#1706 Trump's Kafkaesque Deportation Nightmare is the Shame of the Nation

We're really proud of the show we're making, so we want as many people as possible to see it and hear it, and that includes you, but also you going and checking it out will help the system recommend it to others. So thanks in advance for checking it out. So instead, let's turn to the Abrego Garcia case. Since our last podcast, the Supreme Court ruled in a per curium -- that is an unsigned order with no dissents. That's right. And it gave two obligations to the government.

One, it said that the government has to "facilitate" the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia from prison. It also said they had to "ensure" his due process rights. Remember, they had previously said in a prior decision that these people who had been removed are entitled to a pre-deprivation hearing. They talked about that in the context of the Venezuelans who had been removed under the supposed authority of Alien Enemy Act, and this of course is separate because Mr. Garcia is El Salvadoran. Right.

The idea is before you are removed, you're entitled to a hearing. You can say that legally the whatever the statute is that doesn't apply, or that you're not within the gang or the group that is being removed. So you're entitled to a pre-deprivation hearing, and here the court says, one, they need to facilitate his release; two, they need to ensure due process. In doing that, they need to be prepared to share with the district judge what it is that they are doing.

What steps they have taken, and the prospect of further steps. It's exactly what the court said. And then finally the court did say that, with respect to the district court saying that you have to facilitate and "effectuate" -- we're really getting into the weeds here -- and they did say that the word "effectuate" is unclear. That was exactly their word. Needed clarification.

Yep. Because obviously what they're concerned about is they say you can't order the government to effectuate -- let's just take a different hypothetical -- the release of somebody in Russia, not under our control, totally they're pursuant to Russian authorities to say, now the government of the United States has to go into Russia and redo the following.

So they're saying that is ambiguous, and you have to deal with that situation and make sure that you're not crossing the line into something the government actually can't do. Nor would it really be the province of a court to say that. So those leapt a number of obligations on the government that they needed to fulfill, and it then went back to the district judge and maybe, Mary, what did the district judge then do? Yeah, and I think the timing here is really, really important.

So this is on Thursday evening, I think around five or 6:00 PM that the court put out this order. And in doing that -- let's just remind people, this was up there on a motion to stay the lower court's order, that it needed to stay and vacate, get rid of the lower court's order that the government needed to facilitate and effectuate his return. And so that's the posture where it was in the Supreme Court.

So the Supreme Court pretty much denied that motion to vacate, did tell the district court clarify what you mean by "effectuate" with due regard to the executives -- deference to the executive in foreign affairs, but facilitate, yeah, everything you just said. They ordered them to do.

The only part of what the Supreme Court did that granted in part the government's request was to the extent that the lower court had ordered that that facilitated and effectuated his return by 11:59 last Monday evening. They said that date has passed. That part of the order to vacate that part is granted because that date's already passed. That's the only part -- and this is important -- 'cause Stephen Miller later just flat out, in my opinion, lies about this in public statements.

He might say he's parsing hairs, but that's the only part of what the government requested that the Supreme Court granted. Yes, we're vacating the part that was 11:59 on Monday because that's over. So, the lower court wasted no time. Within hours of getting this back from the Supreme Court, the court did clarify what she meant, and this is Judge Paula Xinis out of the District of Maryland.

She clarified that what she meant was she amended her order to, quote, "direct that defendants shall take all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia to the United States as soon as possible," and then consistent with the Supreme Court's directive, and she quoted it in her brief order, the government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.

Based on that, Judge Xinis then directed the government to answer three questions and to file a declaration by the next morning. She originally said 9:30 the next morning. Answering three questions: One, the current physical location and custodial status of Mr. Abrego Garcia. Two, what steps, if any, the defendants have taken to facilitate his immediate return to the United States. And Three, what additional steps the defendants will take and when to facilitate his return.

She says, if you need to file under seal, you file under seal. So this is all still happening on Thursday evening. The court then says, I'll have an in-person status conference on Friday at 1:00 PM in the courthouse. So next morning, government doesn't get this 9:30 declaration. She wants a declaration from somebody with personal knowledge who can answer that question. Let's take a tiny pause here to talk about what a declaration is.

A declaration is really a substitute for having a witness come in and sit in the witness stand and raise their right hand and take an oath to tell the truth and get asked questions. It's a way to do this on the papers where the government official, puts in writing a declaration, and signs it under oath, right? They're saying, I'm swearing to these things. So it's like the paper equivalent of in-person testimony.

It's just that you can't have a back and forth with a piece of paper; you can only just take what is on there. Yeah. And it very often there'll be lots of follow-up questions that you'd wanna ask and it ducks the issue or it uses -- this is gonna be the example you're thinking of -- it uses language that is just so ambiguous that you immediately are gonna be like, well, what do you mean by that? That's right. So can I just -- we're going to get into this very detailed TikTok.

But, so I'm gonna play dumb here, which is, here's the thing that is not legal niceties and oh, what exactly were the words and what's the difference between facilitate and effectuate? None of that matters, because here's the key thing that has not happened: the United States has not even said that, has asked El Salvador for his return, period. The end. I'm sorry. None of that had to do with state secrets, classified information, foreign policy.

If you wanna know the most limited thing that the United States could do to quote, "facilitate" unquote his return. How about asking? Are you telling me that the president of El Salvador can show up in the Oval Office, that the President of the United States can talk about, oh, I need you to build five more prisons because I wanna put Americans, if legal, in these prisons. That we are paying by all reported accounts to have these people housed.

That we are both sending people and getting people back when El Salvador says, you know what, we won't take those. And we are even sending Kristi Noem there and she is able to do a sort of promotional video, let's just say a video in front of the jail. That you're saying that somehow the president can't even ask and that wouldn't be honored. That is cutting through all of this sort of oh, there, there conceivably could be limits on what a court could order.

They're not even saying they asked for his return. And obviously that would be the end of this. Because if they asked, it would happen. Unless there was a wink to say, I'm gonna ask and I want you to say no. Yep, that's right. So that is why all of this is just such crap. How's that for a legal term?

That the Supreme Court of the United States has said you are directed to facilitate his return and they, the United States government, will not even tell the district court that it has asked for his return. Big picture. A person is in jail, wrongfully. The government has admitted not just in the District court, but the Supreme Court papers from the government said they agreed that this was a mistake.

So he is there because of a United States mistake, and they will not even say that they have asked for his return after causing it themselves. So the Alien Enemies Act was enacted in 1798. It was part of a suite of laws where every of the other laws that were passed around those issues as like America was very worried about war between Britain and France.

All of the other acts passed around that were eventually rescinded because everybody looked at that moment and went, Ooh, that was a little bit tyrannical. We may have gone too far there. But the Alien Enemies Act stayed on the books and has been used very infrequently since then, most recently in World War II, to remove Japanese and German nationals. What the Trump administration has done is say, one, we're using it again.

Two, we're using it not against the government, but against a criminal group, the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which they argue is so enmeshed with the government of Venezuela that it constitutes a hybrid criminal state. And three, saying that any Venezuelan man over the age of 14 who they deem to be a member of Tren de Aragua can be removed under the Alien Enemies Act without any of the process that is set out in actual immigration law.

Under immigration law, you have the ability to make your case before a judge to demonstrate that you qualify for some form of relief, such as asylum, if that applies to you, and the government has to prove that you can be removed. They say, no, no, no, no, because this law existed before any of that. We don't have to go through any of that process. That is their interpretation of the law, and that's what they were doing when they put people on planes and sent them to El Salvador.

What has been litigated and, with a Supreme Court order on Monday night, where we are right now, is that the courts have said no. It is illegal to use the Alien Enemies Act to remove people with no process whatsoever. But the Supreme Court says if people want to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act, they need to do it through what are called habeas claims, which is not the way that the initial court case was brought.

So in theory right now, we're in a world where someone hypothetically could be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, but how that's going to work in practice is a little bit unclear, because it would have to be a different process than the one the Trump administration used in mid-March.

And what we're actually seeing is like even in the hours before you and I are speaking, that judges have started to receive lawsuits filed under these habeas claims and have started saying, yeah, you can't remove people under this act, through this either, right?

So it's really changing very quickly on the ground, and part of that's the result of this 200 plus year-old law being used in a manner in which it's never been used before, and with very little transparency as to what the administration wants to do with it. It seems important to say, as you do in a piece that you wrote, that the Alien Enemies Act sidesteps immigration law because it's being presented as kind of part of immigration law.

But the, one of the key things about it is that it takes us outside of laws that have been instituted to deal with immigration. Yeah? I compare this to when the Trump administration after the beginning of the COVID pandemic, used Title 42, which is a public health law, to essentially seal the US-Mexico border from asylum seekers.

In that case, they were taking a law from outside of immigration that had been enacted before the modern immigration system and saying, because this law doesn't explicitly say immigration law is in effect, we can create this separate pathway that we can use to -- that we can treat immigrants under this law without having to give them any of the rights guaranteed under immigration law.

They're doing the same thing with this, saying because this law that is on the books doesn't refer to the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was passed a century and a half later, we don't need to adhere to anything that was since put in to, say, comply with the Refugee Convention, to comply with the International Convention Against Torture.

All of these structures that have come into place as people have started to care about human rights and not sending people to torture or persecution, they're now saying they don't have to bother with because they weren't thinking about them in 1798. Right. And it brings us to, folks for many years on many issues have been saying, well, it's not legal, so it's all gonna be fixed, 'cause the law's gonna step in and fix it, 'cause it's not legal.

And I think you're referring to the fluidity and the importance of the invocation of law. It's not like it just exists and you bring it down to bear. It's fought terrain. Yeah? Right. Yeah, exactly. It's, contested. And when we say contested, like it really is being fought out in the courts as we speak, because the administration is using its authority, the fact that it is the federal government.

And litigators are saying, please point to us in the law where you can do that, or demonstrate to us that you are adhering it all to what we think of as fairly basic constitutional protections, like due process, like the right to know what you're being detained for. What is legal is, ultimately, what the courts decide, but how they rule on this is very unclear.

And to be fully honest, the government's insistence on giving very little information and in conceding very little, even in cases like Mr. Abrego Garcia's, whereas you say they've said there was a mistake made, makes it a little bit harder to understand what it would even look like to say a government that's been so truculent and so resistant is in fact operating under the law.

And so was Steven Miller's take during that same Oval Office meeting on the administration's supposedly unanimous win at SCOTUS. So during that meeting, Miller, who of course is one of the president's key advisors on immigration policy, offered his hot take on the Supreme Court's disposition of the Abrego Garcia case. So you will recall, listeners, as Melissa just said, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was erroneously -- the government admits erroneously -- expelled to an El Salvadoran mega prison.

A district court ordered the administration to take steps to return Abrego Garcia to the United States. The government appealed, arguing that the district court's order constituted an impermissible attempt by the judiciary to interfere with the president's power to conduct foreign policy.

As we discussed on last week's episode, the Supreme Court then weighed in to say that while the district court cannot dictate American foreign policy, it does have the authority to correct legal wrongs, including the erroneous rendition to El Salvador of an individual an earlier immigration court specifically said could not be deported to El Salvador because of the likelihood of the danger he would face there.

So the Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision, ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return. There were no noted dissents. Peewee German, however, had his own hot take of the court's disposition of the case. I don't know, maybe he translated it to German and things came up a little fuzzy. But you can take a listen to that here.

There's a nine zero in our favor, against the District court ruling saying that no district court has the power to compel the foreign policy function of the United States. As Pam said, the ruling solely stated that if this individual at El Salvador's sole discretion was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time. The guy literally alchemized defeat into victory. Incredible.

For weeks, folks have been wondering whether the administration is going to openly defy the Supreme Court. I don't think we'd anticipated that instead of open defiance, we get magical thinking instead, where they just declared the Supreme Court had said the opposite of what they did and therefore they are in compliance with whatever they say the Supreme Court did. So that's the scene. And now we want to go to the judges. So Judge Boasberg told the administration that he is not the one.

Judge Boasberg went off on the administration. So pull up a chair. Recall that Judge Boasberg is the district court judge who presided over the original lawsuit, alleging that the administration, under the auspices of the Alien Enemies Act, was rendering Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador without any due process, on the view that the migrants were members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

Judge Boasberg, not surprisingly, given this Constitution thing we supposedly got, was appalled that none of the migrants were given a hearing or any other process to challenge the administration's claims. So he told the administration to return the planes that had departed for El Salvador, and the administration's response was basically, Make me, bitch. And then Judge Boasberg was like, excuse you, the fuck you think you're talking to?

He would like to know why the administration thinks it doesn't have to offer these migrants any kind of due process, and why it believes it can give him, or any other judge for that matter, the middle finger.

Now, ultimately, as we know, the Supreme Court got their hands on this case, and the court issued a very narrow procedural ruling that concluded that the case had been improperly filed in the district of the District of Columbia, and that instead it ought to have been filed in the district where the migrants were detained before their departure to El Salvador. So that is in Texas. And that the challenges then should have proceeded as habeas petitions in the Texas district court.

And so the administration was then like, so I guess we're done here. And Judge Boasberg, who's obviously been catching up on the last season of Hacks, was like, no bitch. Let's begin.

So last Wednesday, judge Boasberg issued a 46-page ruling in which he threatened to initiate criminal contempt proceedings unless the administration answered his questions about why it refused to provide due process to the migrants and why the administration ignored his order to turn the plane and the migrants around. And the cherry on top was that he laid out an entire plan for how this would proceed. Stunt on these hoes, queen!

I love that we are like standing Brett Kavanaugh's law school housemate. These are bleak times, Melissa. Bleak times. Join our sorority. I have no idea what kind of relationship he has with Brett Kavanaugh and I have no idea, I don't know really anything about Judge Boasberg. I've never met him. But I do think he is rising to the moment.

And he must know that they are going to fight him tooth and nail and he is writing for history and not holding back about how egregious this conduct is, and he is acting as though the Constitution and the law still matter. And I think that matters a lot. So he obviously has masculine energy. The only one of these fools right now who does, who seems to. Stuck on these hoes, king. He's actually a tall king, not a short king. There you go. He's turning tall. That's true.

Yeah. So, okay, here is basically what he laid out. He wants sworn declarations from administration officials in order to determine who was responsible for making the decisions about due process and ignoring his early orders in the case. In terms of who was responsible, I think we have a hunch it was Peewee German in the study with whatever pen. So if that didn't work, then he was going to refer the matter to the Department of Justice, which could then file criminal charges.

Spoiler alert, that's not gonna happen. Pamela Joe Bondi is like, no. Yeah, absolutely not. Well, another option the administration has is, as Judge Boasberg note, to basically cure any contempt by returning the individuals from El Salvador, acting as though they actually complied with his order and turned the planes around. But as Melissa noted, there is a possibility that Pamela Joe Bondi would elect not to prosecute any contempt, very faint Possibility, very, very faint.

Just being very generous here, that she would elect not to bring criminal contempt charges for contempt of federal court order, in which case Judge Boasberg noted there was a possibility that he could exercise his authority under the relevant rules to appoint an outside prosecutor to prosecute the case. Now, this has been done before. Judges have appointed lawyers to prosecute contempt cases.

This happened in the Donzinger case that went up to the Supreme Court where there was a constitutional challenge to the lawfulness of having private attorneys appointed by a judge to prosecute these kinds of cases. The Supreme Court elected not to take up that case, although Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh indicated they would have done so.

Should also note that even if that happened, that is even if a private attorney launched a successful prosecution of criminal contempt of a court order, criminal contempt of federal court orders is a pardonable offense. And in fact, Donald Trump has pardoned people who were convicted of contempt of federal court orders, during the first Trump administration. That individual who benefited from that: Joe Arpaio.

Can I just say, there are definitely constitutional questions, at least on this court's sort of view of executive power about the permissibility of outside prosecutors. There's certainly this, pardon question. And to my mind, none of that is any reason for Boasberg not to proceed under the law as it currently stands and appoint an outside prosecutor. And if the Supreme Court wants to find that's impermissible, let it be, or if the president wants to pardon, let him do that.

But don't do their work for them. Totally agree. One of the things I do in my book is show the human conditions that create gangs and gang members. I was a part of a small clique in San Francisco, nothing like the really hardcore gangs either here in the US like the Mexican Mafia and other gangs, Crips and Bloods, and MS 13 and 18th Street in El Salvador, which are structures based on US style gangs.

I found friendship and community in a little clique that was mostly nonviolent except at different moments. We were involved in drugs and other stuff, but we were not the hardened heavy weapon wielding gangs of today. And so I've started working with gangs in the 90s in, in LA where the gangs were born, MS 13 and 18th Street.

And, 13 for example, is the letter M is the number of the letter M that the Salvadorian gangs who were being, before they were gangs, they were being bullied and beaten by larger mostly Black gangs in South LA and decided to start arming themselves with machetes. And then journalists like Lisa Ling started noticing that these gangs had machetes instead of guns and started labeling them as extremely violent.

Then the gangs took on the more familiar tattooed faces, tattooed bodies, and more heavily armed gang structures and culture that we know today. So I've watched as the US local and then federal governments have started taking interest in these gangs, and the project has been bipartisan, Democrat and Republican. They've both escalated and used the gangs to legitimate, initially, local policing of young people. Now you're seeing it become this terrorist...

Federalized. ... that Lisa Ling started calling MS 13 the most dangerous gang in the world, even though you never have any statistical basis to prove any gang is the most violent in the world. It's ridiculous. In fact, in 2019 when Trump started using the word terrorist as applied to Salvadoran gangs, and then as Bukele was elected that same year, he starts using the term aggressively, and you see how the "terrorist" word is being thrown around.

I started interviewing cops, police in San Francisco and other cities and found out, for example, that in 2019 you had three white men wielding semi-automatic weapons. These three white men killed more people in 2019 than the allegedly 10,000 MS. 13 and 18th Street gang members in the US combined. So lemme repeat that. Three white men with semi-automatic weapons killed more people in 2019 than all of the 10,000 MS 13 and 18th Street gang members in the United States.

This is the degree to which the media display you're seeing in the meeting between Bukele and Trump is entirely political theater on steroids.

