Slingshot News: ‘You Should Never Run For Another Office’: Trump Goes On Tangent, Belittles Member Of His Own Cabinet During Remarks At The White House
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Slingshot News: ‘We’re Allowed’: Trump Claims He Is Above The Law, Says He Can Attack Harvard All He Wants In Interview
President Donald Trump claimed that he is above the law, saying that he can attack Harvard University all that he wants. Trump is not legally allowed to withhold federal funds from Harvard.
CNN: Kavanaugh faces blowback for claiming Americans can sue over encounters with ICE
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s breezy suggestion this week that Americans who are roughed up by ICE can sue agents in federal court is drawing pushback from civil rights attorneys who note the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has in recent years made those cases nearly impossible to win.
Writing to explain the court’s emergency ruling Monday that allowed the Trump administration to continue “roving” immigration patrols in Southern California, Kavanaugh brushed aside concerns that masked ICE agents had pushed, shoved and detained Hispanics – in one instance throwing a US citizen against a fence and confiscating his phone.
“To the extent that excessive force has been used,” Kavanaugh wrote in a 10-page concurrence, “the Fourth Amendment prohibits such action, and remedies should be available in federal court.”
But in a series of recent decisions – including two that involved incidents at the border – the Supreme Court has severely limited the ability of people to sue federal law enforcement officers for excessive force claims. Kavanaugh, who was nominated to the court by Trump during his first term, was in the majority in those decisions.
“It’s bordering on impossible to get any sort of remedy in a federal court when a federal officer violates federal rights,” said Patrick Jaicomo, a senior attorney at the libertarian Institute for Justice who has regularly represented clients suing federal agents.
Lauren Bonds, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, said that it can be incredibly difficult for a person subjected to excessive force to find an attorney and take on the federal government in court.
“What we’ve seen is, term after term, the court limiting the avenues that people have available to sue the federal government,” Bonds told CNN.
Sotomayor dissents
To stop a person on the street for questioning, immigration officials must have a “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the country illegally. The question for the Supreme Court was whether an agent could rely on factors like a person’s apparent ethnicity, language or their presence at a particular location, to establish reasonable suspicion.
A US district court in July ordered the Department of Homeland Security to discontinue the practice of making initial stops based on those factors. The Supreme Court on Monday, without an explanation from the majority, put that lower court order on hold – effectively greenlighting the administration’s approach while the litigation continues in lower courts.
In a sharp dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited the stories raised by several of the people in Southern California who had been caught up in the crackdown.
“The government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, US citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction,” wrote Sotomayor, joined by fellow liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Jason Gavidia, a US citizen, was approached in June by masked agents who repeatedly questioned his citizenship status, pressing him to name the hospital in which he was born, according to court records. When he could not answer that question, he said, agents racked a rifle, took his phone and pushed him up against a metal fence.
He was later released.
Another US citizen, Jorge Viramontes, was grabbed and escorted by agents into a vehicle and held in a “warehouse area” for further questioning, according to court documents.
Richard Re, a Harvard Law professor, viewed Kavanaugh’s remark in the opinion differently. Maybe, Re wrote on Tuesday, Kavanaugh was attempting to signal something about where he thinks the law should go.
“When you have an important sentence that’s very ambiguous, it’s usually deliberately so,” Re, who clerked for Kavanaugh when he was an appeals court judge, told CNN.
“I think it’s not clear what to make of that remark,” Re said. “It could suggest a genuine interest, on at least one pivotal justice’s part, in revitalizing Fourth Amendment remediation.”
Limited recourse
The court has for years been limiting the ability of people who face excessive force to sue federal agents, litigation that proponents say can act as a check on such behavior.
In 2020, the court’s conservative majority blocked a damages lawsuit from the family of a 15-year-old Mexican boy who was shot and killed across the border by a Border Patrol agent.
Three years ago, the court similarly rejected a suit from a US citizen who owned a bed and breakfast near the Canadian border and who said he was pushed to the ground as Border Patrol agents questioned a guest about their immigration status.
Lawsuits against federal police are controlled by a 1971 precedent, Bivens v.
