Deportation for reporting the news

On Friday, Chief Appellate Immigration Judge Garry D. Malphrus, Appellate Immigration Judge Marcos Gemoets, and Temporary Appellate Immigration Judge Paul A. McCloskey — all appointed by Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi — handed down the deportation order.

Guevara’s attorneys were granted an emergency hearing in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Georgia. The court didn’t issue a decision but asked for further briefing. In the meantime, Mario Guevara is still at risk of being sent to El Salvador.

Although all charges were dropped, he has remained in ICE custody. DHS previously told Truthout in an email that Guevara has been detained because he entered the country illegally in 2004. This is false.

The judge who granted Guevara bond in July wrote that he “has a history of following the laws of the United States, as he legally entered the U.S. with a B1 visa, he has employment authorization and a social security number so that he can legally work in the United States, and he has a history of paying his taxes.”

Prosecutors successfully obtained a stay, or pause, of the bond decision. The government has argued that Guevara “is a danger to the community because Mr. Guevara had ‘on five separate occasions … recorded or live streamed’ law enforcement officers and ‘post[ed] videos of undercover agents, their vehicles, and tag numbers,’” as per Guevara’s petition. “The Government further states that ‘[l]ocal law enforcement reviewed the respondent’s public posts and learned that the videos were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.’”

[...]

“This is yet another example of the Trump administration’s pervasive attempts to stifle journalists and media from doing honest reporting or speaking unfavorably about the administration,” State Sen. Josh McLaurin (D) said in a statement. “This is one of the most dangerous periods for free speech in American history.”

[...]

Today marks Guevara’s 100th day in detention. For much of that time he has been held in solitary confinement.

  Truthout

Lying to the courts

Trump's DOJ famously told the courts they didn't have jurisdiction over the deportees they sent to El Salvador as a reason they couldn't return Kilmar Abrego.

No kings in America

In a ruling that began by invoking Franz Kafka’s “The Trial,” U.S. District Judge James Boasberg granted hundreds of men whom the Trump administration sent to a terrorism prison in El Salvador a chance to win their freedom.

“The reason should be self-evident: the ‘due process of law’ exists so that no ‘person’ within our borders — regardless of citizenship — is deprived of his ‘liberty’ on insufficient evidence or a spurious charge,” Boasberg wrote on Wednesday.

It’s not clear what form of due process the men eventually will receive, especially given the Trump administration’s attempts to resist compliance in these cases. From a legal standpoint, fighting Boasberg’s finding would seem futile: The Supreme Court recently ruled that the men at El Salvador’s CECOT prison are entitled to due process — “with all nine Justices agreeing,” Boasberg noted.

[...]

“Our legal tradition is wholly incompatible with the establishment of a network of overseas prisons, shielded from the Great Writ [of habeas corpus] by the facade of foreign control, to which the government routinely exports detainees without due process — a legal no man’s land,” the ruling states. “Indeed, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 generally prohibited detention ‘beyond the seas’ to places where the writ did not run, […] and such abuses partly animated this nation’s War for Independence.”

Boasberg cited the colonists’ grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, declaring George III’s tyrannical for “depriving us, in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury” and for “transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.”

  Adam Klasfeld Substack

Judge Boasberg was waxing expansively literary in this one. A "ruling for the ages" in the words coined by Trump's Supreme Court.

Judge Boasberg found that he lacked jurisdiction to hear the men’s habeas corpus petitions himself because senior State Department official Michael G. Kozak wrote in a sworn declaration that El Salvador controls the “detention and ultimate disposition of those detained in CECOT.” The judge found that Supreme Court precedent prevents him from second-guessing that assertion, absent direct evidence contradicting it. That means that whatever due process the expelled immigrants receive won’t be in Boasberg’s courtroom.

Hmmmm. He's the DC judge. So who will hear their cases? We don't have a court in El Salvador.

“The court is nonetheless mindful of the possibility, raised by plaintiffs, that the government has adopted and presented its arrangement with El Salvador as a ‘ruse — and a fraud on the court — designed to maintain control over the detainees beyond the reach of the writ,’” [Boasberg] wrote.

[...]

Ultimately, Boasberg found that he must take [the government's attorney] “at his word,” despite his declaration’s “incongruity with multiple public statements made by both Salvadoran and U.S. officials.”

Why, judge, why?

Boasberg ended that phase of his analysis with a warning: “The court nonetheless reminds the government that any official who makes knowingly false statements in a sworn declaration subjects himself to perjury prosecution.”

[...]

Boasberg [...] expressed a willingness to recommend criminal contempt cases himself through a private attorney if he finds charges warranted and Trump’s Justice Department refuses to bring them.

And Trump's DOJ will not be bringing those charges.

JB is running

 

Works for me.

