Trump Admin’s New Defense For Accidentally Sending Abrego Garcia To Salvadoran Torture Camp: We Meant To Do That
from the we're-building-concentration-camps dept
The Trump administration has settled on a terrifying new legal theory: they can declare anyone a “terrorist,” ship them to an offshore torture camp without due process, and courts can do nothing about it because it’s “foreign affairs.” This isn’t speculation — it’s the actual argument they’re making to justify their “accidental” trafficking of Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s CECOT facility.
After initially admitting in court this was an “administrative error,” the administration has pivoted to an even more disturbing stance: they meant to do it all along, and they can do it to anyone. And they’ll just fucking lie about everything to pretend this is all perfectly normal and acceptable.
We mentioned some of this in our story yesterday about Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele’s shameful and dark press conference in the Oval Office, in which both of them denied the ability to bring Garcia back to the US (with Pam Bondi falsely claiming that the only thing the Supreme Court told them to do was send a plane if Bukele chose to release him, and Bukele bizarrely claiming that he couldn’t return Garcia because it would require “smuggling a terrorist” into the US, none of which is true).
The implications here are fucking terrifying. The administration is essentially arguing that once they declare someone a “terrorist” — based on “evidence” as flimsy as wearing a Chicago Bulls hat — they can disappear that person to an offshore torture facility with no due process and no judicial oversight. And they’re making this argument while simultaneously giving the middle finger to both a district court and the Supreme Court.
This authoritarian power grab became crystal clear when Trump advisor Stephen Miller started spewing his laughably false claim that the Supreme Court ruling about Garcia was actually a win for the administration. He’d been practicing this bullshit all morning in multiple media appearances, including a surprisingly contentious interview on Fox News.
So, I want to correct that. I hate to do it, Bill. I have to correct you on every single thing you just said, because it was all wrong.
First, we won the Supreme Court case, clearly, 9-0. A District Court judge said unconscionably that the president and his administration have to go into El Salvador and extradite one of their citizens, a Salvadoran citizen, so that would be kidnapping. We have to kidnap an El Salvador citizen against the will of his government and fly him back to America. Which would be an unimaginable invasion of El Salvador sovereignty.
Again, this is bullshit. Bukele is claiming that he’d have to “smuggle” Garcia back to the US, while the US is claiming it would have to “kidnap” him? Do they just think everyone is fucking stupid? The US and El Salvador have a written agreement (which is already pretty unconscionable) that El Salvador will house prisoners sent from America at CECOT for $20k/year per prisoner, but according to the Associated Press, the agreement states that the US has discretion on the “long-term disposition” of the prisoners.
In other words, there’s a literal contract that says the US can get these prisoners back. No kidnapping required. No smuggling needed. Just a phone call between Trump and Bukele to arrange the transfer and obey the Supreme Court. Or, hell, they could have done it at yesterday’s meeting.
Speaking of the Supreme Court, Miller lied about that as well. First, he ignores that the Fourth Circuit, including famed conservative judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, insisted that of course the district court can order the US to fix a mistake like illegally trafficking someone to a foreign torture camp, ignoring a protection order against sending him to El Salvador.
Having skipped over the Fourth Circuit’s clear ruling, Miller then proceeds to completely misrepresent what the Supreme Court actually said. His claims about “winning” the case are more than just wrong — they’re a deliberate attempt to gaslight the public about a ruling that directly ordered the administration to attempt fix its “mistake”:
So we appealed to the Supreme Court and it said clearly no District Court can compel the president to exercise his Article II foreign powers in any way whatsoever. DOJ called me after the Supreme Court ruling and said: ‘This is amazing we won the case 9-0, we are in excellent standing here.’
So this has been portrayed wrong for 72-hours in the media. They said the most a court can ever compel you to do is facilitate return, which would basically mean if El Salvador voluntarily sends him back we wouldn’t block him in the airport, we would put him back in ICE detention and then he would be deported back to El Salvador or somewhere else.
The Supreme Court said that’s the most the government can be expected to do. So, we won the case, handily. The misreporting on this has been atrocious.
This is also a lie. A flat-out lie. One just needs to read the Supreme Court ruling, which clearly states that the US should work to get him released from the torture camp, not just help him fly back to the US:
The order properly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.
Two important bits here: first, the Supreme Court makes it clear that the “facilitation” is more than a flight back to the US, but is to seek to get him released from custody in El Salvador. Second, the Supreme Court says directly that Garcia has been “improperly sent to El Salvador.”