And frankly, as you alluded to, the explosion of tactics that have been long used against Latino and Black, young men in cities in this country—gang databases— now being basically used at the federal level where, if you're somebody who's from a specific area of Venezuela or if you're from El Salvador and you may know somebody or have been in a community with somebody who's in one of these gangs that they trump up, not to use a pun, as more dangerous than they are, that

that basically classifies you as a part of some broader criminal organization. And now not just criminal according to this far-right Trump administration, terrorist. Yeah. The franchise of criminalization and now terrorization of different groups of people is well underway and it's the biggest, most dangerous thing that's coming out of the Trump/Bukele meeting. It's telling, for example, that during the meeting today Bukele said, and

I quote, "sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands. I like to say that we actually liberated millions." And Trump replies, "who gave him that line? Do you think I could use that?" And so, the meeting reflects, I think, the expansion of the local, national, hemispheric, and global enterprise of terrorization of increasing numbers of groups. You start off with the lowest hanging violent fruit, like the gangs, and they are violent and some of them are murders. Most of 'em are not.

Most of the gang members are not murders. Otherwise, you'd have over 10,000 deaths in MS 13 in the US, when you have an insignificant number statistically doing that. So, you start off with gangs, then you extend it to immigrants generally, as you see Stephen Miller's career, growing and Trump's own election built on that. And then you extend it to, like in El Salvador, journalists dealing with gangs have been arrested, harassed, persecuted, some even exiled. And then you extend it to activists.

You start using the word activists to talk about, like you're talking about the Palestinian activist in Columbia or the Turkish woman who was arrested at Tufts. Or, Mr. Abrego Garcia, who is still in the CECOT gulag that Bukele just built. All of these Im immigrants are now illustrations of how the franchise is extending. But make no mistake coming your way soon is the franchise of terrorization to those of us that are citizens. It's already afoot.

Trump is already talking about deporting citizens to El Salvador, US citizens. And this is where my experience first growing up in pre techno fascist Bay Area, and then as a journalist who's reported on electronic surveillance that, as I watched it go from the analog industrial age to the digital age of surveillance, has taught me that people like Bukele are digital dictators.

We're in the age of digital dictatorship and the industrial age structures of, like my former comrades in the FMLN, could not defeat the digital dictatorship model of Bukele, and so we have to upgrade our social movements for the digital age if we are to fight people like Bukele, who has benefited from CIA trained Venezuelan assets, who became consultants to Bukele and helped him manufacture this bizarre and dangerous reality in El Salvador, that,

that has large segments of the populus supporting him in their desperation. This week on 60 minutes, we reported on the 238 Venezuelan migrants who were deported from the United States three weeks ago. They were flown from Texas to a notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador, where they're being held as part of an agreement with that country's president, Nayib Bukele. The Trump administration claims that all of these men are terrorists and violent gang members.

But we could not find criminal records for an overwhelming majority of the prisoners. Photojournalist. Philip Holsinger has been working in El Salvador for more than a year. He's been to some of the country's largest prisons, interviewing and photographing inmates swept up in the Salvadoran government's controversial crackdown on violent criminal gangs, like MS 13.

But the most notorious by far is the Terrorism Confinement Center known as CECOT, where the Venezuelan migrants deported from the United States are currently being held. Life in the cell in CECOT is the definition of austerity. The bunks are steel. There are no blankets. There are no pillows. There's nothing, it's just a slab of metal, and that's where you sleep. There are no books. There's no television. Zero outside communication. Nothing goes out, nothing comes in.

There's 24 hour surveillance. No misbehaving, no talking. The first time I visited CECOT I was shocked by the silence. The silence is what really got under my skin, and it's like a church. When the planes carrying the Venezuelan migrants arrived in El Salvador, Holsinger was waiting on the tarmac. He photographed the men as they were shackled, shaved, and stripped, capturing their transformation into CECOT inmates. Holsinger wrote about the experience in an article for Time Magazine.

Some of those photos have been published or televised elsewhere, but most of what he shared with 60 Minutes has never been seen before. As soon as they came to the door, they're greeted by a sea of black-clade masked police in riot gear. This is a typical face of the Venezuelans. These are eyes that are asking lots of questions. "Where am I?" "What's happening?" "What's gonna happen to me?" A lot of fear in these faces. Their appearance was different than anything I had seen.

Literally, like they'd just come off the street. They were all in nice clothes. They moved them fast and hard, and they intentionally want them to feel that they're powerless. They grab them in the neck, march 'em down the stairs, and it's rapid and fast and painful. These guys were not allowed to be making eye contact or looking, and the guard came and grabbed his head and forced his head down to tell him, you're not allowed to be looking up and looking around.

And then they go right into a room where they shave everybody's head and they don't shave their heads. tenderly. The guards are just, "fast, fast, fast! Rápido, rápido, rápido, rápido!". So some of them are nicking their heads. This man really grabbed my attention. He may be a criminal, he may be innocent, he may be a father. I don't know his story at all, but I know his eyes. He didn't fight. Hopelessness just gave in.

One of the Venezuelans who caught Holsinger attention was this man, who 60 Minutes has now identified as Andry Hernández Romero. Andry's lawyer told us he is a 31-year-old gay man and makeup artist with no criminal record in the United States or Venezuela. So this is a young man that I had followed from the bus who was exclaiming that he was soy gay and saying that he was innocent and he was being slapped every time he would speak up, but he couldn't help himself.

Then he started praying and calling out, literally crying for his mother. His crying out for his mother really, touched me. You can see in this photograph, the hair it's not cleanly shaved, he's got patches of hair. He's grimacing. These guys were in pain. This is a standard body posture that anybody in CECOT will be trained in. And in this case, they're handcuffed, but when they're not handcuffed, they literally tie their bodies together so that a few guards can control a mass of people.

This posture is a very difficult and painful posture. Right before they go into the scan to be taken to their cells, they're pushed all the way to the ground. I mean, some of them are really hurting. As he took the last few photographs before the Venezuelans were transported to their cells, Holsinger said he felt he had watched these men become ghosts. They've been stripped of their hair and their clothes, and they don't know where they're going. All of their personality was gone.

Your life just ceased to exist. You're just a person in white clothes now. And I had this sort of sense of I'm watching these guys disappear. Who is this Bukele guy? He's 43 years old. He claims, he claims! he's the youngest dictator in the world. He calls himself the world's coolest dictator. He likes to wear Aviator sunglasses. He likes to produce rap videos of prisoners being tortured. In 2019, he was elected to the presidency based on a promise to end gang violence and corruption.

And he did. The homicides dropped from 103 per 100,000 down to 2.4, that was in 2015, to a record low of 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023. So he has an 80% approval rating for doing that across the country of El Salvador. But the miracle came at a staggering cost. He didn't eradicate crime through solving problems that fester crime, like poverty, he eradicated crime by dismantling democracy. This from a piece by Dean Blundell over at Substack.

"...he scrapped due process. He instilled paralyzing fear in El Salvador's 6.3 million people...he's a textbook authoritarian." This is just amazing stuff. This is the guy that Donald Trump was slobbering all over yesterday in the White House. "Since declaring a state of emergency in March of 2022, Bukele has arrested over 85,000 people—roughly 1.6% of the population of his country—often without warrants or evidence.

Human Rights Watch reports only a thousand convictions, meaning tens of thousands of innocent people are languishing in prison. At least 261 have died in custody with credible reports of torture, beatings, and medical neglect." "The Center for Confinement of Terrorism, CECOT," this is where these Americans are being held, "is not a rehabilitation facility.—it's a pay for play concentration camp where prisoners, including US Deportees,

are 'disappeared' into a judicial black hole." writes Dean Blundell. "CECOT opened in 2023...it's a mega prison for 40,000 inmates. Cells lack windows, ventilation or mattresses; prisoners sleep on bare metal, eat twice daily, and endure 23 and a half hour lockdowns with only 30 minutes of exercise in windowless corridors. Human rights groups document systematic torture, scabies starvation, beatings are rampant.

Cristosal, a Salvador and non-governmental organization, reports 367 deaths across the prison system with families denied information about their loved ones." "Bukele's propaganda," he writes, "glorifies this cruelty. He posts slick videos of shackled inmates, heads bowed, escorted by armed guards to a pulsating soundtrack—images straight out of a dystopian thriller." He took 261 US Deportees last month. CBS News looked into them and they found 75% of these deportees had no criminal record.

They committed no crime, and yet they are now trapped in this brutal concentration camp. And the definition, according to the US Holocaust Museum, of a Concentration camp is a prison beyond the rule of law. A place where people are imprisoned without due process of law. And that's exactly what he is running. He is running a concentration camp and we are sending people to it.

Dean Blundell writes, "like Stalin's labor CECOT uses prisoners for forced labor to sustain itself with Bukele boasting 'it's financially self-sufficient.'" he puts some of them to work. He says, "Like Mussolini, he projects strength through militarized displays, replacing judges with loyalists." In 2021, his party ousted the Supreme Court Justices and the Attorney General and installed his loyalists.

He's jailed critics including his former security advisor who died in custody in February of last year, allegedly after being tortured. Politicians, judges, and journalists face ruthless and relentless intimidation. Over 50 official and critics have fled the country. In 2020, he sent troops into the legislature to strong arm approval of a piece of legislation that he wanted. His state of emergency suspends fundamental rights. No warrants, no lawyers, no contact with families.

Amnesty International reports forced disappearances. Women face sexual violence in custody, and families of detainees are threatened with arrest for protesting. He's also targeted minorities with reports of arbitrary arrests of queer individuals. In 2021, he fired all the judges, over 60, affecting 200 magistrates, a third 33% of the judiciary. His new judges rubber stamp his policies like a mass trial of 900 people at once. Yeah, that's due process for you.

His political opponents face trumped up charges while business leaders are squeezed for money and loyalty. This is a country that has a 30% poverty rate, which has not improved since he became president. Instead, they have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Keep in mind that the United States is around 700 per hundred thousand, as I recall, 650, something like that. We are the highest in the developed world. He is at 1600 per hundred thousand people.

He's got 109,000 people behind bars in this little tiny country. Fear permeates societies, dissenters risk. Families of the detained lived in dread. Meanwhile, his wealth grows. He now has 34 homes 34 properties that he has acquired during his term. And this is what strong men do, they enrich themselves. Donald Trump Jr. And Matt Gaetz, fawn over him. Donald Trump Jr. attended his inauguration. I'm telling you, this is Trump's role model. This is what Trump wants. He wants to be a dictator.

And frankly, he is becoming one. He is doing it right now, right in front of us. Before this meeting began off the record or off the mic, whatever you wanna call it, Trump was overheard telling Bukele that next up are the quote unquote "homegrowns" or US citizens, people within the country that he is planning on sending to El Salvador.

The audio for that is absolutely terrible, but luckily, the President of the United States of America was asked a question about it and just went ahead and said exactly what he wanted. We also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking, that are absolute monsters.

I'd like to include them in the group of people to get 'em out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steve. Okay? Okay. Good. Thought that was the wrong one. Good. Anyway. No, it's it's awful. And so what got basically the news here is we've known that Trump has wanted to do this. We've now heard it in so many words.

He also confirmed that he, Pam Bondi and all of the people behind the Trump administration are currently looking at the laws and trying to figure out how they might be able to do it. Luckily for them, they don't give a shit about laws. And currently with Kilmar Abrego Garcia -- who should not be in El Salvador, we have no idea if he's okay or if anything is going on -- they now have a court order to return him and they say, Hey, we can't do anything about it.

And luckily, Bukele says he is not interested in doing it, they're not going to do anything about it anyway. So who gives a shit about laws? It's, this is now, again, we were wondering whether this is an authoritarian state. This is an authoritarian state. This is an authoritarian state. Yeah. And it's like you don't have to look around. They are now arguing that the Supreme Court did not tell them to return him when they did, 9-0. And they had to facilitate his return.

And the fact that they're trying to parse what that means. Steven Miller, he deserves to sit on a tack face up or and something worse. But, the guy is, he's Goebbels, he is the modern day Goebbles. He's a guy using Nazi technique propaganda, in order to try and, completely lie to everything where he is basically trying to say that, if he magically appeared in one of our airports, then, of course we'd have to allow him into our country.

But we can't do anything about getting him out of the prison. And then they ask Bukele, and he says, well, I'm not going to deposit a terrorist into your country. That would be a terrible thing that cannot be done. Are you aware that in El Salvador with this prison, there is no due process for anybody that gets sent there when they're -- Yeah, there's nothing. There's absolutely nothing. There's autocratic will, and that's everything. Yeah. It's a complete lawless state.

But here's a really horrible thing. Imagine how bad conditions were in El Salvador in terms of crime and violence that people there want that. They wanted this. They are happy because now it is quote-unquote "safe." And the people who were causing so much issues were locked up without any due process. So again, what percentage of people are in this prison who are El Salvadorians, who are innocent?

I. We certainly know what the percentage is of people that we sent them there, who don't have criminal records, is. And so this is really, really frightening. And what is staring Garcia in the face right now is a life sentence, without any notion of any process. No parole. No visitors to this prison. I, don't know what to make of this because this is not supposed to happen. You're supposed to at least be able to do something. So is anybody gonna do anything?

So I, just wanna say, first of all, you're assuming that, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still alive. We don't know. We don't have a clue. We don't have a clue if anybody who was sent there, and as you pointed out in the past, 75% of the people who were rounded up in this thing do not have criminal records. We don't know if some of them have died. We have no idea how many people have died in El Salvador in these prisons to begin with.

And that's one of the reasons why you shouldn't be in business with people like this. You shouldn't be creating a business partnership between the President of the United States of America and an autocratic leader in another country. And I wanna put that out there on the record, because I've been seeing a disturbing number of people, Nick, who are saying, what does Bukele have on Trump? Is Trump afraid to fight with him and fight first? No. He's not afraid to fight with him.

They are in a mutually beneficial partnership with each other. They have created a perfect situation to do something like this. And it was on full display in this presser, Nick. Trump was like, well, I don't have any control over this. And Bukele's like, I don't have any control over this. Isn't it wild that the two autocrats aren't able to do anything about this whatsoever? They have created these legal loopholes -- and I even hesitate to say "legal" as an identifier.

They are legalless loopholes, is what it is. They've studied this, figured it out, and figured out a way to move beyond the jurisdiction of the courts as they currently stand. They have -- and by the way, we've talked about it for forever: when were they going to start moving against courts and just simply not listening? Here we are. Period.

And they've already signaled what's coming next with it, which is American citizens -- American-born citizens being shipped out of the country for crimes based on what the Trump administration decides to do. And what did Trump say to Bukele?

He said, you're gonna need to build like five more of these prisons, which goes ahead and lays bare what this is, which is a mutually beneficial economic partnership, which is private prisons that are beyond the United States of America in order for profit for Bukele and others like him. There's undoubtedly kickbacks happening in all of this. Do not get me wrong, I have to imagine there's some laundering that's taking place from what the US is paying El Salvador.

But also it's a political advantage with this. Bukele gains from being the partner with Trump in all of this. He gains more and more power and prestige. And Trump has created the same thing that we've talked about before, which are rendition sites that took place during the War on Terror, where all of this was pioneered and put into effect. Now what do we have, Nick? We have the beginnings of a concentration camp situation.

And it's going to happen outside the borders of the United States of America. And then there's going to be those that are going to be built here because, as we talked about on the weekender, there is a $45 billion project to create those infrastructures. This is how all of this starts to come together, and we're watching it. And now is the time to understand we have to fight against this, before we can't fight anymore. Senator Van Hollen, welcome back to Democracy Now!

The huge news of the day is the pope has died. Two of his major issues — once again, just yesterday, Easter Sunday, calling for a ceasefire in Gaza — you went to the border there, deeply concerned about Israel’s assault on Gaza — and his deep concern for migrants. You just came back from El Salvador, where you met with Abrego Garcia. Why don’t we start there? What exactly happened? Well, Amy, I’m glad you mentioned the pope. We’re all going to miss him.

He was a pope for all of humanity, and Pope Francis was a beautiful soul. So, when I met with Abrego Garcia, my main purpose was to let him know that his wife and his kids loved him and that they were fighting for his return, and to let him know that his sheet metal workers’ union and millions of people in the United States who believe in the Constitution of the United States were fighting for his return and for due process.

He spoke about the conditions that he had experienced, the trauma of having been abducted off the streets of Maryland, trying to make a phone call from the Baltimore detention center — it was from Baltimore — without being allowed to do that, and, of course, then ending up first in the notorious CECOT prison. So, it was — it was, of course, emotional to hear about the trauma he experienced. I told him we were going to keep fighting for him.

I met with the vice president of El Salvador and said, “You really should not be complicit in this Trump administration illegal scheme.” And so, we will keep fighting for his constitutional rights, because if we deny the constitutional rights for one person, we threaten them for everybody. So, can you tell us exactly what Kilmar said as you met at the hotel? And how is it that you got it totally turned around? First, you were met by what? El Salvadoran soldiers?

You were told you can’t to meet with him. And then, just before you left, they brought him out? Well, first, I met with the vice president, and I asked if I could meet with Abrego Garcia. He said no. I said, “If I come back next week, can I meet with Abrego Garcia?” He said no. I asked if I could call Abrego Garcia.

He said no. And so, the next day, I tried to visit CECOT, which is this notorious prison, and was stopped by soldiers three kilometers short of the prison, and they told me they had been ordered not to allow me to proceed.

I had a number of press conferences in El Salvador with a lot of local press, and I called out this sort of horror of this person having been abducted and denied his constitutional rights, and made the point that El Salvador is violating international law, because international law requires that someone like Abrego Garcia be able to make contact with family, with their lawyers, with others.

And so, as I was really preparing to leave on Thursday night, we got a call saying that they had relented and that I could sit down with him. And in my conversation, which lasted probably over 40 minutes, we covered a lot of things, from his abduction to the conditions he was experiencing and many other things. So it’s hard to sort of capture all of that, but the bottom line was he had been traumatized by what happened.

He said it was his family, thinking of his family, that gave him the strength to go on. And I think the fact that he had learned for the first time that people in America were fighting for his constitutional rights also gave him additional strength. I want you to explain how much money Bukele is getting, this country of El Salvador is getting, for imprisoning hundreds of men. We don’t know what their crime is, if there’s any crime at all.

But Bukele said on social media about your meeting, “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” He also wrote, “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the 'death camps' & 'torture'” — obviously mocking — he goes on to say, “now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” You have called this margarita-gate. Can you explain what happened and Bukele’s, to say the least, cynical remark? Well, sure.

This was — it shows how far Bukele and Trump will go to deceive people and try to change the story, because what happened was this. When I first sat down with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, if you look at the original — the first photos, you’ll see a glass of water and a cup of coffee.

