Updates on Trump’s Deportation Obsession and His Open Warfare on the US Courts, and My Interview on Gorilla Radio with Chris Cook

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Many thanks to Chris Cook in western Canada for having me on his weekly Gorilla Radio show on Wednesday to discuss the latest developments in the horrendous “war on migrants” that Donald Trump initiated when he took office three months ago. The interview is available here, on Gorilla Radio’s Substack, taking up the first half of the hour-long show, with Canadian author Ray McGinnis in the second half.

Chris and I last spoke in February, just after Donald Trump had started using Guantánamo to hold migrants — the majority of whom were Venezuelans, who were accused, without evidence, of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang. I wrote about the use of Guantánamo for migrants in a series of articles here, here, here, here, here and here, with a summary on the Close Guantánamo website on March 21.

By that point, Trump had begun shifting his focus to an even more alarming location than Guantánamo, sending 238 Venezuelan migrants and 23 Salvadorians — all, again, accused of being gang members, without any evidence being provided — on a one-way trip to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison (the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or, in English, the Terrorism Confinement Center) on March 15.

With a capacity of 40,000, the CECOT prison opened in January 2023 to hold alleged Salvadorian gang members seized in vast numbers after a “state of exception” (essentially a state of emergency) was declared in March 2022 by El Salvador’s dictatorial president, Nayib Bukele. Ever since, this has allowed the Salvadorian authorities to arbitrarily imprison anyone suspected of gang affiliation without providing any evidence, and to hold them indefinitely without charge or trial.

If that sounds like the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, but on a massive scale, that is entirely appropriate, and a dream for the Trump administration, which, fundamentally, wants to be able to rid the US, as cruelly as possible, of as many migrants as it can get away with deporting, and without having to provide any evidence to justify its actions.

When a cellblock of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo was used to hold migrants in February and March, the Trump administration ran into difficulties regarding both the legality of using Guantánamo, and its insistence that the men sent there were “the worst of the worst”, as investigative journalists and mainstream media reporters repeatedly sought out family members — or the men themselves, in those instances in which they were subsequently deported to their home countries — demonstrating that Trump and his senior officials were lying, and that most of the men had no criminal records, and were solely guilty of having tried to access the US in search of work, and of having tattoos that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) sweepingly and indiscriminately interpreted as signifying gang membership.

CECOT, however, offered what appeared to Trump to be an opportunity to avoid meddling by the judiciary by removing the men in question to an offshore mega-Guantánamo beyond the reach of the courts, even more effectively than the Bush administration had managed with its use of Guantánamo to hold men and boys seized in the “war on terror”, who were alleged to have been terrorists, even though no evidence was either sought or provided to justify those claims.

Legal challenges to extrajudicial deportation and imprisonment in another country

On the day of the first flights to El Salvador, in response to an emergency filing by lawyers, the Chief Judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C. urgently issued a temporary restraining order to prevent their departure. Trump then ignored the court’s order, setting up a confrontation between the executive and the judiciary, which I discussed in detail in an article entitled, Judge Says Nazis in US in WWII Had More Rights to Contest Their Removal Than Venezuelan Migrants Now, on March 31.

At the time, it was apparent that, unlike the men held at Guantánamo, who seem to have been under “final removal” orders, which permitted their deportation to their home countries, many of those sent to El Salvador were not only having their imprisonment outsourced to a country that was definitely not the US, unlike Guantánamo, which was under complete US control, despite being on land leased from Cuba; some had also, very evidently, been snatched from their cells while their asylum claims were still ongoing.

In a subsequent article, No One Is Safe As Trump Gleefully Deports Migrants to El Salvador’s Mega-Guantánamo Without Evidence, Or Even Via An “Administrative Error”, published last week, I updated the story, covering both the ongoing legal challenges, and further alarming evidence of the government’s complete contempt not only for the law (both constitutionally, and in respect of immigration and deportation proceedings), but also for fundamental questions of innocence or guilt. The legal challenges had, by this point, reached the Supreme Court, which, while failing to rule on the legality or otherwise of the Alien Enemies Act, had insisted that anyone the administration wanted to deport had to be allowed to “seek habeas relief” beforehand.

