Trump's Deportation Machine Keeps Growing, As Do The Lies
They just keep trying new things. The chaos, as well as the cruelty, is the point.
The Trump administration’s mass deportation program continues to expand, with new examples of cruelty and incompetence arriving each day. The Supreme Court’s order over the weekend did at least block the administration, for now, from sending more people to El Salvador’s torture prison on dubious charges of being gang terrorists (since we’re at war with Venezuela and all).
PREVIOUSLY!
The Supreme Court’s order was followed Tuesday by another federal judge, in New York, extending an order against Trump’s using the Alien Enemies Act for new deportations within his jurisdiction, and reamed a Justice Department attorney who said that due process is actually “a flexible standard.” District Judge Alvin Hellerstein pointed out that shipping people to a foreign prison, possibly forever, because they have tattoos isn’t anything close to due process. “The law is clear: If you are kicking out a person, you give them an opportunity to defend themselves,” he said at the hearing. “You can't kick someone out by guilt by association.” But hey, we already have, and the fascists in charge of deportations will keep doing it however they can.
The chaos and incompetence, as we always say, are a feature, not a bug. This is a lawless president, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer that his entire administration is devoted to acting as recklessly as it can. Nobody has stopped them yet, and they’re rubbing it in our faces.
Hey, The Courts Never Said The Military Can’t Disappear People To El Salvador
In a shocking development, Ryan Goodman reported at Just Security Wednesday night that the administration seems to think it has a tricksy loophole to defy the Supreme Court: Just transfer prisoners it wants to disappear to Defense Department custody so the DoD can send them. The Court only said DHS/ICE can’t remove people without due process; it never mentioned the DoD, which went ahead and removed at least some people to El Salvador after the Supreme Court ruling. The government even documented the move in a court filing, insisting that DHS wasn’t involved so everything’s peachy.
And what the accompanying ICE official’s affidavit makes clear is that the DHS was directly involved in their removal. That’s because DHS had custody of several of the individuals after the court’s order, and then transferred them to DOD after the court’s order. Indeed, DHS apparently transferred some individuals to the DOD base in Guantanamo. The base served as a very temporary holding place until their transportation by DOD to El Salvador a few days later.
Hey, just a little fun trick to completely ignore the Supreme Court and see if they could get away with it. This one appears to just be developing.
The Rwanda Option
As we keep seeing, whenever courts close a door, the Trump administration tries to open a hole in the wall with a sledgehammer. Tuesday, Marisa Kabas reported that the State Department has a new scheme to deport people who fear persecution if sent to their home countries: Rwanda has agreed to take them. Unlike the effort to send people to the Salvadoran torture prison, the administration isn’t whooping up the Rwanda deportations with sick propaganda videos; it’s just handing out diplomatic goodies Rwanda to take the “third-country nationals (TCNs)” who can’t be legally deported to their home countries.
The US has already shipped to Rwanda a refugee from Iraq, Omar Abdulsattar Ameen, who was granted refugee status but was later accused — on iffy evidence — of an ISIS-involved murder of a cop in Iraq, although he maintains he and his family were in Turkey at the time of the killing. His case was profiled in this 2020 New Yorker article.
A federal judge found the case for extraditing Ameen to Iraq for trial “dubious,” including claims that were “simply not plausible,” and ordered him released in 2021, but during the Biden administration, ICE grabbed him again and sought to deport him. Finally, the deportation machine has a solution, Kabas reports. Ameen has been sent to Rwanda, according to a State Department cable sent this week. She adds, “But it remains unclear what legal processes allowed for this to happen.”
The cable also shows the administration plans to send at least another 10 deportees soon, saying Ameen’s removal “proved the concept for developing a new removal program to relocate TCNs from the United States to Rwanda.”
You’re An American Citizen? Yeah, So?
