After you know, like forever,* California has confirmed that the second round of the election for governor will be between Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton. Becerra came in first with 27.9% of the vote, and Hilton was in second with 25.0%, which edged out Democrat Tom Steyer with 22.5%.

I appear unable to upload images at the moment, but the results can be viewed here.

All of this is an artifact of the two-round system they use in California, which isn’t really a primary, despite what people call it. It is a two-round system wherein the two top voter getters advance to the second round, regardless of margins (i.e., even if a candidate wins 50%+1, they do not win the seat), and where candidates of the same party can both advance to the second round.

These are not a nomination contest, which is the proper definition of a primary.

It seems worth noting that there were 61 candidates on the ballot and that while just under half of first-round voters chose someone other than Becerra or Hilton, Becerra’s ceiling is far higher than Hilton’s.

While we cannot simply port over, say, all the Democratic votes to Becerra (like third-place finisher Tom Steyer’s 22.5%), you can assume that the grand bulk of Dem support that is sprinkled across a number of other candidates will end up supporting Becerra, just as the other Rs will coalesce around Hilton.

FWIW, 59.3% of the vote went to Ds, and 39.7% went to Rs (with about 1% to others).

Weirdly, that is awfully close to the results in 2024, when Harris won 58.5% of the vote, and Trump won 38.3%.

It’s as if the partisan makeup of a given jurisdiction has some predictive power, or something.

Indeed, I will boldly predict that the final results of the election will be roughly 60-40 in November, favoring the Ds.

Bold, I know.

No doubt the fact that the results comport with a fully predictable outcome that conforms to the known partisan mix of the state, to include a Republican advancing (even if it took DAYS* to find out the results!), will quell all those claims that CA’s system is rigged?

Right?

Or will it be proof that it is rigged and that they manufactured this outcome after all the criticism to prove that it’s not?

Sigh.

*I am honestly very frustrated by all the bellyaching over a normal process taking the length of time it normally takes. It seems no story can avoid commenting on how long it takes, and a lot of otherwise reasonable people seem to be almost as hard on CA for counting the way it counts as they are on Trump for lying about fraud. It is a maddening illustration about how we cannot, collectively, figure out the difference between having a splinter in one’s finger versus having one’s hand amputated. I am not even sure that analogy is quite right because it still casts the CA system as a problem, if a minor one. Apart from giving grist to the lying mill, I can not figure out one serious problem with CA’s system, apart from making reporters and pundits have to wait a few days

The Atlantic’s Idrees Kahloon examines, “How Britain Became as Poor as Mississippi.”

The setup:

The past 18 years, enough time for a whole lost generation to be born and brought up, have yielded nothing but stagnation and mass disillusionment. In 2007, before the global financial crisis, Britain was at its postimperial zenith. Median household income had just surpassed that of Germany. A pound was worth more than $2, and London was arguably displacing New York as the center of international banking.

But since then, Britain has been left behind. The country’s output per person is now only just above that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state—and that slight lead is only achieved thanks to London. Outside the capital, in places where tourists do not visit, living standards fall well below Mississippi’s. Brits visiting the United States find that their currency has depreciated to the point where the pound today buys only about $1.35. British wages have lagged well behind those in the U.S., and also those in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark; once you account for inflation, they’ve barely grown at all. Within the next decade, the typical Pole will have a standard of living equal to the typical Brit, if current trends continue.

One generation ago, Britain was a major global power; today, it is a middling one, gripped by sclerosis. Taxation is at the highest level since World War II, yet public services have deteriorated. The National Health Service, the celebrated pillar of the British cradle-to-grave welfare state, has a backlog of 6 million patients—almost a tenth of the population—waiting for treatment. The health service now has to spend more money settling maternity-malpractice claims than it does on actually providing maternity care. Many Brits can neither obtain an appointment with a publicly funded dentist nor afford a private one; in a 2023 survey, one in 10 reported doing DIY dental work, in extreme cases extracting their own teeth or gluing broken crowns back together.