Six Unknown Named Agents, that involved federal drug agents who searched the home of a man without a warrant. The Supreme Court allowed that lawsuit, but in recent years it has significantly clamped down on the ability of people to file suits in any other circumstance besides the warrant involved in the Bivens case. The right to sue federal agents, the court has maintained, should be set by Congress, not the courts.Americans may also sue the government for damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act, if its employees engage in wrongdoing or negligence. But federal courts have carved out a complicated patchwork of exceptions to that law as well. Earlier this year, in a case involving an FBI raid on the wrong house, a unanimous Supreme Court allowed the family to sue, but also limited the scope of a provision of the law that was aimed at protecting people who are harmed by federal law enforcement.
The tort law, Bonds said, is “incredibly narrow, incredibly complex and definitely not a sure thing.”
‘Shadow docket’ criticism
Kavanaugh’s opinion came as the court has faced sharp criticism in some quarters for deciding a slew of emergency cases in Trump’s favor without any explanation.
The Supreme Court has consistently sided with Trump recently, overturning lower courts’ temporary orders and allowing the president to fire the leadership of independent agencies, cut spending authorized by Congress and pursue an aggressive crackdown on immigration while litigation continues in lower courts.
Those emergency cases don’t fully resolve the legal questions at hand – and the court is often hesitant to write opinions that could influence the final outcome of a case – but they can have enormous, real-world consequences.
Emergency cases are almost always handled without oral argument and are addressed on a much tighter deadline than the court’s regular merits cases.
In that sense, Kavanaugh’s opinion provided some clarity about how at least one member of the court’s majority viewed the ICE patrols.
He noted Sotomayor’s dissent and pointed out that the issue of excessive force was not involved in the case.
“The Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness standard continues to govern the officers’ use of force and to prohibit excessive force,” Kavanaugh said.
What he didn’t explain, several experts note, is how a violation of those rights could be vindicated.
“Sincerely wondering,” University of Chicago law professor William Baude posted on social media, “what remedies does Justice Kavanaugh believe are and should be available in federal court these days for excessive force violations by federal immigration officials?”
Kavanaugh faces blowback for claiming Americans can sue over encounters with ICE | CNN Politics
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s breezy suggestion this week that Americans who are roughed up by ICE can sue agents in federal court is drawing pushback from civil rights attorneys who note the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has in recent years made those cases nearly impossible to win.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/10/politics/kavanaugh-blowback-ice
Roll Call: Republicans move to change Senate rules to speed confirmation of some nominees
Facing insurmountable backlog, Thune moves to allow consideration of multiple nominees as a group
Senate Majority Leader John Thune took the first procedural step Monday toward changing the chamber’s rules to speed up the confirmation of lower-level Trump nominees, saying the move is necessary to combat obstruction from Democrats.
Democrats this Congress have forced the GOP majority to use valuable floor time on procedural votes, slowing down the confirmation process and leaving spots unfilled in the Trump administration.
Republicans argue Democrats are destroying a Senate tradition of quickly confirming noncontroversial nominees regardless of the party of the president. But Democrats contend the posture is a needed negotiating tool as Trump has burned through government norms and at times embraced an authoritarian attitude of executive power.
Thune, R-S.D., late Monday asked for immediate consideration of an executive resolution that would authorize the en bloc consideration in executive session of certain nominations. In order to place it on the calendar, he said, he objected to his own request.
The resolution now lies over one calendar day. A copy of the resolution was not immediately available Monday night.
Thune said in a floor speech earlier Monday that after Trump’s eight months in office this term, no civilian nominee has been confirmed by voice vote.
He compared that to other presidents: George W. Bush and Barack Obama each had 90 percent of their civilian nominees confirmed on voice vote, and Trump in his first term and Biden had more than 50 percent.
“It’s time to take steps to restore Senate precedent and codify in Senate rules what was once understood to be standard practice, and that is the Senate acting expeditiously on presidential nominations to allow a president to get his team into place,” Thune said.
Thune said Republicans would seek to speed up confirmations. The change would apply to nominees at the sub-Cabinet level and not Article III judicial nominees, he said.
