The man who never expected to be the public face of the Trump administration’s shotgun approach to deportation is, yet again, being given a set of untenable options and expected to pick one of them. And when he refused to accept the bad choice they gave him, they arrested him this morning at his mandated ICE check-in and announced they’re just going to send him to Uganda.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was originally swept up by ICE and sent to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison, despite have a clear court order that he could not be deported to El Salvador.
Garcia is from El Salvador. Although he’d clearly like to remain in the States with his family, if he had to be removed from the US, he’d prefer to be sent to nearby Costa Rica, which has promised to grant him status, rather than left to rot in a prison overseen by the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” (or an American prison on totally trumped up charges that don’t pass the laugh test).
Garcia has been yanked around by the Trump administration, which has vehemently refused to take even the smallest loss in the War on asylum seekers, even if doing so might have resulted in larger wins later. This yanking around extended to a federal court, where DOJ prosecutors and DHS legal advisors repeatedly tested the patience of multiple presiding judges.
After weeks of claiming it was impossible to retrieve Garcia from the Salvadoran hellhole the administration had sent him to, Garcia was suddenly returned to the United States. While that may have been good news, the rest of it wasn’t. The government still wanted to make Garcia pay for refusing to accept his unlawful punishment silently. It threw the book at him upon his return, claiming Garcia was nothing more than a human trafficker — something it based solely on a 2022 traffic stop where Garcia wasn’t even cited, much less arrested for any criminal activity whatsoever. Two separate courts found the entire claim by the US government preposterous and ordered him released from jail.
The federal government is trying to force Kilmar Abrego Garcia to accept a guilty plea or face deportation to Uganda, his attorneys claimed in a filing on Saturday.
The Salvadoran man, who was wrongly deported in March before being brought back to the United States to face human smuggling charges, was released from criminal custody in Tennessee and sent back to Maryland on Friday.
After Abrego Garcia declined an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail and pleading guilty to the human smuggling charges, his attorneys say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement informed them that he could be deported to Uganda and ordered him to report to their office in Baltimore on Monday.
This is just more pure cruelty from a president who’s made that his presidential brand. Costa Rica would be the obvious choice when the only other option is Uganda, one of the poorest nations in the world. But Costa Rica is only an option if Garcia pleads guilty to fake charges and serves time in prison. If he wants to remain a “free” man, he must subject himself to being involuntarily displaced yet again, unceremoniously deposited in one of the worst places this cruel and unusual administration can think to send him.
The DOJ, of course, refuses to address the allegations made by Abrego Garcia’s lawyers. Instead, its statement says nothing about the pressure it’s applying. Nor does it explain why the government has decided on Uganda as the final destination for Garcia should he refuse to give it the guilty plea it sorely needs to justify its heinous actions after the fact. And rather than actually dealing with this appropriately, they just decided to arrest him and announce the plan to send him to Uganda. It’s pretty clear that the choice of Uganda is about further punishing Garcia for existing and trying to exercise his own rights.
This came a few hours after Abrego Garcia filed a lawsuit to try to block ICE from doing this.
All of this is so blatantly obvious retaliation for making the Trump administration look bad. They wanted quiet acquiescence as they illegally human trafficked hundreds of people to a foreign gulag, and now they’re taking it out on one guy for daring to ask to have his basic rights respected. It’s a sad show from a pathetic Trump administration that is simply unable to handle anyone pointing out their mistakes.
This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0license.
Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his hands, poured filthy water into his ears and threatened to beat him if he didn’t kneel alongside other inmates and lick their backs.
Now that he’s free, Juan José Ramos Ramos, 39, insists he’s not who President Donald Trump says he is. He’s not a member of a gang or an international terrorist, just a man with tattoos whom immigration agents spotted riding in a car with a Venezuela sticker on the back.
Now that he’s free, Andry Omar Blanco Bonilla, 40, said he wondered every day of his time in prison whether he’d ever hold his mother in his arms again. He’s relieved to be back home in Venezuela but struggles to make sense of why he and the other men were put through that ordeal in the first place.
“We are a group of people who I consider had the bad luck of ending up on this black list,” he said.
These are the accounts being shared by some of the more than 230 Venezuelan men the Trump administration deported on March 15 to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador known as CECOT. Throughout the men’s incarceration, the administration used blanket statements and exaggerations that obscured the truth about who they are and why they were targeted. The president has both hailed the men’s removal as a signature achievement of his first 100 days in office and touted it as a demonstration of the lengths his administration was willing to go to carry out his mass deportation campaign. He assured the public that he was fulfilling his promise to rid the country of immigrants who’d committed violent crimes, and that the men sent to El Salvador were “monsters,” “savages” and “the worst of the worst.”
Few cases have gotten as much attention as the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. They were deported against the instructions of a federal judge, frog-marched off American planes and forced to kneel before cameras and have their heads shaved. The administration rebuffed requests to confirm the men’s names or provide information about the allegations it had made against them. Meanwhile, the deportees were held without access to lawyers or the ability to speak to their families. Then, 12 days ago, they were returned to Venezuela in a prisoner swap.
Now that they’re home, they’ve begun to talk. We interviewed nine men for this story. They are bewildered, frightened, angry. Some said their feelings about what happened were still so raw they had trouble finding words to describe them. All of the men said they were abused physically and mentally during their imprisonment. Their relatives say they, too, went through hell wondering whether their loved ones were alive or dead, or if they would ever see them again. All the men said they were relieved to be free, though some said their release was proof the U.S. had no reason to send them to prison to begin with.
Blanco, for example, has no criminal record in the U.S., according to the government’s own data. His only violation was having entered the country illegally. He’d come because he wasn’t earning enough to help his parents and support his seven children, ages 2 to 19, after his family’s wholesale dairy and deli supply business failed. He arrived in December 2023 and turned himself in to immigration authorities in Eagle Pass, Texas, to request asylum. Then he was released to continue his immigration process.
Afterward, Blanco moved to Dallas and found work delivering food. In February 2024, he accompanied his cousin to a routine appointment with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials. While he was there, he decided to notify the agency that he’d changed his address. On his way out of the building, an immigration agent stopped him and asked about his tattoos. He has several of them, including a blue rose, a father hugging his son behind railroad tracks and a clock showing the time his mother was born.
