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Hello and welcome. Today could happen here a podcast but the world falling apart and was mostly just about that at the minute, but we do sometimes talk about how to put it back together as well. Joining me today is Garrison Davis.
Hi.
Garrison, Hello, Hi, and we're on the falling apart theme. Think so we've been on that one quite a lot last few weeks, but today we are specifically talking about the what I'm going to call the rendition of non US nationals by the Trump administration over the last week. The reason I'm calling it, I guess rendition and not deportation is because these people aren't being sent back to
the countries they're from. They are being sent to El Salvador. Specifically, they're being sent to a place called Second So the Trump administration has attempted to send three hundred people who it accuses of being members of a foreign terrorist organization. We're going to get to how they get there under the Alien Enemies Act, to a prison in El Salvador where they will be detained for a year at the
expense of the United States. We're going to break down exactly how we got there over the course of this episode. So the Trump administration has accused these people of being members of two different gangs. The majority of them, there's two hundred and thirty eight people are accused of being members of Trend de Ragua. Trind de Ragua is a Venezuelan gang that the Trump administration recently declared a foreign terrorist organization. Another twenty three it's accusing of being members
of MS thirteen, which is a Salvadorrean gang. The Trump administration use something called the Alien Enemies Act to remove these people. The Alien Enemies Act, we actually spoke about it in November of last year when we were looking at provisions of US law that the Trump administration could use for its mass deportation gender. This is one we spoke about. The Trump administration in the past has been quite good at finding obscure provisions of the United States
law to exclude migrants. You can hear my whole series about Title forty two on that. That's kind of the paramount example. Right. The Only Enemies Act is a two hundred and twenty six year old piece of legislation. The last time it was used was to inter Japanese people during the Second World War. Right, So that's a pretty shameful part of the United States history, and it's great that we're going back there. So who are the enemies in this case?
Right?
It's generally, like I should probably point out the Alien Enemies Act is intended for like the people you were
at war with. Right, So if the United States is at war with let's say Canada, and there are Canadian citizens in the United States, so people who have dual citizenship with Canada, and those people that are individuals within that group are suspected to be spies or suspected to be like serving the interest in Canada not the United States, that they could be excluded or detained under the Alien Enemies Act or sent out of the country, as it's the case here, and as we saw in this instance,
there is very little recourse to appeal.
Right.
This isn't like a deportation hearing or an asylum hearing where you have a lawyer representing you, where you have even a hearing. Right, these people were raudied up and booted out the country in very short order.
Yeah, and like with or without due process, Like we should not be black bagging people and sending them to the like Al Salvador labor prison, Right, Like this is like just doing this at all, even with due process would already be horrifying. Yeah, the fact that they're just doing it like without even any like court process entirely and like trying to like bypass that just adds like another level to an already like horrifying and you know, evil and shameful action.
Yeah, it's terrible. I want it defines some of the categories here. I want to start with Trendy Aragua Spanish understanders will will notice the word trend meaning train. That's because they came out of construction unions who were building trains as part of a Venezuelan infrastructure project in Aragua, which is part of Venezuela. There are other Venezuelan gangs.
Trend Deliano is the other one that springs to mind, which was come from the same place and thus have similar names, but just people should understand that they're different organizations. They also have a strong presence of Venezuelan prisons. They have in the past been accused of doing violence on behalf of the Venezuelan state. By in twenty twenty four, my daughter blame them for the protests after his election.
People remember that that election was widely seen as fraudulent, and I covered that in my series on the Dariant Gap if people want to learn more about Venezuelan politics of migration into the United States. In twenty twenty four, Biden named Trend de Aragua a transnational criminal organization and then Trump named them a foreign terrorist organization. He labeled to cartels as ftos as well. At the time, there's a lot of speculation about why was it to allow
for like drone strikes or co operations. I think we're now seeing that this was part of this large ploy of deportation.
Yeah, because like quote unquote terrorists have even less quote unquote rights than quote unquote criminals. Yes, right, Like it's it's like, yeah, like the like the triangle of like which which deplorable class has the least about of rights? Terrorists are always like the ones with the least.