The objective, he said, was “confirming groups of nominees all together so the president can have his team in place and so the Senate can focus on the important legislative work in its charge.”
The Senate would have to take another 600 votes before the end of the year to clear the current backlog of nominees on the calendar and at committee, Thune said.
“That’s more votes than this record-breaking Senate has taken all year up until now,” Thune said. “There is no practical way that we could come close to filling all the vacancies in the four years of this administration, no matter how many hours the Senate works.”
Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., slammed the GOP effort, warning Republicans that they would come to regret the decision to “go nuclear.”
“What will stop Donald Trump from nominating even worse individuals than we’ve seen to date, knowing this chamber will rubber-stamp anything he wishes?” Schumer said.
The move is the latest in a history of changing Senate rules to lower vote thresholds in the chamber.
Under then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Republicans in 2017 removed the 60-vote requirement for confirming Supreme Court justices as they sought to confirm Neil M. Gorsuch.
Years before, in 2013, Senate Democrats did away with that vote threshold for other judicial nominees.
Since the start of the second Trump administration, some Senate Democrats have sought to use the lower-level confirmations as a pressure point.
In May, Schumer announced a hold on all Justice Department nominees after the administration agreed to accept a plane from Qatar. That move from Schumer prevented U.S. attorney nominees from moving forward on voice votes.
The same month, Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, put a hold on Trump’s pick for U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
Durbin also warned he might do so for other U.S. attorney nominees who reach the Senate floor.
In February, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, announced he was putting a blanket hold on all Trump administration State Department nominees over the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Just ram King Donald’s incompetent appointees through the process!
USA Today: ‘Unconscionably irreconcilable’. Sotomayor rips Supreme Court’s pro-Trump ICE ruling
The liberal justice called the order “unconscionably irreconcilable with our nation’s constitutional guarantees.”
- Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion criticizing the majority’s decision and the Trump administration’s actions.
- Sotomayor argued the ruling allows the government to seize people based on their appearance, language, and type of work.
- The Supreme Court overturned a lower court’s order that had restricted ICE agents’ tactics in Los Angeles.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the Trump administration’s operation of the Los Angeles immigration raids, vowing not to stand idly by while the United States’ “constitutional freedoms are lost.”
On Sept. 8, the Supreme Court lifted a restraining order from a federal judge in LA who had restricted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from conducting stops without reasonable suspicion.
In July, US District Judge Maame Frimpong of the Central District of California said the government can’t rely solely on the person’s race, the language they speak, the work they perform, and whether they’re at a particular location, such as a pickup site for day laborers.
However, the Sept. 8 reversal by the Supreme Court’s mostly conservative majority gave the Trump administration another victory, as Sotomayor condemned the vote.
“That decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Sotomayor wrote in a blistering, 21-page dissent on Sept. 8. “We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job.”
Sotomayor called the order “unconscionably irreconcilable with our nation’s constitutional guarantees.”
The justice, an Obama appointee, ripped her high court conservative colleagues and the government over the ruling. Sotomayor declared that all Latinos, whether they are U.S. citizens or not, “who work low-wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”oss California by broadening its scope from those only with criminal records to anyone in the United States without proper authorization. The crackdown ignited protests, prompting Trump to call in the National Guard and eventually the Marines to diffuse the outrage.
In June, the Trump administration ramped up immigration raids across California by broadening its scope from those only with criminal records to anyone in the United States without proper authorization. The crackdown ignited protests, prompting Trump to call in the National Guard and eventually the Marines to diffuse the outrage.
Sotomayor takes exception to Kavanaugh’s explanation
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who agreed with the Trump administration, said in his concurrence on Sept. 8 that the District Court overreached in limiting ICE’s authority to briefly stop people and ask them about their immigration status.
“To be clear, apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion; under this Court’s case law regarding immigration stops, however, it can be a ‘relevant factor’ when considered along with other salient factors,” Kavanaugh said.