His explanation for what happened:

Some in Britain blame rotten luck—the 2008 financial crash, the coronavirus pandemic, an energy crisis after Russia invaded Ukraine. But other countries endured these challenges too. What differentiated Britain was its self-sabotaging responses to these and other problems. Brexit is the most famous example, but hardly the only one. Bad choices, beginning just after the financial crisis, begot worse ones. As public disillusionment has grown, politicians have been rotated swiftly in and out of power, abruptly terminating whatever policies they had started. Six different prime ministers have governed since the 2010 general election. They do not seem to be getting more talented over time.

[…]

The country’s downward slide has been consistent in one respect: As Britain has become more and more aware of its diminishment, it has retreated ever more fully into a defensive crouch. Politics have become zero-sum, descending into fights over who has robbed whom. Suspicion has fallen, above all, on immigrants, whom both major parties have turned against. There is still an enduring strain of British exceptionalism, quieter and more understated than the American version, which suggests that by retreating inward, Britain can make itself great again. Astonishingly, or perhaps predictably, it is growing stronger as the country’s problems get worse.

[…]

In the 1990s, both the Tories and Tony Blair’s “New Labour” Party made the same bet: Britain was to be a postindustrial, services-based economy, anchored in finance. Tax receipts from a booming London would be redistributed to lagging regions in the old industrial heartland, helping to renew them. Then came 2008, and London’s financial industry cratered.

But the government’s actions during and after the crisis compounded the damage. Rather than increase spending to revive depressed demand, as modern Keynesians would counsel, the government, then led by Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, opted to slash budgets as revenue plunged. The theory was that fiscal discipline—cutting spending more sharply than Britain’s peer countries—would inspire confidence and spur growth. At the time, deficits and debt were seen as immoral; unlike profligate Greece, Britain would manage its affairs prudently.

[…]

Austerity was felt most harshly by those who were already suffering after deindustrialization. The welfare state had partially compensated the losers from globalization. When it abruptly shrank—because the masters of the universe had miscalculated—anger erupted upward, at British elites, and also outward, at European migrants, who were competing for jobs and public services. It was because of this political pressure that Cameron made another fateful decision: to hold the Brexit referendum in 2016. This was a gambit; Cameron expected the vote to fail. He did not want to leave the European Union, but he wanted to arrest the rise of figures such as Nigel Farage, the longtime gadfly of British politics, who had been campaigning for withdrawal from the EU for decades. Left-behind Britain, the places especially harmed by austerity cuts, voted overwhelmingly to leave. The morning after he lost the referendum, Cameron resigned, ushering in a period of political instability that has now lasted a decade, and shows no sign of ending.

There’s a whole lot more, but that’s the gist of his argument.

With respect to Brexit, there is a growing realization that it was a mistake. There has been a lot of talk of “Bre-entry.”

Similarly, while austerity was long the elite consensus at places like the IMF and World Bank, its popularity has faded. To be sure, there are risks to the Keynesian approach as well. Despite our political turmoil, the United States weathered the Great Recession and COVID considerably better than most, partially because of massive infusions of cash into the system by the government. The cost of that is a national debt of over $39 trillion, the interest payments on which have now exceeded our spending on national defense. I’m skeptical that this is sustainable.

The migration of the site to WordPress is complete, and I have redirected the outsidethebeltway.com domain. It may take a few hours for it to show for everyone.

UPDATE: While I don’t have any problem in Chrome, both Safari and Firefox are issuing warnings. Hopefully, that will soon abate as the domain resolves.

UPDATE 2: WordPress has fixed that issue. As best I can tell from my end, the site is working correctly now. The next step will be to update the theme, which was designed in 2018 and is incompatible with more recent WordPress versions.

Let me cut to the chase: the main problem that California takes longer than other states to count all the votes and declare winners isn’t that California takes longer than other states. The problem is that Donald Trump and his allies, like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, lie about what it all means.

