The Supreme Court on Saturday halted, briefly or not, Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort, or at least as it applies to the administration’s brazen attempt to circumvent the legal process in the course of shipping dozens of Venezuelans off to El Salvador, where popular strongman Nayib Bukele’s parlayed his domestic crime-fighting credentials into a paid gig as Trump’s personal jailer.

I won’t blame you for emitting a chuckle despite the decidedly unfortunate circumstances. This, like everything to do with Trump, is so absurd it’s difficult to suppress an incredulous laugh or two.

It’s not that some of the Venezuelans swept up in Trump’s cast net aren’t gang members. It’s just that rounding up hundreds of people, throwing them onto buses, then planes bound for lifetime lockup in a Central American maximum security facility built as a monument to a 43-year-old autocrat’s no-holds-barred, anti-gang crackdown, with no opportunity whatsoever to contest the allegations, is manifestly terrifying, particularly given that the Trump administration hasn’t ruled out using the same tactics on American citizens.

This is like the CIA’s policy towards alleged terrorists in the post-9/11 era, only implemented at home, at scale and, let’s face it, probably without nearly as much evidence against the accused as America had to support kidnapping God only knows how many people around the world in pursuit of Osama Bin Laden.

In fact, my guess is that the Trump administration doesn’t have any evidence at all tying some of the deportees to Tren de Aragua, and as it turns out, only one (the FBI) of the 18 agencies which comprise America’s intelligence community agrees, even remotely, with Trump’s contention that the group “is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the [Nicolás] Maduro regime.” I’m not an expert on Tren de Aragua, but it’s not immediately obvious what it would mean for a criminal gang to “infiltrate” the Maduro regime. The Maduro regime is a criminal gang.

Anyway, the Supreme Court’s order said Trump’s “directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court.” Thomas and Alito dissented (because of course they did), but they were alone. That means Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett are, for now, skeptical enough of Trump’s methods to temporarily order him to stop.

It probably didn’t help Trump’s cause with John Roberts that after mistakenly sending a Maryland dad who, if he was an MS-13 gang member (as the administration insisted), he’s not the sort of criminal mastermind whose case makes for a good hill upon which to die, to Bukele’s prison, the administration all but defied a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” the man’s return.

Specifically, Pam Bondi suggested that providing a plane counted as compliance but that ultimately, the choice to return the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, was Bukele’s. As if Trump couldn’t simply pick up the phone and say, “Listen, Nayib, I love what you’re doing for me down there, but I gotta get that Maryland guy back, and I gotta get him back today.” Asked at a White House event with Trump earlier this month whether he’d return the man, Bukele said, “Of course I’m not going to.”

After Senator Chris Van Hollen flew down to meet with Abrego Garcia, Bukele spent what looked like hours trolling the both of them on Elon Musk’s “X” with dozens upon dozens of childish memes and retweets from MAGA accounts, some of which were plainly propaganda bots.

As The Wall Street Journal — no less — pointed out, this isn’t really about Abrego Garcia who, despite never being convicted of any criminal offense anywhere, does appear to have at least flirted with MS-13 during his life. Rather, it’s about due process. Whether he’s a gang member “is beside the legal point,” the Journal‘s overtly right-leaning Editorial Board wrote. “If he is, then the Administration should have no worries about a hearing to establish the point.”

If Abrego Garcia’s case ends up being the match that sparks an outright constitutional crisis in the US, I suppose it’s worth recounting his backstory.

Abrego Garcia left El Salvador nearly 15 years ago, and although he entered the US illegally, he’s married to an American citizen. An immigration judge determined in 2019 that the government can’t deport him because he might be subjected to reprisals back home, where Barrio-18’s still irritated with him over — and this is real — his mother’s stuffed tortilla business.

See, Abrego Garcia’s mom Cecilia made a mean pupusa back in San Salvador. She didn’t have a storefront, but her tortillas were so good that “everyone in the town knew to get their pupusas from ‘Pupuseria Cecilia,'” according to a filing in the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Well, when you run a family-owned business in a mob neighborhood, you’re likely to get extorted, and that’s what happened to “Pupuseria Cecilia,” who was given a choice by Barrio-18: Pay a weekly protection fee to the gang, or give one of her sons over to the group for membership.

Not wanting her sons to be gang members, Cecilia paid the rent. But it wasn’t enough for Barrio-18, which eventually threatened to kill Abrego Garcia’s older brother, prompting the family to send him to the US (he’s a citizen now). Naturally, the gang began recruiting Abrego Garcia himself, reiterating to Cecilia that if only she’d turn her youngest son over to a life of crime, she’d be free to keep all of her tortilla profits. She again refused, and continued to pay the protection money. At one point, when Abrego Garcia was 12, the gang, citing failure to pay, came to the family home and threatened to kill him unless Abrego Garcia’s father handed over a sum of money, which he did.

The Garcias tried to get away, but when they moved to another neighborhood in San Salvador, Barrio-18 got wind of their location and came after them there too, presenting Cecilia with the very same choice: A weekly cut of the tortilla money or Abrego Garcia. When Cecilia came up short on the money, the gang showed up at the family home with a new threat. Abrego Garcia’s two sisters, they said, would be raped and murdered. The family moved a second time and, ultimately, sent Abrego Garcia to the US, where he arrived in 2012, entering illegally.

In March of 2019, Abrego Garcia was arrested in a Home Depot parking for “loitering” (he was actually looking for construction work) along with a couple of other guys who, according to local police, were wearing gang-related apparel (specifically, a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture”). Abrego Garcia was interrogated, but insisted he wasn’t a member of any gangs, and didn’t have information on anyone who is.

Eventually, he was taken into federal custody by ICE, which brought removal proceedings. He was denied bail by an immigration judge, and forced to marry his wife — who, for whatever this is worth, accused him of domestic violence in 2021 — while detained. In October of 2019, another US immigration judge, convinced by the tortilla saga, issued a “withholding of removal” order. It’s not the same as asylum, apparently, but it should’ve prevented the government from deporting him.

I’m not defending any associations Abrego Garcia did or didn’t have, but in the interest of context, it’s worth mentioning that MS-13 is Barrio-18’s main rival. So, if Abrego Garcia did join MS-13, you can probably trace that decision directly back to Barrio-18 and the tortillas. Also, MS-13 and Barrio-18 didn’t originate in El Salvador. They were founded in LA and, as Amnesty International pointed out, were “later exported to El Salvador through mass deportations.” The irony’s eye-watering.

Again, what’s important here isn’t Abrego Garcia. Nor Barrio-18. Nor MS-13. Nor the tortillas. What’s important is the Trump administration’s blatant disregard first for due process, then for the Supreme Court (which, as the Journal noted in the same linked editorial, “may decide it has to take a firmer stand than it did the first time”) and then, more generally, for the rule of law itself, which is one of several key governing concepts which holds America together.

As a Georgetown law professor put it, in remarks to The New York Times, “the idea that the government can disappear people to a foreign country with no due process and no responsibility for what happens next [is] a rule-of-law crisis.” “If the government can do it to Abrego Garcia,” the same professor went on, “they can do it to anybody.”

Oh, and if you’re wondering, Abrego Garcia’s mother eventually threw in the towel on the tortillas and moved to Guatemala. But even that wasn’t enough to deter Barrio-18, which “continues to harass and threaten [Abrego Garcia’s] two sisters and parents” to this day.