He added, “Immigration stops based on reasonable suspicion of illegal presence have been an important component of US immigration enforcement for decades, across several presidential administrations.”Despite fears, still looking for work:
Sotomayor took exception to Kavanaugh’s comments. She said ICE agents are not simply just questioning people, they are seizing people by using firearms and physical violence.
Sotomayor added that the Fourth Amendment, which is meant to protect “every individual’s constitutional right,” from search and seizure, might be in jeopardy.
“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be ‘free from arbitrary interference by law officers,'” Sotomayor said. “After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”
Salon: Sotomayor says SCOTUS ruling lets ICE “seize anyone who looks Latino”
Sotomayor worried that the ruling made Latinos living in Los Angeles “fair game” for ICE harassment
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the Supreme Court’s decision to allow wide-scale ICE raids and immigration stops in Los Angeles to continue on Monday. In a scathing dissent, she said the court was giving the Department of Homeland Security a green light to “seize anyone who looks Latino.”
The Monday ruling lifted an injunction on “roving” ICE actions in Southern California. That order from a lower court judge barred agents from carrying out detentions based on ethnicity, languages being spoken, employment or location.
While the Supreme Court’s ruling was unsigned, it appeared to be supported along partisan lines as all three liberals dissented. Writing for the liberal justices, Sotomayor called the order “unconscionable” and said it made Latinos throughout the region “fair game.”
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job,” Sotomayor wrote.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring with the unnamed majority, said ethnicity was a “a ‘relevant factor’” for ICE agents to consider. He added that “many” undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles area “do not speak much English,” and work low-wage, manual labor jobs.
“Under this Court’s precedents, not mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote.
In her dissent, Sotomayor raised concerns about how the ruling could impact constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be free from arbitrary interference by law officers,” she wrote. “After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”
Sotomayor says SCOTUS ruling lets ICE “seize anyone who looks Latino” – Salon.com
Sotomayor worried that the ruling made Latinos living in Los Angeles “fair game” for ICE harassment.
https://www.salon.com/2025/09/08/sotomayor-says-scotus-ruling-lets-ice-seize-anyone-who-looks-latino
Independent: Federal agents to ‘flood the zone’ after Supreme Court opens door for racial profiling in Los Angeles immigration raids
The Trump administration is vowing to “FLOOD THE ZONE” after the Supreme Court opened the door for federal law enforcement officers to roam the streets of Los Angeles to make immigration arrests based on racially profiling suspects.
A 6-3 decision from the nation’s high court Monday overturned an injunction that blocked federal agents from carrying out sweeps in southern California after a judge determined they were indiscriminately targeting people based on race and whether they spoke Spanish, among other factors.
The court’s conservative majority did not provide a reason for the decision, which is typical for opinions on the court’s emergency docket.
In a concurring opinion, Trump-appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that “apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion” but it can be a “relevant factor” for immigration enforcement.
Attorney General Pam Bondi called the ruling a “massive victory” that allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to “continue carrying out roving patrols in California without judicial micromanagement.”
The Department of Homeland Security said its officers “will continue to FLOOD THE ZONE in Los Angeles” following the court’s order.
“This decision is a victory for the safety of Americans in California and for the rule of law,” the agency said in a statement accusing Democrat Mayor Karen Bass of “protecting” immigrants who have committed crimes.
Federal law enforcement “will not be slowed down and will continue to arrest and remove the murderers, rapists, gang members and other criminal illegal aliens that Karen Bass continues to give safe harbor,” according to Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
The court’s opinion drew a forceful rebuke from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic justice on the bench, who accused the conservative justices of ignoring the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unlawful protects against unlawful searches and seizures
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job,” she wrote in a dissenting opinion.
“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be “free from arbitrary interference by law officers,’” she added. “After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”
Immigration raids throughout the Los Angeles area in June sparked massive protests demanding the Trump administration withdraw ICE and federal agents from patrolling immigrant communities.
In response, Trump federalized National Guard troops and sent in hundreds of Marines despite objections from Democratic city and state officials. The administration deployed roughly 5,000 National Guard soldiers and Marines to the Los Angeles area, assisting with more than 170 law enforcement operations carried out by federal agencies, according to the Department of Defense.