There is a secondary problem of general impatience from news junkies who want to know election results before they go to bed on election night.

There is, however, nothing inherently wrong, corrupt, anti-democratic, or really worthy of serious criticism for the way that California conducts its elections.

I will confess, had I designed the system, I likely would have required ballots to have been mailed earlier and arrive by election day, and I would prefer a process that was faster. But, I would note, none of that has anything to do with accuracy or democracy/legal legitimacy.

Put another way: I am not claiming that CA’s system is perfect, and I am willing to listen to reform suggestions. But I am also directly stating that there are no legitimate claims of fraud or inaccuracy. There is no evidence that any of this is anything other than what it appears, i.e., they take a while to count.

The core problem, therefore, with California is that Trump and others lie about what it all means.

That’s it. That’s the problem.

See, for example, this story from Axios: California’s “red mirage” feeds MAGA fraud frenzy which includes this:

There was a similar story on NPR this morning, and Tim Miller and JVL were complaining about it on the Bulwark podcast the other day. There are several such stories on Memeorandum as I type this.

Each of these stories has two things in common. First, they talk about how Trump and his allies lie about what CA’s slowness means. Second, none of them has any evidence that CA’s slowness is an actual problem, except that the slowness gives Trump and company an opening for lying.

Stop me if it isn’t obvious that the problem is Trump’s lying, not CA’s slowness. Further, I would note that Trump does not need CA’s slowness to, you know, lie about election results.

In terms of allies, here’s Mike Johnson:

It is amazing to think of all the things that Johnson has said he was unaware of when Trump was doing the indefensible, but all of a sudden, he “instinctively” knows something is rotten in California. This is, I would note, the Speaker of the House deliberately casting doubt on American democracy for petty partisan gain.

Here’s Ron DeSantis:

I refuse to believe that these guys don’t understand how all of this really works. Any given ballot box is not going to be normally distributed. If a box comes from a heavily Democratic precinct, there are going to be more Democratic than Republican votes in the box. Los Angeles is a heavily Democratic city. Math, the harshest of mistresses, dictates that in a Top Two primary, two Democrats is not a fantastical outcome (and BTW, the ballot is actually nonpartisan).

Also, This Just In! Bass is the incumbent mayor, and Nithya Raman is a member of the City Council. The ostensible Republican, Spencer Pratt, is described thusly at Ballotpedia:

Pratt received a B.A. in political science from the University of Southern California. He starred in the reality television shows The Hills, I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, Big Brother, and Marriage Boot Camp. Pratt was also a media entrepreneur and hummingbird hobbyist.

Color me shocked that two elected officials beat out the “media entrepreneur and hummingbird hobbyist.”

Here is how Pratt’s website (and he does use a hummingbird* as part of his logo) describes him:

Spencer first rose to international prominence as the architect of modern reality television, serving as a central figure on MTV’s iconic series The Hills.

Well, then.

Here’s a downloadable poster from said site:

Here are the final results:

BTW, LA County went roughly 65% for Harris and 32% for Trump in 2024. As such, the above numbers seem in line with past elections. I realize, BTW, that LA County is more than just the city of LA, but the county numbers give a rough proxy (and I would guess that the city is probably somewhat more Democratic than the county as a whole (but that is just a guess).

I realized that I wrote a version of this post back in 2022: “We Used to Know on Election Night!”

For the record, by the way, hummingbirds are cool.

UPDATE: I read Jonathan Bernstein’s latest, Undermining Democracy, after I wrote this.

From the piece:

The main thing I’d add to that is that people are tempted to blame California’s slow count for inviting claims of fraud, but that’s bunk. Trump claimed fraud in the very first election he contested, the 2016 Iowa caucuses, and pretty much every election since. Including elections he won. Count fast, count slow; vote by mail or in person; use machines or people to count, and Trump is going to claim fraud, often with the bulk of his party right there with him. Changing how the votes are counted will do absolutely nothing to change that.

Exactly.

