SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
office of legal counsel
165 Massacred Schoolgirls in Iran — and the Silence That Exposes the West’s Moral Selectivity
These were not combatants. They were not militants. They were children seated at their desks, pens in their hands, notebooks open before them, studying, whispering to classmates, and imagining futures that stretched decades ahead.
Mar 07, 2026
In an era when images can circle the globe in seconds and newsrooms claim to uphold universal humanitarian principles; one might expect the killing of 165 schoolgirls inside a primary school to dominate international headlines. One would expect emergency debates, moral outrage, and relentless coverage. Yet in the southeastern Iranian city of Minab—where Israeli-American strikes obliterated classrooms filled with children—the world’s most influential media institutions have responded with something far more revealing than condemnation: they have responded with silence.
These were not combatants. They were not militants. They were children seated at their desks, pens in their hands, notebooks open before them, studying, whispering to classmates, and imagining futures that stretched decades ahead. In seconds, that ordinary school day turned into a massacre. Desks became splintered wreckage, classrooms collapsed into dust, and rows of coffins replaced rows of pupils.
Yet the names of these girls—165 lives extinguished before they truly began—barely entered the global conversation.
This omission is not the product of oversight. It reflects something far more structural: the hierarchy of victims that governs much of the contemporary information order. In theory, modern Western media institutions present themselves as defenders of human rights and guardians of moral accountability. In practice, their editorial priorities often mirror geopolitical interests with striking precision.
When the deaths of children generate outrage in one context but indifference in another, the moral language surrounding human rights begins to lose its integrity.
When tragedies reinforce established narratives about adversarial states, they are amplified, dramatized, and transformed into global moral spectacles. But when tragedies expose the human cost of the military actions carried out by Western powers or their closest allies, they are quietly displaced from the front page—if they appear at all.
The massacre in Minab illustrates this logic with devastating clarity.
The deaths of 165 Iranian schoolgirls do not fit comfortably within the dominant geopolitical storyline that portrays Israel and its strategic partners as defenders of stability and order in a turbulent region. Acknowledging such an atrocity would inevitably raise difficult questions: about the legality of strikes on civilian infrastructure, about the ethics of military escalation, and about the widening humanitarian toll of ongoing Israeli-American attacks across the region.
It is therefore far easier to look away.
But Minab is not an isolated tragedy. Across Lebanon, relentless bombardments have repeatedly struck civilian neighborhoods, reducing homes and streets to rubble. Across Palestine, entire communities have endured cycles of destruction that claim the lives of children whose only battlefield was the ground beneath their feet. Hospitals, schools, and residential blocks have all entered the expanding geography of devastation.
These events do not occur in a vacuum. They form part of a broader pattern in which military power operates alongside narrative power. Missiles shape the physical battlefield, while selective reporting shapes the battlefield of perception.
What emerges is not merely a media bias but a form of narrative engineering. Certain victims are elevated as symbols of universal suffering, while others—often far more numerous—are rendered invisible. Compassion itself becomes curated, distributed unevenly according to political convenience.
For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection. The credibility of humanitarian discourse depends on consistency. When the deaths of children generate outrage in one context but indifference in another, the moral language surrounding human rights begins to lose its integrity.
The girls of Minab deserved the same recognition afforded to any victims of violence anywhere in the world. They deserved to have their stories told, their lives acknowledged, and their deaths confronted with the seriousness such an atrocity demands.
Instead, they encountered a second form of erasure.
First came the missiles that ended their lives. Then came the silence that followed.
For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection.
In the contemporary information age, propaganda rarely announces itself openly. It often operates through absence—through the stories that never reach the front page, the victims whose names remain unspoken, and the tragedies that disappear before the world has time to notice.
The massacre in Minab therefore stands as more than a local catastrophe. It exposes a deeper crisis in the global information order—one in which the value of human life appears disturbingly contingent on political context.
And if the deaths of 165 schoolgirls in their classrooms fail to trigger universal outrage, the question is no longer about geopolitics alone.
It becomes a question about the credibility of the moral system that claims to defend humanity itself.
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Shield of the Americas': Trump Assembles His Fascist Hemispheric Fan Club
The group of Caribbean and Latin American leaders attending Trump’s weekend summit in Miami are the fan club of his aggressive interventionism, his so-called “war on narco-terror,” and his administration’s attacks on left-wing governments and movements.