But the administration wasn’t done lying. Miller then rolled out an even more audacious claim: that sending Garcia to CECOT wasn’t a mistake at all, despite their own lawyers admitting exactly that in court. Here’s Miller testing this latest bit of revisionist history on Fox News:
He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador. He’s an illegal alien from El Salvador. In 2019 he was ordered deported. He has a final removal order from the United States. These are things that no one disputes. Where is he from? El Salvador. Where is he a resident and citizen of? El Salvador. Is he here illegally? Yes. Does he have a deportation order? Yes.
A DOJ Lawyer, who has been relieved of duty, a saboteur, a Democrat, put into a filing, incorrectly, that this was a mistaken removal. It was not. It was the right person sent to the right place.
This is gaslighting taken to new heights. Not only is Miller lying about the “mistake” their own lawyers admitted to, he’s inventing a conspiracy theory about a “saboteur” DOJ lawyer with zero evidence. Miller admits that there was a withholding order on Garcia, barring him from being deported to El Salvador. But Miller claims that once Trump declared MS-13 to be a terrorist organization, that magically dissolved the withholding order, because (he claims) Garcia was a member of that terrorist organization. Fox’s host, Bill Hemmer, who tries to get a word in throughout all this finally asks Miller if he really believes Garcia is an MS-13 member, to which Miller misrepresents things again:
Yes. But here is the thing, Bill. Yes, not only am I convinced of it, not only is El Salvador convinced of it, Bill, he is an illegal alien from El Salvador with a deportation order! So, his only options in life, Bill, his only options in life, are to be deported to El Salvador or to be deported to some other country. That’s it. He has a deportation order!
So Bill, you tell me what country should we deport him to? Tell me? Tell me, please, tell me.
The truth completely demolishes these claims. Immigration expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick has put together a useful timeline that exposes the MS-13 allegations as a complete fabrication based on nothing more than a hat and an anonymous tip.
But there’s even more to it than this. The claims that Miller and Bondi made, that “two courts” declared him to be a member of MS-13, are extremely misleading. Looking over the filings in his immigration court hearings does not even remotely support the claim that he’s some sort of violent gang member. Indeed, the report details how his family was targeted by another gang, Barrio 18, because his family ran a somewhat successful pupusa making business out of their home in San Salvador. Barrio 18 kept demanding more and more extortion payouts. When the family was unable to pay the amount demanded, the gang said they would harm Abrego’s older brother, Cesar.
Rather than being an MS-13 member, court records show Garcia’s family desperately tried to keep him away from gangs. When he was just 12 years old, after his brother fled gang threats, Barrio 18 started targeting young Abrego, and the family went out of its way to protect him:
After Cesar left, the gang started recruiting the Respondent. They told Cecilia that she would not have to pay rent any mote if she let him join the gang. [The mother refused to let this happen. The gang then threatened to kill the Respondent, When the Respondent was around 12-years old, the gang came to the home again, telling Cecilia that they would take him because she wasn’t paying money from the family’s pupusa business. The Respondent’s father prevented the gang from taking the Respondent that day by paying the gang all of the money that they wanted. During the days, the gang would watch the Respondent when he went back and forth to school. The members of the gangs all had many tattoos and always carried weapons.
Eventually, the family had enough and moved from Los Nogales to the 10″ of October neighborhood. This town was about 10 minutes away, by car, from Los Nogales. Shortly after the family moved, members of Barrio 18 from Nogales went to the 10″ of October and let their fellow gang members know that the family had moved to that neighborhood: Barrio 18 members visited the house demanding the rent money from the pupusa business again. They went to the house twice threatening to rape and kill the Respondent’s two sisters and threatening the Respondent. The Respondent’s parents were so fearful that they kept the Respondent inside the home as much as possible. Finally, the family decided they had to close the pupusa business and move to another area, Los Andes, about a 15 minute drive from their last residence. Even at this new location, the family kept the Respondent indoors most of the time because of the threats on his life. After four months of living in fear, the Respondent’s parents sent the Respondent to the U.S.
This is the reality the Trump administration is trying to erase: a 12-year-old kid whose family shut down their legitimate business and moved multiple times to protect him from gangs. When that wasn’t enough, they sent him and his brother to the US specifically to keep them away from gang life. And now Miller wants to brand him a terrorist based on… wearing a Bulls hat.
