I don’t know anyone who has been arrested by ICE, carried off by ICE, or deported by ICE. I don’t know their spouses, children, friends, or other relatives. I know that many were here legally, many were waiting for asylum appeals to be heard, and many had work permits or active student visas. I know most are honest and hardworking, and many have others dependent on them. I also know that none of them are being treated appropriately or humanely, and some are being treated brutally by my government. And I know that for each person captured by ICE, there are tens of others living in constant, daily fear of being abducted.

Truthfully, I didn’t expect any better from Donald Trump and his henchmen. I also didn’t expect anything better from the bunch of hollow politicians elected to Congress as Republicans.

But I have to admit I expected something better of the Supreme Court, the only governmental body whicch has no other body on top of it which can say, “Whoa.”

I understand that there are six judges who are described as conservative, and only three described as liberal. Putting aside the skullduggery that led to this imbalance, and taking into account that so-called conservative and liberal judges have different philosophies of constitutional interpretation, I didn’t expect that the Supreme Court would rule as it has. I did not expect that the Court would so heavily prioritize narrow, ideological judicial thinking over a set of human values that, up until now, had been widely described as and assumed to be central to the Judeo-Christian or American value system.

But here we are. The six conservative justices seem to be as strongly Trump’s henchmen as are the members of the Republican Party in Congress.

Venezuela is today a failed country. I know no one in the United States that thinks otherwise. After all, the United States is currently using the strongest military in the world to bomb defenseless small Venezuelan boats, and murdering everyone invthem, presumably (but without publicly shown proof) carrying drugs bound for the United States.

During the last administration, this country gave Venezuelans the right to remain in the United States temporarily until October 2026 on the theory that their home country was too dangerous to require them to return.

Their country has presumably only become more dangerous, but the Trump administration abruptly terminated the right of those Venezuelans, all legally admitted into the country, to stay here, even until next October. Not one retains the right to remain, irrespective of their individual circumstances.

Just yesterday, the Supreme Court overturned the decision of the US Court of Appeals, which had granted a stay of that order pending further judicial process.

On what basis did the Supreme Court take this position which will affect up to 600,000 Venezuelans and their family members? The answer is: We don’t know.

We don’t know because this decision was taken by the Court on its Emergency Docket and issued with no opinion.

What makes this an “emergency?” The answer is: We don’t know. There are apparently no standards for this, and no one to tell the Court it is wrong.

The Court has done this in many cases, not only this one and, in some of these cases, it has issued final orders in pending cases under the guise of calling them temporary orders. Orders allowing deportations. Orders allowing firings. It is as if a death sentence case was under appeal, and the Court issued an emergency, unsigned, empty, but decisive order permitting the execution to proceed while the case was still pending.

Yes, we have made some grave mistakes in voting for Trump as president and his Republican toadies in Congress. But mistakes are often made, and when they are, we thought we had in the Supreme Court an institution that would keep us from falling into an abyss. We were wrong.

Where do we go from here?