Dear listener, before we start, just a warning that suicide is going to come up in this piece.
Take care.
One is a former migrant from Venezuela. He remembers the day two years ago when he posed for a photograph that would end up changing his life.
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It was September of twenty twenty two, and he and a small group of his family members had just arrived in Ibake, in western Colombia. It was the first days of a long journey to the United States, where he hoped to find work a new life, all of it far away from the economic and political crises in his homeland. In Venezuela, the wont Eka.
Tauna Plaza Kere Antigo.
When the group spotted a monument of an old train car outside the bus terminal, it felt like the perfect spot to take a picture to document the moment. It's an old train engine surround by colorful flowers. It's a group of five men and one woman, all in their twenties, and they stand there smiling at the camera. Juan sits on one side of the train engine, giving a thumbs up. He looks happy. He was happy.
Now.
Almost two years and two thousand miles later, this photo would land one in one of the most infamous prisons on earth that's run by the US government. It's called Guantanamo. From Futro Media and PRX, It's Latino USA. I'm Maria Josa. Today Juan's story and how the Trump administration is taking his war on immigrants to a whole new level. Producer Ariel Goodman has the story.
Huan is one of the one hundred and seventy seven Venezuelan migrants that the Trump administration sent to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba this February.
We have thirty thousand beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people.
Quan is not his real name. We're protecting his identity for security reasons. He's a thirty year old construction worker and a father of four. That photo, the one we described at the top, would eventually be used by immigration and Customs enforcement as proof that Juan was connected to trender Awa. Tren means train in Spanish. In reality, Juan says he took that photo to mark a memory with
his family and that train car. It's an antique commemorating an old Colombian rail line built in the nineteen twenties. But this accusation that Juan was a member of trender AWA would ultimately place him in the crosshairs of the newly elected Trump administration. Determined to fulfill its campaign promise of waging an all out war on immigrants, Trump frequently spoke about t AWA on the campaign trail, often repeating false claims that the gang had taken control of neighborhoods in Colorado.
As we speak, heavily lam Venezuela and gangs taking over entire aprofit buildings and propping complexes in Aurora, Colorado, terrorizing the residence.
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order designating the gang as a quote foreign terrorist organization. We got a hold of Juan and Venezuela, where he was deported in February.
He Vescuccas.
When we spoke to him, he had just visited Marakai, the city where he was born and raised.
Sin sing Joyani time Topuerlo at all.
He tells me that it felt good to be back home and to see his children for the first time in years, But he says nothing is the same. Marakai is the capital state of Arawa. It's called Sudan Garvin because of its abundance of gardens. Arawa is where trend Arawa originated in a prison in twenty fourteen and got its name. It's also where Juan has always dreamed of returning.
To Geriaita Tolment.
Juan says that his biggest dream was to own a house in Maracai that he could hand down to his children. But at twenty two years old, Juan was unable to find work in his home country, so he joined the millions of Venezuelans one in every four who have left their country over the past seven years. In twenty seventeen, Juan moved to Ecuador with his wife and four children.
They lived there for six years. Ja Juan worked in construction, but when COVID nineteen hit in twenty twenty, Ecuador became an early epicenter in Latin America.
Ecuador is seeing one of the world's worst coronavirus outbreaks what possibly thousands did.
More than half a million people lost their full time jobs that year in Ecuador, and life there became untenable for many foreigners, such as Juana. He remembers seeing Venezuelans like himself, kicked out of the places they were renting because they could no longer afford them. Their belongings tossed on the street. That's when he decided to seek opportunities somewhere else, this time north of Venezuela in the United States. First he traveled through Colombia, where he took the photo
in front of that old train car. Then to the Darien Jungle, the infamously dangerous stretch of rainforest that straddles the border of Columbia and Panama.
Jodel Simple mediasutau Ba.