Mar 07, 2026
For nearly three years the Dominican Republic had been excitedly preparing to host the region’s biggest multilateral event: the 2025 Summit of the Americas, bringing together the leaders of nearly every government in the Western Hemisphere. But on November 3, only a month before the summit was to take place, the DR’s foreign ministry abruptly announced the postponement of the event citing “recent climatic events” (i.e., hurricanes) and “profound divisions that currently hamper productive dialogue in the hemisphere.”
Indeed, regional “divisions”—others might say “alarm” or “outrage”—had intensified during the fall of 2025 following the US’ massive military build-up in the Caribbean, its air strikes against alleged drug boats—resulting in scores of extrajudicial killings—and the threats of a US attack on Venezuela. Past summits, including the 2022 summit in Los Angeles, had seen Latin American leaders fiercely push back against US regional policies. Fearing a potential public relations disaster, DR President Luis Abinader—following consultations with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio—decided that pulling the plug was the best option.
So far there’s no word of a new date for the Summit of the Americas. This weekend, however, President Donald Trump will convene a far smaller hemispheric summit at his golf resort in Miami. The group of Caribbean and Latin American leaders that will be attending Trump’s summit—entitled “Shield of the Americas”—are fans of his aggressive interventionism, his so-called “war on narco-terror,” and his administration’s attacks on left-wing governments and movements in the region. They have earned their exclusive invitations through various forms of tribute and by pledging their continued loyalty, though it remains to be seen whether Trump and Rubio will succeed in garnering support for every point on their agenda, in particular for their effort to push China out of the region.
***
Featuring a who’s who of the Latin American hard right, Trump’s divisions-free summit is reminiscent of recent Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPACs) held in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. Like those conferences—in which Argentina’s anarcho-capitalist president Javier Milei and Chile’s far-right president-elect José Antonio Kast have shared the stage with MAGA luminaries like Steve Bannon—the “Shield” summit appears designed to further promote Trump-aligned far-right cultish ideologies in the Americas. As an added bonus, it will be held at the National Trump Doral Miami, ensuring a solid weekend of revenue for Trump’s resort as well as quick, easy travel to and from Mar-a-Lago for the US president.
Still, it remains to be seen whether Trump—whose overall attitude toward the region and its inhabitants oscillates between contempt and indifference—will be willing to invest real time and energy in cultivating this group of leaders.
Each of the summit invitees—numbering 12 at last count—can claim to have advanced the US administration’s regional objectives in one way or another. Many have engaged in sustained attacks against left-wing governments and movements that have resisted Trump’s imperial ambitions. Milei, for instance, has repeatedly insulted President Lula da Silva of Brazil and thrown his support behind former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, convicted last year of plotting a military coup against Lula.
Daniel Noboa of Ecuador, in addition to persecuting left-wing opponents at home, has engaged in an unprovoked tariff war against Colombia’s progressive president—and vocal Trump critic—Gustavo Petro. On March 4, for no apparent reason other than that of wanting to please Trump and Rubio, Noboa expelled the entire diplomatic staff at Cuba’s embassy in Quito. Similarly, Honduras’ recently-elected right-wing president Nasry Asfura rescinded a medical cooperation agreement with Cuba, leading to the departure of more than 150 Cuban doctors that had been serving low-income communities. This offering will have surely warmed the heart of Marco Rubio, who has been pressuring countries around the world to terminate similar agreements in order to eliminate one of Cuba’s few sources of foreign income.
Above all, the cohort of right-wingers attending the summit have been supportive of Trump’s “war on narco-terror,” currently the main vehicle for advancing Trump’s policy of expanding US political and economic influence in the region, referred to both mockingly and seriously as the “Donroe Doctrine.” The first signs of this “war” date back to the first day of Trump’s second term, when he instructed Rubio to designate various drug cartels and Latin American gangs as “foreign terrorist organizations.” It became real when, in late July of last year, the US president ordered a massive build-up of naval and aerial military assets in the south Caribbean and directed US Southern Command (Southcom) to conduct illegal aerial strikes against suspected drug boats, leading so far to over 150 extrajudicial killings of mostly unknown civilians.
