In 2013, the Sacramento Bee published a scathing investigative report about a state-run mental hospital in Las Vegas that was throwing mentally ill people onto buses with bottles of Ensure nutritional supplement and one-way tickets out of Nevada.

To his credit, Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval didn’t dig in his heels. He didn’t claim that the patients were gang members, nor did he post doctored photos of those patients on his social media. His staff didn’t claim the patients were in Nevada illegally. His directors didn’t claim that the executive branch of the state government had the authority to ship people out of state. His lawyers didn’t argue with the courts — when San Francisco sued the state, Sandoval’s administration settled.

Instead, Sandoval did something that, in this day and age, seems impossible. Unreal. Downright strange. Beyond belief.

He started to govern as if the supreme executive power of Nevada shouldn’t be used to systematically ship people out of its jurisdiction.

Can you imagine?

***

In 2025, there’s the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

Summarizing an in-depth timeline of Abrego Garcia’s case that was published by Lawfare, Abrego Garcia moved in with his brother, a U.S. citizen in Maryland, after an El Salvadorian gang repeatedly threatened him, his sisters and family when he was 16. This happened illegally, as most immigration does — legal immigration is nearly impossible under most circumstances. 

Consequently, when Abrego Garcia was arrested by county police in Maryland in March 2019 — during President Donald Trump’s first term — for suspected gang activity, he was transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody. 

How did county police determine Abrego Garcia was in a gang? Well, a confidential informant told an unidentified detective that they knew he was a member of a branch of MS-13 that was based in New York, a state Abrego Garcia never lived in. 

For context, The Nevada Independent’s editorial policy on anonymous sources does not allow opinion columnists to rely on secondhand confidential sources (trust me, I’ve checked).

Six months later, an immigration judge ruled that though Abrego Garcia could legally be deported at any time for illegally entering the United States, he could not be deported back to El Salvador since he would likely be persecuted by the gangs that still harass his family if he returned. This ruling made him legally eligible for a work permit provided he checked in with immigration officials once a year — which he did.

Having thus received a relatively clean bill of legal health, Abrego Garcia moved back in with his wife, joined a union and continued raising the family he started before he was arrested by county police. Though he wasn’t a perfect husband or father by any stretch — his wife, who has been publicly supportive of him as of late, requested a temporary order of protection against him in 2021 — he otherwise stayed out of trouble with the law. To this day he has no criminal record.

On March 12, 2025, Abrego Garcia was pulled over and arrested by ICE officers in front of his nonverbally autistic son. Then, without any further notice or a hearing, he was quickly flown to El Salvador’s Centro del Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). This arrest and deportation, according to a sworn declaration by an ICE official that was made under penalty of perjury, was done by mistake. It was an “administrative error.” An “oversight.” 

In other words, it was done illegally.

Which helps explain why every court that has had a chance to hear Abrego Garcia’s case, including the U.S. Supreme Court, has therefore ordered the Trump administration, in no uncertain terms, to bring him back. The administration made a mistake. It said as much under oath. Now it has a legal duty to correct it.

Despite that clear legal duty, however, Trump refuses to cooperate.

When the administration has testified under oath away from the news cameras, its position has been consistent. The administration itself concedes on page 3 of its filing to the Supreme Court that Abrego Garcia should not have been sent to El Salvador. Additionally, the only evidence the administration has provided in a courtroom that Abrego Garcia belonged to MS-13 is that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia” was used in the same paragraph as “MS-13” by a county police officer on a typed form in 2019.

Instead, the theoretical core of the administration’s legal defense has been that, once Abrego Garcia was shipped out of the United States, any constitutional or judicial protections he may have enjoyed are moot — the executive branch has constitutional prerogatives over foreign relations that no other branch of the government may touch. Therefore, if something happens to someone outside the United States, even if the executive branch illegally or accidentally places them there, the executive branch has full authority to do whatever it wants to further “foreign negotiations.”

Following the legal theory submitted in the administration’s filing to the Supreme Court to its natural conclusion, “the President himself” could seize you or me off the street and ship either of us overseas to a destination of his choosing to “open diplomatic channels” and “engage in direct diplomacy,” provided court proceedings don’t begin before we leave the United States.

If that sounds overly dramatic, note that Trump discussed the possibility of deporting American citizens to CECOT with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. In a recent CNN interview, meanwhile, Republican congressional party leadership refused to answer if the president of the United States has the legal authority to deport American citizens (the Founding Fathers didn’t think King George III had that authority — why should Trump be any different?).

***

Abrego Garcia’s accidental and illegal deportation, alongside Trump openly considering the possibility of shipping American citizens overseas on his command, should be enough to chill anyone’s blood. 

Trump’s administration now claims absolute power over anything it deems to be “foreign relations,” including “the past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful” of non-citizen students who are studying in the United States (sorry, First Amendment). Adding insult to injury, the administration is being completely careless about who it exercises its expanding powers against. For example, it recently detained a U.S. citizen in Arizona for 10 days because he didn’t carry identification and deported a pair of German tourists from Hawaii immediately after they arrived because they didn’t have a detailed enough itinerary to satisfy border officials.

As bad as this is, however — and, as others have noted, this is more than bad enough on its own — our federalist system of government opens the opportunity for upwardly aspirational state and local politicians to add their own equally careless voices to the authoritarian chorus Trump is leading.

Two months ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an immigration law that prohibits undocumented immigrants from coming into the state. Despite that law being blocked in court, however, the state argued last week — after Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a U.S.-born American citizen, was arrested by the Florida Highway Patrol and detained at the request of ICE — that it has no authority over local law enforcement agencies and therefore cannot force them to comply with the court-mandated block in enforcement.

It should be noted that, just as the Nevada State Police Highway Patrol is a division of Nevada’s state government, the Florida Highway Patrol is a division of Florida’s state government. It is, in other words, not a local law enforcement agency and it’s absolutely laughable that any attorney would attempt to argue otherwise.

Immigration isn’t the only issue where governors and Trump can copy each other’s homework. Two years ago, DeSantis took over a small public college because he didn’t like the school’s previously liberal ideology. Today, the college offers a course in “wokeness” (it’s “a kind of cult”) and is planning to receive alleged rapist Russell Brand as a speaker “under conditions that allow for thoughtful and topical engagement.”

Trump, following DeSantis’ example, is now trying the same approach to strongarm private universities, such as Columbia and Harvard. Against Harvard, for example, he recently demanded federal oversight of admissions, hiring and the ideology of students and staff at Harvard University — and is now attempting to freeze $2.26 billion in federal funding and threatening the university’s tax-exempt status because the private university told him no. Harvard is suing the administration in response to these threats.

Now imagine for a moment what would happen if Nevada’s governor, or any other governor, decided they were every bit the singular unitary embodiment of the executive will of the people that Trump and his supporters see him as.

Imagine an anti-abortion governor, elected in a state where abortion is statutorily or constitutionally protected — as it is in Nevada — instructing the highway patrol to park a van in front of a Planned Parenthood and ensure it has enough fuel to get to Idaho, a state with stricter anti-abortion laws than Utah. Then imagine the same governor claiming they have no control over “local law enforcement,” such as the law enforcement agency funded through their executive budget.

Or, for the more conservative readers among you, imagine an anti-gun governor shipping state residents and their arsenals to California or New York. I’m using my imagination — go ahead and use yours.

Imagine a governor who was thin-skinned enough to cause economic analysts to preemptively redact reports about the economic performance of their state right before their state legislature decided how much money there would be to spend in the executive budget this year.

Or just imagine a governor who thinks the mentally ill should be some other state’s problem.

Does Nevada have that governor? Protests notwithstanding, probably not — at least not yet. Let’s at least see if Assm. Max Carter’s (D-Las Vegas) bills are vetoed more often after he decided to say “Fuck Joe!” in public before we make any sweeping pronouncements.

If Trump and his administration succeed in setting an example small-time authoritarians can successfully emulate, it’s only a matter of time before Nevada elects someone who follows along. Other governors are already starting to.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a recurring opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected]. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.