'We're living through hell' and 'it's all downhill from here': Trump-covering reporter

Asawin Suebsaeng, a journalist who has covered President Donald Trump for years for both The Daily Beast and Rolling Stone, has a grim outlook in a new interview with The New Republic about what the administration's mass deportation policies portend for the future.

Trump made it clear this week, during a White House visit with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, that he has no intention of lifting a finger to aid the return of Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia after he was accidentally shipped to an infamous Salvadoran prison despite legal protection from being deported to that country — even though the Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court order for him to "facilitate" Garcia's return. Indeed, the administration is doubling down on it, calling him a criminal gang member even though he has never been convicted of any crime, gang-related or otherwise.

"It was once agreed upon across virtually all partisan lines in American culture and politics that the old saying, 'I would rather let 100 guilty men go free than imprison just one innocent man,' was a good thing," Suebsaeng told The New Republic's Greg Sargent. "That was a principle that we as a society — and as a country that apparently pretends to value things like the rule of law — should live by, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, or anything else."

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"I think one of the most perverse things that we’ve been seeing in recent weeks is that the second Trump administration isn’t just inverting that old saying completely and turning on its head, but they’re doing so very publicly, gratuitously, and gleeful[ly] in public, from the president of the U.S. on down," he continued. "I’ve run out of polite ways to characterize it. And without saying the words f------,f------ hell,we’re living in f------ hell right now over and over and over again to you, I think that is the most polite way I can characterize it to your listeners. And I think it be all downhill from here."

Trump has claimed he has no power to order Garcia's return, and Bukele has echoed this line — but it's complete nonsense, Suebsaeng continued.

"All Donald Trump has to do is give a wink and a nod. It would take two and a half seconds, maybe fewer than that, for him to get the government in El Salvador to get this guy back on a plane to American soil — and they are just steadfastly refusing to do it," he said. "There are a multitude of reasons as to why, both absolutely cynical and absolutely other barbaric things."