By Mary Jones | Tuesday, April 15, 2025 | 4 min read
In the America Donald Trump is trying to build, a mistake by the government isn’t something to fix — it’s something you’re expected to live with. Even if it ruins your life. Even if it gets you shipped off to a foreign prison. Even if you’re an American citizen.
Last week, two stories broke that might not seem connected — or relevant — to your everyday life. One involves a man you’ve never heard of, detained and deported to a prison in El Salvador. The other is about Harvard University — a place that may feel worlds away. But both stories are about power. About whether it can be limited. And whether any of us are truly safe when it isn’t.
Meet Hilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. He was wrongly deported under Trump-era immigration policies — the government has admitted as much. But instead of correcting their error, Trump’s lawyers argued in court that the government doesn’t have to bring him back. That the courts are powerless. That once deported, even mistakenly, you can be forgotten. Vanished. Forever.
This isn’t about just one man. This is a message. A precedent. That the government can make an error — even a catastrophic one — and walk away from it. That in Trump’s America, the state has the right to seize you off the street, ship you to a foreign prison, and say: “Oops. Oh well.”
Trump’s lawyers are laying out their vision of justice: absolute, unaccountable, and final. It’s not about Abrego Garcia anymore. It’s about you. It’s about what happens when someone in power decides you’re a problem — and they no longer need to explain themselves.
The rot doesn’t stop at immigration. It’s spreading to the foundations of American education. Last week, Trump launched a political blitzkrieg against Harvard University — demanding total control over admissions, hiring, curriculum, and even campus maintenance staff.
Yes, Donald Trump wants the power to hire Harvard’s janitors. And its professors. And decide who gets into the medical school. He demanded the right to fire faculty who, in his words, are “more committed to activism than scholarship.”
Let’s pause here. Trump, who dodged the Vietnam draft with suspiciously timed bone spurs — spurs that no longer appear in his glowing medical records — wants to silence scholars who protested wars he was too afraid to fight and too indifferent to oppose.
Trump’s administration told Harvard it must “reduce the power of students” and “reduce the power of faculty” — with no explanation of what that even means. Their goal? To gut academic freedom, punish dissent, and turn the oldest university in America into an ideological puppet.
Harvard, founded in 1636 — 150 years before the U.S. even existed — has educated revolutionaries, presidents, scientists, and Nobel Prize winners. Trump, meanwhile, spent the Vietnam War polishing his golf swing.
This isn’t about policy. It’s about control. Trump’s lawyers demanded Harvard shut down all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs — while in the same letter, demanded “viewpoint diversity.” That’s how broken this ideology is. It wants diversity, but only the kind that kneels.
Harvard, thankfully, said no. In a defiant statement, Harvard President Alan Garber, who is Jewish, pushed back:
“No government… should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”
That’s how you stand up to a bully.
Harvard’s legacy isn’t abstract. It’s your health. Your safety. The first smallpox vaccine? Harvard. Anesthesia? Harvard. The first kidney transplant? Harvard. MRI technology? Telemedicine? Oral contraceptives? Thank Harvard. And Trump is threatening to defund it all because it won’t let him run the place like a mob boss with a grudge.
This isn’t just a culture war skirmish. It’s a blueprint for authoritarianism. Control the courts. Control the universities. Control who gets deported — and whether anyone can do anything about it when they are.
That’s how democracy dies. Quietly. Bureaucratically. With paperwork filed by lawyers in well-tailored suits. With mistakes labeled “durable reforms.”
Durable. That’s the word Trump’s team used over and over in their letter to Harvard. But if they want to talk durability, let’s talk facts: Harvard has lasted 389 years. It will outlast Donald Trump. It will outlast his lawyers. It will outlast every authoritarian thug who thinks power is a right and not a responsibility.
But not unless we fight back.
Because today, whether we know it or not, we are all Hilmar Abrego Garcia. And today, it’s Harvard in the crosshairs. Tomorrow? It could be you.
Copyright 2025 FN, NewsRoom.
