Trump said that millions of people would not be able to have trials, as the government already knew who the criminals were, and it was necessary to get them out of the country as soon as possible.
Andrew Feinberg, the White House correspondent for The Independent, went back and forth with White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt [Bimbo #1] Monday about criteria DHS uses to classify illegal migrants as foreign combatants.
Leavitt shouted, “Shame on you!” at Feinberg at one point after he noted some migrants can be classified as members of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua and become eligible for deportation to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act over symbols in their tattoos and their clothing.
The White House press secretary disagreed with Feinberg, who cited the federal government’s own documents on the matter.
Feinberg said, “You can get classified [as Tren de Aragua] by simply having certain symbols in your tattoos and wearing certain streetwear brands. That alone is enough to get someone classified as TDA and sent to El Salvador.”
Leavitt [Bimbo #1] fired back, “That’s not true, actually, Andrew.”
Feinberg attempted to read from a DHS document laying out how immigration authorities confirm Tren de Aragua affiliations as he and Leavitt spoke over one another.
When the reporter noted that he had a question about the process, Leavitt replied, “Shame on you! And shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover for these individuals! This is a vicious gang, Andrew.”
The Trump administration has allowed immigration agents to invade homes without a warrant for over a month, according to a leaked internal memo.
The memo, obtained by USA Today and issued by Attorney General Pam Bondi [Bimbo #3] March 14, orders Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials to break into the homes of suspected members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua without a warrant.
A former New Mexico judge and his wife were arrested on Thursday after being accused of sheltering a Tren de Aragua gang member at their home.
Local news captured the raid and arrest of former Dona Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano and his wife Nancy Cano, who were charged with tampering with evidence and conspiracy to tamper, respectively.
In footage posted by KFOX14 News, Mr. and Mrs. Cano could be seen in handcuffs next to agents from both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).
Newly uncovered guidance from the Justice Department claims the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) allows federal law enforcement officers to enter the houses of suspected gang members without a warrant and remove them from the country without any judicial review.
In a March 14 memorandum, obtained by the open government group Property of the People through a public records request and first reported by USA Today, Attorney General Pam Bondi [Bimbo #3] instructs federal law enforcement officers on how to carry out arrests on members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TDA), which President Donald Trump has declared are “alien enemies” under the AEA.
The Trump administration has refused to disclose many of the operational details of its unprecedented invocation of the 1798 wartime law to send alleged TDA members to a prison in El Salvador under an agreement with that country’s president, Nayib Bukele. The memo is one of the first public glimpses at the Trump administration’s claims that it can identify, pursue, arrest, and deport migrants, unconstrained by the Fourth Amendment or due process.
A federal judge in Maryland has ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of another man who was sent to an El Salvador prison as part of the government’s push to swiftly remove alleged members of a Venezuelan gang.
The man, identified only as Cristian in court documents, was born in Venezuela and came to the U.S. as an unaccompanied minor. He and others who came to the country as children reached a settlement agreement with the government in November that prohibited their removal while their asylum applications were pending.
President Donald Trump‘s administration moved a Venezuelan man who had worked in construction in Philadelphia to Texas for possible deportation after a federal judge had issued an order blocking his removal from Pennsylvania or the United States, according to court records.
A plane transporting the man took off on April 15 from an airport in the state capital Harrisburg about a half hour after U.S. District Judge Stephanie Haines issued an order temporarily blocking the administration from moving him out of her western Pennsylvania judicial district or the country, Justice Department lawyer Laura Irwin told an April 17 hearing, conducted as a conference call.
In late January, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan immigrant working in a delivery job in Detroit, picked up an order at a McDonald’s. He was heading to the address when he erroneously turned onto the Ambassador Bridge, which leads to Canada. It is a common mistake even for those who live in the Michigan border city. But for Mr. Prada, 32, it proved fateful.
The U.S. authorities took Mr. Prada into custody when he attempted to re-enter the country; he was put in detention and ordered deported. On March 15, he told a friend in Chicago that he was among a number of detainees housed in Texas who expected to be repatriated to Venezuela.
That evening, the Trump administration flew three planes carrying Venezuelan migrants from the Texas facility to El Salvador, where they have been ever since, locked up in a maximum-security prison and denied contact with the outside world.
But Mr. Prada has not been heard from or seen. He is not on the list of 238 people who were deported to El Salvador that day. He does not appear in the photos and videos released by the authorities of shackled men with shaved heads.
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.”
By trying to deport student activists he describes as antisemitic “terrorist sympathizers,” you might think, President Donald Trump is cannily choosing unpopular targets who are unlikely to attract much public support. But according to recent polling by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), most Americans are not fans of that speech-chilling initiative.
According to the latest iteration of FIRE’s quarterly National Speech Index survey, which was conducted from April 4 through April 11, just 26 percent of Americans “support” or “strongly support” a policy of “deporting foreigners legally in the United States on a student visa for expressing pro-Palestine views,” while 52 percent—twice as many— “oppose” or “strongly oppose” that policy. The rest were undecided.
When FIRE asked about “deporting foreigners legally in the United States with a green card for expressing pro-Palestine views,” the results were similar. While 23 percent of respondents thought that was a good idea, 53 percent disagreed, and 23 percent took no position.
“Deporting someone simply for disagreeing with the government’s foreign policy preferences strikes at the very freedoms the First Amendment was designed to protect,” says Sean Stevens, FIRE’s chief research adviser. “Americans are right to reject this kind of viewpoint-based punishment.”
