Three federal judges in Vermont have played a leading role in trying to establish constitutional protections against the unlawful seizure and imprisonment of people by arbitrary government force.

These three cases are a small sample of the vast program of immigration enforcement launched by President Trump in order to deport thousands of immigrants to El Salvador or South Sudan or wherever he can send them. Such a program could not be anything but brutal. Justice takes time — to hold hearings and consider individual cases. We are all individuals deserving of justice, and our immigration status does not alter that constitutional reality.

The cruelty of the program has become apparent to millions of Americans who turned out in all 50 states on June 14 to declare that America is not a nation of kings.

By the logic of the Trump administration, all those millions could well have been rounded up and imprisoned in some vast gulag. After all, the administration has advanced the idea that protest itself may be antithetical to the national interest. And dissenting views seemed to be the only specified basis for the seizure of foreign nationals in two of the Vermont cases.

One of those foreign nationals, Mohsen Mahdawi, is a lawful resident of Vermont and a student from Columbia University, where he was also a pro-Palestinian activist. His activism, according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, could “potentially undermine” U.S. foreign policy.

The absurdity of Mahdawi’s arrest, and of Rubio’s claim, was compounded by the fact that masked and armed ICE agents seized him after he had turned up in Colchester for a citizenship interview. In other words, he was doing everything right. While in prison, he has said he felt empathy for his father and other relatives on the West Bank who had been imprisoned by Israelis. But as it turned out, U.S. District Judge Geoffrey Crawford saw no justification for his detention and ordered his release.

In another case, a Turkish woman, Rümeysa Öztürk, was grabbed off the street in Somerville, Mass., by masked government agents and whisked away in a car. In ordering her release from a Louisiana detention center, U.S. District Judge William Sessions found the government’s justification for her detention to be pathetically weak. What had she done? She had co-authored an op-ed piece for a student newspaper supporting Palestinian rights.

But of course, this is what people in America do — they express wide-ranging views on issues of their choosing. Rather than undermining American policy, this freedom is a bulwark of our democracy, drawing people here from all over the world, seeking to participate in that freedom. The Johnson and Nixon administrations thought that dissent on the Vietnam War was inimical to American interests, even if history proved that dissent on the war was pointing the nation in the right direction.

In a third case, U.S. District Judge Christina Reiss found that there was no basis for the government’s case against Russian scientist Kseniia Petrova, whom it had held in detention for four months. She had entered the country with frog embryos obtained from a lab in France to further her research at Harvard Medical School. Not only was her detention illegal, but it represented a further chilling assault on science. The most brilliant scientists from abroad have long sought to come to the United States, but now they are wondering why they should.

Vermonters are familiar with these three cases. But multiply them by the thousands, and we gain an understanding of the outpouring of protest in downtown Los Angeles, and in other cities, as well as the recent No Kings marches in every state. Brutality seems to be not an accident, but a feature of the administration’s policy.

It was on display in the manhandling and cuffing of Sen. Alex Padilla. His crime? Showing up at a press conference and daring to ask a question of Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security. That was followed later by the manhandling of Brad Lander, New York City comptroller, also on a bogus charge.

It used to be that public officials knew how to handle questions that made them uncomfortable. It was part of their job. Now the job seems to be the deployment of force to send the message that dissent won’t be tolerated.

Except dissent is spreading in all parts of the country. Wresting people away from their families, sending them off to who-knows-where — this is not right, and it is no way to solve the border problem. The government will argue that making life miserable for foreigners here will dissuade others from coming.

It used be that we tried to make America great by making it a vibrant, welcoming, open, prosperous place where we were proud to welcome people from other places. Not American carnage, but America the beautiful.

David Moats of Salisbury is the former editorial page editor of the Rutland Herald, where he won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series of editorials on Vermont’s civil union law.