Felipe Zapata Velásquez, a University of Florida student, was arrested for a traffic offense and deported to Colombia. ICE called it routine. His family called it trauma.
https://www.facebook.com/FearAndLoathingCloserToTheEdge/posts/665054132830559
The wife of a wrongly deported Salvadoran father living in Maryland was moved to a safe house after Donald Trump’s administration posted a court document that included her address on social media.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura said she began fearing for her safety and the safety of her three children after the Department of Homeland Security shared a protective order from 2021 that prominently featured her address to the department’s 2.4 million followers on X.
“I don’t feel safe when the government posts my address, the house where my family lives, for everyone to see, especially when this case has gone viral and people have all sorts of opinions,” she told The Washington Post. “So, this is definitely a bit terrifying. I’m scared for my kids.”
No doubt Kristi Noem (Bimbo #2) is experiencing intense orgasmic pleasure at the thought of their torment and misfortune. Making people miserable must be a lot more exciting than killing puppies and goats.
The wife of Kilmar Abrego García, the Maryland man mistakenly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador by the Trump administration, has been moved to a safe house by supporters after U.S. officials posted a court document on social media that included the family’s address.
Some Democrats fear they’re playing into Trump’s hands by fighting his mass deportations rather than focusing on his failures on bread-and-butter issues like the cost of living.
But it’s not either-or. The theme that unites Trump’s inept handling of deportations, his trampling on human and civil rights, his rejection of the rule of law, his dictatorial centralization of power, and his utterly inept handling of the economy is the ineptness itself.
In his first term, not only did his advisers and Cabinet officials put guardrails around his crazier tendencies, but they also provided his first administration a degree of stability and focus. Now, it’s mayhem.
https://robertreich.substack.com/p/ineptitude-incompetence-stupidity
Stephen Miller, President Trump‘s Deputy Chief of Staff, said that U.S. citizens are owed reparations for “damages inflicted by mass migration.”
…
Miller rejected the idea of any compensation for the Abrego Garcia case, saying that the real victims are American citizens affected by the influx of unlawful immigrants into the country:
“Where does our whole country go to get repaid for all of the wealth, all of the prosperity and security that has been stolen from us by decades of uncontrolled, illegal mass migration? We all deserve reparations for what has been stolen from us”
Miller went on to link immigration to a broad range of societal issues, including school performance, crime, and drug overdoses, though he offered no data to support the connections.
“We used to have a functioning public school system in this country,” Miller claimed. “Then we had open borders. Nobody’s learning how to read or write. An entire generation of Americans—multiple generations, in fact—have been robbed of educational opportunities.”
President Donald Trump’s refusal to bring a Maryland man, who was wrongfully deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, back to the United States — despite a Supreme Court ruling — has raised serious concerns among some analysts, who say that such an unchecked use of the Alien Enemies Act is unprecedented.
In a report published in the New York Times Tuesday, reporters note that even during World War II, there was “a check” on the government and individuals who received a hearing under the civilian boards were mostly freed.
“During World War II, the Department of Justice established civilian hearing boards in which ‘registered aliens’ of German, Italian and Japanese descent arrested by the government could argue they were not a danger to the nation, legal scholars said,” the report states.
In a tyrannical system, the accused’s guilt is determined by their being accused in the first place. If the government says someone is a terrorist, then they are dealt with accordingly. There is no appeal and indeed there is no formal process at all beyond the pronouncement: terrorist; guilty.
That is the system that the Trump administration would like everyone in America to live under — one where the word of a 78-year-old man and his underlings is enough to justify sending anyone to a foreign prison for the rest of their life.
To date, that goal has been largely implicit. Hundreds of men have been sent to a notorious detention facility in El Salvador where, according to the administration, they will spend the rest of their lives. All have been tarred as terrorists and gang members, but the vast majority have never been convicted of so much as shoplifting — in the United States or elsewhere.