We’re also getting more and more stories of American citizens getting caught up in the mass deportation madness, exactly as everyone predicted, and so far the administration is making clear that’s not going to slow it down, because don’t go thinking citizenship makes you special. Just a quick overview:
In Arizona, Jose Hermosillo, a 19-year-old US-born citizen who lives in New Mexico, was arrested near Tucson and held in a private prison for 10 days despite insisting he was a citizen, until his family finally had a chance to show authorities his birth certificate. DHS, in typical Trumpy language, claims “Hermosillo's arrest and detention were a direct result of his own actions and statements.” According to a DHS statement, Hermosillo “approached Border Patrol in Tucson Arizona stating he had ILLEGALLY entered the U.S. and identified himself as a Mexican citizen.” DHS even released a “transcript” of what he supposedly told them, including the answer “No” when asked if he was a citizen. Hermosillo admits he signed the transcript because the officer told him to “sign everything.” But he didn’t know what it said because he can’t read and the officers didn’t read what was on the paper to him. (Not a great look for New Mexico schools; he has learning disabilities and dropped out after 10th grade.) Oh, and other documents in his case are hinky; the arrest report said Hermosillo was detained “at or near Nogales, Arizona,” which is a long 70 miles from Tucson, where he was actually scooped up. Maybe he was at fault for that mistake too. Or maybe it’s just nearer than Rwanda.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the US citizen wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and mom of the couple’s three US citizen kids, is now in hiding in a safe house. Last week, the government failed to redact her home address when it tried to smear Abrego Garcia as a dangerous “wife beater” by posting to Twitter a 2021 petition for a protective order that she had filed. Vasquez Sura says that she filed the petition after he hit her during an argument over money, and that it was the only such incident in their marriage. She didn’t go to a scheduled court hearing, so the order expired, and the incident had no bearing on his deportation case. But it makes him look bad, and the order, still with her home address, remains on Twitter. Vasquez Sura told the Washington Post (gift link), “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. […] This is definitely a bit terrifying. I’m scared for my kids.” DHS wouldn’t comment on posting the address, but the White House continues to call Abrego Garcia every name in the book.
Axios on Wednesday outlined three ways American citizens could be caught up by the deportation frenzy, including possible imprisonment of US convicts in foreign prisons, an idea Trump has repeatedly advocated; the possibility that citizens who advocate on behalf of the disappeared might be charged as “accessories” to terrorists, as already floated by Trump adviser Seb Gorka, and also by “border czar” Tom Thumbhead Homan; and the likelihood that if a citizen is scooped up and sent overseas in error, the administration will do nothing, as it repeatedly has in the case of Abrego Garcia.
In March, an attorney in Texas, Clay Jackson, offered to help a Dallas-area family of mixed immigration status (undocumented parents, one US citizen child, another child with DACA protection) find an immigration attorney after a member of the family was caught up in an ICE workplace raid. A couple days later, Jackson’s wifi dropped out shortly before two men who refused to identify themselves knocked on his door, telling him, “We have information that you are obstructing an ongoing immigration investigation.” They said they didn’t have to show badges or say what agency they were with, and when Jackson said he needed to call his attorney, they left. His Ring doorbell camera was knocked out when the wifi went down, and Jackson hasn’t been able to find out anything more about who the men were. Just a little friendly visit from the goon squad to remind him that constitutionally protected lawyering is frowned upon these days.
All this shit. All the lies. It’s all part of a shambolic, sloppy, seemingly improvised slide into fascism, but as with the constant clusterfucks we saw with Trump’s first-term child separation program (“There’s no child separation program!!”), the chaos and the seeming incompetence are, if not quite deliberately planned out, part of the project to dismantle institutions and normality so that the authoritarian takeover can spread to all parts of the government. They’re throwing shit in every direction, noting what works and where they get blocked, and keeping us all off balance, all the time. It’s not just the cruelty that’s the point. The chaos is the point, and the method.
But even as they try to keep us off balance, we have to, well, stand up. For a hero to end this story, look no farther than Rep. Yassamin Ansari (D-Arizona), who was part of the congressional delegation that went to El Salvador earlier this week to check on the safety of Abrego Garcia and other deportees as well. Ansari appeared on a long segment on Laura Ingraham’s Laura Lies To You All Hour on Fox News Tuesday, and repeatedly spoke the truth in the face of all the propaganda, very confidently rebutting the official lies about Abrego Garcia and other deportees. She explained that if the administration wants to call him and the others terrorists and gang members, they have to do it in court or it isn’t legal. She noted a good five times that Trump has been ignoring the Supreme Court, a message most Fox viewers never hear. Even if most of them dismiss what Ansari said, like Ingraham did, the message was there, a rarity on the network. We wish we could embed it, but if you want to see someone keeping her feet while being barraged by lies, go watch it here.
[ABC News / Handbasket / New Yorker (archive link) / Just Security / Popular Information / WaPo (gift link) / Axios / Radley Balko / TNR]
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“The Court only said DHS/ICE can’t remove people without due process; it never mentioned the DoD”
From the minds that brought you, “But Dad, you only said that I couldn’t drive your car to the drive in. You didn’t say my friend couldn’t drive it”
The point of these is to keep everyone, especially people of color but also *everyone*, in a state of fear. This is state terrorism.