Yeah. And we've been doing that for twenty odd years now with Quantanamo Bay and renditions to Egypt and Syria and other places. In this case, people are being sent to Sikot, which is this prison in El Salvador. Sometimes. Can you spell that, yeah, cecot uh Centro that cult? Yeah, Seacott I guess. It stands for terrorism confinement, Terrorism detention center. It is largely referred to as a super prison. Right it was built in our Bibles. Part of his iron
Fist would be the way you translate. It's iron fist policy against gangs and against crime, and it has been widely condemned for human rights abuses. People are crammed into cells with more than one hundred people, but there are fewer bunks than there are prisoners, right, so they can't even all lie down at the same time. The bunks don't have bedding, they're just flat like metal sheets. They're four high, so you have to climb over other people
to sleep. For more than one hundred prisoners, there are two open toilets. That's the only access to a bathroom that you have. They might be allowed out for half an hour each day. They're not allowed to communicate with their families or the outside world. They're forced to shave their heads and they all wear white. The lights are
left on all day. As I said that, they're provided with no bedding, They contact with the outside world, very little access to anything other than standing in that cell. There's two bibles in each set. It's the only sort of entertainment they're allowed. It just sounds like a torture camp, Like, yeah, this is completely inhumane, right, it's horrific, and for a couple of years now, but Kelly has been doing like these media tours of the of p sicot, like using
it to generate content. It's very much designed to generate this image of like, this is what will happen to quote unquote, what will happened to you if you're a quote unquote in a gang. It's sort of been used to promote his image of someone who's taking an iron fist to gangs. And as we saw when these people were sent to our salbad Or, this tendency to use I don't know what you would call it incarceration as
a way of making content. It was very much the case here, right, Yeah, I'm going to break for ads. When we come back, we will be consuming content that is people being stripped of their human rights. And we are back, Garrison. Do you want to go ahead and play this? And so the the tweet in question, the zet in question, it's by Naibuke, the president of Bel Salvador. Right, should I read it out? Yeah?
I think you should think it's worth noting that like this style of propaganda close to the mirrors a lot of what like DHS and the Trump administration is doing on their official accounts, a lot of a lot of the like memified content creation format and like aesthetics being used to just display like torture and deportations and human arts abuses is very common among government accounts in the States right now. It's pretty pretty horrifying to look at. And this this kind of follows the suit and is
possibly even more bleak. Yeah, but yeah, we should read read this whole, this whole message and then and then we'll pribace skip around on the video and talk about what we're seeing.
Yeah, so I'll just read it obviously in turnstand I'm quoting it hit artly from him. Today, the first two hundred and thirty eight members of the Venezuelan criminal Organizeation trend ragois arrived in our country. They were immediately transferred to SIKORD, the Terrorism Confinement Center for a period of one year, parentheses renewable. The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for
US over time. These actions, combined with a production already being generated by more than forty thousand inmates engaged in various workshops and labour under the Zero Idleness Program will help make our prison system self sustainable. As of today, it costs two hundred million per year. On this occasion, the US has sent us twenty three MS thirteen members wanted by Salvatory Injustice, including two ring leaders. One of them is a member of the criminal organization's highest structure.
This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants of MS thirty, including its former and new members, money weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors. As always who continue advancing in a fight against organized crime, but this time we're also helping our allies, making our prison system self sustain and obtaining vital intelligence to make a country an even safer place. All in a single action.
They God blessed Sarbador, and they God blessed the United States. I should probably just add that the US sent three million dollars to pay for these six million dollars. I'm sorry to pay for this three hundred prisoners that intended to send.
The Zero Idleness program is like one of the most sinister things I've like read recently.
Yeah, I mean you could put out of a Georgio well or like old Huxley or something right, and it wouldn't sound out a place.
It's even even like you know, it's almost cliche now to point like German work camps, but like.
Come on, yeah, I mean come on, yeah, yeah, that we were doing it again.
So yeah, we'll probably play a clip of the music and then I'm going to skip around on the video. You're can just talk about what we're seeing here. It's first we have a shot of an airport with three different planes and people getting rounded up and pushed on in single file. It has like this like action movie type music lines of soldiers.
So as as the.
People getting loaded on the plane, they're getting like forced forced down. There's like people with like guns, police military like manhandling people pushing their heads down, physically removing clothing.
Yeah, they're showing their tattoos there, right, that's what they're pulling up his shirt.
Yeah, but like even the way that they just like walk around with these people like like like forcing their heads almost like their concrete as they make them shuffle along the ground, just like basic dehumanization shows them getting transported onto buses.
