Tag: el salvador
Stephen Miller

Trump And Miller Brazenly Lie About Unanimous Supreme Court Order

Backing up the Trump administration, the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, says he has no intention or ability to return an unlawfully removed Maryland legal resident, Kilmar Abrego García, to the United States. Abrego García was wrongly deported to a notorious maximum security “mega-prison” for terrorists in El Salvador.

“How can I return him to the United States?” President Bukele said to reporters on Monday, during a meeting with President Donald Trump and his top officials in the Oval Office, as reported by The Washington Post. “I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it.”

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court in an apparent unanimous opinion ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” the return of Abrego García to the United States.

Minutes before President Bukele’s remarks, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, on-camera in the Oval Office, delivered what is being called an “outrageous misinterpretation” of the Supreme Court’s opinion, which was quickly condemned.

“I promise you, if he was your neighbor, you would move right away,” Miller, who was the architect of the first Trump administration’s child separation policy, told reporters.

“What was the ruling in the Supreme Court, Steve, was it nine to nothing?” President Trump interjected.

“Yes, it was a 9-0, in our favor,” Miller wrongly claimed. “against the district court ruling, saying that no district court has the power to compel the foreign policy function of the United States.”

“As Pam said,” Miller continued, referring to Attorney General Pam Bondi, “the ruling solely stated that if this individual—at El Salvador’s sole discretion—was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time.”

“No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here, because he is a citizen of El Salvador,” Miller claimed, before pointing reporters to Bukele.

“That is the president of El Salvador. Your questions about it per the court can only be directed to him,” said Miller.

Attorney Michael Kasdan responded to Miller’s remarks: “We have reached the point where the White House openly lies on television about what a unanimous Supreme Court ruling against them says. The stuff of dystopian novels.”

“This is a blatant lie. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 AGAINST Trump,” wrote the progressive nonprofit People For the American Way.

“This is deeply Orwellian. The Court ruled against the Trump administration 9-0,” observed the MeidasTouch Network.

Conservative legal activist and political commentator Ed Whelan, who clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, weighed in.

“Outrageous misrepresentation of Supreme Court ruling,” Whelan declared, serving up a somewhat technical legal analysis. “The unanimous Court ruled that the district-court order ‘properly requires the Government to ‘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.’ Yes, the Court also stated that the “intended scope of the term ‘effectuate’ in the District Court’s order is, however, unclear, and may exceed the District Court’s authority,” and it told the district court to ‘clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.’ But: (1) ‘due regard’ doesn’t mean that the district court couldn’t give any teeth to ‘effectuate’; (2) in any event, the district court dropped ‘effectuate’ from its revised order, so this is all irrelevant. Duty to ‘facilitate’ continues.”

Commenting on the video, immigration attorney Allen Orr Jr. Esq. wrote: “When you tell yourself the story you want to believe even when it is fiction.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Monsters Inc.: The Unconscionable White House Assault On Abrego Garcia

Monsters Inc.: The Unconscionable White House Assault On Abrego Garcia

Passover began this past weekend with the traditional meal and discussion known as the “seder.”

“Seder” means order, and the meal requires a precise liturgy unchanged for thousands of years. (The English translation has undergone a few rewrites to soften up the edges of what is a fairly martial story.) I was struck, as I hadn't been previously, by the following line recited during the breaking of the middle matzoh: “For the sake of our redemption, we say together the ancient words which join us with our people and with all who are in need, with the wrongly imprisoned and the beggar in the street.”

The reference to the "wrongly imprisoned” this weekend of course brought immediately to mind Kilmar Abrego Garcia, now residing in a hellhole gulag due entirely to his wrongful, mistaken deportation by the United States. I have previously analyzed the rank lawlessness and unconstitutionality of his abduction by the Trump Administration. And last Thursday, a unanimous Supreme Court affirmed that the Constitution requires the government to facilitate his release from custody in El Salvador

.

The Administration filed its latest response in the case on Sunday. It is a model of disingenuousness and arrogant contempt. The response simply ignores Judge Paula Xinis’s demand to explain what steps the government has taken—or contemplates taking—to reverse the deep injustice. It goes on to misconstrue the Supreme Court order, replacing the Court’s affirmation of Judge Xinis’s command to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return with a made-up distinction between 1) steps to remove domestic obstacles that impede his return (there are none), and 2) any efforts whatsoever to effect Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.

