Last week, after arriving in Manila from a Hong Kong trip, former Philippine President/Strongman Rodrigo R. Duterte was served, in an unparalleled display of swiftness and audacity unseen since that fateful day of 21st August 1983 at the then Manila International Airport, with a warrant of arrest issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands.

After a brief ruckus at the airport, and reminiscent of the old Tagalog action movies in which underdog antihero villains were forcibly dragged away to face their condign punishments behind closed doors, local police officials and Interpol operatives hurriedly brought the former strongman to Villamor Air Base for processing.

Based on the Duterte camp’s frantic reactions to the event, it was obvious that they were caught totally off guard not only by the suddenness of the arrest but also by its sheer brashness. In fact, Duterte’s representatives had to scramble to seek urgent relief from the Supreme Court (SC).

However, even before the SC could raffle off the case, the Marcos government made a preemptive move by whisking away and physically loading the former strongman’s aging body into a waiting, chartered plane bound for The Hague.

Thus, in the blink of an eye, the former president found himself stuck on a plane en route to his temporary custodial destination in a foreign country, an interim arrangement that, absent any effective judicial or extra-legal intervention in the future, would become painfully permanent.

And then like the twin narrative in an imaginary Machiavellian novel, and mirroring the Marcos government’s jet-lightning speed to whisk away a subject in custody while judicial relief was being sought, the Trump administration followed suit thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C. by hauling hundreds of undocumented gang members away from US territory despite a federal court blocking the move.

Per news reports, the deportees, alleged members of Venezuela’s violent Tren de Aragua and El Salvador’s blood-thirsty MS-13 gangs, were loaded onto two separate airplanes in a Texas airport while a court hearing questioning the legality of the action was ongoing.

Shielding the exercise behind the US president’s wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law last invoked during World War II, the Trump administration argued that the alien gang members were akin to an invading foreign force that warranted an extraordinary response.

Thus, the deportees were sent to an El Salvador mega-prison known for its no-nonsense treatment of violent crime offenders and terrorists under a $6-million deportation housing agreement with the US government.

Notably, by the time the federal judge issued a formal restraining order, the gang members were already en route to Honduras for a brief layover. However, the judge’s order did include an explicit directive to fly the deportees back to the US if the planes were already in the air.

Notwithstanding the judge’s instructions, the airplanes continued their flight and landed in El Salvador the following morning, after which, in an apparent dig at the futility of the judge’s directive, El Salvador’s president impishly posted on X: “Oopsie... too late…” above a news headline referencing the judge’s order.

To be fair, no one can accuse the Marcos government of violating any court order despite all the haste.