“How can I return him to the United States? I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous,” Bukele said. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States. We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.”
"To liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. That’s the way it works,” Bukele told Trump. Abrego Garcia has not been charged with terrorism.
Archived at https://archive.is/w3Vyt
Trump then turned to Bukele and said of the assembled reporters: “They’d love to have a criminal released into our country. These are sick people.”
Garcia has never been convicted of criminal charges in the US or El Salvador. It’s hard to overstate what a big fucking problem this is. Due process is dead, you’re a criminal because we say so.
Did any of the “reporters” there challenge them on this essential point?
Not that I know of, likely because they don’t want to be kicked out. The white house kicked out the AP a while back for asking a question about climate change or some shit. This would get them removed and sued, no doubt, and our news organizations are either complicit or don’t have the balls/finances to push back.
Courts ruled the AP should be allowed back in.
But the White House just violated that order: https://apnews.com/article/trump-ap-press-freedom-court-gulf-caffd32aa8ec6b04a50b8c5277d7c9cb
Of course they did, because there are no consequences, no accountability.
This part of project 2025 is explicitly labeled “ignore the courts”.
All going according to plan.
This ruling was made by a Trump-appointed district court judge, and two Trump-appointed appellate judges declined to grant a last minute administrative stay.
That goes to show just how much of a loser this AP case is for the Trump administration. Yet the administration ignored the order anyway, and they filed a paper this morning suggesting that the appellate judges merely “forgot” to issue the steady.
Garcia isn’t a green card holder, but he does have legal status. He’s under “withholding removal”, which is kind of asylum lite. He can live and work here, and he made regular checkins to prove he was behaving, but the government is allowed to deport him to anywhere except El Salvador, although until this they hadn’t tried.
Thank you for the correction!
EDIT: sorry, not citizen, but nonetheless a legal green card holder who’s been determined to be here legally.
Also, you can’t, you know, legally deport a US citizen to an El Salvadorian gulag even if they had committed a crime. Trump here is trying to shift the Overton window from a discussion of if they’re a US citizen to if they’ve committed a crime (they haven’t, of course), and it’s fucking disgusting.
At this point, the only criminal I think who deserves to be sent to a deep, dark hole never to return is Mr. 34 Felonies himself.
EDIT: sorry, not citizen, but nonetheless a legal green card holder who’s been determined to be here legally.
I don’t think Garcia was a citizen, he was a green card holder, but Trump is openly discussing sending citizens to El Salvador anyway. Nobody’s going to stop him anyway, so why the fuck not?
Also, in 2019 ICE sought to have him removed but lost their motion argument and ended up with a court order forbidding them from doing so, which ICE never did anything to get lifted. That’s why the Trump administration has had to say they deported Kilmar by mistake, if it was anything other than a mistake (which we all know it was but don’t have smoking gun proof for) that’s intentional violation of a court order, aka the Constitutional crisis all the official people have been trying to pretend isn’t happening.
Miller recently went on TV and directly and openly said it wasn’t a mistake.
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/5248143-stephen-miller-doj-man-mistakenly-deported/
That’s the crime in their eyes.
Not quite. His crime was existing while brown. Let’s not mince words, there’s no time left; we’re in a dictatorship now, and they can now send anyone away for anything. It took a good twenty ish years, but the fascists finally managed to kill due process.
And the kind of defiance our country was built on.
You will fall in line or you will be gulaged. Brown and immigrants first, as a test, and to warm the pot. Maybe you later.