He said the tattoos signified his affection for his family, not evidence of affiliation with a gang. Records show the officials didn’t believe him and detained him. While in custody, a judge ordered his deportation. However, because Washington and Caracas don’t have diplomatic relations, the Venezuelan government was refusing to accept most deportees from the United States at the time. Immigration officials released Blanco back into the U.S. until they could send him home.
For the next seven months, Blanco continued on in Dallas and picked up additional work as a mechanic. Then, shortly after Trump was inaugurated, ICE officers asked Blanco to come in for another appointment and detained him. A month later, despite Venezuela agreeing to take back some deportees, Blanco was on one of three planes bound for El Salvador.
“From the moment I realized I was in El Salvador and that I would be detained, it was anguish,” he said. “I was shaken. It hit me hard. Hard, hard, hard.”
To deport the Venezuelans, Trump invoked an obscure law from the 1700s known as the Alien Enemies Act. He declared that the men were all part of a Venezuelan prison gang called Tren de Aragua that was invading the United States. Within days, CBS News published a list of the men’s names, and there were anecdotal reports indicating that not all of the deportees were hardened criminals, much less “savages.” By early April, several news organizations had reported that the majority of the men did not appear to have criminal records.
Administration officials dismissed the reports, saying that many of the deportees were known human rights abusers, gang members and criminals outside of the U.S. The fact they hadn’t committed crimes in the United States, they said, didn’t mean they weren’t a threat to public safety.
When asked for comment for this story, Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, called ProPublica a “liberal rag hellbent on defending violent criminal illegal aliens who never belonged in the United States.” She added, “America is safer with them out of our country.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson echoed the White House’s claim. “Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
The fact that border encounters have plummeted to record lows after reaching record highs during the Biden presidency suggests that the administration’s efforts are having the effect that Trump intended. After what happened to him, Colmenares said he didn’t think migrating to the U.S. was safe anymore.
He’d been a youth soccer coach in Venezuela before setting off for the U.S. He followed the rules and got an appointment to approach the U.S.-Mexico border last October, as had more than 50 of the men. At the appointment, Colmenares said an agent pulled him aside to take pictures of his many tattoos — then detained him. He never set foot in the U.S. as a free man.
“The country with the Statue of Liberty deprived us of our liberty without any kind of evidence,” he said in an interview two days after he was returned to his family. “Who is going to go to the border now, knowing that they will grab you and put you in a prison where they will kill you?”
The men we interviewed said the terror they felt in El Salvador began almost immediately upon arrival.
Salvadoran police boarded the planes and began forcing the shackled men off — shoving them, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with their batons. Five said they saw flight attendants crying at the sight.
“This will teach you not to enter our country illegally,” Colmenares said one ICE official told him in Spanish. He wanted to explain that wasn’t true in his case but could tell there was no point. He got off the plane and was loaded onto a bus to prison.
Once inside, guards stripped them down to white boxers and sandals. Those who tried to refuse to have their heads shaved were beaten. Blanco said he heard their screams and didn’t dare resist. Humiliated and enraged, he did as he was told: head down, body limp.
They were loaded up again on the buses and taken to another part of the compound. Blanco said the shackles were so tight that he couldn’t walk as fast as the guards wanted, so they beat him until he passed out and dragged him the rest of the way. Inside, they dropped him so hard that his head banged on the floor. As he opened his eyes and saw the guards, bright lights and polished concrete floor, he asked: “God, why am I here? Why?”
The men said beatings by the guards were random, severe and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets. One man we spoke to said he suspects he will have a lasting injury from a hard kick to the groin.
Colmenares recalled seeing one man defecate all over himself after a particularly severe beating. Guards laughed at him and left him there for a day, saying that the Venezuelans weren’t “real men.”
Just as vicious, the men said, was the psychological abuse. They lost track of the days because they were never allowed outdoors. Blanco said that whenever he asked a guard for the time, they’d mock him: “Why do you want to know what time it is? Have somewhere to be? Is someone waiting for you?”
Over and over, the men said, the guards called them criminals and terrorists and sons of bitches who deserved to be locked up. They said the guards told them so often that they were nobodies and that no one, not even their families, cared about them that some started to believe it.
The men said they waged at least two dayslong hunger strikes, skipping the beans, rice and tortillas they were fed most days, to demand an end to the abuses and an explanation for why they were in prison. “They told us nothing about how the process was going, what was going to happen to us, when we were going to see a judge, when we were going to see an attorney,” Ramos said.
Several of those interviewed said suicide crossed their minds. Ramos said he thought: “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience. Being woken up every day at 4 a.m. to be insulted and beaten. For wanting to shower, for asking for something so basic. … Hearing your brothers getting beaten, crying for help.”
Four talked about a man who started cutting himself and writing messages on the walls and sheets with his blood: “Stop hitting us.” “We are fathers.” “We are brothers.” “We are innocent people.”
Some of them became friends. They made playing cards out of juice boxes and soaked tortillas in water and shaped the cornmeal into dice. They talked about their families and wondered if anyone knew where they were. They prayed.
About three and a half months into their detention, the men said they noticed a change in the guards and in the conditions in the facility. They were beaten less frequently and less severely. They were given ibuprofen, antibiotics and toothbrushes. They were told to shave and shower. And a psychologist came in to evaluate them.
Then, sometime after midnight on July 18, guards began banging their batons on the bars of the men’s cells. “Everyone take a shower,” they yelled.
This time, when Blanco asked for the time, a guard gave it to him. It was 1:40 a.m.
Photographers and reporters were allowed into the facility. Blanco wondered whether he was about to be a part of a publicity stunt. He told himself he wouldn’t give them what they wanted. No smiles for the camera.
Then, a top Salvadoran official walked in. “You are leaving.”
In a brief phone interview, Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president, denied any mistreatment and pointed to videos of the men looking unscathed as they left the prison as proof they were in good shape. He declined to comment on what role, if any, the U.S. had played in what happened to the men while they were in El Salvador. However, according to court records, the Salvadoran government previously told the United Nations that while it was physically holding the men, they remained under U.S. jurisdiction.
The Trump administration pledged millions of dollars to El Salvador to hold the deportees in CECOT.
Natalia Molano, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the U.S. is not responsible for the conditions of the men’s detention in El Salvador. If there are complaints now that the men have returned to Venezuela, she said, “the United States is not involved in the conversation.”
