Trump fakes a “war” to send Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s brutal “mega-prison”

Trump also defies a restraining order by a federal court judge, and pretends that these men are gang members, based solely on their tattoos.

On my website, my new article, Horror As Trump Invokes the Alien Enemies Act, Defies a Judge and Sends Innocent Venezuelans to El Salvador’s “Mega-Prison”, is my detailed report about the latest horrors in the "war on migrants" declared by Donald Trump when he took office two months ago.

This latest horror — after his early enthusiasm for using Guantánamo — involves his inappropriate invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants. This also involved him flagrantly ignoring a temporary restraining order issued by a federal court judge preventing the use of the Act, and immediately sending 238 Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador, along with 23 alleged Salvadorian gang members, to be imprisoned in the notorious CECOT "mega-prison", established by El Salvador’s hardline President Nayib Bukele.

This unconscionable off-shoring of migrants to a reviled prison in another country — for which the Trump administration has reportedly paid President Bukele $6 million — took place, as with Trump’s recent use of Guantánamo to hold migrants, without any evidence having been provided to back up the administration’s assertions that these men were members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang.

Instead, stories are emerging, as they did at Guantánamo, that they were nothing more than men who had sought to get to the US to secure work, and that the entire basis of their alleged gang membership is a result of sweeping and imprecise assessments of the significance of their tattoos.

While the Trump administration has, to date, sought to justify its actions by applying them to undocumented migrants with “final removal” orders, Drop Site News discovered that one of the men sent to El Salvador, a professional footballer who fled persecution in Venezuela for taking part in protests, was flown out of the US while he still had a credible asylum appeal pending — an additional outrage to add to the tsunami of outrage that Trump’s “war on migrants” has already provoked amongst those of us who see, chillingly, the slippery slope we are on if judges’ orders are no longer obeyed, and if Trump gets away with expanding the arbitrariness of the “war on terror” to every migrant in the US.

I hope you have time to read my article, which is a follow-up to an article I posted yesterday on the Close Guantánamo website, Despite the Farcical Collapse of His Guantánamo Migrant Plan, Trump Sends More Venezuelans to the Notorious “War on Terror” Prison, a detailed overview of the last seven weeks of lawless misery for migrants at Guantánamo, where migrant flights resumed just two days ago.

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