Also,

Look: Donald Trump took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Undermining confidence in elections based on nothing at all is a form of undermining the Constitution. It’s that simple. Am I suggesting that these false claims could be part of a legitimate impeachment and removal? I am. And he’s not the only one. Speaker Johnson took an oath to defend the Constitution as well, and so did every yahoo Member of the House and Senator jumping on the phony fraud bandwagon.

Indeed.

See, also, Rick Hasen writing at MS Now: Trump’s latest ‘voter fraud’ claims may backfire on him in the fall.

I am less sanguine about the boy-who-cried-wolf of it all, but the piece is worth a read in any event.

And to add to those undermining democracy, here’s Representative Steve Scalise:

AP (“Donald Trump booed by the crowd during the anthem prior to Game 3 of the NBA Finals“):

Donald Trump was booed loudly by fans inside Madison Square Garden when he was shown on video screens during the national anthem as he became the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game.

Chants of “U-S-A! U-S-A!” echoed through the arena as Avery Wilson sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but they they gave way to boos moments later as Trump was displayed on the jumbo screens giving a military salute. The jeers ended when the U.S. flag followed him on the screens, and fans cheered when New York Knicks players were shown. Mentions of the San Antonio Spurs also elicited vociferous boos.

The president was unfazed. “It was, I think, mostly cheers,” he told reporters after the game before boarding Air Force One to return to Washington. “It was loud, and it was very enthusiastic.”

Trump watched Game 3 from Knicks owner James Dolan’s suite, along with granddaughter Kai, personal adviser Boris Epshteyn and Cabinet secretaries Lee Zeldin, Sean Duffy and Doug Burgum. He sat next to Dolan for the first quarter and spent part of the second talking to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and Republican gubernatorial hopeful Bruce Blakeman.

Trump’s Marine One helicopter flew from his home in New Jersey and landed near Wall Street before his motorcade made its way up through Manhattan and to the arena roughly an hour before tipoff. He encountered a handful of people making rude gestures, and outside the area, one group held signs saying “Trump must go.”

[…]

During the afternoon before Trump’s arrival, the New York Police Department and the U.S. Secret Service set up a large perimeter surrounding Madison Square Garden. Fans lined up to get inside the arena more than four hours before tipoff, in a scene more closely resembling New Year’s Eve in Times Square than the usual leadup to a basketball game.

They were required to provide a ticket or pass to get past various checkpoints, along with going through a Transportation Security Administration-style magnetometer. Secret Service personnel and police were positioned at every corner and in large numbers. Daily commuters, tourists visiting Manhattan and fans were all confounded at various times as they tried to maneuver the security.

Politicians getting booed is a fact of life, even when they don’t have disapproval ratings in the 60s. Who can forget the heartwarming Let’s Go Brandon! cheers under the previous administration?

It didn’t help that Trump’s attendance caused considerable inconvenience. It’s not the first time.

This is the latest major sporting event Trump has attended during his time as president, and the security measures have created major hassles for fans.

Thousands of fans missed the start of last year’s U.S. Open men’s singles final between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner because of lengthy security lines. Even though the U.S. Tennis Association pushed back the start of the match by a half-hour, many fans still couldn’t get in because added measures meant that they had to go through screening not only when they arrived at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center but again in front of the steps into Arthur Ashe Stadium, where Trump watched from a suite.

It’s my longstanding view, conditioned by my time working in downtown DC and experiencing constant disruptions from official motorcades, that such disruptions should be restricted to the people’s business. It’s one thing to shut down several blocks of downtown Manhattan to ensure the President can safely address the United Nations. It’s quite another to do so for him to personally attend a ballgame.

Let’s get to the heart of the matter: a key aspect of Christian Nationalism is being able to exclude persons that those in power do not like from being given full rights and privileges as citizens. The whole point of fusing national identity with a given religion is to assert that only persons who adhere to the state’s preferred religious beliefs really belong. By definition, this means first dividing the world into “Christian” and “non-Christian,” then determining who and what “real” Christians are.