As we were speaking, the government folks, Bukele’s folks, ordered the waiters to bring these two glasses that were filled with liquid, looked like margaritas, because they had either salt or sugar or something around the rim. We, of course, did not order them. They brought them to the table. If you looked at the one in Kilmar’s glass, the liquid was actually lower than mine to try to create the appearance that he actually drank it. All of this is a deception.

As I pointed out, if you were really Sherlock Holmes, you would see that the sugar or salt or whatever it was around the rim, that there was no gap in it, so, obviously, no one had had a sip. But this goes to the big lie being told by Bukele and Trump and others to try to create the impression that this person, who was in one of the most notorious prisons in El Salvador and now is still very much in detention and in a news blackout, is somehow being treated fairly.

So, these are the lengths they will go, Amy, to try to create this deception, this illusion. They actually wanted to have the meeting by the pool of the hotel. We negotiated away from that. But it was pretty clear what their plan for deception was. And, you know, I think they really bungled it, because they did it in such a blatant way that I’m telling you what happened, and we’re calling it out, and what it demonstrates is what a big lie they will tell. I know you have to go. Fifteen seconds.

How do you see Kilmar coming home? What is your demand? And why is this so important to you, Senator? So, two things. Number one, when you have the Trump administration flagrantly violating court orders, I do think at some point the court is going to have to find the Trump administration lawyers in contempt and sanction them, number one. Number two, we need to keep pressure on El Salvador. I’m going to be talking later today to some officials in the state of Maryland.

You know, El Salvador has seen more American tourists going there. My view is that American tourists should not be visiting El Salvador when they’re participating in this illegal scheme with the Trump administration. State pension funds can look to see whether they want to divest from any companies doing business in El Salvador. So there are ways to put pressure on El Salvador here.

And the reason this is all so very important is because when you deny constitutional rights to one person, you are threatening them for every single one of us. That’s why this case is so important. If the Trump administration gets away with violating his constitutional rights and violating constitutional orders — I mean, court orders, you know, we are already in a constitutional crisis, but it’s getting worse by the day.

We've just heard clips, starting with Main Justice discussing the Supreme Court's ruling requiring the US government to facilitate the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia. CounterSpin focused on the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, its rare historical use, and ongoing legal battles over its constitutionality. Strict Scrutiny discussed Stephen Miller's misleading interpretation of the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling on the Abrego Garcia case.

The Majority Report explored the historical and political factors influencing the evolution of gangs and the bipartisan efforts to criminalize and label them as terrorists. 60 Minutes detailed photojournalist Phillip Sing's harrowing observations of Venezuela migrants held in El Salvador's harsh terrorism confinement center. Thom Hartmann dissected the alarming rise of the 43-year-old self-proclaimed "world's coolest dictator" in El Salvador.

The Muckrake Political Podcast discussed Trump's overheard plans to deport US citizens to El Salvador. On Democracy Now!, Senator Van Holland reflected on the Pope's recent death, the Gaza ceasefire and his visit to El Salvador. And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive sections. But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members who get this show ad free as well as early and ad free access to our freshly launched other show, SOLVED!

(that's all caps with an exclamation point), which features our team of producers discussing a carefully curated selection of articles and ideas to then solve some of the biggest issues of our day In each episode. Members get the podcast of SOLVED! first each week with an additional members-only backstage segment, but we're also posting the show on the Best of the Left YouTube channel. To support all of the work that goes into Best of the Left and have SOLVED!

delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support (there's a link in the show notes), through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. And as always, if regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email, request any financial hardship membership because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information.

If If you have a question or would like your comments included on the show, you can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991. We're also on the infamous Signal app at the handle bestoftheleft.01, or you can simply email me to [email protected]. Now as for today's topic, just a quick note about seeing some light in the otherwise absolute bleakness of this moment. In fact, it's actually becoming a bit of a very dark running joke on SOLVED!

for one or the other of us to share something that we've personally been taking heart in, only to be met with horrified stares from the rest. And we don't do it joking, like we're actually taking genuine, positive feelings from some very dark stuff, but it doesn't always translate. So that may happen again today, but here goes. I already congratulated Producer Deon on SOLVED! for this, but there's even more to add today.

He asked on a recent episode if the term Kafkaesque was in general usage these days, and none of us had really heard it used much, but agreed that it was due for a comeback. Then as if on cue, the example started arriving. The first from a judge in a court transcript who said, quote, "Do you realize that this is Kafkaesque?

I've got two experienced immigration lawyers on behalf of a client who is months away from graduation, who has done nothing wrong, who has been terminated from a system that you all keep telling me has no effect on his immigration status, although that clearly is BS, and now his two very experienced lawyers can't even tell him whether or not he's here legally, because the court can't tell him whether or not he's here legally, because the government's counsel can't

tell him if he's here legally." End quote. And then the second example just came up from Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times who said, quote, "I understand why Kilmar Abrego Garcia has become the face of Donald Trump's monstrous policy of sending migrants to a gulag in El Salvador. In a court filing, the administration's own lawyers initially admitted that his deportation was an administrative error, and the White House has been disregarding a Supreme Court ruling to facilitate his return.

Abrego Garcia's case was both a human tragedy and an incipient constitutional crisis. His Kafkaesque predicament is a stark illustration of what it means to be stripped of the law's protection, and thus a warning for us all." End quote. So by now you're starting to get the gist of the sort of stuff we've been taking comfort from recently.

Obviously none of this is a sign that things are getting better, only that people are using language appropriate to the occasion, which, in a case like this, you take is a good sign. I guess.

Now I'm not one to get terribly excited about polling data in relation to an administration that cares not at all about their popularity, because I don't believe that they're tanking approval ratings, which are happening, or headlines like this one from the AP, quote, "Immigration is Trump's strongest issue, but many say he's gone too far, a new AP poll finds" will have any impact on Trump's governing or legal strategy.

But at least what this all points to is that, as monstrous as some of our fellow citizens are in taking perverse pleasure in the suffering of immigrants they wish expelled from the country, they are not the majority by a long shot.

And when faced with the realities of Trump's government, lawyers attempting to make his actions fit within something resembling the law, there is no more appropriate term to describe the situation than Kafkaesque, which Merriam Webster defines as "having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality." Nailed it. Now, we also talked recently on SOLVED!

about the nature of people to either forget or romanticize periods of the past, when they are long ago enough that they cannot be remembered firsthand. For instance, the inability of most people to remember the time before wildly successful vaccines is helping drive a disastrously dangerous desire to go back to a sort of pre-vaccine era imagined to be more pure and healthy.

Similarly, Americans have been extremely comfortable for a very long time living in a society with people in government who, despite other disagreements, all basically believed in the sanctity of law and democracy itself. I mean, Richard Nixon was a major outlier, and the bipartisan response against him was something we really couldn't imagine happening today.

It was that sense of comfort, that lack of institutional memory about the dangers of those who would happily ignore the law in pursuit of their own aims, that has helped elect and reelect the most blatantly lawless president we've ever had. So there's not that much positive to look to, other than the evidence that many are seeing clearly what is happening and are horrified by it.

And the distinct possibility that witnessing these horrors today may somewhat inoculate us as a society against this kind of hate-driven politics, at least for a while. The fallout will continue to be terrible and last long into the future. Not unlike the projection that I just saw, that measles is on track to, again, become endemic in the country, killing hundreds of thousands in the coming decades, if vaccination levels remain at their current rate.

But in both cases, living through the political horrors of the Trump era and the medical horrors of the anti-vax movement will undoubtedly create a backlash that pulls us back in a more thoughtful direction. it may not sound all that positive right now. But you know, that's just what passes for positivity in these particular days that we're living through. And now we'll continue to dive deeper on four topics today.

Next up, section A. Deportation practices followed by Section B, victims of the regime, section C, Venezuela and El Salvador, and Section D resistance. Could you just remind us of where we are in this case and what exactly did Judge Zinis order the government to do? The judge originally ordered for two items. First for the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release and return from seko. This is the mega prison in El Salvador.

The White House has said that his deportation was an administrative error. Second, to ensure that if he is brought back to the US his immigration case. Due process within immigration courts During Tuesday's hearing, judge Zinis said that she had received information of little value on what had been done to fulfill any of this. So she granted a request from Abrego Garcia's lawyers for the government. Team to undergo a process called expedited discovery.

This means that government officials from Homeland Security, immigration, and Customs Enforcement and State will be deposed under oath. She gave both sides two weeks to complete the discovery process. Did the judge say why she's granting this expedited discovery process? She said that this would be done specifically to determine whether the government is abiding by her original court order, whether they intend to abide by it, and if not, whether that's in good or bad faith.

How did the government respond? The administration has so far continued to argue that it cannot force another government to extradite someone that they're holding. Back to the US on Tuesday. Drew en signed the lawyer for the Justice Department. Also brought up two documents. One was a status report on where the DOJ stands on bringing Abrego Garcia back to the us.

In this, A DHS official said that Abrego Garcia could be let in through a legal port of entry, but that if he did arrive, DHS would either move to deport him to a third country or back to El Salvador. Anyways, na Zini said that this was already getting too far ahead since. The government hasn't shown that it has facilitated his return at all. And sign then pointed to the Oval Office press conference transcript from Monday during which Trump met with Salvadoran President Nale.

Both leaders said that they didn't have the power to return him, but to that zine said that those answers that EN Z is pointing to during this press conference would not be considered responsive in a court of law. So let's talk a bit about the stakes of this case. I mean. For example, what have we learned about the relationship between the president and the courts?

The takeaway from Tuesday's hearing is that this is another judge growing, frustrated with the administration's answers on what it's doing in response to court orders. But the administration has in a way, set up for many of these policy debates to take place. In the courts and even make their way up to the Supreme Court as we've seen in this case. But not every decision is gonna go the administration's way.

So we have continued to see that there's also a growing tension between the courts and the administration. And you know, on Monday in front of El Salvador's leader, Trump criticized the quote, liberal judges that are blocking his agenda. This is of course, not new as he's previously criticized, those who have issued orders against his immigration directives, especially those related to the flights, to El Salvador. Let's back up a second though.

And, and Kate, I think you're sort of gesturing toward this in, in your comment, but we have a federal judge who is issuing an order finding probable cause that the government was in criminal contempt of that judge's order and that they willfully disregarded it. And that is a big, huge deal, right? Yeah. So I mean, we're talking about practicalities now. What happens next?

Predictably, the government has said that it's going to appeal this, um, it's my understanding that it's not appealable, but that might not stop the Supreme Court from intervening here. So, you know, put a pin in it. We will see. But Judge Boberg gave the government the option to cure contempt by simply returning those individuals that it had expelled in violation of his order.

He also instructed the government to identify the individual who gave the relevant directives to ignore his orders and not return the planes. So. There are things that the government can do and, and maybe they're pretty easy to do. I mean, he is not asking for a kidney here. He's just like, let me know who put you up to this. Let turn the planes around, fix it, or we can play hardball. We can do this the easy way, or we can do this a hard way and that's a big deal.

Yeah, we said the fact that an order of finding probable cause for contempt isn't appealable, might not stop the Supreme Court, and it certainly doesn't seem like it's gonna stop the DC circuit, a two to one DC circuit panel with the two being Trump appointees issued an administrative stay of Judge Berg's order finding probable cause for criminal contempt.

Please note that Judge Berg's order did not find anyone in particular in contempt and it contemplated further proceedings before the court would actually do anything. That is not an appealable order, but that wasn't going to stop the best lawyers. This administration never had Judge Rao and Judge Katz.

Now some of you might be wondering how is criminal contempt possible if the Supreme Court concluded that Judge Berg's order halting the expulsions was invalid because the case had been filed in the wrong court via the wrong mechanism? There's actually a prior Supreme Court decision that said you can still find an individual in contempt of a court order even if the underlying order is invalid, and that is a pretty infamous decision, I think, of the Supreme Court Walker versus City of Birmingham.

And it's infamous, of course, because there the Supreme Court upheld a criminal contempt finding against the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. Who was denied permission to March, marched anyway, and then was held in contempt. Of the court order that denied permission to march. So that's the law. And you know, if you're thinking that's a Warren Court precedent, Leah, I don't know if the Supreme Court will abide by it. Fair. I hear you.

But this is a bad Warren Court precedent and one that upheld the conviction of Dr. King. So I think Sam Alito will be fine with it. He will be very cross pressured, that's for sure. That's true. At least there's cross pressure. Yeah. Wow. Um, alright. I showed up today. You sure did. You did. I'm just gonna let you cook. Okay. Judge Palus, who is handling the Abrigo Garcia case also seems to be plum out of patience with these goons.

In a hearing last week, she read the government lawyers for absolute filth and told them to get their shit together and start answering her questions. There is no passing in. This cold call. Bitches was basically the energy and, and I'm not gonna lie, I, I have to say her energy was really something and it just sort of jumped off the pages of the transcript and she basically was like, Hey bitches.

Have you read Laura Hillenbrand's epic book about an underdog horse who comes back to be War Admiral? No, you haven't. Well, you should because I'm about to ride You like sea biscuit if you don't answer these questions. That was basically the energy. Like, what the fuck do you mean? Like, you don't have answers for me? You better have some answers. Yeah. Anyway, I was very black mom. I, I, I, I felt seen in a lot of ways. Um, so we will say more about those proceedings in a second, but.

As the courts work through whether they can prod this administration along toward observing constitutional norms and returning someone who is wrongfully expelled because of a quote unquote paperwork error, and who received no due process in the course of his rendition to a foreign gulag. We just wanted to note that this week we also got some very pointed reminders of why due process is in fact so important.

Yeah. So first, the administration is mistakenly, I hope, mistakenly, um, sending deportation notices to citizens. So Nicole Mia posted on Blue Sky that she had received a notice of deportation. Um, she's a United States citizen and like, are, are they seriously going to mistakenly deport US citizens? Like air quotes mistakenly second, the administration could not even spell. Mr. Abrego Garcia's first or last name correctly, in some of the district court filings over the last week.

This is sloppy af, which is why due process is important. That is how mistakes get made and due process is how we identify those mistakes and rectify them. And that is why I think people actually are pretty exercised correctly about Abrego Garcia, but the fact that the claims they are making apply with full force to anyone, yes, lawful resident. Unlawful resident, naturalized citizen, somebody born a citizen. Literally, if they say, once we have mistakenly sent you away, the law can't help you.

Like that applies to everyone. But you know, who doesn't agree with a claim? I just made our esteemed vice president who took two X last week to basically whine about how due process makes a lot of work for the government, and so we should dispense with it. I mean, this was a pretty stunning, I thought real men liked hard work, put those men to work observing due process. Not, not this guy. I mean, it, it was, first of all, I didn't.

I don't know, I guess X has completely dispensed with character limits. I'm not on it anymore, so I will occasionally see, but you literally wrote a whole ass essay, I mean a really bad one, but a whole ass essay on X that is essentially a claim that due process is expensive and inconvenient and so no longer required. And I just, Melissa, you, you wanna get it.

Lemme just say one thing, which is that, first of all, if I had taught this guy constitutional law, I would hide my head in a bag to borrow a phrase from Justice Scalia. Um, and I will just say, I do hope that there is some soul searching happening at Yale Law School right now. And the last thing I'll say is everything he says about due process being expensive and burdensome applies equally to potentially respecting First Amendment rights.

The lawmaking process in which Congress has to agree on language and then pass the law, the president then signs. It also applies to the appointment and confirmation process for principal officers. I mean, essentially the whole constitution is pretty inconvenient when you stop to think about it. And I welcome that, that wisdom emanating from the mouth of JD Vance because I think that's where this takes us. Melissa, sorry.

No, no, no. I, I just wanted to note that there was a period around, I don't know, 2017 when all of the men's were crowing about how important due process was when people were posting on Twitter and making spreadsheets about whether or not there were men who had sexually harassed 'em or assaulted them or whatever, and gotten away with it. And during those moments, I too agreed that due process was vitally important because these couldn't be itinerant commitments. But here we are.

Yes. Well, I also think they are going to have renewed interest in due process during any contempt proceedings that may arise. Um, my guess is good point. My guess is there due process, maybe due process, um, will be. Demanded and insisted upon. Amy, what exactly did the court do today and maybe just as important. What didn't they do?

So what the court did was the court barred the federal government until the Supreme Court said, O says otherwise from removing Venezuelan migrants who were at a particular detention facility. Really the, the. Case comes out of the Northern District of Texas where a facility known as the Blue Bonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas is located.

And so lawyers from the A CLU had come to the Supreme Court filing an emergency appeal asking the justices to block the removal of Venezuelan migrants from that facility. To El Salvador and the Supreme Court at 1:00 AM on Saturday morning issued an order that said, until further notice from this court, the federal government can't remove anyone from this district. The Supreme Court hasn't said anything about the substance of the President's order, which he issued back in March.

Relying on this Alien Enemies Act, this 1798 law that. Gives the president the power to order the removal of enemy aliens without, you know, to, to have them be removed relatively quickly. You know, the order has only been, the law has only been invoked three times in US history during the war of 1812 during World War I and during World War ii. And so.

Some lawyers and legal, legal scholars say that the president can't rely on this law at all to remove anyone, um, right now, but the Supreme Court isn't weighing in on that right now. At least as we said, the court acted, not known for its speed, but had remarkable speed last night. Uh, they did this just hours after the case was filed. They didn't wait for the appeals court to act. What does that say to you? It says that they wanted to be, they wanted to act quickly.

You know, not only did they not wait for the appeals court to act, they didn't wait for the federal government to weigh in. You know, they directed the federal government to file a response as soon as possible, which is also unusual. Usually they set a. Deadline for the federal government. But in this case, they just said as soon as possible after the court of Appeals has weighed in. Um, and I think they wanted to act. They wanted to make sure that these flights didn't take place.

You know, it's interesting because during a different hearing involving these flights in Washington, DC before Chief Judge James Bosberg on Friday, a government lawyer. Represented to Judge Boberg that there weren't gonna be any flights on Friday or Saturday. Um, and yet the f the Supreme Court still took the, the really unusual step of issuing this order to make clear that, that these flights should not take place and that no one should be removed from this part of Texas to El Salvador.

Much has been made about the government's reaction, the administration's reaction and response to the earlier Supreme Court ruling, uh, in the Abrego Garcia case. Do you think that had anything to do with it? I think it probably had a lot to do with it. The, I. Lawyers from the A CLU referenced it obliquely in their briefs.

They said, you know, if you are going to send people over to El Salvador and if a mistake is made, you know, just sort of throw up your hands and say there's nothing we can do, then it is doubly important to make sure that there is due process and that the su.