DOJ tripping over Trump's dick tie

U.S. District Judge James] Boasberg, the chief federal district judge in Washington, D.C., is trying to discern whether the U.S. government retains “constructive custody” of nearly 140 Venezuelan immigrants who were hurriedly deported to El Salvador under Trump’s mid-March invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, a rarely used wartime power. If so, it would be possible to bring them back to receive due process, which Kambli reluctantly acknowledged they did not receive two months ago.

[...]

The judge is now asking for an “expedited” fact-finding inquiry so that he can decide whether to advance the case further. He is asking for statements under oath from administration officials about the U.S. government’s legal arrangement with El Salvador so that he can rule on whether the government does in fact retain custody of the prisoners it has sent overseas.

[...]

Boasberg said during a court hearing that Trump’s claim appears to undercut the administration’s legal position that it has no authority to return Abrego Garcia or hundreds of other immigrants the U.S. sent there in recent weeks, despite growing questions about the legality of the operation.

“Didn’t the president say just last week that he could secure the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia simply by picking up the phone and asking the president of El Salvador to release him?” Boasberg asked. “Was the president telling the truth?”

The inquiry forced Justice Department attorney Abhishek Kambli into a tricky spot.

“That goes to the president’s belief about the influence that he has,” Kambli said.

But influence, the DOJ attorney added, doesn’t equate to legal control.

  Politico

Nice evasion.

Another pointed exchange came as Boasberg pressed Kambli about Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s visit to the notorious Salvadoran prison, known as CECOT, where the deportees are being held. Noem claimed during the appearance that the prison was “one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use.”

“Is she wrong about that?” the judge asked.

“I’m not going to necessarily parse out every statement,” Kambli demurred. “Sometimes public statements lack the nuance of any given situation.”

“Is that another way of saying these statements just aren’t true?” the judge said.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying at all,” Kambli said.

Drilling down further, Boasberg pressed on whether the U.S. government is paying El Salvador to house the people it has deported there in partnership with the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, a close Trump ally. Kambli acknowledged that the U.S. government had paid “grants” to El Salvador “for law enforcement and anti-crime purposes,” which the country could use to house deported immigrants in its prisons.

Not as clever as the first exchange.

Boasberg also used Wednesday’s hearing to force the Justice Department to acknowledge that those around Trump had spent weeks misrepresenting the Supreme Court’s ruling. Trump allies have claimed that the high court upheld Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act. But the justices intentionally avoided that question. In the meantime, three federal district court judges — in Texas, New York and Colorado — have ruled that Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act was improper.

Soccer player and children's coach disappeared

 

Boycott El Salvador

 

He's not involved

 He will never take the blame for anything.  Under the bus you go.

Look at those eyes.  They look like an old white hen's.

He's not involved.  As if ICE and DOJ aren't doing his bidding.  And did he not JUST have El Salvador's president sitting beside him in  that vey room in front of cameras telling the world there was nothing he could do? 

Not involved, indeed.

"The buck stops here" president is throwing up his hands in Hell.

UPDATE 04/21/2025:

Due Process is due

 

Everyone is entitled to due process.  It's the law in this country.

Resistance

Democrats are rushing to organize trips to El Salvador as President Trump refuses to comply with a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of a Maryland resident who was erroneously deported to the country.

[...]

[Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.).] and Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) are trying to secure GOP authorization to lead a congressional delegation to visit deportees at El Salvador's Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), Axios first reported Tuesday.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) is leaving Wednesday to travel to the Central American country. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) is also planning a trip, as Axios first reported.

[...]

"We have to do similar kinds of things for the others who are victims of this dystopian attack on our Constitutional rights," said Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.). "This president is dangerous and we can't let this go."

[...]

The sentiment within the party about rallying behind deportees is not universal.

Some in the more establishment wing of the party have bristled at that approach, arguing it makes the party look frenetic without securing any concrete wins.

  Axios

Why? They're not securing any wins any way that doesn't look frenetic. Or any way, for that matter.

The second House Democrat who spoke anonymously, a centrist, called the deportation issue a "soup du jour," arguing Trump is "setting a trap for the Democrats, and like usual we're falling for it."

"Rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy ... the thing where his numbers are tanking, we're going to go take the bait for one hairdresser," they said, likely referring to Andry Hernandez Romero.

Only if Trump tries to deport U.S. citizens, the lawmaker argued, will Democrats need to draw a "line in the sand" and "shut down the House."

Who is that asshole? They're not worth quoting on this important matter if they won't give their name. The tariffs take a back seat in importance to snatching up people and sending them to a foreign gulag. Did this person not hear Trump say that "homegrowns are next" or Tom Homan saying public officials are on the list?

Democratic aides and lawmakers told Axios they were bombarded Tuesday with calls from constituents and activists, similar to how DOGE and tariffs have dominated their switchboards in past months.

"It's a lot," one House Democrat told Axios when asked about the call volume they have received on the issue.

Said another House Democrat: "I just came from a round-table with two Dem activist groups and all they wanted to talk about was El Salvador."