The supposed distinction tracks neither what the Supreme Court ordered nor the law. On the contrary, it mangles the Court’s opinion in what could only have been a purposeful way. The DOJ filing asserts that the Court ordered it to take “all available steps to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia.” But in fact, the Court expressly held that Xinis’s order “properly requires the Government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” It would have been a cynical and empty judicial command had it been limited to removing domestic obstacles to his return—whatever that even means.

Yes, there must be limits to the judiciary’s ability to nudge the Executive where the commands transgress demonstrable national security prerogatives, and those limits could be reached if El Salvador flatly refused to cooperate. Here, though, nobody with any sophistication doubts that El Salvadoran President Bukele will leap to do exactly what he thinks will please the U.S. president.

(In fact, an easy face-saving way out of the Abrego Garcia mess for the United States would be for President Bukele to announce today that, in his sovereign mercy, he is returning Abrego Garcia to the United States. If that happens, no one should be fooled: Bukele is a two-bit dictator who will do exactly what he thinks—or is told—Trump wants.)

The Administration’s filing sets the stage for a showdown with Judge Xinis on Tuesday, when she can be expected to excoriate DOJ lawyer Drew Ensign and demand actual answers and a good-faith showing that they’ve tried to comply with the order the Supreme Court affirmed.

But I want to focus today not on the patent lawlessness of the Department’s response but on its monstrousness. From the moment this grievous mistake was revealed, the Administration’s prevailing view about the ultimate Kafkaesque nightmare they have imposed has been a mixture of indifference and enthusiasm.

Thus, Trump, Attorney General Bondi, Vice President Vance, and immigration czar Homan have all trotted out versions of the argument that the "administrative error” is insignificant because Abrego Garcia belongs in the El Salvador Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) anyway.

Vance argued, completely falsely, that Abrego Garcia was a “convicted MS-13 gang member,” when in fact he has never been convicted of that crime or any other in the United States. We’ve learned Vance was jumping to conclusions based on a stray suggestion from a confidential informant.

Bondi tried to deflect responsibility for the mistake onto immigration authorities. When a DOJ attorney acknowledged in court that the detention was an error—which was the only answer the attorney could have given consistent with his duty of candor to the court, and an answer the U.S. had already acknowledged—Bondi placed him and his supervisor on administrative leave for failing “to zealously advocate on behalf of the United States.”

Trump most recently has asserted that Abrego Garcia is in the "sole custody of El Salvador" and that his return is therefore "up to President Bukele and his government.”

This contention is at best highly misleading, and designed to frustrate Judge Xinis, who has current control of Abrego Garcia's case with the support of a unanimous mandate from the Supreme Court to “require” the Government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release.

It is preposterous to argue—and the Administration has done nothing to show—that it would be anything other than a light lift to secure Abrego Garcia's release with a simple request to Bukele, who is due to visit the White House today. And the Court, in effect, has required the Administration to undertake that light lift, and not to try to play games with national security assertions that are really beside the point.

Again, though—bogus legal assertions aside—it is stunning that the Administration remains so committed to not remedying its own grave error. Its bullheaded, reflexive position is basically: “Oh well, so we made a mistake, but there’s nothing to be done about it.”

This stance is a grotesque rejection of the most fundamental axiom of the rule of law and civilized society.

Here is how one eminent American jurist put it: “[i]f the rule of law is not the same for everyone, then it is not the rule of law.” His colleague echoed the sentiment when he proclaimed that equal justice under law “means that every person, regardless of wealth or power or station, is entitled to the same fair process.”

As the passage in the Seder makes plain, this recognition—far more than a precept of American law—is an axiom in the Judeo-Christian tradition, central to the rule of law everywhere it exists. It is firmly endorsed in the writings of the Founders. Ben Franklin is the source of the famous maxim: better one hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.

Consider that idea, and the recognition of the ultimate horror of punishing the innocent that it encapsulates. Franklin is asserting—and his assertion has become talismanic—that a high cost to public safety and justice is better than the conviction of a single innocent. How much worse, then, is the summary delivery to barbaric life imprisonment of a man who should never have been rounded up in the first place?

The Administration has stood the Franklin adage on its head, changing it to something like: it is great that 100 persons we think are guilty should suffer, but greater still that 100 guilty persons and one innocent person suffer.

The U.S. government is ostensibly our government—a government of the people. Exercising power in our name, the president has brought shame upon all Americans with his embrace of a paradigmatic injustice, coupled with the lie that letting an innocent man rot in prison is a foreign policy imperative against which the law, the Constitution, and fundamental morality all must give way.

The coming test in the Supreme Court will pit first principles of justice and human decency against an arid claim that the intonation of the words “foreign affairs” or “national security” is a license for evil. As it did unanimously last week, the Court must stand firm against that grotesque assertion.

