organizers coming into factories and warehouses and ports to stir up trouble. In the 1950s and ’60s, it was supposedly radical civil rights organizers from up north, come to the South to plant the seeds of discontent in the minds of local African Americans. Today, it is foreign students, supposedly in America to stir up trouble on campuses around Israel-Gaza, and to lead astray good, God-fearing American youth.

I wish I could say it is just a few bad apples at the top of the barrel who have, in the worst sense of the words, become Good Americans. But it isn’t. Look at the eagerness with which federal employees far lower down the totem pole have worked to scrub government libraries and websites of anything redolent of “diversity” or “equality.” Witness the Orwellian heroics of these censorious technocrats to purge websites about the Underground Railroad of references to the racialized nature of American chattel slavery. Witness the efforts to scrub the Naval Academy library of hundreds of books, by such acclaimed authors as Maya Angelou, because they touch on racial issues or women’s issues or discuss the history of racism or the presence of the KKK in the US—all part of the effort to comply with anti-diversity orders and sentiments. Witness the inane dismantling of public health websites that explore how some populations are rendered more vulnerable than others to certain diseases, the scrubbing of environmental sites of words such as “climate change” and “environmental justice.” These ideas-cleansing mandarins are, after all, only obeying orders. Witness the private companies stampeding to get their part of the tens of billions of dollars soon to be spent on building up immigrant-detention facilities. Witness the masked ICE enforcers essentially kidnapping academics off of the streets of American cities.

It turns out we aren’t so very different from other populations navigating life under totalitarian government. It turns out there are an awful lot of Good Americans out there only too keen to outdo their office mates in their virtual book-burning efforts and their enforcement of brutal, dehumanizing rules. They may be, like many of those Good Germans of yore apparently were, decent family folk, kind to their children, respectful of their neighbors. Yet coexisting with these fine traits is a craving to fit in and a fear of standing alone against vast and unjust forces.

For generations after World War II, Hollywood knew it could conjure up an image for sadism-backed-by-the-menace-of-the-state by showing an SS man in a leather trench coat, possibly also a monocle, dispassionately pronouncing to an impending victim, “Vee have vays of making you talk.” Years from now, will Hollywood—or, for that matter, Bollywood and other overseas film-making hubs—use similar bywords for cruelty be the Texan ICE man, drawling something to the effect of “We have ways of making y’awl self-dee-porrrt?”

Stanley Milgram would have understood this morally cretinous moment all too well. “It is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act,” he wrote in Obedience To Authority. “The essence in obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view himself as an instrument for carrying out another person’s wishes and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions.”