Chicago (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Trump kidnapped hundreds of Venezuelan men on March 15, spiriting them away to a black site hellhole outside the reach of due process, habeas corpus, and American justice. Accusing the victims, without evidence, of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang and invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, ICE forced the men onto three airplanes, flew them to El Salvador, and dumped them into CECOT prison — the harshest prison on earth. Ghostly denizens on the outer edge of US jurisprudence, these Venezuelan men languish in nightmarish conditions with little hope of ever getting out.
The legal rationale for this brutal action — the Alien Enemies Act — allows Trump’s grisly deportation machine to defy the constitution, judicial processes and the immigration courts. The Trump regime alleged that the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang invaded the United States. On its face, this is ridiculous. The Trump Justice Department has shown no evidence to prove that the gang constitutes the advanced guard of a Venezuelan invasion force. Further, the Trump administration has not shown evidence that the men are even members of Tren de Aragua or that any have committed crimes in the US. The ACLU sued to block the use of this act.
Within hours US district judge James Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order. When Boasberg was informed that several planeloads of Venezuelan men were already being deported to El Salvador, he ordered a halt to the flights. He further demanded that any planes, which had already left, must return to the US. ICE ignored the orders. The aircraft landed in El Salvador.
Evidencing lots of preplanning, a slickly produced propaganda video captured, over pulsing music straight out of a drug cartel thriller, the dramatic nighttime arrival of the deportees at a Salvadoran airport. With hooded guards grabbing their hair and the backs of their necks, the men are paraded past a small army of soldiers in helmets and body armor. The prisoners — bent double and chained — are dragged to the CECOT prison. Their heads are forcibly shaved. After dressing them in flimsy white prison garb, they are dumped into overcrowded cell blocks where they will be subjected to degrading treatment, hard labor, and torture.
The response from the MAGA horde to this Triumph of the Will-style display of authoritarian theater was sheer joy. “This is exactly what I voted for!” wrote the Libs of TikTok, the handle for various far-right and anti-LGBTQ social-media accounts. Finding his promised mass deportations difficult to do quickly, Trump wanted a sensational propaganda spectacle, a climactic humiliation ritual in front of TV cameras, a public sacrifice on the MAGA altar.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem even starred in her own appalling propaganda video, using the CECOT inmates as involuntary extras. Standing in front of a huge cell stacked vertically with shirtless prisoners in a towering undifferentiated mass, Noem — flaunting her MAGA make-over of redesigned dentures, hair extensions, and facial reconfiguration — promised to send more migrants to hopeless, anonymous internment. Posting the video on X, she said, “If you do not leave, we will hunt you down, arrest you, and you could end up in this El Salvadorian prison.”
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TOPSHOT – US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem speaks during a tour of the Terrorist Confinement Center (CECOT) as prisoners stand, looking out from a cell, in Tecoluca, El Salvador, on March 26, 2025. (Photo by Alex Brandon / POOL / AFP) (Photo by ALEX BRANDON/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
“Her visit to the prison was a typical gross and cruel display of political theater that we have come to expect from the Trump administration,” said Vicki Gass, executive director of the Latin America Working Group, a human rights organization. “That the Trump administration is flouting judicial orders and denying due process to people within the US borders is outrageous and frightening.”
In response to Judge Boasberg’s order to stop the flights, El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele — self-proclaimed as “the world’s coolest dictator” — posted on social media: “Oopsie . . . too late” with a laughing emoji. He announced that the deportees would face at least one year of hard labor. This is literal enslavement.
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SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR – JANUARY 14: President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele delivers a speech during the first press conference of the year at Casa Presidencial on January 14, 2025 in San Salvador, El Salvador. (Photo by Alex Peña/Getty Images)
Elon Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted Bukele’s sarcastic comment. The national security advisor Mike Waltz responded to Bukele’s message with a clip of Denzel Washington declaring, “Boom!” This is what passes for judicial respect in the Trump administration of monsters.
