Progressives are trying to manufacture yet another moral panic, this time over Trump’s suggestion that American citizens and residents could be held in foreign correctional facilities. They drop the new panic into the narrative about Trump’s alleged totalitarian ambitions. You’ve all heard it by now. Trump wants to be a dictator. Sending terrorists and violent offenders to facilities external to the United States confirms it. He’s a fascist. And a Nazi. It is an absurd narrative.
Extraterritorial incarceration (or cross-border incarceration) is not an extraordinary practice. Several of the most progressive European countries have arranged to house prisoners in facilities in other countries—and their crime rates, albeit on the rise, are lower than ours. Progressives have for as long as I have been alive offered up Europe as an aspirational model for the United States. Are they not aware of the practice of cross-border incarceration across the European Union?
Denmark has leased prison cells in Kosovo to house prisoners (Kosovo isn’t even an EU member state). In 2021, an agreement was made to send hundreds of inmates to a facility in Kosovo, with the arrangement formalized in 2023. Prisoners are today being housed there. This policy was driven by overcrowding in Danish prisons. Norway has sent prisoners to a Dutch facility to manage capacity constraints. In 2015, Norway leased space in the Netherlands to house inmates due to insufficient domestic prison capacity. Belgium also leased prison space in the Netherlands, specifically in Tilburg, to accommodate 500 inmates starting in 2010. This was a response to overcrowding in Belgian prisons.
The UK is exploring options to house prisoners abroad due to record-high prison populations. Discussions have been reported with Estonia to potentially send British prisoners to facilities there. Sweden is also in talks with Estonia to house prisoners in Estonian facilities, as part of efforts to address domestic prison overcrowding. While the Netherlands has primarily been a host country (e.g., leasing facilities to Belgium and Norway), it has also explored sending prisoners abroad.
Readers should be aware that the reason given for cross-border incarceration, namely overcrowding, begs another question: why are these countries experiencing prison overcrowding? Crime has been rising across Europe and many of these countries lack the facilities to handle the influx of convicts. It moreover makes their societies safer to house incorrigibles in other countries. This begs yet another question: why is crime rising in Europe? Over the last several decades, Europe has made residents of millions of foreigners whose cultures are incompatible with European culture and who grew up in corrupt and crime-ridden countries. People are culture-bearers. The rise in crime correlates with the influx of Africans, Arabs, and Eastern Europeans. The correlation is not spurious.
According to Eurostat data from 2022, intentional homicides in the EU increased by more than 4 percent compared to 2021. Sexual violence offenses are on the rise across Europe. Thefts rose by 18 percent, robberies by nearly 10 percent, and burglaries by over 7 percent. Organized crime, particularly drug trafficking, is a growing concern, with INTERPOL noting a significant rise in related violent crime and money laundering.
Some countries and cities experience more crime than others. Berlin saw an 8 percent rise in violent crime from 2021 to 2023, with homicides up 15 percent, sexual assaults up 12 percent, and robberies up 10 percent, according to the German Federal Criminal Police Office. Nationwide, violent crimes hit a 15-year high. In the UK, Birmingham’s violent crime rose 13 percent from 2021 to 2023, with knife-related offenses up 10 percent. London reported a 21 percent increase in knife-related incidents between July 2022 and June 2023, and homicides spiked in 2023.
Sweden’s crime index in 2023 was 48.5, among the highest in Europe, when it used to be one of the safest countries in the world. Belgium, France, Netherlands, and Spain have all experienced rising drug-related gang violence, contributing to the increasing problem of violent crime. Belgium and France rank even higher than Sweden on crime indices (49.1 and 55.3, respectively, in 2023).
Just as many European countries are utilizing or considering extraterritorial incarceration in countries in their region, the Trump Administration is using and considering extraterritorial incarceration in foreign counties. The panic over the CECOT detention center located in Tecoluca, El Salvador, depends on concealing the fact that cross-border incarceration is a common practice. The corporate media and progressive pundits will not tell their publics this. Perhaps many of them don’t know about it. But some do. The truth is a problem for their narrative.
This is why progressives in America are not branding the governing parties of Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom “Nazis.” It’s why they aren’t warning the citizens of those and other social democratic countries that their governments are on the path to “fascism.” Wasn’t it only a few months ago progressives scolded Vice-President JD Vance for criticizing Europeans for their repressive speech policies and for corrupting democratic processes by marginalizing oppositional parties? Their gaze is selective. Their anti-fascism is fake.
Extraterritorial incarceration is not a sign of fascism. Social democratic countries across Europe have turned to or considering utilizing the practice to make their cities and communities safer in the face of growing crime caused by the globalist strategy to drive down wages by importing and securing residence for cheap foreign labor—also to disrupt Western culture. Misplaced humanitarianism among the populations there functions to cover and advance the strategy. The rise of repressive free speech law and lawfare disenfranchising those with nationalist sympathies is at its core a strategy to tamp down popular opposition to the globalist agenda. Extraterritorial incarceration would not be necessary if Europe deported those who threaten Western civilization.