The courts of this country can review these removals before they take place, and then also they're very clear in their wording in this order saying, you know, until further notice from this court, you know, the government should not remove anyone because they've seen some of the, the sort of word games that have been played right now in the courts, sort of about what exactly it means for the federal government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return from El Salvador.

As you said, the no court has ruled on the, uh, whether the administration has the right to use the, uh, uh, the, uh, alien Enemies Act in the way they're using it. Is it possible, or do you think it's likely or unlikely that the court could do that now in this case? I. Uh, it's not clear when it's going to do that. I mean, it seems inevitable that it's going to have to do that.

And as some legal scholars have pointed out, the, you know, the Supreme Court could save everyone a lot of trouble if it went ahead and, and ruled on this. You know, if it were to rule that the Trump administration could rely on the Alien Enemies Act, then we'd still need to have this process before someone could be removed to El Salvador. But if it were to rule that the.

The Trump administration can't rely on the Alien Enemies Act, then, uh, it would certainly obviate the need for all of these proceedings because people couldn't be removed. So what's next? Uh, what's next is we now wait for the federal government to file its response, um, to the application for the stay because the Supreme Court temporarily put the proceedings on hold, but we'll see what the federal government has to say next and what the Supreme Court says after that.

Now entering Section B victims of the regime. Today we're gonna hear the stories of two of those men starting with 25-year-old Neddy Alvarado, Boez, Noah takes it from here, Maria. So one of the first people I called was N's, older sister. Maria Daniela, she still lives back in Venezuela, in their hometown of Yari Tagawa, and she tells me her family is devastated. To know Neri is having to experience this injustice.

She tells me they know Neri has never done anything wrong and that her brother wouldn't hurt to fly. She says he is a person who in all his life and in all his years, has never had an ounce of evil in his heart. Maria Daniella says that Neri had always been a really hard worker. Their father is a farmer in Yaarit. And Neri had been helping him in the fields since he was young, but she says that like every young person, he had dreams and goals, so he left for the US in late 2023.

Maria Daniella tells me that he'd never been to another country before. Mary first went to Mexico and tried to apply for asylum in the us. At first, he tried requesting an appointment through CBP one that was an app the Biden administration used so that migrants supplying for asylum could schedule an interview at an official port of entry. Neri ended up waiting in Mexico for about four months, but he never got an appointment.

So Maria Daniella says he decided to turn himself in at the border instead. Mm-hmm. Records show the border patrol only held RY for a day. He was then released into the us, allowed to apply for asylum and ended up in Dallas, Texas, where he eventually met a man named Juan Enrique Hernandez. Enrique is an American citizen and has been in the US for 27 years. He owns two Venezuelan bakeries and ne he started working for him last year.

Showing up every day from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM That is until immigration agents arrested ne outside his apartment in early February, just weeks after Trump took office, despite the fact that ne willingly turned himself in at the border nearly a year earlier and was allowed to apply for asylum. The Justice Department was now charging him with a misdemeanor alleging that he entered the country illegally.

Enrique went to visit him in detention the next day in Blue Bond Detention Center in Avi Ne tells Enrique that one of the first questions he was asked by an ICE agent was cater twice. Do you have any tattoos? We responded, yes, I have three tattoos. His sister, Maria Daniela describes them to us. There's a tattoo on his forearm that says brother and another. That's his family. The biggest tattoo is on his leg.

She says it's a symbol for autistic children with the name of the 15-year-old brother Neon has autism. And Maria Daniella says Neri has always been devoted to him. I've seen a picture of the tattoo that he got for his brother. It's a large autism awareness ribbon made up of different colored puzzle pieces.

His brother's name is written in cursive along the side, Enrique tells me that Neri explained the tattoos to an ice agent, telling him the tattoos aren't religious or political or symbols of any criminal gang. Enrique also says Neri was asked to hand over his phone so the agents could review it for evidence of gang activity. They don't find anything into the, and Enrique says the ICE agent told Neri, he would write down that he is not a member of rag. He tells ne, as far as I'm concerned.

You don't have to be here, but for reasons that remain unclear. Other officials in ICE's Dallas Field office decided to keep Neri in detention during that time. Enrique says Neri went before an immigration judge and was given a choice. Keep fighting for asylum and stay locked up her. Get deported back to Venezuela NE's. Eager to get out detention. So he agrees to go back home to Yari. Tagawa. Enrique spoke to Neri shortly before he was going to be deported.

Told him, look, the only concern I have here, boss, is that the 90 people detained with me. They all have tattoos. It's as if ne is starting to realize that something was up. Maria, Daniella says she and her family were in contact with ne every day he was detained, but that stopped after Friday, March 14th. At the same time, Maria Daniella starts seeing that Venezuelans have been sent El Salvador. And then on March 20th NE's 25th birthday, it was confirmed.

CBS News published the full list of Deportees and Ne Alvarado. Borges was one of the names. Enrique says, do you think a bad person would work with autistic children or work at a bakery from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM every day? He tells me It's an incredibly difficult situation. What is he supposed to tell NE's mom, she's in Venezuela, and ask for updates every day? What can I tell her? How do I respond? Back in Venezuela ne actually taught swimming classes to kids with developmental disabilities.

It was a place called Club Orino, and they actually released a video after they learned what had happened to Neri in it. We hear from the president of the club and he says, we wanna make clear. Neri is not a gang member. He demands the immediate release of his friend. Then the video cuts to several kids and parents from the club, including his brother Eren, who say Ner is an honest, good person. And not a criminal. They all demand justice for Neri.

My reporting partner, Isabel and I have seen many videos like this one online. Venezuelans both here in the US and back in Venezuela are outraged at the thought that their friends and family members could be treated this way. We've spoken to nearly a dozen of them ourselves, and we continue to hear from more So let's drill down into the specifics. Trump claimed he was actually handed something.

If so, what it would've been is the gang field interview sheet filled out by a Prince George's county cop when Abrego Garcia was detained in 2019. As we reported at the New Republic, that cop was subsequently suspended and indicted for serious misconduct. But put that aside for a sec. The gang field interview sheet makes two key claims tying him to MS 13. We're gonna go through both of them slowly.

The first one is that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie with imagery of rolls of money with the eyes, ears, and mouth of the presidents on the bills covered. It's a little cryptic from the report what that exactly means, but Eric, is this clothing necessarily indicative of membership in MS 13? And what do you make of this description of the imagery?

Well, first of all, I, I don't think that, um, I'm aware of any research that would identify that clothing as somehow emblematic of MS 13. What I would say is that in our research, looking into the presence and the nature in organization activities of MS 13 in the greater Washington DC area, one of the things that we found quite striking was the degree to which law enforcement. Officials were not able to correctly identify who was part of the gang and who was not.

So the idea that this gang identification sheet is authoritative information, certainly based on our work several years ago, including in Prince George County, we would not have, uh, have of considered that, um, a reliable source. Eric, can you tell us a little more about the work that you did in the PG county and DC metro area and what it said about the difficulty that authorities have in identifying members of the gang?

I. Yes. Well, and one of the things that we did in the project was we would ask law enforcement officials to enable us to interview, uh, people who were detained under their jurisdiction, uh, and who were members of gangs. And we would find them that some of the people they refer us to were clearly, as best we could tell, not part of the gang. It just seems like this whole enterprise is really deeply flawed and, and for understandable reasons. This is complicated stuff.

These are complex social phenomenon we're talking about here. The second claim in the Maryland Copp Gang Field interview sheet that's supposed to tie Abrego Garcia to MS 13 is the claim that a confidential source said that he's a member of the Western clique. His lawyers point out that this operates primarily in New York where he never lived. Eric, what do you make of this assertion? Would you place much stock in this confidential source? And is the general claim credible?

Well, the general claim is plausible, but I wouldn't, I don't see precisely why an anonymous source whose information we have no basis for verifying, uh, and, and we don't see any other profile that would enable us to associate this individual with MS. 13. I think we don't have any information about particular criminal activity that this person is said to have carried out.

Uh, we don't have any, um, whether it's robbery, whether it's car theft or whatever it might be, uh, that would associate him, uh, with a click of MS 13 operating in Maryland. The whole thing that makes this so ridiculous, which you just put your finger on, is that he was never charged with, let alone convicted of any crime related to gang activity or any crime at all. I wanna bring up another aspect of all this.

I. One of the reasons that Rego Garcia received withholding of removal status in 2019 is because he feared that if he were sent back to El Salvador, he'd face harm from the Barrio 18 gang, which had threatened his family with death in attempting to extort his mother over her OSA business. I've heard this described as supposed evidence that he was an MS 13 and that. This is why he feared a rival gang.

But Eric, my understanding is that a threat like this doesn't have to do with membership in a rival gang. It's more that Barrio 18 is threatening him for not doing their bidding in territory. They've marked as theirs. Kind of similar to how gangs carved up territory in The Godfather. If you remember all the, you know the chieftains sitting around saying that, you know who's gonna have what? Can you talk about this?

The way that Barrio 18 or MS 13 operates in El Salvador is that they extort local businesses, self-employed, corner stores, bodegas, and so on and so forth, bus drivers, um, and you have to pay, um, or else you get torched. And what seems to have happened is that his mother didn't pay. And at that point, not only is she subject to violence, but anybody related to her is also subject. Violence and the fact that he fled is itself an act of defiance, um, that is subject to retribution by the gang.

And it's also the case that even if he weren't a member of MS 13, if he lived in a territory that was governed by MS 13, then he automatically becomes a target of violence from barrio. Um, so there's all sorts of reasons to treat credibly, the basic narrative that led the immigration court to, um, withhold the order of removal. So speaking of this broader narrative, my understanding of the way MS 13 functions is that to, to bring people in, you're usually getting teenagers, right?

Not people in their twenties. So the whole narrative that the Trump administration is spinning makes you wonder, why didn't Abrego Garcia get drawn into gang activity earlier when he was a teenager? I mean, he would've been more vulnerable. He arrived in the United States at the age of 16. And so if he had been drawn into MS 13. As a teenager, there'd be a paper trail, there'd be a record of activity, of gang activity. There's none of that. Am I right about this?

Is, is it likely that he'd be pulled in in his twenties? Well, I think, you know, one of the things that we just don't understand, um, on in this case is what is the criminal activity that he's associated with. And so if he were an active member of the gang, he would be involved in criminal activities, and there's been no charge, as best I can tell of his participation in any such activities. Recruitment into the gang typically happens during one's teenage years.

Um, the gangs, um, target, uh, young people who are directionless, who don't have roots in their community. They off often have broken families, and they offer a kind of family. They offer a community, they offer membership in something. And so yes, typically the entry into. Gang activity, gang networks happens during the teenage years. And so yes, it would be rather unusual for somebody to first connect to the gang, um, in their twenties, um, at an envi in an environment where he was working.

Doesn't really hold together very well. Right. Uh, putting it all together, a lot of what we actually know about MS 13 and Abrigo Garcia's specific overall trajectory casts even more doubt on the claim that Trump is making, which again, he is basing on something that he said was handed to him. Is that about the size of things? The facts just don't add up in any way, do they?

Well, the facts don't add up in any way, but I think they do in the sense that we know that for years, Trump has demagogued the image of MS 13. This is the person who talks about migrants poisoning the blood of the United of Americans. This is the person who talks about vermin, who talks about contamination, and there's no. Loyalty here to facts or to decency or to civility.

Um, this is somebody who is an opportunist and who deploys, um, fear of outsiders, um, who deploys resentment against migrants and for whom to be able to say, MS 13, MS 13, transnational gang terrorist organization is all just part of a demagogic, um, um, toolkit. Among Amir MLA's clients is an activist who has been charged in connection with a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Michigan. MLA said he believes that is the reason why he was stopped.

He told me more of what happened when we spoke on Wednesday. I. So, as I understand, you were returning home from vacation with your family, then you were pulled aside by some federal agents. Pick up the story from there and just start to tell us what happened. Well, as soon as I got to the passport check line, the agent looked over to another agent and asked, is the TTRT team available? I didn't know what that acronym stood for. Right? So I did a quick Google search.

At that point, I realized it meant the ter. Task Force on terrorism, something along those lines. Tactical terrorism response team is what the acronym was. And at that point, my gut just, you know, my heart fell into my stomach at that point. I was so, you know, concerned and worried. Um, I looked over at my wife and I told her we're probably gonna be stopped and, and detained and questioned and so. They eventually took me over to an interview room.

My family was waiting for me, anxiously not knowing what was going on. Um, and at then a plain clothes officer walks in and says, we know that you're an attorney and we know that you've been handling some high profile cases lately. Um, and then I said, okay, well what can I help you with? And he said, um. We would like to look at your phone. And he handed me a, a pamphlet with a federal statute that says that at the border they're allowed to confiscate my phone for a number of days.

Um, and at that point I was just shocked that they wanted to take my phone. Well, let me ask you this. At that point, did you have any sense of why they wanted to see your phone? What did they tell you? Well, it was, it was apparent to me at that point that they had already done their homework about me before I arrived because they, they knew that I was taking on some, some cases, he knew who I was and he knew where I was coming from and, uh, he knew I was at an attorney.

So it wasn't a random selection. They were prepared to talk to me and discuss things with me. Um, and he was adamant that he wanted to see my phone. What did you do then? Did you give him your phone? No. At that point I said, listen, you know that I'm an attorney. Everything in my phone could be privileged information. I have emails that go back over 10 years. I have text messages with clients.

I have all my, my, uh, court filings and, and my office filings are in my cloud, which is available on my phone. Mm-hmm. You're not getting full and unfettered access to my device. It's not gonna happen. Um, and so that puzzled this agent and he had to go to a supervisor. The supervisor comes back and says, here's a legal pad. Here's a pen. Write down everything that you believe is privileged. We won't go through that. I look, I looked at him with, you know, astonishment.

How do you expect me to go through 10 years and more of information that's in my device and see this is privilege and this isn't. It was a ridiculous conversation. You said in other interviews that I've heard that you believe that you were targeted because you were representing a pro-Palestinian protestor. You said that they seemed to know who you were, they seemed to know that you were an attorney.

What led you to make the connection that this protestor might have been the reason that you were detained, interrogated. They wanted your phone. I. This is the only case of, of any high profile action that I'm involved in right now. This is the only one that we've been making a lot of noise about because in Samantha Lewis's case, my client at the University of Michigan, they're criminalizing free speech.

They're charging seven students, um, with resisting and opposing police officers, which are felonies. And all they were doing was engaging in peaceful protest about the war in, uh, on Gaza. So that we've made a lot of noise about and that we're vigorously defending, why else would they mention that? I'm, they we, that I know that you're engaging in high profile cases.

I just wanna note that NPR has reached out to Customs and Border Protection, and at the time of our conversation, we've not yet heard back, but A CBP spokesman named Hilton Beckham told the Detroit Free Press, which he spoke to, that searches of electronic media have not gone up during the Trump administration. And I'm gonna quote here, allegations that political beliefs trigger inspections or removals are baseless and irresponsible. Your response.

I had say to them that, you know, what was the purpose of searching my device? Then I, if you know that I'm not a, there's, there's no probable cause, there's no warrant, there's no concern that I'm a, a threat to national security or anything of that nature. The purpose of searching my phone doesn't have anything to do with terrorism. Um. There's only a chilling effect and it's done to be intimidating. Um, in my opinion, for the causes that I was engaging in.

I'm standing up for students, I'm standing up for immigrants and, and political dissenters, and I think this was a, a, um, a way to try to, uh, uh, dissuade me from taking on these types of cases. Ultimately you did not consent to just hand over your phone, but if I understand correctly, you did at some point let them look at the contexts that are in your phone. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Well, they kept threatening to take my device and they said they had, they had the legal right to do so, so I didn't want to walk away, uh, from that meeting or interrogation or detention without my device in my hand. So I did acquiesce to allowing them to see the list of my contacts that's stored in my phone only. Um, and they agreed with that. They said, okay, we'll look at your contact list and, um, and, and we'll go from there.

So at that point, they took my device for maybe seven or eight minutes and they came back. Um, they apparently had downloaded my contact list and then began to ask me further questions about who contacts in my phone were, and that's when I said, no, this is getting into too much, uh, you know, uncharted waters here. If anybody that's in my phone is gonna be a friend, a family member, or a client, right?

I'm not gonna tell you if these folks are clients or not, but that's all the information you're gonna get. Okay? If this is part of a much broader effort to intimidate lawyers who work, whose work runs counter to administration priorities, I wanna ask you in a minute or so that we have left, is this working? No, I think it's doing the opposite effect.

The outpouring support that I've received from members of the bar, not just in Michigan, but nationally and members of the community is, is a showing that people are offended by this type of conduct. This is not what America's all about. We are a, a, a nation of laws. We have protections, we have amendments. The fourth amendment included of your right to privacy, which includes not, um.

Having your personal effects and papers be searched, um, and it's setting a terrifying precedent if, if government agents can target a lawyer at the border, what's stopping them from doing to anyone who dares to speak out. Well, we understand, uh, if we're paying attention that the Trump administration is not just interested in so-called criminals. You know, when we read that they are tracking anyone, immigrant citizen, no matter who expresses criticism of the deportation agenda on social media.

So it, it seems clear that this is. Ideologically based on its face, or at least piece of it is, is that not a legal front to, to fight on A lot of things that would be entirely illegal if the government went after a US citizen for them are in fact historically considered okay for the government to do in the context of immigration law. Mm-hmm. For example, the grounds that are being used for many of these student visa revocations are this.

Your regulation that the State Department can revoke the visa of anyone it deems to be a foreign policy problem for the United States, which does open itself up to deporting people for speech, for protected political activity, for, again, the sort of thing that would be, you know, a poor constitutional right for US citizens. But that in the context in which US immigration law has developed, which was a lot of people being very concerned about.

You know, communist infiltration, immigrants have kind of been carved out. I think in general, it's really important for people to understand that while the Trump administration loves to imply that it's going to use all of its powers, maximally, that no one is safe and that everyone should be afraid, uh. In fact, you know, citizens do have more protections than green card holders. Green card holders do have more protections than others.

For example, the one green card holder who they've tried to use this State Department thing on, the judge in that case as of when we're talking, has told the government to give me some evidence in 24 hours, or I'm ordering this guy released because it does take more to deport somebody on a green card. So how. Scared people should be, it shouldn't just be a function of what the government is saying, although you know what it's doing is more relevant.