Bukele’s despotism provided a framework for Trump. In 2022, El Salvador’s National Assembly declared a “state of exception” that allows police to arrest anyone they deem suspicious and imprison them without due process. This foreshadowed Trump’s invocation of obscure legal codes, like the Alien Enemies Act, to grant himself sweeping powers to arrest, jail, and deport any immigrants he wants. When Bukele replaced key Supreme Court magistrates with groveling loyalists who would allow him to run for an unconstitutional second term as president, it presaged Trump’s defiance of the judiciary, his disregard for democracy, and his own musings about running for a third term.
To the MAGA cult, Bukele is an aspirational figure. Having given him a standing ovation at the ultra-right CPAC event last year, many hunger to execute his authoritarian “state of exception” transformation of El Salvador in the US. In fact, in many ways, Bukele’s El Salvador is already here.
Using police state tactics, Trump has targeted and kidnapped a growing number of college students for opposing genocide. On a near-daily basis, there has been an escalation of the assault on academics involved in protesting Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, or simply expressing views deemed to put them on the “wrong” side of the Trump-Netanyahu axis.
For almost four weeks, Mahmoud Khalil — a green-card holder with permanent US residency — has been held without charges for participating in “pro-Hamas protests” while he was a student at Columbia University. Though he has not been charged with any crime, the administration argued that he must be deported to prevent “the spread of antisemitism” — a blatantly exaggerated charge that equates being pro-Palestinian with being antisemitic. In Khalil’s only public statement, he described the Louisiana detention center where he was being held as a place where prisoners are “precluded from the protections of the law.”
A Turkish-born VISA holder Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the streets outside her Somerville, Massachusetts, home by masked ICE agents. She was sent to the Louisiana detention center despite a court order that Ozturk not be moved outside Massachusetts. In a horrifying video taken from a surveillance camera, six masked abductors suddenly ambushed and encircled Ozturk. Shrieking in fear, the Tufts University student is grabbed by her wrists, handcuffed, and hustled into a unmarked van. Apparently, she wrote an article opposing war crimes in Gaza. She is accused of being a threat to US foreign policy.
At the University of Alabama, ICE arrested an Iranian doctoral student Alireza Doroudi and detained him at the Louisiana lockup following allegations that he posed unspecified “national security risks” after his VISA was revoked. Doroudi’s attorney said that his client has not been charged with any crime and that, despite his VISA being revoked, he could legally stay in the country as long as he was in school.
While these repressive and extrajudicial tactics offer a glimpse into Trump’s encroaching totalitarianism — his attempt to stifle public criticism and penalize those who stray from state-approved ideology, the scope of his authoritarian madness is demonstrated by the secret banishment of Venezuelan migrants to the Salvadoran slave prison. It is monstrous both in its intent and its consequences.
This lawless deportation is so antithetical to professed American values, so execrable, that it screams out for a stronger and more enforceable redress than a judge’s orders. But that’s all there is. This ghastly saga has been met with little protest, certainly not among the Democratic and Republican politicians who are supposed to uphold those values.
In fact, Trump and congressional Republicans in Congress have been waging a multi-front attack on the federal judge who tried to stop this state-sanctioned abduction. Ludicrously trashing the judge as a “radical left lunatic,” Trump and his cult called for the judge’s impeachment. They are angry that he audaciously asked the Justice Department for details of the Gestapo-like midnight flights of immigrants to the black hole prison in the jungle.
Instead of focusing on Trump’s dictatorial action and condemning this secret black site expulsion, CNN and MSNBC continued into their sixth day of covering the stupidly named “Signalgate.” Eight pathetic Trump-clowns stumbled into a war-planning text chain. They inadvertently shared classified details with a despised journalist about an upcoming, just-for-show attack on the Houtis in Yemen. He exposed their already well-known, head-exploding incompetence. In their own words, they also reveal their juvenile and racist mind-set when it comes to bombing Yemeni civilians.
While everyone’s eye was on the war-chat story, the DOJ claimed a “state secrets privilege” to deny the judge’s request for details on migrants sent to CECOT, setting up another milestone in its attack on the Constitution. ICE literally disappeared the men on their website – an online detainee locator. The details of this fascistic scheme have been shrouded in such secrecy that the families of these men, who have vanished into the void, are reduced to scouring blurry stills from news footage to see if they can recognize birthmarks, tattoos, or other identifying characteristics.
