Trump's cruel "dual state" runs into a legal wall

Trump’s cruel “dual state” runs into a legal wall
The president touted his judges. Now they're standing up on immigration and democracy

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published April 21, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) After Operation Metro Surge, in which an estimated 3,000 federal immigration agents were deployed throughout Minnesota from December to February, resulting in over 3,700 arrests and the shooting deaths of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the media and political class grew bored and moved on. Donald Trump’s mass deportation machine did not.

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A growing number of voices are insisting that Donald Trump has made America a lawless nation. This is imprecise. The law has not disappeared — it has been Trumpified and bent into a weapon to destroy the constitutional order. German legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s permanent state of emergency and a two-tiered legal state are both the playbook and historical precedent.

As Pema Levy explained in Mother Jones, the dual state operates under “the facade of normalcy” that cloaks its authoritarian nature, functioning as a “smokescreen” that “fosters acceptance by the people until it’s too late.” Leaders of Nazi Germany “purposefully left some of the existing legal system intact” by creating a parallel “normative state” that housed most Germans. Jews and other groups considered enemies of the Third Reich became “victims of the arbitrary and violent prerogative state.” In such a system, Levy warned, the law is used to make the unconscionable “legal.”

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Many of the jurists aren’t mincing words when describing the Trump administration’s actions. According to POLITICO, one described its use of immigration proceedings as a “game of detention roulette.” Another “called the administration’s reinterpretation of the law to prioritize detention ‘radical.’” Julie Rubin, a district judge in Maryland, said it most eloquently: “The Government’s discretion in matters of immigration is deep and wide, but surely its chop does not overcome the banks of due process enshrined in the Constitution.” ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/04/21/trumps-cruel-dual-state-runs-into-a-legal-wall/