Anybody Going To Stop Trump Disappearing Whoever He Wants Into Foreign Prisons?
Guess we are about to find out.
Remember all of those eleventy-million times over the past decades when courts could have held Dictator Day One accountable for any of the times he broke the law? Ending with the Supreme Court stalling for eight months before finally declaring that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue if he wanted to? And then Trump was like, “First I’ll come for the immigrants, and the trans people!” And 77 million idiots were like, “hrrr drrr, oook oook ook, we love that!” then they picked fleas off of each other, ate them, and went to vote for him?
And so here we are, 56 days in, and his administration is gleefully, laughingly defying court orders while simultaneously playing dumb. Saturday night, the administration deported 260-something alleged Venezuelan gang members. Alleged, because these people have had no hearings or any kind of public due process that we know of, and so we don’t actually know who they are. They could have been US citizens who’d been on their way to church. And, but, whoever they are, ICE loaded up two planes full of them and sent them to El Salvador, where the US has a deal to pay El Salvador $6 million to disappear people into prison for a year.
Friday night, Trump declared he was invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, claiming it applied to all Venezuelan gang members aged 14 and up (so, some of these people may not even be adults). Then Saturday, the plane took off at about 2:30 p.m. from Texas, and the ACLU rushed to court.
At about 6:51 p.m., Judge James Boasberg said NO, this 236-year-old law used three times when America was at war does not apply to these planes of people, turn those planes around right now. And at that point the planes were still in the air, off of the Yucatán Peninsula.
Then at 8 p.m. Li’l’ Marco Rubio re-Xitted a cry-laughing emoji posted by the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele: “Oopsie... Too late 😂”
And at 10 p.m. Bukele posted dramatic video of them getting off the plane.
BUUUT according to Axios’s Marc Caputo, this was no oopsie, and hair club dropout and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, with the help of dog-shooting Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, "orchestrated" the whole thing. They did briefly deliberate if they were going to follow the court order or not, and decided on NAH. “An official” told Axios, “[The plane was] already outside of US airspace. We believe the order is not applicable.” Which is, of course, completely made up and has never been the law. Said another unnamed official, “We wanted [the plane full of deported people] on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out.”
As it happens, Axios happened to take a spot in the press pool after reporter SV Date from HuffPost was thrown out for daring to ask Trump if he agreed with JD Vance that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Instead of owning it, Trump blew up and replaced Date with an outlet that agreed to call the Gulf of Fragile White Masculinity the Gulf of America instead.
Anyway, Trump TruthSocial-ed Bukele’s video at 3:54 p.m. on Sunday:
These are the monsters sent into our Country by Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats. How dare they! Thank you to El Salvador and, in particular, President Bukele, for your understanding of this horrible situation, which was allowed to happen to the United States because of incompetent Democrat leadership. We will not forget!
Before the election, Trump and Stephen Miller were making noise about Venezuelan gang members taking over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. The gang Tren de Agua is real, and nine gang members were individually arrested last year for two shootings, assaults, thefts and instances of threatening people with guns. That is bad. But police said there was no evidence of organized gang activity, much less that the gang had taken over entire blocks, or the entire city of Aurora. And when a reporter asked Miller for some numbers to go with his wild and false claims that Caracas has a lower crime rate than the United States because they’re sending all of their criminals here, Miller lost his shit and started yelling.
But, break the law first then avoid being held accountable later is Trump’s lifetime MO, and so far it has served him just fine.
Right after Axios’s story came out, Trump press secretary and angry pile of pancake makeup Karoline Leavitt issued a denial: “The Administration did not 'refuse to comply' with a court order. The order, which had no lawful basis, was issued after terrorist TdA aliens had already been removed from U.S. territory.”
Then she was like, well, okay, they DID knowingly defy a court order, but Trump has a right to do it:
The written order and the Administration's actions do not conflict. Moreover, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear — federal courts generally have no jurisdiction over the President's conduct of foreign affairs, his authorities under the Alien Enemies Act, and his core Article II powers to remove foreign alien terrorists from U.S. soil and repel a declared invasion. […] A single judge in a single city cannot direct the movements of an aircraft carrier full of foreign alien terrorists who were physically expelled from U.S. soil.
And she snotted for good measure: “If the Democrats want to argue in favor of turning a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters back to the United States, that's a fight we are more than happy to take.”
“An official,” probably hateful muppet Miller, crowed to Caputo, “This is headed to the Supreme Court. And we're going to win.”
So I guess sooner or later we’ll see how this corrupt, compromised court will rule in the case of Can Donald Trump Disappear Whoever He Wants Into Foreign Prisons vs. No.
Defying immigration court orders is already happening. The Times reports that Thursday Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Brown University professor and kidney transplant specialist with a valid visa, was expelled after Judge Leo T. Sorokin had ordered the government to provide him with 48 hours notice before deporting her. But Customs and Border Protection put her on a plane anyway. The judge filed notice Sunday morning that he had reason to believe the government had defied his order, and has ordered representatives from CBP into his courtroom today to explain themselves.
ICE has also reportedly been holding detainees for longer than 12 hours, depriving them of food and beds for days, withholding medications from people like German-American green card holder Fabian Schmidt, and doing shit like sending permanent resident and mother of five Ma Yang to Laos, where she has never been. And of course a week ago ICE picked up green-card holder, Columbia University grad student and Syrian-born Algerian citizen Mahmoud Khalil for WRONGTHINK.
Bubbles Rubio is very pleased! And on “Face the Nation” Sunday morning vowed to do even more. Host Margaret Brennan pressed, where’s the evidence that Khalil had a link to terrorism, or was it just his point of view? Is it only pro-Palestinian people who are going to have their visas revoked, or other points of view as well?
It’s everybody, said Rubio, because all of these people are RUDE and TERRORISTS.
RUBIO: Well, not just the student, we're going to do more. In fact, we– every day now we're approving visa revocations, and if that visa led to a green card, the green card process as well and here's why, it's very simple. When you apply to enter the United States and you get a visa, you are a guest. [...] if you tell us when you apply for a visa, I'm coming to the U.S. to participate in pro-Hamas events, that runs counter to the foreign policy interest of the United States of America. It's that simple. So, you lied. You came– if you had told us that you were going to do that, we never would have given you the visa.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Is it only pro-Palestinian people who are going to have their visas remote- revoked, or other points of view as well?
SECRETARY RUBIO: No, I think anybody who's here in favor– look, we want to get rid of Tren de Aragua gang members. They're terrorists too.
And the mom of five, is there evidence she’s a terrorist too? And the doctor? Are her patients going to be “Oopsie, cry laughing” when there’s nobody to transplant a kidney?
We have laws for a reason and due process for a reason. What will happen when Bone Spurs and company simply ignore judges, and dare judges to find a way to make them stop? Constitutional crisis, is the term, and we are now all in uncharted waters over the Gulf of Who Knows, on the coast of the Yucatán.
Thanks, SCOTUS!
I’m researching this week’s article on Black and Tans at the local Irish pubs(plural). I considered stopping drinking; then I read this. Time for the third shot of JayMo.
The criminal gang you should most worry about is currently in the white house.