[...]

It's not clear whether House Democrats will be able to get their formal delegation.

A spokesperson for House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-Ky.) declined to comment on whether he would grant Garcia and Frost permission to lead a CODEL.

Come on. We know he won't.

Garcia suggested Democrats may forge ahead anyway with something more informal, telling Axios: "We've been discussing already what the other options would be. Our intention is to go to El Salvador."

As it should be.

UPDATE 05:41 pm:

US District Judge James Boasberg ruled Wednesday that “probable cause exists” to hold Trump administration officials in criminal contempt for violating his orders in mid-March halting the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members.

The long-awaited decision on Wednesday from a judge President Donald Trump and his allies have repeatedly attacked puts the administration on the path toward being punished for thwarting court orders.

[...]

“The Court ultimately determines that the Government’s actions on that day demonstrate a willful disregard for its Order, sufficient for the Court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt,” Boasberg wrote in a 46-page ruling detailing his decision.

“The Court does not reach such conclusion lightly or hastily; indeed, it has given Defendants ample opportunity to rectify or explain their actions,” he added. “None of their responses has been satisfactory.”

[...]

Boasberg says he wants sworn statements first from people who can attest to the officials making the decisions not to turn the planes around as they carried migrants to El Salvador on March 15.

Then, Boasberg says, if those statements aren’t satisfactory to him, he will ask for live witnesses to testify at hearings or depositions.

The judge could then, he says, ask the Justice Department to prosecute Trump administration officials, or he could appoint an attorney as a special prosecutor.

  CNN

Obviously, he'd have to appoint a special prosecutor.

UPDATE 07/19/2025:

Completely expected

 

Just to put an extra FU on the filing, they filed it an hour late.  

Better get your ticket.

"Home-growns are next."

And in related news...

Arrested at his citizenship interview.

He is a Palestinian-born green card holder.

Unlawful, yet unstoppable

 

UNACCEPTABLE!

 

Despicable

 

Go to any rural American area and take the shirts off 20 men.  You'll be able to take a similar picture.  Hell, take the shirt off Pete Hegseth.

Lawless Trump 2.0

 

Trump 2.0 - Instill fear

 In addition to suing lawyers and prohibiting federal agencies from using certain lawyers or signing contracts with companies who use those lawyers, prohibiting access to certain news agencies, purging federal employees, and shutting down funding for any institution declared guilty of DEI hires, Trump's ICE is snatching up people from the streets and raiding places where immigrants can be collected and sent to an El Salvador torture center.  Here's another today:

 

UPDATE 08:38 am:

UPDATE 03/20/2025:  And another...

UPDATE 03/21/2025:

Finally, a sensible approach to migration

Mexico and the United States on Wednesday announced a joint plan to send development and agricultural aid to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to alleviate the root causes of migration from those countries.

Under the plan, dubbed “Sembrando Oportunidades,” or “Planting Opportunities,” both countries will work through their own agencies, the Mexican Agency for International Development Cooperation (Amexcid) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), to address irregular migration from northern Central America.

USAID said in a press release that the two agencies will "plan to coordinate our development resources and expertise to help citizens of northern Central America build prosperous futures in their home communities."

The efforts are set to begin in Honduras, where the agencies will "plan to provide youth with skills and experience that can lead to long-term employment, reducing the risk of irregular migration," Amexcid said in a press release.

[...]

"Both Mexico and the United States have committed resources to this effort and both agencies have begun to coordinate."

  The Hill

While I applaud the approach, I don't imagine it will be nearly enough, and I hope they have some mechanism in place to combat the corruption that will inevitably divert funds to administrators.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Why make sense when you can stir up a shitstorm?

The United States is cutting off aid to the "Northern Triangle," otherwise known as the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the State Department told CNN Saturday, one day after President Donald Trump said they had "set up" migrant caravans for entry into the United States.

  CNN

Or, via Fox:

I guess she feels like a fool now.  (She is one.)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

A serious professional mistake

First the Haitians, now the Salvadorans

The move, announced on Monday by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), gave Salvadoran holders of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) until September 9, 2019, to leave or find a legal way to stay in the country.

The US government had originally granted Salvadorans special protection status after two earthquakes killed nearly 8,000 people in 2001.

[...]

"Based on careful consideration of available information, including recommendations received as part of an inter-agency consultation process, the Secretary determined that the original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist," the DHS said in a statement.

[...]

In its statement, the DHS also said it had determined that El Salvador could successfully reintegrate its nationals.

[...]

"Three hundred people leave El Salvador daily as migrants in search of a better future," argued Edwin Murillo, who lives in the US state of Texas but is originally from San Salvador.

"If 300 people are leaving daily, because the living conditions are not suitable, then how is it possible that the Trump administration has decided to force thousands of Salvadorans to return?"

  alJazeera

US response, probably: That's not our problem.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.