The technical reason Garcia didn’t get asylum? He filed for it too late. He missed the one-year filing deadline after arriving in the US. Yes, the Trump administration is using a paperwork technicality — one that applied to a 12-year-old kid who was fleeing death threats — to justify sending him to a torture camp for the rest of his life.
Despite denying asylum on this technicality, the court still granted him a protection order, recognizing the very real risk to his life if returned to El Salvador. And while Miller keeps touting that an immigration judge “accepted” a police report claiming MS-13 ties, he conveniently leaves out that this was only considered for a bond determination, not as evidence of actual gang membership.
In fact, the Fourth Circuit completely demolished these attempts to paint Garcia as a gang member:
Even then, the Government’s “evidence” of any connection between Abrego Garcia and MS-13 was thin, to say the least. The Government’s claim was based on (1) Abrego Garcia “wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” and (2) “a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York—a place he has never lived.”
However, the administration has now taken Stephen Miller’s mythmaking about Garcia being a dangerous “terrorist” member of MS-13 and run with it.
First, DHS put out a nonsense “ICYMI” statement claiming, without evidence, that Garcia is absolutely an MS-13 member and was properly deported to El Salvador:
“I think this illegal alien is exactly where he belongs—home in El Salvador. He was in our country illegally, he is from El Salvador, was born in El Salvador, and, oh, the media forgot to mention: He is a MS-13 gang member. The media would love for you to believe that this is a media darling, that he is just a Maryland father. Osama Bin Laden was also a father, and yet, he was not a good guy, and they actually are both terrorists. He should be in this El Salvador prison, a prison for terrorists, and I hope he will remain there.”
Yes, you read that right. DHS is comparing a man whose only “evidence” of gang ties is wearing a Bulls hat to the mastermind of 9/11. This isn’t just dishonest — it’s deranged. And it gets worse.
Not to be outdone in the fabrication department, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem piled on with her own set of completely made-up claims about Garcia:
“This was just one of those examples of an individual that is a MS-13 gang member, multiple charges and encounters with the individuals here, trafficking in his background, was found with other MS-13 gang members—very dangerous person, and what the liberal left and fake news are doing to turn him into a media darling is sickening,”
Every single word of this is a lie, as the Fourth Circuit explicitly found in its ruling:
Indeed, such a fact cannot be gleaned from this record, which shows that Abrego Garcia has no criminal history, in this country or anywhere else, and that Abrego Garcia is a gainfully employed family man who lives a law abiding and productive life. Tellingly, the Government “abandon[ed]” its position that Abrego Garcia was “a danger to the community” at the hearing before the district court.
With all these lies now firmly established as their official narrative — that Garcia is definitely MS-13 (despite zero evidence), that sending him to El Salvador was totally intentional (despite admitting in court it was a mistake), and that the Supreme Court didn’t really order his return (despite explicitly doing so) — the administration finally filed its third “status report” with the district court. The filing, submitted an hour after the deadline, doubles down on every single one of these fabrications. It falsely claims the immigration court found Garcia to be MS-13 and argues that Trump’s terrorist designation of MS-13 somehow retroactively voided Garcia’s protection order, despite never making such an argument to an immigration court.
The filing then descends into pure absurdity, simultaneously arguing that the US can’t possibly retrieve Garcia because that would require “kidnapping” him, as Miller has been claiming:
DHS does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.
…while quoting Bukele’s equally nonsensical claim that he can’t return Garcia because that would be “smuggling” a “terrorist”:
I understand that, in response to a question regarding Abrego Garcia, President Bukele said, “I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.”
It is quite something to have, in the same document, and just two paragraphs separated from each other, both arguments that (1) the US seeking to get Garcia back would amount to “forcibly extracting” him and (2) that Bukele returning Garcia to the US would amount to “smuggling a terrorist.”
Remember: no one has asked the US to “forcibly extract” Garcia, nor has anyone suggested Bukele needs to “smuggle” him. There’s literally a contract between the two countries governing these transfers. This isn’t about law or sovereignty — it’s about the Trump administration inventing increasingly absurd excuses to keep an innocent man in a torture camp, all to maintain their strongman facade. It’s pathetic men playacting at being tough guys by terrorizing the powerless.
