Be aware though - as soon as anyone ends up in El Salvador (or wherever), it apparently doesn't matter if any "accidents" were had. What's done, is done.
This is incredibly convenient if you want to trim the opposition a little.
That's evil and stupid.
By that twisted logic, the President can ship all the gold in Fort Knox to a Russian bank under his own name, and US courts "won't have jurisdiction" to rule that it must be returned.
Sooner or later it's going to happen to someone who's a full US national.
(mind you this is going to get flagged off by Trump supporters and politics avoiders)
/s, but I became less sure of it as I typed.
("Make China great again" already occurred, in the 1960s.)
But a Rex Talionis is an interesting concept too.
This is also about more than just this single case. From the little we know so far it seems that being from Venezuela and having any kind of tattoo is sufficient to be targeted.
Trump is still very very far away from that.
Assuming this man is innocent, we should rather blame El Salvador for actually imprisoning him.
This should be a un-ignorable reminder of the value of due process. Better a guilty person go free than an innocent person sent to their long, slow, undignified death.
90 points | 6 hours ago | 24 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43542333
> An executive order that Mr. Trump signed the day after taking office instructs federal contractors not to engage in D.E.I., which the order described as “illegal discrimination.” The letter to French businesses said the order “applies to all suppliers and contractors of the U.S. government, regardless of their nationality and the country in which they operate.”
[0] https://apnews.com/article/french-companies-dei-letter-us-tr...
> Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted to mistakenly sending Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT prison.
:O
If you haven't heard of CECOT, go watch one of the recent YouTube videos on it. I'm glad that El Salvador has taken control over gang activity but, man, CECOT is one of the last places on earth you want to end up.
Why would you assume this? We're also under investigation for human rights abuses in our prisons. AFAIK most of the rights you have as a prisoner are civil rights.
https://www.roadpeace.org/working-for-change/crash-not-accid...
> It’s a crash, not an accident. End the language of denial.
> I can’t help but get upset when people call a crash an accident. I lost my leg in a crash with a lorry. It was preventable – and even though the driver didn’t intend for the crash to happen, it was still his fault
People claim that Obama "couldn't" close it, but I think DOGE have demonstrated with USAID that the President absolutely could have closed it by executive order and simply cutting off the pay of everyone there.
Due process exists for precisely this reason, and Trump and his band of sycophants intentionally bypassed due process as a "show of strength". An example. A wilful accident.
There were already processes in place so that exactly this kind of accident does not occur.
You're assuming the system would have been as compliant with Obama as they are with Trump, but I doubt that would have been the case. Congress passed a law to make it illegal for Obama to close Gitmo and simply refused to allow it, but their hands are mysteriously tied WRT Trump and DOGE.
Second, Obama did not had supreme court saying "president is above the law and can break it" nor would right wing supreme court justices voted for it. Trump has that ruling, because his politics matches the one of the right wing supreme court justices.
Third, Obama had actual opposition. Conservatives and republicans were opposing EVERYTHIGN he was doing. And had power to do so. Including when he adopted their own ideas. They even threw massive fit about suit of a wrong color. Right now, republicans have all the power including , majority in supreme court, so there are not checks or balances.
No! Trump bypassed due process intentionally and quickly (and illegally) so that the courts, which ruled it illegal, couldn't pass the ruling in time to stop the flights.
We should blame Trump and all of the chain of command beneath him that took part in it.
I agree with you.
Now explain how can we scale the due process to deport everyone that entered here illegally in a reasonable timeframe. 15-30 million hearings will take a century to be resolved.
The system is not designed for such massive load in mind.
There's a possibility he's dead already, and so the current administration or El Salvador or both are stalling for time long enough that the media cycle moves on to something else.
If you get flagged, it might just be because you're violating the HN guidelines with the part of your comment I replied to.
> sent a Salvadorian immigrant to a notorious Salvadorian prison
>the man had protected immigration status in the U.S., specifically barring him from being sent back to that country for fear of persecution.
Once again I agree with you. Let's deport them first and make remote immigration courts in every US embassy. This way they have remedy for false positives, and let law/justice take as long as law/justice takes
What level of false positives are you willing to tolerate - US nationals wrongly deported?
How many fatalities (including suicides) are you willing to tolerate in this process?
(fairly easy to imagine hypothetical situation: lawful US national gun owner with Hispanic name is shopped to immigration by his neighbours. ICE come to his house in the middle of the night to deprive him of his rights. Is he (a) legally (b) morally entitled to open fire on them? If not, what do all the 2nd amendment tyranny resistors mean? If so, isn't this going to be a huge mess?)
Canary Mission: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/rumeysa-ozturk-tufts...
Betar US: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/25/what-is-betar-us-th...
It's a low bar, just so long as you're informing on a group that's not in lock-step with Trump's agenda.
(edit: at the moment the only possible document would be a US passport, because a driving license doesn't prove nationality, so the 50% of Americans who don't have passports are SOL)
And being forcibly removed from the US is exactly the sort of power that due process is intended to limit, by Constitutional design for all people in the US (not just citizens).
Given how these "arrests" seem to be done by plainclothes individuals who don't identify themselves?
Yes. Legally (depending on state) yes, and morally always.
(Arrests in quotations because anyone arrested has rights, something that seems to be skipped over here)
What paperwork do you have that confirms you are a citizen right now? Especially since birthright citizenship is now being thrown out the window.
This is a scale thing though right? You'll have some false convictions if you want a justice system. Nothing is perfect, breakage inevitable.
Nobody wants to be the victim of a miscarriage of justice themselves, but everyone wants crime to be dealt with effectively. The trade offs are real and I suspect the average person has an acceptable non-zero rate in the back of their mind
Such that wilfully bypassing parts of it to support a political agenda is nothing less than dictatorial.