Yeah, so they said, they're arriving at set good now sort of bright white, very sterile facility. Now they're being forced into their knees, yeah, and shaved, getting.
Their beards shaved, heads shaved, getting shackled, all while being forced onto their knees on the ground.
Then the cops doing this are all wearing I guess balaclavas. Describe them as face masks and hats.
Yeah, all of all of the military police officials are trying to hide their identity as they you know, publicly display the actions that they're doing, as when they're you know, shaving and holding people's heads up for the camera.
Yeah.
So it it's it's a lot of that kind of stuff you see. You see them like pushing pushing people all in matching white clothes in single file into cells.
Yeah, and this is the cell so we spoke about before. We'll include this link in the in the sources.
It's basically just three minutes of torture porn. Like that's like, that's what that's what they're doing.
I guess, yeah, it's it's it's pretty bleak, honestly.
Like, I don't know what else to say about it besides like it's it's just it's just like channeling pure evil, Like I like it's it's there's nothing else to say.
Yeah, I mean that. I don't know how anyone will watch that and think good. So we should talk about how they're identifying these people, and we should talk about the process by which they were sent there. ICE policy says a person could be deemed a gang member if they office the notes to quote gang membership identification criteria. One of the criteria that they seem to be using
in this instance is their tattoos. So there are some gangs that have a process of tattooing to enter the gang, right MS thirteen Mara Salva structure, it's what the MS stands for being one of them. These like Mara Central American gangs have tended to use that in the past. This isn't really something that happens with Trend de Raguas
as far as I'm aware of. Some people they've pointed to tattoos of trains in a document the gear found from the Texas Department of Public Safety, pointing to stars as evidence that people were part of Trend de Ragua. So I remember where Trend Dragua does not have a policy of tattooing people specifically, because this is a thing that has been used by law enforcement to identify members, right, like, it would be silly to keep doing that once once
it's become so clear that the state uses that. So the one sort of case that I've seen legal documents on of these people, the one name we have one of these people who's been sent is a man named Hersirees Barrios. He was a footballer professional football in Venezuela who protested against my daughter regime, was tortured and detained as a result. I've spoken to probably I would imagine thousands of Venezuela and migrants. Right again, I would like you to listen to my series on Italian Gap if
you haven't, I put a lot into it. All of these people have stories of watching people be shot, the brutal repression of protest, state violence, economic collapse, persecution for supporting the opposition in the country, right and this is one of those stories. The criteria that they used to identify him were a tattoo which had a football with a crown over the top and then the word Dios
God in English underneath raise. Barrios's lawyer says that this is an homage the logo of Real Madrid, his favorite football club. They have claimed that it is evidence of gang membership. That's what the government is claiming here. The other criteria that they used is a picture of him like throwing up the horns. I guess which I believe it means I love you in sign language, I'm not sure if I's think an urban legend or if that's the case, and there are obviously different sign languages, but
this is a hand gesture. It's especially common in the Spanish speaking world. If you're not familiar, I have my little finger and my index finger extended and my two other fingers curled up as if I was making a fist.
Almost like almost like a spider man hand symbol.
I guess sure, I'm not familiar, but if you say so to visually reference for people, if you were making a little cow like a bulk with your hands, sure you would be doing your shadow puperty. It's very common, Like yes, it's a very typical hands It's a thing that people do when they when they're taking photos, like I've even seen it, like when you know, if there's if I'm working with a photographer and they're snapping photos of larger groups of people. People just do it like
just like people did the peace sign. You know, it's a thing to do with your hands. Those are two criteria they use. So I should point out that none of these people have been accused or convicted of a crime, either in the United States or in El Salvador. Right. Even if they had been accused of a crime, even convicted of a crime, the United States is very unclear what legal basis they would be to then detain them
in El Salvador. Right, Like, the United States doesn't have a system whereby we can send people to penal colonies. At the time of writing, this has been challenged in court. Right, A district court judge attempted to block the A district court judge did block these removals. Now, he actually blocked them before the people had arrived in El Salvador. However, despite this, the planes didn't turn around. And I'm just going to quote directly from what the judge said here.
