Foreign Diplomats Are Worried About The Rule Of Law In Trump’s America

Donald Trump’s second term in office has been marked by a series of unprecedented and highly controversial law enforcement decisions — everything from mass pardons to an immigration crackdown that has pushed, if not blown right through, the most basic constitutional constraints. Recent public polling suggests that a growing number of Americans are rattled by what they have seen and are increasingly concerned about the future of the country’s law enforcement apparatus and legal system. The news on Friday that the FBI raided the home of John Bolton, a former Trump official turned critic, is not likely to help matters.

Now those concerns are going global.

Senior officials in some of America’s closest European allies are quietly fretting about the law enforcement priorities of the Trump administration and even the conduct of the Justice Department, according to four European diplomats who are stationed in Washington and who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive trans-Atlantic diplomatic and law enforcement matters.

Their concerns run the gamut from the administration’s approach to specific issues — including immigration, free speech and international drug trafficking — to broader and more structural questions about the integrity of the U.S. legal system and the potential erosion of the rule of law.

The atmosphere has gotten so bad that some of the diplomats I spoke to now worry the Trump administration has complicated, and could eventually undermine, their countries’ ability to cooperatively work with the Justice Department on critical diplomatic and law enforcement initiatives.

“Our formal position is that we don’t care who the [U.S.] president is,” one of them told me, but the Trump administration’s actions on various legal fronts have prompted serious “concerns about what’s happening here” and how it may impact the international legal community.

It is a sentiment that is both shared and discussed broadly within the European diplomatic corps, they said. The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

These diplomats’ concerns about international law enforcement cooperation are not abstract either, for our allies or for us. “U.S. disengagement from key enforcement partnerships,” another said, “has weakened global coordination in combating corruption, money laundering and cyber threats.”

The mood among the European diplomatic set, to the extent that it can be summed up based on these conversations, appears to be one of heightened vigilance and of low-level — but persistent — anxiety about where things are headed in the U.S. legal system in Trump’s second term and beyond. “We still don’t know how far they’ll go,” one of them told me.

The United States’ ability to cooperate with its trans-Atlantic allies plays an important — and underrated — role in promoting some of the country’s most critical law enforcement objectives.

Under normal circumstances, that cooperation occurs on a daily basis. There are the high-profile matters — like when we want someone who has been apprehended in Europe to be extradited to face criminal charges in the U.S. But there are also more mundane, but similarly important, points of collaboration — like when the Justice Department requests European banking or travel records as part of a money laundering or financial fraud investigation. (I made my fair share of these requests myself when I was a federal prosecutor.)

One diplomat stressed that their country maintains positive relations with the U.S. and that cooperation with their American counterparts remains vital to their domestic security. But they also explained that the Trump administration had forced them to more closely scrutinize — and perhaps even enforce — provisions in the treaties that govern their cooperation with the United States on law enforcement matters.

For instance, they have always had conditions that govern the extradition of prisoners from their country to the U.S. — the defendant cannot be subject to the death penalty or held in particularly poor conditions — but they are “looking at them more strictly now” for American compliance. There is “worry among real legal minds” about potential conflicts on these issues down the line, the diplomat said, but they stressed that “as of now, we have no reason to fundamentally change our cooperation” with U.S. law enforcement.

Another diplomat put things more bluntly, accusing “the Trump DOJ” of “disregarding foundational legal commitments, including protections for asylum seekers and due process in deportations.” That, in turn, “has undermined the credibility of U.S. leadership and signaled that domestic politics could override international obligations.”

Some of Europe’s diplomats worry in particular about the administration’s hardline approach to immigration enforcement, even as they recognize that Europe has struggled to manage its own migration issues. One of the diplomats I spoke with told me that they were taken aback by the administration’s wide-ranging efforts to deport legal immigrants and revoke visas on vague and unsubstantiated claims like “support for terrorism” — moves that they also view as sharp and disturbing incursions on free speech.

Another diplomat was particularly rattled by the administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to send people to El Salvador and its use of “third-party” deportations, in which foreigners are sent to countries where they have no ties. According to this person, efforts like these would be illegal under European laws and international treaties, but they also signal a heavy-handed and callous approach to international migration problems.

In some cases, the Trump administration’s aggressive maneuvers may be undercutting its own objectives.

Case in point: On Trump’s first day back in office, he signed an executive order designating drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” under U.S. law. There are a host of practical problems with this maneuver, including how it would apply to individuals or companies who have been inadvertently swept up in the cartels’ operations and whether they could then be criminally charged with providing “material support” to those organizations — for instance, if a business engages in a financial transaction with a company that, unbeknownst to them, has ties to a cartel.

But there’s other potential collateral damage: The Trump administration’s decision could ultimately prevent the extradition of defendants to the United States who have been apprehended by European countries. That is because the “foreign terrorist organization” designation could expose some defendants to the death penalty, and certain European countries will not extradite defendants to countries where they are eligible for the death penalty.

Two of the four diplomats cited this issue specifically when describing some of the issues now on their radar. One of them described it as an example of “a very practical thing” that they are confronting with Trump back in office and added that a recent news report that Trump had directed the use of the U.S. military against foreign cartels had created even more “confusion” about the relevant legal issues.

The apparent disconnect between U.S. law enforcement prerogatives and international legal commitments in that context is emblematic of broader concerns that several of the diplomats expressed to me about the Trump DOJ. Since Trump’s return to office, their embassies have at times struggled to reach their designated law enforcement liaisons at the DOJ — people who they ordinarily work with to coordinate and facilitate information-sharing on law enforcement matters and to manage extraditions.

There are also broader and more serious concerns about whether the Justice Department is being irreversibly politicized under Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Two of the diplomats I spoke with zeroed in on this issue without prompting. One of them described the strident and aggressive tone in public remarks from Bondi and Patel on law enforcement matters like violent crime and illegal immigration as both counterproductive and unprofessional. They worry that the standards for decorum among the nation’s top law enforcement officials have fallen, and that senior administration officials like Bondi and Patel — as well as DHS Secretary Kristi Noem — have politicized law enforcement in a way that may seriously compromise the integrity of the U.S. criminal justice system and make allied law enforcement agencies reluctant to lend support to Trump administration investigations or prosecutions they see as primarily political.

“The leaders behave differently from their predecessors and see their roles differently,” another diplomat told me. They worried about whether there will be a “trickle-down effect in the way they see their jobs and the way they operate” that would eventually reach deeper into the career levels of the DOJ and FBI, which are supposed to be strictly nonpartisan.

At the same time, the diplomats recognize the practical limits of their influence on these issues given the vital role that the U.S. still retains in providing support Europe. “We depend on the U.S. for our security,” one of them noted, which “leaves us with little room to maneuver.”

By definition, diplomats focus on advancing their own countries’ interests on the global stage, but three of the four officials I spoke with also expressed broader concerns about the future of the rule of law in the United States under Trump.

They are not concerned about potential spillover effects in their own legal systems; as one of them noted, the two-party American political system makes the country particularly vulnerable to large political swings. But they are watching and worrying about the future of the country.

One of the diplomats pointed in particular to the ways in which the private sector and civil society have acceded to Trump’s extortionate demands, and they questioned whether the decision to “align with the Trump administration out of fear or pragmatism” could ultimately entrench a form of politics in the U.S. that is typically associated with corrupt foreign regimes.

Another diplomat pointed to “politicized judicial appointments, selective law enforcement and shifting prosecutorial standards” in recent months that they believe “have fed a growing perception — both in the U.S. and abroad — that the law is being applied unevenly.”

The implications are not simply theoretical — nor are they limited to the U.S.

“In the transatlantic context,” one of them told me, “shared principles of justice underpin coordination on everything from extradition and financial crime to cybersecurity and climate policy.” They worry about “a return to the ‘cowboy era,’ when might made right and institutional guardrails were weak,” which could in turn create an international environment where “polarization deepens and democratic norms erode.”

“Restoring trust in the rule of law — at home and abroad — is not just in the U.S. national interest,” they continued. “It is vital to global stability.”