Trump defies the courts, Sends migrants to El Sal Prison

[Cdub100 3,838]

43 minutes ago, The Real timschochet said:

You’re aware Stephen Miller is Jewish right? 
(He’s a huge weasel too, but I find it amusing that you really like him.) 

There I go judging people by the content of their character again. Thanks for the heads up, and not surprisingly, a Jew in a high-level government position. 

[TimHauck 2,619]

1 hour ago, The Real timschochet said:

You’re aware Stephen Miller is Jewish right? 
(He’s a huge weasel too, but I find it amusing that you really like him.) 

Well Miller is a huge racist, of course @Cdub100 likes him

[jbycho 592]

7 minutes ago, TimHauck said:

Well Miller is a huge racist, of course @Cdub100 likes him

Well, you are a huge racist. 

[SaintsInDome2006 380]

Trump’s 48-hour scramble to fly migrants to a Salvadoran prison

Quote

 

The administration rounded up some of the Venezuelans two days before the flights took off, pressing forward even as Venezuela agreed to accept deportees.

The message from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to El Salvador’s Foreign Ministry outlined an audacious plan: The United States would be sending as many as 500 Venezuelan gang members to the Central American nation, and it planned to do so within 24 hours.

The March 13 communication was part of secretive negotiations with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and served as Rubio’s formal notice that the Trump administration was sending the Venezuelans to be imprisoned there for a year “or until a determination concerning their long-term disposition is made,” documents show. Detainees at the megaprison have no access to lawyers or contact with their families.

A Washington Post investigation shows how officials raced to execute the plan, rounding up some of the men at their homes the same day Rubio’s message went out. And they pressed forward with the removals, even as Venezuela agreed to accept deportation flights, in a high-stakes bid to show power and deter migrants from attempting to cross the border illegally.

The Post examined immigration and court records, and conducted interviews with attorneys, friends and family members, to piece together information about more than 50 of the men believed to be imprisoned at the Terrorism Confinement Center, the megaprison often referred to by its Spanish acronym, CECOT. The review shows that despite the administration’s claims, many of the immigrants sent to El Salvador had entered the United States legally and were actively complying with U.S. immigration rules.

At least two of the men imprisoned in El Salvador had been approved by the State Department to resettle as refugees in the U.S. after extensive vetting by federal law enforcement authorities, documents show. At least four had protections against removal through temporary protected status, often called TPS, granted to those fleeing Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis, according to attorneys for the men or records shared with The Post. Others had been active members of Venezuela’s opposition and had open asylum claims.

On March 15, a day later than Rubio’s message anticipated, the U.S. sent more than 260 migrants, including 23 Salvadorans, to El Salvador. Many had no deportation orders. President Donald Trump invoked the wartime powers of the Alien Enemies Act against the Venezuela-based gang known as Tren de Aragua to remove over 100 of the migrants without giving them a chance to contest their removals.

 

The first flights were over international waters when a federal judge in Washington ordered the Trump administration to turn them around. Instead, they flew to Honduras, where they waited on the tarmac for four hours. Bukele would not allow them to land in El Salvador until the international airport there was closed to commercial traffic for the night, around 10 p.m., according to a U.S. official and an airport administrator. Like others interviewed for this article, they spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss internal matters.

Rubio has said that the U.S. had to send the Venezuelans to El Salvador that day because their own country would not take back alleged gang members. But records reviewed by The Post show that two deportation flights to Venezuela were also scheduled to leave that weekend carrying dozens of alleged criminals, including at least one man Rubio has publicly accused of gang membership.

Those flights were canceled after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, prompting uncertainty about whether Venezuela could still safely send a plane to the U.S. to pick up deportees, according to two people involved in the discussions. Trump’s Alien Enemies Act proclamation says that property belonging to an “alien enemy” and used for hostile activity is subject to “seizure and forfeiture.”

Though Trump administration officials have called the migrants sent to CECOT in mid-March the “worst-of-the-worst criminals,” in court, the government has admitted that many do not have criminal records. Neither the U.S. nor El Salvador has released their names, leaving families to scour unofficial lists and sleuth through videos and photos released by Bukele’s government to determine their loved ones’ whereabouts.