During his months in CECOT, Ramos said he found solace in the Bible, the only book available. He said he felt particularly drawn to the Book of Job, a wealthy man whom God tested with loss and pain. Despite his losses, Ramos said, Job “never denied God.” He said Job “had a lot of faith.”
That’s how Ramos, a former telephone technician, saw his time in El Salvador: a divine test that he’d overcome with faith. The seven long months it had taken him to migrate from Venezuela to the United States — which involved walking through the treacherous Darién jungle — seemed easy by comparison.
As soon as his family and neighbors got word that he was on his way home to Guatire, just outside Caracas, they cobbled together $20 to help his mother, Lina Ramos, decorate the house and make a meal of chicken and rice with plantains.
Knowing that his mother had marched and fought for his release, that no one had forgotten him and the other men who’d been detained with him, he said, “was the best gift we could have gotten.”
But the effects of what he went through still linger. Now, when he tries to read the Bible, he said, he notices his sight is failing in his left eye. He thinks it was caused by a particular beating, one of many, where guards repeatedly hit him on his ears and head after he tried to bathe outside of the designated time. He said he has no money at the moment to see a doctor. He arrived home with nothing but the clothes he was wearing.
He is sure he’ll work something out, though. He has faith.
In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention.
Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra stared into the camera at his virtual bond hearing. He wore the orange shirt given to inmates at a jail in Laredo, Texas, and headphones to listen to the proceedings through an interpreter.
More than a year earlier, Rodríguez had been convicted of shoplifting in the Chicago suburbs. But since then he had seemed to get his life on track. He found a job at Wrigley Field, sent money home to his mom in Venezuela and went to the gym and church with his girlfriend. Then, in November, federal authorities detained him at his apartment on Chicago’s South Side and accused him of belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
“Are any of your tattoos gang related?” his attorney asked at the hearing, going through the evidence laid out against him in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement report. “No,” said Rodríguez, whose tattoos include an angel holding a gun, a wolf and a rose. At one point, he lifted his shirt to show his parents’ names inked across his chest.
He was asked about a TikTok video that shows him dancing to an audio clip of someone shouting, “Te va agarrar el Tren de Aragua,” which means, “The Tren de Aragua is going to get you,” followed by a dance beat. That audio clip has been shared some 60,000 times on TikTok — it’s popular among Venezuelans ridiculing the stereotype that everyone from their country is a gangster. Rodríguez looked incredulous at the thought that this was the evidence against him.
That day, the judge didn’t address the gang allegations. But she denied Rodríguez bond, citing the misdemeanor shoplifting conviction. She reminded him that his final hearing was on March 20, just 10 days away. If she granted him asylum, he’d be a free man and could continue his life in the U.S.
I told my editors and colleagues about what I’d heard and made plans to attend the next hearing. I saw the potential for the kind of complicated narrative story that I like: Here was a young immigrant who, yes, had come into the country illegally, but he had turned himself in to border authorities to seek asylum. Yes, he had a criminal record, but it was for a nonviolent offense. And, yes, he had tattoos, but so do the nice, white American moms in my book club. I was certain there are members of Tren de Aragua in the U.S., but if this was the kind of evidence the government had, I found it hard to believe it was an “invasion” as Trump claimed. I asked Rodríguez’s attorney for an interview and began requesting police and court records.
Five days later, on March 15, the Trump administration expelled more than 230 Venezuelan men to a maximum security prison in El Salvador, a country many of them had never even set foot in. Trump called them all terrorists and gang members. It would be a few days before the men’s names would be made public. Perhaps naively, it didn’t occur to me that Rodríguez might be in that group. Then I logged into his final hearing and heard his attorney say he didn’t know where the government had taken him. The lawyer sounded tired and defeated. Later, he would tell me he had barely slept, afraid that Rodríguez might turn up dead. At the hearing, he begged a government lawyer for information: “For his family’s sake, would you happen to know what country he was sent to?” She told him she didn’t know, either.
I was astonished. I am familiar with the history of authoritarian leaders disappearing people they don’t like in Latin America, the part of the world that my family comes from. I wanted to think that doesn’t happen in this country. But what I had just witnessed felt uncomfortably similar.
As soon as the hearing ended, I got on a call with my colleagues Mica Rosenberg and Perla Trevizo, both of whom cover immigration and had recently written about how the U.S. government had sent other Venezuelan men to Guantanamo. We talked about what we should do with what I’d just heard. Mica contacted a source in the federal government who confirmed, almost immediately, that Rodríguez was among the men that our country had sent to El Salvador.
The news suddenly felt more real and intimate to me. One of the men sent to a brutal prison in El Salvador now had a name and a face and a story that I had heard from his own mouth. I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
As a news organization, we decided to put significant resources into investigating who these men really are and what happened to them, bringing in many talented ProPublica journalists to help pull records, sift through social media accounts, analyze court data and find the men’s families. We teamed up with a group of Venezuelan journalists from the outlets Alianza Rebelde Investiga and Cazadores de Fake News who were also starting to track down information about the men.
We spoke to the relatives and attorneys of more than 100 of the men and obtained internal government records that undercut the Trump administration’s claims that all the men are “monsters,” “sick criminals” and the “worst of the worst.” We also published a story about how, by and large, the men were not hiding from federal immigration authorities. They were in the system; many had open asylum cases like Rodríguez and were waiting for their day in court before they were taken away and imprisoned in Central America.
On July 18 — after I’d written the first draft of this note to you — we began to hear some chatter about a potential prisoner exchange between the U.S. and Venezuela. Later that same day, the men had been released. We’d been in the middle of working on a case-by-case accounting of the Venezuelan men who’d been held in El Salvador. Though they’d been released, documenting who they are and how they got caught up in this dragnet was still important, essential even, as was the impact of their incarceration.
From the moment I heard about the men’s return to Venezuela, I thought about Rodríguez. He’d been on my mind since embarking on this project. I messaged with his mother for days as we waited for the men to be processed by the government of Nicolás Maduro and released to their families.
Finally, one morning last week, he went home. We spoke later that afternoon. He said he was relieved to be home with his family but felt traumatized. He told me he wants the world to know what happened to him in the Salvadoran prison — daily beatings, humiliation, psychological abuse. “There is no reason for what I went through,” he said. “I didn’t deserve that.”
The Salvadoran government has denied mistreating the Venezuelan prisoners.
