The Trump administration has transferred hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador even as a federal judge issued an order temporarily barring the deportations under an 18th century wartime declaration targeting Venezuelan gang members, officials said Sunday. Flights were in the air at the time of the ruling.
“But they’re bad people, Ian” you squeal. “They’re gang members. Bad things should happen to them because they’re bad!”
Well, maybe.
Thing is, we don’t know. The government claimed they were all gang members, but the reason countries have checks and balances, something the US once claimed to be proud of, was to be certain there aren’t miscarriages of justice. People accused of a crime are taken to court, where the truth of said allegations are determined so that somebody with power can’t just make assertions and punish people.
Due process. It’s not a panacea, bad shit still happens to innocent people, but it’s one of the safeguards.
Here’s the issue: if the government had proof that all of these people were gang members and that they could be deported illegally, why not go in front of a judge?
There are only two possible reasons:
- They don’t have proof for all of the people, and still want to deport them; or,
- They want to set the precedent that they can deport whoever they want just based on an accusation, without the judiciary having any say.
If you’re OK with either of these things, you are an evil piece of human garbage and stupid on top of that. Such people remind me of Red Staters who voted Trump, knowing about DOGE, then were surprised when Musk and Trump took their jobs and Trump decided to destroy American farmers with tariffs and by taking away their immigrant labor base.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
H.L. Mencken
Every right taken from other people will eventually be taken from you. Extraordinary renditions were against non-Americans outside of America, right, so they didn’t matter. When Obama drone killed an American citizen, well he was a terrorist and he wasn’t in America, so that was OK, right? The people being extradited now are gang members, and not Americans, so it doesn’t matter to you, does it? I mean, we don’t actually know that none of them are Americans are that all are gang members, but you’re a good person, so just like those Trump voters fired by Musk, you’ll be OK.
Right?
Oh, and the Gaza genocide has started up, with confirmation that Trump OK’d it. And that’s just Arabs, right, so it has nothing to do with you and they have it coming or something because they dared fight back, and that’s terrorism when weak people do it.
Right?
Elites who have learned they can get away with genocide would never genocide you.
Right?
As an aside, there is no possible half decent world where America does not lose all its power. Ideally a break up, so that it can never again be even a great power.
May it happen soon.
As for Europe, I’ve written about how they could fix things and reindustrialize, but on a moral basis, it’s hard to think that would be a good thing for the rest of the world, with a few exceptions like Ireland. (Ireland, of course, was the first victim of English colonialism. White niggers.)
My guess is that Europe’s leaders don’t have what it takes to turn Europe around though.
Oh well. *Sound of massive cheers from every country they colonized and enslaved and now lecture on human rights.*
Oakchair
The oligarchs have already been coming for Americans as told by:
the 60% chronic illness rate
the million dead from opioids
and on and on and on
The forever wars serve another purpose. They distract the populace so the oligarchs can rob, maim and kill them with less scrutiny.
They came
we did nothing
They came
we did nothing
and then we we’re gone.
different clue
This also applies to those leftists who voted against Harris to punish the Democrats or non-voted to “let” Trump win in hopes that Trump would win. They also knew all about Musk and Doge and etc. They also knew that Trump was equally pro-genocide in Gaza and would prove it in due course.
But altruistic punishment was more important to them in this particular case at this particular time. They indulged themselves in what Swamp Yankee has called the “Strasserite fantasy”. For political non-hobbyists, here is a link to the Gregor Strasser referred to in Strasserite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Strasser
If America breaks up, the piece which will become the Gilead Republic of Christianazi Satanofascistan will be the piece that gets all the A-bombs and H-bombs.
mago
First came the sanctions causing widespread suffering in Venezuela forcing a significant exodus to the USA, which initially offered asylum.
Next we see this massive illegal (and expensive I would wager) deportation, and not only that, the deportees are going to one of the worst hell hole prisons on this hemisphere where they will be doing forced slave labor for a year, to be renewed. As a bonus, US taxpayers get to foot the bill.
What’s next? I don’t know, but dark days are upon us. There’s no humanity or reason in our policies and institutions. We are so screwed . . .
Troy
> Different Clue
“leftists who voted against Harris to punish the Democrats”
While I understand your frustration with some leftists who voiced they did that, I don’t see that as having played even a minor role in the 2024 presidential election. Looking at the Exit Polls (https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2024/politics/2020-2016-exit-polls-2024-dg/index.html), what seems to have pushed Trump over the top was Harris losing Biden’s support among rural and moderate voters. Biden had made some inroads there —enough to win the presidential election— but Harris lost some of that support. She had more than Clinton, but but it still wasn’t enough.
What can probably be inferred from the numbers is Harris (and Clinton) were poor campaigners. They didn’t get out into the country to win rural support and they didn’t get into the conversation with moderates. They both safely played to their bases but in American politics, safe is death.
Harris did have some momentum when she brought on Tim Waltz, but she gave it up pivoting back to her ideological politics of triangulating between Democrat and Republican, leaving the moderates and rural voters out of her campaign.
And going into the mid-terms, I don’t think Democratic leadership has any issue with their strategy. They’ll keep doing the same campaign, over and over.
Jefferson Hamilton
Troy,
Don’t even bother. Every time it’s the same old shit, and they never give up the tired old schtick which has ZERO evidence behind it except their social media-based vibes. It was the mean old Bernie Bros’ fault that Clinton lost in 2016, even though demonstrably more Bernie voters voted for Clinton than Clinton voters voted for Obama in 2008.
Ian Welsh
Clinton holdouts called themselves PUMAs. “Party Unity My Ass.”
It was a big deal, they were extremely bitter about Obama.
So next time a centrist throws “party unity” at you, you know what to say.
different clue
@Troy,
In the wider scope I suspect you are correct. Biden’s Harris got 13 million less votes in 2024 than Obama’s Biden got in 2020. In the little time remaining before work, I can’t research how many electoral votes Michigan had and whether Michigan going to Harris would have made Trump lose or only narrowed Trump’s margin of electoral college victory. I also don’t know whether if all the punishment-from-the-left votes had gone to Harris , whether she would have won or not. It may be that the number of votes lost to basic demotivation and carefully fostered apathy was bigger than the “altruistic punishment” vote.
Anyway, I voted ‘uncommitted’ in the Michigan Primary when I still hoped it would make a difference. It made no difference. In the general election, the choice presented was between genocide against Gaza and autopilot at home, or genocide against Gaza plus the Triple Nazi Revolution here at home ( Silicon techbro nazis, Republican/MAGA nazis, Christian nazis.) And Trump may greenlight an even bigger, faster, more complete and thorough genocide against Gaza going forward.
Still, as George Orwell wrote someplace or other, motive matters in judging the actions of people. The ‘altruistic punishers’ wanted Trump to be elected as ‘punishment’ and ‘comeuppance’ for the Democrats. Trump is what they wanted, even if they can’t take credit for getting the Trump they wanted. The ‘altruistic punishers’ at Naked Capitalism are still wallowing in their whataboutism and both-sides-ism to pretend to themselves and eachother that Trump is no worse than Harris would have been, and maybe is better.
The mid-terms won’t matter. ( Perhaps vengeful voters could vote against every Democratic Senator who voted for Cloture and then for the Republican Continuing Resolution. Some, like Peters and Durbin , are retiring anyway, perhaps to recieve their lucrative private sector rewards. Perhaps Schumer could be ego-bruised by getting defeated in his next election.)There won’t be anything left to save by then at the Federal level. Political effort and awareness should focus on state and local levels where there may be a chance of steering Secular Blue-Zones toward separate survival economics in preparation for separate survival.
different clue
Someone in Canada has a sense of political humor, as shown by the sticker stuck onto a “Canada or Europe food only” sign in a deli case.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1jea6en/he_did_it/
Mary Bennet
Some of us voted for Harris because we have had mediocre presidents before and we didn’t want Trump to be able to claim a landslide. He did anyway, of course.
About immigration: The present situation came about because successive administrations simply refused to enforce the laws. Especially those relating to deliberately underpaying non-citizens. I have yet to learn that the bunch currently in power intend to prosecute anyone for that crime.
Affirmative action was supposed to be a program to uplift disadvantaged communities, Black and Native American in particular. It was never supposed to be an excuse for favoritism for rich kids from East and Southwest Asia. Mr. Welsh, how would you feel if you had shepherded a high-achieving good kid, no drugs, arrests or pregnancies, through high school and college, and given up your own chance at a comfortable
retirement to pay for the latter, only to see a small army of foreign trust fund babies shoehorned in ahead of him or her?
As for the student protesters, I don’t see any of them traveling back to the ME to fight Israel and support their co-religionists.
Maybe some of you reading this get to pick and choose what laws you want to abide by, but I don’t. Meanwhile the Democratic Party has apparently decided that immigration and Israel are the hill they want to die on. More likely, they are calculating that the Trump admin. will be so bad that all of us will turn to them and they won’t have to give up their two cherished issues. Not bloody likely.