The Kafkaesque basis of Trump’s “war on migrants”

An overview and some important updates to the legal challenges to Trump’s decision to send 238 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison three months ago.

A photo from the CECOT prison in February 2023, shortly after it opened, proudly publicized by President Bukele’s media office.

In my new article on my website, The Alarming Kafkaesque Basis of Trump’s “War on Migrants”, which I hope you have time to read, I provide a detailed update on the legal challenges to the Trump administration’s decision, three months ago, to invoke the little-used Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to send 238 Venezuelans on a one-way trip to El Salvador’s CECOT prison for alleged terrorists.

I look at a recent ruling by Judge James Boasberg, the Chief Judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C., in which, after comparing the treatment of these men to the lawless ordeal endured by K., the lead character in Franz Kafka’s novel "The Trial", he ordered the administration to arrange for the men to have habeas corpus hearings.

Judge Boasberg did so because of the failure of the administration to demonstrate that they had made any efforts to establish whether, as they alleged, these men were members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang, noting that "significant evidence has come to light indicating that many of those currently entombed in CECOT have no connection to the gang and thus languish in a foreign prison on flimsy, even frivolous, accusations."

The administration, predictably, has appealed Judge Boasberg’s ruling, which will now make its way to the D.C. Circuit Court, where, back in April, one appellate judge memorably declared that, the last time the Alien Enemies Act was used (in the Second World War), "Nazis got better treatment than has happened here."

I also look at how Trump’s "war on migrants" — and his use of the CECOT prison — has been influenced by the "war on terror", the prison established at Guantánamo by George W. Bush, and the CIA’s "black site" torture program, and I also examine the well-chronicled lack of evidence against these Venezuelan men, the troubling manner in which many of them were sent to El Salvador even though they had ongoing immigration appeals, and the recent revelation that some of them also had Temporary Protected Status.

Introduced under Joe Biden, Temporary Protected Status applied to hundreds of thousands of migrants, but it has also been under fire from Trump, and in two recent cases the Supreme Court, alarmingly, complied with his requests to strip these and other protections from nearly 900,000 migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti and Nicaragua, which could lead to another tsunami of detentions and deportations.

My interview about the 40th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield

In a recent audio interview with Tony Gosling in Bristol, posted below via YouTube, I discussed the 40th anniversary of the Battle of the Beanfield (on June 1), the most violent peacetime assault on civilians by the British state in modern history, when a convoy of travellers, en route to Stonehenge to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival, was "decommissioned" with astonishing brutality by 1,400 police.

I discussed the events of the day, drew comparisons with the Miners' Strike of the year before, and marvelled at how a military exclusion was erected around Stonehenge every summer solstice for the next 15 years.

I also discussed how draconian laws introduced after the Beanfield fed into further draconian laws in the decades that followed, each time critically eroding the rights of Gypsies and travellers, and the rights of everyone to gather freely and to protest, because, once introduced, draconian laws are rarely, if ever repealed.

Tony and I also discussed how the neoliberal cost of living crisis is, ironically, creating a new wave of priced-out individuals, who are finding new ways of living off-grid and outside the system.

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