The White House of Louis XVI
One of the worst abuses of pre-revolutionary France may come to America
In pre-revolutionary France, kings had a fearsome weapon. It was called the lettre de cachet.
It was elegantly simple. The king could order something to be done. One of the king’s ministers would counter-sign. The thing would be done. That’s all there was to it.
What made lettres de cachet notorious, however, is that the thing to be done could be the arrest and imprisonment of anyone. For any reason. The lettres de cachet did not have to specify a crime. The king could simply order anyone imprisoned anywhere — including the infamous Bastille prison — for as long as he pleased. Without trial. Without charge. Without even an explanation. The unlucky were arrested and taken away, to be held incommunicado if the king wished, and that’s all there was to it. There was no right of review. No habeas corpus. No oversight or restriction or limitation of any kind.
Lettres de cachet became a symbol of unchecked power so notorious they helped fuel the revolution.
Americans should familiarize themselves with the phrase. While Donald Trump doesn’t yet have lettres de cachet, he is on the verge of creating an unchecked power as appalling as that held by Louis XVI.
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is a 29-year-old married father of three special needs children who, in 2011, fled El Salvador at the age of 16 and illegally entered the United States. In 2019, he was arrested while seeking work. A court denied him asylum because that status requires an application within a year of arrival, but the court did grant him “withholding from removal” status — he could not be returned to El Salvador — on the grounds that a gang had targeted him and he was likely to be victimized if deported. The Department of Homeland Security also gave him a work permit. He married and apparently lived a normal, law-abiding, tax-paying life with his wife and children. He has no criminal record.
But Abrego was swept up in Donald Trump’s deportation drive and flown to a notorious supermax prison in El Salvador. The prison is built to house “terrorists” — El Salvador’s brutal gang members. The US government is now paying the government of El Salvador to house deportees it says are gang members, although they have provided little or no evidence to that effect because, say defence lawyers, there isn’t any.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has repeatedly said the original court judged Abrego to be a gang member. She is lying. While that allegation was raised at the initial hearing, for the purposes of determining if Abrego could be released on bond, no court ruled he was a gang member. And in litigation over his deportation, the government presented no evidence he is a gang member. But the government did acknowledge, in court, that the deportation of Abrego violated the earlier court ruling and was thus in error.
So the resolution is simple, right? Send him back. And that can be done easily enough. The US can ask. The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, portrays himself as a close ally of Trump’s, and his government is literally in business with the US administration. He would send Abrego back in a heartbeat if Trump asked.
But Trump won’t ask. In fact, after being taken to court, and admitting the deportation was illegal, the US government has refused to lift a finger.
Late last week, the Supreme Court unanimously ordered the government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return and report to a lower court on its progress. Government lawyers have openly defied that lower court. Yesterday, in an astonishing display of hubris, Trump hosted Bukele at the White House, where Trump said he would not ask for Abrego to be returned and Bukele said he would never send him back. Both smirked. Their aides chuckled.
It was naked contempt of the Supreme Court. Worse followed.
Trump was caught on a mike saying to Bukele, apparently thinking he was speaking privately, that next would come “the homegrowns,” so Bukele should build five more supermax prisons. Reporters later asked Trump if he was he talking about shipping Americans to El Salvador. “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem, no,” Mr. Trump said. “I’m talking about violent people. I’m talking about really bad people.”
So what now?
The Supreme Court can repeat itself, I suppose. But the court was careful to note it cannot direct the administration’s foreign policy, which is why it ordered the administration only to “facilitate” Abrego’s return, it didn’t order the government to “order” his return. The administration has responded with a red herring — saying it can’t “order” Bukele to return Abrego, and Stephen Miller, Trump’s Luciferian aide, insisted the US would not dare dream of “ordering” Bukele’s return for that would violate El Salvador’s “sovereignty.” (The citizens of Panama, Canada, and Denmark — all nations whose sovereignty Trump has repeatedly threatened — can only look on, agog.)
So what happens if the administration keeps playing this obscene game, smirking and chuckling all the while? What happens if the Supreme Court refuses to slap down this contempt, order Trump to act, and jail officials who refuse?
And even if the court should take that astonishing step, what if Bukele, knowing what Trump really wants, refuses to send Abrego back when asked?
No institution has the power to stop the madness.
That would leave a man who has never been convicted of any crime, or even charged, to sit in a hellish prison as long as it pleases Donald Trump to keep him there.
He may never get out.
There is no one and nothing that can save him now.
And who’s next?
If Trump did the same to an American citizen, as he evidently has been considering, how would this end any differently? Once the jet cleared American airspace, there would be no authority with the power to intervene.
More smirking, more chuckling. Someone else consigned to hell.
This is not my conjecture. When the Supreme Court made its unanimous order, Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the Supreme Court, joined by two other justices, issued a separate statement warning that the administration’s position would mean the government "could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene."
If that comes to be, the American president would possess a power remarkably like the lettre de cachet — the ability to order anyone to be imprisoned without conviction, without trial, without charge or even accusation. And there they would remain, for as long as it pleased the king.
Victims would have no recourse. They wouldn’t even be owed an explanation. They could simply be locked away.
But this isn’t France in 1785, you protest. Surely this is impossible in the United States of 2025.
It would be comforting to think so. But actions that were impossible a very short time ago are now the stuff of daily news in the Trump era.
There is no more reason to think this impossibility any more impossible than all the others.
There is one constitutional remedy left. I don’t think it’s likely, considering the people involved, but based on the constitutional balance of powers, when the Executive ignores the Judiciary, the remedy is impeachment by the Legislature. If Congress lets Trump continue as a dictator, then all that is remains in opposition are people in the streets.
If I remember correctly, a companion piece to the lettre de cachet was a carte blanche. It is too soon for the entire judicial and public service system to have been corrupted so there will still be many judges, lawyers, law enforcement officers and public servants looking to follow law and normal practice. Over time that will change if the administration continues down its current path and is unchecked. But until then it bears watching whether something like a carte blanche exists. It does to a degree now given the pardons issued by Mr. Trump and his apparent willingness to speak about granting more in exchange for people doing what he wants.
And it exists for Mr. Trump himself considering the Supreme Court immunity decision. Right now the Attorney General is still trying to brush a legal veneer over actions. What happens if this comes to an end and they simply acknowledge what they are doing is illegal but push ahead anyway arguing that the SC gave him authority to do so whenever it relates to his ‘official duties’?