What Is Your Exit Strategy?
The government of the United States is arbitrarily revoking permanent resident cards and visas, coercing law firms and attacking the courts, and straight out disappearing people to foreign prisons without even pretending to care about due process or their fate. People are dying in overcrowded American detention centres. To my American friends: have you developed your exit strategy?
The country is well on its way to becoming a totalitarian dictatorship under the supreme leadership of Donald Trump. Republicans are openly calling for his face to be etched into Mount Rushmore and placed onto $100 bills. Larger-than-life downtown statues and mandatory portraits of the supreme leader in waiting rooms and living rooms are not far behind.
Trump has stated that he intends to seek a third term and that there are ways to do so. We are already familiar with those ways; we all witnessed them on January 6, 2021, when a mob of his supporters attacked Congress in what the rest of the world clearly understood was an attempted coup d’état. His first act upon returning to office was to grant pardons to over 1,500 people convicted in that attack. This is not a man known for paying his dues; he did not grant them pardons for what they had done, but for what he still needs them to do.
The American Constitution does not permit a president to serve more than 10 years, or be elected more than twice. But it also does not permit the president to get gifts from foreign powers, abrogate free speech, the rule of law, or due process, so that is clearly no impediment.
If you are waiting for the American legal profession and justice system to regain the upper hand on the question of constitutionality, you’re barking up the wrong tree. The rule of law works, at the most fundamental level, on the honour system. And in case there was any doubt, it was the Supreme Court itself that ruled that the president is immune from prosecution for all acts conducted in his capacity as president.
Just in case anyone still wants to challenge him through the legal system, Trump has been actively attacking the country’s major law firms to put a chill on legal opposition and take revenge on anyone who has ever dared oppose him, or has even been associated with someone who has opposed him.
With American residents being abducted by plain-clothes government agents wearing facemasks and renditioned to foreign countries without any form of due process, there is no reason to believe that American citizens are any safer. It is only a matter of time until outspoken critics of the Trump administration are quietly disappeared as well, their rights ignored. If non-citizens can be deported without due process, then what due process is left for citizens to prove their citizenship?
Americans seem to believe that what is happening is abstract, only happening on social media, that it isn’t real or somehow won’t affect them. How many stories we have heard over the past two months of Trump supporters who are victims of Trump’s policies and have said variations of “I didn’t think he meant me!”
Unfortunately for those south of the border, when the rights of some people are taken away, everyone’s rights are taken away. When the president disregards any one part of the Constitution and gets away with it, the Constitution as a whole becomes meaningless.
Opposing a totalitarian dictator isn’t good for your health and well-being, nor, if you’re loud enough, for that of your family. Americans who publicly oppose Trump will face increasing problems, from job loss to arbitrary arrest, to the kidnapping and threatened deportation already being faced by non-Americans. Take Turkish student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was arrested in Boston by plain-clothes officers and sent to an immigration detention centre in Louisiana pending deportation without facing any charges, for having taken part in a pro-Palestinian protest.
Mahmoud Khalil remains in custody, as well, if you remember his case from just two weeks ago. These arrests are all being done to set a precedent that anyone can be arrested on the orders of the President, which has no basis in law, by using people whose protests are not widely supported by the public. That is entirely the point; once the precedent is set on people who won’t garner widespread pushback, the stage is set to arrest any opponent of the administration.
In 2015, one of the signature promises of Canada’s Liberal government was to rapidly accept 25,000 Syrian refugees, as that country was in the depths of a civil war that, though the West has since largely lost interest, has not come to an end. We have since taken over 100,000 Syrian refugees — of the estimated 14 million people displaced by the war. Since 1980, Canada has taken in over one million refugees from around the world.
In the past decade, refugee claimants from the United States have numbered in the hundreds, and not one has been accepted. Under Canada’s rules, it is possible to claim refugee status on the grounds of political persecution. If it becomes any clearer that opposing Trump can result in real persecution by the government, pro-democracy Americans would be free to claim refugee status in Canada. As a country that both legally recognises the Unites States as a safe country — though American citizens are exempt from the Safe Third Country Agreement — and is already suffering a serious housing crisis, this would put Canada in a very awkward position.
Accepting 25,000 refugees is one thing; potentially accepting millions is not really in the cards. Moreover, Canadians would be unlikely to welcome masses of Americans seeking political asylum. To us, Americans have made their own bed, and they will need to sleep in it.
For any Americans wondering whether or not they should leave before the totalitarian government is fully formed and their legal rights no longer exist, when they come for you, too, each will need to make a plan that does not include running for the border and hoping to find open Canadian arms. Just as the Trump administration claims refugees crossing their southern border is a national emergency, Canada could well say the same thing.
Rather than looking to leave, the only effective exit strategy Americans should be considering is how to reclaim their democracy and re-establish the rule of law before it is too late.
It will mean a country built on the concept of rugged individualism will have to find a way to work together for the common good.
Until then, good luck.
"Rather than looking to leave, the only effective exit strategy Americans should be considering is how to reclaim their democracy and re-establish the rule of law before it is too late."
I wish Canadians were watching more closely from a policy level, and trying to strengthen Canadian Democratic Institutions to avoid what happened to the United States Government from happening to the Canadian Government as well.
I don’t see any of the options on my ballot later this month offering any policies in that direction – only a focus on an individual person and the people around them, when these are clearly the inevitable result of systemic flaws.
Without reform, it is only a matter of time before Canada goes down the same route as the US already has.