All of this emerged as more cases were uncovered of men sent to El Salvador despite upcoming immigration court hearings, despite clear cases of mistaken identity (the gay Venezuelan makeup artist Andry Hernandez Romero being a prominent example), and, in one case — that of Salvadorian and Maryland resident Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — despite his one-way ticket to CECOT being because of an “administrative error” that the administration initially admitted, but then, shamefully, tried to walk back from through hysterical and groundless denunciations of him as a terrorist. In another intervention, the Supreme Court, on April 10, unanimously ordered the government to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return.

On April 13, in defiance of the Supreme Court’s requirement for habeas hearings, the Trump administration sent another ten alleged gang members (both Venezuelan and Salvadorian) to CECOT, the day before Trump welcomed Bukele to the White House, and both men joked about how neither of them would do anything to bring Abrego Garcia back — yet another snub to the Supreme Court.

It was in response to my “No One is Safe” article that Chris contacted me for an interview, but in the scattershot chaos of the “war on migrants”, a week is a long time, and in the meantime additional notable developments are worth reporting.

A Senator visits El Salvador, and the Supreme Court intervenes decisively

On Thursday April 17, Abrego Garcia’s Senator, Chris Van Hollen, who, with 24 of his fellow Democratic Senators, had previously written a letter to the Trump administration calling for his release, traveled to El Salvador to meet with him. After being refused entry to CECOT, he eventually met him in his hotel, after Bukele allowed him a brief visit, and on his return he appeared on Sunday’s political shows across the US networks, repeatedly delivering his key message that, “if you deprive one man of his constitutional rights, you threaten the constitutional rights of everybody.”

On Saturday April 19, the Supreme Court intervened yet again on the deportation issue, responding to an emergency submission by the ACLU, after lawyers discovered that “dozens of Venezuelan migrants faced imminent deportation without the judicial review the justices previously ordered”, in Reuters’ words.

At 12.55am, as Reuters proceeded to explain, “the Supreme Court temporarily barred the Trump administration from deporting another group of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador”, stating, “The Government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this Court.” Just two of the nine Justices — Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — “publicly dissented from the decision.”

Later on Saturday, the administration filed a response “urging the justices, once they review the matter further, to formally reject the ACLU’s request on the migrants’ behalf.” Karoline Leavitt, the ever-hysterical White House Press Secretary, said in a statement, “We are confident in the lawfulness of the Administration’s actions and in ultimately prevailing against an onslaught of meritless litigation brought by radical activists who care more about the rights of terrorist aliens than those of the American people.”

Formally, however, the White House stated only that Donald Trump “would stay the course in his immigration crackdown”, but, as Reuters described it, “gave no immediate indication that the administration would defy the Supreme Court, appearing for now to avert a potential constitutional crisis” between what it accurately described as “coequal branches of government”, a distinction lost on Trump, and those behind him who are part of the Project 2025 program to thoroughly sideline and subvert the judiciary to allow Trump, or any future far-right, white supremacist president, to permanently exercise unfettered executive power.

Further court challenges

On Tuesday April 22, two federal court judges issued rulings that, as Reuters described it, “extended temporary blocks on some deportations of Venezuelan migrants and signaled that President Donald Trump’s invocation of [the Alien Enemies Act] to speed up their removal from the United States may not survive judicial review.”

In Denver, District Judge Charlotte Sweeney ruled that the Trump administration “was required to give Venezuelan migrants held in ICE facilities in Colorado 21 days before any planned deportation under the Alien Enemies Act, and to inform them of their right to challenge their removal”, while, in New York, District Judge Alvin Hellerstein called for ten days’ notification.