But it should also be a function of how many layers of protection the government would have to cut through in order to subject you to its will. Well, and that gives us points of intervention. You know, and I appreciate the idea that while we absolutely have to be concerned about what's being said, it's helpful to, to keep a, a clear eye on what is actually happening so that we see. Where the fronts of the fight are.

But I, I then have to ask you, you know, when you hear analysts say, well, you know, this person had a disputed status, this person had a green card, and make those distinctions. But then you hear Trump say, well, heck yeah, I'd love to send US citizens. To, uh, prison in El Salvador. You know, it, he's making clear he doesn't think it's about immigration status.

He says, if I, if I decide you're a criminal and you bop people on the head, or whatever the hell he said, you know, um, you're a dangerous person. Well, I, I would love the law to let me send us citizens to El Salvador also, so you can understand why folks. Feel the slipperiness of it, even as we know that laws have different layers of protection. I do.

The thing that strikes me about these US citizens to El Salvador comments is that like I was reporting on Trump, you know, back when the first time he was a presidential candidate, so it's, you know, I've been following what he says for a minute. Mm-hmm. It's really, really rare for Donald Trump to say if it's legal, we're not sure it's legal, right. But he said that about this and press secretary, Caroline Levitt has also said that about this.

And like that caveat is just so rare that it does make me think that this is. Different from some of the other things where Trump says it and then the government tries to make it happen. Right? But they are a little bit aware that like there's a bright line and even they are a little bit, you know, leery of stepping over it and kind of insistent about that. Mostly because I worry a lot about people being afraid to.

Stand up for more vulnerable people in their communities because, because they're so focused on the ways in which they're vulnerable, right? And so what I don't wanna see is a world where non-citizens can be, you know, arrested and detained with no due process. And citizens are afraid to speak out because they heard something about citizens being sent to El Salvador and they worry, they will be met. I, I I hear that. I hear that.

And, and following from that, I, I wanna just quote from the piece that you wrote for the New York Times last November about focusing on what is actually really happening. And you said that the details matter, not only because every deportation represents a life.

Disrupted and usually more than one since no immigrant is an island, they matter precisely because the Trump administration will not round up millions of immigrants on January 20th, but millions of people will wake up on January 21st not knowing exactly what comes next for them. And the more accurate the press and the public can be about the scope and scale of deportation efforts.

The better able immigrants in their communities will be to prepare for what might be coming and try to find ways to throw sand in the gears. What I hear in that. Is that there is a real history making moment for a press corps that's worth its salt. Absolutely, and to, to be honest, in the weeks since the flight percent El Salvador, we've seen some tremendous reporting from national and local reporters about the human lives that were on those planes we know.

So much more about these people than we would have. But what that means is that these people who arguably the administration would love to see disappear, Elli, would love to see disappear. They're very, very visible to us, and that's so important in, you know, making it clear that. Things like due process aren't just, it's not just a hypothetical.

Nice to have due process is the protection that prevents in general gay makeup artists from getting sent to a country that they've never been to because of their tattoos. Mm-hmm. That it's an essential way to make sure that we're not visiting harm on people who have done nothing to deserve it. Well, finally, I, I do understand that. We have to fight wherever there's a fight, but I do have a kind of fear of small amendments or reforms as a big picture response.

You know, we can amend this here, or we can return that person. You know, it feels a little bit like a restraining wall against a flood, and I, I just feel that it helps to show that. We are for something, you know? Mm-hmm. We're not just against hatefulness and bigotry and, and the law being used to, to arbitrarily throw people out. We have a vision of a shared future, you know, that that doesn't involve, uh, deputizing people to snitch on their neighbors who they think look different.

You know, we have a vision about immigration that is a positive vision that we've had in this country, and I guess I wish I'd see more of. Of that right now in media and elsewhere. What makes it particularly hard from my perspective is that most Americans know very little about immigration law. Right? You know, it's extremely complicated and most people have never had firsthand experience with it. So in order to get people to even understand what is going on now, you need to do more work.

Than you do for areas where people are kind of more intuitively familiar with what the government does and that takes up space that otherwise could go to imagining different futures. The other problem here is that frankly, you know, there it, it's not that new and radical ideas on immigration are needed. It's a matter of. Political will to a certain extent. Right, right.

Like the reason that the the Trump administration's use of this registration provision is such a sick irony to some of us is that there was a way that Congress proposed to allow people to register with the US government. It was called comprehensive immigration. Form. Yeah. You know, that there, there have been proposals to, to regularize people, to put people on the books, to bring people out of the shadows.

And the absence of that and the absence of a federal government that was in any way equipped to actually process. People rather than figuring out the most draconian crackdown and hoping that everybody got the message is where we've gotten to a point where everyone agrees that the system is broken and the only solutions appear to be these radical crackdowns on basic rights. It was a short time ago, Supreme Court agreed to hear oral arguments in the case about ending birthright citizenship.

How confident are you that the court will rule in your favor and allow that order to end birthright citizenship to go forward? Well, you're just telling me that for the first time, I am so happy. I think it, the case has been so misunderstood that case birthright citizenship is about slavery. If you look at the, uh, details of it, the signings of it, everything else. That case is all about slavery. And if you view it from that standpoint, people understand it.

But for some reason, lawyers don't talk about it. The news doesn't talk about it. That's not about tourists coming in and touching a piece of sand and all of a sudden they're a citizenship. You know, they're a citizen. That ship that is all about slavery and even look at the dates on which it was signed, it was right at that era during, right after the Civil War, I. And if you look at it that way, the case is an easy case to win.

And I hope the lawyers talk about birthright citizenship and slavery because that's what it was all about. And it was a very positive, it was meant to be positive. And uh, they use it now and instead, not for slavery. They use it for people that come into our country and they walk in and all of a sudden they become citizens and they pay a lot of money to different cartels and others. It's all about slavery, and if you look at it that way, we should win that case.

Um, this is some breaking news we got while recording, and that is that the Supreme Court has scheduled four argument. The Trump administration's requests to stay insignificant, respects to put on hold, insignificant respects the orders. That prevent them from implementing their wildly unconstitutional plan to strip birthright citizenship from certain individuals.

Now, I wanna quickly explain what issue was actually before the court, because the administration did not ask the Supreme Court to review whether. Their efforts to strip birthright citizenship are legal. Instead, the question they asked the courts to take up is whether it was permissible for the lower courts in these cases to issue nationwide injunctions to prevent the administration from implementing this policy on a nationwide basis, but the practical effect of the court.

Ruling against nationwide injunctions here would give the administration ostensibly a green light to implement this policy in large swaths of the United States. And, uh, we, we will, we are, we are gonna go off on this shit in a second, but I just want to note at the outset that the idea that the court would take up the nationwide injunction issue in this case is utter garbage.

One, they had numerous opportunities to do so when courts were enjoining Biden administration policies, they turned away those efforts, apparently no concern there. And second, if there is any case in which a nationwide injunction is appropriate, it would be an injunction against the birthright citizenship eo, because how are you going to implement an injunction against that policy on a state by state basis? Determine where people are born and like, can they travel in the United States?

Like it makes no effing sense. Thoughts. Who are the four? I took four people to Grant Cert here. Yep. Who do you think they are? Well, Gorsuch has been railing against these Yes. Nationwide injunctions for a while. Yeah, I am sure. Gorsuch. Yeah. Um, my guess is Justice Thomas. I think he has, uh, indicated rather selective views, um, on the propriety of nationwide injunctions, um, Alito. 'cause this could help the administration, right. Alito, because this could help the administration.

And then you probably get a J four right. From one of Brett or Amy or even the Chiefy. Yeah. And okay, so here, here is my goblin villain. Take on what is happening. Mm-hmm. Um. I think there is a chance and still a greater than 50% chance that the court rules against the Trump administration on these birthright citizenship applications. So I, I think they're gonna reject the administration's request to narrow the scope of the injunctions in this case.

And I think the chief probably and other justices love the idea of buying themselves some goodwill, some credibility and cover for when they inevitably give the administration a green light on a host of other atrocities. Yeah. Be it refusing to get Mr. Rego Garcia back in the United States. Right.

Be it allowing the administration to implement this insane, a EA policy, be it dismantling the administrative state, be it unconstitutionally, coercing law firms, the media educational institutions, like who knows what they're gonna do. But my guess is they saw this as kind of like a freebie for them. Hey, guess what? Citizens? We're going to acknowledge that you're citizens. Wait. That, that's literally, you're welcome. The best case scenario to hope for here.

Yeah. I think that's astute and very likely, right. The thing that's hard for me to, to figure is that I think that the credibility that they could buy is only gonna come on the substantive question if, if they're gonna reject, but gonna, the policy people that when the headlines people are not mm-hmm. Are Trump administration gets ruled against, right. Supreme Court rules against Trump administration on birthright citizenship. That's what the headlines are gonna say.

Mm-hmm. The thing I'm worried about is what if that means they're ultimately gonna allow, they're gonna rule against it on this sort of don't rule it out injunction issue rule. And then next fall, uh, they're gonna have the actual rule it out, actual substantive question, rule and allow, I mean, they can't possibly allow this order in its entirety. They can't allow it to people who are lawfully here and have kids as the order purports to do.

And I also think there's the statutory question, which is like whether or not the constitution requires birthright citizenship, which it definitely does. Congress has passed laws conferring citizenship. So you can't by executive order, do this anyway. Whatever the constitution has to say about it. Laws are for losers, Kate. Correct? That's true. Constitutions are for tss. Are for suckers. Yeah. Yeah. This is some good literation. Ladies.

Kate, you and you're reading, why do you keep reading the Constitution as though the words matter? We're, we're reading it and they're reading it. I guess Leah, you, you make an excellent point though about the selectivity of this court antipathy for nationwide injunctions and.

I also think it's a really astute point and a clarion call to the media to think about how it chooses to cover this case, because the media will absolutely shape the narrative around what the ultimate disposition of this, and they really have to get it right here. what kinds of questions are, are you thinking of?

I mean, I'm talking to people with residency, people with citizenship who are concerned about potentially, you know, because there's this, been this warning about within the, the last 10 years, I think it's actually supposed to be five, but they're saying if they can prove any, you know, what, what they call terrorists or antisemitic associations within 10 years, they might come for people's citizenship. Uh, but just, you know, routine travel. Can I go see my sick mother?

You know, should I go to this conference abroad? Is it safe for me just to, to go on vacation? You know, these are people that have had residency for years in some cases. You know, and, and certainly student visas are at more risk than ever, but it's a new world. We're adjusting to it. But, you know, I do think that this is really sending a message.

It's, it's elevating things because it's one thing, you know, and, and what happened to Mahmud, Khalil was, was terrible and should never have happened. But they came to his house, which is a fairly routine way for ice to enforce, uh, for ESA ostrich. They met her on the street and where they'd been surveilling her, they knew she was going to be, but there's an extra route level of cruelty.

Even, even I think, beyond coming to your house to when you think you're gonna be going in to finalize your immigration status as a citizen to cross that final threshold. And they do it because they know for sure that you're not gonna be armed. For example, you're gonna be going into a federal building, so it's safe to intercept you there. But, uh, I, I do think that it's really sending a message in a, in a way that every one of these arrests is a message. But I think this one's really deep.

So when people are, when people are asking you about what, if anything, they can do in terms of travel, what, what advice, knowing that you're not giving people legal advice, but what are, what are you telling them? Like, what should people know about traveling right now? The most important thing is that if you've ever had any contact with the criminal legal system, make sure that you have certified copies of that case.

Because that's, that's the biggest thing that gets people intercepted coming back in. And CBP is relentless about this, even if they know the case was dismissed, even if they've been through this three or four times with you before in secondary screening. So I've been providing letters and certified copies that people need to travel. You know, assuming that your case is dismissed and that you're, you're safe to travel.

Uh, if you do have an, a pending case or you do have a conviction of some kind, you've gotta talk to a lawyer before you even think about traveling. But otherwise, you know, for a lot of my clients who are politically active, have been very active on social media, who've been outspoken, unfortunately, I, I hate to have to tell anybody this, but locking down your social media and just scrubbing your phone, be understanding that they can take your phone at any time when you come back in.

You know, just be prepared for a complete scouring of your history. You know, I just, I, I can't believe I have to give this advice, but I have to do it. You mentioned that the mode in which the administration is targeting these students is sending a message. What is that message?

It's a message to student protestors obviously to start with, but it's a message to all of us that our free speech is, is, is a liability, the, the things that we say, and certainly for people who are on student visas, which are very tenuous and ISIS terminating illegally terminating, uh, as far as we can tell, hundreds and hundreds of student visas right now on spurious grounds and almost nothing.

Uh, so I really think that starting with the most vulnerable populations, people that they can easily target for their free speech and then moving down is, is the way to go here for them. And I, I do think that it is a direct message that we are gonna come for people that say things that we don't like. I was posting a couple weeks ago about a client that I had who was disappeared.

There was a, a scholar of, of Russia, who's from Russia, uh, who's, who looks a lot at, at how Russia got to where it is today. And I'm still thinking about what she said because she. Posted this and, and said, next they'll be coming For the lawyers who speak out next, they'll be coming for the lawyers who complain to the government and to the public about what they're doing to their clients, because that's what happened in Russia.

Not to make it about me, but, uh, it, I never thought that I'd be at all even have to consider liability to myself for doing my job. Right. And, and returning to Malawi's case, I also wanna emphasize that the government is preparing to deport Malawi back to the West Bank where he was born in a refugee camp. This is what he told, uh, AJ plus a year ago. And when I was 12 years old, they killed seven Palestinians from the refugee camp in the middle of the night.

I collected their body parts with my own hands. I peeled their skin of the wall. I put their body parts in plastic bags. No child should experience this. I was 12 years old at that time. It's a truly horrific situation. And we also know that violence against Palestinians continues and has escalated, particularly in the wake of October 7th.

Madi told me that, uh, his father's store was blown up a few months ago in retaliation, and this is a very actively dangerous situation that the government is about to throw him into. So we know that Mahmud, Khalil and Ru Meza Ozturk, the Tufts grad student you mentioned and and who we spoke about last week with Representative Aana Presley are being held in ice detention in Louisiana.

Louisiana holds the second largest number of people after Texas where more than 12,000 people are being held nationwide. Nearly half of the roughly 50,000 immigrants detained have no criminal record, and many only have minor infractions like traffic violations according to track. So why have Texas and Louisiana become hubs of immigration detention for this administration? I've actually been to Louisiana, to central Louisiana where they, uh, Jayna and Oakdale facilities are.

And, uh, I can tell you, well, for one thing, I think it's cheap real estate. Uh, it seems like there's not a lot down there. So I, it makes sense that they, they purchase these vast tracks of land, but, um, they're also in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

And I, I can't think that's a coincidence that the immigration infrastructure, and this has been coming, I mean, these facilities have been here, I've been doing this since 2006 and, you know, certainly under Bush, they were doing a lot of the same things, moving people around the country in the same way. Not quite as, uh, dramatically as we're seeing right now. But, you know, this is very intentional that they go to these places where they can offer jobs.

And sometimes it's the only form of employment in these areas. And where they're isolated from everybody where there are not attorneys. You know, there certainly is not a thriving immigration bar in Janna, Louisiana and, and or in the other places in Texas where they're holding them. And you know, I, Congresswoman Pressley last week was, was absolutely right. And she's my congressman one by the way, very proud of her.

She was absolutely right to say that these are political prisoners and that they're being treated like political prisoners. People really need to understand that. There are other ways they, they maybe that they could have gotten to this, but, uh, they're, they're taking the hardest possible approach on people for their political opinions and they're putting 'em in these facilities.

And I can tell you, having been there myself, uh, the, the other thing is that the immigration judges in these facilities are unforgiving. And you can look at their records. They're all available on the TRAC website. You can look at any given immigration judge's outcomes, their asylum grants are pretty bad. You know, in some cases I, there, there's a judge in New Mexico I was just dealing with who has a hundred percent asylum grant rate denial.

From last year just denied every case in front of him. Hmm. And I've been being told that I had a client who was disappeared a couple weeks ago, and I talked to him yesterday. He said, every single person, you've got people in the facility from all around the world who are all around the country, who have all been sent to this place in New Mexico, and they're all being denied bond, which is, uh, extraordinary.

I mean, you can't have a day where you just, you know, a week where you just deny everybody's bond. You have to have somebody who's eligible for bond. Uh, and of course the government's position is that people charged under these foreign policy grounds that, uh, the three people we've been talking about are, are being charged under, are mandatory detainees. I believe they're saying they can't release them in bond.

So it's just, it really emphasizes, and, and I I, to the point that I looked up Amnesty International's definition of a prisoner of conscience in, you know, Khalil and, and Auster, and they all meet this definition. I mean, that's, that's to that point. So this is where we're sending them. Now ICE gets the $45 billion that it's looking for. I don't think that people understand what that's going to look like.

Even Trump voters I don't think are prepared for what it's gonna look like when immigration, unfortunately, is that involved in our lives. You've reached Section C, Venezuela and El Salvador. Now, at this time, this time period where they, where, where this was happening, did the Venezuelan government let people leave or did you, or did they always have to do it through illegal means? No, actually a lot of people went through legal means.

So when people started leaving at first, um, the very first wave is with the first story, which is people who worked for the oil industry and, and similar, a lot of those people ended up moving to other o uh, petroleum hubs. So there's a lot of Venezuelans in Houston, Texas. There's a lot of Venezuelans in Calgary in Canada. A lot of them in the Gulf. Uh, so that was the first immigration wave, mostly legal.

Then eventually in 2016 there was a ma a default, and it start, people start pouring out. So a lot, a lot of middle class. Went out kind of like me to, to do a master's with the excuse of getting a job, but most of it was legal. And then within the, the South American continent, it was also legal because Venezuela used to be part of me sour, I don't dunno if you're aware of it, but it's kind of like one of those regional, um, organizations. And one of the things that they had was.

Work per immediate work permits as soon as they immigrated. So a lot of people when they left, they were legal migrants because they were within the me sur Then Mer Seur invalidated Venezuela because they hadn't, they didn't pay their, their dues and of course, like the whole authoritarian regime, et cetera. And that's when the illegal immigration started happening. Um, basically because since the economy collapsed. The economy shrunk by a factor of five, something like that.

So the real impact was a famine, an unrecognized famine when I moved out. We were seeing people, like families foraging in, in the parks, just like going to parks and picking fruit, or going to garbage cans and picking out, uh, food rests because there was not, there were not enough supplies out in the market, and so people had a choice between staying and. Basically facing hunger or leaving, and, and at that point when it's that violent people must leave.