Among them is a barber from Venezuela, a gay man who was labeled a member of the gang Tren de Aragua based on the say-so of one former, discredited police officer who lost his gig in law enforcement after reportedly crashing his car, while intoxicated, into a family’s home.
Another is a 19-year-old who entered the country legally and had a permit to work but was reportedly grabbed by ICE agents during an operation that was targeting someone else.
The most prominent case has been that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who a Department of Justice lawyer admitted was wrongly expelled from the country as a court had earlier issued him a protection from deportation order (that DOJ lawyer has since been fired for his honesty). The Trump administration has offered a series of post-facto excuses for why this father and union apprentice should be denied the opportunity to ever see his family again, centering on the claim that he was a member of MS-13; as with the barber, that too is an allegation that relies on the testimony of an unreliable cop — one who later pleaded guilty to giving confidential police information to a sex worker, according to The New Republic.
No real court would have sentenced Abrego Garcia to life in prison over such flimsy evidence (White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, apparently improvising, on Tuesday added another claimed offense, one that has never even been asserted in a legal filing: human trafficking. The lack of real evidence of any guilt, much less the kind that would argue for depriving him of liberty forever, is why he was never presented before a court — and it is why, presumably, President Donald Trump is defying a Supreme Court order to facilitate his return to the country, which would risk allowing him to speak freely about his ordeal and the conditions inside a prison that no one detained within has ever left, alive.
But one need not piece together from its actions what the Trump administration really thinks of due process and the rule of law. On Tuesday night, Vice President JD Vance made explicit that the intent is to defy legal principles that date back to antiquity, scolding those who insist on respecting the rights of the “many” undocumented immigrants who have “committed violent crimes, or facilitated fentanyl and sex trafficking.”
Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) accused the Trump administration of blatantly lying about the whereabouts of wrongfully deported immigrant Kilmar Ábrego García on Wednesday.
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Per CBS News’ Scott MacFarlane, Van Hollen explicitly said that “the Trump administration is lying” about García.
“If you listen to President Trump… you would think that U.S. courts have found that Mr. Ábrego García is part of MS-13,” Van Hollen said, referring to the violent criminal gang whose origins are in Central America. “But in fact they have not found that. Recently a U.S. federal judge said that the Trump administration did not have evidence to support the claim that he had ever been part of MS-13.”
He also emphasized that García has never been charged with a crime.
Warning that the executive branch’s claims should shock “the intuitive sense of liberty” of Americans, a panel of judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit today unanimously rejected the Trump administration’s attempts to stay a lower court order to release Kilmar Abrego Garcia from a prison camp in El Salvador.
The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration last week to facilitate the release of Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man that three government officials admitted was mistakenly sent to El Salvador’s most notorious prison, along with several hundred other alleged gang members. However, the Trump administration has done nothing to comply with that order; it insists it has no power to return Abrego Garcia from another sovereign state—nor does a court have the authority to force it to do so.
When the federal district judge overseeing Abrego Garcia’s case attempted to enforce the Supreme Court’s order, the Trump administration requested an emergency stay from the Fourth Circuit Court.
Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a Ronald Reagan appointee to the Fourth Circuit, wrote that allowing the administration’s passive interpretation of “facilitate” would “reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood.”
“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter,” Wilkinson wrote. “But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.”
“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” Wilkinson warned.
Trump administration officials have made no secret of its contempt for the concept of due process.
President Trump’s lawyers have set a new legal hurdle before the Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador.
Even if Kilmar Abrego Garcia is returned to the United States, he will be held as an illegal immigrant can be deported again because he is member of a foreign criminal gang, they said.
The uncompromising statement presented to a Maryland judge echoed the Oval Office meeting between Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Monday.
U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi insisted Abrego Garcia will not be allowed to enter or remain in this country. “He’s not a Maryland man. He’s part of foreign terrorist organization. He’s a member of MS-13,” she said.
Real leaders know how to admit when they’ve made a mistake, suck it up, apologize, and move on.
Sadly, real leadership is utterly lacking in Washington today.