Hellerstein, a Bill Clinton appointee, said, as Reuters described it, that “he understands Trump’s desire to move quickly on deportations but that the administration must afford migrants due process.”

As he stated, “This is not a secret court, an inquisition in medieval times. This is the United States of America.” With specific reference to Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans to El Salvador, he stated that it “may run afoul of the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment”, and called the presidential proclamation announcing it “contrary to law.”

As Reuters noted, these rulings “provided the first judicial guidance on how the Trump administration can ensure due process rights under the Alien Enemies Act since the Supreme Court’s April 7 order requiring migrants be given the opportunity to challenge their removals in court.”

That order didn’t specify “how much notice migrants should be given”, although the ACLU, representing the migrants in both states, “had urged the judges to provide notice 30 days in advance”, which, as Reuters described it, was “in line with the procedure that the US government used the last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked, during World War Two, to intern and deport people of Japanese, German and Italian descent.”

In her ruling, Judge Sweeney also indicated that “the ACLU was likely correct that the Alien Enemies Act was inapplicable because Tren de Aragua’s presence in the United States did not amount to an act of war.” Speaking after the ruling, Lee Gelernt, the lead ACLU lawyer in the case, said, “The court properly recognized that this wartime authority cannot be used during peacetime and that the government is not complying with due process.”

Meanwhile, in Maryland, District Judge Paula Xinis, who is in charge of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s case, and who, last week, ordered the government “to provide discovery information on what it has done — or has not done — to free Abrego Garcia”, adding that this information would “help her determine if the administration has been acting in good faith”, concluded on April 22 that the government was acting in “bad faith.”

“For weeks, defendants have sought refuge behind vague and unsubstantiated assertions of privilege, using them as a shield to obstruct discovery and evade compliance with this court’s orders”, Judge Xinis wrote, adding, “Defendants have known, at least since last week, that this court requires specific legal and factual showings to support any claim of privilege. Yet they have continued to rely on boilerplate assertions. That ends now.”

However, despite Judge Xinis demanding a response by 6pm on April 23, the administration responded by “asking for a stay of the order to provide sworn testimony and documents about efforts to return” Abrego Garcia, seeking a week’s extension, which she subsequently allowed.

In another case, however — that of a 20-year old Venezuelan also sent to El Salvador, identified for his safety only by the pseudonym Cristian — another District Judge in Maryland, Judge Stephanie Gallagher, appointed by Trump in his first term in office, ordered him on April 24 to also be brought back from El Salvador because his removal violated a previous court settlement, described by ABC News as “a class action case from 2019”, which “was filed on behalf of individuals who entered the US as unaccompanied minors and later sought asylum”, in which a settlement was reached last year.

As ABC News described it, “Judge Gallagher said that facilitating Cristian’s return requires the defendants ‘making a good faith request to the government of El Salvador and to release Cristian to US custody for transport back to the United States to await the adjudication of his asylum application on the merits by USCIS [US Citizenship and Immigration Services]’”, with Judge Gallagher calling the deportation a “breach of contract.”

Representatives seek confirmation that Andry Hernandez Romero, the gay makeup artist sent to CECOT, is alive and well

While all this was happening, four members of the House of Representatives wrote a letter to the administration seeking their assistance in requesting “a wellness check” for Andry Hernandez Romero, the gay makeup artist sent to CECOT on March 15, “to ensure his health and safety.” Just as a reminder, Hernandez Romero, who “had no criminal history and entered the United States legally through the CBP One app to seek asylum from political persecution and anti-LGBTQ+ violence”, as Advocate explained, and who was awaiting an immigration hearing after passing a “credible fear” interview, was sent to CECOT because of his non-gang related tattoos.

As Advocate added, the man responsible for alleging that Hernandez Romero was a gang member was Charles Cross Jr., “a former Milwaukee police officer with a history of misconduct, including a criminal conviction and DUI [driving under the influence] crash that led to his firing. Despite that record, he was hired by [prison operator] CoreCivic and was working at the Otay Mesa ICE facility when he flagged Hernandez Romero.”