And so that's, that's when it start to be a, a humanitarian crisis. You, uh, have a background in economics and one of the drivers of, uh, political upheaval is income inequality between, uh, the country's business people and the government leadership and the, and the regular people. Do you have any insights on how best to address that kind of inequality for other people? Inequality, is it, it, it looks different in every country.

Um. So it's very difficult to, to give like a one silver bullet answer. The, the bottom line is that the reason why Chavez got to where he was, the, the president got to where he was is because there was a lot of inequality and a lot of people felt that something had to change because no matter what they did. They were falling back and they, no matter how many jobs they had, how many eights they had, they couldn't afford basic living.

And the promise that was made as some other people have made was very similar. We're gonna lower the price of eggs and we're gonna lower the price of milk, and we're gonna lower the prices of this and that, and we're gonna, and for a time it happened, but through very controversial means.

And a problem that's faced with this kind of Soviet left socialism, which is what they attempt to implement very like a Soviet style of, of central planning, is that they, they broke the market, they broke market mechanisms. And with that on the moment like.

When as, as soon as oil prices went down, which is what was feeding the redistribution mechanism went out, the entire thing collapsed, and whatever gains were done in trying to reduce inequalities were magnified because now you had tons and tons and tons of people fully depending on a system that was unsustainable. Um, and just left to in free fall. Basically, they were left in free fall in, in a, in a crash that was extremely similar to the fall of the former Soviet unions in East Europe.

Like the, the parallels when you study the economics are very similar, so. Inequality is not the same everywhere, but it always creates a political problem because the majority feel that there's no matter, like no matter what they do, they don't have enough. And that fuels this sensation that you need a strong man to come and fix it. Yeah. Especially when you have somebody that is, uh, lusting for power and uses that to their advantage. Right.

I. Absolutely, because it's very easy to make promises. It's extremely easy to make promises. However, once they get to power, at least in majority of cases. They usually don't do. The only thing that truly changes the situation, which is raise taxes on the richest people that that is, I mean, there's a limited amount of resources, there's a whole discourse about this, et cetera.

But when you have enormous inequality and you have to buy social peace, you have to get that money from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually taxes. And if the richest people are not paying taxes. There's no way for redistribution, and it's a myth that the, the, the bottom 90% of G are gonna be able to make it through, through market mechanisms. So it's very easy to come and say, yes, we're gonna lower the prices. But yeah, exactly. How, how is it, are you gonna make transfers?

Like, are you gonna, are you gonna pay the x are gonna subsidize things? 'cause if you're not, then there's very little evidence that you're gonna be able to do it. What exactly is the US up to in Venezuela? A New York Times report from 2018 claims that the Trump administration held secret meetings in 2017 with Venezuelan military officers to discuss their plans to overthrow President Nicholas Maduro. That would not have been the first time a US administration has meddled in Venezuela's affairs.

In fact, US involvement in Venezuela dates back decades. Well, it's not new. As, as, uh, um, the history record proves the US has sought regime change in Venezuela. Since the election of Ugo Chaz, this has been going on a long time. I think the main difference is that the Trump administration is much more aggressive about it and open about it, but you can't talk about US intervention in Venezuela or even Latin America without mentioning in nearly 200 year old policy. Called the Monroe Doctrine.

To put it simply, it basically declared that the United States had a kind of supremacy in this hemisphere, originally designed to block European powers, claiming colonies in Latin America. The Monroe doctrine was later interpreted to mean the US also claimed the right to overrule the democratic process on the continent through invasions, coups, and CIA covert operations. The United States is an empire, and so if you're an empire. You want as many countries as possible to line up with you.

And so the, the pawns matter, uh, as well, in, in a chess game in 2013, secretary of State, John Kerry announced the end of the Monroe Doctrine. Many years ago, the United States dictated a policy that defined the hemisphere for many years after. We've moved past that era, but how true is that statement? It never ended.

In terms of foreign policy, there is very little difference between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans on the matter of exercise of US foreign power In Latin America, we've had coups supported by Democrats and we've had coups supported by Republicans. Venezuela also checks another key box of reasons for US intervention. Oil. Venezuela's petroleum production reached an all time high in 1970. A few years later in 1976, the industry was nationalized.

Venezuela has some of the largest deposits of oil in the world, and potentially that oil could be of great asset, as Mr. Bolton has said. Uh, if American companies are able to exploit it. Venezuela was always seen as a very willing ally and also as a constant supply of oil. But beyond Oil, the US was desperate to prevent this former ally from becoming a socialist state. Venezuela was the beginning of a radical political change in Latin America.

Beginning in 1998, Venezuela went from being the model democracy, the preferred option that the US promoted in Latin America, a pacted democracy that always supported the US to being its nemesis. When the election of Ugo Chavez who promoted regional integration, uh, national sovereignty. Nationalism and an alternative to the US promotion of free trade and neoliberalism in Latin America. Huga Chavez's election was particularly concerning for the us.

He not only sought to use Venezuela's oil wealth to fund healthcare, education, and other benefits for the poor. But he also aligned with Cuba's, Fidel Castro, Washington's longtime nemesis in Latin America. So in that sense, Venezuela becomes a thorn in the side of the us. And you add to that, that the election of Chavez in Venezuela was quickly followed by Lula in Brazil, the, uh, kiers in Argentina, corre and Ecuador, Morales and Bolivia Basha in Chile.

And you saw a change in the geopolitical, uh, character in the landscape of Latin America. And that's threatened the US as hegemony. So that what's happening now in many cases is an effort to recoup that hegemony and Venezuela is, is part of that effort to recover the US' control and power. In 2002, after 18, people were killed in an anti-government protest.

Venezuelan military officers and opposition leaders staged a coup to overthrow President Chavez, US government officials serving under George W. Bush at the time denied having any prior knowledge of the coup. While American officials said they would not support any extra constitutional moves to Alt Chavez. There were CIA documents that were made public that showed that the United States government had advanced knowledge of the coup. Intervention doesn't always rely on force.

President Trump announced sanctions on Venezuela's. State-run oil industry in an effort to press for change in the country. What we're focusing on today is disconnecting the illegitimate Maduro regime from the sources of its revenues. Well, I, I think that from the very beginning, the US policy towards Venezuela has been one of isolating Venezuela. This was under the Bush Obama, and now Trump administration, Venezuela depends on oil for about 95%.

Of its export earnings, it takes oil profits, purchases, food, brings it back to the country for sale. That means it can be easily intervened and can be easily up upended. So sanctions means that the country no longer can, on many levels, be able to utilize its foreign assets to buy food and bring it home. Sanctions also means it can't renegotiate its debt. Sanction also means it can't buy on the international market.

After the death of Hugo Chavez in 2013, his former Deputy Nicholas Maduro took power. Since then, Venezuela has been rocked by political, financial, and humanitarian crises, and ordinary Venezuelans are bearing the brunt of. All of them. The country is facing hyperinflation, poverty and food shortage. People are struggling to afford basic necessities, including medicine.

3 million Venezuelans have fled to neighboring countries like Columbia and Brazil while Maduro blames the US critics, including many former supporters and officials of Hugo Chavez, blame corruption and poor governance. President Trump took advantage of the chaos and division in Venezuela to throw his support behind the self-declared interim President Juan Huo. Keep in mind that the US' involvement in Venezuela fits a long-term pattern of US intervention in Latin American politics.

So you have a long history of US intervention in the region and it's very anti-democratic, very often supported dictatorships. And in the 21st century, it was mostly against these. Left governments who were more interested in independence and self-determination than the prior governments that were close to the us. The Trump administration has now called on veteran foreign policy advisor Elliot Abrams, to act as special envoy on Venezuela.

Abrams certainly has experienced in the region, but that experience has not necessarily been in promoting democracy throughout the 1980s. He was a key figure in organizing the Reagan administration's support. For dictators and death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and Nicaragua, he pleaded guilty in 1991 to two counts of misdemeanor for withholding information from Congress about illegal US funding for right wing Nicaragua and paramilitaries, the Iran Contra affair.

The selection of Elliot Abrams shows that it's very similar to what they were doing in the 1980s when they were trying to overthrow the elected government of, of Nicaragua, and there was so much resistance to it, uh, by the way, in the United States, that the Reagan administration had to end up. Funding the Contras illegally with the arm sales to Iran. This is the neocons like, uh, John Bolton coming back and just trying to do the same thing all over again.

I. Whatever the intentions of the United States, the opposition to Maduro is growing and popular. Years of economic mismanagement, corruption, and authoritarian repression of the media and political opposition has drawn even many supporters of Hugo Chavez onto the streets. To demand that the government step down. So is it possible to want change in Venezuela but oppose us involvement in the country?

I agree there needs to be change in Venezuela, but the Venezuelans have to decide that it's a very slippery slope when we go down, uh, having the US become the arbitrary of internal politics and any country. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. You know, it is, this is a novel. So these stories are fictionalized, but they are based on real experiences of friends of yours or people that you knew. Correct. Correct. So technically it's five short stories.

It's not one novel because the stories go in chronological order, but they are not intertwined. So you finish one, you start something else. Oh, okay. Um, but it is a long read. It is 300 pages long, so it does read like a novel, uh, because it exists in the same universe. However, they are about 80% true story. I, I took stories that were very real and I just fictionalized them for the purpose of entertainment, for making the, the reading more, more pleasant.

But yeah, I would say the bulk of the information is true story. Now you said you recently moved for France, but you lived there for uh, many years. Yeah. Were you involved, was there like a Venezuelan community ex pack community? That, uh, you got to know there really, there's not a very, no, there's not a very big link between Venezuela and France. Um, of course at the end of the day you find each other just because, you know, someone is a cousin of someone or someone is a friend of someone.

So I did have my small community of Venezuelan friends, but for the most part, there's not even a very big Latino community in France. Their, their majority of their immigration comes from their former colonies, which is Africa and somewhat in the Middle East. Yeah, that is weird. That's strange. 'cause France does have a big presence in South America, so that's, that's weird. Commercially. My, my, but not politically. It's not a, it's not a close tie.

Uh, which of the stories that you wrote about in your book were the hardest to write? From a personal standpoint? And were, and were any of them close to your own experience? I would, I think so. It's, there's five of them. Number two and number four were probably the hardest to write because. Actually, because they were so distant from my own experience, the first, the, the second one is the Chronicle of a Kidnapping, so it's a minute to minute recount of a kidnapping for ransom.

So it's extremely violent. That one was. Excruciating to write because you have to place yourself in the skin of someone who is kidnapped and how would you face the situation. Although the person who recounted the story in person remembered a lot of details, so it saved me from from Fictionalizing a lot. And the fourth one. I think it was the most painful because that one is about a political prisoner that ends up in a torture center. Mm-hmm.

So it is a heartbreaking story of a person that I, I knew before, um, like long before he ended up in that situation. And I, I would've never imagined that something like this would happen to him. And. It was so difficult for him to tell the story that I had to come up with ways to tell it that were from second sources. So like reading in the newspapers or looking at a lot of, um, documentaries and, and trying to capture that.

So there was a lot of trying to imagine being in, in, in prison unjustly. Uh. Actually without due process and that, that was so difficult to write. Honestly, that was the, the one that took me the longest. Okay. People don't have an understanding that, that in a lot of these authoritarian regimes, uh, people disappear is what they call it. That's what know Chile, they did it and, and Argentina. They've done it. Yeah. You know, all these oppressive regimes, they disappear. People. Correct.

And so that's pretty much what happened with Vene in Venezuela, that people would just disappear or did they actually know that they were eventually, yes. So this, this, the fourth story that I'm talking about is titled, uh, Hugo is the name of the character that one is about, as a person who disappeared, actually, they didn't disappear in the sense that.

Their family knew that the government had taken them because they went into their home at four in the morning, abducted him from his house, and then didn't tell anyone where he was for weeks until they bribed enough officers that they found out where they were. But this became a standard practice, um, and also taking people from, from street protests. So yes, they, they did became, they did, they, they haven't been understood as. De, which is what you call that, but it is.

It is exactly what was, what was happening at that point. And I think it calmed down mostly because people got so scared that they're no longer protesting the way they used to. But probably if people went out and tried to confront the government again, it would happen again. And I think there's a lot of Americans that believe that they'll be protected if they get arrested. Protesting. It's like it's, it can happen. Uh, you know, like that, that You mean in, in the states or elsewhere?

Yeah. 'cause in the story there is an American who for whatever reason, went and married a Venezuelan woman and found himself in this prison. Um, and it took years before the American government could take him out. Right. And, and Americans just think that due process is everywhere and it's like, Nope.

Yeah. Well, the due process part is very key in this, in this part of the story because the study case that you could, you could take from my book is that an authoritarian regime came in and dismantled the due, like the, the rule of law bit by bit and. 15 years later, which is when this story happens, the the fourth one that we're talking about, due process is no longer.

Existing. So this guy spends, I dunno, six months in jail and eventually a friend of his realizes that they, there's not even a case against him, he's just been abducted and he's kidnapped by the government. But there is no due process. Therefore, there's nothing to do with lawyers. Lawyers have no resources to taking a him out of jail. And it becomes a political negotiation. He actually ends up leaving jail because there is, uh, a pact that happens with the opposition party.

And then we juxtapose that with Ruben's story. The first story where the protesting gets, gets him put on a list. Yeah. And basically he can't work. So actually book is an escalation. Sorry. Yeah. The book is an escalation. So the first one is gonna be Reuben, who is, um, a young guy who's in college. Very typical that college kids are gonna be very present in protests, anti-government protests everywhere around the world. Students tend to be quite left and liberal anywhere in the world.

Um, things are happening. And he signed a petition to impeach the precedent. I. This gets him blacklisted for life. Uh, and he discovers later down the line that he's never gonna be able to find a government. Job, like he gets blacklisted from federal jobs. He gets blacklisted from the oil industry, which in Venezuela is a national industry. And he was studying in, uh, petroleum engineering. So imagine a petroleum engineering person who will never be able to work for the state.

It just becomes impossible for him, uh, to imagine a future in Venezuela. And then that's. That, that's one of the first building blocks. It just escalates throughout the book into the dismantling of the state. You mentioned the CIA and its current involvement in El Salvador's politics, but. It's the, it did not obviously begin there. Uh, the United States sent billions of dollars in military aid to El Salvador's government in the eighties, and it was a violent, repressive regime.

If you could give us a little bit of that history as we lead into explaining how bou Kelly fits into that history, uh, that would be great. Yeah. Uh, El Salvador was for the better part of the 20th century, one of the longest standing military dictatorships. In, in the world, in the hemisphere and in the world. And, um, it's always, it is always been as well. The one of a, it was the first place to launch a a, an indigenous in communist insurrection against dictatorship in the Americas in 1932.

When, approximately 32,000, I mean, I'm sorry, approximately somewhere between 10 to 50,000. We still don't know. Because the memory of that has been erased in official records. Um, people were killed by their own government. And so the, the violence and murder of El Salvador has ingrained itself in the political and even the social culture of El Salvador, where, for example, um, dictatorship after DIC was continually torturing, killing.

Uh, disappearing, uh, exiling and, and, and, and perpetuating other actions to terrorize their way into domination. So, in the sixties and in the fifties and sixties, you start seeing the birth of groups following Ceva and Fidel Castro in the Americas that were revolutionary mostly Marxist Leninist.

Revolutionary organizations that eventually in 19, in the 1980s became the Faro Martin National Liberation Front and the FMLN, uh, waged a, uh, a successful war to dismantle the military dictatorship, sadly. Um. And tragically, the FMLN did not retool itself for the digital age, the analog age Marus, Leninist political military structures, uh, did not get upgraded for, for, for, for the world that Silicon Valley created.

And so, um, eventually you get in the nineties, um, the right wing fascist arena party instituting what's known as manura. Smart hand politics in response to the gang problem that was growing after the war because, uh, Bush administration, one, attorney General Bill Barr, started targeting gangs in the US making up until that time, the most, the largest shift in, in, uh, FBI resources, from counter counterintelligence to focus on gangs.

19 in, in 1992. In response to LA Riots, he also began the practice of deporting gang members to El Salvador and then the rest of Central America. A region rife with ruins and perfectly fit to grow US style, LA style gang structures like the Mexican mafia. So that's where you get MS 13 and 18th Street growing out of the rotten soil of US policy in the US of deportations of, of de, of deportations and gang policing. Right. Right. So they fed one another.

Right. And I guess it created almost a cycle of. You have, uh, sorry to cut you off here, Roberto, but it's such a key point. MS. 13 originating in the US prison system informing deportation policies, sending those folks back to El Salvador, building up their resources and creating, almost strengthening them, but also tying in us kind of gang policing into the immigration. Uh, carceral state that's so key in the nineties and into the two thousands. Oh, and that you, you're right on point, Emma.

In addition to that, you see the kinda robocop of US policing and El Salvador's actual influence on it. You had people like a guy named, uh, the late maximum warring who a former, uh, US, Pentagon, uh, Colonel, uh, who and strategist. And, um, you know, professor, a distinguished professor in the US Army College, uh, you know, uh, starting his career focusing on insurgency, counter insurgent in, in El Salvador after the war, men warring. What does men warring do?

He goes and he, uh, starts looking at gangs as the new insurgency and starts framing gangs. As, as insurgency, there's a line that runs from that kind of thinking to the terrorist language you see being used today. And you then some of the 50, some of the many trainers that the US sent to El Salvador after the war ended in 1992 went where to San Francisco, la, New York to train US police forces in counterinsurgency.

And then you have, you know, over the years, US presidents, including Obama for example, heavily militarizing US police. So you have in El Salvador an outsized, a tiny country with an outsized, uh, contributions to the militarization of the United States itself. Mm-hmm. And even the militarization of the police. That's an outgrowth of the War on Terror, which is where we come full circle of the classifying of these folks as terrorists, because we did the same thing. Uh, with the mujahideen.

We know that the United States has enabled. Far right governments not just in, uh, south Amer or Latin America, but also in the Middle East. Um, and then that's come back to bite us because they become the, well, maybe not even bite us, but it, it benefits these people because then the military budget increases and the surveillance state increases. And this is a new group of people, uh, to go after. It's just a completely.

Incongruent policy if you actually care about safety and not just the carceral state and, uh, making some money like that, that it, it creates cycles of violence, is really what I'm saying. Um mm-hmm. And it doesn't seem like there's, we're just, we're diving even further into, um, just a more digitized version of that policy. You, you write about it as a. Digitized neoliberal 21st century sista, which is so, uh, well said.

Like, how, how does that look when you bring in the surveillance technology piece? Well, it looks like things you see in sci-fi movies. I don't, you know, I don't teach sci-fi writing, but I'm a fan of sci-fi writing in sci-fi movies. One of my favorite being The Matrix. You're living in the Matrix right now in many ways, as far as the stimulation of reality. What takes place in the White House right now between Buke and Trump is an entire stimulation.

When you have this terrorist language being applied indiscriminately and and without any basis in reality, when you, when you're gonna start seeing it, extend the brand of terror, the terrorist brand, into different groups that are gonna include many of us unless we build something else that El Salvador has to teach us, which is our, the social movements. That can, that are the only things that are gonna be able to challenge the rise of fascism.

We're not gonna liberal progressive our way out of climate change techno fascism. We simply, it's proven time and again in, in the case of El Salvador, in the case of gangs, in the case of immigration, for example, immigration by the way, being the, uh, the royal road that leads to fascism, not just in the US but throughout the world. Right. In Europe and other and, and even in the Americas.

Um, in, in the case of these, the, the, the, the, this escalation of this, this, this techno fascist practice, we're gonna have to build the social movements that kind of include elements of liberal, progressive. We're gonna have to be a little more radical and to the left of that, if we're to, to get through this. So. I wanna start by asking you about this mega Prison Sea Cot.

It was built after Buel declared a state of emergency in 2022 to deal with violent gangs which were controlling large parts of the country. The government suspended some civil liberties, including the right to do process now. Given all of this, what are conditions like in that prison? This mega prison is a poster child of our prison system. It's a high security prison built allegedly to exclusively hold gang members.

It has been heavily used by Que propaganda machine producing, as you might have seen, highly professional videos in which every single image. He's meticulously taken care of. So if you see something from that prison, it is because the regime wants to to see it. Some people have described this mega prison as, as basically a black hole. Is that accurate? I think it is a good description. No one can enter this prison. Relatives of the prisoners cannot visit them.

They are not allowed to receive anything from outside. Um. According to President Belli, they don't see the light of the sun ever, and they are kept behind bars for most of the day. Um, this is what we know from the Salvadoran authorities because we cannot enter this prison. And right now, this situation is not exceptional. It's the same situation for the other 32 prisons.

It sounds like from your reporting, the director of this prison system is somewhat notorious, the director of the Salvadoran Prison System, a man called O Luna has been sanctioned by the US State Department and also by the Treasury Department. Even the El Salvador Police Intelligence unit has described him as an important piece of a criminal organization that distributes drugs.

His administration of the prison system has brought back systematic torture to our prisons, something we thought was part of our most painful past. One thing that El Farro reported is it wasn't just Venezuelans who were deported to El Salvador. Who else was on those planes? As far as we know, there are at least four different categories of people that came in those first three flights. One Venezuelan suspects of belonging to the trend.

Crime organization, two Venezuelan undocumented migrants, completely unrelated to this criminal organization. Three Salvadoran undocumented migrants, and four Salvadoran members of the EMS 13 gang, including at least one gang boss who was preparing to stand trial in the United States. And I gather this is important because of reporting El Farro did about Bke and the deal he made with the MS 13 gang. That's right.

Bke made a secret agreement with the gangs five years ago that helped his party win elections. In exchange. Mr. Bke free. Some of the gang of bosses, including a few required by the United States for extradition. Some of those freed by Bke were recaptured in Mexico and sent to the United States where they are expected to disclose all the details of their pacs with the bouquet administration. We also know that when Mr. Buke offered Secretary Rubio to receive deportes and criminals.

He also demanded that the gang bosses were also sent back to El Salvador, and at least one of them was sent to El Salvador in those first flights. Carlos, as I understand it, it was El Salvador's ambassador to the US who said Quele asked for those gang leaders to be deported. I guess the idea here is that if you put them in a jail in El Salvador, then they can't tell their secrets. That's that's what we think. As you know, MS 13 is considered a terrorist organization in the United States.

If the trial in New York proves Mr. Buchel deals with them, it could potentially be very damaging since it would mean that he had illegal deals with a terrorist organization and also illegally freed some of the terrorist organization leaders. So what happened to the charges that the US had against them? We only know of one, because we saw him in the images of the deportees that arrived to El Salvador.

In this specific case of this one single person, we found documentation where the, the Justice Department instructs the attorney assigned to the case to ask the judge to dismiss the charges against this gang leader in order for him to be deported. Let me ask you a question, just pulling away from the prison a, a, a little bit.

Yeah. The Trump administration has praised Bule for slashing crime in El Salvador, and yet, just two years ago, the State Department cited reports of arbitrary killings, forced disappearances and torture. Is the Trump administration ignoring this evidence, or is there something in B'S harsh policies that they connect with? I can't answer that. I think you know much more about the nature of Mr. Trump's administration.

What I can say is that Mr. Belli has been very successful in grabbing power and still keep his high popularity. He still enjoys after almost six years in power, a popularity that, um, comes around 75% depending on the polls. So that makes him. A very attractive person for all the people in these extreme rightist movements all over the world. So for your typical Salvadorian, life is better because of the moves that he's made.

Mr. Buel has effectively taken the gangs out of the communities of Salvadorian people and lowered the murder rate in the country. So life is apparently better, but. We know how in exchange for this so-called security, one person or one group of people is grabbing power, dismantling democracy, and there's no more accountability. There's no more checks and balances. There's a lot of violence still in Alor, but now it's being inflicted by the authorities.

Police and the army now can make arrests without a judge's order and hold anyone in prison almost. Indefinitely. 70,000 people have been detained in these years, which makes El Salvador the country with the highest rate of incarcerated population even above the United States. I don't know of any experience when only through repression you really canceled a violence that has grown out of a society that is not functioning. Let me quote Archbishop Romero, who was killed in El Salvador in 1980.

He used to say, violence will not be eradicated unless we address it root causes, and we have to know that gangs are just. The most radical, the most horrible and the most violent expression of a dysfunctional society. But if we don't address the causes that built a fertile ground for these. Young kids to become so violent, then we are not solving any problem. And finally, section D resistance.

But to be clear, to go back to some things that they can do, this is something that can be found to be civil contempt. Yeah. That is contempt of a judge's order. The judge then can use the refusal to answer as an inference against the government in terms of finding facts. And just as an example, we saw that with Judge Barrell Howell in the Rudy Giuliani case, where he violated multiple discovery orders.

And so they were sanctions that included findings against him because he hadn't complied, so they can use it in the case. They can also, as you said, impose fines on the government. If the contempt is found to be personal, they can impose it on the person. They can also, if it's serious enough, they can actually impose jail as a civil contempt remedy. The idea is that you jail somebody until they comply with the order. And that is something that can be ordered if a judge finds that.

I actually dealt with that a lot when I was dealing with organized crime work as a government prosecutor. I dealt with the sort of various issues that come up when a mobster refuses to testify without a valid privilege. There can be fines, there can be jail terms, and then if it's a lawyer who's doing this, there can be ramifications in terms of their bar license. With referrals. So there are tools in the arsenal. It is just so rare to see when you're dealing with the government. That's right.

Because the government has an obligation, obviously, as an oath of office. They have a duty of candor as the Chief Justice has said. I mean, you know, a court order is, you know, is something you comply with and then if you disagree with it, you can appeal it. So we may again get to that 'cause we're dealing with the same thing before Judge Boberg.

So this is a good segue to speaking about the Judge Bosberg case, because people remember that the decision from the Supreme Court there that said these people are entitled. To a due process hearing before the deprivation. That is before being removed. But the issue that the court split on was whether it has to be habeas or whether it had to be the Administrative Procedures Act and said it has to be done by habeas. Well, what happened?

What happened was the plaintiffs read that and complied with it. Filed habeas. Exactly. So they filed habeas in New York. In Texas. Why in those two locations? Because that's where the plaintiffs were that were being represented. The original five plaintiffs. Exactly. So two of the plaintiffs, 'cause they had counsel, were able to be taken off the plane and didn't end up in El Salvador. And so they were. Housed in are housed in New York.

So the habeas was filed in New York and the judge there, what did he do? He issued a stay. The TRO, like you cannot deport these people. He issued a class certification too. Not for the nation. For anybody in the Southern District of New York who's either currently in detention or will be in detention, cannot be deported without notice of an opportunity to be heard. Right. Which is totally in compliance with the Supreme Court's decision. Exactly.

And you know what people were thinking when that decision from the Supreme Court came down, oh, it's a ruse to get it to Texas. And you know that's a favorable venue for the government. Well, guess what happened, Mary, when the habeas was filed in Texas, temporary restraining order class certification applicable there in the Southern district of Texas. I think it was the Southern District Brownsville. Yes. That's about almost as far south as you can go. Yep. Same thing.

Temporary restraining order. You cannot deport these people without notice and an opportunity to be heard. I will also say both judges ordered, they can't be transferred either. Without noticing an opportunity to be heard so that you can't pull some shenanigans. It's like, okay, we're not gonna give you notice in New York, so we're gonna quickly transfer you someplace else so that it's almost like a whack-a-mole.

Anytime we transfer you, as soon as you file habeas there, oh, you're not there anymore. Right? So it's kind of like. Don't move these people until they get hearings. That was like the next day after the Supreme Court too. It was so fast. This is good news.

In terms of what you are seeing, I wanna make sure people understand this, is you are seeing judges across the country, judges appointed by, as we've talked about on this podcast, judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans, including judges appointed by Donald Trump. Upholding the rule of law.

And so there is good news here in terms of what the courts are doing in terms of upholding what's going on, but it is a real sign of where the administration is that you're seeing this sort of uniform, almost uniform sort of resistance to the law breaking. Hopefully this will happen is I will get my citizenship. That's Mos Kay Madi, a Palestinian student at Columbia University. I spoke with him the night before his scheduled interview with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

I've been waiting for this interview to be scheduled, uh, for over a year after a decade living in the us Madi, a green card holder was prepared. He had studied for the test. He was ready to swear the oath, and he was hopeful he'd walk out of that meeting. A naturalized citizen proof that I understand what the Constitution is about, what is the democracy of this, uh, in this country is about what is the rights of people in this country about?

Then I, after passing the test, I hope that I would do. The Pledge of Allegiance and I will come out of there as a citizen with rights. But Madi, a leader of the campus protest movement against Israel's war on Gaza, also knew the risks. The second option is I may get out of there with handcuffs as detained person with no rights taken to ICE detention Center On Monday, Madi went to his citizenship interview, but instead of grinding him citizenship, immigration agents arrested him.

He now faces deportation to the occupied West Bank. He's the ninth Columbia student, targeted for deportation as the Trump administration revokes over a thousand student visas, including for many students who had no connection to pro-Palestine protests. The targeting of pro-Palestine voices and international students is part of a broader crackdown. It's part of a mass deportation campaign that disregards individual's legal status or rights and punishes them for constitutionally protected speech.

To discuss Malawi's case, I'm joined by his representative rep, Becca Ballant, the Democratic Congresswoman for Vermont. Welcome to the Show Rep Balance. Thank you for having me. So to start, can you tell me how your office first became aware of Malawi's situation? We first became aware because a local um, rep, so a house rep in our state legislature was there with Maxima.

Mei because she knows him and, um, was there hoping that what was happening was the last citizenship hurdle, essentially taking the citizenship test. And so she was there in real time posting about what was happening. And then of course, you know, we were getting updates as well to the office. And the thing that is incredibly shocking about this particular instance is that the.

The reasons that are being given by the Secretary of State Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security, uh, Christie Nome is that his, his statements, his beliefs that in some way he is a danger to, to us interests. Okay. Like we can unpack that for a very long time, which is completely in total, you know, BS on so many levels. But this is a, this is a man who was an outspoken critic of people who were being, uh, violent in, in their protest.

He's a Buddhist, he is someone who spoke out against antisemitism. He said the, the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle for people to have a free Palestine are one and the same. It is about freedom of, of both peoples and the fact that he, they're saying that that. That somebody who is speaking about peace, who has relationships with Israeli students on campus, he was building those bridges that somehow he is a danger.

I mean, it just gives up the entire, the entire scam of, of what is happening here. This is about power, it's about control. It is about people using this idea of lawlessness and the people themselves who are using that idea, the Trump administration, they themselves are the lawless ones. It is so perverse and I, I, Vermonters, are completely outraged by this as they should be. And they're connecting the dots here. Couple dots.

They're connecting the dots of if this can happen to someone like Max Modally, it can happen to anyone because they're not giving people due process. They're not giving them access to their attorneys. They're not telling them what they're being charged with and. It is this incredible, uh, distraction from their own lawlessness and the fact that we are economies in free fall. Like that's how craven it is. That's how crass it is.

They are playing to a base of people who delight in cruelty at this point, to distract from the fact that this president is failing on so many other fronts and they're using people as their pawns. It's disgusting, it's inhumane. It is illegal. It is just, you know, so depressing about this is where we are as a nation. This is a good segue into the letter that you led on Wednesday.

Sent to the Department of Homeland Security and to the Department of State demanding answers on the government's quote, abduction of madi. I'll just say it was notable, at least for me, to see that kind of language being used by members of Congress. Um, I'll quote from the letter masked hooded men in plain clothes removed Mr. Madi. He was then handcuffed and taken into an unmarked van from the U-S-C-I-S office in Colchester, Vermont.

All Americans should be chilled by this action taken straight out of dystopian fiction. Yes. So to start, why did you think, you know, a lot of people, you know, months into the Trump administration have been asking, where are Democrats? What are Democrats doing? Why did you think it was important to send this letter right now? My gosh, so many reasons. Um. Where to begin? For me, I mean, I think it's important for, for me to speak about my own family's history in this. Mm-hmm.

So my grandfather, um, layup Pol Ballant, he was, uh, a victim of the Holocaust and my family experienced people, uh, you know, ratting them out as, as Jews, ratting them out, as, as dangers, you know, a danger to, to society, and that this is an inflection point from our country. This is about our courage and this is about our ethical values. Not just as a nation of laws, but also also as human beings.

And it is dystopian for at the, in the same breath that they are saying that Harvard University, Columbia University, they need to sign these agreements that there will be no masks on campus. They themselves are sending their own brown shirts. You know this, this essentially paramilitary army. You know, masked, hooded, can't identify them if they're so proud of what they're doing, then show your damn face, then show your id, then talk about what grounds you are holding this person.

But it's being done in secret and it is meant to shock and awe and to get the rest of us to remain silent. They have no evidence. They have no details, which is what we're demanding of both Secretary Rubio and Secretary Nome. If in fact, you claim. He is a danger to our country's foreign interests, then provide the certification to Congress. That is what you have to do if you're using this provision.

And I never thought that I would see this kind of behavior from a democratically elected government. They, you know, we are, we are, we are certainly in constitutional crisis when they are screaming about lawlessness, when they are defying court orders, when they're defying the constitution. When you have the, the felon in chiefs directing all of this, you know, if this were. A novel, you would say it, it would be right out of it was Orwellian. All of it is Orwellian.

And, and I just, I know that Vermonters understand that this is about all of us. If you'll deny due process from somebody who was in this country with a green card for 10 years, who is somebody who, uh, you know, talked about peace and connection between Palestinians and Israelis who was looking to build bridges, if this man is somehow a threat to society, then we are down a sick path.

there was reporting in Axios that is driving a lot of the news coverage as it relates to kil Mara Bgo Garcia, the immigrant who was illegally sent to a maximum security prison in El Salvador. That reporting reads 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, were falling for it.

Quote, rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy, the thing where his numbers are tanking, we're gonna take the bait for one hairdresser, they said, likely referring to Andrew Hernandez Romero, only if Trump tries to deport US citizens. The lawmaker argued, well, Democrats need to draw a line in the sand and shut down the house. So let's talk about this because I understand that there are people who say Democrat's worst issue is immigration.

At a moment where Trump is quite literally destroying our economy, which, you know, 2024 showed us anything is a major issue to exploit, a potent issue to exploit. We should be focusing on that. Two things here. One, we should focus on that and we do focus on that. I talk about the economy every single day. I talk about the impacts of Trump's idiotic tariffs on our stock market, on our 4 0 1 Ks, on the cost of everyday goods.

The reality is that Trump is destroying a generation of farmers by sending other countries to Brazil or Australia to get stuff like beef and soybeans where they used to come to American farmers. For those things, even if the tariffs are removed, we won't recover to where we were pre tariff levels because they're creating new relationships with other farmers, other countries. Aside from that, you know, our car manufacturers are gonna suffer.

Our supply chains are the result of decades of close cooperation, uh, with Canada and Mexico, and that process is going to grind to a halt because of what Trump is doing, which is basically a death now for American auto manufacturing. Jerome Powell, just this week announced slower growth and high inflation. Inflation was the issue that killed Democrats in the 2024 election. So I will continue to beat on this drum every single day.

But talking about the economy and talking about immigration are not mutually exclusive. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. And I'm sorry, but I refuse to believe that Trump disappearing legal residents to a foreign prison is something that we should stay silent about just because Trump polls better on immigration.

I refuse to believe that moderate Republicans and independents think that allowing a Maryland dad and legal resident charged with no crime rotting in a foreign gulag is acceptable. I refuse to believe that we have lost every shred of our humanity in this country. And look, I'm not saying this, uh, from a political perspective at all. I'm saying this as a human being with an ounce of empathy. I am all for the deportation of dangerous criminals.

This guy ain't one he was charged with, nothing afforded no due process. He's got three kids with disabilities. He's a sheet metal worker, a union member. And the fact that he wore a Chicago Bulls hat in 2019 is the justification that ICE pointed to in claiming that he's a gang member of a city that by the way, he didn't live in again. I'm all for the deportation of dangerous criminals. Like I live in an American city too. I want my family to be safe too.

I have the same fears that everybody else has. I'm not, uh, blind to the realities of life in America in 2025. I mean, hell, I can guarantee you, uh, if you've looked at my inbox based on the amount of threats I receive, um, which I'm sure are far greater than the average person, um, that I'm hyper aware of crime, but do it legitimately disappearing. This guy is not legitimate, nor frankly is it American. We have a constitution. We have a Fifth Amendment right, affording you a trial.

If you've got a gang member who is here illegally. We're probably all in agreement that those people should be deported, but we have to know that they are gang members. And the way to do that is by affording someone due process, which Garcia was denied. Again, I'm not defending criminals.

