from the bad-faith-proclamations-from-the-death-cult dept
For a long time, we’ve believed no president would dare enact the Alien Enemies Act again, not after it was abused to send more than 100,000 residents and citizens of Japanese descent to US concentration camps during the Second World War.
Even the administrative power grabs and uptick in bigotry that followed the 9/11 attacks never went as far as Trump has in his second presidential term. Trump, along with his supporters and enablers, are enacting a racial cleansing of America. That it’s been mostly bloodless so far isn’t much comfort. In fact, due to the lack of concerted push-back by any other branch of the government (a late-night order from SCOTUS notwithstanding), the only thing this bloodlessness indicates is that we’re still on the early end of the Trump 2.0 timeline
But even bad faith efforts to remove brown people from the US need some sort of excuse, no matter how unbelievable, to justify the abjectly horrible actions being taken by the Trump administration. It gives everyone involved the veneer of lawfulness they’ll need to cling to if, and more hopefully, when they’re held accountable for their actions.
The claim being used to buttress sending people who are here in this country legally to foreign prisons under the Alien Enemies Act is this: The deportees are actually enemies engaging in hostile acts under the direct supervision of a foreign, unfriendly government. Here’s how the Trump Administration has framed this flimsy argument:
Trump’s invocation of the act claims such a link: “TdA is undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States both directly and at the direction, clandestine or otherwise, of the Maduro regime in Venezuela.”
Almost no evidence has been offered to support these assertions. Similarly sloppy work is being done by federal officers, ex-cops, and private contractors to identify alleged gang members. From what we’ve seen so far, the mere presence of literally any tattoo on a detainee’s body is enough to get them shipped off to an El Salvadoran maximum security prison.
No one in the Trump administration cares how sloppy and how cruel this is. And they certainly won’t be moved by the determination of multiple US intelligence agencies, whose combined forces have yet to uncover anything linking the Venezuelan government to Tren de Aragua gang activity in the United States, much less anything that ties hundreds of detainees to activities that would justify their removal under the Alien Enemies Act.
The National Intelligence Council, drawing on the acumen of the United States’ 18 intelligence agencies, determinedin a secret assessment early this month that the Venezuelan government is not directing an invasion of the United Statesby the prison gang Tren de Aragua, a judgment that contradicts President Donald Trump’s public statements, according to people familiar with the matter.
The determination is the U.S. government’s most comprehensive assessment to date undercutting Trump’s rationale for deporting suspected gang members without due process…
Even if this full assessment is made public, it won’t change anything. It’s not going to stop the Trump administration from ignoring due process rights and expelling as many foreign residents from the US as possible. All that’s guaranteed to happen is the mass firing of every intelligence official involved in generating this assessment. Bigoted sociopaths are running the country now and there’s not a single person in any position of power in this administration who gives one solitary fuck about the truth. We citizens, however, don’t have to pretend to believe Trump’s bullshit. That’s still a luxury we can afford, which is more than can be said about the billionaires and bootlickers he’s surrounded himself with, who are clearly willing to watch an entire country burn in exchange for a little bit of Oval Office access.
Filed Under: alien enemies act, donald trump, due process, immigration, mass deportations, tda, venezuela
