Must-Reads and Some Thoughts on Deportations, Renditions, and Dictatorial Collaborations

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Must-Reads

From Social Security clawbacks that could bankrupt seniors to a message from Mahmoud Khalil, here are some of the most important articles I’ve read this week.

• “I Am a Political Prisoner,” Writes Mahmoud Khalil From ICE Jail by Mahmoud Khalil. “I have always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention.”
• How Three Alleged Tesla Vandals Got Caught by Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox. “Federal law enforcement agencies have turned to a variety of techniques and surveillance capabilities to identify people who have allegedly set fire to Tesla vehicles and property, including automatic license plate readers and social media crawling, according to newly unsealed court records obtained by 404 Media.”
• Setting Ominous Precedent, Court Tells Greenpeace to Pay $660M to Pipeline Firm by Cody Bloomfield. “In awarding damages that punish commonplace speech and advocacy — in addition to validating a collective liability theory of protest — the North Dakota jury has endangered core exercise of First Amendment rights.”
• Hungary Bans LGBTQ Pride Events, Approves Facial Recognition to Track Attendees by Zane McNeill. “Thousands of demonstrators filled the streets of Budapest after Hungarian President Tamas Sulyok approved a law prohibiting LGBTQ Pride events and authorizing the use of facial recognition technology to monitor attendees.”
• Former EPA Employees Warn of Polluted Skies Ahead Under Trump by Mike Ludwig. “Experts and former employees say the Trump administration’s moves to fire key scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and dismantle clean air and water protections will make the United States a “sicker and poorer” place to live while demoralizing the next generation of environmental investigators and public health researchers.”
• Social Security ‘Clawback’ Change Could Bankrupt Seniors by Justin Glawe. “The agency will now revert back to a more punishing policy that some Republican members of Congress previously publicly opposed — a policy that makes seniors bear the costs of the government’s mistakes.”
• It May Not Be Brainwashing, but It’s Not Democracy, Either by Thomas B. Edsall. “These billionaires, Duran argued, ‘are fully in control of Trump’s MAGA party,’ but their ambitions go beyond that. ‘The Republican Party is simply a host organism for the parasite of tech fascism,’ Duran wrote, but ‘it’s not just the Republican Party that’s lost its soul. The tech authoritarians are also moving to co-opt leaders in the Democratic Party.’”
• Trump Admin Considers Ending Division Tasked With Funding HIV/AIDS Prevention by Chris Walker. “A federal official with knowledge of the administration’s thinking said that the plan is ‘not 100 percent going to happen,’ but it’s ‘100 percent being discussed.’”
• Tribal Health Leaders Say Medicaid Cuts Would Decimate Health Programs by Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez. “Indian Country has a unique relationship to Medicaid, because the program helps tribes cover chronic funding shortfalls from the Indian Health Service, the federal agency responsible for providing health care to Native Americans.”
• DOGE's 'AI-First' Strategist is Now the Head of Technology at the Department of Labor by Brian Merchant. “Thomas Shedd, the 28 year-old ex-Tesla engineer and DOGE official installed as the head of the federal government’s Technology Transformation Services, has quietly—and perhaps illegally—become the Chief Information Officer at the Department of Labor, too.”
• Texas is Poised to Make Measles a Nationwide Epidemic, Public Health Experts Say by Stephen Simpson. “With cases continuously rising and the rest of the country’s unvaccinated population at the outbreak’s mercy, Texas must create stricter quarantine requirements, increase the vaccine rate, and improve contact tracing to address this measles epidemic before it becomes a nationwide problem, warn infectious disease experts and officials in other states.”

ICYMI

For this week’s episode of Movement Memos, I spoke with my friend Mariame Kaba about what our book Let This Radicalize You brings to this political moment. We also talked about the fight for reproductive justice, the problem with schadenfreude, and the need to build collective courage. You can find audio, a transcript, and show notes here, or you can listen wherever you get your podcasts.

A lot of people have expressed that they’ve found this episode helpful, and I hope you will, too.

Deportations, Renditions, and Dictatorial Collaborations

There’s a lot to talk about on the immigration front, starting with Friday’s announcement that Trump will revoke the Temporary Protected Status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the U.S. The change will go into effect on April 24. Trump has long expressed that he did not view a parole entry program Biden established in 2022 as legitimate. During his presidential campaign, Trump and his running mate often failed to make any distinction between immigrants without legal status and immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, targeting both with their xenophobic rhetoric. Now, many people who previously enjoyed protected status may be targeted by law enforcement.

I want to talk a bit about what that targeting looks like in practice.