I'm demanding that we know who the criminals are so that we are not punishing people who are innocent or even upstanding members of society, people who pay taxes and go to work and take care of their kids and enrich our communities. And I wanna be clear, because Republicans are trying to own this narrative with every fiber of their being. What I am saying is not an extreme position. Disappearing innocent people to foreign prisons is the extreme position period. Full stop.

And if, by the way, the moral imperative to speak out wasn't enough, which it should be, but let's say that you're still, you know, numbers driven and you just can't bring yourself to want, discuss immigration because of what all the polls say, then just look at the polls according to the latest yu gov survey of all the issues in the political zeitgeist right now, the following question, deporting immigrants without criminal convictions to El Salvador

to be imprisoned without letting them challenge the deportation in court. That question polls dead. Last among Americans, 46% of Americans strongly oppose it, and 15% of Americans somewhat oppose it. That's nearly two thirds of Americans who oppose in some fashion what this administration is doing. Not exactly a home run hill to die on. So again, even if the moral argument isn't enough, the polling backs up.

That position that disappearing innocent people to a foreign gulag with zero due process is not something that Americans are responding well to. And in the same way that Trump destroyed his lead on the economy, he's doing the same thing with his last vestige of support with immigration. And there's one more reason that I think, uh, it's especially important to discuss this, and that's that if we don't speak up now, we embolden Trump to go after everybody else.

The reality is that while his administration promised that it was only interested in going after hardened undocumented criminals, they have already undermined their own promise by going after this guy, this guy who was charged with nothing. He's a legal resident. In fact, just this past week. It was reported that US citizens are now being detained, including a couple up in Boston. This is a pattern by the Trump administration. If you allow them an inch, they will take a mile.

If one law firm, capitulates Trump realizes how easy it is, and he goes after a dozen more. If one university like Columbia Capitulates, Trump goes after more. If one tech billionaire capitulates, Jeff Bezos, mark Zuckerberg, he goes after more. If one media company like a, B, C News capitulates, he goes after more.

If we do not stand up and fight him now on this issue, when he's going after one legal resident who was not charged with a crime, then we don't get to act surprised when he goes after other legal residents or ultimately American citizens. We've seen the playbook. He's already broadcasting it, so we have to fight now on this issue while there's still an opportunity to fight So you guys are both coming to me from El Salvador.

Can you explain, obviously what you're doing there and what you seek to accomplish? I. Well, thanks. Look, I, we, uh, both, um, both Maxwell and I have been very committed to the release of Kmar Reo Garcia. Um, people are probably aware we have been fighting like hell to ensure that this country's a place that actually listens to decisions by the Supreme Court. Donald Trump is defying a nine zero order by the Supreme Court to return Kmar, who was illegally taken to El Salvador.

Return him back to the United States. We also know that lower courts have affirmed this. The Trump administration has essentially said, we made a mistake. We shouldn't have sent him there. So Maxwell and I requested an official delegation to El Salvador, to James Comer, we're both on oversight. Um, they denied that official, uh, congressional delegation trip. And we said, you can deny us and we're gonna come here anyways no matter what.

And so we're here in El Salvador on the ground now, uh, and Maxwell and I and other, and two other members are, are committed to this fight. I. So given the fact that, that James Comer denied your, your request for, uh, a congressional delegation, a ell are, are first and foremost, are you guys safe by virtue of being there without the protections that would be afforded to you, uh, if you had done it through a ell, obviously there there's always risks. Risks associated with all these trips.

Um, but we took that into account as we put together the itinerary in the schedule. I mean, there's a reason why everyone found out we were here when we got here already, and it's really important to our security. Um, but the other thing is, um, it, you know, like Robert said, we didn't want to allow that, this denial of our, of our requests keep us. From doing the work that we need to do.

And the fact of the matter is both of our offices are receiving tons and tons and tons of letters, mail, phone calls, emails of constituents who are saying, you know, go out there, fight for due process. Or, I've heard from people who've said, I see myself represented in this situation like, like I'm a rego Garcia. Like this could be me. And so for us, we don't wanna wait.

I. Um, until this situation gets outta hand and Donald Trump is actually doing this to us citizens and even more people, now's the time when we have to stand up for this. So, you know, we, we wish we'd be here on an official Cordell. Obviously it gives us more resources, the ability to do a little bit more.

Uh, but we didn't run for Congress to just cow away when a Republican idiot like er tells us no. And so when we got that letter, we, you know, called each other up and said, let's do it anyway. Perfectly put. And, and I, and I would ask too, like, what does it say that.

That James Comer opted if he, when he had the opportunity to approve this codel, that he opted to say no. Thereby trying his level best to prevent you from, from a going, or B, if you do go, obviously trying to, to prevent you from from, from this getting any oxygen. Well, I think, look, what's what's really important for all is we're not gonna be stopped by James Coleman and the Republicans.

And let's be really clear, the only official ELLs that have had members come here from the house have been Republican ELLs with no Democrats, right? So for for the House, for the House of Representatives to have only approved ELLs, for Republicans to come here, to tour of the prisons, to meet with officials. Is crazy. We should be allowed as Democrats in a bipartisan way to check and not just on the welfare of kmar, but ensure that other people that are here are getting due process.

We should be here meeting with officials and yet, because they wanna prove official s. We're gonna be here anyways, and we're proud that we're here. And more importantly, the American public need to understand that Donald Trump is defined. The Supreme Court and the people here in El Salvador. We spoke to, uh, numerous, uh, press from El Salvador. Um, in English, in Spanish. We're also, we're, we're obviously both part of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, uh, as well.

So it's important for them to hear in their language, what Donald Trump is doing, and to build pressure here on the ground to release Kilmore and others. That deserve their due process. And have you been able to make contact with Garcia? And also can you give an update because the, the latest reporting that we have is that he was moved out of Sea Cot to a different prison. Um, and so what was the significance of that move?

So we made an official request to meet with him to, to make sure he's okay. I mean, know, you know, one of the people we're here traveling with, um, is the, uh, the lawyer of his family that they want to know where he's at. They want to know if he's okay. They, they want to know what's going on. Um, and so our, our. Uh, request to meet with him was denied by the government. They said because it wasn't an official trip.

Um, which I guess hopefully if an official trip happens when more Democrats in the future, there'll be no reason for them to not let them see each other. But the other thing that we're finding is that there's just not, there's a lack of information. You know, we went to the embassy to speak with the staff there and the ambassador, and we left.

With the, you know, we, we left under, with the under with understanding that the Trump administration has not told the embassy to, uh, uh, uh, comply with the Supreme Court ruling at all, um, to facilitate nothing. And not even that, they don't really know where he's at our embassy, which is very problematic when we talk about the fact that our Supreme Court in a unanimous decision, has instructed administration to facilitate the return of this man.

They are willfully flipping the bird to the Supreme Court, which also shows that we're, we're in a constitutional crisis right now as well. So there's, there's many reasons for this trip. Um, but everyone should understand that this can happen to anyone if we don't stop it now. That's why we're here. No, no. I just wanna add one thing, which I think is really important. 'cause we were obviously meeting with the ambassador today. Um, and, and there's no question that, um.

The embassy has not begun any process to facilitate this release, which the Supreme Court has mandated. So that's be crystal clear. Um, they're defined the Supreme Court to be clear. The second thing is we also understand that this is an issue, um, that's bigger than just Kilmore, right? This is about due process. It's about the separation of powers and it's about other. People that are here in El Salvador that are essentially having no due process.

We, we have a story which, um, a lot of folks have covered about an Andre Romero, a young man, 19 years old, a gay hairdresser going through the asylum process, had an appointment for asylum through our own process that we approved, and that it's picked up and sent directly to an El Salvador prison. We have not heard from him. And no, his family has not, his attorneys have not. We just wanna know if he's okay if he's alive.

We've actually asked the ambassador if we could get a wellness check or could see um, him as well. And we have yet to hear back. But that's also been one of our requests. So there's a lot of things that we're working on here. It makes sense because I mean, there are a lot of people on the right who say, oh, we're, we're perfectly fine with immigration, but you just have to do it the right way. This is somebody who did it the right way and yet still was disappeared to a foreign gulag. Right.

That that's exactly right. I wanna dig into the point you made just prior, because I think that's especially important, this idea that. That the Overton window shifts so easily with this administration and we're seeing it happen to legal residents. And now we're finally seeing reporting that, that, uh, American citizens are being detained. They're being detained at airports, they're being detained at, uh, at different ports of entry.

And so have you heard of any of your constituents, for example, uh, who are American citizens who are being detained? And can you just speak more broadly about this idea of, of. EN enabling Donald Trump to do this now with no pushback and what that will mean in terms of giving him the green light to do it to an even broader degree in the future. So we actually just had a situation like this happen in Florida, um, in North Florida.

Um, we had a person who is a citizen detained, uh, by local police for something completely unrelated. I think it was a minor traffic infraction. And then ICE issued what's called the detainer, which is essentially when the local police can hold someone. I believe it's, it can be up to 24 or 48 hours for ice to come pick them up. So they held this guy and he, they, the, the family went to the court proceeding holding up the birth certificate.

Holding up the paperwork saying, look, he's a citizen. He was born here. What's going on? And the judge said, because we have some new laws in Florida that are horrible. We have some of the worst immigration laws in the country. The judge said, I, because of the law, we have to wait for ice to get here, for ice to tell us what to do. So it, it's the federal government, but we also can't take our eyes off the states that are, they're, you know, it's a race to the bottom.

And who can impress Trump the most to make the worst, most authoritarian. Um, inhumane laws that even if you're a citizen. You get pulled over for having a tail light out or whatever it is that you can end up being held up to 24 48 hours, uh, for ICE to come and get you. We, we heard about a similar thing happening in Arizona. It's happening across the country. This is why we're here. We're not here to be heroes. We're not here for any of that.

We're here because we need to keep talking about it, protesting about it. Members of Congress, we need to do everything we can with the power that we have within our institution. The courts need to keep going. We can't afford. To throw any part of the response out. Everything at full force all the time right now because we, if we wait till it really gets outta hand when citizens are being sent to foreign countries.

When a Congress person compete, like, I'm not trying to scare people, but this is what's going on in my state right now and in certain states across the country. And that's why we have to, we have to finish it now. We have to rise up now and make sure that doesn't happen again. And that's why I said we're, we're the second batch of members here, van Holland. Um, really led the charge on this. We're following his lead. There's gonna be more people coming.

We've been talking with a lot of our colleagues. There's more trips. And Brian, let me add one thing to Matt, what Maxwell said. Sure. It's really important that I, I know you've, you know, there's some, some are, some are saying, some Democrats are out there saying that, um, this is a distraction or that perhaps, uh, we should focus on, on, um, other, you know, other things. And then there are a lot of things to focus on. Right. We can do all things at once, right?

We can take on, uh, this injustice that is happening to Killmore and others. We can take on Elon Musk and the billionaire class who are trying to rip off Americans. We can take on the destruction of our federal agencies. We can take on all these big issues at once, but we've gotta be all in and we've gotta be in the fight. And being in the fight also means showing up and being wherever we need to be, including El Salvador, to stand up for our democracy and our values.

But I actually wanted to start today by talking about fear, because fear's clearly a major driver of Trump's span, brand of politics always has been. And how we all respond to that fear in this moment. Is gonna determine a whole lot about the future of this country. Congressman Jamie Raskin summed it up pretty well in the New York Times this week. He said there's a regime of fear that's been brought down on society.

People need to see leaders and organizers standing up and speaking with authority against what's happening. Congressman Jamie Raskin summed it up very well there. He's here today. We have a lot to talk about. We're gonna talk to him in just a moment. But I also wanna talk about a few other things, because this week we also saw at least one Republican acknowledge that that fear too.

I mean, during an event in Alaska this week, Senator Lisa Murkowski was asked what she would say to people who are afraid right now. And she was way more candid than I at least expected her to be. What are you gonna have to say to people who are afraid or who represent people who are afraid? We are all afraid. Okay. It's quite a statement, but we are, um, we're, we're in. In a time and a place where, I don't know, I, I certainly have not, I have not been here before.

Um, and I'll tell you, I am, I am, uh, oftentimes very anxious myself about, about using my voice, um, because retaliation is real and that's not right. It's definitely not right and retaliation is real. We've seen it. Those fears are real. We all know that Trump has vindictive and he is betting he can gain a lot of leverage by creating even more fear. But at the same time, we've already seen that giving into his demands gets you absolutely nowhere.

I mean, when law firms cave, the demands don't stop. The firms that struck deals with Trump are now learning that the White House will effectively be choosing their pro bono clients for them. And when universities cave, the demands don't stop either. Columbia's deal with Trump right now might now include a court decree giving the White House control over the university's management. And when media outlets cave, the demands definitely don't stop.

I mean, paramount entered into settlement talks with Trump over a frivolous lawsuit, and Trump still pushed the FCC to revoke CBS's broadcast license. Point is this, capitulating to Trump won't save you. You'll just be targeted again and again. Because when you give into Trump's demands, you're just sending the message. His threats and tactics work. You're not putting the episode behind you. You're just inviting more demands. That's how mob bosses work.

And remember, fear is what Donald Trump sees as his most effective tool. I, in some ways, it's his only tool, fear of re retribution and fear of him weaponizing the powers of his office is basically what he relies on, and he is obviously relying on it to use that office in ways. We've never seen before.

I mean, he is trying to use the IRS of all places to target the nonprofit status of universities, which is the goal of making all nonprofit groups afraid of continuing the work that they're doing. He's trying to use immigration powers to make any non-citizen fear that he could change their legal status and force them out of the country at a moment's notice. Trump is using his office to instill fear in every single way he can.

And he is doing it in a way that he thinks, at least is politically smart, he thinks it is. He's trying to lure his political opponents into making this about just defending elite institutions like Harvard or Big city law firms nobody's ever heard of. He's spreading lies about Kamar, Abrego Garcia, daring people to defend him personally rather than defending the rights he's been denied.

And on the issue of Garcia specifically, some Democrats have said it's a distraction from the economic calamity he's caused. Some have said Kamar, rego Garcia is an imperfect hero for this issue. Maybe he is saying it's playing on Trump's turf on immigration, and Republicans really do think this is their turf. They really do. I mean, just listen to how Stephen Miller described this issue.

President Trump, his policy is foreign terrorists that are here illegally get expelled from the country, which by the way is a 90 10 issue. It sounds scary. I mean, 90 10, first of all, Stephen Miller needs a math class. I think we've all learned, but that's a big bluff from a little man and his sidekick. It's true that when pollsters are asked broad questions, when they ask broad questions to people out there about immigration and deportation, broadly, Trump's policies do well.

But when those questions get more specific and that's important, it's a totally different story. A U gov poll this morning found that six in 10 this month, sorry, found six in 10 respondents said they opposed deporting immigrants without criminal convictions to El Salvador to be imprisoned without letting them challenge the deport their deportation in court. 61%. Guys, that's a pretty clear majority, especially compared to the 26% of respondents who said they supported Trump's actions.

It's not exactly 90 10, and Stephen Miller's favor on that one. Is it? And we're seeing that on the ground in states across the country too. Even some pretty red states. Just listen to the earful that Republican senator Chuck Grassley got from an older, mostly white crowd in Iowa this week. You gonna bring that guy back from El Salvador? Why not? Well, because that's not a, that's not a power of. Supreme Court said to bring it back.

Judges are Cantion Constitution Hearing Committee, Trump don't care if I get an order to pay attention for $1,200. And I just say, no. Does that stand up? Because he's got an order from the Supreme Court and he's just said no. He just said, screw it. I'm the president of that country. Is not subject to our US Supreme Court back. I pissed. Not sure that was what Senator Grassley was expecting from that town hall meeting in Central Iowa.

I mean, I guess people in central Iowa are a part of that 10%. Steven Miller was talking about, I mean, who knows, and I guess a Reagan appointed federal judges too on his calculation. In that federal judge's ruling upholding court decisions requiring the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return, judge James Harvey Wilkinson III did not mince words exactly. He wrote quote, it is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter, but in this case it's not hard at all.

The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process. That is the foundation of our constitutional order. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons. I mean, that is a pretty clear distillation of the issue here.

Likewise, the Supreme Court dealt Trump another big setback just this weekend, and in order that they issued at 1:00 AM Saturday morning making some of the judges cranky, the court temporarily blocked the administration from deporting another group of detainees to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. That was a seven two decision by Donald Trump's Ultra conservative court. Seven two. So the courts seem to be standing up to him.

Some Republicans are standing up to him and the public is not exactly on his side either. And what's now becoming clear is there are actually rewards for standing up. It's morally right, but there are rewards too. I mean, after Harvard said it would stand up to Trump's demands, it's an outpouring of support and an immediate surgeon donation. Donations.

The pushback had enough of an effect on the Trump administration that they came up with a tortured process explanation as the only way I can describe it, of how this all happened with White House officials claiming the I original demands were sent by mistake. Okay? So their decision to fight back, not only shine a bright spotlight on Donald Trump's power grab, it also made his administration look kind of silly in the process.

And any intention like that on any of the crazy stuff they're trying is a good thing right now. When Senator Corey Booker spoke for 25 hours on the Senate floor, it brought attention and news coverage, and also made him a hero to Democrats because he wasn't consumed by fear. He just kind of let it rip for 25 hours.

When Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hit the road, they drew tens of thousands of people, if not more at the rallies, not just in blue bastions like la, but in places like Tampa, Idaho, and Missoula, Montana. Even as staunch project presses, which they proudly are. They're appealing to people across the ideological spectrum because they don't fear fighting.

Back more recently, Senator Chris Van Holland of Maryland traveled to El Salvador this week and pressured the government there to give him a meeting with Kumar Abrego Garcia. Not only did v Helen clearly take a stand in the process, he also proved and showed people that Abrego Garcia was alive and forced the Salvadorian government to play a bit of defense. And since then, van Halen has commanded a ton of attention. I mean, this morning he did a round of five Sunday shows talking about a strip.

So aside from the obvious moral reasons behind all of this pushback, and there are plenty of those, there's also a big political opportunity for anyone who's willing to take a stand and look on their own. Any of these things might not seem like a huge deal, but taken together all of this pushback is starting to matter. Yesterday, tens of thousands more people gathered across the country for another day of nationwide protests. They were called no Kings protests.

A follow up to the hands-off protest that drew millions into the streets just two weeks ago. But what will Neva translate to? Who knows, but standing up for what's right, trying some things, applying some pressure, getting some media attention is far more effective than being fearful and timid because being fearful and timid has never worked against the sky and it sure isn't working now. That's going to be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in.

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