For those who are not particularly religious, or who have little direct experience with Christianity in the United States, that may sound odd. But just stop and think about the history of Protestants and Catholics in European history to remind oneself how these arguments can go. Or, if one needs a very contemporary example, look at how conservatives mock James Talarico’s faith as somehow not being real.

As I have noted before, I was raised Southern Baptist and spent a good deal of my life, well into adulthood, in either Baptist or non-denominational Evangelical churches. For much of my late teens, twenties, and into my thirties, I tried mightily to apply an intellectual understanding of the faith and the Bible, which included reading quite a lot about deviations from standing Christian orthodoxy as well as divisions within that orthodoxy. As such, I read quite a bit about things like Mormon theology v. basic protestant theology. There are some very important differences, for what it is worth. I say this as a matter of fact, not as anything else.

Beyond any of that, just sitting in various services over those decades, here are the kinds of things I was taught. In Baptist circles, Catholics were viewed on a scale from asserting”they were misguided in their theology” to people asking “are they really Christians?” to some who would say that they weren’t. I had a pastor at a Calvary Chapel in California repeatedly question the faith of mainline Protestants. And one thing was for sure: Mormons, Christian Scientists, and Jehovah’s Witnesses were members of cults. A prominent example of this can be found in the work of Walter Martin and his very influential (at the time) book, Kingdom of the Cults.

The point of bringing all of this up is that Christianity has a lot of internal division. And while, say, Evangelicals and others may be happy, in this moment, to see “Christian” as some big umbrella, once they get more power, don’t expect them to continue to operate that way.

Hegseth’s list that James Joyner noted a few days ago illustrates this principle. Eliminating 180 religions from the Defense Department’s list of recognized religions was a signal about what was “real” and what wasn’t. This was rather boldly reinforced by the fact that 21 of 31 religions listed (just over two-thirds of the list) are variations on “Christian.” As I stated in the comments of that post, I have no strong feeling about what the right number of religions should be, and can understand from a bureaucratic point of view that maybe 221 designations is unruly. But I will state, also, that I would prefer a system that errs more on the side of inclusion than exclusion.

At any rate, one of the designations still on the list, as James noted, was “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (CJ)” but there is s a major difference between that listing and the 21 that precede it in the list. See if you can see it.

• Christian – Assemblies of God (AG)
• Christian – Baptist (BA)
• Christian – Brethren (BR)
• Christian – Catholic (CA)
• Christian – Church of Christ (CC)
• Christian – Church of God (CG)
• Christian – Church of the Nazarene (CN)
• Christian – Episcopal/Anglican (EA)
• Christian – Evangelical (EV)
• Christian – Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW)
• Christian – Lutheran (LU)
• Christian – Methodist (ME)
• Christian – Non Denominational (ND)
• Christian – Orthodox (OX)
• Christian – Other (CO)
• Christian – Pentecostal (PE)
• Christian – Presbyterian (PR)
• Christian – Quaker (QU)
• Christian – Reformed (RE)
• Christian – Scientist (SC)
• Christian – Seventh Day Adventist (SA)
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (CJ)

The Mormons are not classified as “Christian” but instead are classified on the list as being one of the other ten categories that aren’t “Christian” (e.g., Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs).

This raised the ire of some of Utah’s members of Congress.

Here’s Representative Kennedy’s thoughts:

Senator Mike Lee is quite exercised, calling it “offensive” and “repugnant.”

He also seems to almost understand, at least when it is his ox being gored, why the US government shouldn’t be getting into making judgments about religion.

Once the government moves away from inclusivity and decides that, yes, being a Wiccan is just silly, or whatever, then you are not that far off from hardcore Evangelicals showing you that, in fact, they think Mormons are not a denomination but, in fact, a cult. Wait until the people who follow Doug Wilson tell you what they really think about Catholics.

Too bad no one studies history, or even contemporary world politics, as they might discover that many of the bloodiest fights are not between different religions, but instead within a religion over who belongs to the true faith.

Ultimately, there are only two ways to guarantee that your faith, whatever it may be, is protected. There is the illiberal pathway of religious nationalism wherein your faith is the official faith, and other faiths (or lack of faith entirely) are either tolerated as the pleasure of the ruling elites or persecuted and outlawed.

The other route is a liberal, pluralistic democracy wherein everyone’s faith is legally protected by a neutral, secular state.

Once you move away from neutrality, someone has to decide what is “proper” religion and what isn’t. And the more the state becomes infused with the notion that it is the state’s job to determine which faiths are proper, the more power will be wielded against the improper.

This whole issue of listing religious affiliation for the DoD is, on one level, small potatoes, but it is a small peeling away of the curtain to see how these people think.

But while it is true that Evangelicals have been more accepting of Mormons as belonging in their club since at least Romney’s run at the presidency, I don’t think that they really, truly accept that notion. Yes, they all believe in Christ, as Lee states, but their versions are rather different. And when you think you know the truth, you tend not to be in the mood to tolerate people whose version of the truth deviates from your own. Indeed, history shows that the greatest intolerance is often not Religion A versus Religion B, but it is the fight within Religion A over their view of God.

I will end with a family anecdote that illustrates the point. I learned as a small child that one of my aunts was estranged from the rest of my family because her denomination (I think it was the Church of Christ) thought that the rest of the family (mostly, if not all, Baptists) were going to Hell because the Church of Christ was the correct approach to Christian beliefs.

All of which is to say that we need to find our way back, as a country, to liberal pluralism before this gets ugly and we aren’t just fighting over bureaucratic lists.

UPDATE (James Joyner, 1544): It appears the Department got the message.

Planet Of The Apes was a classic. Beneath The Planet Of The Apes was supposed to be the sequel to end all ape sequels, just as World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars. How did both of those efforts work out?

Beneath The Planet Of The Apes carried the deep distrust of human nature into another film. But now, with another astronaut (who looked a lot like the first astronaut), a first act that looked a lot like the first film, and then, it added psionic mutants and a sacred doomsday weapon. Were they enough to make a good sequel?

Return to Ape City! Voyages into the Forbidden Zone! An underground city that was once above ground! Near-identical men with beards fight to the death! Giant gorilla headpieces! The final confrontation between Taylor and Dr. Zaius! It’s all here.

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

For feedback, contact someancientgeeks@gmail.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Reddit, and Bluesky. Also, check out the Ancient Geeks blog on Substack! And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend. Also, we always appreciate a review on the podcast platform of your choice.

© 2026 Tom Grant and Steven Taylor

Axios (“Trump tells Netanyahu not to strike Iran“):

President Trump told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Sunday not to retaliate against Iran’s missile attack and allow more time for diplomacy, according to a senior U.S. official and an Israeli source familiar with details of the call.

[…]

Trump told Netanyahu during the call to hold off because “we are close to doing something good in terms of a deal,” according to the U.S. official. Netanyahu pushed back but ultimately “pseudo agreed” to stand down, the official said.

The official said Sunday’s call was calmer than last week’s tense exchange between the leaders and that Trump did not raise his voice at Netanyahu. “We think the president bought a little bit of time. He is pretty adamant that we are close to a deal with Iran. I don’t think anything is imminent in terms of an Israeli strike,” the U.S. official said.

[…]

Trump told the Financial Times that Netanyahu “won’t have any choice” but to accept any deal the U.S. secures from negotiations with Iran. “I call the shots. I call all the shots. He doesn’t call the shots,” Trump said of Netanyahu.

Reuters (“Israel hits Iran petrochemical plant in new strikes after Trump reprimand“):

Israel said on Monday it hit a petrochemical plant in Iran’s southwest, along with strikes elsewhere on military targets, after U.S. President Donald Trump ​reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to refrain from further attacks.

