WASHINGTON " June 18, 2035

The courtroom is built like a confession.

It sits inside the restored east wing of the old Federal District Courthouse, marble cleaned, brass polished, bullet pock divots left in place on purpose. Above the judges' bench hangs a simple seal adopted after the war: E PLURIBUS LEX, "Out of many, law."

At 9:02 a.m., the five defendants rose together, an oddly synchronized motion that looked more like muscle memory than respect. They faced three judges: one retired federal appellate jurist, one military judge from the reconstituted Judge Advocate General's Corps, and one civil rights scholar appointed by the Senate under the 2032 Justice Renewal Act.

In the first row of the gallery sat families who had spent a decade learning new kinds of waiting: for fathers who never came home from "temporary processing," waiting daughters whose names were misspelled in detention logs, waiting for the country to remember itself. A few wore laminated photographs carried through the black years: faces held up at vigils while cameras looked away.

Then the clerk read the caption that will likely define an era in history books:

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. STEPHEN MILLER, KRISTI NOEM, TOM HOMAN, GREG BOVINO, and OTHERS.

The charges, filed under a postwar synthesis of federal criminal law, military law, and ratified human-rights obligations for government officals are stark: crimes against humanity, torture and cruel treatment, unlawful confinement, forced displacement, conspiracy to deprive constitutional rights under color of law, murder, kidnapping, and illegal domestic deployment of military force.

The story the government intends to tell is equally stark: that the Trump-era crackdown did not simply "happen." It was first designed as policy, then as a political weapon, and finally as machinery. The government sought to prove that these defendants were not mere functionaries. They were authors of vast criminality under the color of law.

In a nation recovering from decades of performance politics, the tribunal has been engineered to resist theatricality. There will be no pundit panels, no "trial scorecards," no crowd shots. Cameras are limited to a fixed feed, the same angle every day. The public can watch, but not consume.

"Justice has to be boring again," Chief Judge Elena Marquez said. "If it is entertaining, we have failed."

Outside, security was visible but restrained: National Guard in soft caps, no armored vehicles, no long guns. A permitted protest stood behind barricades, holding signs that read DUE PROCESS IS THE POINT, a sentence people only write after learning what it costs when due process disappears.

In question are the deaths at the hands of ICE and DHS of over 180 American citizens and over 1,100 immigrants, as well as the illegal use of force against over 3,500 American citizens and tens of thousands of immigrants, and the illegal detention of thousands of American citizens.

Stephen Miller, 49, once a White House deputy Chief of Staff and policy architect, is accused of designing the legal and rhetorical framework for what prosecutors call the "Permanent Emergency": the series of rolling declarations that treated dissent as sabotage and migration as invasion, and that increasingly erased the line between foreign threat and domestic political opposition.

Kristi Noem, 63, former Secretary of Homeland Security in the administration's final years, is accused of overseeing an expansion of detention operations and authorizing the illegal abuse of DHS intelligence components and political staff to identify journalists, protest organizers, and elected officials as "enemy combatants" and for the corrupt abuse of government planes, housing, and for spending over $400 million dollars on ads featuring herself.

Tom Homan, 73, the administration's most visible immigration enforcer, is charged with directing ICE operations that prosecutors allege escalated from civil deportation into punitive confinement, "retribution sweeps," and mass transfers designed to sever detainees from counsel and family. Homan is also accused of running a massive fraud scheme that demanded bribes from DHS contractors.

Greg Bovino, 58, a border enforcement commander whose name became synonymous with the hardline "line-hold" doctrine, is accused of implementing field policies that prosecutors say amounted to systematic abuse, creating "expedited removal systems" where medical care, legal contact, and even recordkeeping were intentionally degraded.

"And others" is not decorative. A sealed list of additional defendants, spanning DHS legal offices, contractor executives, and military liaisons, will be unsealed in phases, according to the Office of the Special Prosecutor. Executives from social media, telecommunications, and data brokers will be called to testify on their sharing of user data with DHS and its prime data contractor, Palantir.

The hinge years: from politics to crackdown

The government's case will center on what it calls the hinge period after Donald Trump's death in 2027, an event that did not relieve tension so much as detonate it. The succession crisis that followed accelerated the regime's instincts: to control the narrative, punish defection, and treat oversight as treason.

J.D. Vance is not in the dock. The former Vice President fled the United States after a brief civil conflict amid contested federal succession and state refusals to comply with emergency directives. U.S. intelligence believes he is living in Russia under protection, though Moscow has never confirmed it.

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary during the period when military assets were used in ways now under scrutiny, is also absent, killed in a drunk driving accident before the conflict peaked. The tribunal will still examine orders and communications bearing his signature, and whether subordinates had a duty to refuse to carry them out.

The prosecution's thesis is chillingly simple: when the leader is gone, the system either collapses or becomes feral. Here, it became feral.

"You can always find a lawyer."

Special Prosecutor Nadia Rahman began with what she called the "foundational lie" of the crackdown: that legality could be manufactured by memo.