We asked the Trump administration about its evidence against Rodríguez. This is the entirety of its statement: “Albert Jesús Rodriguez Parra is an illegal alien from Venezuela and Tren de Aragua gang member. He illegally crossed the border on April 22, 2023, under the Biden Administration.”
While Rodríguez was incarcerated in El Salvador and no one knew what would happen to him, the court kept delaying hearings for his asylum case. But after months of continuances, on Monday, Rodríguez logged into a virtual hearing from Venezuela. “Oh my gosh, I am so happy to see that,” said Judge Samia Naseem, clearly remembering what had happened in his case.
Rodríguez’s attorney said that his client had been tortured and abused in El Salvador. “I can’t even describe to this court what he went through,” he said. “He’s getting psychological help, and that’s my priority.”
It was a brief hearing, perhaps five minutes. Rodríguez’s lawyer mentioned his involvement in an ongoing lawsuit against the Trump administration over its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans. The government lawyer said little, except to question whether Rodríguez was even allowed to appear virtually due to “security issues” in Venezuela.
Finally, the judge said she would administratively close the case while the litigation plays out. “If he should hopefully be able to come back to the U.S., we’ll calendar the case,” she said.
Naseem turned to Rodríguez, who was muted and looked serious. “You don’t have to worry about reappearing until this gets sorted out,” she told him. He nodded and soon logged off.
We plan to keep reporting on what happened and have another story coming soon about Rodríguez and the other men’s experiences inside the prison. Please reach out if you have information to share.
When you’re shooting for 3,000 arrests a day, it seems kind of pathetic to complain about being mildly bruised a few times a week.
DHS and ICE have constantly used a supposed massive increase in assaults on ICE officers to justify ICE’s tactics: the masks, the unmarked vehicles, the refusal to present IDs or warrants, and untargeted raids of any place the DHS (and its assembly of federal law enforcement officers from the FBI, ICE, CBP, HSI, US Marshals Service, ATF, DEA, and even the fucking IRS) feels its might find some Latino-looking foreigners.
ICE and DHS insist on using only percentages in their press releases and official statements on preferred government jawbone, X. It’s far more impressive to say there’s been a 700% increase in assaults than to say there have been 69 more assaults on ICE officers during the first six months of this year as compared to the same time period last year.
Another 14 assaults have allegedly occurred, which means the increase in assaults now tops 800%. This will only alarm the willfully ignorant, which is pretty much who it’s meant to alarm: the chorus of bigots who fully support an administration composed mainly of bigots.
But those numbers are pathetic, especially given how many officers are in the field. ICE has about 20,000 officers (although not all of them do field word) and is being assisted by another few thousand federal officers pulled from several agencies, in addition to the another few thousand military troops. And yet, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick points out on Bluesky, regular police officers are being assaulted far more frequently than ICE officers and no one’s issuing daily press releases about that:
We now know that an “830% increase” is an increase from 10 assaults in 6 months to 93 assaults in 6 months, at a time when DHS has *massively* increased at-large arrests and officers deployed in the community.For comparison, NYPD is averaging 194 assaults on officers per MONTH.
As this post points out, NYPD officers have been assaulted nearly 200 times per month since the beginning of the year. That’s according to the NYPD’s stats, which are reported in its usual alarmist fashion by the NY Post. According to that reporting, NYC law enforcement officers have been assaulted 970 times since the beginning of the year. Even at its pre-pandemic lows, NYPD officers were getting assaulted far more often (595 times in five months in 2019) than this supposed War on ICE that federal officials keep tweeting about.
And let’s not forget that the word “assault” is extremely slippery when used to reference attacks on officers. According to the government’s own representations and reports about “violence” perpetrated against federal officers (including ICE), the term covers everything from actual violence resulting in injury to things that just might be mildly annoying for federal cops.
Among more than a dozen other allegations facing protesters, federal officers say one person shined a “high-powered handheld laser” in their eyes and that people have kicked tear gas canisters back at them. One criminal complaint says a protester “fell back and donkey-kicked’ (an agent) in the shin.”
While there have been an extremely small number of truly violent attacks on immigration enforcement officers, there’s been far more incidental contact — something that has been provoked by officers seeking to escalate situations, as well as by officers who look more like criminals than cops when they carry out raids and arrests.
The amount of ICE activity has increased exponentially over the past six months. Assaults on officers have only increased incrementally, even given the expansive definition of “assault” law enforcement officers deploy to generate criminal charges against people who have done nothing more than come into contact with ICE against their will.
And that’s why ICE and DHS officials will continue to use the percentage, rather than the actual numbers, when issuing press releases and public statements. 830% sounds impressive. Ninety-three total alleged assaults — against a combined force seeking to perform 3,000 arrests per day — sounds like a rounding error.
The Trump administration’s maximum cruelty version of immigration enforcement has sent swarms of masked officers to anywhere someone looking kind of foreign might be found. Due process has been eliminated, with the administration relying on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to do its dirty, unconstitutional work for it.
To make things even worse, undocumented migrants aren’t even being sent back to the countries they came from. Instead, planes full of deportees are being sent to places like war-torn South Sudan or, more often, a maximum security concentration camp run by the El Salvadoran government.
Those being deported have reason to fear for their safety when the only options are some of the worst places on earth. Normally, that would allow them to petition courts for removal to their home country or, at least, somewhere less hideous than a country currently hosting a war or a maximum security prison run by a sadistic government.
Even if the Trump administration was willing to entertain these petitions (and it definitely isn’t), it no longer has to concern itself with the well-being of the people it deports. The Supreme Court decided late last month that there’s nothing wrong — constitutionally or otherwise — with engaging in human trafficking of deportees… at least not not that it’s the Trump administration doing it.
The government has always had the power to send deportees to countries they’re not actually from. But the government is supposed to — right up until SCOTUS said otherwise — allow deportees to assess their survival chances in yet another foreign country and give them an opportunity to be deported somewhere less dangerous or, preferably, to the country they came from.
Todd M. Lyons, the acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wrote in a memo to the ICE workforce Wednesday that a Supreme Court ruling last month had cleared the way for officers to “immediately” start sending immigrants to “alternative” countries.
People being sent to countries where officials have not provided any “diplomatic assurances” that immigrants will be safe will be informed 24 hours in advance — and in “exigent” circumstances, just six. Those being flown to places that have offered those assurances could be deported with no advance notice.