I went six days without eating, he says. Most of the time I was running to keep up with the guides. Huan's journey continued for over a year. He ran out of money in Costa Rica and stayed there working in construction for a year and a half. He rode on top of train cars with migrants from all over South and Central America, ran from immigration officials, walked through forests at night. He finally made it to the United States
in May of last year. Friends and family here instructed him to do as they had done, turn himself over to immigration authorities, where he would be processed and then let free while his asylum case was determined and in El Paso, Texas. Juan did just as he was told. He felt happy he had made it across Aijata, but I was wrong, he says. That was where my nightmare began. Juan says that the ICE officials asked him questions about
his entire life. They went through his phone and found that picture of him in front of the train, which he says they used to connect him to Trenderrawa. That and a tattoo of three stars he has on his right arm, which they claimed was also proof that he had ties to the gang. According to experts, though trend Arawa doesn't use tattoos as a signifier of membership, Quan says he got that tattoo when he was sixteen years old because it looked like a tattoo that one of
his favorite reggaeton artists, Farruko had. According to US court records, Juan has no criminal history here other than improper entry into the country. He also provided a Venezuelan government document to Latino USA declaring that he has no criminal history in his country of origin.
Legas among me the policy.
I come from poverty. He says, but I have nothing to hide. Quan was charged with a legal entry and eventually sent to a detention center in net Baso, where he stayed for several months. There, he says that every day everyone in his cell block would gather around a television to watch the news. It was how they stayed connected to the outside world.
It is now official CNN projects that Donald Trump has been elected president, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris and making a political comeback like any in modern American politics.
When the new president began threatening to send the so called worst criminal migrants to Guantanamo Bay, fear and rumors started to spread amongst the detainees, and one.
Night, alb Alberonier all of us.
One by one. They called ten people by name.
He says.
The next day he would find out in the news what had happened to them.
The Department of Homeland Security has released the first images of detained migrants arriving at Guantanamo Bay. The ten people on the flight from El Paso, Texas are suspected members of a Venezuelan gang. The Trump administration has said the high security prison facility used to hold Al Qaeda detainees will now also be used for so called hardened criminals who do not have proper documentation.
Juan immediately recognized the people in those images. They were the young Venezuelan men who had been taken from the detention center the previous night. That's when the trauma started, he says. The images showed the migrants shackled from head to toe boarding massive military aircrafts, surrounded by heavily armed guards, headed to Guantanamo Bay, and just a few days later, this time by the cover of night, Kuan's name was
also called. He described it as a horror movie. He says that he and around fifteen other migrants were treated like terrorists. They were shackled from the legs, hands, and waist. He estimates that he was on the plane for eight hours, flanked by soldiers with rifles. When they landed, they were ushered and then shackled again into seats on a bus with black plastic covering the windows. It felt like a kidnapping,
he says. He says they were told that they were going to Miami, but instead they were taken to Guantanamo Bay.
Join King Sailor.
Kuan describes the fifteen days that followed as torture. He wasn't given any information about what was happening or if he would ever leave. It was a hopelessness, he says, that made him want to die. Lawsuits against the Trump administration that have since been filed by civil rights groups include testimonies from some of the Venezuelan detainees in Guantanamo. They detail instances of physical abuse, use invasive strip searches, lack of medical care, and no access to legal counsel.
Partico Domo Kwan estimates that his cell, which in place of a mattress, had a piece of plastic, was seven by five feet, the size of a small bathroom with a tiny latrine.
He passed the days screaming, pacing his cell, kicking the door, and banging his head on the wall. He says he felt like he was drowning. He told us that sometimes guards would come in and chain his body to a restraint chair for hours. A US colonel recently admitted to The New York Times that in one single day, prison staff strapped six of the Venezuelan migrants to restraint chairs after they attempted suicide. Cierria Zier, you couldn't tell day
from night Quan explains. Juan spoke of extreme cold and extreme heat. He says he was barely fed and felt hungry every day. I swear, He says, it feels like you've been buried and that they've thrown the dirt on top of you, but you're still alive. The desperation was so deep that one day he chewed on his own tongue repeatedly in the hopes that he would bleed to death.
Soon before they were released, Juan says that he and the other migrants attempted to wage a hunger strike, which they organized by yelling to one another through the cell walls. Juan stopped what little betting he had into the latrine to flood his cell refuse food, and continued to spend his days kicking the door of his cell and yelling, hoping that it would call attention to his case or
bring him answers. On February twenty first, all one hundred seventy seven Venezuelan men who were detained at Guantanamo Bay, the first but not the last migrants sent there by the Trump administration, were deported back to Venezuela. In this video, the men, the youngest of which was nineteen years old, are dismounting a plane surrounded by Venezuelan officials. Some smile, one throws his hands up in the air and looks
at the sky, appearing to thank God. While the Trump administration first accused the group of being the quote worst of the worst, it later admitted in court for that close to thirty percent of the detainees did not have criminal records other than unauthorized entry into the United States, and that they were considered quote low threat illegal aliens. When Juan arrived in Venezuela, he says that he was ten pounds lighter, he had no money or clothes other
than the ones that he was wearing. Now he's slowly trying to piece his life back together. He wants to work on what he does best, construction, but he says that the pay is so low in Venezuela that he practically would be doing it for free. Instead, he's considering selling bananas to help pay the bills. Juan tries to fill his days with his family, but at night, he says he can't sleep unless he takes pills. Once he dreamed of making it to the US. Now the memories of it manifest as nightmares.
I assume.
At night is when the real terror comes. He says, I fall into a loop remembering what I lived through. It's something I can't let go of.
One was deported to his home country of Venezuela in February, and just weeks later, over two hundred Venezuelans under similar circumstances were sent from the US to another infamous prison, this time in El Salvador. When we come back, we dive into the new phase of Trump's war on immigrants that's coming up. Stay with us, Yes, hey, we're back.
And before the break, we heard the story of jue A Venezuelan and immigrants who spent fifteen days in Guantanamo after the Trump administration accused him of being a member of the Venezuelan gang trin Zagwa. But now Trump is taking his war on immigrants to another level. Just a couple of weeks ago, he in vote the Alien Enemies Act of seventeen ninety eight. It's a wartime law. This Alien Enemies Act has only been invoked three times, most recently during World War Two, when it was used to
put Japanese immigrants in internment camps. By claiming that then n Ahwa is conducting quote irregular warfare in the United States. The Trump administration is using the Act to deport migrants who it claims have ties to the gang, all of this without due process, and in March it deported more than two hundred Venezuelans to El Salvador's infamous mega prison secote. To better understand all of this, we're going to speak to Ramsey Kassim. He's professor of law at the City
University of New York. Professor Cassim has represented detainees at Guantanamo Bay over the last twenty years. He's also one of the lead lawyers defending Mahur Khalil.
Ice agents detained a leader of the Gaza Solidarity encampment at Columbia University. Mahan Khalil is an Algerian citizen of Palestinian descent who's a Green Card holder and a lawful permanent resident of the United States. Immigration officials told Khalil's lawyer his green card is being revoked.
Professor Ramsey Cassim, welcome to Latino, USA.
Thank you so much for having me Adia So, Ramsey.
We're looking today at Trump's move to incarcerate migrants abroad, first in Guantanamo, now in El Salvador, and we're going to get into that in a moment. But to start off, can you connect the dots for us? How is the Trump administration's detention of your client Mahmour Khalil connected to the administration's move to incarconate migrants, as civil rights groups like yours are arguing in these unlawful ways.
One way to connect the dots, Maria is to point out that when the Trump administration decides to fly migrants who it claims without much support, are affiliated with gangs to Guantanamo, and when it also makes a move on someone like Marmo Trallier, who his only offense, as far as anybody can see, is that he has said things that the government happens to disagree with in support of
Palestinian lives and rights and freedom. The through line between those two actions is that these are essentially communications efforts, and so when it comes to leveraging the horrible symbolism of Guantanamo, the intended message is we are doing the most hard nosed thing to quash migrants, and migration we're sending them to and so that's a politically valuable message that comforts the Trump Administration's political base here in the
United States, and the administration also intends to deter migrants from coming to the United States again by leveraging and mobilizing the horrific symbolic weight of Guantanamo and all the associations with torture, with indefinite incarceration, without fair process, without trial, without conviction for decades on end. And once again, the people who are being brought to Guantanamo are brown and
black folks. That was the case with the nearly eight hundred Sunny Muslim prisoners who were incarcerated there since nine to eleven, and that's the case today with the LATINX migrants, whom the administration claims are gang affiliated again without much support, much like previous administrations claimed that the Muslim man at Guantanamo were affiliated with terrorist groups and with mister Khalil, the message is taking the harshest possible measures by targeting
a Green card holder in New York City with no criminal convictions, and it also wants to send a message to protesters that their speech will not be tolerated and it will be punished. They want to silence folks who stand up in support of Palestinians and who stand up
against genocide, and that has already backfired. Frankly, I mean, you've seen Mariyap, the thousands of people who have taken to the streets and solidarity with him and solidarity with the Palestinian people, and also to stand up for rights in this country to speak up.
