Trump's Immigration Gestapo Disappearing Innocent LGBTQ Migrants? Or Just The One So Far?
This story just gets more and more evil.
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All right, buckle up, because I’m in a white-hot rage with this one.
It’s happened again. I had a whole plan for what I was going to write about this morning, and then I saw a story at the very last minute and scrapped everything.
This one, though, I have to say … those of y’all who have followed me for a long time, you know I’m a pretty cool customer. I get pissed off, but I channel it, and I spend a lot of time laughing and making fun of people who deserve it in the process.
Right now, though, I’m shaking.
As we all know by now, Donald Trump ordered his ICE thugs last weekend to kidnap and disappear hundreds of Venezuelan migrants, people he and the Nazis in his administration are claiming are all criminals, members of the gang Tren de Agua, but without offering proof of any kind, much less in a court of law. He hasn’t tried to prove the people he disappeared into El Salvador — into the arms of that failed country’s authoritarian garbage president, into one of the most horrific prisons on the planet — were in the United States illegally, or tried to enter the United States illegally.
We’re just supposed to trust Dear Leader, the world’s vilest living Hitler, when he says he had to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to rid the country of these alleged violent criminals, specifically 137 out of the 260 they disappeared that day. (The others, they say, were deported through normal processes.)
Anybody who’s paying attention — anybody who isn’t sick with the sort of MAGA daddy issues that cause fearful conservative white people to ignorantly trust that Daddy is doing whatever he must do to protect us, and Daddy must not be questioned, because Daddy loves us — already suspected we’d find out in short order that large numbers of the people Trump’s Gestapo picked up were absolutely innocent, no criminal record, not in gangs, nada. (By the way, those daddy issues are what I was going to write about this week, and still will at some point, because that ridiculous, pathetic Daddy trust is inextricably intertwined with the phenomenon of large numbers of seemingly decent Americans turning a blind eye to what’s really happening right now. People prone to blind obedience to authoritarian father figures in church and at home are prone to it in politics too, whether it’s the Third Reich or Trump’s Fourth Reich.)
Now we’re learning the truth about some of the people Donald Trump kidnapped.
Did I mention I’m shaking writing this?
Last night, Rachel Maddow hosted immigration lawyer Lindsay Toczylowski, cofounder/president/CEO of the Immigration Defenders Law Center, to talk about her client, who was disappeared by Donald Trump’s ICE thugs last weekend. She revealed his first name, Andry, and explained that he is now in that Salvadoran prison.
As Toczylowski has explained, Andry is part of the LGBTQ community, a gay man. He worked in the arts in Venezuela. He’s a makeup artist. He came here for asylum, legally. He has no criminal history. ICE detained him originally because of his tattoos. He was kidnapped, and now he’s trapped in El Salvador, in torture central, because Donald Trump put him there, without due process, because Donald Trump is an evil, racist bag of shit.
The Trump administration contends that Andry has tattoos that suggest he is part of the Tren de Agua gang. Toczylowski says that’s utter bullshit, and that Andry’s tattoos are the kind you’d see on literally anybody, anywhere, in Venezuela or in the US. It’s kind of amazing how the Trump administration’s Nazis are so het up about tattoos on Venezuelan migrants seeking asylum, but yet they can’t correctly identify Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s tattoos as white nationalist Christian extremist tattoos. You know, unless they really love Pete’s white nationalist Christian extremist tattoos, and white nationalist Christian extremism is the fucking point of all this.
Toczylowski told Maddow they started to figure out that Trump had disappeared Andry to his bought-and-paid-for black site in El Salvador when ICE failed to produce him for a court appearance last week. The immigration judge was confused how he could have been disappeared when there was no removal order. The ICE lawyer didn’t have an answer. ICE won’t let Andry’s lawyers talk to him. They aren’t going to produce him for his next hearing, which is scheduled in the next couple of weeks.
This is what the Trump administration is doing. This is who they are. (Donate to Toczylowski’s organization HERE.)
Stories are starting to spread about about the innocent people Trump has disappeared to El Salvador without due process, into one of the most dangerous prisons in the world. Franco Caraballo, who showed up for a scheduled appointment with ICE and didn’t come back. Francisco Garcia Casique, same story. Te common denominator here is that these guys all seem to have tattoos. Gang tattoos? Not necessarily, just tattoos. Caraballo has a tattoo of a clock with the time his daughter was born. Another of the disappeared, Jerce Reyes Barrios, has a tattoo of soccer ball with a crown on it, because he’s in a soccer gang he’s a professional soccer player, one who was tortured by the Maduro regime. That’s what he was fleeing.
But these motherfucking goons in the Trump regime can’t tell the difference between that and a gang tattoo, or between the tattoos Andry the Venezuelan makeup artist has and a gang tattoo. Or maybe that’s just their story and they’re sticking to it. Caraballo’s wife Johanny Sanchez says, “It feels like any Venezuelan immigrant now is labeled as Tren de Aragua."
Shirin Ali and Mark Joseph Stern have much more at Slate on other Trump kidnapping victims sentenced to slavery in El Salvador and just how fucking stupid ICE’s claims that they have “gang tattoos” are. They argue that the precise reason Trump didn’t want to give these people due process is because everybody’d figure out they were innocent in five fucking seconds.
Maybe the Trump regime is simply full of white supremacists like Donald Trump, who still wanted the Central Park Five executed even after it was definitively proven they were innocent. Maybe to Trumpers, the evidence for these people’s criminality, for their guilt, is indeed their skin, but not the part covered by tattoos.
(By the way, useful reminder: During the campaign, Trump often dementia-babbled about Hannibal Lecter because he was convinced that Venezuela and other countries were emptying out insane asylums and sending everyone to the US. The Silence Of The Lambs came out in 1991, approximately the time Trump’s brain ceased being able to process new information, and it soon became clear that Trump’s brain made this association because he thinks applying for asylum is the same thing as insane asylum. He’s just the stupidest person who ever lived.)
ICE thug Robert Cerna from the Harlingen, Texas, office — where the Trump Human Trafficking flights took off from — admitted in a sworn declaration that aw shucks, “many” of these people don’t have criminal records, but that just shows you how dangerous they are! No, really.
"The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat," according to Cerna's declaration. "The lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile."
Well holy fucking God, they could say that about anybody they wanted to, couldn’t they?
Anyway, dude swears they vetted them all real careful, and so does frustrated gym teacher and Trump immigration czar Tom Homan. Maybe they found some secret Venezuelan gang messages in Andry’s makeup tutorials. Or maybe they’re full of shit.
Tim Miller from The Bulwark put out a video last night. I don’t know him personally — though I’d like to meet him, as a fellow pissed-off southern gay in this business — but it’s safe to say he’s shaking the way I’m shaking right now. How these evil Trump Nazis are literally doing this to people who tried to come to the United States the right way, for asylum, fleeing oppression and abuse, people who’ve done nothing wrong. Miller quite rightly says that in a just world Tom Homan and Stephen Miller would be worried they’d be the ones going to prison. He also goes over just how absolutely ridiculous ICE’s criteria is for deciding if a person is “in a gang.” (Again, the soccer player with the tattoo that was IN ACTUALITY MODELED AFTER THE FUCKING REAL MADRID LOGO.)
Tim’s video came out before that Maddow interview last night, about sweet Andry, who is currently enduring God-knows-what because of the sick, diseased hate in Donald Trump’s black fucking heart. I look forward to his incandescent rage the next time he updates.
Hey by the way, did y’all hear the Trump administration’s legal all-stars think that because Trump baselessly invoked the Alien Enemies Act, they can now just enter people’s homes without a warrant, like if they think they’re in a Venezuelan gang or something, based on their obvious expertise at identifying such things? Or I guess they can just say they think so, even if they just think there’s a trans person or a drag queen inside. Maybe a woman who needs an abortion.
This is where the fuck we are. The bad guys are in charge. And if you think there’s anybody in today’s version of Martin Niemöller’s famous “First they came for the …” quote, anybody on the Trump Nazis’ enemies list that you’re exempt from rising up to defend, I regret to remind you of how that quote ends.
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I am furious with this maladministration, but even more so with those who put them in power - the oligarchs (for their precious tax cuts that they don't need), the MSM (employed by the oligarchs), and the bigots (who just couldn't bring themselves to vote for a Black woman).
My partner and I are trans. We're not even sure where the balancing act between staying locked in our house and continuing to do the things that bring us joy is anymore. Is flying to L.A. from Philly safe? What if we get diverted to shithole country? They're clearly using the airport panopticon as their first line of attack, the one we just let them build after 9/11 because some dipshit tried to light his underwear on fire so we need to have digital strip searches for freedom. Is it okay to get on a train to Maryland? It passes through safe states, but is Amtrak itself federal property? My partner's passport application was denied. "Insufficent evidence to prove sex at birth." Mine is up for renewal next year. I'm going to get the same treatment, even though my documentation was good enough to get a "Real ID". I don't know what to do with all my rage right now. Let's just say my fantasies about what to do to these assholes are worthy of a SAW film.