Quote any plane containing these folks and it's going to take off or is in the air, needs to be returned to the United States. Then it's another quote later. This is something you need to make sure he's complied with immediately. This didn't happen right. The planes went from the US torndor Salvador. They didn't stop even when the
judge had given this order for them to stop. Now, normally, in illegal proceedings such as this, right that the government or one of the parties may not agree with the findings of the judge and they may choose to appeal it right, that's very normal. You still comply with the order, then appeal it right. You don't just keep doing whatever you feel like doing because you don't think the judge was right like that. That's in theory, not how this works now in practice. What means does a judge have
to force the executive to listen to him? I don't know. We're not seeing any of them on display at the minute. The government has cited various reasons for ignoring the ruling. One of them press Securely Caroline leave It claimed that there was quote no lawful basis for the ruling. Go back to my previous statement about how you're supposed to appeal things. They also claimed in court that a verbal
order is not the same as a written one. That's not something that's generally understood to be the case, and that because the flights were over international water, the order did not apply. This was then part of the foreign policy powers reserved to the president. That last one is particularly worrying. You effectively don't have your rights in international waters, role like humans don't have rights in international waters.
Yeah, it's just allowing the US government or the UST government trying to say that it's allowed to do whatever it wants if the action is being taken or not, like immediately on US soil or other foreigns oil.
Yeah. So we're going to take another break and when we come back, we will talk about their response to this judge is ruling. All right, and we are back. So Trump's response to this Judge Boseberg's ruling was, I'm just going to read this is a true social post aka a truth quote. This radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barak Hussein.
Obama was not elected president. M Dash. I'm not going to say when it's capitalized, just to understand that it's sporadically capitalized in the fashion that Trump likes to do. He didn't win the popular vote. Parentheses by a lot exclamation mark comma. He didn't win all seven swing states, he didn't win two seven hundred and fifty to five
and twenty five counties. He didn't win anything. I won for many reasons in an overwhelming mandate, but fightling illegal immigration may have been the number one reason for this historic victory and just doing what the voters wanted me to do. This judge, like many of the crooked judges I'm forced to appear before, should be impeached. We don't want vicious, violent, and demented criminals, many of them deranged murderers,
in our country. Make America great again, Tom Homan. The borders are also told Fox News quote, I don't care what the judges think.
We made a promised to American people. The President Trump has made a promised to American people. We're going to make this country safe again. I wake up every morning loving my job because I work for the greatest president in the history of my life, and we're going to make this country safe again. I'm probably a part of this administration. We're not stopping. I don't care what the judges think. I don't care the left. Thanks were coming too.
I just love saying you going through these protestss just crunching on the apple as they're liberal tiers, just just floout the hallway.
Tom Holman, thanks so much for joining the program.
You got to think this is open defiance of the courts, right, Like, I don't really know.
It's what we've been talking about the past month on executive disorder. How we are just continually like ramping up this clash between the executive branch and the judicial branch. The congressional branch has already basically given up all of their power, and yeah, this is like an actual constitutional crisis. Very few people are taking this as seriously as what it should be, and even the courts seem a little bit tepid to like actually enforce their own power or like try to.
Yeah, I mean Boseberg mentioned contempt once from what I can find on pacer, but like, obviously these judges I think are somewhat concerned that if they, you know, they find the government in contempt to court, then what happens because if you like, yeah, if you play your Trump card and no one cares, then you have no chives left to play.
It's it's kind of odd how the judges themselves are seemingly afraid of like pushing this constitutional crisis into a explicit territory right to be like what if we do the thing that then makes it clear to everyone else like we have no power, like like we actually have like like it is just authoritarianism via the executive branch. Yeah, it's almost like they're trying to like backpedal from this like very obvious accelerationist push of like no, we need to actually test test this.
Out, yeah, because we need to know where we're at.
Like, and they're scared too, because they're scared what if what if that testing causes like the Trump side to win.
Yeah, but that we're already winning in the in the absence of testing exactly.
And the problem is that in absence of that, you were just giving up and letting Trump win. Yeah. Like, after Trump called to impeach the quote unquote radical leftist lunatic of a judge who tried to temporarily halt the the deportation of of these three hundred Venezuelan immigrants, Chief Justice John Roberts made a rare public statement rebuking calls to impeach judges for rulings that don't align with political agendas,
and that's as far as they're going. Right now, they're making rare public statements saying you probably shouldn't call to impeach a judge. Meanwhile, Musk complaints on Twitter dot com about a quote unquote judicial coup, and it mistakenly calls for sixty senators to impeach a leftist to judges. Now, of course, the Senate does not do impeachments. The House does, and the Senate requires sixty seven votes to convict it and remove someone from office once impeached. So haha, we gotcha,
We gotcha. Elon, you made a mistake, We win notes co. Yeah, it's where we're at right now with this case. We're recording this.
