Trump & Bukele Plot US Citizen Detention In Salvadoran Torture Camps, While Defying Supreme Court Via Gibberish Responses To Reporters

Legal Issues

from the dark-fucking-days dept

In a stunning White House appearance that should alarm anyone who cares about constitutional rights, democracy, the rule of law or anything of the sort, Donald Trump and Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele openly defied a Supreme Court order while discussing plans to expand El Salvador’s notorious detention system to imprison US citizens without due process. The meeting, which came just days after Trump admitted the US could retrieve Abrego Garcia from unlawful detention in El Salvador, devolved into the two leaders joking about imprisoning anyone while promoting a chilling vision of “liberation through incarceration.”

We had just posted our last article about how Donald Trump has admitted he could order Abrego Garcia returned to the US (as the Supreme Court has directly instructed the Trump admin to do) before meeting with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele. We wondered if reporters would ask both Bukele and Trump about this, and they did. The answers are beyond stupid.

When a reporter asked Trump about his earlier comments saying that if the Supreme Court said to return Garcia to the US then the US government should follow through and have Garcia returned, Trump scolded the reporter:

Why don’t you just say, ‘isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country?’ Why can’t you just say that? Why do yo go over and over and that’s why nobody watches you anymore. You know you have no credibility.

Literally, all the reporter did was ask him about his on-the-record comments from three days ago.

As for the specific question about returning Garcia, Trump passed the question (after also mocking the news station the reporter worked for) to Attorney General Pam Bondi who was there:

Bondi responded with a series of false claims about both Garcia and what the Supreme Court actually ordered. Let’s break down each lie.

First, Bondi claimed:

First, and foremost, he was illegally in our country. He had been illegally in our country. And in 2019 two courts, an immigration court and an appellate immigration court ruled that he was a member of MS-13 and he was illegally in our country. Right now, it was a paperwork… it was additional paperwork had needed to be done.

This is demonstrably false. As the Fourth Circuit noted with regards to Garcia, not only has the government presented no evidence that Garcia is a member of MS-13, but they actually abandoned this claim in court.

Finally, I turn to the Government’s assertion that the public interest favors a stay because Abrego Garicia is a “prominent” member of MS-13 and is therefore “no longer eligible for withholding relief.” …. Whatever the merits of the 2019 determination of the Immigration Judge (“IJ”) regarding Abrego Garcia’s connection to MS-13, the Government presented “[n]o evidence” to the district court to “connect[] Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or any other criminal organization.” … Indeed, such a fact cannot be gleaned from this record, which shows that Abrego Garcia has no criminal history, in this country or anywhere else, and that Abrego Garcia is a gainfully employed family man who lives a law abiding and productive life. Tellingly, the Government “abandon[ed]” its position that Abrego Garcia was “a danger to the community” at the hearing before the district court. … The balance of equities must tip in the movant’s favor based on the record before the issuing court. An unsupported — and then abandoned — assertion that Abrego Garcia was a member of a gang, does not tip the scales in favor of removal in violation of this Administration’s own withholding order

The Fourth Circuit further noted:

Even then, the Government’s “evidence” of any connection between Abrego Garcia and MS-13 was thin, to say the least. The Government’s claim was based on (1) Abrego Garcia “wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie,” and (2) “a vague, uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York—a place he has never lived.”

But Bondi wasn’t done with the lies. She also claimed:

That’s up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us. The Supreme Court ruled, President, that if El Salvador wants to return… this is international matters, foreign affairs… if they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning: provide a plane.

That’s false. As we noted earlier today, the Supreme Court’s ruling directly says that the administration should “facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.” For Bondi to claim this means that if El Salvador “wants” to send him back they can send a plane is simply untrue.

A reporter then asked Bukele the same question, leading to an even dumber response:

Bukele: Are you suggesting I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right? How can I smuggle… how can I return him to the United States? Like… I smuggle him into the United States, what would you do? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.

Reporter: But you could release him in El Salvador?

Bukele: Yeah, but I’m not going to release him. I mean I’m not very fond of releasing terrorists in our country. I mean we just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western hemisphere and you want us to go back, releasing criminals, so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world? No. [Laughs] That’s not going to happen.

Trump: [points to reporters] Well, they would love to have criminals released into our country. They would love it. They’re sick. [Points to reporters again] These are sick people.

Again, all of this is nonsense. Garcia is not a terrorist or a criminal. Again, the Fourth Circuit ruling made that clear. Second, there’s no “smuggling” involved. Literally seconds before this exchange, Bondi claimed (incorrectly as a matter of law) that the only thing the Supreme Court ordered them to do was to send a plane if Bukele agreed to release Garcia. So, literally the whole repetitive thing about “smuggling a terrorist into the US” is wrong on both key points: it’s not a terrorist and it wouldn’t be smuggling.

Bukele’s tangent about the “murder capital of the world” is also nonsense. Again, no one has said that Garcia has murdered anyone. Or that he’s violent. Or a criminal. Indeed, the US government had admitted that he’s lived a non-violent, non-criminal life in the US for many years.

All of this is framing basic due process rights as a threat to public safety, a rhetorical trick that autocrats have used throughout history to justify extrajudicial detention. No one should be falling for it here.

As for Trump saying the US media would love it if criminals were released into the US, I should remind you that the person who did the biggest mass release of criminals into the US was Donald Trump when he pardoned all of the convicted January 6th Capitol insurrectionists.

So, let’s be clear about this, because what happened in the White House today is absolute bullshit. The Supreme Court ordered the US government to see what could be done about getting Garcia back, acknowledging (as the US government had originally done, though they’re now trying to retcon in something else) that the government was forbidden by law from sending Garcia to El Salvador.

The US government has a contract with El Salvador that explicitly calls out that the US gets the “decision” on those prisoners’ “disposition.” Thus, the US can easily tell El Salvador to send Garcia back. Bukele’s false claims about “smuggling a terrorist” into the US are unrelated to the issue at hand. Both of them are lying in pursuit of building modern concentration and torture camps.

But the most chilling revelations came from an unguarded moment before the official White House stream began. In footage captured by Bukele’s team, Trump can be heard urging the construction of five more CECOT-style camps, specifically mentioning his desire to send “homegrown” — meaning US citizens — to these facilities:

When reporters later pressed him on this point, Trump didn’t back down. Instead, he openly endorsed the idea of sending US citizens to Salvadoran torture hellholes:

Trump’s sudden concern about “criminals that rape women” rings particularly hollow coming from someone who famously boasted about sexually assaulting women and who was found liable for sexual assault. But the exchange got even more chilling when Bukele introduced his Orwellian concept of “liberation through imprisonment,” which had Trump practically giddy with excitement.

Bukele: Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands. I like to say that we liberated millions.

Trump [leaning in and looking excited]: That’s very good!

[Everyone laughs]

Trump: Who gave him that line? You think I can use it? [Laughs]

Bukele: In fact, Mr. President, you have 350 million to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. [shrugs] That’s just the way it works.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what we witnessed today: A foreign dictator stood in the White House and openly suggested that the path to “liberating” 350 million Americans requires imprisoning those deemed problematic — with the obvious implication (given how things have gone so far) being that this should happen without charges, without trials, without due process. And the President of the United States not only agreed, but was enthusiastic about adopting this framework of authoritarian repression.

If you don’t see all of this as one of the darkest days in American history, in which the President is openly embracing disappearing people without due process in the name of “liberty,” you are a part of the problem. Fascism has risen in America, and it is being aided by a foreign dictator whom Trump admires.

Filed Under: abrego garcia, concentration camps, donald trump, due process, el salvador, nayib bukele, supreme court, torture