No Kings? Meet King Don and King John

Version 2

https://tinyurl.com/33xrj394 - View or download PDF

Peter Costantini ~ Seattle ~ April 30, 2026

Treachery, lechery, mendacity and cruelty: could King Don be channeling King John? 

Version 2 combines the three parts of the Inter Press Service series with minor edits and updates.

IPS is a global not-for-profit news agency headquartered in Roma, Italia, and founded in 1964.
Most of its correspondents are located in the Global South.

 

April 30, 2026

No Kings? Meet King Don and King John Peter Costantini’s 3-part commentary examines Trump’s second administration through King John, the Magna Carta and the No Kings movement, arguing that the central issue is whether executive power remains subject to law. https://ipsnews.net/2026/04/no-kings-meet-king-don-and-king-john-part-1-of-3 https://ipsnews.net/2026/04/no-kings-meet-king-don-and-king-john-part-2-of-3 https://ipsnews.net/2026/04/no-kings-meet-king-don-and-king-john-part-3-of-3

Allegra Love - Intolerable

Allegra Love is a veteran immigration attorney based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
She has represented and advocated for immigrants in the U.S. and Mexico.
This commentary originally published on her blog May 7, 2025.

Seen on the side of the highway during a wild dust storm in Southern New Mexico

Photo credit: Allegra Love

A couple weeks ago, I began describing my work as a little like palliative care. Some colleagues were accompanying a big family to an ICE check-in where they would almost certainly face removal to their home country. These lawyers were incredible advocates and had taken some swings, but options were running low - it seemed like it was time to tell the family to prepare for the fact that they were going to face deportation. They had to figure out what they needed to manage stress, to be as comfortable as possible, and to exert as much control as they could on how it all went down.

One way to describe my job is to help people avoid this moment. We take detailed notes about their histories and their families and review regulations and footnotes in practice advisories to try and find a path through the labyrinth of immigration laws that could allow them to avoid being forcibly removed from the country. Those pathways are rarely easy and never cheap or fast. Sometimes those pathways take an unfathomable amount of strength for our clients to follow. But very often we find them. So, one of the hardest parts of the deal is when you have to level with a client and explain that there is nothing you can offer them and that they need to start wrapping their head around what it is going to mean to face their imminent removal. I have gotten better at this conversation over the years but it can turn an already difficult day into one where I come home and cry or zone out to a couple hours of TV, as I have been doing lately.

Which is why I have been pretty solemn lately facing the days at work. There hasn’t been much fanfare, but on April 11, the government somewhat quietly enacted a new (but also old) registration requirement for certain non-citizens living in the US. This has not made much headway in the news yet. How could it when the White House has been engaging in a standoff with the Federal Courts over the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia from the CECOT in El Salvador? But that horrifying mess can also inform us about what is so terrifying about registration. Let me explain:

About two weeks ago, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) opened up the process of Alien Registration and issued a warning. Through reviving a dormant piece of the Immigration and Nationality Act, it is now regulation in the U.S. that a certain class of non-citizens fill out a form to register as not having any immigration status, get fingerprinted, and carry a card that says they are undocumented. It’s a simple online form called the G-325R. It doesn’t cost anything to fill out. The idea is to send in your information, go to the nearest application support center, get fingerprinted, and then be issued a card that says you registered. The card does not confer any status or access to work authorization. If a person fails to do this within a very short time frame they could face fines, potential criminal liability, and myriad unforeseen consequences. If it sounds like a trap, well, that’s because it is.  And we are already seeing the first reports of federal criminal charges for people failing to register.

Please do not mistake this newsletter as permission for you to now analyze and advise your non-citizen neighbors on their need to register with USCIS. There are enormous swaths of folks without discernible legal status in the U.S who are also not required to register because they are already considered registered by virtue of something in their history as a non-citizen in the U.S. like, say, a previous employment authorization document, a notice to appear in immigration court, or an expired visa. The media is going to say things like “illegal immigrants required to register under new law” but this is false. It only applies to certain individuals. Registration is dangerous and people should consult with a qualified practitioner to understand if they are currently subject to the requirements. Again, it does not affect everyone and comes with significant consequences. Do not advise if you are not qualified to do so. 

This kind of classification is a step towards genocide. If that sounds dramatic to you, consider that people are being disappeared from our country into an El Salvadoran torture center from which no one has ever been publicly released. The government is now also saying that they will send people to Libya. Through registration, folks are demanded to carry proof that they are subject to this kind of treatment. And if they choose not to? Then they face criminal penalties that could separate them from their children and would almost certainly be paired with deportation with aggravated consequences. 

There are those of you out there who might think that there is an element of fairness here. After all, people in the United States without permission have violated a law - why shouldn’t they be subject to enforcement? The problem is that people perceived as “illegal immigrants” in this country are being deprived of due process and subjected to extraordinary levels of human rights abuses. Perhaps it seems fair to ask someone to carry around a card that shows they do not have immigration status in the U.S. but that’s not really what is being asked here. Folks who engage with registration have to show up and be fingerprinted and face the potential gulag. How could anyone trust that they are not the next to be sent to CECOT, or interned without due process? The government is actively lying about the people who they are disappearing and baselessly claiming that they are heinous criminals. Is it reasonable to ask a person to roll the dice and subject themselves to this? Why would anyone incriminate themselves as being an undocumented immigrant when our country is treating that administrative violation as being on par with terrorism? There is an extremely strong legal argument that under the fifth amendment, non-citizens subject to registration have the right to remain silent. But will that protect them if and when charges come down in Federal court?

The ethical quandary here for an attorney is unenviable. On one hand, it is a lawyer's job to advise their clients to comply with the law. Registration is now required for many and avoiding it creates criminal liability and could prevent folks from accessing future immigration benefits. And yet the Trump administration is publicly engaging in illegal human rights abuses of people who are classified as undocumented. How could a lawyer advise a person to incriminate themselves and expose their family to that level of illegality and violence? The only thing that one can do is examine each case individually and explore the various options and consequences. There’s no real way around trouble. Ultimately, every person must decide for themselves what they want to do with this quagmire.

I saw a headline a couple weeks ago about a person who disappeared - a Venezuelan man who ran astray of his truck route at the Canadian border and got detained crossing back. He wasn’t located in ICE detention and wasn’t on the deportation manifests. Only now is the Trump administration saying he is in El Salvador. We will certainly be told  that he was a heinous criminal as a means of justifying his disappearance, assured we are all safer because of this brutality. From reading the articles about it, I understand that this gentleman waited in line to get his parole into the U.S. last November and came across the bridge with the permission of our government, hardly here illegally. I think about the many mornings I spent at a shelter in El Paso last fall helping recently arrived individuals just like him fill out their work permit applications before they headed out for their destination in the U.S. Was he among them?

Here in New Mexico, ICE reported the arrests of 48 people straight off back in March - straight off of the mean streets of Santa Fe and Albuquerque – and none of those individuals have been identified by name or located. Jonathan Blitzer’s article in the New Yorker - The Mystery of ICE’s Unidentifiable Arrests – bears out what happened or didn’t happen or … no one really knows who those people are, if they ever existed, or where they are now. In the article ICE list crimes these mystery men had committed – homicide, child sexual assault, drug trafficking … shoplifting. We are meant to simply trust that disappearing people from our streets is in all of our best interests.

The question of course is, what can we do? It is really important that all of us continue to reflect on our attitudes towards non-citizens and illegality in this country. I will talk till I am blue in the face about how misunderstood the concept of immigrants as criminals is, but I don’t actually think that is what is relevant here. What’s relevant is that even if a person does the most vile thing in the U.S. if they murder or rape or kidnap a kid, they are afforded due process in criminal courts and in U.S. immigration courts and we are not allowed to disappear them. It’s part of the constitution that is supposed to protect us all. We have to immediately stop qualifying that protection as only for people who are born here.

The Trump administration just recently expressed frustration that if everyone got due process it would "take, without exaggeration, 200 years.” It’s really difficult to stomach this President, who himself benefited from lengthy legal battles for extremely serious criminal charges, asserting that in some cases, due process is simply too inconvenient. 

I may be naive, but I still think there is time for all of us to express to our elected officials, from Congress people down to our local city councils, that the right to due process under the constitution must be defended – because none of us should be naive enough to believe that this is going to stop with non-citizens. It is intolerable now. And we must say so. And act as if it is so. 

I discussed this all on the phone a couple weeks ago one of my best friends, who can be counted on to send me thoughtful encouragement, and afterwards he texted me a quote from John Berger: “When something is termed intolerable, actions must follow. These actions are subject to all the vicissitudes of life. But the pure hope resides first and mysteriously in the capacity to name the intolerable as such: and this capacity comes from afar — from the past and from the future. This is why politics and courage are inevitable. The time of the torturers is agonizingly but exclusively the present.”

Thanks, friend! I am reflecting on that quote today. Wishing everyone courage for the things they face today, no matter how large or small.

*            *            *

Allegra Love - Newsletter #40 - Illegal

First published January 26, 2023

Allegra Love is a veteran immigration attorney based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has represented and advocated for immigrants in the U.S. and Mexico. This piece was originally published on her blog at the beginning of the third year of the Biden administration. But many of its observations on the meanings and uses of the term “illegal” resonate even more strongly today.

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Wherever there are folks talking about the U.S. border or U.S. immigration policy, there seems to be a whole lot of confusion about what the word illegal means. Without getting too philosophical, we can just generalize and say that illegal means something forbidden by law. There are so many instances we can point to where we can confidently call an action illegal because we understand the law that prohibits it. But when it comes to immigration, I think sometimes we throw the word illegal around willy-nilly without actually understanding the mechanics of the law or being able to articulate the actual violation of a statute.

The latest federal policy concerning Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans at the U.S. border is a prime example of this. Three weeks ago, on January 5th, the White House made a major announcement in regard to the “situation in the southwest border”. If you didn’t catch the news about it then, you can read the President’s remarks on the White House web site.

The announcement revealed the rollout of two new programs supposedly designed to reduce migration pressure. The first is an app called CBP ONE that will theoretically allow an asylum seeker to schedule an appointment at a port of entry to make an asylum claim. The second is a “parole program” that creates a pathway to the U.S. for Haitians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans, the nationalities that represent the highest number of border crossers in the last couple years. A limited, though substantial number of people can apply but to qualify they must do so from their country of origin and have a fiscal sponsor in the United States.

Neither of these programs are a terrible idea. In fact, they could be an awesome step forward to creating a better and more humane way to seek safety in the U.S. We need more orderly ways to apply for asylum at the border and an app could theoretically streamline information and communication. And although “parole” can be a complicated and problematic immigration status once someone arrives to the U.S., having more humanitarian pathways directly out of these countries that circumvents the drama at the border is a nod in the right direction. But these programs should complement the right to asylum, not undermine it.

See the problem is that when the President announced these programs, he completely undermined our laws about how a person can legally seek asylum. Unless they do what he says, Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans will now be ineligible for asylum and categorically expelled from the U.S. border (the administration had already been subjecting Venezuelans to this ban). He said it in his speech:

“My message is this: If you’re trying to leave Cuba, Nicaragua, or Haiti… do not just show up at the border. Stay where you are and apply legally from there.”

Moments later he said:

“We can’t stop people from making the journey but we can require them to come here … in an orderly way under U.S. law.”

It’s a sleight of hand for sure. The administration has created these new programs which will make things more orderly for them. They want people to use them. They would prefer it if they used them. But they communicate it by saying that this is the new way of coming to the U.S. is legal and the other is illegal. This is not true.

Let’s take a look at the text of 8 U.S. Code § 1158, part of the Refugee Act as it was adopted by Congress in 1980, which describes the general authority to apply for asylum:

“Any alien* who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section1225(b) of this title.”

(* Here I would like to acknowledge that calling someone an alien is a shitty thing and we should not do it in conversation and should push back anytime people around us including politicians and media do it. In a recent piece I wrote blasting the Biden Administration, my editor and I discussed how you should quote a law that uses such a vitriolic term and we decided that the best thing to do is quote the statute faithfully and then include aside bar explaining why the term sucks. Consider this my sidebar.)

The law states it rather plainly. A person can ask for asylum whether or not at a designated port of entry. This means that someone who crosses the U.S. border in pursuit of asylum has not acted illegally. They do not need to stay in their home country. They do not need a fiscal sponsor. They do not need to use an app. This is true no matter how many times our President, politicians on the right, or reporters for the media imply otherwise. A president cannot arbitrarily decide that it is illegal for entire nationalities to seek asylum at the border because they are undesirable and problematic and because he created a way that would be easier for his administration to deal with. There are people for whom asking for parole from will be impossible and for whom it is too dangerous to wait for an appointment at the border. These people are allowed to ask for asylum by crossing the border, exactly the way our Congress prescribed.

This point was almost universally missed in the media coverage following Biden’s announcement.

Take the NY Times headline: “Biden Announces Major Crackdown on Illegal Border Crossings.”

Or Politico: ”Biden announces new program to curb illegal migration as he prepares for visit to border.”

Or the lede from PBS New Hour: “President Joe Biden said Thursday the U.S. would immediately begin turning away Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans who cross the border from Mexico illegally, his boldest move yet to confront the arrivals of migrants that have spiraled since he took office two years ago.”

If you re-read those headlines and substitute the word undesirable, uncontrollable, or unwelcome in for the word illegal, you will get a more accurate sense of what this new policy means. But when we keep saying it – “illegal, illegal, illegal” - it’s understandable that we start to believe it’s true.

Perhaps a more accurate use of the word illegal is where it concerns the President’s actions. He is not only contravening federal law by turning back people of these nationalities, he is also violating the Refugee conventions to which the U.S. is a signatory.

Yesterday a group of 77 Congress people sent a letter to the White House criticizing Biden’s policies and calling them out as illegal for, well, the exact same reasons I laid out above. According to NBC news this was the White House’s response:

“Donald Trump tried to categorically bar asylum in the United States for everyone, everywhere. The Biden administration is creating safe and orderly pathways for people who want to seek asylum in the United States. People can make an appointment from their phone to apply for asylum at a port of entry; plus, they can use the expanded parole process, or use the expanded refugee programs. That’s not an asylum ban. It’s a safe, orderly, and humane process for seeking asylum.”

This White House official does not mention the expulsions of people who can’t follow their new, safe, orderly process and shouldn’t be expected to because they don’t have the luxury of waiting in their country or waiting for an appointment at the port of entry. The whole point of asylum is its universality and to say that this is not a ban because there are still some people in the world who can get it is just ... gaslighting.

I do not imagine that there is going to be much uproar about the effective end of asylum rights for Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Cubans. The public seems to believe that providing these protections is an option, not a law and unfortunately, many people who were watchers on the wall to call out Trump’s border policies as illegal, seem less inclined to do so when it is President Biden calling the shots. Once this transition is complete and we normalize violating the international rights of asylum seekers, then there is no reason to doubt that we will turn this policy on the next nationality of people who threaten the White House’s political narrative. It took them less than two months to expand it from Venezuelans to three more nationalities. They tested it, there was little pushback, they expanded it.

I hope people read this newsletter and think about what it means for something to be illegal versus undesirable. I hope that when the White House inevitably reports a sharp decline in “illegal” border crossings and touts the success of their program, that you pause and consider just which people are acting illegally. Think a few steps down the line to what this might mean as climate catastrophes worsen. What if the only option we allow people is to stay where they are and request a limited number of spots on the parole list. What if they are cooking to death or drowning? This could happen any day now. And what will we think when the president says:

“My message is this … Stay where you are and apply legally from there.”

Will you feel comfortable with a president deciding on the fly what legal means? Or would it be better if we had a set of international conventions and norms that guaranteed the right of people to move when they are going to die? Well, we have them and though they are flawed and insufficient and in dire need of modernization, we adopted them into U.S. law 43 years ago to protect ourselves from ourselves when it becomes inconvenient to help people who need humanitarian protection. This president is abandoning them.

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See also Allegra’s previous post: Allegra Love - Newsletter #41 - More Boxes

Allegra Love, PO Box 3218, El Paso, TX 79923

Allegra Love - Newsletter #41 - More Boxes

Allegra Love is a veteran immigration attorney based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has represented and advocated for immigrants in the U.S. and Mexico. This post was originally published February 21, 2023 as an email newsletter.   A couple months ago  I did some public speaking for the first time in a very long while. There was a period not too long ago when I felt like I was giving presentations once a week but that has slowed down. I have stopped working for the various non-profit organizations I used to work for and, by my estimation, the public is a lot less interested in immigration issues these days. Nevertheless when a church study group asked me to come through and talk about border issues under the administration, I gladly accepted. It was fun to kick the tires and chop it up with some church-goers and try out some new ideas. And gratefully, the conversation left me with plenty to think about. At the event a gentleman asked a perfectly reasonable and welcomed question that I know is on the minds of many Americans. I had been rattling on about the rights of asylum seekers and our obligation both moral and legal to welcome them to the U.S. He mentioned that not all the people at the U.S. border could possibly be seeking asylum, a point I do not dare dispute. I don’t recall if he used the term “economic migrants” but the implication of his question was that asylum rights may be well and good and important but what about all the people who aren’t bona fide asylum seekers and are fleeing their countries because of poverty or lack of jobs or food. Do we have an obligation to those people too? The term economic migrant gets thrown around a lot. People (not this gentleman at the church, I must clarify) act as if the worst thing in the world would be an asylum system that fails to exclude economic migrants. Where on earth did this term, “economic migrant” even come from? I think in a lot of people’s imaginations, economic migrants are people who are attempting to enter the U.S. because they simply need a job. There are certainly plenty of people at the U.S. border who fit into this category. There are those people that leave relatively stable existences in their home countries to seek better opportunities here. But there are many who are leaving places where they simply cannot work at all or earn a single dollar to feed their family. Or there isn’t actual food to buy in their countries. Or maybe their homes have been destroyed by climate disaster. These are all economic migrants and they are treated as if they don’t need protection because we have an asylum system that doesn’t contemplate the dangers they face. Qualifying for asylum requires meeting an extremely narrow set of specifications that make up the refugee definition. It can be very very hard to prove and there are many moving parts including but not limited to: your immigration history; the country you are from; timing; where you apply; what judge you appear in front of; if you manage to find a lawyer to help you; and what lawyer is assigned to represent the government. During my career as an asylum lawyer I have often  been in court rooms where the judge, the government attorney, and I all agree that my client will be killed if they are returned to their country. Despite this, too many times, my client and I have failed to adequately prove asylum eligibility and the judge orders my client removed under the color of law. Asylum is designed to help a very specific set of people and there are a ton of honest-to-god life threatening calamities which it does not contemplate. One glaring omission in asylum law is that violence against women is not considered a ground for protection. There are so many more: flood; famine; war; gang violence; crop failure. But one critical principle of asylum and refugee law is that everyone gets the chance to ask for protection. In theory, we allow everyone to ask because if we don’t, then we run the risk of capriciously sending people back to situations where they will be killed. Everyone gets scrutiny if they want it and the bar is set purposefully low for asking. Eventually they may find themselves in an immigration court attempting to prove that complicated eligibility, but Day 1 of the asylum process is meant to be easier. It is supposed to help people get immediately safe from the threats they face while they get the complicated asylum process started. The result of this is that yes, some people who accurately claim on Day 1 that their lives are  in danger in their countries, end up not qualifying for actual asylum when it is adjudicated by a judge. And yes, that creates a system where some people are allowed into the U.S. to live for a while who will one day be deemed undeserving of that favor by U.S. law. To many that is a problem. But let’s imagine an opposite system where the threshold to access basic protection for getting the asylum process started wasn’t easy to pass. How many people would we send back to their deaths who would have otherwise qualified for asylum because we made it too hard to seek the initial protection? I contend there would be many. I will argue every day for a system that accidentally protects too many people than one that results in more people dead. Of course, this is all theoretical. I answered that gentleman’s question based on an idea of how asylum is supposed to work. In reality, here in the U.S., at our Southern border, we currently have a system that chooses more dead people over giving some people who may one day lose their asylum cases in court temporary protection. The reasons why are a little bit practical but mostly political. Practically speaking, our immigration courts are backed up beyond belief. Our system of evaluating claims in immigration court is so slow and broken that there is a backlog of over 2 million cases. When someone accesses temporary protection to wait for their day in court it could result in years of living in the U.S. This one way that the myth of open borders perpetuates around asylum seekers. Waiting for your asylum hearing looks like being allowed to come in and live and make a life. There are people who see that and feel resentful but there are other ways to react. My reaction is usually, who cares? I have had so many clients who have waited five, six, seven years to get to their asylum hearings. By the time it happens most people have established communities in their towns. Some have had kids. Some have graduated from school programs and started careers. They are paying taxes. In a lot of cases you would barely know them from any other immigrant who came to the U.S through “the right way”. They are living proof that newcomers can create thriving lives that contribute to American life. And then their hearing comes around and I, for one, have pretty much lost the plot on why we need to deport them. But the open borders myth is politically dangerous. People don’t think that it should be so easy to come to the U.S. This is, of course, an ironic position coming from the millions and millions of Americans who earned their inalienable rights of citizenship in this country by… wait for it... being born. We did not have to go through an obstacle course or battle or moral test of character to have our chance to grow up safely, work, have a family, thrive, or fail in this country. And yet we think people leaving home, traveling across continents, placing their bodies in abject danger, suffering horrific indignities at the hands of our government, and navigating the bureaucratic morass of American immigration law is too easy. Just pause, please, and think about that. So our country continues to use its political energy to devise strategies to keep more people out and make it harder for people to navigate. We have a box we call “asylum” and we say only people who fit in it deserve mercy and we make it extraordinarily difficult for people to fit into. Why not just create more boxes? I ask that with a shrug. That morning at the church I basically ended my answer to that gentleman's fine question with a shrug. Yes, we can get hung up on which group deserves more humanity than others, but we don’t have to. I don’t have all the answers about how it would work but, and I am repeating myself here, I will argue every day for a system that accidentally protects too many people than one that results in more people dead. To that end I have a fun book recommendation. It’s a serious and goofy graphic novel called “Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration”, by Brian Caplan and Zach Weinersmith. It is, as the title suggests, a case for open borders. It is written by an economics professor who believes in capitalism, which makes it all the more interesting. You may not agree with everything you read in it. I didn’t. But isn’t that the point of books? But it does shamelessly contemplate a future where everyone who wants to come to the U.S. would be welcome to come to the U.S. and how that could actually be a good thing. Seems like an interesting idea to take for a spin.