"This case is not about immigration policy," Rahman said. "This case is about state power used as a weapon against the vulnerable, and then turned inward against citizens."

Her opening previewed evidence, including internal White House and DHS emails, draft executive orders, and recorded meetings recovered from personal devices after the war. The documents, she said, show a deliberate progression of attacks, first on immigrants, then on American citizens:

Dehumanizing rhetoric targeting migrants, then protesters, then journalists, then "disloyal state officials."

Administrative punishment; abuse of government powers against American citizens, including illegal wiretapping, travel restrictions, and IRS audits against critics.

Physical coercion, including mass arrests at protests, militarized raids framed as security operations against domestic terrorists, and detentions that blurred into disappearance.

The day's first major exhibit was not a photograph. It was a flowchart: emergency authorities invoked, agencies involved, signature blocks, normal review bypassed. A diagram of how a democracy can be disassembled without ever announcing its own destruction.

"You can always find a lawyer," Rahman said. "The defendants did. They found lawyers to justify what they wanted, then language to make it sound like protection."

The free speech file.

This tribunal reaches beyond border enforcement. A central section will examine restrictions on speech and protest, measures prosecutors argue created the conditions for wider abuse.

Court filings describe directives known as the "Speech Restrictions": federal pressure on platforms, threats to broadcasters' licenses, narrowed press access, and the branding of certain reporting as "operational interference." Prosecutors allege DHS used classifications and "domestic extremist" designations to target protest organizers, coordinating with the White House and state Republican parties to pre-frame arrests as preemption rather than punishment.

Two former government attorneys, now cooperating witnesses, are expected to testify about meetings where plans were implemented to illegally monitor cell phones and email accounts of protestors and journalists.

The military question: the republic's scar

The most volatile evidence concerns illegal domestic use of military force. The tribunal will examine whether federal officials deployed military assets, including combat personnel, surveillance, and logistics, in violation of long-standing constraints, and whether civilians were mischaracterized as insurgents to justify escalation.

The civil conflict was brief by global standards but devastating by American ones. It left burned statehouses, still-open forensic investigations, and veterans, some conscripted under emergency measures, now testifying for the norms they were once told they were defending.

The tribunal is trying to answer a question that haunts every recovered democracy: When the state becomes afraid of its own people, who tells the state to stop?

Defense: fog, chaos, and "distributed" responsibility

Defense attorneys signaled a common strategy: extraordinary circumstances. Border surges, unrest, threats of violence, and an emergency atmosphere that blurred security and politics. Abuses, they claim, were the work of rogue actors, not designers.

Miller's counsel called him "a political adviser, not an operator," warning against criminalizing ideology. Noem's attorney argued she relied on professionals and that decision-making was "distributed." Homan was portrayed as "a hard man in hard times." Bovino's defense emphasized field chaos.

The prosecution anticipated it.

"There is a word for distributed decision-making' used to commit systematic criminality," Rahman said. "It is conspiracy.'"

Truth, reconciliation, and the insufficiency of confession.

The tribunal operates alongside the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which has gathered thousands of testimonies, granted conditional amnesties to lower-level actors who disclosed full participation, and recommended reparations.

But the tribunal exists where the republic draws a line: there are acts for which confession is not enough.

"We are not here to perform vengeance," Commissioner Gregory Ludwig said outside the courthouse. "We are here to restore the relationship between citizen and state. That cannot be restored while the architects of deliberate abuse live inside the story as misunderstood patriots."

A temporary memorial wall in the plaza lists the names of the disappeared. People stop, touch a name, and move on, as if physical contact might anchor a fact that was once denied.

The evidence that will matter.

The most decisive exhibits may not be the most graphic. Prosecutors say the case will hinge on documentation: chains of command, sign-off trails, and intent.

Pretrial filings highlight three categories of intent evidence:

Draft language seeking to "increase deterrent discomfort" and "maximize compliance through uncertainty."

Communications about optics: how to frame raids, phrase detention, discredit witnesses.

Retaliatory targeting: lists for "special handling" of critics of the Administration, both political and media.

As the first day adjourned, the defendants were escorted out through a private corridor. The gallery emptied into bright summer light. On the courthouse steps, a former detainee read a short statement, voice steady, hands shaking.

"I don't need them to suffer," he said. "I need the country to admit what happened. I need my kids to grow up in a place where the law is not a costume."

Inside, Judge Marquez offered a final line that felt less like rhetoric than diagnosis.

"Power," she said, "is not on trial. Abuse of power is."

The tribunal reconvenes tomorrow. The prosecution's first witness will be a former DHS IT technician who turned over the entirety of the department's communications and data to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission after Administration officials claimed it was lost during the civil disorder that rocked Washington.

And in a country that spent too long living inside a crisis, a strange sensation is beginning to return, not relief, exactly, but something adjacent.

The feeling that the republic is writing an ending that is not just survival, but accountability.

#10 You're most welcome, Shoeless.