On January 3, following months of threats of US intervention in Venezuela, US forces conducted an unprovoked military attack and invasion of Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, who were flown to New York to await trial on dubious charges. The next day, the members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC, by its Spanish initials) met and discussed a statement denouncing the illegal attack on Venezuela. Nine governments opposed the statement and effectively blocked its release. The leaders of those governments, except for that of politically unstable Peru, are now on the “Shield of the Americas” invitation list. Two other leaders who’d been elected but hadn’t taken office—Kast of Chile and Asfura of Honduras—defended the attack, and have been invited as well.
A number of governments have gone even further in embracing Trump’s “narco-terror war.” After the US administration designated the fictitious Venezuelan drug organization “Cartel de los Soles” as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, later identifying Maduro as its leader, the presidents of Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay, and the DR (all “Shield” invitees) did the same. Given the lack of real evidence that this so-called cartel exists, the US Department of Justice removed the term from its indictment of Maduro; however, the terrorist designation remains in the books in the US and in those four Latin American countries.
Many of the governments represented at the Miami summit have adopted the term “narco-terror” in official discourse and policy statements. Noboa, whose security forces are allegedly responsible for forced disappearances and widespread human rights abuses, has launched his own “war on narco-terror” in Ecuador. On March 3 the US and Ecuador announced joint military operations targeting “terrorist organizations” with US special forces supporting Ecuadorian commandos to “combat the scourge of narco-terrorism,” per Southcom. Other summit invitees, including Argentina, the DR, Bolivia, and El Salvador appear to be getting in the game as well and Paraguay, like Ecuador, has signed a Status of Forces Agreement with the US administration, allowing the presence of US troops and providing them with immunity from local prosecution.
It’s possible that the Trump administration considers that framing US military expansionism in the hemisphere as a combined war on terrorism and drug-trafficking is helpful in garnering public support, though there’s not much indication that it has, outside of the Republican MAGA base. But it’s hard to claim, with a straight face, that President Trump is genuinely determined to fight drug trafficking knowing that he recently pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year sentence for his role in enabling the importation of more than 400 tons of cocaine to the US. Or when one considers that one of his primary partners in his drug war is President Noboa, whose family’s business appears to be implicated in cocaine trafficking, according to a recent investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
As of the writing of this article, there are few details about the agenda of the summit except that apparently “security” and “foreign interference” will be discussed. Regarding “security,” Trump, Rubio, and Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth—who are all reportedly attending—probably won’t need to do much to convince their allies to double down further on the “narco-terror” threat. Given recent events, it’s likely they’ll focus more on shoring up regional support for the war with Iran, which has so far received mostly tepid backing, with the exception of presidents Milei, Kast, and Santiago Peña of Paraguay, who have all cheered on the joint US-Israeli attacks. They may also seek more overt backing for the intense US regime change effort targeting Cuba, which involves an oil blockade that could soon cause a “humanitarian collapse,” according to the United Nations. Trump and many Republicans have said that when they’re done in Iran, “Cuba is next.”
By “foreign interference” the White House is presumably not referring to US interference in Latin America and the Caribbean, which has been a constant for many decades but has reached new heights under Trump. Instead, the term is widely understood in Washington as primarily a reference to China’s growing regional influence. Here it is far from certain that Trump and his team will make much progress given the massive economic benefits derived from Chinese trade and investment. China is currently the top trading partner for Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Paraguay and the second biggest trading partner for nearly all of the other countries represented at the summit.
Many of these leaders have engaged in strident rhetoric against the PRC, but ultimately have quietly chosen to strengthen relations with the world’s second-biggest (and soon biggest) economy. Milei, for instance, referred to the Chinese government as “assassins” and said that he refused to do business with communists. He has completely changed his tune now: At Davos this year he called China “a great trading partner” and said that he plans to visit Beijing this year.
According to a schedule that the White House shared with the media, President Trump will participate in the “Shield of the Americas” summit for two and half hours and then fly back to Mar-a-Lago in the afternoon. With 12 other heads of state present, it’s doubtful that much will be achieved. There will be speeches—one can expect a long, rambling speech by Trump in which he’s likely to congratulate himself again for his “success” in Venezuela—there will doubtless be many selfies taken with Trump, but it’s unlikely that there will be anything resembling real dialogue.