The implications of what’s happening here cannot be overstated. The administration isn’t just defying both a district court and the Supreme Court — they’re establishing a terrifying new precedent: that they can unilaterally declare anyone a “terrorist,” ship them to an offshore torture facility, and then claim US courts are powerless to intervene because it’s now a “foreign affairs” issue.
Under this definition, as multiple people pointed out, the US government can literally grab anyone off the street, put them on a helicopter, and once they reach international waters, they can do whatever they want to them, and no court could ever intervene.
Here’s what the Holocaust Memorial Museum defines as a “concentration camp”:
The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.
CECOT fits this definition perfectly. The only twist is that Trump has placed these concentration camps in another country, creating a paper-thin legal fiction that lets the administration claim that once they’ve disappeared someone across the border, American courts suddenly lose all jurisdiction because it’s now just “foreign affairs” under executive control.
You know those lessons about the Holocaust that ask “what would you have done?” That question is no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration is actively building a network of offshore concentration camps and arguing they can disappear anyone into them without due process — and that US courts are powerless to stop them because of “foreign sovereignty.”
The hypocrisy here is staggering. This is the same administration that regularly threatens to violate other nations’ sovereignty — claiming it will annex Canada as “the 51st state” and repeatedly threatening to seize Greenland. But suddenly they’re deeply concerned about El Salvador’s sovereignty when asked to retrieve someone under a contract that explicitly gives the US control over prisoner transfers?
And what happened to Trump, the self-proclaimed “master dealmaker”? The man who claims he can negotiate anything can’t manage a simple prisoner transfer with his ally Bukele? The truth is painfully obvious: they don’t want to bring Garcia back. They want to establish the precedent that they can disappear anyone they want.
The reality is inescapable: this isn’t about law, sovereignty, or national security. The Trump administration, with Stephen Miller as its architect, is deliberately constructing a system of offshore concentration camps and inventing increasingly absurd legal theories to justify them. Why? Because they want the power to disappear people without accountability or oversight.
This case isn’t just about saving Garcia from a torture camp — though that alone should be enough. It’s about preventing the creation of an American gulag archipelago, where anyone the administration declares “dangerous” can vanish forever beyond the reach of US courts. The fact that they’re building this system using such obvious lies and contradictions doesn’t make it less dangerous — it makes it more so. It shows they don’t even feel the need to make their excuses plausible anymore.
Judge Xinis now faces a stark choice: accept these transparent fabrications and help establish a precedent for extra-judicial disappearances, or stand firm against this assault on basic constitutional rights. History is watching.
Filed Under: abrego garcia, concentration camps, donald trump, el salvador, kristi noem, nayib bukele, pam bondi, paula xinis, stephen miller, torture camps
Comments on “Trump Admin’s New Defense For Accidentally Sending Abrego Garcia To Salvadoran Torture Camp: We Meant To Do That”
Remember, folks: If they’ll do it to non-citizens, they’ll do it to citizens soon enough. They want you afraid of being snatched off the street for protesting the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza or the Trump administration’s cozy ties with Elon Musk or literally anything else Trump wants to punish people for saying or doing.
Anyone who supports this also supports innocent born-and-raised Americans being shipped to El Salvador for what are effectively thoughtcrimes. After all, when due process can be ignored to deport someone to another country with no oversight and no way to bring them back home, whether that someone committed an actual crime will ultimately be irrelevant.
Re:
Or for any reason.
All it would take is them grabbing you without proof of citizenship or ignoring it. They have already arrested citizens or tried to arrest native americans.
Re:
America has a long history of abducting citizens for being the wrong colour and dumping them in a country they have no ties to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation
It happened before, it can happen again.
Re: Re:
Yeah, it happened to Cheech Marin!
Re: Re:
Citing wikipedia does help your arguement
Re: Re: Re:
What a useless, snide little comment. That isn’t an academic citation, it’s a link to a common & accessible resource for people to learn about a relevant parallel from history.
Re: Re: Re:2
And this is is a website, not a research paper, so I really do not understand what point you’re trying to make, if any.
Re: Re: Re:2
I apologize. Temporary lack of reading comprehension on my part caused that. I’ve now flagged your comment as insightful to make up for what I just said.
Re:
All it would take is a typo, or being mistaken for someone with the same name, a social media post that’s “too woke”, or no reason at all.
And as I’ve said before, loyalty won’t save you. These are incredibly cruel and evil people. They don’t care who they hurt. It’s all a game to them.
Not a fucking word from the 2A clownshow
They’ve spent the last 200 years cosplaying how they would stop a revolution/invasion/whatever and when the fascists show up, these “patriots” have nothing to say.
Dear 2A nutjobs: Shut the fuck up, from now on.
Signed, actual Patriots.
Re:
Well, they don’t have to shut up. They could also put up. There’s really no third viable option anymore if they want to preserve their integrity.
Re:
One could just as well say that the first-amendment people haven’t done a thing to stop this, so there’s no point letting people have those rights, either, without government pre-approval.
When people don’t like something in the Constitution, they should get it amended, instead of having the courts “cosplay” their way around it.
Re: Re:
Does that apply to Trump v. Anderson? Because The SCOTUS had to ignore the literal text of the 14th amendment in order to come to their decision.
Re: Re: Re:
That one’s kind of complicated. Trump didn’t storm the capital, but just egged people on—which is speech. The 14th Amendment does have precedence over the 1st, but does speech count as “engaging in” insurrection? My gut feeling is yes, and Trump should therefore have been ineligible, but I don’t agree it’s as clear as you’re making it out to be.
There are worse examples of SCOTUS ignoring literal text, such as Gonzales v. Raich in which intra-state non-commerce was found to fall under the inter-state commerce clause. By this logic, what could the clause not do?
As to the 14th Amendment, they frequently ignore the equal protection clause, which is why people tried to push the Equal Rights Amendment, even though it didn’t say anything new. The failure of that (which is disputed) was then used as an excuse for more un-equal treatment.
Re: Re: Re:2 interstate commerce
Hardly new or novel. In Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), the court held that growing wheat for one’s own use could be regulated as interstate commerce, because if Mr. Filburn had not grown his own wheat, he might have purchased wheat from out of state.
Re: Re: Re:3
“If you didn’t paint your fence, you might have hired an out-of-state contractor to do it”—so, obviously, the Feds can regulate your choice of color.
“If you imagine a fictional world, you could theoretically write down a story and copyright it, which is a federal function”—so, thoughts can be regulated under the Commerce clause, too.
“Filburn” seems to be where that clause was first given such a broad scope, but I’m sure there were other parts of the Constitution being routinely ignored long before it.
Re: Re: Re:3
Note the big change compared to 1920, though. When the Feds wanted to ban humanity’s most harmful drug, alcohol, they apparently didn’t feel they had the necessary legal authority—so they went through the proper process to get that power. Whereas when they wanted to ban cannabis in 1937, they just seized the power.
Now we’ve got an administration that’s very keen on seizing power, and often have more than a century of precedent to back them up. It was dangerous to let that power grow unchecked, but it took a long time for the dangers to manifest concretely. That’s why some people suggest imagining how one’s worst enemy could abuse a law or a court ruling.
Re: Re: Re:4
Whilst alcohol statistically causes more harm than opiates, for example, that is simply because it is more easily available to the greatest number of consumers, whereas on a physiological level, opiates such as fentanyl have been shown to cause more harm over a much shorter period of time. Remember kids, correlation does not equal causation.
Re: Re: Re:5
I don’t think it’s so simple. There’s also the social acceptability of it; it’s fine to invite a co-worker to a bar, even “to get hammered”, but inviting them to an opium den might get you fired. I’ve also heard that young people find it easier to meet a drug dealer than to get someone to buy them alcohol.
Either way, do the reasons really matter? The USA has declared opioid “epidemics” for a few thousand deaths a year—though it’s now upward of 80,000—-whereas the CDC say 178,000 people per year die from alcohol, and we kind of just ignore that. (And then there are 480,000 deaths from smoking, but I’m not gonna say society’s ignoring that.)
Re: Re: Re:6
As Mark Twain once paraphrased, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Thanks for proving him right.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:2
But you have Democrats in Congress that actually call for violence, the party of peace and inclusion in sighting violent crimes. Their freedom of speech is guaranteed.
Like children throwing tantrums wah wah wah…
Re: Re: Re:3
That’s “parliamentary privilege”, basically, and is extremely common worldwide.
But don’t be fooled into thinking any party is about “peace”. The USA kills people, and always has, and only fringe politicians ever come out against that—whether in reference to the death penalty, the military, or the USA’s absurd propensity to get involved in foreign wars.
Re: Re: Re:2 Egging the crowd to storm the capital
For people who are not rich and far right, that’s called incitement and gets you in trouble with FBI even before someone acts on your pressure.