On Thursday, Bosebag gave them a twenty four our extension to provide details about the flights. The government has suggested that it might claim that these are state secrets, despite the fact that it has widely publicized these flights, including in the video that we discussed.
Yeah, they're turning these into like TikTok is, Instagram real hype videos.
They're not state secrets publicly.
You're publicly displaying these to show that these people are not human. Yeah, like you're trying to scare everyone into saying we decide if you are a person or not, and if you're not a person, this is what we can do.
This, we can do whatever we want to. Yeah, it should be noted as well, there is actually a process in US law through the Alien Terrorist Removal Court for the expedited removal of terrorist suspects without revealing classified information publicly. In fact, Boseberg was chief judge on that court for five years Jesus Christ. But we are not using that process where we using the Alien Enemies Act in today.
So yeah, this is in new exciting territory. In On Monday, so that's the day that you're hearing this, a panel of judges from the District Court in DC will hear an appeal by the United States government against Bosberg's attentive restraining order, the one that it obey anyway, so we will have more on this and we will keep updating you on this and SUF fight it to say that I guess again, this is a constitutional crisis, Like this
is what it looks like. I don't I don't know if people expect like fireworks to go off or like some confetti to drop and it to be like the separation of powers is gone. But if the government can ignore the courts, and that is what is happening. So I guess we will see in the meantime. These people, many of whom one of them was a musician, one
of them was a football player, right like. I've interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of fens wild migrants, and most of them, it will shock you to hear, are just people who don't want to live with the boot of the state on the neck, people who want to make a decent living for their their families for what it's worth. None of the Venezuelan migrants I met in the Daddian Gap or in the United States or have come to United States.
And my knowledge is for people who are like wondering how those stories kind of resolve, they resolve with people currently stuck in Mexico in pretty terrible conditions, either working for very little or unable to work at all, and trying to work out what to do. It's pretty bleak for them, it's pretty bleak for us to if this is the duration that things are going. I don't ever have much more to say.
No, I don't know what else there is to say about them, just bypassing the courts to do a complete authoritarian overgrab so that they can send hundreds of people to essentially like a labor camp black site in a different country for an unknown period of time without any legal process.
Like it's to be clear, not all of these people even entered the United States between ports of entry, which has been charged as a misdemeanor. Generally isn't charged. Some of them came with the CPP one, the fucking app the thing you're supposed to do.
These are not proven criminals like these these these are just people some of who immigrated legally and have been detained by ICE. I don't now shipped off to a like torture labor prison in a different country where they're going to stay for at least a year in parenthesis renewable so like in death Like it's like.
They can be forced to labor for the rest of their lives, a thing that has happened before in human history.
No, Like, if you're like history understanders should look at what's happening and be like, oh, we're doing that again, huh. And the only way that this ends is with people getting angry enough to start doing something about it. And I feel like we are we're so like everyone's become so complacent that it's even hard to get people to care or like hear about this sort of thing from happening.
Yeah, and you don't have to be like I want to phrase this in radical terms that you don't have to be like anywhere on the left to understand that, like, this is an assault on basic human rights. It's just sort on the foundational principles of the United States government. And everyone should be said about this. You shouldn't be a left right issue. This should be like a right wrong issue. So hopefully you can all have some talks
with your family this week. I don't know, like, I think it's really important to push back on the idea that these people have done any crimes, because they have not, that they have been convicted or found using any reasonable degree of evidence to be members of gangs like TRENDRAGU.
And even if they have been convicted, they should not be sent to the Al Salvador Orticer labor camp. But the fact that they're not even convicted, these are just random in some cases, like random Venezuelan men who have been rounded up.
For the crime of having tattoos for the most part, fucking horrifying. It is petrifying. Yeah, it's happening. It is happening here.
Every day we're getting closer to the cool Zone as more and more people start taking this situation seriously.
Yeah, so yeah, take it seriously. You know, advocate for these people. Best of luck, And if you want to email us, you can do cool Zone Tip at proton dot me. That's an encrypted email address, but it's only encrypted end to end. If you also send from an encrypted email address, do your due diligence, and yeah, send us, send us tips if you have tips, ideas, if you have ideas, and we will be back tomorrow with more things that are happening here.
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