A Nazi isn’t already a murderer but someone who sees himself as a superior race and others as Untermensch.
Many Nazis didn’t kill anyone but were ok with it.
I mean, he's running a slave prison for human trafficking victims charged with no crime and given no process, surrounded by such pathetic theatre it is banana republic levels of farce, so ultimately he should be captured by the ICC, and it will likely end up there.
What the government means is that they don't want to get him back.
The one place this has been debased and eroded has been NatSec, and that's part of why the government wants to use that justification for its immigration enforcement.
If the idea is that we are deporting people that are here illegally, it shouldn't be controversial to require some degree of evidence and a brief examination of that evidence by someone not immediately connected to gathering it, and some kind of oversight structure.
Camp X-Ray was specifically designed to be nobody's jurisdiction. They have nothing.
That is utterly shameful. It brings back reminders of our slave-owning past, where human beings were deprived even of the ownership of their own bodies.
Societies that do believe in this do not have capital punishment. It seems to me from the outside that US have different priorities. Like with school-shootings - apparently that is worth it there.
Perhaps this is an assumption you are making which is not true.
Behaving decently would actually help the objective of sending a lot of illegals home. People then might say ok to that, but this way there'll be a lot of resistance to the process.
It's the same reason why white supremacy is still relevant despite the color of skin being less important: it still ties into the impressive rhetorical power of colorism and the implicit introduction of "others" that allows the oppression of the general population for not being "civilized" enough, as if the word had any meaning to a person whose brain hadn't been turned to porridge by interaction with finance bros.
I mean, Thomas Jefferson said it was self-evident that every man was created equal and had the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, yet he kept people as property in slavery. That just about sums up American theory vs practice. Same with the legal system: plenty of innocent people have been executed despite it being pretty clear they were innocent, simply because the legal system didn't allow the case to be reopened to handle the new evidence.
And if you care to read court fillings the proof of the man being gang member is:
- Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie.
- A confidential informant claimed he was an active member of MS-13 with the "Westerns" clique (which operates in New York, where Garcia never lived).
> Abrego Garcia’s family has had no contact with him since he was sent to the megaprison in El Salvador, known as the CECOT. His wife spotted her husband in news photographs released by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on the morning of March 16, after a U.S. District Judge had told the Trump administration to halt the flights. “Oopsie,” Bukele wrote on social media, taunting the judge.
The man is nothing more than a tyrant with a smile, and now his concentration camp will be used to house whoever pays him or gets in his way, not just alleged gang members. He's already in power unconstitutionally: https://apnews.com/article/el-salvador-elections-bukele-demo...
Now it may take decades for Salvadorans to rid themselves of this dictatorship.
One reason is that things like this happen, where every time is a chance for someone to be hurt, killed, or deported in a country where it is not uncommon for officers to beat or shoot people for perceived non-compliance:
> “I was born in Chicago, Illinois, and am a United States citizen,” Noriega said in his statement, adding that on Jan. 31, after buying pizza in Berwyn he was surrounded by ICE agents and arrested. Officers took away his wallet, which had his ID and Social Security card. “They then handcuffed me and pushed me into a white van where other people were handcuffed as well.”
https://chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/2025/03/14/us-citiz...
> Jensy Machado, who says he voted for President Donald Trump, told Telemundo 44 that on March 5, ICE agents blocked in his pickup truck not far from his Manassas home as he headed to work with two other men. He said the agents initially refused to let him show his REAL ID-compliant Virginia driver’s license, proof of his lawful status in the U.S.
> “They didn’t ask me for any ID,” he said. “I was telling the officer if I can give an ID, but he said to just keep my hands up and not moving. And then after that, he told me to get out of the car and then he put the handcuffs on me. And then he went to me and said how did I get into this country and if I was waiting for court or do I have any case? And I told him I was an American citizen, and he looked at his other partner, like, you know, smiling, like saying, ‘Can you believe this guy?’ Because he asked the other guy, ‘Do you believe him?’”
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/president-trump-politics/...
Ironically, from the Declaration of Independence:
> Grievance 18: "For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Jury trial:"
> Grievance 19: "For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses:"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievances_of_the_United_State...
Also, given January 6:
> Grievance 27: "He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us […]
What's that you say? You have not committed a crime? Unfortunately, our records indicate that you have. Bummer! :\
You're an American Citizen? Why, that changes things! Hard to tell lookin at ya ;). But unfortunately we don't have the time or resources to make a positive determination about that now, so you'll have to wait in Venezuela for as long as it takes while the law/justice sorts this out.
Yes, I understand you claim you've done nothing wrong, but you've got to understand, people voted to get rid of "people like you", and that's the president's mandate. So in the end it may turn out that you're innocent, but for the next 4 years please enjoy this Venezuelan gulag. It's your patriotic duty.
At least with Abu Ghraib the message from leadership was that it was rogue individuals doing bad things. Whether this was actually true is another question, but at least the Bush admin felt it was important to say "this behavior is wrong." Now we've got messaging from the administration saying "look at how much pain we can inflict."
"We don't have the resources to give that many people their full legal rights" should not be followed by "so we will deny them their rights." The government could massively expand the number of immigration courts or otherwise massively increase resourcing that goes into processing these cases. Otherwise they can get fucked. Legal rights make the job of law enforcement more difficult. That's a good thing.
No, I don't think supporting "eventual" emancipation is good enough if you don't do anything to actually bring it about.
What a ridiculous reason in hindsight, huh? "Yes, the inevitable reconciliation of our gross injustices against fellow man will be fixed one day. But not now, because I like the comfort of the status quo and would prefer white people not die for a principled cause."
To say nothing of his own slaves, this fickleness of leadership is not what American politics should aspire to.