United States v. Vaello-Madero is a case about an impoverished American citizen, forced to repay a debt to the federal government that he only learned about fairly recently and that he cannot possibly afford.
It is also a case about colonialism and the legacy of the US government’s discriminatory treatment of Puerto Rico. And it is a case about the ways American democracy functions, and whether insulating that democracy from an ideological judiciary is worth allowing callous laws to remain in place.