Instead, the summit’s goal appears to be, first, offering the leaders limited face time with Trump as a sort of recompense for their loyalty and various good deeds. Some of these leaders have already received decisive support from Trump. Shortly before a key congressional election in Argentina, the US Treasury offered Milei’s government a $20 billion bailout, which stabilized the country’s economy and helped Milei’s party clinch a major electoral victory. Late last year, Trump interfered in a big way in Honduras’ election by endorsing Asfura’s candidacy and threatening to exact an economic punishment on the whole country if voters didn’t elect him. Asfura ended up winning by a razor thin margin that was contested by his opponents.
For leaders of some of the smaller countries, participating in the summit is itself a big reward, one that allows them to show domestic constituencies that their pliant behavior has paid off in the form of privileged access to the US president. For Trinidad’s Persad-Bissessar, who supported Trump’s boat strikes even after Trinidadian civilians were killed, and Guyanese president Irfan Aali, who promised US oil companies “preferential treatment” in their bids to operate in Guyana’s booming oil sector, the participation in such an exclusive event with Trump is, in itself, the reward.
Finally, it’s likely that, through this brief summit, Trump and Rubio are hoping to consolidate a hemispheric posse of sorts—a group of obedient allies who will continue to defend the administration’s interventionism and its violations of sovereignty and international law and that will eagerly participate in the expansion of the US’ militarized security agenda.
Still, it remains to be seen whether Trump—whose overall attitude toward the region and its inhabitants oscillates between contempt and indifference—will be willing to invest real time and energy in cultivating this group of leaders. His appointment of Kristi Noem as “special envoy” to the summit, as part of a maneuver to remove her from the position of Homeland Security Secretary, doesn’t send the most positive signal to his far-right guests. Even they may be cringing at the thought of the future of the summit being in the hands of a firebrand immigration enforcer who played a key role in the persecution and stigmatization of migrants that beckoned primarily from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Keep ReadingShow Less
3 Steps for a Just Immigration System: Abolish ICE, Grant Amnesty, End US Imperialism
We need a new system of immigration—one that serves the common good, respects the dignity of all peoples, and aligns with the principles of a democratic society.
Mar 07, 2026
On February 26, federal agents lied to gain access to a residential building. The agents, who local officials said lacked a warrant and wore “fake badges” to impersonate New York police officers, said they were looking for a “missing child.” In reality, they were hunting for Elmina Aghayeva, a Columbia University student who the Department of Homeland Security alleges had her visa terminated “for failing to attend classes.”
Due to the efforts of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Aghayeva has since been released. Still, the incidence speaks volumes to the level of normalized cruelty and injustice inherent in our current system of immigration control and enforcement. Aghayeva is not “the worst of the worst.” Even if we accept DHS’ assessment that she needed to be detained, there was a way of doing this lawfully—one where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents acquire a warrant, clearly identify themselves, respect her rights, and do not further erode public trust in law enforcement.
We need a new system of immigration—one that serves the common good, respects the dignity of all peoples, and aligns with the principles of a democratic society. Here are three steps we can take toward that end.
First Step: Abolish ICE
What was once a fringe position is now supported by the majority (76%) of Democrats and a plurality of US adults (46%).
While the Trump administration’s disregard for the rule of law has made ICE’s injustices more blatant, it has ultimately only exposed what the agency has been since its inception.
Given recent events, this turn is unsurprising. In the last year alone, ICE agents have: broken into people’s cars (Mahdi Khanbabazadeh and Marilu Mendez), used explosives to break into people’s homes (Jorge Sierra-Hernandez), pressed their knees into people’s necks (Tatiana Martinez and George Retes), kidnapped people (Kilmar Ábrego Garcia and Gladis Yolanda Chavez Pineda), detained hundreds of children including 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, detained over 170 US citizens including Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez and Dulce Consuelo Díaz Morales, shot people (Carlitos Ricardo Parias and Jose Garcia-Sorto), permanently maimed people (Kaden Rummler), and killed people (Silverio Villegas González, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Renee Good, and Alex Pretti).
In the name of pursuing people who commit fewer crimes than US citizens, actively contribute to the US economy, pay taxes for public services they cannot access, and culturally enrich our communities, ICE acts with reckless abandonment.