Why is this expedited removal process so extremely necessary migrants will only have less than a day to assess their survival chances in whatever country the US chooses to dump them in? Well, if you believe DHS head Kristi Noem (and you definitely shouldn’t), it’s the only way to keep this country safe.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, whose agency oversees ICE, confirmed on “Fox News Sunday” that the agency had the policy in place. The memo is “incredibly important to make sure we get these worst of the worst out of our country,” she said.
But that’s not what’s happening. It wasn’t even happening nearly a decade ago, when Trump took his first run at eliminating non-white people from the United States. Back in 2017, ICE couldn’t find enough dangerous criminals to deport, so it basically began falsifying arrest numbers to keep the administration’s top bigots satiated.
This time around, there’s been a whole lot more deportation. And with White House advisor Stephen Miller expecting ICE to perform 3,000 arrests a day (the closest it’s come to this point is still several hundred arrests short of that mark), moving a few numbers around isn’t going to work. To accomplish this, ICE has to basically expel every migrant officers come across, which is why nearly two-thirds of people arrested by ICE have no criminal record at all, and nearly every person arrested (93%) by ICE has never been convicted of any violent offenses.
This isn’t the “worst of the worst” being given what they supposedly deserve. This is thousands of people who work hard, pay taxes, and commit fewer crimes than the white people who seem believe they’re operating at a higher human level than people whose skin is darker than theirs.
Even during the (relatively more sane) first Trump administration, it was clear there just weren’t enough dangerous criminals residing in this country illegally to back up Trump’s bloated, fact-free “invasion” claims. Statistics continually show migrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens while doing other useful things like paying taxes and providing an incredibly reliable workforce.
This time around, the pretense of ejecting dangerous criminals from our country was abandoned pretty quickly. While the government may occasionally claim someone being sent to a foreign gulag is one of the bad guys, for the most part our extrajudicial rendering program is largely based on bogus gang tie assumptions and the administration’s willingness to constantly violate constitutional rights until it’s finally forced to stop.
Trump’s budget bill adds another $30+ billion to ICE’s bottom line, hoping to ensure that the agency will finally be able to achieve the administration’s bigoted wet dream of 3,000 arrests per day. Numerous other federal agencies, including the DEA, US Marshals Service, ATF, and FBI, have been directed to prioritize assisting in immigration enforcement. And the Department of Homeland Security isn’t all that concerned about all the other crime it’s supposed to be keeping tabs on, as this lengthy, extremely harrowing report on the current state of ICE under Trump by Nick Miroff of The Atlantic points out.
At ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which has long focused on cartels and major drug-trafficking operations, supervisors have waved agents off new cases so they have more time to make immigration-enforcement arrests, a veteran agent told me. “No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” the agent said. “It’s infuriating.” The longtime ICE employee is thinking about quitting rather than having to continue “arresting gardeners.”
Serious crimes are no longer worthy of ICE’s attention. Nor are they apparently worthy of the larger investigative unit operated by the DHS itself, which tends to handle more of the human trafficking and child exploitation cases. Along with rerouted agents from other federal law enforcement agencies, HSI is now just supplying warm bodies to help ICE reach its 3,000 arrests per day quota.
HSI agents have been told to shift their focus to civil immigration enforcement and assisting ERO [Enforcement and Removal Operations], effectively relegating them to be junior partners in Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Some agents and officials told me they suspect HSI is paying a price for wanting to distance itself from immigration enforcement.
“Their personnel are being picked off the investigative squads, and there’s only so many people to go around,” another former ICE official told me. “There are national-security and public-safety threats that are not being addressed.”
This is all on top of existing problems that have been made worse by the administration’s focus on immigration enforcement. ICE has never been popular, but morale is falling off a cliff now that officers are expected to work 60-80 hours a week doing things like “chasing day workers across Home Deport parking lots.”
Officers are also seeing plenty of resistance from people who aren’t targets of their enforcement efforts, which has only encouraged more of them to cover up identifying markings, as well as their faces, when performing mass arrests of people who are, for the most part, working hard at their place of employment.
Injecting billions of dollars into ICE isn’t going to fix the morale problem. All it will do is give it bigger problems to deal with while presumably adding even more untrained officers to the mix, which just means the morale problem will spread to the new hires as soon as they realize what they’re in for. And while Trump may send out the occasional “THANK YOU!!!” via social media, this is the day-to-day reality for ICE officers as they try to meet the administration’s 3,000 arrests per day quota.
“No one is saying, ‘This is not obtainable,’” the [ICE] official told me. “The answer is just to keep banging the field”—which is what ICE calls rank-and-file officers—“and tell the field they suck. It’s just not a good atmosphere.”
And, just like the DOJ, ICE is losing lawyers left and right as people who actually know the law find it’s no longer possible to retain their morality and ethical standards while working for the Trump administration.
Adam Boyd, a 33-year-old attorney who resigned from ICE’s legal department last month, told me he left because the mission was no longer about protecting the homeland from threats. “It became a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December,” Boyd said. He told me that he saw frustration among ICE attorneys whose cases were dismissed just so officer teams could grab their clients in the hallways for fast-track deportations that pad the stats. […] The hallway arrests sent the message that the immigration courts were just a convenient place to handcuff people. Some ICE attorneys “are only waiting until their student loans are forgiven, and then they’re leaving,” he said.
Nothing about this makes America any safer. It definitely doesn’t make it any greater, no matter what the hats and t-shirts and loudmouthed bigots wearing them might say. The administration isn’t interested in fighting crime. It’s only interested in silencing dissent, implementing martial law, padding its mass deportation stats, and eliminating as many non-white people from this country as possible.
What the administration has going for it is the fact that the law enforcement business tends to self-select wannabe fascists and gives bigots legal cover for their racist actions. Anyone left at ICE who isn’t in it for the racism will be replaced by people who are there explicitly for the opportunity to oppress minorities. The administration’s blind hatred is leading the blindly hateful to a future only people who still bleach their hoods religiously every Sunday will appreciate. We’re living through a particularly ugly chapter in American history right now. Let’s hope this will just be another thing we learn from, rather than something that’s just setting itself up for perpetual reruns.
