As Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) flies to El Salvador in an attempt to ensure Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s release, one New York Times Columnist is drawing parallels to the antebellum (or sale of free Black Americans).
“This is a fundamentally tyrannical assertion of illegitimate power,” penned Jamelle Bouie. “Here, I’m thinking of the fraught legal status of free Black Americans in the antebellum United States. ‘The possibility of being kidnapped and sold into slavery was shared by the entire American free Black community, whether young or old, freeborn or freed slave, Northerner or Southerner,’ explains the historian Carol Wilson in her book Freedom at Risk.”
Bouie notes, the kidnapping of black free people was illegal in most states but was still “pervasive,” not just for the profits but also because “the majority of American whites rendered it unlikely that kidnappers would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law."
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The former Chief Political Correspondent for Slate drew several parallels from the antebellum to the more recent illegal deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.
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“The example of free Black Americans illustrates an important principle of political life. The question of who has rights — and of whose rights are to be respected — is inseparable from our treatment of those on the margins of political life,” he wrote. “The mere existence of a group of nonpersons threatens the freedom of those who live within the scope of concern, however far from the center they might be.”
“You cannot restrict unfreedom to a particular class of people," Bouie opined. “To allow Trump the authority to seize and disappear immigrants at will is to close the curtain on democracy for citizens, too. You cannot have despotism for some and freedom for others.”