The escalation complicates U.S.-led efforts to broker a broader deal with Iran, driving oil prices up by nearly 5%, with benchmark Brent ‌futures back above $97 a barrel.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps blamed the U.S. for the latest exchange of fire with Israel and said further attacks on non-military and energy targets would have consequences for the global economy.

Donald J. Trump, Truth Social, earlier this morning:

For some reason, I’m reminded of a memorable line from Zathras. (Or was it Zathras?)

Great war. Terrible war. Much killings. Everyone fighting. A great darkness. It is the end of everything. Zathras warn, but no, no one listens to poor Zathras, no.

When I saw the AP headline “More than half of Latin Americans deported from US to Congo are now back home,” I thought something good had happened. Alas, not so much.

More than half of the 15 Latin Americans deported in April to Congo under the Trump administration’s widely criticized crackdown on migrants have returned to their countries of origin, the Congolese government and one of their lawyers said Friday.

U.S. immigration judges have ruled they were likely to face persecution back home.

Congo is one of at least eight African nations with which the U.S. has struck third-country deportation deals.

Under a series of often-secret agreements, the Trump administration has deported thousands of people to nearly two dozen countries that are not their own, advocates say. Immigration lawyers said the administration uses deportations to third countries as a legal loophole to indirectly force asylum seekers back to their home countries.

Alma David, a U.S.-based attorney representing one of the 15 migrants, said eight deportees have returned to their home countries in recent weeks.

Granting that the number here is small, this is quite troubling. Judges have ruled that these individuals are eligible for asylum in the United States because they faced a risk of persecution in their home countries. So we instead deport them to Congo? Where, apparently, it’s so bad that they’d rather take their chances back home.

Four Peruvians and three Colombians returned home earlier this week, assisted by the International Organization for Migration, a U.N.-affiliated agency, David said.

They returned via the IOM’s Assisted Voluntary Return program, in which the IOM covers travel costs and logistics for migrants who consent to go back to their home countries, as an alternative to forced deportation.

The lawyer said the migrants had been granted protections against removal to their home country by U.S. federal courts, which ruled they were likely to face persecution if they returned.

“The fact that they chose to return there anyway raises serious concerns that they likely felt backed into a corner because no viable alternative was presented to them,” David said.

The IOM has said assisted voluntary returns are “strictly voluntary and based on free, prior and informed consent.”

A Colombian man returned to his home country on his own in recent days, David said.

“These developments confirm the strictly transitional, temporary, and time-limited nature of this mechanism, as announced from its launch,” the Congolese government said in the statement. “Further departures will take place shortly as part of the implementation of the arrangement.”

And, apparently, it’s not just Congo.

The announcement comes on the same day as rights lawyers filed a case against Equatorial Guinea before Africa’s top human rights body, accusing the central African nation of forcing deportees from the U.S. back to their home countries in violation of their rights.

This is reminiscent of the shameful practice euphemistically called “extraordinary rendition” during the so-called Global War on Terror. Began under the Clinton administration, greatly expanded under the Bush administration, and continued well into the Obama administration despite Obama’s Executive Order prohibiting the practice, those suspected of terrorism were sent to countries with autocratic regimes to be interrogated, often under torture. While illegal under international law, including treaties to which the United States is a signatory, and numerous U.S. laws, it ostensibly gave plausible deniability.

While odious, it was at least under the guise of national security. Al Qaeda had murdered a significant number of Americans even before 9/11, and it was easy to rationalize extraordinary means. As Obama put it at the program’s end,

People did not know whether more attacks were imminent. And there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. It’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.

It’s much harder to justify in the case of those who are simply in the United States illegally. Even if they have been convicted of violent crimes, we have the means to detain them under due process.

• Via NR’s The Corner: President Trump Endorses Cops Using the Punisher Logo. Nothing disturbing about this iconography, now is there? Who could possibly object to the usage of a symbol associated with vigilante violence, including extrajudicial murder, especially when it is personalized to be associated with the sitting president?