Techdirt has just written about how people are using Ring doorbell cameras to warn others in the area about the presence of ICE agents and the risk of possible ICE raids. That’s a good example of using existing technology to monitor the increasingly widespread and brutal activities of ICE teams. But driven by a desire to counter the US government’s moves, people are also coming up with new systems to warn people about what is happening in their community.
For example, the Stop ICE Raids Alert Network sends and receives warnings about nearby ICE activity using text messages. On its home page, it claims to have over 470,000 subscribers currently. That approach, while effective, might be a little basic for some people, and a number of smartphone apps have been created to meet the need for something more sophisticated. One of them is ICEBlock, which came to the notice of a wider public thanks to a CNN report on 30 June. Its developer, Joshua Aaron, told CNN that his free app was designed to be an early warning system for users when ICE is operating nearby. Its slogan is “See Something, Tap Something”:
Users can add a pin on a map showing where they spotted agents — along with optional notes, like what officers were wearing or what kind of car they were driving. Other users within a five-mile radius will then receive a push alert notifying them of the sighting.
Aaron says he does not want users to interfere with ICE’s operations directly, and when a user logs a sighting, the app warns: “Please note that the use of this app is for information and notification purposes only. It is not to be used for the purposes of inciting violence or interfering with law enforcement.” Aaron has also tried to minimize the risk that the platform is flooded with false reports:
Although ICEBlock has no surefire way of guaranteeing the accuracy of user reports, Aaron says he’s built safeguards to prevent users from spamming the platform with fake sightings. Users can only report a sighting within five miles of their location, and they can only report once every five minutes. Reports are automatically deleted after four hours.
Privacy for users is naturally a key concern:
ICEBlock doesn’t collect personal data, and users are completely anonymous, according to Aaron. It’s only available on iOS because Aaron says the app would have to collect information that could ultimately put users at risk to provide the same experience on Android.
Reassuring users of those privacy protections will likely be key to growing ICEBlock’s user base, given how the government is building a database to aid in its deportation efforts.
I’ll have to watch the clip myself but surely it sounds like this would be an incitement of further violence against our ICE officers. As you stated, there’s been a 500% increase in violence against ICE agents, law enforcement officers across the country who are just simply trying to do their jobs and remove public safety threats from our communities.
Despite her use of a misleading statistic about assaults on ICE officers, Leavitt’s criticism of ICEBlock naturally led many people to investigate it. In fact, soon after her comment, ICEBlock became the top social networking app in the App Store— ahead of Threads, WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook — a position it still holds at the time of writing. In the CNN interview, Aaron said his app had more than 20,000 users, but thanks to Leavitt the number is more than ten times that. According to a story on Wired, ICEBlock now has over 240,000 users, and Trump administration officials have threatened to prosecute Aaron for creating the app, and CNN for reporting on it.
Another app that aims to report and share sightings of ICE activities is Hack Latino. On its GoFundMe page, which is no longer accepting donations, the organizer claims “30,000 app users and 50,000 website visitors”. As someone from Guatemala who uses the Hack Latino app explains in an article on the Rest of the World site, the app works like Waze, which provides live traffic updates: “It sends you a message saying there’s a Border Patrol ahead and that you need to turn back. Most migrants are protecting themselves with it.” However, the same article warns that the US government has taken note of the rise of these apps, and is already working to counter them. It quotes Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization that supports migrants and refugees:
The U.S. government, said Rios, is hiring companies that can identify users who post information about raids on these platforms.
“Many of us no longer post all the information,” said Rios. Instead, details on immigration sweeps are “being shared on paper from person to person, or through photos and WhatsApp.”
And so the contest between the hunters and the hunted continues.
“Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recited.
ICE did go to Home Depot, it must be noted. And because it did, Los Angeles is now filled with soldiers — more than 4,000 National Guard troops and another few hundred Marines.
The Trump administration couldn’t find enough criminals to arrest the first time it held power. With the quotas increasing exponentially during Trump’s second term, it’s no longer acceptable to just let ICE be ICE and raid whatever the hell it wants whenever the hell it wants to. It’s not enough to send federal officers into US courts to arrest migrants for daring to show up for their mandated check-ins. It’s not enough to pile as many people with brown skin into a bunch of buses for daring to exist in a nation that used to be considered a melting pot, not to mention a beacon of hope to oppressed people all over the world.
This irrational hatred can’t be satiated using the normal stuff, or even the “new normal” stuff, like daily raids of businesses by ICE. It probably can’t even be satiated by turning ICE into the largest federal law enforcement agency by adding another $60 billion to its budget, as Trump’s budget bill does.
Anything that might slow the removal of migrants from the US must be removed. The administration isn’t willing to tolerate any speed bumps that hinder its maximum cruelty efforts. Within the last two weeks, the administration has taken steps that will grease the already extremely slippery wheels of its mass deportation program.
Department leadership is directing its attorneys to prioritize denaturalization in cases involving naturalized citizens who commit certain crimes — and giving U.S. attorneys wider discretion on when to pursue this tactic, according to a June 11 memo published online. The move is aimed at U.S. citizens who were not born in the country; according to data from 2023, close to 25 million immigrants were naturalized citizens.
Yes, Trump is again playing all the old hits. He brought back the Alien Enemies Act — something made infamous for its abuse of Japanese migrants during World War II — to justify extrajudicial expulsions of migrants, routing them to foreign torture prisons and war-torn nations the US has no interest in making any less war-torn.
This moves the cruelty plan forward a half-decade or so, aligning the Trump administration with Cold War McCarthyism and the expeditious stripping of citizenship of anyone Joe McCarthy and his supporters felt weren’t American enough to remain Americans. This move goes further than earlier denaturalization efforts pursued by President Obama and Trump during his first term in office, rigging the game for the government by allowing it to use criminal charge removal justifications while bringing these cases in civil court.
The DOJ memo says that the federal government will pursue denaturalization cases via civil litigation — an especially concerning move, said Cassandra Robertson, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University.
In civil proceedings, any individual subject to denaturalization is not entitled to an attorney, Robertson said; there is also a lower burden of proof for the government to reach, and it is far easier and faster to reach a conclusion in these cases.
Robertson saysthat stripping Americans of citizenship through civil litigation violates due process and infringes on the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.
Like any bully, the government isn’t interested in a fair fight. It will use criminal allegations during these hearings, while simultaneously denying those accused of full access to their rights.
Migrants not suspected of criminal acts aren’t in the clear, though. ICE may be working its way towards 3,000 arrests a day but that doesn’t mean the administration can’t punish people ICE hasn’t managed to arrest yet. Migrants in the country illegally will no longer be given a warning period before being fined for this civil infraction, allowing the government to run up the tab on several million people.
The Trump administration is looking to speed up its ability to fine those in the United States illegally — up to $1,000 per day — according to a rule set to be published Friday in the Federal Register that was obtained by ABC News.
Currently, the government can alert those in the U.S. illegally 30 days before it starts issuing fines.
The rule proposed by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security allows the government to immediately start fining those in the U.S. illegally.
People who’ve never been told their actions might subject them to daily fines will now be several thousand dollars in debt before they’re even aware this is an option the federal government has at its disposal. Trump started fining migrants during his first term, something that was halted when Biden took office. Trump’s return to the Oval Office brought the fines back. But it’s only now that the heads up issued to migrants is being replaced with federal silence and the steady tick of increasing fines.
The DHS says this is just good government business, pinning the blame on those who will not be notified their continued presence in the United States might be costing them up to $1,000 a day.
The Department of Homeland Security on Friday announced that it would terminate temporary protected status for Haiti, setting the groundwork for hundreds of thousands of Haitians to potentially be deported from the United States once the designation expires later this summer.
The termination of temporary protected status — a designation that shields from deportation people who have traveled to the U.S. from countries that are deemed unsafe because of natural disasters, armed conflict or other extraordinary conditions — would put up to 500,000 Haitians at risk of deportation, as gang violence continues to roil the country.
DHS Bratz doll Kristi Noem says everything is going great in Haiti, claiming there’s no need to extend the temporary protected status. What’s left unsaid is why this is even happening, because there’s no way in hell the Trump administration will ever be honest about its own fear-mongering about Haitian immigrants or its willingness amplify racist conspiracy theories on national TV.
Noem and Trump say Haiti is safe. The State Department still disagrees, even with Marco Rubio currently serving as the top level of mismanagement.
Since March 2024, Haiti has been under a State of Emergency. Crimes involving firearms are common in Haiti. They include robbery, carjackings, sexual assault, and kidnappings for ransom. Kidnapping is widespread, and U.S. citizens have been victims and have been hurt or killed. Kidnappers may plan carefully or target victims at random, unplanned times. Kidnappers will even target and attack convoys. Kidnapping cases often involve ransom requests. Victims’ families have paid thousands of dollars to rescue their family members.
Protests, demonstrations, and roadblocks are common and unpredictable. They often damage or destroy infrastructure and can become violent. Mob killings and assaults by the public have increased, including targeting those suspected of committing crimes.
The airport in Port-au-Prince can be a focal point for armed activity. Armed robberies are common. Carjackers attack private vehicles stuck in traffic. They often target lone drivers, especially women. As a result, the U.S. embassy requires its staff to use official transportation to and from the airport.
This move says two things. First, Trump wants to expel Haitians because he probably believes they’re eating pets or otherwise are too dark-skinned to remain in the United States. Second, it says Haiti probably isn’t safe, but it’s safe enough for people this government no longer wants in this country. Separately, these implicit statements are horrible. Together, they’re just more Trump administration ugliness and bigotry from an administration that truly doesn’t care how awful it is, so long as it still has the support of the most awful people in the nation.
Way back in the day of EARLIER THIS YEAR, people could expect to be subjected to warrantless, invasive device searches only at US borders and international airports. Visa applicants, however, just needed to fill out some paperwork and wait for permission to head abroad to find work and/or continue their education.
Now, you don’t even have to enter the United States to be subjected to rigorous vetting that opens every digital drawer and roots around in your unmentionables/mentions. And pay no mind to Lady Liberty. She’s come a long way, baby.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Under new guidance, we will conduct a comprehensive and thorough vetting, including online presence, of all student and exchange visitor applicants in the F, M, and J nonimmigrant classifications.
To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to “public.”
That’s from Marco Rubio’s State Department, an announcement that makes it clear Trump’s anti-migrant actions aren’t just about ejecting foreigners of the browner-skinned persuasion, but about preventing foreigners from setting foot in the US for any reason at all.
F, M, and J visas are all related to seeking higher education and/or learning trade skills. There’s no free riding here. These aren’t people sneaking across the borders and laying low until they secure permanent residence. These are people who are here for a single purpose and willing to pay for the (actual) privilege of accessing educational and trade services.
But this administration’s inherent xenophobia means even people seeking nothing more than temporary stays in the United States must be free from expressed thoughts that aren’t fiercely patriotic for a country they’re only seeking to visit.
The State Department is now in the business of rooting out wrong think, something it made clear a few months ago:
The cable… states that applicants can be denied a visa if their behavior or actions show they bear “a hostile attitude toward U.S. citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).”
That’s why visa applicants are now “instructed” to set their social media profiles to “public.” “Instructed” is a heavy word. The federal government isn’t asking. This is a mandate. If you want to come to the United States, you have to subject yourself to a thorough vetting of your social media profiles by State Department staff, who will then subjectively decide whether or not you’re pro-America enough to be granted a visa.
It’s always been true that visas are a privilege and not a right. But it’s only since Trump’s been in office that the State Department has decided to be a hard-ass about it. Generally speaking, if someone meets the requirements, they get a visa. While some vetting does happen, it’s usually been done to prevent actual criminals or terrorists from entering the country. Now, it’s just something more the federal government can do to prevent foreigners from entering the country by treating anything not completely supportive of Trump as a reason to reject a visa application.
The United States was once proud of its melting pot status. Now, we’ve got more in common with the Confederacy than the Union that defeated it two decades before the Statue of Liberty was erected as a beacon of hope directed at the entire world.
Much of what we’ve written about regarding the Trump regime’s nonsensical and ridiculous immigration policies have focused on how they’re grabbing people off the streets, or disappearing them to random foreign gulags without due process. But we’ve also talked about the absolute insanity of US immigration policy as it pertains to foreigners traveling to the US on visas. And the most telling thing about recent stories involving tourists being denied entry to the US? Nobody’s surprised by them anymore—even when they involve utterly ridiculous reasons like having a satirical meme on your phone.
We’ve mentioned how the US is now scanning the social media of anyone who wants to visit, and it’s leading to plenty of ridiculous stories that seem likely to cause plenty of foreign tourists to just stay the fuck away.
In the past two weeks, two such stories have made a fair bit of news. First, Aussie writer and former Columbia student Alistair Kitchen told a story of flying from Melbourne to Los Angeles (for a layover before traveling on to New York to visit friends) where he was detained for 12 hours, pressured into revealing his phone contents, and then being shipped back to Australia… because way back when, he had written an article about Palestinian protests at Columbia.
He wrote about the ordeal in the New Yorker, and there are plenty of crazy bits, with the CBP people demanding he unlock a folder on his phone and then scrolling through his dick pics with him being perhaps the craziest part:
He was gone for a long time. I imagined him, in his office, using some new software to surface all the grimy details of my life. Though I’d deleted a lot of material related to the protests from my device, I’d kept plenty of personal content. Presumably Martinez was skimming through all of this—the embarrassing, the shameful, the sexual.
That fear was confirmed. Martinez came out and said that I needed to unlock the Hidden folder in my photo album. I told him it would be better for him if I did not. He insisted. I felt I had no choice. I did have a choice, of course: the choice of noncompliance and deportation. But by then my bravery had left me. I was afraid of this man and of the power that he represented.So instead I unlocked the folder and watched as he scrolled through all of my most personal content in front of me. We looked at a photo of my penis together.
Come to America! Land of the free! Where we detain you for no reason at the border to yell at you about your reporting (free press!), force you to reveal your secrets (no general warrants!), and gleefully scroll through your dick pics together (cruel and unusual).
As Kitchen notes, they had planned to block him from entering all along. While he had done a cursory “cleanup” of his social media before flying to the US, they apparently already had everything they needed.
They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. Officer Martinez intercepted me before I entered primary processing and took me immediately into an interrogation room in the back, where he took my phone and demanded my passcode. When I refused, I was told I would be immediately sent back home if I did not comply. I should have taken that deal and opted for the quick deportation. But in that moment, dazed from my fourteen-hour flight, I believed C.B.P. would let me into the U.S. once they realized they were dealing with a middling writer from regional Australia. So I complied.
Then began the first “interview.” The questions focussed almost entirely on my reporting about the Columbia student protests. From 2022 to 2024, I attended Columbia for an M.F.A. program, on a student visa, and when the encampment began in April of last year I began publishing daily missives to my Substack, a blog that virtually no one (except, apparently, the U.S. government) seemed to read. To Officer Martinez, the pieces were highly concerning. He asked me what I thought about “it all,” meaning the conflict on campus, as well as the conflict between Israel and Hamas. He asked my opinion of Israel, of Hamas, of the student protesters. He asked if I was friends with any Jews. He asked for my views on a one- versus a two-state solution. He asked who was at fault: Israel or Palestine. He asked what Israel should do differently. (The Department of Homeland Security, which governs the C.B.P., claims that any allegations that I’d been arrested for political beliefs are false.)
Then he asked me to name students involved in the protests. He asked which WhatsApp groups, of student protesters, I was a member of. He asked who fed me “the information” about the protests. He asked me to give up the identities of people I “worked with.”
Unfortunately for Officer Martinez, I didn’t work with anyone. I participated in the protests as an independent student journalist who one day stumbled upon tents on the lawn. My writing, all of which is now publicly available, was certainly sympathetic to the protesters and their demands, but it comprised an accurate and honest documentation of the events at Columbia. That, of course, was the problem.
That story got some attention, but not nearly the global attention that the story of a Norwegian tourist, Mads Mikkelsen, who had a somewhat similar experience. In his telling, he was denied entry due to a JD Vance meme on his mobile phone.
Mikkelsen claims that immigration officials stopped him for questioning and quizzed him “about drug trafficking, terrorist plots, and right-wing extremism,” all of which he said was “totally without reason.” He says he was placed in a holding cell.
“They took me to a room with several armed guards, where I had to hand over my shoes, mobile phone, and backpack,” he told Nordlys.
Next, Mikkelsen claims that officials threatened to imprison him or fine him $5,000 if he did not grant them access to his phone, so he did. He said that is when agents found a meme on his device that showed the vice president’s face—digitally altered to make him chubbier, bald, and cartoonish—that became popular after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the Oval Office in February. He claimed they also signaled disapproval to a photo of him with a homemade wooden pipe.
Now, the Department of Homeland Security has denied that he was denied entry for the meme, saying it was actually because he had admitted to past drug use (apparently he admitted to having marijuana twice: once in New Mexico and once in Germany, though he pointed out it was legal in both places — though in New Mexico while it’s legal at the state level, it’s still (stupidly) illegal at the federal level):
That said, the meme (which had already gone semi-viral back in February) suddenly started appearing all over the place, with plenty of people (especially across Europe) using the meme and Mikkelsen’s story to mock both JD Vance and American immigration/visa policies.
It even went all the way up to the Irish legislature, where a politician, Ivana Bacik, held up the meme of JD Vance during questions on legislation.
Here’s the thing that should terrify anyone who gives a shit about America’s global reputation: when told that a tourist was denied entry over a JD Vance meme, nobody’s first reaction was “that’s obviously fake.” Instead, people across the globe nodded and thought “yeah, that tracks.” The fact that this story is completely believable is a damning indictment of where US immigration policy has gone. That’s not the kind of shit the US is supposed to do, and there’s no way that this isn’t damaging US tourism as these stories spread far and wide.
The thing is, as absurd as it is that Mikkelsen was turned away for either the meme or smoking a little pot, as with the Australian writer, Kitchen, the truly horrifying bit was in how they treated Mikkelsen. Lots of people are laughing about the JD Vance meme bit, but nothing Mikkelsen did could possibly deserve this kind of treatment.
He alleges that he was then strip-searched, fingerprinted, had blood samples taken, and was held for five hours before being put on a flight back to Norway.
Strip searched? Blood samples? What the fuck?
Whether Mikkelsen was actually bounced for the meme or the pot is beside the point. The real story is that when the world hears “American border agents detained a tourist over a satirical image of the Vice President,” their response isn’t disbelief—it’s dark laughter and relief that they’re not planning any trips to the US anytime soon.
That’s not the brand of a free society. That’s the brand of an authoritarian state where mocking the leadership gets you disappeared. And if that doesn’t embarrass the shit out of anyone with even a passing familiarity with what America used to claim to stand for, then we’re already further gone than these stories suggest.