The Trump administration has admitted that it sent one man, Kilmar Abrego García, to El Salvador in error. A federal judge has ordered the U.S. government to return a second man while his asylum claim is adjudicated. The operation was so hurried that officials also flew several women who could not be detained at the all-male prison and had to be returned to the United States. El Salvador also declined to imprison a Nicaraguan the U.S. had sent, fearing conflict with its neighboring countries, court records indicate.

In response to detailed questions from The Post, a senior State Department official acknowledged that the Venezuelan government had planned to accept deportation flights the same weekend as the flights to El Salvador, but dismissed those as “one-offs.”

“The Venezuelan regime began to accept regular repatriation flights of Venezuelan nationals only after the U.S. began the criminal alien deportation flights to El Salvador,” the official said.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said the administration would not “detail counterterrorism operations and foreign policy negotiations with foreign countries for the press.” A Justice Department spokesperson said: “Activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy, remove dangerous illegal aliens from our country, and keep Americans safe.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment.

The Post asked three communications officials in the Salvadoran government to provide the identities, whereabouts and additional information about the deportees transferred to CECOT but received no response.

Rander Peña, Venezuela’s vice minister of foreign affairs, said his government has not received an official list of names of those detained in El Salvador.

The deportations have triggered a standoff between the courts and the Trump administration, which has asserted that its executive power overrides certain due process rights. The administration’s attempts to circumvent court rulings have sparked concerns among some legal scholars of a looming constitutional crisis.

On Thursday, a federal judge blocked the administration from removing migrants in South Texas under the Alien Enemies Act, finding that the president’s invocation of the act had exceeded his authority.

“It’s horrifying,” said Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal, a Salvadoran human rights group. “The Venezuelans have not had a trial. They have not been convicted. They’ve been deported to El Salvador and disappeared into one of the most brutal prisons in the hemisphere. They’re outside the reach of the rule of law at this point.”

***

Roger Eduardo Molina and his girlfriend, Daniela Núñez, arrived at a Houston airport less than two weeks before Trump was inaugurated.

The couple had wanted to start a new life in the U.S., but only if they could do so legally. They applied to resettle through a State Department-run program called the Safe Mobility Initiative that spent several months vetting them through security checks and face-to-face interviews.

In September, they were conditionally approved for refugee status and, after completing the final clearances, given plane tickets to Texas.

“It was a huge blessing,” said Núñez, 30.

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Trump was actively campaigning for president and touting his plan to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, which would allow the government to bypass standard removal proceedings for anyone age 14 or older whom it deemed an “alien enemy.” The 1798 authority had been activated just three times in the nation’s history, all during times of war. It had last been used during World War II, when it paved the way for the incarceration of more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent.

“Those were the old days, when they had tough politicians,” Trump said at a campaign rally in Arizona last year.

More than half a million Venezuelans had entered the United States since 2019, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). And increasingly, Venezuelans became a target in Trump’s remarks.

He falsely claimed that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro had emptied out Venezuela’s prisons in order to flood the U.S. with criminals, and he often spoke of Tren de Aragua, which began in a Venezuelan prison and is now a loosely operated transnational network. Experts who have studied Tren de Aragua say it has not established a strong presence in the U.S., but Trump spoke of the gang as if it were in every American city.

Indeed, the same week Molina was granted refugee status, Trump was blasting Venezuelans at a news conference, suggesting, without evidence, that Tren de Aragua had overrun a city in Colorado.

“They’re taking over the place; they took over buildings,” Trump said Sept. 6. “This is just the beginning.”

Molina, 29, was not politically outspoken, but his family said he caught the ire of a local official aligned with Maduro after he organized a fundraiser on Facebook to improve the soccer field where he played. The official saw Molina’s fundraiser as a jab at the government and its poor maintenance of public spaces. Molina began receiving threats on WhatsApp, Núñez said. The couple fled to Colombia in 2021.

