We’ve noted repeatedly how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired Bari Weiss to run CBS for a very obvious set of reasons: to coddle wealth and power, validate and amplify right wing grievance bullshit, divide and distract the electorate, and undermine real journalism.
And she’s doing all of those things incredibly well.
Weiss’ first major move was to host a town hall with a right wing opportunist nobody was actually interested in. Her second major move? To effectively kill a major 60 Minutes story about the president’s concentration camps. More specifically, to derail a 60 Minutes story focusing on the stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to a brutal prison in El Salvador (CECOT).
CBS announced they were “postponing” the story, which had already seen multiple layers of fact checking and legal review, just three hours before it was poised to broadcast. Veteran 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi was understandably pissed off, and shared a must-read complaint with her colleagues about Weiss’ ham-fisted effort to undermine the network’s journalism:
Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:
It’s quite a letter, which leaked almost immediately:
News Team,
Thank you for the notes and texts. I apologize for not reaching out earlier.
I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.
Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now-after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.
We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.
If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient. If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast.
We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.
These men risked their lives to speak with us.
We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.
CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that “low point.” By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.
We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it.
When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of “Gold Standard” reputation for a single week of political quiet.
I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight. Sharyn
Before killing the segment, Weiss had recommended numerous changes, including adding a new interview with Trump’s unhinged racism-czar Stephen Miller, and replacing the term “migrants” more frequently with words like “illegals.” You know, to be fair and balanced:
“Ms. Weiss first saw the segment on Thursday and raised numerous concerns to “60 Minutes” producers about Ms. Alfonsi’s segment on Friday and Saturday, and she asked for a significant amount of new material to be added, according to three people familiar with the internal discussions.
One of Ms. Weiss’s suggestions was to include a fresh interview with Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown, or a similarly high-ranking Trump administration official, two of the people said. Ms. Weiss provided contact information for Mr. Miller to the “60 Minutes” staff.
Ms. Weiss also questioned the use of the term “migrants” to describe the Venezuelan men who were deported, noting that they were in the United States illegally, two of the people said.”
Alfonsi notes that the 60 Minutes team had already asked for comment from the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security. She also noted that Weiss had basically implemented a “kill switch” for any journalism the Trump White House finds inconvenient.
One presumes they found this particular story extra problematic not just because it exposes the Trump administration’s brutal and unconstitutional industrialized racism machine, but because it humanized Venezuelans at a time when the administration is trying to inflame racial tensions to justify its illegal, militaristic pursuit of Venezuelan precious metal and oil resources.
CBS, of course, wasn’t exactly a bastion of independent, hard-nosed journalism before Weiss and Ellison came to town. The network’s very first response to authoritarianism was to hire more right wing voices. Like many media outlets, it had already been compromised by generational bullying by the U.S. right wing, designed to discredit all factual opposition of right wing ideology for having a “liberal bias.”
Weiss was just hired to finish the job.
The latest paper-edition of the Onion satirical newspaper put it pretty well:
This should not have surprised anybody who has been paying attention. As noted previously, Weiss doesn’t have any actual experience in journalism (certainly not enough to warrant the promotion). She’s an opportunistic, contrarian-for-contrarianism’s-sake troll who built a blog dedicated to culture war grievance and lazy engagement bait.
Billionaires hired Bari Weiss to inflame cultural divides, disorient the public, and undermine journalism. They fire real journalists and replace them with Weiss (and others like her) to divide and distract the electorate from the actual causes of most U.S. dysfunction: usually unchecked corporate power, extreme wealth disparity, corruption, and our increasingly sociopathic, technofascist billionaire class.
Weiss part of an army of fake journalists employed by U.S. billionaires for this purpose (aided in some instances by hostile foreign intelligence), and despite the agenda never being subtle, the consolidated corporate media (the remnants of which Ellison is steadily trying to buy up and dominate) is utterly incapable of being honest with itself about any of it. Quite by design.
I see a lot of commentary pointing out that “Bari Weiss isn’t very good at journalism,” which distracts from the point that she wasn’t hired for journalism. She was hired to blow smoke up the ass of establishment right wing power, whether that’s Trump’s concentration camps or Netanyahu’s industrialized murder of toddlers.
If Weiss gets fired sometime next year it won’t be because she’s a terrible journalist that undermined the outlet’s already sagging credibility, it will be because she’s a clumsy propagandist and a ratings bore.
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.
Stephen Miller claims on Fox News that returning the Maryland father who was wrongly deported to El Salvador would constitute a "kidnapping" and "invasion of El Salvador's sovereignty.""He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador," Miller lies. "This was the right person sent to the right place."
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 coursethe 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 orderproperly requires the Government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvadorand 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.
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.
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.
In a stunning White House appearance that should alarm anyone who cares about constitutional rights, democracy, the rule of law or anything of the sort, Donald Trump and Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele openly defied a Supreme Court order while discussing plans to expand El Salvador’s notorious detention system to imprison US citizens without due process. The meeting, which came just days after Trump admitted the US could retrieve Abrego Garcia from unlawful detention in El Salvador, devolved into the two leaders joking about imprisoning anyone while promoting a chilling vision of “liberation through incarceration.”
We had just posted our last article about how Donald Trump has admitted he could order Abrego Garcia returned to the US (as the Supreme Court has directly instructed the Trump admin to do) before meeting with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele. We wondered if reporters would ask both Bukele and Trump about this, and they did. The answers are beyond stupid.
When a reporter asked Trump about his earlier comments saying that if the Supreme Court said to return Garcia to the US then the US government should follow through and have Garcia returned, Trump scolded the reporter:
Why don’t you just say, ‘isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’ Why can’t you just say that? Why do yo go over and over and that’s why nobody watches you anymore. You know you have no credibility.
Literally, all the reporter did was ask him about his on-the-record comments from three days ago.
As for the specific question about returning Garcia, Trump passed the question (after also mocking the news station the reporter worked for) to Attorney General Pam Bondi who was there:
Bondi on Garcia: "That's up for El Salvador if they want to return him. That's not up to us."
Bondi responded with a series of false claims about both Garcia and what the Supreme Court actually ordered. Let’s break down each lie.
First, Bondi claimed:
First, and foremost, he was illegally in our country. He had been illegally in our country. And in 2019 two courts, an immigration court and an appellate immigration court ruled that he was a member of MS-13 and he was illegally in our country. Right now, it was a paperwork… it was additional paperwork had needed to be done.
This is demonstrably false. As the Fourth Circuit noted with regards to Garcia, not only has the government presented no evidence that Garcia is a member of MS-13, but they actually abandoned this claim in court.
Finally, I turn to the Government’s assertion that the public interest favors a stay because Abrego Garicia is a “prominent” member of MS-13 and is therefore “no longer eligible for withholding relief.” …. Whatever the merits of the 2019 determination of the Immigration Judge (“IJ”) regarding Abrego Garcia’s connection to MS-13,the Government presented “[n]o evidence” to the district court to “connect[] Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or any other criminal organization.”… Indeed, such a fact cannot be gleaned from this record, which shows thatAbrego 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.… The balance of equities must tip in the movant’s favor based on the record before the issuing court. An unsupported — and then abandoned — assertion that Abrego Garcia was a member of a gang, does not tip the scales in favor of removal in violation of this Administration’s own withholding order
The Fourth Circuit further noted:
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.”
But Bondi wasn’t done with the lies. She also claimed:
That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us. The Supreme Court ruled, President, that if El Salvador wants to return… this is international matters, foreign affairs… if they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning: provide a plane.
That’s false. As we noted earlier today, the Supreme Court’s ruling directly says that the administration should “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.” For Bondi to claim this means that if El Salvador “wants” to send him back they can send a plane is simply untrue.
A reporter then asked Bukele the same question, leading to an even dumber response:
COLLINS: Can President Bukele weigh in on this? Do you plan to return Garcia?BUKELE: How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I'm not going to do it. The question is preposterousTRUMP: These are sick people
Bukele: Are you suggesting I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right? How can I smuggle… how can I return him to the United States? Like… I smuggle him into the United States, what would you do? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.
Reporter: But you could release him in El Salvador?
Bukele: Yeah, but I’m not going to release him. I mean I’m not very fond of releasing terrorists in our country. I mean we just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western hemisphere and you want us to go back, releasing criminals, so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? No. [Laughs] That’s not going to happen.
Trump: [points to reporters] Well, they would love to have criminals released into our country. They would love it. They’re sick. [Points to reporters again] These are sick people.
Again, all of this is nonsense. Garcia is not a terrorist or a criminal. Again, the Fourth Circuit ruling made that clear. Second, there’s no “smuggling” involved. Literally seconds before this exchange, Bondi claimed (incorrectly as a matter of law) that the only thing the Supreme Court ordered them to do was to send a plane if Bukele agreed to release Garcia. So, literally the whole repetitive thing about “smuggling a terrorist into the US” is wrong on both key points: it’s not a terrorist and it wouldn’t be smuggling.
Bukele’s tangent about the “murder capital of the world” is also nonsense. Again, no one has said that Garcia has murdered anyone. Or that he’s violent. Or a criminal. Indeed, the US government had admitted that he’s lived a non-violent, non-criminal life in the US for many years.
All of this is framing basic due process rights as a threat to public safety, a rhetorical trick that autocrats have used throughout history to justify extrajudicial detention. No one should be falling for it here.
As for Trump saying the US media would love it if criminals were released into the US, I should remind you that the person who did the biggest mass release of criminals into the US was Donald Trump when he pardoned all of the convicted January 6th Capitol insurrectionists.
So, let’s be clear about this, because what happened in the White House today is absolute bullshit. The Supreme Court ordered the US government to see what could be done about getting Garcia back, acknowledging (as the US government had originally done, though they’re now trying to retcon in something else) that the government was forbidden by law from sending Garcia to El Salvador.
The US government has a contract with El Salvador that explicitly calls out that the US gets the “decision” on those prisoners’ “disposition.” Thus, the US can easily tell El Salvador to send Garcia back. Bukele’s false claims about “smuggling a terrorist” into the US are unrelated to the issue at hand. Both of them are lying in pursuit of building modern concentration and torture camps.
But the most chilling revelations came from an unguarded moment before the official White House stream began. In footage captured by Bukele’s team, Trump can be heard urging the construction of five more CECOT-style camps, specifically mentioning his desire to send “homegrown” — meaning US citizens — to these facilities:
Trump to Bukele: "Home-growns are next. The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places. It's not big enough."
When reporters later pressed him on this point, Trump didn’t back down. Instead, he openly endorsed the idea of sending US citizens to Salvadoran torture hellholes:
REPORTER: You mentioned you're open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens but aren't criminal to El Salvador. Does that include US citizens?TRUMP: If they are criminals and hit people with baseball bats, if they rape 87 year old women, yeah. Yeah. That includes them. I'm all for it.
Trump’s sudden concern about “criminals that rape women” rings particularly hollow coming from someone who famously boasted about sexually assaulting women and who was found liable for sexual assault. But the exchange got even more chilling when Bukele introduced his Orwellian concept of “liberation through imprisonment,” which had Trump practically giddy with excitement.
Bukele: They say that we imprisoned thousands. I say we liberated millions […] to liberate that many you have to imprison some.Under Bukele, more than 2% of El Salvador's population is now incarcerated without due process, the highest proportional incarceration rate in the world.
Bukele: Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands. I like to say that we liberated millions.
Trump [leaning in and looking excited]: That’s very good!
[Everyone laughs]
Trump: Who gave him that line? You think I can use it? [Laughs]
Bukele: In fact, Mr. President, you have 350 million to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. [shrugs] That’s just the way it works.