For those who might want to quibble over the status of those housed in foreign prisons by noting that they are not citizens, know that the basis for citizenship in most of these countries (jus sanguinis) precludes even those born in those countries from automatically becoming citizens there. That means that residents who have lived their entire lives in these countries are subject to extraterritorial incarceration—analogous to sending US citizens to overseas detention facilities, an idea Trump is floating. These same persons are also subject to deportation, which would in the long term be the most effective way for reducing prison overcrowding and crime in Europe.
This is the advantage of citizenship law based on ancestry instead of birthright. On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born in the US to parents who are illegally in the country or here on temporary visas. The order challenges over a century of legal precedent established by the 1898 Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which has been blocked by multiple federal judges in states like Maryland, New Hampshire, and Washington, who deemed it unconstitutional. I have explained in articles on Freedom and Reason why it may not be unconstitutional. Extraterritorial incarceration may not depend on whether it is.
The Supreme Court announced on Thursday that it will hear arguments on May 15, 2025, to address the Administration’s request to lift nationwide injunctions preventing the order’s enforcement. Legal scholars and critics, citing the Fourteenth Amendment’s “clear language” and “historical intent” to grant citizenship to all born on US soil, view the order as unlikely to succeed, though they admit that case’s outcome could hinge on the Court’s interpretation of jurisdictional nuances and its stance on nationwide injunctions (which also must be addressed, as I have also argued in articles recently published on this platform).
Before closing, I want to address two related arguments I routinely confront on social media. The first concerns the matter of civil rights for those who encounter the criminal justice process. I’m a civil libertarian. I have always been a strong advocate for the Bill of Rights. Leaving aside the question of whether noncitizens should have full access to those rights (I lean towards the position that they shouldn’t in any robust sense), such arguments concern principle. My record on principle in this regard is unassailable.
However, there are pragmatic considerations to be considered in making any public policy. Moreover, public safety is a human right. Due process is important, but so are the human rights of those who want to live in safe communities. The ideal approach to enhancing public safety means supporting the needs of communities. Central to this is the presence of high-wage, value-added manufacturing jobs and protection of American citizens and legal residents from cheap foreign labor by strict enforcement of immigration laws. American once enjoyed this situation. During the period between immigration restrictions in the 1920s and the globalization push following WWII, especially after the opening of the country to mass immigration again, crime was at historic lows in America. Families were largely intact. And communities were thriving.
If progressives were concerned with the situation of those who are arrested, convicted, and sentenced to prison, kept here or sent abroad, why do they oppose policies that would recapture America’s Gold Age? It’s not as if we don’t know what works. Why do progressives support social policies destructive to communities and families? The drastic rise in crime that begins in the mid-1960s and peaks in the early-1990s was only reversed by mass incarceration and interventionist police action. Had progressives not pursued such destructive policies as the Great Society and globalization, there would have been no need to take the drastic measures taken in the 1980s and 1990s to restore some modicum of public safety to our towns and cities. Expanding the criminal justice system was necessary not merely because progressives have no will to do the things that make American safer; they actively oppose policies that addresses the root causes of crime in America—deindustrialization and the replacement of American workers with foreign labor.
The second argument I routinely confront on social media is the claim that the rate of crime commission by immigrants is lower than the rate for Americans (the rightwing libertarian think tank Cato Institute distributes this claim, which has become ubiquitous). On X, in recent back-and-forth about the deportation of criminal aliens, I awaited the inevitable. I didn’t have to wait for long (I never do). “But immigrants commit crime at only half the rate of Americans.”
This claim is flawed. For one thing, it obscures the fact that those entering the United States illegally, such as crossing a border without authorization, outside a designated port of entry, are violating the criminal law. Despite what we are told, illegally entering the United States is not merely a civil violation; it’s a crime under 8 U.S.C. § 1325, which can result in fines, imprisonment for up to six months, or both for a first offense. Penalties may increase for subsequent violations or aggravating circumstances.
Being established that it is a crime to illegally enter the United States, one would have to assume that American citizens illegally enter other countries with similar immigration laws (which is a great many of them—some even stricter) at a rate much greater than foreigners illegally entering this country. Since this is a rather absurd assumption, it’s obvious that illegal aliens have a much higher crime than American citizens when comparing apples to apples—without committing any additional crimes. I’m being a tad sarcastic here; this is not what those who make this claim have in mind. But it’s still worth pointing out.
What they mean to argue is that Americans are more criminal than immigrants. Not quite. Some native-born groups have very high crime rates—black men, for example, commit homicides at 6–8 times the rate of white men. This is a consequence of deindustrialization and the ghettoization of black men in dilapidated inner-city areas with high levels of social disorganization, exacerbated by public assistance programs undermining families in these areas—thanks to the progressive transnationalist project. Thus comparing immigrants to “all Americans” obscures several distortions. The majority of Americans, despite the decline in their standard of living, are law-abiding tax-paying citizens.
The real problem is that appealing to rates obscures the real issue, namely crime volume. Presumably, nobody wants more crime (at least nobody will admit that, albeit it is functional to certain ends). Rates aside, the fact is that illegal aliens add thousands of violent crimes (even ignoring millions of border-crossing violations) on top of all the violence crime America already endures. Reducing the numbers of illegal aliens to zero would stop those crimes cold. Fewer victims, less burden. It’s that simple, really.
Removing the alien contribution to the crime problem would mean thousands of fewer assaults, homicides, or robberies each year, easing the burden on victims, law enforcement, and the justice system. Additionally, the reduction would address measurable costs: fewer resources spent on processing illegal entry cases, less strain on infrastructure, and reduced economic impacts, not only the tens of billions of dollars in net fiscal costs attributed to illegal immigration annually (the burden on taxpayers), but the half a trillion dollars in lost wages to American workers annually (money that goes into the pockets of employers). By eliminating this population’s presence, the US avoids these added crimes and costs entirely, keeping the crime volume lower than it would be otherwise.
The real point of the claim is to suggest that immigrants are better than native-born Americans. To that I say, “fuck you.” But I need to say just a bit more than that. Making immigrants appear as a more desirable lot than Americans is functional to the ends sought by progressive transnationalists—not just to the needs of the corporations who seek super-exploitable labor pools, or the needs of Democrats seeking to draw more resources to their states and groom more voters for their party, but to advance the project of deconstructing the American Republic and, more broadly, the West.
At first approximation, the left loathes strength and tradition and takes up the cause of the weak and the marginal. This is the cause of “social justice.” It’s a struggle between “oppressor” and “victim.” In this formulation, normal working class and small business men and women (depicted as exclusively white) are the oppressor. Everybody else is the victim. But a closer examination reveals something very different. Leftists rationalize Islamofascism and defend Hispanic gang culture, both deeply patriarchal and antihuman traditions. This is why they get so exercised over attempt to deal with the worst people—the anti-West protestors on our college campuses, MS-13 members Trump is deporting, men demanding access to women’s spaces, murders and rapists (as long as they’re not white). Progressives upend reason, science, and common sense in the institutions they have captured for a reason. This is motive force behind the endless manufactures of moral panic.
Why did Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen travel to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego Garcia in prison but not personally reach out to the mother of Rachel Morin, whose daughter was raped and murdered in 2023 by Victor Martinez-Hernandez, a fugitive from El Salvador, while exercising on a hiking trail northeast of Baltimore? Van Hollen’s priorities are clear. And he speaks for millions on the left. I discussed his visit to El Salvador in Thursday’s blog. Update: Van Hollen finally got his meeting with Garcia. It was photographed. They had drinks together. Garcia looks healthy. More Democrats are making their way to El Salvador to join in the grandstanding—despite the evidence making it clear that Garcia, an El Salvadorian citizen, is right where he should be.
What lies in back of progressive social justice rhetoric is “Europhobia,” a hatred for, loathing of, and prejudice against Europeans and European culture. This includes the United States and Canada, the progeny of European society. I am reluctant to use such a neologism in light of the propaganda constructs “Islamophobia” and “transphobia,” but perhaps such constructs resonate with those who manufacture them. I trust readers understand what I mean with this term. It’s the anti-West sentiment, the source of sympathy for Hamas and animus towards Israel and Jews more generally on the left, etc.
This is not hyperbole. The left is explicit about it. I repeat myself: today’s left loathes Western civilization and the Enlightenment. They have abandoned their historic solidarity with the working class (which has smelled a bit paternalistic, frankly). They articulate this abandonment through their condemnation of “white privilege” and other like rhetoric. This is the postmodernist project. Note the construction: postmodern. They seek a new world order that leaves behind modern society and its values: democratic republicanism, humanism, individualism, liberalism, and secularism. They want this replaced by the atavisms of tribalism and “indigenous ways of knowing.” This destructive ideology is rampant in our colleges and universities—even k-12. It has corrupted medicine and science. It has colonized our sense-making institutions. It targets the family. And the community.
Tens of millions in the West are waking up to the fact that the postmodern project represents an existential threat to everything they hold dear. They are recognizing the signs now. The dramatic cultural and political pivot we’re witnessing is driven by an awakening in the West. Hopefully, it’s not too late. And despite the consequences of impatience with civil rights and due process that protects the worst humans on earth, the impatience is understandable—and until the left quits its anti-human project, the consequences inevitable. The majority is caught between principle and pragmatics, and they have only one life to live, and there are other lives to which they are responsible. They have to secure the safety of their families, and there are times where doing so demands bold action. In light of this, extraterritorial incarceration is a rather minor matter.
freedom and reason 