It’s one of the exceptions to first amendment protections, and people got nervous when Sarah Palin was calling for lone wolves who might intervene regarding popular Democrats at the time.
But then, she’s far right and rich, so she got a pass, but if that triggered controversy then, actively sending a crowd to march on the capital and intervene with an election process should be well beyond any line.
Re: Re: Re:3
Yes, that’s one of the ways in which courts refuse to uphold the law, which is quite clearly written and lacks any such exception.
Re: Oh they're saying plenty, specifically 'Go Trump!'
Turns out that all those ‘We need all these guns in order to stop the government from trampling all over the rights of the people’ excuses only applied when the ‘wrong'(read: democrat) government was in power.
When it’s their side going full dictatorship…
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re:
Funny how the left could have easily used those same excuses to be better prepared for this themselves but were too busy crapping themselves in terror at the very sight of the bits of metal.
But we’ll be fine, you guys are protesting harder than ever and they’ll definitely listen!
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/18/nx-s1-5300155/trump-dance-performance-protest-kennedy-center-nelken-line
Yes. You are absolutely going to win this one, no doubt.
Re: Re:
Are you finished with this incessant whining about how the streets aren’t yet flooded with the blood of your “enemies” in the name of democracy? Because I’d love to know what exact, specific, non-violent actions you have in mind for meeting this moment.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Re: Re:
The three letter agent is shining so bright as to render the sun irrelevant.
Don’t you have another dance class to take to show those mean ol’ fascists you really mean business this time?
Re: Re: Re:2
I get it now. I really do.
You’re angry that they were out there doing something.
You’ve been going on and on and on about that one protest for weeks now. I’m thinking it’s because you’re pissed off not at the ineffectuality of it, but that it happened at all—that for all the fun of mocking a dance-based protest of fascism, it’s still a protest by way of art and self-expression, and that is what really has you angry.
And I know that now because I figured out what you are.
All this poking and prodding and trying to make me—specifically and only me, by the by—agree with some idea of needing to do “more” is a provocation. It’s you trying to get me to say exactly what you want me to say so you can go back to whatever hole you oozed out of and say “look, I got the dumb liberal to say it’s time for violence” and do some little song-and-dance shit for whoever is listening. And every time I don’t say what you want me to say so you can claim victory, you get angrier and angrier about it, because you clearly won’t leave me (or this site) alone until you get what you want.
And given that baseless (and factually wrong) accusation that I’m a government agent, I’d say you’re one of two things: a right-wing provocateur who’s trying to get me to say shit that will make the government arrest me, or a government agent who’s trying to…well, you get the point. Either way, it’s high time you figured out that I’m not the idiot you think I am. (I’m a different kind of idiot, thankyouverymuch.) You won’t be able to provoke me into breaking my principles in re: violence by insulting me, threatening me, or trying to emotionally manipulate me. I’m not going to give you what you want, and you can either stay mad about that and keep harassing me on a daily basis like a fuckin’ weirdo, or you can leave. Fix your heart or die, I don’t care which.
Re: Re:
I bet your hair smells real nice.
The very idea
The very idea that the US government (Administration) can operate anywhere without oversight of either other equal branch of government is inherently nuts.
CIA black sites: nope
Gitmo: nope
CECOT: oh, sure, also we want 5 more CECOTs please
It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
I feel like there’s too much focus on this one person being (maybe-accidentally) shipped to a foreign torture camp. Due process is important, but I think there’s also some room to be concerned that the USA is shipping anyone off to a “foreign torture camp”. As if legally trafficking people to such a camp would be a-okay.
Re: I too have noticed a dearth of concern that the US does this at all.
More on this, when did this contract between the US and El Salvador begin, and who was sent there before the current abduction and rendering campaign? I can’t imagine any crime so heinous that deportation to such a place is warranted; usually such people end up on death row.
Or have we just discarded the notion of criminality, and all US inmates are now political prisoners? (I’ve been saying this since 2014 if not before, but whatevs.)
Re: kidnaping, human trafficking, treason!
got to start somewhere! it also appears that less then half are even from that country. and when it comes booting border hoppers. they need to go back to there country! not some concertation camp in a foreign country!
Re: Re:
Garcia is a native of El Salvador, but he was specifically exempted from being deported back there out of fear for his life—until the Trump administration said “send him to the concentration camp anyway”, that is.
“Do they just think everyone is fucking stupid?”