Let’s be absolutely clear about what we witnessed today: A foreign dictator stood in the White House and openly suggested that the path to “liberating” 350 million Americans requires imprisoning those deemed problematic — with the obvious implication (given how things have gone so far) being that this should happen without charges, without trials, without due process. And the President of the United States not only agreed, but was enthusiastic about adopting this framework of authoritarian repression.
If you don’t see all of this as one of the darkest days in American history, in which the President is openly embracing disappearing people without due process in the name of “liberty,” you are a part of the problem. Fascism has risen in America, and it is being aided by a foreign dictator whom Trump admires.
Here’s quite an example of the Streisand Effect. Buzzfeed investigative reporters have an incredible new series of stories about the massive new prison/concentration camps built in China to house the various Muslim minority populations they’ve been imprisoning (Uighurs, Kazakhs and others). But what’s relevant from our standpoint here at Techdirt is just how they were able to track this information down. As revealed in a separate article, Buzzfeed’s reporters effectively used the Streisand Effect. They looked at the maps provided online by the Chinese internet giant Baidu and spotted a bunch of areas that were “blanked out.” The reporters noticed that this graying out was deliberate and different than the standard “general reference tiles” that Baidu would show when it didn’t have high resolution enough imagery.
Once they realized that something must be going on in those spots, they found many more examples that matched in places where the reported complexes were:
Once we found that we could replicate the blank tile phenomenon reliably, we started to look at other camps whose locations were already known to the public to see if we could observe the same thing happening there. Spoiler: We could. Of the six camps that we used in our feasibility study, five had blank tiles at their location at zoom level 18 in Baidu, appearing only at this zoom level and disappearing as you zoomed in further. One of the six camps didn?t have the blank tiles ? a person who had visited the site in 2019 said it had closed, which could well have explained it. However, we later found that the blank tiles weren?t used in city centers, only toward the edge of cities and in more rural areas. (Baidu did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)
And then it was only a hop skip and a jump to finding more such tiles… and then cross referencing them with satellite imagery from other sources — including Google Earth, Sentinel Hub, and Planet Labs. And, voila:
We quickly began to notice how large many of these places are ? and how heavily securitized they appear to be, compared to the earlier known camps. In site layout, architecture, and security features, they bear greater resemblance to other prisons across China than to the converted schools and hospitals that formed the earlier camps in Xinjiang. The newer compounds are also built to last, in a way that the earlier conversions weren?t. The perimeter walls are made of thick concrete, for example, which takes much longer to build and perhaps later demolish, than the barbed wire fencing that characterizes the early camps.
In almost every county, we found buildings bearing the hallmarks of detention centers, plus new facilities with the characteristics of large, high-security camps and/or prisons. Typically, there would be an older detention center in the middle of the town, while on the outskirts there would be a new camp and prison, often in recently developed industrial areas. Where we hadn?t yet found these facilities in a given county, this pattern pushed us to keep on looking, especially in areas where there was no recent satellite imagery. Where there was no public high-resolution imagery, we used medium-resolution imagery from Planet Labs and Sentinel to locate likely sites. Planet was then kind enough to give us access to high-resolution imagery for these locations and to task a satellite to capture new imagery of some areas that hadn?t been photographed in high resolution since 2006. In one county, this allowed us to see that the detention center that had previously been identified by other researchers had been demolished and to find the new prison just out of town.
In other words, the Chinese government’s efforts to suppress the existence of these concentration camps helped reporters locate them. It’s long been known that internet maps in China were slightly off in China, in part due to deliberate obfuscation on geographic data, but the idea that they’d fuzz out maps in a way that now reveals just how massive their concentration camps are is fascinating (and, of course, troubling).
The more light that can be shed on what China is doing to Muslims in that country, the better. And the fact that its own ham-fisted attempts at censorship helped enable reporters to discover the extent of its concentration camps is clearly noteworthy.