The lead author of the letter, Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), who is gay, traveled to El Salvador with his colleagues on Monday (April 21), and managed to get a promise from the US ambassador, William Duncan, to at least “make an official request for information on Romero.” As Garcia said, “For the first time since Mr. Romero has been essentially kidnapped and sent to this prison, the embassy did acknowledge the actual case, and they did agree that they are going to actually inquire about his health and wellness, which no one had done up to that point.”

As Anita Chabria of the Los Angeles Times explained on April 23, “It’s come to this, that even getting someone to ask for proof of life is a win.”

Reflecting on his visit, Rep. Garcia also criticized Trump’s risible claim, on April 21, after the most recent Supreme Court ruling, that providing hearings for those he wishes to deport — he erroneously called them trials — was impossible, because “to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years.”

As Rep. Garcia described it, “You don’t get to decide that someone doesn’t get due process. That’s not the way our entire legal system is designed or built. Whether you are a citizen, a noncitizen, a student visa holder, or a temporary resident — everyone gets due process in the country. It’s foundational to the United States.”

The risk of “persecution, torture, and death”

Despite the positive court rulings noted above, however, ABC News also revealed that, on March 31, the Trump administration had sent four Venezuelans — all alleged Tren de Aragua members — to the CECOT prison from Guantánamo, where they had been briefly held, defying a court order by Boston-based District Judge Brian Murphy, a Biden appointee, on March 28, “barring the removal of people to countries other than their place of origin”, or as listed on their final order of removal, “without an opportunity to raise concerns about their safety.” As ABC News also noted, “None of the men had orders of removal to El Salvador before their deportation.”

Cynically, Justice Department lawyers argued that the court order was not violated because the deportation of the Venezuelans “was carried out by the Department of Defense — not the Department of Homeland Security, which is a defendant in the lawsuit.”

An ICE spokeswoman, Tracey Huettl, claimed that “each of the four men were identified as members of Tren de Aragua by federal law enforcement, and had extensive criminal records”, but, even if this, for a change, is actually true, it still didn’t give the administration the right to deport the men to El Salvador without reviewing the safety concerns highlighted in Judge Murphy’s order.

Last week, long after the flight had departed, Judge Murphy followed up on his initial temporary restraining order — which was also flouted when other Venezuelans were flown to El Salvador — by issuing “a preliminary injunction requiring the Trump administration to give noncitizens the chance to raise concerns about their safety before they are removed to third countries.”

As ABC News explained on April 18, Judge Murphy’s injunction “bars the Trump administration from deporting any noncitizen to a country not explicitly mentioned in their order or removal without first allowing them to raise concerns about their safety.”

As he stated in his order, “Defendants argue that the United States may send a deportable alien to a country not of their origin, not where an immigration judge has ordered, where they may be immediately tortured and killed, without providing that person any opportunity to tell the deporting authorities that they face grave danger or death because of such a deportation.” He added, “All nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Assistant Solicitor General of the United States, Congress, common sense, basic decency, and this Court all disagree.”

He also noted that Trump administration officials “have applied and will continue to apply the alleged policy of removing aliens to third countries without notice and an opportunity to be heard on fear-based claims — in other words, without due process.” Adding that his order was designed to prevent what ABC News described as “the irreparable harm of noncitizens being sent to countries where they might face persecution, torture, or death without having the chance to challenge their removal in court”, he stated that the “irreparable harm factor” weighs in the Plaintiffs’ favor, declaring that “the threatened harm is clear and simple: persecution, torture, and death. It is hard to imagine harm more irreparable.”

Judge Murphy further added that noncitizens be given “written notice before they are removed to a third country, as well as a ‘meaningful opportunity’ to raise concerns about their safety, including providing at least 15 days to reopen their immigration proceedings.” He also “certified a class — meaning the order applies not only to the plaintiffs in the case, but also any noncitizen with a final order of removal” anywhere in the US.