In a disturbing case, a woman spotted her missing husband — a father with protected legal status — in news photographs. The Trump autocracy acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had mistakenly deported him to El Salvador. The man, Kilmer Armado Abrego-Garcia, is a Salvadoran national who resided with his wife and their five-year-old child in Maryland. ICE blamed an “administrative error” for his incarceration. But the DOJ said that U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction to order his release from the mega-prison.
ICE attorneys further told the court that Trump’s “primacy in foreign affairs” outweighs the interests of Abrego Garcia and his family. “They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg Abrego, Garcia’s attorney said. “If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless — all of them — because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”
So far this is the most egregious case of error that has come to light and so far the only time the Trump regime has admitted to mistakes when it sent three planeloads of deportees to El Salvador’s “Terrorism Confinement Center.” Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the DOJ falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos.
Another victim of the deportations, Jerce Reyes Barrios is a professional soccer player who had fled Venezuela after protesting against dictator Nicolás Maduro and was living peacefully in the US until the government snatched him up and deported him to El Salvador. ICE’s accusations were based on his tattoo of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball that, they alleged, “is proof of gang membership.” In reality, the tattoo was inspired by the Madrid soccer team logo, which is also circular in shape and features a crown.
“Masked,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / ChatGPT, 2025
Neri Alvarado Borges was detained by ICE outside his apartment in early February and later sent to CECOT. An ICE agent told him, “We’re finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.” His 15-year old brother has autism and his tattoo is an autism awareness ribbon with his brother’s name on it. Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay make-up artist and hairdresser, was also exiled to CECOT because ICE claimed his “crown” tattoos proved he was a gang member. Actually, his traditional tattoos memorialize the carnival-like Three Kings Day commemorations celebrated in his Venezuelan hometown.
The implausible misinterpretation of benign tattoos is a common theme across migrants caught up in Trump’s unlawful scheme. The government’s theory appears to be that any Venezuelan migrant with tattoos is presumptively a member of Tren de Aragua until proven otherwise — except that they cannot prove otherwise since they have been denied due process.
The White House has yet to provide evidence that the hundreds of Venezuelans flown to El Salvador — without an opportunity to challenge their labeling as Tren de Aragua “terrorists”— had actual ties to the gang. When pressed on the criteria used for their identification, Press Secretary prevaricator Karoline Leavitt pointed to unspecified “intelligence” deployed to arrest the Venezuelans she called “heinous monsters.” She suggested the public should trust ICE.
In a Federal Appeals Court, the DOJ made arguments that amount to a legal claim of Trump’s dictatorial power. It informed the court that the president has authority to declare any non-citizens to be “alien enemies” and to deport them to a foreign prison — without notice, a hearing, or any meaningful opportunity to prove their innocence. In a District Court hearing, the DOJ refused to provide Judge Boasberg with details of these mass deportation operations, insisting that Boasberg‘s authority must yield to the “mandate of the electorate.” In other words, Trump’s electoral victory grants him an absolute right to conduct these deportations, rendering them unreviewable by the judiciary.
Last Friday, by a 2-1 vote, a panel of appellate judges left in place Boasberg’s order temporarily prohibiting deportations of the migrants under the Alien Enemies Act. Circuit Court Judge Patricia Millett said that Nazis detained in the US during World World II received better legal treatment than Venezuelan immigrants who were deported to El Salvador under the same statute. While the order halts further deportations for now, it does nothing for the 238 migrants that are already in the prison. The order did not demand their return.
Trump will take the case to the Supreme Court in the hope that it will normalize the use of the Alien Enemies Act such that this test run persecution can be expanded into a full-blown suspension of all immigrants’ constitutional rights.
Whether or not the Supreme Court blesses the use of extra-constitutional powers, the MAGA crusaders won’t stop with immigrants and pro-Palestine protestors. They are coming for the academics; they are coming for the lawyers; they are coming for the judges; they are coming for transgender Americans; they are coming for public-sector workers; they are coming for racial justice and women’s rights advocates. They are causing devastation in their wake and they must be stopped. Tuesday night’s defeat of Trump/Musk oligarchy in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race provided a needed jolt of energy. The demonstrations on April 5 must be the start of mass resistance.
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