The Pentagon has ended most of those operations, but hundreds of National Guard members remain active in southern California.
California Governor Gavin Newsom sued the administration, alleging the president illegally deployed the troops in violation of a 140-year-old law that prohibits the military from performing domestic law enforcement operations.
ACLU legal director Cecillia Wang, representing groups who sued to block indiscriminate raids in Los Angeles, said the Supreme Court order “puts people at grave risk.”
The order allows federal agents “to target individuals because of their race, how they speak, the jobs they work, or just being at a bus stop or the car wash when ICE agents decide to raid a place,” she said.
“For anyone perceived as Latino by an ICE agent, this means living in a fearful ‘papers please’ regime, with risks of violent ICE arrests and detention,” Wang added.
In his lengthy concurring opinion, Kavanaugh suggested that the demographics of southern California and the estimated 2 million people without legal permission living in the state support ICE’s sweeping operations.
He also argued that because Latino immigrants without legal status “tend to gather in certain locations to seek daily work,” work in construction, and may not speak English, officers have a “reasonable suspicion” to believe they are violating immigration law.
Sotomayor criticized Kavanaugh’s assessment that ICE was merely performing “brief stops for questioning.”
“Countless people in the Los Angeles area have been grabbed, thrown to the ground and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor,” she wrote. “Today, the court needlessly subjects countless more to these exact same indignities.”
Because the court did not provide a reasoning behind the ruling, it is difficult to discern whether the justices intend for the order to have wider effect, giving Donald Trump a powerful tool to execute his commands for millions of arrests for his mass deportation agenda.
Bass warned that the ruling could have sweeping consequences.
“I want the entire nation to hear me when I say this isn’t just an attack on the people of Los Angeles, this is an attack on every person in every city in this country,” she said in a statement.
San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. judge blocks Trump administration from ending legal status for Venezuelans and Haitians
President Donald Trump’s administration is illegally seeking to deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and Haitians to their conflict-stricken nations, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Friday.
The people affected by the ruling have been living in the United States under temporary protected status, or TPS, granted to undocumented immigrants with no serious criminal record who would be endangered by war, natural disasters or other conditions in their homeland. Trump opposes TPS and contends it has been used to protect members of criminal gangs.
But U.S. District Judge Edward Chen said removing the protections from Venezuelans and Haitians would return them to “conditions that are so dangerous that even the State Department advises against travel to their home countries.”
“For 35 years, the TPS statute has been faithfully executed by presidential administrations from both parties, affording relief based on the best available information obtained by the Department of Homeland Security in consultation with the State Department and other agencies, a process that involves careful study and analysis,” the judge wrote. “Until now.”
He did not say how many immigrants were covered by the ruling, but advocacy groups said it would protect hundreds of thousands from each nation. Chen had previously halted the deportation of 350,000 Venezuelans with TPS status, but the Supreme Court froze his order in May and allowed the administration to seek their deportation.
Friday’s ruling “provides immediate relief to several hundred thousand Venezuelans who should not have been subjected to this lawless policy in the first place,” said their attorney, Ahilan Arulanantham, a UCLA law professor. “Sadly, today’s ruling comes too late for many Venezuelans who were detained and deported under that policy because the Supreme Court allowed it to take effect without giving any reasons. We are hopeful the rule of law will now prevail.”
In Friday’s decision, Chen said Trump’s Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, terminated TPS for both groups of migrants as soon as she took office, with “no meaningful review,” reversing extensive findings and decisions by her predecessors. He said it was the first such action in the program’s 35-year history.
The judge said Noem had made unfounded assertions that “Venezuela didn’t send us their best” but instead sent “criminals.” She referred to Venezuelan migrants as “dirtbags” in a Jan. 29 Fox News interview. Chen also cited Trump’s campaign claims that Haitian migrants were eating household pets in Ohio.
Such statements are evidence that the administration’s actions were “based on racial, ethnic, and/or national origin animus,” said Chen, who was appointed to the court by President Barack Obama.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/tps-protections-21033502.php
Associated Press: South Sudan repatriates Mexican man deported from US in July
South Sudan said Saturday it repatriated to Mexico a man deported from the United States in July.