It sure seems like it. And that’s become my new argument against supporters:
“You know, they think you’re an idiot… so fucking stupid that they need to do the thinking for you. First they lied to you, and then they kept lying to you, and now they’re acting like you’re too stupid to notice. But you’re not stupid, right? Are you gonna take that kind of shit?”
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Re: Go Trump
This is adsactly what 72 million people voted for. Personally they need to deport not only every illegal, but every foreign student that hates America and supports Hamas
Re: Re:
Question: Should Jews be given special treatment and privileges, even over Christians, by the United States government?
Because I’m pretty sure deporting people who protested the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza without explicitly supporting Hamas are being targeted by the Trump administration for “antisemitism”. That seems to me like the administration is giving favorable treatment to Jews despite the First Amendment’s promise that the government will show no such favor to any religious group.
Or is a right-winger like you okay with that?
Re: Re: Re:
That’s not so much giving “favorable treatment to Jews” than it is “giving favorable treatment to Zionists”. Not all of us Jews are Zionists (some of the biggest anti-Zionist demographics in the US are young Jews), and there are twice as many Christian Zionists in the US as there are there are Jews in the world. If you’re only protecting and listening to a subset of Jews while casting out the others based on what you think Jews should be you’re no “protector of the Jews”, period. If anything, you’re antisemitic (not you personally, Stephen T. Stone, but the impersonal “you”).
Re: Re:
They voted for throwing out the Constitution? I understand people who voted for Trump’s promise to deport illegals, but that’s not what they’re doing right now. They’re deporting alleged criminals, dissenters, and random brown people, claiming they are all criminals without due process
“[and] every foreign student that hates America and supports Hamas”
If you truly believe that, then you are the one that hates America. You might be trolling, but you might be just misunderstanding something. One of the most important things we have here the promise of innocence until proven guilty, with due process given to proving that. To ignore or avoid that is quite literally anti-American.
Shouting to throw out non-criminal dissenters at all is quite unpatriotic. Dissenting, protesting, disagreeing is the foundation of democracy, right next to compromise.
Shouting to throw out anyone without due process is one of the most unpatriotic things you could do. And incredibly stupid, because it sets a precedent for the exact same thing to happen to you, if someone you give that power to suddenly decides they don’t want you around.
I forget exactly how Scott Sharkey’s joke went but it was something like this:
The New York Times: The president has shit his pants.
Press secretary: The president has never shit his pants.
Trump: I shit my pants on purpose!
Every fucking time.
Contract with El Salvador
I’m interested in more info about this part: “The US and El Salvador have a written agreement (which is already pretty unconscionable) that El Salvador will house prisoners sent from America at CECOT for $20k/year per prisoner, but according to the Associated Press, the agreement states that the US has discretion on the “long-term disposition” of the prisoners.”
Can you share a link to that AP article you mention? I didn’t turn it up with a simple Google search. I’m hoping they shared the text of the actual contract itself, or at least more excerpts from it. I would like to know what’s in there.
Re:
Is this text any help? (Found via Startpage.)
The part that Miller convienly leaves out of his “right person sent to the right place, is that not only was he deported to El Salvador, but that he was put in SECOT on his arrival.
If he was just sent to El Salvador, then the US could just give him. A plane ticket back, it’s that he’s held in CECOT that makes getting him back a problem.
The thing is without a criminal conviction (in which Garcia is not alone in those sent to SECOT by Trump, he just happens to be the one non criminal with a withholding order who was sent there) there’s no justification for his continuing imprisonment.
And it would be very easy for Trump to tell Bukele that he’s not a criminal and therefore should be released, or at tell him we’re not paying to detain him any more.
Until there are direct personal consequences, they'll keep doing it.
The White House is clearly testing to see if there are direct consequences to Trump or to any of his principles for their refusal to act according to court demands.
Or in grade school parlance Make me!
As for Miller’s false accusations, do not make me point once again at Sartre’s antisemite quote, which applies entirely here. The president and his principles do not speak in good faith, and at this point it is wrongdoing by the press to pretend they will ever offer trustworthy commentary.
By now FOX News is well established as a propaganda outlet and toxic to its viewership. Those who continue to watch the channel should be regarded as ill with diminished faculties.
Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger: I have directly been assured; [the extermination policy of the German Reich] has personally been denied, to me, by the Führer!
Reinhard Heydrich: And it will continue to be [denied by the chancellery.]
