Commentaries by Professor Benjamin G. Davis | University of Toledo College of Law

President Trump said during an Oval Office meeting April 14 that it would be up to El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to decide whether mistakenly deported man Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia would be allowed back to the United States. President Bukele responded by stating that he did not “have the power to return him” and [...]

Part one of the series can be found here. Let us come up the rough side of the mountain. After writing “Embracing the Repression,” I was asked about how to make courage contagious. After mulling this over for some time, I have concluded that I do not know for certain. That said, courage has a [...]

Part two of the series can be found here. When I read CNN’s piece about  a pro-Israel group sharing with the Trump administration a Palestine activist “deportation” list, I immediately thought of Edwin Black’s foreword in IBM and the Holocaust, in which he questioned where the Nazis got their lists in the first place. That [...]

Part one of the series can be found here. Part two of the series can be found here. During the War on Terror, force drift was explained to me as the concept that increasing levels of force are seen to be reasonable, and there is an almost unstoppable trend toward the use of more and [...]

On Sunday, I attended a training by the Diaspora Alliance about the worrying rise of instrumentalized antisemitism. The Diaspora Alliance describes instrumentalized antisemitism as the use by political actors of Jewish peoples’ legitimate fears in an antisemitic environment. The idea is, these actors will manipulate those fears to compel organized action ultimately aimed at shoring [...]

Part one of this series can be found here: Return of the Torture Monsters: Here We Go Again. Part three of this series can be found here: Return of the Torture Monsters Part III: Force Drift Across Administrations. Recently, the ACLU highlighted one of the torture architects of our past. In early 2002, then National Security [...]

I was recently removed from an academic listserv for expressing my concerns about the administration of Donald Trump. This type of self-censorship permeating across sectors, including academia, is a troubling sign of our times. In some ways I feel as though we are living in 1933 Germany, when Adolf Hitler took power and rapidly dismantled [...]

As the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to dismantle the federal government as we know it, reports have emerged that the US African Development Foundation (USADF) denied entry to a gaggle of DOGE minions. This refusal was reportedly at the behest of the foundation’s resident and CEO Ward Brehm. The USADF board [...]

The Office of the Attorney General was established some 200 years before the first woman ever served in the role (Janet Reno, 1993-2001). It would take an additional decade for the first person of color to hold the office (Alberto Gonzales, 2005-2007). Since the passage of the 1789 Judiciary Act — the law that created [...]

Dear President Trump, As an ordinary citizen, I write to protest and dissent from your effort in plain sight to dismantle the United States Constitution and the Federal Government. You took the oath to take care and faithfully execute the laws of the United States. Instead, you try to dismantle sections of the government established [...]