Given New York District Judge Alvin Hellerstein’s warning that deporting Venezuelans to El Salvador “may run afoul of the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment”, I would expect this concern to become a focus of forthcoming court challenges, but, in the meantime, the treatment of Judge Murphy by the administration provides yet another baleful example of their persistent refusal to accept that the US courts have any right to impede their actions in any way, even when deportation to a foreign mega-Guantánamo, on the basis of seemingly non-existent evidence, involves the threat of torture or death.

The double scandal of an indiscriminate racist deportation policy and a deliberate effort to subjugate the courts

In our interview, both Chris and I had differing opinions about the main thrust of Trump’s policies. In my case, I’ve been particularly shocked by the extent of the racism it has revealed, not only posing a threat to every migrant in the US, but revealing a cruelty on the part of the administration that suggests that they’re happiest when pushing out lies about gang membership to obscure their determination to deport patently innocent people.

Chris, meanwhile, contended that, above all, the policy’s main aim is to destroy the courts— or, specifically, to destroy the courts as what Reuters accurately described as “coequal branches of the government” with the executive, and with Congress, where the Republican majority, in contrast to the courts, has largely been silent on Trump’s marginalization of them since he took office and began trying to rule through a blizzard of “proclamations” and executive orders.

With hindsight, I think we were both correct, and I can only hope that, while racism shows no sign of going out of fashion anytime soon, the courts will refuse to back down from their inconvenient dedication to both the US Constitution and the weight of legal precedents, which, even in a judiciary that is often skewed by the political nature of its appointments and its deference to the weight of decisions taken by the executive branch, also has the potential, the power and, sometimes, the responsibility to act as a bulwark against executive overreach, or even, given the extent of the administration’s evident contempt for the law, executive tyranny.

Note: The migrant deportation program, and the particularly despicable use of El Salvador’s CECOT prison is not the only deportation scandal that is testing the limits of the judiciary’s compliance with the actions of the executive branch. In another recent article, I wrote about the case of Mahmoud Khalil, the student and permanent resident targeted for deportation by the administration because of his activism for the Palestinian cause, on which the Trump administration has enslaved itself to Israel’s wishes.

Khalil is being held in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana, and was recently prevented from attending the birth of his first child, although he is far from the only legal resident targeted, along with student visa holders who are being stripped of their right to stay in the US. Figures compiled by Inside Higher Ed indicate that over 1,700 students have had their visas revoked by the State Department since Trump took office, although, as Decolonized Journalism reports, “Some estimates suggest that visa revocations are as high as 5,000.”

In an article on April 18, “Denied, detained, deported: the most high-profile cases in Trump’s immigration crackdown”, the Guardian reported on some of these cases, also including some of the men sent to El Salvador, and a story from February that I had missed, which involved “over 100 migrants from countries as far flung as Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, China, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Pakistan” being dumped in Panama “because their nations of origin refuse[d] to accept them back from the US.”

As the Guardian proceeded to explain, “Shocking scenes unfolded of the people locked in a hotel in Panama City, signaling and writing on the windows pleading for help”, and the deportees, who included children, “were then moved and held at a facility deep in the dense jungle that separates Panama from Colombia. They were later reportedly freed and were seeking asylum from other countries”, although their futures were appropriately described as “uncertain.”

One of those deported was Artemis Ghasemzadeh, a 27-year old migrant from Iran, who “wrote ‘Help us’ in lipstick on a window of the hotel in Panama City, as a desperate way of alerting New York Times reporters on the street to her and fellow detainees’ plight.” As the Guardian added, “She had thought that, especially as a convert from Islam to Christianity who faces danger in Iran as a result, she would be offered freedom in the US.”

As we are all learning, however, being foreign-born and not white is more likely, in Trump’s America, to do nothing but put a target on your back.

* * * * *

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

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