Lawless
The Trump Administration shipped legal immigrants to a foreign prison.
Hey everyone. This was supposed to be the Birthright Citizenship Jackal™, but we had a medical emergency this week (everyone is OK) and that has been a major delay. It will arrive soon, but in the meantime I wanted to touch on something else really fast.
You may have heard about the Trump Administration’s detention of several Venezuelan men and their subsequent removal to El Salvador. The story actually broke around the time I published my last Jackal, but I held off on including it for a few different reasons.
For one, the story was getting attention because it seemed to be the first real indication that the Trump Administration was defying a direct order from the courts (as they have threatened to do repeatedly). The timeline on that is still being hashed out (there was a hearing in that case today),1 although it certainly appears like it was an open defiance of the law. Here is a timeline from Axios, with the relevant bits here:
The president signed the executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act on Friday night, but intentionally did not advertise it. On Saturday morning, word of the order leaked, officials said, prompting a mad scramble to get planes in the air.
Inside the White House, officials discussed whether to order the planes to turn around. On advice from a team of administration lawyers, the administration pressed ahead.
Between the lines: Officially, the Trump White House is not denying it ignored the judge's order, and instead wants to shift the argument to whether it was right to expel alleged members of Tren de Aragua.
I will probably write more about the Alien Enemies Act and a lot of other legal stuff associated with this story, but the last line (bolded by me) is really important to keep in your head.
When I was writing my last Jackal, the story was in flux and there were some reports that the deported Venezuelans were not actual members of Tren de Aragua and were instead legal immigrants to the U.S.
I held off because members of Tren de Aragua are pretty crafty and are good at tricking people into thinking they aren’t really members of the gang. Now that we have the benefit of hindsight (and more information), it is clear that the Trump Administration - in its haste to disobey a judge’s order - deported legal immigrants without due process and sent them to a Salvadoran prison.
If all of the allegations are true this is a human rights violation punishable in the U.S. and in international courts. Some of these men were legally present in the U.S. and were arrested after attending their routine appointments with ICE. They were then handcuffed, shackled, and sent to El Salvador without a hearing or even a justification.2
One of them is a Venezuelan soccer player, who fled to the U.S. after being tortured by the regime in Venezuela. He is a legal immigrant and was accused of being a member of Tren de Aragua for two reasons:
The soccer player has a soccer tattoo. Imagine that. One of the other detainees is Mervyn Yamarte. Two pictures, each worth a thousand words:
Here is the one shared by Salvadoran “President”3 Nayib Bukele:
Yamarte is not a gang member, and does not even have any gang-related tattoos. He - like many of the others deported by the Trump Administration - was in the U.S. working, reporting to ICE, and patiently waiting for an immigration hearing. His family had no idea what happened to him until they saw the video posted by Bukele.
Imagine how his mother felt: She had not heard from him in weeks, and then she saw a video of him in a prison infamous for human rights abuses and forced labor. Tim Miller’s rage captures the moment (whole video is worth watching):
The last one is the most enraging to me. Gustavo Adolfo Aguilera Agüero is 27 years old and came to the U.S. in 2023. He has a nine-month old son, who is (presumably) living in Dallas, where his family settled. His son is a U.S. citizen. He came to the U.S. legally, and was awaiting an immigration hearing. He was arrested while he was taking out the trash, and deported to El Salvador.
We have no idea where these men will end up or what will happen to them. This truly feels like the child separations that happened during Trump’s first term, which was such a huge and devastating crisis that we are still (literally) paying for it.
This stuff seriously matters, even aside from all the normal, “preserve democracy” reasons. As I’m sure you’re all aware, the economy is teetering and the U.S. is tipping closer to a recession, all thanks to Trump.4
When you create an atmosphere where your country is seen as unsafe for any and all travel, foreign governments are going to tell their citizens to stay away from you. That is literally happening, right now. In Maine, innkeepers are sounding the alarm: The usual influx of Canadians into the U.S. for the summer vacations isn’t just slowing down; it’s come to a complete halt. Fewer visitors to America = less money being spent here = another rung on the ladder towards economic collapse.
We are clearly on a course for disaster. And the worst part is that once we’re in a recession, the very dumbest and least-qualified people on the planet will be the ones trying to get us out of it. Surely, they won’t screw that up too, right?
The attorney for the Justice Department reiterated to the judge that while he understood the judge’s order to “turn the planes around,” he did not know the status of the planes in question or where they were. The Administration does seem to be trying to say they did not defy the judge’s order. I am skeptical.
I link to this elsewhere in the post, but Adam Isacson has a great roundup of all these cases here.
This is also a point worth making: The reason the Biden Administration had a higher deportation rate of violent criminals than Trump is because when you try to deport everyone you see you cannot focus on deporting the worst ones.