You know what's incredible, Ramsey, is that when we first reached out to you to talk about Guantanamo, you told me that your last client had just been released from Guantanamo earlier this year, and all of a sudden, you
find yourself now having to talk about Guantanamo again. So you did represent men on Guantanamo as a result of George W. Bush's post nine to eleven quote unquote war on Terror, and back then the Bush administration justified their indefinite detention without due process and the human rights abuses that they endured by arguing that this was quote unquote a new kind of warfare with a new kind of enemy.
And now Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act saying this is a time of war, describing an influx of migrants and immigrants and refugees as quote an invasion. So what part of Trump's actions are unprecedented and what part of them are actually part of a direct lineage to Bush era policies.
The continuity is remarkable, and everything from the visuals on the first plane full of so called War on Terror prisoners landed there. The US government had photographers there. There are these notorious, infamous pictures of Muslim, black and brown men on their knees shackled. You know, their eyes are covered and they're being photographed because the point was to message to the outside world that the United States was responding to nine to eleven in the harshest possible way.
And so it's the same now with the Venezuelan migrants. There were photographers on the tarmac as the men in jumpsuits and shackles were being taken aboard a plane that was going to fly them to Guantanamo. It's really just about the politics, the messaging, and the authority that they
are invoking. It's very similar to what they did after nine to eleven, when they claimed on all sorts of novel grounds, that they had the authority to incarcerate anyone, including a US citizen, as an enemy combatant quote unquote, without having to charge them without having to try them and without even having to abide by the Geneva Conventions.
What happened with El Salvador, right, is that the deportee planes tool Salvador were already in the air when a judge ordered that they return. The judge had issued a verbal order in time to stop those deportations, but the Trump administration did not comply with that order. So Ramsey, what is your level of alarm about a president defying the American court system and how much in danger are our checks and balances in terms of what upholds our democracy?
You know, I think that is certainly troubling that the administration was under an order not to do something, not to fly these mental Salvador, and that it did it anyway. Now, one might say we are not yet in the worst possible place, in the sense that the Trump administration's position is not that it openly defied a court order or disregarded it's making arguments about why the right people were not aware of the judge's order at the right time.
They're making those sorts of excuses, And I only highlight that not to excuse it, but just to distinguish it from where we might be headed, which is a place where the US government will just ignore or openly disregard a court order and say that it's doing that. And these are all steps towards sort of the open defiance
and disregard of judicial authority that I'm talking about. They're all flirtations with, but we might be headed towards, and so it's very important to take note of what's happening and to push back.
Professor Ramsey Kassum, thank you so much for taking the time out of your really busy schedule to speak to us here at let you Know USA.
We appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Maria for your work and for this opportunity.
Don't miss the rest of my conversation with Professor Ramsey Kassum dropping on Sunday, we go deeper into Mahmu Khalil's case and what it signals about the right to free speech and do process in the United States for.
All of us.
Our episode was produced by Ariel Goodman and edited by Andrea Lopez Gruzzado, mixing and scoring by Stephanie Lebou and JJ Carubin. The Ladiro USA team also includes Roxanna Guire, Julia Caruso, Felicia Romguez, Fernando Chavari, Jessica Elis, Victoria Strada, Dominiquinestrosa, Renando Lanos Junior, Luis Luna Marta Martinez, Monica Moreles Garcia, Rasha Sandoval, Lur Saudi and Nancy Trujillo, Penilee, ramidez Wal and Bishop Maria Garcia and myself are co executive producers
and I'm your host, Marie la Posa. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, I'll see you on social media. Asta la proxima note bajas chao.
Latino USA is made possible in part by the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide, and funding for Latino usas. Coverage of a Culture of Health is made possible in part by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation