What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to make El Salvador a legally bulletproof concentration camp for his enemies.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran national who was shipped in violation of a court order by the Trump administration to a notorious prison camp in El Salvador for indefinite detention. He and several hundred others detained there were supposedly connected with gangs that Trump claims is a national security threat to the United States—but, like the vast majority of them, he was later determined to have no ties to gangs and no known criminal activity whatsoever. Abrego Garcia had fled El Salvador to escape persecution from gangs, and was in the United States legally on that basis.

Trump's DOJ now admits that Abrego Garcia's forced relocation to an El Salvadoran prison was an "administrative error." The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Trump must "facilitate" his return, but Trump is now claiming that the United States is powerless to make the El Salvadoran government do anything—even though Abrego Garcia and the other detainees are being held there at the request and expense of the Trump administration. 

Trump has refused to provide any details of that arrangement, or even a legal basis for it.

Trump's position, reiterated in two mandatory court updates filed today, is that when the Supreme Court ordered him to "facilitate" Abrego Garcia's return to the United States, it did not mean that Trump had to do anything to cause him to be released from the foreign high-security prison camp he's being held in—not even, apparently, to ask the "sovereign" El Salvadoran government to do so.

If Trump's position is allowed to stand, then anyone—whether a citizen or not, whether accused of a crime or not—can be "mistakenly" or deliberately put out of the reach of American law and the Constitution as long as there is a foreign autocrat loyal to Trump who allows it. This is about as serious a constitutional crisis as can be imagined.

Trump's respect for the "sovereignty" of the government the United States is paying to run an offshore gulag does not extend to other sovereign entities he has threatened to invade since retaking office, like Panama or Greenland or Canada.

Why does this matter?

• Secret offshore prisons for those who offend the ruler is about as un-American as it gets.

• Presidents are not kings.

• Not even trying to free someone from a foreign prison known for torture and abuse when you admit you sent them there by "mistake" is evil.