Pushback to President Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation orders never fails to entertain. Current Tren de Aragua sympathy is one such example.
After Trump declared last week that Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan crime organization, would be classified as a terrorist organization and carried out several alleged members’ deportations to El Salvador, a U.S. district judge ordered a pause on the deportations. The judge said the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which Trump invoked, may not apply. Of course, the deportations were completed anyway, which prompted ideological opponents to adopt the gang as a new cause for justice.
The Washington Post offered readers insight into this gang being “targeted by Trump,” mostly by explaining why, according to vague expert sources, Tren de Aragua is rather a “loose network that doesn’t operate like the groups typically considered terrorist organizations.” Other independent voices, such as Yale professor Timothy Snyder, likened the deported Venezuelans to ideological dissidents who have “disappeared” under fascist regimes.
The politics of “wokeness” seems to be dying off, but everything in its realm still acts as a progressive entity. The defining quality of leftist optimism, namely a preoccupation with “resistance,” says as much. We have seen it in the specific motivations adherents have had for latching on to certain groups: Black Lives Matter and transgender advocates explicitly chose equity and emotionalism over reality. The public has since bucked the social pressures accompanying these identity politics — the primary characteristics of a woke culture — but the mechanism remains. The progressive framework of the eternal oppressor-oppressed relationship runs the show.
This sort of “resistance” is not a logical opposition that seeks to refine the president’s actions but an immediate identification of whoever is on the flip side of Trump with the oppressed. By those standards, the rules of the game resemble blind heuristics rather than legal theories. Take it from participants, who were also incidentally featured in the Washington Post: “Resistance 1.0 was largely about defending the rule of law and democratic norms. Resistance 2.0 is in many ways centered around the problem of Musk and other billionaires amassing too much power, making Sanders a kind of godfather of the movement.”
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Federal worker allegiance is a newer and somewhat more principled example from the Left. It was a given, however, considering that taking the side of federal workers against Trump is built into the internal politics of an administration swap. Rhetorical sympathy for Tren de Aragua is a new beast with old horns. The position does not exactly seek radical liberation for supposed gang members, but it takes otherwise reasonable legal uncertainty to an oppositional extreme. At a certain point, it reads as resistance for the sake of resistance.
At the end of the day, the Trump administration has so far been tactful in its own resistance: Doing so much at once, even creating chaos, prevents opponents from making any singular matter a durable point of contention. Democratic resistance has to latch on to Trump. This method has proven unworkable. On top of that, it goes so far as to make Trump into a sort of anti-hero — the same mold that progressive politics tries to construct for its own causes, ones such as Tren de Aragua.