(From Conspiracy, 2001)
We all know the rest of the story, and how it will end if we can’t or won’t stop it.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Once again, nothing new
Bush did this twenty years ago, sending brown people to Guantanamo to be tortured, using dubious legal theories as justification. How short people’s memories are.
Re:
What do you think about the Uyghurs?
Re: Re:
I think they’re not really Chinese, so it’s fine for them to made stateless or killed. Oh, wait. I forgot I’m supposed to be a South African woman.
Re:
Hey do you get social credit points for posting on TD bro?
What about them?
If the response from the court is anything less than an absolute destruction of Trump’s administrations bs then this country has fallen completely.
'Yeah we think you're an idiot and are lying to you, what are you going to do about it?'
Judge Xinis now faces a stark choice: accept these transparent fabrications and help establish a precedent for extra-judicial disappearances, or stand firm against this assault on basic constitutional rights. History is watching.
Time for the judge to either put up or shut up. The DOJ is lying right to their face now both about what’s happening and what other courts, including no less than the US Supreme Court said, so they can either continue indulging their public humiliation fetish by letting the DOJ slap them around or bring the gavel down and apply some actual penalties.
Duh
Even if he was a criminal, he still deserves due process. Human rights don’t end at borders.
My guess on this whole thing:
Re:
Which is why she should add a footnote: “If he doesn’t come back alive, I will issue an order enjoining the gov’t from sending any people to CECOT, as they clearly cannot ensure such prisoners’ release should it become necessary.”
Re: Re: Why TF does CECOT exist?
This is one of those questions that is raised regarding the Auschwitz extermination facility, that a lot of people had to cooperate to finance, charter and build such a facility without any of them deciding this is fucking wrong.
It applies to CECOT as well (also Camp Delta at the Guantanamo Bay military base, which still has detainees in captivity Camp Five Echo is not closed).
I can’t help but think of the torture in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back used to provoke responses. The cruelty is the point.
Re: Inspired by a true story
That he was kidnapped as a favor to Bukele hadn’t occurred to me.
Wow, we have the plot of the next political thriller NYT bestseller.
Sure, the administration has been rather exaggerating the situation.
But the ruling is basically a win for them. The Supreme Court ruled that this was at least to some degree a foreign affairs issue, and that the judiciary will exert only limited power over any foreign affairs.
And they have, of course, left the contours of that entirely unclear (other than that the word “effectuate” is probably too much judicial power over whatever part of this is foreign affairs), ensuring that at minimum one more visit to the Supreme Court will be needed before any actual decisions are to be made.
The regime’s modus operandi of “do it and maybe think about undoing it in 3-4 years when the courts get around to making an actual ruling, at least if other things we’ve done haven’t made it impossible to undo” is intact. Possession remains nine-tenths of the law.
This comment has been flagged by the community. Click here to show it.
Tell me you're unhinged without saying it
This article and the following comments screams unhinged. The guy is a person born in El Salvador. He’s back home, he was here illegally. He was ordered to leave, he made up a lie about a rival drug gang going to off him, it doesn’t exist anymore anyway. Get over it, the POS isn’t coming back.
Re:
Why does the burnt toast smell stupid?
Re:
The only thing unhinged is you and your type supporting illegal, unconstitutional authoritarianism.
He was not. He sought asylum, which did fail, but the immigration court offered him protected status such that he could not be sent back to El Salvador, and on top of that, it granted him the ability to get a work permit and become a contributing member of society, which by all indications he was.
He was never ordered to leave. This is a lie.
Multiple courts found evidence that the claims regarding Barrio 18 were accurate, including tremendous details regarding the threats and extortion they exacted on his family, such that the family was forced to move multiple times. Why do you ignore the courts there and lie about what they said? How are your actions not the unhinged ones anyway?
What makes you refer to him as a POS? Again, multiple courts have found that he has never been charged or convicted of any crime, and there are widespread reports that he was a productive, contributing member of society in Maryland, raising a family.
So what makes him a POS? The color of his skin? The fact that he sought to capture the American dream?
There is only one person in this conversation who is unhinged and a POS. And it’s you who made the original comment.
Re:
Uh, no. Garcia committed a misdemeanor in the way he came to the US, sure, but he subsequently attained legal status. He couldn’t have got his green card if his stay was at all subject to (further) legal proceedings. Why do you think Trump is deporting non-white people without giving them access to their rights to due process?