—> US Sends Immigrants to Salvadoran Prison

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“… At an immigration detention facility in Texas that morning, many of the men knew they were about to be deported but thought they were headed home to Venezuela. Some told family members they were even happy that their ordeal in America appeared to be over.

“He was relieved because he was ready to leave the hole where he had been,” Eirisneb Rodríguez said, recounting a call last Friday from her husband, Obed Navas, a barber who lived in Sherman, Texas.

The next night, the Venezuelans stepped off planes to learn they had landed in El Salvador. There, President Nayib Bukele’s government met them with hundreds of soldiers and police officers in riot gear to film their handover and lock them up in the Terrorism Confinement Center, or Cecot, known as the world’s largest prison and home to the country’s most violent gang members.

… The White House signaled that the use of wartime powers to send deportees to a Salvadoran prison and broadcasting their treatment were meant to serve as a deterrent. The Trump administration is “encouraging illegal immigrants to actively self-deport, to maybe save themselves from being in one of these fun videos,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. She described the deportees as “heinous monsters” and gang members who had invaded the U.S. from Venezuela intent on committing violent crimes.

… The Wall Street Journal spoke with the families of seven of the deported Venezuelan migrants who had all left their homes between late 2023 and last year for the U.S., where they applied for political asylum.

Many of the men, who worked as barbers and at other jobs, are married with small children. They were detained in the days after Trump took office in January, accused of being affiliated with TdA and sent to detention centers in Texas.

… Roughly half the 261 deportees were removed under Trump’s wartime authority, according to the White House. Another 101 were removed under Title 8, or regular immigration proceedings, and 23 were members of El Salvador’s MS-13 gang.

… Among those detained was César Francisco Tovar, 23 years old, who had come to the U.S. with his family in October 2023, claimed political asylum and started work in a barbershop. His wife, Yulainy Herrera, said police on Jan. 27 pulled him over in San Antonio, where they had been living, and asked to see his driver’s license.
“… The use of tattoos by Tren de Aragua, a group that began to be noticed in the U.S. about two years ago, isn’t as central to its membership as is the case with, say, El Salvador’s MS-13, said Steven Dudley, co-director of InSight Crime, which tracks organized-crime groups in Latin America.

Herrera said she had now lost all contact with her husband in El Salvador. He has no access to a lawyer and no way to get home to Venezuela, she said.

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… At the time the order was issued on Saturday evening, one plane was still on the ground in Texas and two others were hours from reaching El Salvador. All three landed at Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras—an airport where last month deportees had been transferred to Venezuelan aircraft to go home.

This time, the planes were routed to El Salvador. In Venezuela, families began wondering what happened when they lost contact with their detained relatives. Francisco Javier Garcia, a 24-year-old Venezuelan who migrated to the U.S. to work as a barber, called his mother every day—and then suddenly stopped on Sunday.

Then his mother, Mirelys Casique, saw the video of migrants in El Salvador. She immediately recognized her son.

“It’s my son, I can tell by his ears, his head, his body—I’m his mother,” said Casique. “I felt my heart sink.” …”
 
“… Foreign journalists reporting on the state of exception who fixate on CECOT are likely focusing on the wrong prisoners in the wrong prison. The middle-aged faces and full-body tattoos that appear in the footage from the megaprison suggest that they are gang members who have likely been in prison since well before the state of exception began. (Most Salvadoran gangs abandoned the practice of tattooing their faces years ago.)

In a sample of 1,177 people imprisoned under the state of exception, Cristosal’s researchers found that only 54 had tattoos and only nine of that group were linked to gangs. Of the hundreds of family members of people detained under the state of exception whom Cristosal has interviewed, almost all have been told by prison authorities that their relatives are not being held at CECOT. Prisoners’ relatives were instructed to bring monthly packages of food, medicine, and clothing to older prisons in other parts of the country.

If the bodies of the 85,000 people detained without warrants bear any marks, they are more likely those of scabies and torture rather than tattoos. Testimonies gathered by Cristosal from former prisoners describe horrific overcrowding, disease, and systematic denial of food, clothing, medicine, and basic hygiene in El Salvador’s older prisons. …”
 
It never ceases to amaze me the things that make right-wingers scared.

This guy is basically turning them upside down over a toilet, like some bully with a pip squeak in high school, emptying their pockets to fund his crypto scams with Musk, and they're riding around with black American flags on their trucks like they're in some sort of great battle with a Venezuelan gang no one had ever even heard of before.

I don't make light of mental illness. I am mentally ill myself, as are some others here. And we've had good conversations about that.

But, my god! What in the hell is wrong with these people? It's a mass-produced cultural psychosis that makes them essentially mentally ill, whether or not they would be naturally.

Just dreadfully bored, spoiled stupid people that have to feel like they're they main character in some sort of movie plot.
 
It is unbelievable that we are rounding up people, no due process, not convicted of a crime or even charged with a crime, and sending them to a prison in El Salvador.
And paying El Salvador to take them.

The money we are spending to deport them, we could easily pay enough judges to actually rule on their case, and enough people to process them after their case is heard.
 
It probably shouldn't need to be said, but in addition to violating the constitution, the renditions to El Salvador violate the Geneva Convention, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the federal Torture Victim Protection Act.

Interestingly, the TVPA allows civil suits in personal capacity against anyone who aids or abets torture by a foreign government. Hope you have some nice liability insurance, Pam Bondi, Tom Homan, Marco Rubio, etc. There are plaintiffs' attorneys (top-notch ones) salivating at the opportunities that will be presented.

Note also that the plaintiffs do not have to be US nationals or citizens in a TVPA lawsuit. They don't even have to be a resident. The TVPA is an amendment to the Alien Tort Statute.
 
This is, without question, the most evil thing that the United States has done in my lifetime.
were you alive for Vietnam? Unfortunately, the US did a lot of evil stuff in the 70s and 80s. Maybe more aiding and abetting, rather than direct responsibility, but still.
 
were you alive for Vietnam? Unfortunately, the US did a lot of evil stuff in the 70s and 80s. Maybe more aiding and abetting, rather than direct responsibility, but still.
Well I will give Sringwall some creditif he adds "not in War time" .....
 
That’s true, but those activities were more covert. Now we have an administration that proudly boasts about the evil they inflict.
Also, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib were moral stains during W.’s administration but this is certainly the most in your face we are intentionally taking the Dark Side as a policy matter (as opposed to clandestine or out of control junior officer atrocities). Back during W.’s Administration, Lindsay Graham was one of the most outspoken Senators about Guantanamo Bay abuses, BTW. Now?

crickets GIF
 
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