And let’s be clear: While the Trump administration’s disregard for the rule of law has made ICE’s injustices more blatant, it has ultimately only exposed what the agency has been since its inception: a lawless, bloated policing and surveillance behemoth with virtually no oversight. It was a mistake created in the frenzy following 9/11. For the good of the nation, it must be abolished (and DHS too).
Second Step: Grant Amnesty
Rather than mass deportation, we should offer amnesty for all undocumented immigrants currently living in the US who have not committed any violent crimes.
The problems with ICE stem from its basic mission: to find and deport the over 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country. Since the vast majority are law-abiding and legal status is not an observable trait, ICE agents resort to more invasive, discriminatory, and militant measures. Any alternative to ICE tasked with the same mission will likely replicate its problems.
The irony here is that deporting all undocumented immigrants would only harm the US. According to the Center for Migration Studies, Trump’s mass deportation plan “could cost over $500 billion to implement and would sacrifice billions in tax revenue per year. It also would lead to labor shortages and reduce the GDP by $5.1 trillion over the next 10 years.” By contrast, providing undocumented immigrants with amnesty would contribute $1.2 trillion to the US economy over 10 years and $184 billion per year in federal, state, and local taxes.
We cannot continue to indiscriminately violate international law and then complain when America’s victims come here seeking a better life.
That money could be used to improve the lives of millions by funding Medicare For All, tuition-free public colleges, city-owned grocery stores, and SNAP and other welfare programs, as well as building public housing and improving our crumbling infrastructure. Instead, we are actively engaging in an absurd policy of national self-harm where the only benefactors are the politicians who continuously scapegoat immigrants as well as corporations who benefit from surveilling, imprisoning, and exploiting their labor.
Beyond economic considerations, amnesty safeguards our democracy and protects human rights. The current immigration regime perpetuates racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia, while ICE agents terrorize our communities and threaten all our lives.
Trump’s mass deportation agenda calls for separating undocumented immigrants from their friends, families, and communities. This includes 86 DACA recipients that ICE deported last year. Those people had lived in the US for most of their lives, respected its laws, and considered it their home. Now, they are being sent to an unfamiliar country—one where they may not know the language, culture, or anyone living there.
What’s more, many immigrants come to the US fleeing violence and persecution abroad. Deportation often entails purposely putting people’s lives at risk. As Farah Larrieux, a 46-year-old Haitian currently on Temporary Protected Status (TPS), said: “All these people are here because they were forced to come. […] They came to save their lives. For many, returning to Haiti now is, in practice, a death sentence, making them vulnerable to extortion and kidnapping.” If DHS succeeds in terminating TPS for Haitians, our tax dollars would go toward effectively funding her execution.
Third Step: End American Imperialism
Whether it's Haiti, Cuba, Venezuela, Gaza, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, or so many other nations, US interventionist policies fuel political instability abroad.
American imperialism must end. We cannot continue to invade, bomb, and wage wars that fuel the very mass displacement and migration that create the “border crisis.” We cannot continue to indiscriminately violate international law and then complain when America’s victims come here seeking a better life. They are not the “foreign invaders” who infiltrated “our homeland”—America invaded theirs. They have not “destroyed our country”—we destroyed theirs as they built ours. We owe them a debt: Amnesty and humanitarian aid in this context is not a gift, its reparations.
America must fund USAID, not more “forever wars.” We must work alongside foreign nations—as equals—to meaningfully improve economic and political stability around the world.
For the people who are already here, abiding by our laws and contributing to our communities, this is their home. Hunting and deporting them is not justice. It endangers everyone while diverting billions of dollars away from programs and policies that would benefit everyone.
Together, we can forge a better future—we simply need to take the right steps.
Keep ReadingShow Less
How to Defeat a Lawless and Murderous Trump Regime
What does accountability look liked when the Trump administration doesn’t just break the law, but uses theories of legality in a distinctly lawless fashion?
Mar 07, 2026
In response to his sentencing following his conviction on 34 felonies in May 2024, President Trump stated that he had “won the election in a massive landslide, and the people of this country understand what’s gone on. This has been a weaponization of government.”
Despite his conviction, Judge Juan Merchan sentenced him to an unconditional discharge with no consequences like prison, probation, or even fines. The judge determined that this was the “only lawful sentence” that avoided infringing on the authority of the presidency. Had that been Donald Trump’s first encounter with the law (which, of course, it wasn’t), it would have been a stark lesson in impunity.