On January 31, Chicago resident Julio Noriego was kidnapped by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He had just purchased a pizza when ICE agents surrounded him, seized his wallet, handcuffed him, and forced him into a white van. Noriego was never questioned about his legal status. After examining his identification, agents realized they had apprehended a U.S. citizen and eventually released him.

Five days earlier, on January 26, 47-year-old Abel Orozco Ortega was similarly seized by ICE when agents came looking for one of his sons—a man twenty years younger than Ortega. Upon realizing they had the wrong man, ICE agents hastily produced an administrative warrant for an arrest that had already occurred. Ortega remains in government custody. According to his lawyer, Ortega currently lacks lawful status in the U.S., but is eligible for a green card.

Ortega’s wife has breast cancer, and his family is struggling to make mortgage payments in his absence. “We’re all human, we deserve to be treated as such,” his son Eduardo, a U.S. citizen, told reporters at a press conference.

Unfortunately, dehumanization is a central strategy of the Trump administration. The administration has repeatedly grounded its deportation efforts in the idea that undocumented people are “criminals,” and therefore deserving of apprehension and deportation. While it notably isn’t true that all undocumented people have committed a crime by seeking refuge in the United States, the administration is relying on the fear and contempt rhetoric about “criminal” immigrants often provokes. After all, people in the U.S. are conditioned to believe that criminals deserve to be punished, and to ignore the torturous conditions that imprisoned people often experience.

This strategy of conjuring threats and “enemies within” can also be seen in the administration’s invocation of the Immigration and Nationality Act to target Mahmoud Khalil and Badar Khan Suri, and in Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to carry out the rendition of Venezuelan immigrants who were sent to a prison in El Salvador. 

The U.S. has reportedly paid the Salvadoran government $6 million to incarcerate 261 Venezuelans at Cecot, Latin America’s largest mega-prison. Cecot is an acronym for Terrorism Confinement Centre in Spanish. The prison was built in order to house people arrested under the country’s state of emergency, which Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele declared in 2022. Since the state of emergency was declared, more than 84,000 people have been arrested in El Salvador.

Upon arriving at Cecot, the kidnapped Venezuelan immigrants received the facility’s usual treatment. After being hustled into the facility with their heads bent low, the men were forced to kneel as guards shaved their heads and demanded their absolute submission.

Overcrowded cells at Cecot hold 80 or more people. Imprisoned people are only allowed to leave their cells for a half hour per day, for group exercises and Bible readings in a central hallway. There is no outside recreation time. No books, games, or letters from home are permitted, and no visits from family or friends are allowed.

Bukele—who has called himself the “world’s coolest dictator”—has said “gang members will spend their entire lives in prison,” while El Salvador’s Justice Minister Gustavo Villatoro has boasted that “none of those who enter Cecot ever leave on foot.”

In February, during a visit from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Bukele offered to incarcerate people criminalized in the U.S. at Cecot. Rubio called the offer “very generous” and expressed enthusiasm.

Trump also praised the idea. “It’s no different than a prison system, except it would be a lot less expensive,” he said. “And it would be a great deterrent—send them to other countries.” Trump, however, admitted the plan might not be legal. “We’ll have to find that out legally. I’m just saying, if we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat.”

By invoking the Alien Enemies Act, and sending undocumented people, rather than U.S. citizens, to Cecot, Trump appears to be test driving the arrangement Bukele proposed in February. The administration claims that 137 of the Venezualens targeted in the operation are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, and therefore pose a serious threat to the United States. 

Even if the administration could prove its claims about the people it shipped to Cecot being affiliated with Tren de Aragua, its actions would still be immoral and illegal. However, there has been no evidence presented to support the claim that the immigrants the administration sent to El Salvador are actually gang members. As The New York Times has reported, some detainees appear to have been selected on the basis of artistic or sports-related tattoos that the government has deemed gang-related. Those individuals include Mariyin Araujo, a 32-year-old former soccer player and coach with two young daughters. The mother of Araujo’s children discovered that he was one of the men imprisoned in El Salvador when she saw a photo of him circulating on social media. In the image, Araujo could be seen sitting on the floor at Cecot prison with his head bowed.

“There was something inside of me that held out hope that it would not be him, but it was him,” she said.

The Alien Enemies Act has never been invoked outside the context of an actual war, and its previous invocation in wartime is nothing that ought to be emulated. (It was last invoked during WWII to justify the detention of people of Japanese descent.) On Monday, federal judge James Boasberg ruled that Trump could not use the act to deport people without due process. The judge specified that if any planes were already in the air, they needed to turn around. That order was not respected. Records show that two planes that were already in flight proceeded to El Salvador, while one that had not yet taken off also made its way to the country in spite of the judge’s order.

Government lawyers offered technical explanations for the administration’s defiance, saying the judge’s verbal order wasn’t in the written ruling, and that the third plane’s passengers weren’t covered by the order. Meanwhile, administration officials insisted Boasberg lacked the authority to restrict Trump’s deportation powers.

Trump called Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic Judge” who “wants to assume the role of President,” and called for his impeachment. Elon Musk called the ruling “a judicial coup.” Other administration officials have also raged against Boasberg, including Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

On Monday, Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan told Fox News, “We’re not stopping … I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care what the left thinks. We’re coming.”

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has rebuked calls for Boasberg to be impeached, stating that an appeal, rather than impeachment, is the appropriate response for parties who disagree with a judicial decision. Nonetheless, White House insiders believe that Roberts and other conservative justices will take their side if the matter comes before the Supreme Court—an intervention that Trump has publicly called for.

On Tuesday, Trump told Fox News that the administration will not defy any court orders, but that he believed the Supreme Court would ultimately uphold his authority in the matter.

They might. And if they don’t, it’s unclear how far he will go.

Last weekend, the administration deported Brown University assistant professor and surgeon Rasha Alawieh, in spite of a court order issued the same day, which stated that Alawieh should not be removed from the state.

While pundits fixate on whether Trump will openly defy court orders, his administration continues to violate them, ignoring rulings and telling one story in court and another in public. As the U.S. slides further into autocracy, judicial interventions are considered one of the few guardrails separating our so-called democracy from outright dictatorship. That guardrail is already buckling—and could snap entirely at any moment.

Trump’s mood and impulse control are major factors in this crisis, and that bodes poorly for us all. 

For example, it’s clear that Trump was eager to take Bukele up on his offer to incarcerate U.S. prisoners at Cecot. Like a child eager to play with a new toy, Trump did not want to wait. He wanted to do what the “cool” dictators do: send his targets to a nightmarish prison that’s praised by global right-wing figures for the same reasons human rights groups have condemned it. So the administration conjured an excuse to make Venezuelan immigrants the first victims of this despicable arrangement, and invoked the stigma of gang affiliation to justify its violent, lawless actions.

The idea that the Alien Enemies Act ought to apply to Venezuelans is as nonsensical as the notion that Mahmoud Khalil’s presence in the United States imperils U.S. foreign policy. These efforts represent the administration’s true objective: an effort to function above and outside the law, while twisting the workings of government to its will. That is Trump’s objective, and this is only the beginning. 

We must understand the expansive nature of this dictatorial project. Words like “criminal,” “alien,” and “gang member” are used to dehumanize Trump’s targets, so that we might view their fates as wholly disconnected from our own. A culture that has religiously embraced criminalization as essential, redemptive, and solutionary has conditioned us to accept this rhetoric and left many people unprepared to practice solidarity with targeted, scapegoated communities. Our enemies delight in the biases that lead us to abandon Trump’s targets, believing (or perhaps just hoping) that we will not be consumed by the same forces. 

Remember Trump’s assertion that if it were legal to do so, he would send people criminalized in the U.S. to be imprisoned in El Salvador “in a heartbeat.” While the U.S. prison system is a death-making horror show, even that well of suffering is not deep enough for this president. He wants to send his targets to an isolated prison in a rural region of El Salvador—a place that local officials claim that no one leaves alive. 

If he can make that wish a reality for undocumented Venezuelan people, we should expect this dictatorial collaboration to expand. Whether that happens because Trump defies the courts, or because the Supreme Court enables him, more people will disappear. In times such as these, seemingly far-fetched outcomes can quickly become standard practices. Media entities, cowed by threats of state reprisal, normalize the unthinkable, while the masses try to go about their business. 

However, business as usual is a fantasy. 

Our situation is severe, and our fates are connected. While the administration’s lawyers argue that the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 allows ICE agents to enter people’s homes without a warrant, and university crackdowns continue, tens of thousands of people are being thrown out of work. Environmental protections and public services are being dismantled while techno-fascists loot the federal government. We have more reason to protest than ever, and with Kash Patel heading up the FBI, we also have more to fear, in terms of repression, than we have at any moment in contemporary history. No one is exempt from the harm Trump and his movement will cause in the name of their backward political vision. 

We must all defend targeted communities as though we are defending our own freedom and our own families, because those are the actual stakes. There are no tidy divisions between us that will ultimately be respected. The lawless spectacle will continue, and it must be resisted. 

Much love,

Kelly

Action Notes

• If you are interested in taking action, you can use Detention Watch Network’s website to find an immigration defense organization in your area. You can also donate to support their work. 
• If you are interested in organizing a community defense group in your area, you can check out Siembra NC’s Defend and Recruit Playbook.

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