Q Toon: Whatever Happened?

Since Max has asked:

A weekly editorial cartoon might not have been the best medium for an extended story arc. I have publications running my cartoons that only publish biweekly or monthly, for one thing. There are other news events worthy of comment a lot of the time. And installments like today’s lack a specifically LGBTQ+ element.

Last February, I drew a cartoon in which Max, the MAGA half of the Max and Leo household, discovered that Leo had been swept up in an ICE abduction action while volunteering at a food pantry. I anticipated that this Completely Corrupt Trump Regime's modus operandi would be similar to that of its previous iteration: incarcerate people in cells and cages, and dump them back in their nations of origin.

Instead, the Trump Troopers are now sentencing its captives without due process or fair trial to life imprisonment in squalid, Kafkaesque concentration camps in third world dictatorships, notably El Salvador, South Sudan, and Florida. 

You may have thought that the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution protect persons against unreasonable search and seizure and deprivation of liberty without due process, and guarantee trial by an impartial jury. Our professed "strict constructionists" on the republic's highest court, however, have discovered a much looser interpretation of the nation's founding document.

Meanwhile, it has been three months since an ICE guard at the concentration camp where Leo has been held took note of the tattoo of Max’s initials on Leo's butt and misread it as "MS13." 

Given our polICE state enforcers’ policy of Deport ’Em All, Let History Sort ’Em Out, it doesn't seem reasonable to imagine that someone at Stalag Trumpteen would suddenly realize that Leo was swept up by mistake in that ethnic cleansing sweep back in February and send him home now.

Nor has the Trump regime chickened out on their goal of an Aryan Nation. Rather, when it comes to reining in executive branch overreach, it is the current Supreme Court that Always Chickens Out.