As a team of New York Times reporters notes today, the ruthless authoritarian regime that Trump has set into motion following Project 2025, with its total denial of rights and due process for people rounded up and shipped to hellhole foreign prisons, affords prisoners fewer rights than they had in World War II US internment camps.
#Trump #ICE #immigrants #deportations #AlienEnemiesAct
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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/world/americas/trump-migrants-deportations.html
"Never before, legal analysts say, has the Alien Enemies Act been used with such little due process.
During World War II, the Department of Justice established civilian hearing boards in which 'registered aliens' of German, Italian and Japanese descent arrested by the government could argue they were not a danger to the nation, legal scholars said."
"A Guatemalan immigrant with no Massachusetts criminal record was arrested Monday on Tallman Street after federal agents shattered the glass on his vehicle as he and his wife waited inside the car for their lawyer to arrive."
~ Gerardo Beltran Salinas
#Trump #ICE #immigrants #deportations #AlienEnemiesAct
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https://newbedfordlight.org/lawyer-federal-agents-detain-guatemalan-man-29-with-no-criminal-record/
"Juan Francisco Méndez, 29, who was taken to an undisclosed location, has been in the United States for two years and was undocumented, but pursuing an adjustment of his immigration status, according to his attorney, Ondine Gálvez. Méndez’s wife, Marilú, a beneficiary of an asylum program, had petitioned for him so he could regularize his status. They are the parents of one child."
"Gálvez said Méndez has no criminal record. A name and date of birth search in the Massachusetts judicial system showed that Méndez has no criminal record in the state, according to a clerk at the New Bedford District Court."
The family's car window was smashed and they were pulled violently from the car. One agent wore a vest that said FBI. Video link below.
"Trump’s El Salvador scheme is more than just flouting American constitutional law. It repudiates the fundamental principle of due process with roots dating back four millennia. It is, as a Reagan-appointed judge on the Fourth Circuit searingly put it, 'a path of perfect lawlessness.'"
~ Andy Craig
#Trump #ICE #immigrants #deportations #AlienEnemiesAct
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https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/trumps-policy-of-shipping-innocents
"In a way that’s never happened before in American history, a president and his subordinates are openly defying not just a court order but one upheld without dissent on appeal all the way up to the Supreme Court. The most basic way in which the judicial and executive branches of government interact has been shattered."
"But more fundamentally than that, Trump has repudiated the very foundation of law itself. Its deep roots are at the core of human civilization as we know it, and Trump has trampled over them with no remorse."
"The press often refers to these actions as 'deportations,' but confining people to violent prisons in a country they’ve never set foot in—without adjudication of guilt or even a public airing of the accusations—is far closer to kidnapping and human trafficking than to any legitimate exercise of justice."
~ Elliot Kirschner
Jonathan V. Last asks Paul Krugman to comment on Trump talking with the "cool dictator" Bukele about building gulags and encouraging Bukele to build them. Krugman responds that it's interesting that, as Trump ran for president, a lot of folks said, "Oh, that won't happen." The "smart and savvy" crowd said, "Don't freak out."
And they all turned out to be very wrong.
A recording from Paul Krugman and Jonathan V. Last's live video
Krugman says,
"There was a lot of people just not believing, not believing that he was who he said he was. And look, it's not just the regular, it's not just guys in red caps and diners. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, they're absolutely shocked, shocked to discover that what you knew, what I knew, is actually the reality. They managed to convince themselves that somehow this was going to be just kind of benign, good for them."
And they would be allowed to say bad words in public and they would not face regulation. And [they] are now having this horrible realization that—I'm not sure if they're willing to admit it to themselves— they're having this horrible realization that all of the people warning about the threat to democracy were completely right."
William Lindsey 