It’s no surprise then that, in an interview last year with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press, when asked about his obligation to uphold the Constitution, Trump responded, “I don’t know.” In his conversation with Welker, he also defied a Supreme Court decision that ordered the return of immigrant Kilmar Armando Ábrego García from El Salvador, where he had been deported thanks to what the Trump administration termed “an administrative error.” Blaming the deferral of that decision on Attorney General Pam Bondi, the president stated that he was “not involved in the legality or illegality” of the case.
Despite his seemingly ambivalent feelings in that interview, he has emphatically asserted his position with respect to the law elsewhere, especially when it came to him. For example, on February 16, 2025, he wrote on X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Nonetheless, outright violations of the law have been a signature characteristic of his administration writ large. For example, last March, when Judge James Boasberg ordered the return of planes carrying migrants being deported from the United States to El Salvador’s CECOT prison (known for its brutality), Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem instructed the two flights to continue in clear violation of the court order. The Justice Department would subsequently argue in a court filing that the administration hadn’t violated the judge’s order because the flights carrying the migrants were no longer over U.S. territory when the ruling was issued.
In short, although the attitudes of President Trump and his administration toward legality have been guided by the belief that their power is in no way meaningfully constrained by the law, it would be a mistake to assume that they’ve governed through lawlessness alone. To focus solely on lawlessness would be to minimize the way the president and his administration have simultaneously relied on and weaponized the law itself to legitimize their violence and their violations. They have pursued an America First strategy that has centered on the expansion of executive power and the protection of narrowly defined national interests, while tossing aside both human rights and international legal norms. To fully grasp the depths of the Trump administration’s violence, lawlessness must be examined alongside the strategic use of the law to manufacture a sense of legality and a facade of legal legitimation.
Legalizing Boat Strikes to “Save Americans”
On Tuesday, September 2, 2025, on President Trump’s order, U.S. military forces conducted an airstrike against a boat that the administration claimed belonged to the Latin American gang Tren de Aragua, which he had previously designated a terrorist organization and described as “narcoterrorists.” Since that first strike conducted in the waters of the Caribbean Sea, there have been 46 subsequent boat strikes in both the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific Ocean that have killed 147 people to date. Despite the view of legal experts that such strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings, the Trump administration has insisted on their legality. In late November, for example, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth stated on X that “our current operations in the Caribbean are lawful under both U.S. and international law, with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict — and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers, up and down the chain of command.”
The approval Hegseth referred to came in the form of a memorandum from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Although that memo has not been made public, sources familiar with its contents report that it frames the strikes as acts of collective self-defense undertaken in the interests of the United States and several Latin American countries. The memo also argues that, because the U.S. is in an armed conflict with the drug cartels, the strikes don’t require Congressional approval, being both in the national interest and sufficiently limited in scope, nature, and duration not to qualify as war-making. That memo has been criticized in numerous ways, with some experts insisting that the legal arguments are not only flawed, but were put together to legitimize a political decision already made by the White House.
In the last quarter-century of the War on Terror, weaponizing the label of terrorism has been repeatedly invoked to justify repressive interventions. As law professor Sirine Sinnar notes, “Through invoking terrorism, the Trump administration targets its political enemies, pushes an openly racist and xenophobic agenda, and flouts international law more brazenly than its predecessors. But it can do all this so easily because the concept of terrorism has long been selective, political, and racialized, and because Congress and the Supreme Court have largely shielded counterterrorism from accountability.” The designation of individuals as “narcoterrorists” reflects the enduring currency of this post-9/11 framework, demonstrating how the language of terrorism can be redeployed in new contexts through strategically constructed threat narratives.
The Spectacle of “American [In]Justice”
In a speech on January 3rd, President Trump announced the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores de Maduro, accusing them of conducting a “campaign of deadly narco-terrorism against the United States and its citizens,” and insisting that “hundreds of thousands — over the years — of Americans died because of him.” Further justifying his capture, Trump also claimed that the Venezuelan leader had been sending members of the Tren de Aragua gang to the United States to spread drugs and terror. As it happens, though, not only was there a lack of evidence of that, but the claim wasn’t even mentioned in the Justice Department’s indictment of the Venezuelan president. The Maduros, Trump asserted, would “soon face the full might of American justice and stand trial on American soil.” Despite such a projection of power and the assumed superiority of “American justice,” the Trump administration’s entire governing strategy has proven that just as legality is malleable, so, too, is justice.