They were prepared to start over again when they arrived in Texas on Jan. 8, in the last days of the Biden administration. Then they were stopped by a CBP officer at the Houston airport.

The officer asked Molina whether he had any tattoos. He showed him the crown on his chest, the soccer ball and forest on his wrists, the palm tree on one ankle and the infinity sign inscribed with the word “family” on the other. The officer told them the tattoos were associated with Tren de Aragua, recalled Núñez, who witnessed one of Molina’s conversations with a CBP officer.

Next the agent looked through his phone. In a WhatsApp group chat that included several friends, Molina had once made a joke about the hamburgers he sold to help support his family. He told his friends that if they didn’t buy his burgers, Tren de Aragua would come after them. It was the kind of joke heard often among Venezuelans living in Latin America, the couple told the agent.

“These aren’t the kinds of jokes we make in my family,” the officer said. The officer detained Molina for further questioning. Núñez was told she could either wait in U.S. detention for her case to be sorted out or could return to Colombia that day. She chose the latter. Molina wasn’t given the option.

Another official asked him whether he was afraid of returning to Venezuela, he later told Núñez. When he responded yes, he was informed he would be taken into custody while his case was adjudicated. Three lawyers with extensive experience in refugee law said they had never heard of a vetted refugee being arrested on arrival.

***

Days after Trump’s inauguration, the new administration began to put in motion plans to speed up deportations.

Trump said he wanted to deport “millions” of immigrants, but reaching that goal would prove difficult. Most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are entitled to an immigration court hearing before they can be deported, including criminals. With the current backlogs, those cases can take months or years to resolve.

In late January, Richard Grenell, Trump’s special missions envoy, traveled to Caracas to meet with Maduro and persuaded Venezuelan officials to temporarily accept deportation flights from the U.S.

The meeting generated international headlines and seemed to signal the level of authority Grenell wielded in the new administration and the contrasting approaches he and Rubio had on Venezuela. While Grenell favored engagement, Rubio had long been a Venezuela hawk keen on applying maximum pressure on Maduro.

Grenell did not respond to questions or an interview request.

Three days later, in early February, Rubio announced an agreement of his own. He said that in an “extraordinary meeting” at Bukele’s lake house, the Salvadoran president had agreed to accept “any illegal alien in the United States who is a criminal from any nationality, be they MS-13 or Tren de Aragua, and house them in his jails.”

About two weeks after Rubio announced the agreement with El Salvador, Trump designated Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations. Experts estimate the number of active Tren de Aragua members in the United States is probably in the hundreds. But U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local law enforcement agencies were announcing arrests of alleged Tren de Aragua members almost every day.

***

In early March, immigration attorneys started receiving reports that Venezuelan migrants were being moved from detention centers around the country to facilities in South Texas.

Among them was Franco Caraballo Tiapa, who was transferred March 8 to the Rio Grande Processing Center in the border town of Laredo. He told his wife he was dressed in red to identify him as dangerous and put into a cell with dozens of other Venezuelans. He had an ongoing asylum case and no criminal record in Venezuela or the U.S., according to government records reviewed by The Post. According to the asylum application he filed jointly with his wife, he had been detained and beaten for participating in political protests in his home country.

While the transfers to South Texas were underway, Maduro on March 10 stopped accepting U.S. deportation flights in retaliation for the Trump administration revoking Chevron’s license to operate in Venezuela.

But Grenell again stepped in and, on March 13, posted on X that he had persuaded Maduro to resume accepting the deportation flights. They were scheduled to restart within 24 hours. That same morning, as Trump’s envoy was announcing his plan, Rubio sent the formal notice to El Salvador about sending hundreds of Venezuelan deportees. Documents obtained by The Post show U.S. officials also planned to send two Salvadoran members of MS-13.

Bukele had specifically requested the return of one of them, high-ranking gang leader Cesar Humberto Lopez Larios, according to the documents. Lopez Larios had been held on terrorism-related charges by the U.S. Justice Department, and authorities said he had information about an alleged secret deal Bukele had struck with MS-13, granting the gang’s leaders money and privileges in exchange for reduced violence in El Salvador. The Salvadoran government ultimately agreed to take up to 300 Venezuelans and the MS-13 leaders, CNN recently reported, citing an internal document.

As Rubio was sending his message March 13, some of the immigrants who would soon be deported to El Salvador were still being taken into custody. On that day, at least seven Venezuelan migrants were detained at their homes, some of them after Rubio’s message was sent, according to interviews.

That morning, officers arrived at the Dallas-area home of Daniel Paz González, a 29-year-old Venezuelan whom a judge had ordered deported after he missed an immigration check-in appointment, according to his sister, Greilys Herrera.

Although they had come looking for Paz, family members said, the officers also arrested his two Venezuelan roommates: Leonel Javier Echavez Paz, his cousin, and Yohan Fernández. Both men had work permits and no removal orders, Herrera said.

“They have tattoos that need to be investigated,” officers explained to Herrera when she went to the house to pick up Paz’s son, her toddler nephew. Herrera described Echavez’s and Fernández’s tattoos respectively as a rose and a Chicago Bulls insignia — popular motifs that immigration officials have said also sometimes indicate gang membership. Independent experts say Tren de Aragua does not use tattoos to identify who belongs to the gang.

While her brother was to be deported because of the judge’s order, Herrera said the officers assured her that her 19-year-old cousin and their friend would later be released. None of the three men were criminals or in a gang, Herrera said.

Documents provided by the family show the three men were transferred to East Hidalgo Detention Center, seven hours south of Dallas but a short, 25-minute drive from an airport in Harlingen, Texas, from which many deportation flights leave.

***

Historic dust storms whipped across much of Texas on March 14, bringing visibility to nearly zero.

The weather forced the cancellation of the deportation flights to Venezuela that Grenell had posted about the previous day, Venezuela’s interior minister announced. The flights had been slated to leave from the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, according to two people familiar with the plan. They were rescheduled for two days later. Manifests show the rescheduled flights were expected to carry 230 Venezuelans to Caracas.

Hundreds of miles to the southeast, the three planes that would fly to El Salvador waited at the Harlingen airport as groups of mostly Venezuelan detainees from East Hidalgo and three other South Texas detention centers were loaded onto buses and told they were going to be deported. Some in the group later told their attorneys and family members that authorities had informed them that they were headed to Venezuela.

Just after noon, an officer told a group of waiting men that the flights were called off and would be rescheduled for the next day, court records show. The migrants were given varied reasons such as “weather” or “a mechanical issue.”

Salvadoran officials had been asking for documentation showing the criminal associations of each of the men the United States planned to send to CECOT, according to the U.S. official and the administrator of the airport in El Salvador. The New York Times first reported on those negotiations. The airport administrator said those discussions were ongoing as of March 14 when he learned the flights would be delayed.

After the flights were delayed, immigration authorities transferred Abrego García — the man the government would later say was deported by mistake — from a detention center in Louisiana to South Texas. He arrived that evening, his wife told The Post.

The delay also gave the Venezuelans an opportunity to tip off their families and attorneys about their imminent deportation. Rumors began to fly that the planes might be headed to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base or El Salvador, court records show.

At least one attorney, Martin Rosenow, was convinced there had been a misunderstanding. He said he assured his client’s wife that her husband could not be involuntarily deported without a removal order from a judge.

But other attorneys speculated that Trump had secretly signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act and was waiting to publish it online — thus putting it into effect — until the last possible moment as part of a strategy to avoid legal challenges.

Attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward spent their Friday night scrambling to mount a legal challenge before their clients could again be taken to the airport.

They filed in federal court in D.C. in the predawn hours of March 15.

***

Hours later, guards at the El Valle Detention Center began calling names from a list. For a second day in a row, several dozen men were brought into a room and told to gather their belongings. Among the men were plaintiffs in the ACLU’s lawsuit, according to a court filing.

By then, their case had been assigned to James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court in D.C. At 9:40 a.m. Eastern time, Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order, barring the removal of the five plaintiffs named in the lawsuit. The order instructed the government to “maintain the status quo” until a court hearing he scheduled for early evening.

But across South Texas, DHS officials continued to move forward with the operation.

Shackled migrants were loaded onto buses. Shortly after 3:30 p.m. Eastern, men at El Valle were again loaded onto buses and taken to the airport, one man later said in a sworn statement. Unbeknownst to the deportees on board, the White House published a signed copy of Trump’s proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act at 3:53 p.m. as they were being driven to the airport.

At the airport in Harlingen, the three planes destined for El Salvador waited on the tarmac. A helicopter hovered overhead as people — including some of the ACLU plaintiffs — were taken off the buses and loaded onto the planes in groups of 10.

One man carried documents showing he had an upcoming court appearance in his asylum case and no deportation order, still under the impression he could not be deported.

Inside the planes, people began to panic, according to court filings that described the scene. Some wept. Others desperately asked the officers lining the aisles for information about where they were going. They received no response.

An officer boarded one of the planes and called out several names, including those of the ACLU plaintiffs on board, they later told their attorneys, who shared their accounts in court filings. As they were taken off the plane and again loaded onto a bus, the plaintiffs said they were told by an officer that they had “just won the lottery.”

At 5 p.m. in D.C., the hearing began in Boasberg’s courtroom.

When Boasberg asked a government attorney whether deportations under the act were imminent, the attorney, Drew Ensign, said he did not know.

ACLU lawyer Lee Gelernt told the judge he had received reports that planes in Texas were about to take hundreds of people to a Salvadoran prison. He urged the judge to temporarily block the government from deporting not just his clients but any detainee under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act.

Boasberg suggested a brief pause to give the government’s attorneys time to gather information before he made a decision.

The hearing adjourned at 5:22 p.m.

“See everybody in 38 minutes,” Boasberg said.

Four minutes later, the first plane departed from the Texas airfield.

The second followed 19 minutes after that.

By the time court reconvened 15 minutes later, the two planes were already flying off the coast of Mexico over international waters, according to flight data.

Ensign told the judge that the government could not publicly provide “operational details as to what is going on” because of potential “national security issues.” But when Boasberg moved the proceeding into a closed session, Ensign said he did not have details to share.

Worried that there would be no way for the judge to intervene once the planes reached El Salvador, the ACLU’s Gelernt pushed the judge to rule quickly. Just before 7 p.m., Boasberg issued a temporary injunction blocking the Trump administration from using the act to deport alleged gang members in custody.

“I think there’s clearly irreparable harm here given that these folks will be deported, and many — or a vast majority — to prisons in other countries or even back to Venezuela, where they face persecution, or worse,” Boasberg said.

To Ensign, he said, “you shall inform your clients of this immediately, and that any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States.”

His order was published in writing at 7:26 p.m.

The third plane took off from Texas 10 minutes after that. Officials would later say the migrants on that flight were not deported under the Alien Enemies Act but under traditional immigration law.

The government did not turn the planes around.

***

The flights made their stop in Honduras, where they waited to comply with Bukele’s request to arrive late at night.

On board, guards circulated a form for the detainees to sign, court records show. It was in English, and the migrants struggled to understand it.

But one phrase did stand out to all of them: Tren de Aragua.

Gladis Caricote said she refused to sign.

Caricote, a Venezuelan woman who believed she was being deported to her home country, peered out her window as the plane landed in El Salvador. What she saw didn’t look right, she told The Post.

“They kept insisting that we were going to Venezuela,” Caricote said. “But we didn’t recognize the airport or the uniforms of the officials on the tarmac.”

While the men on board were violently dragged onto buses, the women were not. U.S. officials had sent them to El Salvador for detainment at CECOT, but the prison houses only men. Bukele would not accept the women.

Caricote said she and the other women became distraught when they saw the men being shoved and slapped by Salvadoran guards. It was a spectacle that would soon be seen by millions around the world. Bukele’s team captured it on camera, then slickly edited it into a video he and Trump shared on social media.

***

The names of Venezuelans believed to be imprisoned in El Salvador have disappeared from an online ICE detainee tracker. They now appear on a list obtained and published by CBS News that has become, in the absence of government information, an unofficial guide to those shipped to CECOT on March 15.

Venezuela is prepared to send its own planes to “rescue the kidnapped Venezuelans,” said Peña, Maduro’s vice minister of foreign affairs. But the possibility of a quick resolution is further complicated by the fact that Venezuela and El Salvador do not have diplomatic relations.

The U.S. deportation flights to Venezuela that Grenell had helped arrange for March 16 — the ones that had been rescheduled because of weather — were canceled out of concern that Venezuela’s plane could be seized under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act.

A week later, Maduro agreed to send a plane to Honduras to pick up Venezuelans being deported from the U.S.

Since then, Venezuela has accepted at least two deportation flights a week, according to the U.S. official and another person familiar with the flights. Among those Venezuela has taken back is the migrant Rubio has described as a suspected gang member — a man who pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer in Times Square and was originally supposed to be deported March 16.

The Trump administration has also flown at least two other planes of migrants to El Salvador. But it has done so under federal immigration law, not the Alien Enemies Act, and for those flights it has provided a list of names and information on criminal backgrounds for the migrants, who were destined for the megaprison.

The names of Molina, Caraballo and the three men who were arrested at their Dallas home are among those missing from ICE’s online detainee locator and now appear on the unofficial list.

No one has heard from them since the planes left South Texas.

[Hardcore troubadour 14,934]

 Bring back our violent gang members! 

[SaintsInDome2006 380]

2 hours ago, Hardcore troubadour said:

 Bring back our violent gang members! 

Apparently we have imprisoned members of the opposition of the Chavez-Maduro regime. Go celebrate with the communists.

[The Real timschochet 6,421]

Trump complained today that due process would require 3 million trials. But it doesn’t. 

First off we’re not deporting 3 million people, ever. I don’t care what he says. 
 

Second, due process doesn’t mean a trial, it means a hearing to make sure you’re who the government says you are, that you’re not a citizen, a felon, etc, Some of these hearings might take no more than 5 minutes before a judge. 

[EternalShinyAndChrome 3,836]

5 minutes ago, The Real timschochet said:

Trump complained today that due process would require 3 million trials. But it doesn’t. 

First off we’re not deporting 3 million people, ever. I don’t care what he says. 
 

Second, due process doesn’t mean a trial, it means a hearing to make sure you’re who the government says you are, that you’re not a citizen, a felon, etc, Some of these hearings might take no more than 5 minutes before a judge. 

What is 3 million x 5 minutes each?

[The Real timschochet 6,421]

2 minutes ago, EternalShinyAndChrome said:

What is 3 million x 5 minutes each?

Doesn’t matter does it? We’re not deporting 3 million people. 

[EternalShinyAndChrome 3,836]

Just now, The Real timschochet said:

Doesn’t matter does it? We’re not deporting 3 million people. 

We'll see.  We're going to get real close if we don't so you might as well get used to it.  You and your team are on the wrong side of history once again AND on the wrong side of what the people want.  You're a small, fringe, lunatic minority who supports illegals over actual US citizens. 

[The Real timschochet 6,421]

8 minutes ago, EternalShinyAndChrome said:

We'll see.  We're going to get real close if we don't so you might as well get used to it.  You and your team are on the wrong side of history once again AND on the wrong side of what the people want.  You're a small, fringe, lunatic minority who supports illegals over actual US citizens. 

We’re not going to get real close. Come one you and I can disagree on what SHOULD be done but we can agree on what WILL be done. You know they’re not going to get rid of 3 million people right? Most of them work and it would gut the economy to send them away. You get this right? It’s never going to happen. 

[EternalShinyAndChrome 3,836]

2 hours ago, The Real timschochet said:

We’re not going to get real close. Come one you and I can disagree on what SHOULD be done but we can agree on what WILL be done. You know they’re not going to get rid of 3 million people right? Most of them work and it would gut the economy to send them away. You get this right? It’s never going to happen. 

We all know how mad you guys got when we took away your slaves the first time. Even started a civil war over it.  But no matter how much crying you do, you won't get your slaves back this time either.