By the way, the names of the eminent jurist and colleague who so firmly recognized the principle that requires the return of Abrego Garcia: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice (and Trump appointee) Brett Kavanaugh.

Talk to you later.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Egged On By Trump, Bukele Won't Return Victim Of Wrongful Deportation

Egged On By Trump, Bukele Won't Return Victim Of Wrongful Deportation

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador joined President Donald Trump for a Q&A session with reporters on Monday, during which he pigheadedly said that he would not return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison.

“I suppose you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist threat to the United States. I'm not going to do it. It's like, I mean, the question is preposterous,” he said.

Bukele continued to claim, “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” before Trump eventually jumped in to call the press “sick people” for asking about Garcia's Supreme Court-ordered return.

Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen and legal U.S. resident who is married to a U.S. citizen, held valid documents of residency issued by the Department of Homeland Security

Despite admitting that Garcia was wrongfully deported, the Trump administration has offered up a series of disingenuous and unconstitutional claims to justify leaving Garcia in El Salvador’s notoriously violent prison.

But the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling that the Trump administration must facilitate Garcia’s return to the United States.

Unsurprisingly, the Trump administration is now wrongfully claiming that the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction over this case—because that would be a democracy with checks and balances, not a dictatorship.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Deportation 'Error': When Judicial Pigs Fly -- In Formation!

Deportation 'Error': When Judicial Pigs Fly -- In Formation!

Our alleged Supreme Court last night upheld a district court’s order to return the Salvadoran migrant Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the government had wrongfully deported to El Salvador, where he has been held in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison for the last 26 days.

“The order properly requires the government to ‘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.” The Supreme Court's order, issued in response to an appeal by Garcia that he had been wrongfully seized and deported along with some 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members, cautioned District Court Judge Paula Xinis that she should define more precisely what she had meant by the word “effectuate” in her order to return Garcia, whom she said the government had deported by a “grievous error.”

The Trump administration had alleged without evidence that Garcia is a member of the violent street gang MS-13. Garcia has been a resident of the United States with protected status for 10 years, during which time he has never been arrested. He is married to a U.S. citizen. Judge Xinis found that the “evidence” against Garcia “consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and 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.” Garcia has been a resident of Maryland and claimed never to have been to New York.

For its part, the Trump DOJ admitted in court that Garcia had been deported in an “administrative error” and claimed that there was nothing that could be done to return him to the U.S. because he was being held by a foreign nation, to which the U.S. government had turned him over. Garcia had been given no due process to challenge his deportation under the Alien Enemies Act. In a separate order earlier in the week, Chief Justice John Roberts had temporarily allowed the government to continue using the 200-plus year old law but said that future deportees had to be given due process notice of the proceedings against them and were entitled to challenge their deportation in court. Garcia had been given none of the due process now ordered for future use of the Alien Enemies Act by the Trump administration.

The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, signed a “statement” as part of the court’s otherwise unsigned order. Justice Sotomayor wrote that the Trump DOJ had asserted that it could refuse to return Garcia to the U.S., against the order of a federal judge, “for no reason recognized by law,” and that the Trump administration position “implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.” `We could get down in the weeds as to why the court’s order was issued without naming its author or giving even a hint of what the vote might have been, but the most likely reason is that Roberts, Alito, Thomas et. al. had no interest in putting their names on a legal ruling that is bound to draw fire from Donald Trump and his political and legal sycophants.

The Supreme Court’s order in the Garcia matter is a victory for the wrongfully deported Salvadoran migrant but does not address either the fate of the Venezuelans deported along with him or the use of the Alien Enemies act to justify their deportation. The Alien Enemies Act allows the government to deport persons in a “time of war” who are considered dangerous to the country’s national security. There has been no declaration of war against Venezuela or any other country. The deported Venezuelans, many of whom claim they are not gang members and were rounded up on the basis of their soccer team tattoos and nothing else, are not “enemies” under any definition of that word.

How much leeway the Supreme Court will end up giving the Trump administration to use the Alien Enemies Act is not yet known, but today’s order provides hope that at least some due process will be observed in the deportation of migrants from this country. Under today’s order, the Trump administration will be forced to return at least one wrongfully deported migrant, and the court ordered the government to “be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps” with respect to the return of Garcia. That smells suspiciously like judicial oversight of the Trump DOJ and Department of State, which until this moment have acted in their enforcement of the laws and in judicial proceedings as if they are being run by a criminal gang.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

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