The Trump-Generated Crisis Has Arrived: How Will We Respond?

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Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:

The barrage of extremist, and even unconstitutional, executive orders from Donald Trump are meant to overwhelm us. Perhaps that’s why a large segment of the country doesn’t realize the dangerous and historic moment we are facing. How anti-immigrant policies, and removing people from the country without due process, are just the tip of the iceberg, colliding directly with everyone’s individual liberties — undocumented people and citizens alike.

Now, Trump affirms that he is “not joking” when he says he’s exploring “loopholes” in order to serve a third presidential term. The Constitution establishes that no president can serve more than two mandates. Constitutional lawyers agree that it’s impossible for Trump to obtain a third presidential term.

But Trump, who doesn’t give a damn about the Constitution, wants to take advantage of his political power, giving off an air of invincibility, of continuity. It’s about selling the idea throughout his base, to distract attention from the excesses that his government is implementing and proposing on diverse fronts: immigration, the economy, education, the environment, relations with allied and non-allied nations, the dismantling of the federal government and programs vital to the population, the erosion of due process of law and the rule of law, and respect for the traditional division of powers in the U.S. democracy.

Maybe it doesn’t matter to you that masked agents in civilian clothes and unmarked vehicles take a student visa holder, for having different ideas from the administration. Or that they deport an authorized immigrant “by mistake,” and send him send him to the CECOT jail in El Salvador without knowing what he’s accused of, without a hearing before a judge, or stating that he belongs to MS-13 without offering proof, like what happened to Kilmar Abrego García.

But that is weakening our judicial system. Eventually, the same thing can happen to a citizen, for reasons that have nothing to do with immigration. Like, for example, criticizing Trump’s extremism.

You may not sympathize with pro-Palestinian individuals, but in this country, the Constitution guarantees freedom of expression. Rumeysa Ozturk is the Turkish student who attends Tufts University and was detained by masked people after her visa was revoked. Ozturk had participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and the administration says she is antisemitic. They also allege that she participated in activities supporting Hamas, although they have not presented proof of that, according to press reports. Ozturk belongs to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 509, which conducted demonstrations in more than fifteen cities on Tuesday, condemning “attacks on the First Amendment.”

The freedom of expression that this First Amendment guarantees is the same one that Trump and his followers utilize to lie and misinform. The same one that Trump continues to use, to insist on the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

Trump is also intimidating judges, asking for the dismissal of magistrates if they rule against him. It’s about disappearing the independence that the courts supposedly have, and disregarding court rulings when legal remedies already exist, like the appeals process, if he doesn’t like the ruling.

And he wants to use the Department of Justice to investigate his “enemies,” like the prosecutors in charge of various cases against him, or the law firms participating in those cases. The risk of beginning to use the governmental apparatus to persecute and intimidate those who do not think like Trump, or who criticize him, is real. It’s not theoretical.

Those who still believe that we are not descending into a dangerous spiral do not seem to understand what is happening. Trump is implementing the extremist Project 2025 of the Heritage Foundation, which many categorized as “fake” or “an exaggeration.”

Let’s review some of the proposals of Project 2025, beyond the detention and deportation of undocumented people and authorized immigrants, and the massive dismissal of federal employees: plans to cut Medicaid; the abolition of the Department of Education and essential programs like Head Start; attacks on civil and labor rights; the elimination of anti-discrimination protections; and ending initiatives against climate change and protection of the environment, among many other things.

This is already happening. The crisis is among us. The question is how the U.S. population will respond.

The original Spanish version is here.