Supreme Court says US must begin process to release Maryland man deported to El Salvador

Yeah. This comment broke my heart a little. I've been thinking about what the reality is like for these people thrown into some of the worst places in the world, all of a sudden, for doing literally nothing. What they wake up to in the morning, what they're eating, what their day is like. He's presumably not hardened to any of this. He's just some guy. He may not have any access to news or any kind of information or know that the Supreme Court has said anything about it.

It could be you or me. Or anyone you know. Just randomly snatched off the street for no reason at all, and then thrown into hell, on purpose, without even a pretense that there is a justification for it.

So there's a weird little story. Lifetimes ago, a man named Dmitry Sklyarov got snatched at a tech conference in the US because he had back home written some software that according to someone was illegal in the US. It was bullshit, but this was back in the pre-Patriot Act, pre-ICE-as-Gestapo days. The US was a lot more democratic back then. But, anyway, they nabbed him, and the forum-typing activist internet did its thing, and there was a protest outside the jail about what bullshit it was. Eventually, he had some hearings in front of a judge because that's what they did back then, they dropped the charges, he got to go home.

Anyway, it's easy to look at something like this past weekend and think it doesn't mean anything. Everyone ran around with signs, people got mics or bullhorns and got performatively mad and yelled. Maybe in the grand scheme of things it didn't do much, as of yet, although it's not over and there's another one set for the 19th. The point with Sklyarov is that he said it really touched him that people were having a protest outside the jail. He said back in his country, no one really cared if someone went to prison. Maybe your family and close friends would get involved, but as far as the general public it's just like "oh well I guess he's in prison now." He said it seemed really weird and wholesome that these random people he didn't know were outside yelling about it, even if it didn't "do" anything for them to be there.

It's like "Hey buddy, you're not forgotten. We're taking time out of our day and doing travel to yell about it because we don't like that you're in there. We know your name, we know it's bullshit, we're willing to put some effort in."

I don't know if Garcia knows that there are people talking about him and that there are protests against the ICE fuckery, but it's important not to forget about him. His life is important just like yours, whether or not the Supreme Court thinks it's worth bothering with.