The man, a Mexican identified as Jesus Munoz-Gutierrez, was among a group of eight who have been in government custody in the east African country since their deportation from the U.S.
Another deportee, a South Sudanese national, has since been freed while six others remain in custody.
Munoz-Gutierrez’s repatriation to Mexico was carried out by South Sudan’s foreign ministry in concert with the Mexican Embassy in neighboring Ethiopia, the South Sudanese foreign ministry said in a statement.
The repatriation was carried out “in full accordance with relevant international law, bilateral agreements, and established diplomatic protocols,” it said.
In comments to journalists in Juba, the South Sudan capital, Munoz-Gutierrez said he “felt kidnapped” when the U.S. sent him to South Sudan.
“I was not planning to come to South Sudan, but while I was here they treated me well,” he said. “I finished my time in the United States, and they were supposed to return me to Mexico. Instead, they wrongfully sent me to South Sudan.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has said that Munoz-Gutierrez had a conviction for second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison.
South Sudan is engaging other countries about repatriating the six deportees still in custody, said Apuk Ayuel Mayen, a spokeswoman for the foreign ministry.
It is not clear if the deportees have access to legal representation.
Rights groups have argued that the Trump administration’s increasing practice of deporting migrants to third countries violates international law and the basic rights of migrants.
The deportations have faced opposition by courts in the U.S., though the Supreme Court in June allowed the government to restart swift removals of migrants to countries other than their homelands.
Other African nations receiving deportees from the U.S. include Uganda, Eswatini and Rwanda. Eswatini, in southern Africa, received five men with criminal backgrounds in July. Rwanda announced the arrival of a group of seven deportees in mid-August.
South Sudan repatriates Mexican man deported from US in July
South Sudan has repatriated a Mexican man deported from the United States in July. Jesus Munoz-Gutierrez was among eight people held in South Sudan since their deportation.
https://apnews.com/article/south-sudan-us-mexico-deportations-924ebd609d65efc6681f4bb59b6cc94e
CBS News: Trump says the U.S. military destroyed a boat operated by Tren de Aragua off Venezuela. Here’s what to know about the gang.
The deadly U.S. military strike in the Caribbean this week on a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela is the latest measure President Trump has taken to combat the threat he sees from the Tren de Aragua gang.
The White House has offered few details on Tuesday’s attack and insists the 11 people aboard were members of the gang. The criminal organization, which traces its roots to a Venezuelan prison, is not known for having a big role in global drug trafficking but for its involvement in contract killings, extortions and human smuggling.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warned Wednesday that the United States will keep assets positioned in the Caribbean and strike anyone “trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco terrorist.”
U.S. officials have yet to explain how the military determined that those aboard the vessel were Tren de Aragua members. The strike represents a paradigm shift in how the U.S. is willing to combat drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere and appears to send a combative message to governments in the region as well as drug traffickers.
Tren de Aragua operations spread beyond Venezuela
Tren de Aragua originated more than a decade ago at an infamously lawless prison with hardened criminals in Venezuela’s central state of Aragua. The gang has expanded in recent years, recruiting from among the more than 7.7 million Venezuelans who have fled economic turmoil in their homeland and migrated to other Latin American countries or the U.S.
Mr. Trump and administration officials have consistently blamed the gang for being at the root of the violence and illicit drug dealing that plague some U.S. cities. Mr. Trump has repeated his claim — contradicted by a declassified U.S. intelligence assessment — that Tren de Aragua is operating under Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s control.
During his 2024 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump described Aurora, Colorado, as a “war zone” overrun with members of the gang. Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain rejected that characterization, explaining the gang was tied to organized violent crime concentrated in three apartment complexes in the city.
Chamberlain said earlier this year his department had counted a total of nine confirmed Tren de Aragua members who passed through Aurora in the last two years.
The size of the gang is unclear. Countries with large populations of Venezuelan migrants, including Peru and Colombia, have accused the group of being behind a spree of violence in the region.