Many have described the Trump administration’s capture of the Maduros as simply lawless, but the administration’s officials didn’t act without considering the law (in their own lawless fashion). They even requested that the Office of Legal Counsel produce an opinion on whether the president could legally direct U.S. military forces to support law enforcement in seizing Maduro and bringing him to the United States for prosecution (without, of course, any congressional action).
A heavily redacted version of the memo responding to that, dated December 23, 2025, was released on January 13th, 2026. It frames the sending of U.S. special forces and air power into Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, to capture the Maduros as a law-enforcement action to arrest a fugitive, not a military invasion (despite all the Venezuelans who died). It argues that, because of the limited duration and narrow scope of the operation, the action falls under the president’s constitutional authority and isn’t an act of war that would require congressional authorization. Although the memo did avoid making a definitive argument that the operation didn’t violate international law, it essentially tried to make that determination inconsequential by deeming the actions legal under domestic law.
Performing Legality, Producing Impunity
While the contents of the memo are certainly important, it’s no less critical to understand the purpose and function of such memos to begin with. Like other such “legal” documents, memos from the Office of Legal Counsel are designed to offer a version of “legality” that minimizes scrutiny, enables repetition, and contributes to normalizing state violence in its many forms.
Some have compared the boat-strike memos to the torture memos drafted under the Bush administration. John Yoo, one of the infamous authors of those memos, argued that, for abuse to rise to the level of torture, the result had to be nothing less than organ failure or death. So, consider it ironic that he actually criticized those boat-strike memos, despite their similarity to the torture memos’ form of impunity. In fact, when asked if he regretted the decisions he had made, Yoo said, “The only thing I regret was just the pressure of time that we had to act under.” But he also added that he “would probably do the same things again.”
Yoo nevertheless expressed skepticism about the Trump administration’s rationale for the boat strikes, saying about those supposed drug boats, “They’re not attacking us because of our foreign policy and our political system…They’re just selling us something that people in America want. We’re just trying to stop them from selling it. That’s traditionally, to me, crime. It’s something that we could never eradicate or end.”
Yoo, of course, neglected to mention that, while justifying the most brutal forms of torture at the Bush administration’s prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in CIA “black sites” globally, the torture memos provided impunity for anyone involved in creating that torture regime in the wake of the 9/11 attacks of 2001. And no court ever formally ruled those memos illegal, while Yoo, like all the other Bush administration officials involved in sanctioning the torture apparatus, never faced the slightest accountability. Even when a report on those memos was released by the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility in 2009, recommending that Yoo and an associate of his be disciplined, it was vetoed by Associate Deputy Attorney General David Margolis, who viewed the memos as resulting from poor decision-making rather than unethical behavior. Like the torture memos, then, the boat-strike memos are meant to offer a facade of legality, while ensuring impunity.
What Yoo’s critique also conveniently overlooks is that legal memoranda like the torture memos don’t just interpret the law. Instead, they offer a threatening “legal” reality to justify certain all-too-grim interventions. Under the Bush administration, this included the denial of Geneva Convention protections based on the argument that the United States was fighting a new kind of war with non-state actors who don’t abide by the laws of war. According to their logic, if the enemy does not follow the laws of war, the United States is not required to extend full protection. This discursive rationale was used to disregard the fact that adherence to Geneva protections is non-reciprocal.
Those memos also exploit perceived gaps in existing legal frameworks to manufacture ambiguity, while, above all, staging a performance of legality. Like the torture memos, the memo authorizing the capture of President Maduro was designed to be a buffer against legal, political, or diplomatic challenges, minimizing the vulnerability of the Trump administration to judicial scrutiny and congressional action.
In his article “Citizen in Exception: Omar Khadr and the Performative Gap in the Law,” Matt Jones has written about the consequences of such performances of legality. He argues that “the law’s reliance on continual performance interventions means that gaps in the law may in fact become enshrined in law if a given authority, such as a judge, recognizes them as legitimate within the jurisprudential history of past performances.” In other words, challenging state actions as illegal, whether the conduct occurred as a result of sheer lawlessness or unsound legal rationales, can actually end up rendering the behavior legal.