Authorities in Chile first identified the gang’s operations in 2022. Prosecutors and investigators have said the group initially engaged primarily in human trafficking, organizing unauthorized border crossings and sexual exploitation, but over time, members have expanded their activities to more violent crimes, such as kidnapping, torture, extortion and became more involved in drug trafficking.
While Tren de Argua has dominated ketamine trafficking in Chile, unlike other criminal organizations from Colombia, Central America and Brazil, it has no large-scale involvement in smuggling cocaine across international borders, according to InSight Crime, a think tank that last month published a 64-page report on the gang based on two years of research.
“We’ve found no direct participation of TdA in the transnational drug trade, although there are cases of them acting as subcontractors for other drug trafficking organizations,” said Jeremy McDermott, a Colombia-based co-founder of InSight Crime.
McDermott added that with affiliated cells spread across Latin America, it would not be a huge leap for the gang to one day delve into the drug trade.
Landlocked Bolivia and Colombia, with access to the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea and a border with Venezuela, are the world’s top cocaine producers.
Trump designated Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organization
On his first day in office, Mr. Trump took steps to designate the gang a foreign terrorist organization alongside several Mexican drug cartels. The Biden administration had sanctioned the gang and offered $12 million in rewards for the arrest of three of its leaders.
Mr. Trump’s executive order accused the gang of working closely with top Maduro officials — most notably the former vice president and one-time governor of Aragua state, Tareck El Aissami — to infiltrate migration flows, flood the U.S. with cocaine and plot against the country. A U.S. intelligence assessment released earlier this year found minimal contact between the gang and low-level officials in the Venezuelan government but said there was no direct coordination between the gang and the government.
In March, Mr. Trump also declared the group an invading force, invoking an 18th century wartime law that allows the U.S. to deport noncitizens without any legal recourse. Under the Alien Enemies Act, the administration sent more than 250 Venezuelan men to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, where they remained incommunicado and without access to an attorney until their July deportation to Venezuela.
A U.S. appeals court panel this week ruled that Mr. Trump cannot use that law to speed deportations of people his administration accuses of being Tren de Aragua members. A final ruling on the matter, however, will be made by the Supreme Court.
The Trump administration alleged the men deported to the prison were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, but provided little evidence. One justification officials used was that the men had certain kinds of tattoos allegedly signifying gang membership, including crowns, clocks and other symbols. But experts have said tattoos are not reliable markers of affiliation to the gang.
Trump cites the gang in justifying the military strike
The U.S. has not released the names and nationalities of the 11 people killed Tuesday. It also has not offered an estimate of the amount of drugs it says the boat was carrying.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday told reporters the U.S. military will continue lethal strikes on suspected drug trafficking vessels, but he dodged questions on details of the strike, including if the people in the boat were warned before the attack.
But, he said, Mr. Trump “has a right, under exigent circumstances, to eliminate imminent threats to the United States.”
“If you’re on a boat full of cocaine or fentanyl or whatever, headed to the United States, you’re an immediate threat to the United States,” he told reporters in Mexico City during a visit to Latin America.
Venezuela’s government, which has long minimized the presence of Tren de Aragua in the South American country, limited its reaction to the strike to questioning the veracity of a video showing the attack. Communications Minister Freddy Ñáñez suggested it was created using artificial intelligence and described it as an “almost cartoonish animation, rather than a realistic depiction of an explosion.”
Hegseth responded that the strike “was definitely not artificial intelligence,” adding he watched live footage from Washington as the strike was carried out.
The strike shows that the U.S. government is “quite literally deadly serious” in its targeting of drug traffickers, said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
But he questioned whether the link to Tren de Aragua has more to do with the “familiarity” that Americans now have with the gang.
“I certainly hope that the U.S. government has the intelligence and we are not shooting first and asking questions later,” Berg said.
Eleven Venezuelans murdered without due process!
Trump says the U.S. military destroyed a boat operated by Tren de Aragua off Venezuela. Here’s what to know about the gang.
The deadly U.S. military strike this week on a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela is the latest measure President Trump has taken to combat the threat he sees from the Tren de Aragua gang.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-boat-tren-de-aragua-gang-venezuela