Legal rationales like those provided in the torture memos also offer an administration the opportunity to act as if its behavior were legal. As Jones points out, when it came to Guantanamo, for example, “the Bush administration’s creative interpretation of the law allowed them to operate ‘as if’ their behavior were legal, knowing that, by the time the law’s reality caught up, the strategic tasks they wanted accomplished in Guantanamo would have long been completed.”
To this day, Guantanamo remains open and there has never been the slightest accountability for anyone involved in past crimes there or the indefinite institutionalization of that infrastructure of state violence.
The Architecture of Hyper-Legality and the Law’s Double-Edged Sword
To understand why the Trump administration has not always chosen to completely violate or disregard the law, it’s useful to consider the concept of hyper-legalism. In “International Refugee Law, ‘Hyper-Legalism’ and Migration Management: The Pacific Solution,” author Claire Inder, special assistant to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, suggests that hyper-legalism “implies a commitment to lawfulness and rule-following, with an underlying disingenuousness in the understanding of ‘legality.’ It suggests that the applicability of the rules themselves is infinitely malleable by the actor purporting to comply.”
Although Inder focuses on refugee law, hyper-legalism’s relevance to a broader spectrum of governing policies is clear when it comes to Donald Trump and his administration, where a performance of legality has all too often been considered sufficient to allow them to pursue their ultimate objective of justifying whatever intervention they may deem necessary. However, that doesn’t mean that Trump and members of his administration don’t understand the limits of hyper-legalism. As Daniel Ghezelbash, director of the Kaldor Center for International Refugee Law, has argued, some actions are so egregious under international law that no amount of formalistic sophistry can legitimize them. And when that’s the case, states can resort to obfuscation as a tactic. “Obfuscation,” as he puts it, “is achieved through secrecy about what actions the government is taking and deliberate silence as to the purported legal justifications.”
The Trump administration’s refusal to release the Office of Legal Counsel memo that has provided it with supposed legal cover for those boat strikes in the Caribbean and the Pacific is emblematic of hyper-legalism and its limits. More broadly, the fact that its officials are using the law to justify egregious conduct while rejecting any semblance of transparency makes such legal arguments difficult, if not impossible, to challenge in the immediate moment. That, in turn, risks the further institutionalization of sanctioned violence, while, of course, providing legal rationales for future acts of state violence.
In his article “Hyperlegality,” legal scholar Nasser Hussain questions common assumptions about the operation of emergency laws and the idea that the measures implemented are just temporary deviations from the norm. Although he focuses on the United Kingdom, his analysis is distinctly relevant to Donald Trump’s America. He argues that antiterrorism legislation in Great Britain hasn’t just functioned as a short-term, reactive response to crisis, but has produced structural and enduring transformations in the legal order. And that’s just what’s now happening in the United States, where the latest “emergency laws” and defenses of exceptional interventions are helping to create legal frameworks and blueprints that will, in the future, only strengthen and entrench the ability of the state to enact egregious violence. In short, while the violence of the Trump administration may seem exceptional, the historical trajectory of the War on Terror should be a reminder that what we are witnessing isn’t new and isn’t likely to disappear in the future.
In analyzing the Trump administration’s governing strategy, it’s important to remember that, as Hussain argues, “the rule of law is and has always been capable of accommodating a range of repressive but legal measures.” In other words, even as the Trump administration’s remarkable disregard for the law in so many cases poses urgent challenges, the malleability of the law, as demonstrated throughout the history of the United States, should offer a warning against the seemingly commonsensical response of simply instituting more rules, regulations, conventions, and laws. After all, the law’s primary function is to preserve the state, not to deliver justice.
All too often, the law operates as a double-edged sword: it can secure rights and constrain power, but it can also legitimize repression, exclusion, and harm. Our task, then, is to understand how to wield the law strategically to challenge the violence and power of the state and to demand justice and accountability.
Whether the Trump administration cloaks its actions in legal rationales or disregards legality altogether, communities at home and abroad continue to resist. Recognizing that the law alone will not save us is not a call to despair but a call to organize and build our power. Because nothing has ever altered the course of injustice except the organized power of the people — and nothing else ever will.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular