#1706 Trump's Kafkaesque Deportation Nightmare is the Shame of the Nation

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to this episode of theaward-winning Best of the Left podcast.

(00:03):
For those of us who knew that Trump waslawless and deeply racist in his desire
for mass deportations of brown people,we are getting exactly what we expected.
For others, at least the lawlessnessis coming as a bit of a surprise.
And yet, here we are.
For those looking for a quick overview,the sources providing our Top Takes in

(00:25):
about 50 minutes today includes MainJustice, CounterSpin, Strict Scrutiny,
The Majority Report, 60 Minutes, TheThom Hartmann Program, The Muckrake
Political Podcast, and Democracy Now!
Then in the additional Deeper Diveshalf of the show, there will be more in

four sections (00:41):
Section A, Deportation practices; followed by Section B, Victims
of the regime; section C, Venezuela andEl Salvador; and Section D, Resistance.
But first, we are still in majorpromotion mode as we launch
our new weekly show SOLVED!
We really need everyhand on deck we can get.
So subscribe at the Best of theLeft YouTube channel, watch, like,

(01:04):
comment, all of those sorts of things.
We're really proud of the show we'remaking, so we want as many people
as possible to see it and hear it,and that includes you, but also you
going and checking it out will helpthe system recommend it to others.
So thanks in advance for checking it out.
So instead, let's turn tothe Abrego Garcia case.
Since our last podcast, the SupremeCourt ruled in a per curium -- that

(01:29):
is an unsigned order with no dissents.
That's right.
And it gave two obligationsto the government.
One, it said that the governmenthas to "facilitate" the release
of Mr. Abrego Garcia from prison.
It also said they had to"ensure" his due process rights.

(01:52):
Remember, they had previously saidin a prior decision that these people
who had been removed are entitledto a pre-deprivation hearing.
They talked about that in the contextof the Venezuelans who had been removed
under the supposed authority of AlienEnemy Act, and this of course is separate
because Mr. Garcia is El Salvadoran.
Right.
The idea is before you are removed,you're entitled to a hearing.

(02:14):
You can say that legally the whateverthe statute is that doesn't apply,
or that you're not within the gangor the group that is being removed.
So you're entitled to a pre-deprivationhearing, and here the court says, one,
they need to facilitate his release;two, they need to ensure due process.
In doing that, they need to beprepared to share with the district

(02:37):
judge what it is that they are doing.
What steps they have taken, andthe prospect of further steps.
It's exactly what the court said.
And then finally the court did saythat, with respect to the district court
saying that you have to facilitate and"effectuate" -- we're really getting
into the weeds here -- and they did saythat the word "effectuate" is unclear.

(03:00):
That was exactly their word.
Needed clarification.
Yep.
Because obviously what they're concernedabout is they say you can't order the
government to effectuate -- let's justtake a different hypothetical -- the
release of somebody in Russia, not underour control, totally they're pursuant

(03:20):
to Russian authorities to say, now thegovernment of the United States has to
go into Russia and redo the following.
So they're saying that is ambiguous,and you have to deal with that
situation and make sure that you'renot crossing the line into something
the government actually can't do.
Nor would it really be theprovince of a court to say that.

(03:41):
So those leapt a number of obligationson the government that they needed
to fulfill, and it then went back tothe district judge and maybe, Mary,
what did the district judge then do?
Yeah, and I think the timinghere is really, really important.
So this is on Thursday evening,I think around five or 6:00 PM
that the court put out this order.

(04:01):
And in doing that -- let's justremind people, this was up there on
a motion to stay the lower court'sorder, that it needed to stay and
vacate, get rid of the lower court'sorder that the government needed to
facilitate and effectuate his return.
And so that's the posture whereit was in the Supreme Court.
So the Supreme Court pretty much deniedthat motion to vacate, did tell the

(04:23):
district court clarify what you meanby "effectuate" with due regard to the
executives -- deference to the executivein foreign affairs, but facilitate,
yeah, everything you just said.
They ordered them to do.
The only part of what the SupremeCourt did that granted in part the
government's request was to the extentthat the lower court had ordered that

(04:43):
that facilitated and effectuated hisreturn by 11:59 last Monday evening.
They said that date has passed.
That part of the order to vacatethat part is granted because
that date's already passed.
That's the only part -- and this isimportant -- 'cause Stephen Miller
later just flat out, in my opinion,lies about this in public statements.
He might say he's parsing hairs,but that's the only part of

(05:07):
what the government requestedthat the Supreme Court granted.
Yes, we're vacating the part that was11:59 on Monday because that's over.
So, the lower court wasted no time.
Within hours of getting this back fromthe Supreme Court, the court did clarify
what she meant, and this is Judge PaulaXinis out of the District of Maryland.
She clarified that what she meant wasshe amended her order to, quote, "direct

(05:32):
that defendants shall take all availablesteps to facilitate the return of
Abrego Garcia to the United States assoon as possible," and then consistent
with the Supreme Court's directive, andshe quoted it in her brief order, the
government should be prepared to sharewhat it can concerning the steps it has
taken and the prospect of further steps.

(05:52):
Based on that, Judge Xinis thendirected the government to answer
three questions and to file adeclaration by the next morning.
She originally said 9:30 the next morning.

Answering three questions (06:03):
One, the current physical location and
custodial status of Mr. Abrego Garcia.
Two, what steps, if any, thedefendants have taken to facilitate his
immediate return to the United States.
And Three, what additional stepsthe defendants will take and
when to facilitate his return.

(06:23):
She says, if you need to fileunder seal, you file under seal.
So this is all stillhappening on Thursday evening.
The court then says, I'll havean in-person status conference on
Friday at 1:00 PM in the courthouse.
So next morning, governmentdoesn't get this 9:30 declaration.
She wants a declaration fromsomebody with personal knowledge
who can answer that question.

(06:43):
Let's take a tiny pause here totalk about what a declaration is.
A declaration is really a substitutefor having a witness come in and sit
in the witness stand and raise theirright hand and take an oath to tell
the truth and get asked questions.
It's a way to do this on the paperswhere the government official,
puts in writing a declaration,and signs it under oath, right?

(07:04):
They're saying, I'mswearing to these things.
So it's like the paper equivalentof in-person testimony.
It's just that you can't have a backand forth with a piece of paper; you
can only just take what is on there.
Yeah.
And it very often there'll be lots offollow-up questions that you'd wanna ask
and it ducks the issue or it uses -- thisis gonna be the example you're thinking

(07:24):
of -- it uses language that is just soambiguous that you immediately are gonna
be like, well, what do you mean by that?
That's right.
So can I just -- we're going toget into this very detailed TikTok.
But, so I'm gonna play dumb here, whichis, here's the thing that is not legal
niceties and oh, what exactly werethe words and what's the difference

(07:47):
between facilitate and effectuate?
None of that matters, because here'sthe key thing that has not happened: the
United States has not even said that, hasasked El Salvador for his return, period.
The end.
I'm sorry.
None of that had to do with state secrets,classified information, foreign policy.

(08:09):
If you wanna know the most limitedthing that the United States could do to
quote, "facilitate" unquote his return.
How about asking?
Are you telling me that the presidentof El Salvador can show up in the Oval
Office, that the President of the UnitedStates can talk about, oh, I need you to
build five more prisons because I wannaput Americans, if legal, in these prisons.

(08:33):
That we are paying by all reportedaccounts to have these people housed.
That we are both sending people andgetting people back when El Salvador
says, you know what, we won't take those.
And we are even sending Kristi Noemthere and she is able to do a sort
of promotional video, let's justsay a video in front of the jail.

(08:55):
That you're saying that somehowthe president can't even ask
and that wouldn't be honored.
That is cutting through all of this sortof oh, there, there conceivably could
be limits on what a court could order.
They're not even sayingthey asked for his return.
And obviously that wouldbe the end of this.
Because if they asked, it would happen.

(09:15):
Unless there was a wink to say, I'mgonna ask and I want you to say no.
Yep, that's right.
So that is why all ofthis is just such crap.
How's that for a legal term?
That the Supreme Court of the UnitedStates has said you are directed
to facilitate his return and they,the United States government, will
not even tell the district courtthat it has asked for his return.

(09:40):
Big picture.
A person is in jail, wrongfully.
The government has admitted not justin the District court, but the Supreme
Court papers from the government saidthey agreed that this was a mistake.
So he is there because of a UnitedStates mistake, and they will not
even say that they have asked for hisreturn after causing it themselves.

(10:04):
So the Alien EnemiesAct was enacted in 1798.
It was part of a suite of lawswhere every of the other laws that
were passed around those issues aslike America was very worried about
war between Britain and France.
All of the other acts passed aroundthat were eventually rescinded because

(10:25):
everybody looked at that moment and went,Ooh, that was a little bit tyrannical.
We may have gone too far there.
But the Alien Enemies Act stayed on thebooks and has been used very infrequently
since then, most recently in World War II,to remove Japanese and German nationals.
What the Trump administration has doneis say, one, we're using it again.

(10:46):
Two, we're using it not against thegovernment, but against a criminal
group, the Venezuelan gang Tren deAragua, which they argue is so enmeshed
with the government of Venezuela thatit constitutes a hybrid criminal state.
And three, saying that any Venezuelanman over the age of 14 who they deem

(11:08):
to be a member of Tren de Aragua canbe removed under the Alien Enemies
Act without any of the process thatis set out in actual immigration law.
Under immigration law, you have theability to make your case before a judge
to demonstrate that you qualify forsome form of relief, such as asylum, if
that applies to you, and the governmenthas to prove that you can be removed.

(11:33):
They say, no, no, no, no, becausethis law existed before any of that.
We don't have to go throughany of that process.
That is their interpretation ofthe law, and that's what they
were doing when they put people onplanes and sent them to El Salvador.
What has been litigated and, witha Supreme Court order on Monday
night, where we are right now,is that the courts have said no.

(11:57):
It is illegal to use the AlienEnemies Act to remove people
with no process whatsoever.
But the Supreme Court says if peoplewant to challenge their removal under
the Alien Enemies Act, they need todo it through what are called habeas
claims, which is not the way thatthe initial court case was brought.

(12:19):
So in theory right now, we're in a worldwhere someone hypothetically could be
removed under the Alien Enemies Act, buthow that's going to work in practice is a
little bit unclear, because it would haveto be a different process than the one the
Trump administration used in mid-March.
And what we're actually seeing is likeeven in the hours before you and I

(12:41):
are speaking, that judges have startedto receive lawsuits filed under these
habeas claims and have started saying,yeah, you can't remove people under
this act, through this either, right?
So it's really changing very quicklyon the ground, and part of that's the
result of this 200 plus year-old lawbeing used in a manner in which it's

(13:02):
never been used before, and with verylittle transparency as to what the
administration wants to do with it.
It seems important to say, as you doin a piece that you wrote, that the
Alien Enemies Act sidesteps immigrationlaw because it's being presented
as kind of part of immigration law.

(13:22):
But the, one of the key things about it isthat it takes us outside of laws that have
been instituted to deal with immigration.
Yeah?
I compare this to when the Trumpadministration after the beginning of the
COVID pandemic, used Title 42, which isa public health law, to essentially seal
the US-Mexico border from asylum seekers.

(13:44):
In that case, they were taking a lawfrom outside of immigration that had been
enacted before the modern immigrationsystem and saying, because this law
doesn't explicitly say immigration lawis in effect, we can create this separate
pathway that we can use to -- that wecan treat immigrants under this law
without having to give them any of therights guaranteed under immigration law.

(14:08):
They're doing the same thing with this,saying because this law that is on the
books doesn't refer to the Immigrationand Nationality Act, which was passed
a century and a half later, we don'tneed to adhere to anything that was
since put in to, say, comply with theRefugee Convention, to comply with the
International Convention Against Torture.

(14:29):
All of these structures that havecome into place as people have
started to care about human rightsand not sending people to torture or
persecution, they're now saying theydon't have to bother with because they
weren't thinking about them in 1798.
Right.
And it brings us to, folks for manyyears on many issues have been saying,

(14:49):
well, it's not legal, so it's all gonnabe fixed, 'cause the law's gonna step
in and fix it, 'cause it's not legal.
And I think you're referring tothe fluidity and the importance
of the invocation of law.
It's not like it just existsand you bring it down to bear.
It's fought terrain.

(15:09):
Yeah?
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
It's, contested.
And when we say contested, like it reallyis being fought out in the courts as
we speak, because the administrationis using its authority, the fact
that it is the federal government.
And litigators are saying, pleasepoint to us in the law where you can do

(15:31):
that, or demonstrate to us that you areadhering it all to what we think of as
fairly basic constitutional protections,like due process, like the right to
know what you're being detained for.
What is legal is, ultimately,what the courts decide, but how
they rule on this is very unclear.
And to be fully honest, the government'sinsistence on giving very little

(15:56):
information and in conceding very little,even in cases like Mr. Abrego Garcia's,
whereas you say they've said there wasa mistake made, makes it a little bit
harder to understand what it would evenlook like to say a government that's
been so truculent and so resistantis in fact operating under the law.

(16:17):
And so was Steven Miller's takeduring that same Oval Office
meeting on the administration'ssupposedly unanimous win at SCOTUS.
So during that meeting, Miller, who ofcourse is one of the president's key
advisors on immigration policy, offeredhis hot take on the Supreme Court's
disposition of the Abrego Garcia case.

(16:38):
So you will recall, listeners, asMelissa just said, Kilmar Abrego Garcia
was erroneously -- the governmentadmits erroneously -- expelled
to an El Salvadoran mega prison.
A district court ordered theadministration to take steps to return
Abrego Garcia to the United States.
The government appealed, arguing thatthe district court's order constituted

(16:59):
an impermissible attempt by the judiciaryto interfere with the president's
power to conduct foreign policy.
As we discussed on last week's episode,the Supreme Court then weighed in
to say that while the district courtcannot dictate American foreign
policy, it does have the authority tocorrect legal wrongs, including the
erroneous rendition to El Salvador of anindividual an earlier immigration court

(17:22):
specifically said could not be deportedto El Salvador because of the likelihood
of the danger he would face there.
So the Supreme Court, in a unanimousdecision, ordered the administration
to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return.
There were no noted dissents.
Peewee German, however, hadhis own hot take of the court's
disposition of the case.

(17:42):
I don't know, maybe he translated it toGerman and things came up a little fuzzy.
But you can take a listen to that here.
There's a nine zero
in our favor, against the District courtruling saying that no district court
has the power to compel the foreignpolicy function of the United States.
As Pam said, the ruling solely stated thatif this individual at El Salvador's sole

(18:04):
discretion was sent back to our country,that we could deport him a second time.
The guy literally alchemizeddefeat into victory.
Incredible.
For weeks, folks have been wonderingwhether the administration is going
to openly defy the Supreme Court.
I don't think we'd anticipated thatinstead of open defiance, we get
magical thinking instead, where theyjust declared the Supreme Court had

(18:25):
said the opposite of what they did andtherefore they are in compliance with
whatever they say the Supreme Court did.
So that's the scene.
And now we want to go to the judges.
So Judge Boasberg told theadministration that he is not the one.
Judge Boasberg went offon the administration.
So pull up a chair.
Recall that Judge Boasberg is the districtcourt judge who presided over the original

(18:47):
lawsuit, alleging that the administration,under the auspices of the Alien Enemies
Act, was rendering Venezuelan migrantsto El Salvador without any due process,
on the view that the migrants weremembers of the Tren de Aragua gang.
Judge Boasberg, not surprisingly, giventhis Constitution thing we supposedly got,
was appalled that none of the migrantswere given a hearing or any other process

(19:08):
to challenge the administration's claims.
So he told the administration to returnthe planes that had departed for El
Salvador, and the administration'sresponse was basically, Make me, bitch.
And then Judge Boasberg was like, excuseyou, the fuck you think you're talking to?
He would like to know why theadministration thinks it doesn't
have to offer these migrants any kindof due process, and why it believes

(19:31):
it can give him, or any other judgefor that matter, the middle finger.
Now, ultimately, as we know, the SupremeCourt got their hands on this case, and
the court issued a very narrow proceduralruling that concluded that the case had
been improperly filed in the districtof the District of Columbia, and that
instead it ought to have been filed in thedistrict where the migrants were detained
before their departure to El Salvador.

(19:53):
So that is in Texas.
And that the challenges then shouldhave proceeded as habeas petitions
in the Texas district court.
And so the administration was thenlike, so I guess we're done here.
And Judge Boasberg, who's obviouslybeen catching up on the last season
of Hacks, was like, no bitch.
Let's begin.

(20:14):
So last Wednesday, judge Boasberg issueda 46-page ruling in which he threatened
to initiate criminal contempt proceedingsunless the administration answered his
questions about why it refused to providedue process to the migrants and why
the administration ignored his order toturn the plane and the migrants around.
And the cherry on top was that he laid outan entire plan for how this would proceed.

(20:39):
Stunt on these hoes, queen!
I love that we are like standing BrettKavanaugh's law school housemate.
These are bleak times, Melissa.
Bleak times.
Join our sorority.
I have no idea what kind of relationshiphe has with Brett Kavanaugh and I
have no idea, I don't know reallyanything about Judge Boasberg.
I've never met him.
But I do think he is rising to the moment.
And he must know that they are goingto fight him tooth and nail and he is

(21:03):
writing for history and not holdingback about how egregious this conduct
is, and he is acting as though theConstitution and the law still matter.
And I think that matters a lot.
So he obviously has masculine energy.
The only one of these foolsright now who does, who seems to.
Stuck on these hoes, king.
He's actually a tallking, not a short king.

(21:25):
There you go.
He's turning tall.
That's true.
Yeah.
So, okay, here isbasically what he laid out.
He wants sworn declarations fromadministration officials in order to
determine who was responsible for makingthe decisions about due process and
ignoring his early orders in the case.
In terms of who was responsible, Ithink we have a hunch it was Peewee
German in the study with whatever pen.

(21:46):
So if that didn't work, then hewas going to refer the matter to
the Department of Justice, whichcould then file criminal charges.
Spoiler alert, that's not gonna happen.
Pamela Joe Bondi is like, no.
Yeah, absolutely not.
Well, another option the administrationhas is, as Judge Boasberg note, to
basically cure any contempt by returningthe individuals from El Salvador, acting

(22:10):
as though they actually complied withhis order and turned the planes around.
But as Melissa noted, thereis a possibility that Pamela
Joe Bondi would elect not toprosecute any contempt, very faint
Possibility, very, very faint.
Just being very generous here, thatshe would elect not to bring criminal

(22:34):
contempt charges for contempt of federalcourt order, in which case Judge Boasberg
noted there was a possibility that hecould exercise his authority under the
relevant rules to appoint an outsideprosecutor to prosecute the case.
Now, this has been done before.
Judges have appointed lawyersto prosecute contempt cases.

(22:55):
This happened in the Donzinger casethat went up to the Supreme Court
where there was a constitutionalchallenge to the lawfulness of having
private attorneys appointed by a judgeto prosecute these kinds of cases.
The Supreme Court elected notto take up that case, although
Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaughindicated they would have done so.

(23:16):
Should also note that even if thathappened, that is even if a private
attorney launched a successfulprosecution of criminal contempt of a
court order, criminal contempt of federalcourt orders is a pardonable offense.
And in fact, Donald Trump has pardonedpeople who were convicted of contempt
of federal court orders, duringthe first Trump administration.

(23:39):
That individual who benefitedfrom that: Joe Arpaio.
Can I just say, there are definitelyconstitutional questions, at
least on this court's sort ofview of executive power about the
permissibility of outside prosecutors.
There's certainly this, pardon question.
And to my mind, none of that is anyreason for Boasberg not to proceed
under the law as it currently standsand appoint an outside prosecutor.

(24:02):
And if the Supreme Court wantsto find that's impermissible,
let it be, or if the presidentwants to pardon, let him do that.
But don't do their work for them.
Totally agree.
One of the things I do in my bookis show the human conditions that
create gangs and gang members.
I was a part of a small clique in SanFrancisco, nothing like the really
hardcore gangs either here in theUS like the Mexican Mafia and other

(24:27):
gangs, Crips and Bloods, and MS 13 and18th Street in El Salvador, which are
structures based on US style gangs.
I found friendship and communityin a little clique that was mostly
nonviolent except at different moments.
We were involved in drugs and otherstuff, but we were not the hardened

(24:51):
heavy weapon wielding gangs of today.
And so I've started working with gangsin the 90s in, in LA where the gangs
were born, MS 13 and 18th Street.
And, 13 for example, is the letterM is the number of the letter M that
the Salvadorian gangs who were being,before they were gangs, they were being

(25:15):
bullied and beaten by larger mostlyBlack gangs in South LA and decided to
start arming themselves with machetes.
And then journalists like Lisa Lingstarted noticing that these gangs had
machetes instead of guns and startedlabeling them as extremely violent.

(25:38):
Then the gangs took on the more familiartattooed faces, tattooed bodies, and
more heavily armed gang structuresand culture that we know today.
So I've watched as the US localand then federal governments have

(25:59):
started taking interest in thesegangs, and the project has been
bipartisan, Democrat and Republican.
They've both escalated and usedthe gangs to legitimate, initially,
local policing of young people.
Now you're seeing itbecome this terrorist...

(26:19):
Federalized.
... that Lisa Ling started calling MS13 the most dangerous gang in the
world, even though you never have anystatistical basis to prove any gang
is the most violent in the world.
It's ridiculous.
In fact, in 2019 when Trump startedusing the word terrorist as applied to

(26:42):
Salvadoran gangs, and then as Bukele waselected that same year, he starts using
the term aggressively, and you see how the"terrorist" word is being thrown around.
I started interviewing cops, police in SanFrancisco and other cities and found out,

(27:02):
for example, that in 2019 you had threewhite men wielding semi-automatic weapons.
These three white men killed morepeople in 2019 than the allegedly
10,000 MS. 13 and 18th Streetgang members in the US combined.
So lemme repeat that.

(27:23):
Three white men with semi-automaticweapons killed more people in 2019 than
all of the 10,000 MS 13 and 18th Streetgang members in the United States.
This is the degree to which the mediadisplay you're seeing in the meeting
between Bukele and Trump is entirelypolitical theater on steroids.

(27:47):
And frankly, as you alluded to, theexplosion of tactics that have been long
used against Latino and Black, young menin cities in this country—gang databases—
now being basically used at the federallevel where, if you're somebody who's
from a specific area of Venezuela or ifyou're from El Salvador and you may know

(28:12):
somebody or have been in a communitywith somebody who's in one of these gangs
that they trump up, not to use a pun,as more dangerous than they are, that
that basically classifies you as a partof some broader criminal organization.
And now not just criminalaccording to this far-right
Trump administration, terrorist.

(28:35):
Yeah.
The franchise of criminalization andnow terrorization of different groups
of people is well underway and it's thebiggest, most dangerous thing that's
coming out of the Trump/Bukele meeting.
It's telling, for example, that duringthe meeting today Bukele said, and
I quote, "sometimes they say that weimprisoned thousands. I like to say

(28:57):
that we actually liberated millions."And Trump replies, "who gave him that
line? Do you think I could use that?"
And so, the meeting reflects, Ithink, the expansion of the local,
national, hemispheric, and globalenterprise of terrorization of

(29:19):
increasing numbers of groups.
You start off with the lowest hangingviolent fruit, like the gangs, and they
are violent and some of them are murders.
Most of 'em are not.
Most of the gang members are not murders.
Otherwise, you'd have over10,000 deaths in MS 13 in the US,
when you have an insignificantnumber statistically doing that.

(29:41):
So, you start off with gangs, then youextend it to immigrants generally, as
you see Stephen Miller's career, growingand Trump's own election built on that.
And then you extend it to, like inEl Salvador, journalists dealing with
gangs have been arrested, harassed,persecuted, some even exiled.

(30:04):
And then you extend it to activists.
You start using the word activists totalk about, like you're talking about the
Palestinian activist in Columbia or theTurkish woman who was arrested at Tufts.
Or, Mr. Abrego Garcia, who is still inthe CECOT gulag that Bukele just built.

(30:29):
All of these Im immigrantsare now illustrations of how
the franchise is extending.
But make no mistake coming your waysoon is the franchise of terrorization
to those of us that are citizens.
It's already afoot.
Trump is already talking about deportingcitizens to El Salvador, US citizens.

(30:52):
And this is where my experience firstgrowing up in pre techno fascist Bay
Area, and then as a journalist who'sreported on electronic surveillance
that, as I watched it go from the analogindustrial age to the digital age of
surveillance, has taught me that peoplelike Bukele are digital dictators.

(31:12):
We're in the age of digital dictatorshipand the industrial age structures
of, like my former comrades in theFMLN, could not defeat the digital
dictatorship model of Bukele, and sowe have to upgrade our social movements
for the digital age if we are to fightpeople like Bukele, who has benefited

(31:34):
from CIA trained Venezuelan assets,who became consultants to Bukele and
helped him manufacture this bizarre anddangerous reality in El Salvador, that,
that has large segments of the populussupporting him in their desperation.
This week on 60 minutes, wereported on the 238 Venezuelan

(31:57):
migrants who were deported fromthe United States three weeks ago.
They were flown from Texas to anotorious maximum security prison in
El Salvador, where they're being heldas part of an agreement with that
country's president, Nayib Bukele.
The Trump administration claimsthat all of these men are
terrorists and violent gang members.
But we could not find criminal records foran overwhelming majority of the prisoners.

(32:23):
Photojournalist.
Philip Holsinger has been workingin El Salvador for more than a year.
He's been to some of the country's largestprisons, interviewing and photographing
inmates swept up in the Salvadorangovernment's controversial crackdown
on violent criminal gangs, like MS 13.
But the most notorious by far isthe Terrorism Confinement Center

(32:44):
known as CECOT, where the Venezuelanmigrants deported from the United
States are currently being held.
Life in the cell in CECOT isthe definition of austerity.
The bunks are steel.
There are no blankets.
There are no pillows.
There's nothing, it's just a slab ofmetal, and that's where you sleep.

(33:06):
There are no books.
There's no television.
Zero outside communication.
Nothing goes out, nothing comes in.
There's 24 hour surveillance.
No misbehaving, no talking.
The first time I visited CECOTI was shocked by the silence.
The silence is whatreally got under my skin,

(33:31):
and it's like a church.
When the planes carrying the Venezuelanmigrants arrived in El Salvador,
Holsinger was waiting on the tarmac.
He photographed the men as they wereshackled, shaved, and stripped, capturing
their transformation into CECOT inmates.
Holsinger wrote about the experiencein an article for Time Magazine.

(33:54):
Some of those photos have beenpublished or televised elsewhere,
but most of what he shared with 60Minutes has never been seen before.
As soon as they came to thedoor, they're greeted by a sea of
black-clade masked police in riot gear.
This is a typical face of the Venezuelans.
These are eyes that areasking lots of questions.

(34:16):
"Where am I?" "What's happening?""What's gonna happen to me?"
A lot of fear in these faces.
Their appearance was differentthan anything I had seen.
Literally, like they'djust come off the street.
They were all in nice clothes.
They moved them fast and hard,and they intentionally want them
to feel that they're powerless.

(34:38):
They grab them in the neck,march 'em down the stairs, and
it's rapid and fast and painful.
These guys were not allowed to be makingeye contact or looking, and the guard
came and grabbed his head and forced hishead down to tell him, you're not allowed
to be looking up and looking around.

(34:58):
And then they go right into a roomwhere they shave everybody's head
and they don't shave their heads.
tenderly.
The guards are just, "fast, fast,fast! Rápido, rápido, rápido, rápido!".
So some of them are nicking their heads.
This man really grabbed my attention.
He may be a criminal, he may beinnocent, he may be a father.

(35:19):
I don't know his story atall, but I know his eyes.
He didn't fight.
Hopelessness just gave in.
One of the Venezuelans who caughtHolsinger attention was this man,
who 60 Minutes has now identifiedas Andry Hernández Romero.
Andry's lawyer told us he is a 31-year-oldgay man and makeup artist with no criminal

(35:40):
record in the United States or Venezuela.
So this is a young man that I hadfollowed from the bus who was exclaiming
that he was soy gay and saying thathe was innocent and he was being
slapped every time he would speakup, but he couldn't help himself.
Then he started praying and callingout, literally crying for his mother.

(36:03):
His crying out for hismother really, touched me.
You can see in this photograph,the hair it's not cleanly
shaved, he's got patches of hair.
He's grimacing.
These guys were in pain.
This is a standard body posture thatanybody in CECOT will be trained in.
And in this case, they're handcuffed,but when they're not handcuffed,

(36:25):
they literally tie their bodiestogether so that a few guards
can control a mass of people.
This posture is a verydifficult and painful posture.
Right before they go into the scanto be taken to their cells, they're
pushed all the way to the ground.
I mean, some of them are really hurting.
As he took the last few photographsbefore the Venezuelans were transported

(36:47):
to their cells, Holsinger said he felthe had watched these men become ghosts.
They've been stripped of theirhair and their clothes, and they
don't know where they're going.
All of their personality was gone.
Your life just ceased to exist.
You're just a person in white clothes now.
And I had this sort of sense ofI'm watching these guys disappear.

(37:10):
Who is this Bukele guy?
He's 43 years old.
He claims, he claims!
he's the youngest dictator in the world.
He calls himself theworld's coolest dictator.
He likes to wear Aviator sunglasses.
He likes to produce rap videosof prisoners being tortured.
In 2019, he was elected to thepresidency based on a promise to

(37:31):
end gang violence and corruption.
And he did.
The homicides dropped from 103 per 100,000down to 2.4, that was in 2015, to a
record low of 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023.
So he has an 80% approval rating for doingthat across the country of El Salvador.
But the miracle came at a staggering cost.

(37:53):
He didn't eradicate crime throughsolving problems that fester
crime, like poverty, he eradicatedcrime by dismantling democracy.
This from a piece by DeanBlundell over at Substack.
"...he scrapped due process. Heinstilled paralyzing fear in El
Salvador's 6.3 million people...he'sa textbook authoritarian."

(38:15):
This is just amazing stuff.
This is the guy that DonaldTrump was slobbering all over
yesterday in the White House.
"Since declaring a state of emergencyin March of 2022, Bukele has arrested
over 85,000 people—roughly 1.6% ofthe population of his country—often
without warrants or evidence.
Human Rights Watch reports only a thousandconvictions, meaning tens of thousands of

(38:37):
innocent people are languishing in prison.
At least 261 have died in custody withcredible reports of torture, beatings,
and medical neglect." "The Center forConfinement of Terrorism, CECOT," this
is where these Americans are being held,"is not a rehabilitation facility.—it's
a pay for play concentration camp whereprisoners, including US Deportees,

(38:57):
are 'disappeared' into a judicialblack hole." writes Dean Blundell.
"CECOT opened in 2023...it's amega prison for 40,000 inmates.
Cells lack windows, ventilation ormattresses; prisoners sleep on bare metal,
eat twice daily, and endure 23 and ahalf hour lockdowns with only 30 minutes
of exercise in windowless corridors.

(39:18):
Human rights groups documentsystematic torture, scabies
starvation, beatings are rampant.
Cristosal, a Salvador and non-governmentalorganization, reports 367 deaths across
the prison system with families deniedinformation about their loved ones."
"Bukele's propaganda," hewrites, "glorifies this cruelty.
He posts slick videos of shackledinmates, heads bowed, escorted by armed

(39:42):
guards to a pulsating soundtrack—imagesstraight out of a dystopian thriller."
He took 261 US Deportees last month.
CBS News looked into themand they found 75% of these
deportees had no criminal record.
They committed no crime, andyet they are now trapped in

(40:03):
this brutal concentration camp.
And the definition, according to theUS Holocaust Museum, of a Concentration
camp is a prison beyond the rule of law.
A place where people are imprisonedwithout due process of law.
And that's exactly what he is running.
He is running a concentration campand we are sending people to it.

(40:24):
Dean Blundell writes, "like Stalin's laborCECOT uses prisoners for forced labor
to sustain itself with Bukele boasting'it's financially self-sufficient.'"
he puts some of them to work.
He says, "Like Mussolini, he projectsstrength through militarized displays,
replacing judges with loyalists." In2021, his party ousted the Supreme

(40:44):
Court Justices and the AttorneyGeneral and installed his loyalists.
He's jailed critics including hisformer security advisor who died in
custody in February of last year,allegedly after being tortured.
Politicians, judges, and journalists faceruthless and relentless intimidation.
Over 50 official and criticshave fled the country.

(41:06):
In 2020, he sent troops into thelegislature to strong arm approval of
a piece of legislation that he wanted.
His state of emergencysuspends fundamental rights.
No warrants, no lawyers,no contact with families.
Amnesty International reportsforced disappearances.
Women face sexual violence incustody, and families of detainees are
threatened with arrest for protesting.

(41:27):
He's also targeted minorities with reportsof arbitrary arrests of queer individuals.
In 2021, he fired all the judges,over 60, affecting 200 magistrates,
a third 33% of the judiciary.
His new judges rubber stamp his policieslike a mass trial of 900 people at once.
Yeah, that's due process for you.

(41:48):
His political opponents face trumpedup charges while business leaders
are squeezed for money and loyalty.
This is a country that has a30% poverty rate, which has not
improved since he became president.
Instead, they have the highestincarceration rate in the world.
Keep in mind that the United Statesis around 700 per hundred thousand,
as I recall, 650, something like that.

(42:09):
We are the highest in the developed world.
He is at 1600 per hundred thousand people.
He's got 109,000 people behindbars in this little tiny country.
Fear permeates societies, dissenters risk.
Families of the detained lived in dread.
Meanwhile, his wealth grows.
He now has 34 homes 34 propertiesthat he has acquired during his term.

(42:33):
And this is what strong mendo, they enrich themselves.
Donald Trump Jr. And MattGaetz, fawn over him.
Donald Trump Jr. attendedhis inauguration.
I'm telling you, thisis Trump's role model.
This is what Trump wants.
He wants to be a dictator.
And frankly, he is becoming one.
He is doing it right now,right in front of us.

(42:55):
Before this meeting began off therecord or off the mic, whatever you
wanna call it, Trump was overheardtelling Bukele that next up are the quote
unquote "homegrowns" or US citizens,people within the country that he is
planning on sending to El Salvador.
The audio for that is absolutelyterrible, but luckily, the President

(43:16):
of the United States of America wasasked a question about it and just went
ahead and said exactly what he wanted.
We also have homegrown criminals thatpush people into subways, that hit
elderly ladies on the back of the headwith a baseball bat when they're not
looking, that are absolute monsters.
I'd like to include them in thegroup of people to get 'em out of

(43:38):
the country, but you'll have to belooking at the laws on that, Steve.
Okay?
Okay.
Good.
Thought that was the wrong one.
Good.
Anyway.
No, it's it's awful.
And so what got basically thenews here is we've known that
Trump has wanted to do this.
We've now heard it in so many words.
He also confirmed that he, Pam Bondiand all of the people behind the Trump
administration are currently lookingat the laws and trying to figure

(44:01):
out how they might be able to do it.
Luckily for them, they don'tgive a shit about laws.
And currently with Kilmar Abrego Garcia-- who should not be in El Salvador, we
have no idea if he's okay or if anythingis going on -- they now have a court
order to return him and they say,Hey, we can't do anything about it.
And luckily, Bukele says he is notinterested in doing it, they're not
going to do anything about it anyway.
So who gives a shit about laws?

(44:22):
It's, this is now, again, wewere wondering whether this
is an authoritarian state.
This is an authoritarian state.
This is an authoritarian state.
Yeah.
And it's like you don'thave to look around.
They are now arguing that theSupreme Court did not tell them
to return him when they did, 9-0.
And they had to facilitate his return.
And the fact that they'retrying to parse what that means.

(44:42):
Steven Miller, he deserves to sit ona tack face up or and something worse.
But, the guy is, he's Goebbels,he is the modern day Goebbles.
He's a guy using Nazi techniquepropaganda, in order to try and,
completely lie to everything wherehe is basically trying to say that,
if he magically appeared in one ofour airports, then, of course we'd

(45:03):
have to allow him into our country.
But we can't do anything aboutgetting him out of the prison.
And then they ask Bukele, and hesays, well, I'm not going to deposit
a terrorist into your country.
That would be a terriblething that cannot be done.
Are you aware that in El Salvador withthis prison, there is no due process for
anybody that gets sent there when they're
-- Yeah, there's nothing.
There's absolutely nothing.

(45:23):
There's autocratic will,and that's everything.
Yeah.
It's a complete lawless state.
But here's a really horrible thing.
Imagine how bad conditions were inEl Salvador in terms of crime and
violence that people there want that.
They wanted this.
They are happy because now it isquote-unquote "safe." And the people
who were causing so much issues werelocked up without any due process.

(45:46):
So again, what percentage of peopleare in this prison who are El
Salvadorians, who are innocent?
I. We certainly know what the percentageis of people that we sent them there,
who don't have criminal records, is.
And so this is really, really frightening.
And what is staring Garcia in theface right now is a life sentence,
without any notion of any process.
No parole.

(46:08):
No visitors to this prison.
I, don't know what to make of thisbecause this is not supposed to happen.
You're supposed to at leastbe able to do something.
So is anybody gonna do anything?
So I, just wanna say, first ofall, you're assuming that, Kilmar
Abrego Garcia is still alive.
We don't know.
We don't have a clue.
We don't have a clue if anybodywho was sent there, and as you

(46:30):
pointed out in the past, 75% of thepeople who were rounded up in this
thing do not have criminal records.
We don't know if some of them have died.
We have no idea how many peoplehave died in El Salvador in
these prisons to begin with.
And that's one of the reasonswhy you shouldn't be in
business with people like this.
You shouldn't be creating a businesspartnership between the President of
the United States of America and anautocratic leader in another country.

(46:51):
And I wanna put that out there on therecord, because I've been seeing a
disturbing number of people, Nick, who aresaying, what does Bukele have on Trump?
Is Trump afraid to fightwith him and fight first?
No.
He's not afraid to fight with him.
They are in a mutually beneficialpartnership with each other.
They have created a perfectsituation to do something like this.

(47:13):
And it was on full displayin this presser, Nick.
Trump was like, well, I don'thave any control over this.
And Bukele's like, I don'thave any control over this.
Isn't it wild that the twoautocrats aren't able to do
anything about this whatsoever?
They have created these legalloopholes -- and I even hesitate
to say "legal" as an identifier.
They are legallessloopholes, is what it is.

(47:34):
They've studied this, figured itout, and figured out a way to move
beyond the jurisdiction of thecourts as they currently stand.
They have -- and by the way, we'vetalked about it for forever: when were
they going to start moving againstcourts and just simply not listening?
Here we are.
Period.
And they've already signaled what's comingnext with it, which is American citizens

(47:55):
-- American-born citizens being shipped outof the country for crimes based on what
the Trump administration decides to do.
And what did Trump say to Bukele?
He said, you're gonna need to buildlike five more of these prisons, which
goes ahead and lays bare what thisis, which is a mutually beneficial
economic partnership, which is privateprisons that are beyond the United

(48:16):
States of America in order for profitfor Bukele and others like him.
There's undoubtedly kickbackshappening in all of this.
Do not get me wrong, I have toimagine there's some laundering
that's taking place from whatthe US is paying El Salvador.
But also it's a politicaladvantage with this.
Bukele gains from being thepartner with Trump in all of this.

(48:37):
He gains more and more power and prestige.
And Trump has created the same thingthat we've talked about before, which
are rendition sites that took placeduring the War on Terror, where all of
this was pioneered and put into effect.
Now what do we have, Nick?
We have the beginnings of aconcentration camp situation.
And it's going to happen outside theborders of the United States of America.

(48:58):
And then there's going to be thosethat are going to be built here
because, as we talked about on theweekender, there is a $45 billion
project to create those infrastructures.
This is how all of this starts tocome together, and we're watching it.
And now is the time to understandwe have to fight against this,
before we can't fight anymore.
Senator Van Hollen, welcomeback to Democracy Now!
The huge news of the dayis the pope has died.

(49:23):
Two of his major issues — once again,just yesterday, Easter Sunday, calling
for a ceasefire in Gaza — you wentto the border there, deeply concerned
about Israel’s assault on Gaza — andhis deep concern for migrants.
You just came back from El Salvador,where you met with Abrego Garcia.

(49:43):
Why don’t we start there?
What exactly happened?
Well, Amy, I’m gladyou mentioned the pope.
We’re all going to miss him.
He was a pope for all of humanity,and Pope Francis was a beautiful soul.
So, when I met with Abrego Garcia, mymain purpose was to let him know that his

(50:06):
wife and his kids loved him and that theywere fighting for his return, and to let
him know that his sheet metal workers’union and millions of people in the United
States who believe in the Constitutionof the United States were fighting
for his return and for due process.

(50:28):
He spoke about the conditions that he hadexperienced, the trauma of having been
abducted off the streets of Maryland,trying to make a phone call from the
Baltimore detention center — it wasfrom Baltimore — without being allowed
to do that, and, of course, then endingup first in the notorious CECOT prison.

(50:52):
So, it was — it was, of course, emotionalto hear about the trauma he experienced.
I told him we were goingto keep fighting for him.
I met with the vice president ofEl Salvador and said, “You really
should not be complicit in this Trumpadministration illegal scheme.” And

(51:12):
so, we will keep fighting for hisconstitutional rights, because if we
deny the constitutional rights for oneperson, we threaten them for everybody.
So, can you tell us exactly whatKilmar said as you met at the hotel?
And how is it that you gotit totally turned around?

(51:33):
First, you were met by what?
El Salvadoran soldiers?
You were told you can’t to meet with him.
And then, just before youleft, they brought him out?
Well, first, I met with thevice president, and I asked if
I could meet with Abrego Garcia.
He said no.
I said, “If I come back next week, canI meet with Abrego Garcia?” He said no.

(51:54):
I asked if I could call Abrego Garcia.
He said no.
And so, the next day, I tried tovisit CECOT, which is this notorious
prison, and was stopped by soldiersthree kilometers short of the prison,
and they told me they had beenordered not to allow me to proceed.
I had a number of press conferences inEl Salvador with a lot of local press,

(52:19):
and I called out this sort of horrorof this person having been abducted and
denied his constitutional rights, and madethe point that El Salvador is violating
international law, because internationallaw requires that someone like Abrego
Garcia be able to make contact withfamily, with their lawyers, with others.

(52:43):
And so, as I was really preparingto leave on Thursday night, we got
a call saying that they had relentedand that I could sit down with him.
And in my conversation, whichlasted probably over 40 minutes, we
covered a lot of things, from hisabduction to the conditions he was

(53:06):
experiencing and many other things.
So it’s hard to sort of capture allof that, but the bottom line was he
had been traumatized by what happened.
He said it was his family,thinking of his family, that
gave him the strength to go on.
And I think the fact that he had learnedfor the first time that people in America

(53:29):
were fighting for his constitutionalrights also gave him additional strength.
I want you to explain how muchmoney Bukele is getting, this
country of El Salvador is getting,for imprisoning hundreds of men.
We don’t know what their crimeis, if there’s any crime at all.
But Bukele said on social media aboutyour meeting, “Now that he’s been

(53:51):
confirmed healthy, he gets the honorof staying in El Salvador’s custody.”
He also wrote, “Kilmar Abrego Garcia,miraculously risen from the 'death
camps' & 'torture'” — obviouslymocking — he goes on to say, “now sipping
margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen inthe tropical paradise of El Salvador!”
You have called this margarita-gate.

(54:13):
Can you explain what happenedand Bukele’s, to say the
least, cynical remark?
Well, sure.
This was — it shows how far Bukeleand Trump will go to deceive
people and try to change the story,because what happened was this.
When I first sat down with KilmarAbrego Garcia, if you look at the

(54:36):
original — the first photos, you’ll seea glass of water and a cup of coffee.
As we were speaking, the governmentfolks, Bukele’s folks, ordered the
waiters to bring these two glasses thatwere filled with liquid, looked like
margaritas, because they had either saltor sugar or something around the rim.

(54:59):
We, of course, did not order them.
They brought them to the table.
If you looked at the one in Kilmar’sglass, the liquid was actually
lower than mine to try to create theappearance that he actually drank it.
All of this is a deception.
As I pointed out, if you were reallySherlock Holmes, you would see that the

(55:19):
sugar or salt or whatever it was aroundthe rim, that there was no gap in it,
so, obviously, no one had had a sip.
But this goes to the big lie being toldby Bukele and Trump and others to try to
create the impression that this person,who was in one of the most notorious
prisons in El Salvador and now is stillvery much in detention and in a news

(55:43):
blackout, is somehow being treated fairly.
So, these are the lengths theywill go, Amy, to try to create
this deception, this illusion.
They actually wanted to have themeeting by the pool of the hotel.
We negotiated away from that.
But it was pretty clear whattheir plan for deception was.

(56:05):
And, you know, I think they reallybungled it, because they did it in
such a blatant way that I’m tellingyou what happened, and we’re calling
it out, and what it demonstratesis what a big lie they will tell.
I know you have to go.
Fifteen seconds.
How do you see Kilmar coming home?

(56:26):
What is your demand?
And why is this soimportant to you, Senator?
So, two things.
Number one, when you have the Trumpadministration flagrantly violating
court orders, I do think at some pointthe court is going to have to find
the Trump administration lawyers incontempt and sanction them, number one.

(56:50):
Number two, we need to keeppressure on El Salvador.
I’m going to be talking later today tosome officials in the state of Maryland.
You know, El Salvador has seenmore American tourists going there.
My view is that American touristsshould not be visiting El Salvador when
they’re participating in this illegalscheme with the Trump administration.

(57:10):
State pension funds can look to seewhether they want to divest from any
companies doing business in El Salvador.
So there are ways to putpressure on El Salvador here.
And the reason this is all sovery important is because when
you deny constitutional rights toone person, you are threatening

(57:33):
them for every single one of us.
That’s why this case is so important.
If the Trump administration gets awaywith violating his constitutional rights
and violating constitutional orders — Imean, court orders, you know, we are
already in a constitutional crisis,but it’s getting worse by the day.

(57:55):
We've just heard clips, startingwith Main Justice discussing the
Supreme Court's ruling requiringthe US government to facilitate
the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia.
CounterSpin focused on the AlienEnemies Act of 1798, its rare
historical use, and ongoing legalbattles over its constitutionality.
Strict Scrutiny discussed StephenMiller's misleading interpretation

(58:17):
of the Supreme Court's unanimousruling on the Abrego Garcia case.
The Majority Report explored thehistorical and political factors
influencing the evolution of gangs andthe bipartisan efforts to criminalize
and label them as terrorists.
60 Minutes detailed photojournalistPhillip Sing's harrowing observations of
Venezuela migrants held in El Salvador'sharsh terrorism confinement center.

(58:41):
Thom Hartmann dissected the alarmingrise of the 43-year-old self-proclaimed
"world's coolest dictator" in El Salvador.
The Muckrake Political Podcastdiscussed Trump's overheard plans to
deport US citizens to El Salvador.
On Democracy Now!, Senator VanHolland reflected on the Pope's
recent death, the Gaza ceasefireand his visit to El Salvador.

(59:03):
And those were just the Top Takes.
There's a lot more inthe Deeper Dive sections.
But first, a reminder that this showis produced with the support of our
members who get this show ad free aswell as early and ad free access to our
freshly launched other show, SOLVED!
(that's all caps with an exclamationpoint), which features our team of
producers discussing a carefullycurated selection of articles and
ideas to then solve some of the biggestissues of our day In each episode.

(59:28):
Members get the podcast of SOLVED!
first each week with an additionalmembers-only backstage segment, but
we're also posting the show on theBest of the Left YouTube channel.
To support all of the work that goesinto Best of the Left and have SOLVED!
delivered seamlessly to the newmembers-only podcast feed that you'll
receive, sign up to support theshow at BestOfTheLeft.Com/Support
(there's a link in the show notes),through our Patreon page, or from

(59:50):
right inside the Apple Podcast app.
And as always, if regular membership isn'tin the cards for you, shoot me an email,
request any financial hardship membershipbecause we don't let a lack of funds stand
in the way of hearing more information.
If If you have a question or wouldlike your comments included on the
show, you can leave a voicemailor send us a text at 202-999-3991.

(01:00:11):
We're also on the infamous Signal app atthe handle bestoftheleft.01, or you can
simply email me to Jay@BestOfTheLeft.Com.
Now as for today's topic, justa quick note about seeing some
light in the otherwise absolutebleakness of this moment.
In fact, it's actually becoming a bitof a very dark running joke on SOLVED!

(01:00:33):
for one or the other of us to sharesomething that we've personally
been taking heart in, only to be metwith horrified stares from the rest.
And we don't do it joking, like we'reactually taking genuine, positive
feelings from some very dark stuff,but it doesn't always translate.
So that may happen againtoday, but here goes.

(01:00:56):
I already congratulatedProducer Deon on SOLVED!
for this, but there'seven more to add today.
He asked on a recent episode ifthe term Kafkaesque was in general
usage these days, and none of ushad really heard it used much, but
agreed that it was due for a comeback.
Then as if on cue, theexample started arriving.

(01:01:17):
The first from a judge in a courttranscript who said, quote, "Do you
realize that this is Kafkaesque?
I've got two experienced immigrationlawyers on behalf of a client who is
months away from graduation, who has donenothing wrong, who has been terminated
from a system that you all keep telling mehas no effect on his immigration status,

(01:01:38):
although that clearly is BS, and nowhis two very experienced lawyers can't
even tell him whether or not he's herelegally, because the court can't tell
him whether or not he's here legally,because the government's counsel can't
tell him if he's here legally." End quote.
And then the second example justcame up from Michelle Goldberg in

(01:02:00):
the New York Times who said, quote,"I understand why Kilmar Abrego
Garcia has become the face of DonaldTrump's monstrous policy of sending
migrants to a gulag in El Salvador.
In a court filing, the administration'sown lawyers initially admitted that
his deportation was an administrativeerror, and the White House has
been disregarding a Supreme Courtruling to facilitate his return.

(01:02:23):
Abrego Garcia's case wasboth a human tragedy and an
incipient constitutional crisis.
His Kafkaesque predicament is a starkillustration of what it means to be
stripped of the law's protection, andthus a warning for us all." End quote.
So by now you're starting to getthe gist of the sort of stuff we've

(01:02:44):
been taking comfort from recently.
Obviously none of this is a sign thatthings are getting better, only that
people are using language appropriateto the occasion, which, in a case
like this, you take is a good sign.
I guess.
Now I'm not one to get terribly excitedabout polling data in relation to
an administration that cares not atall about their popularity, because

(01:03:07):
I don't believe that they're tankingapproval ratings, which are happening,
or headlines like this one from the AP,quote, "Immigration is Trump's strongest
issue, but many say he's gone too far, anew AP poll finds" will have any impact
on Trump's governing or legal strategy.
But at least what this all points tois that, as monstrous as some of our

(01:03:30):
fellow citizens are in taking perversepleasure in the suffering of immigrants
they wish expelled from the country,they are not the majority by a long shot.
And when faced with the realities ofTrump's government, lawyers attempting
to make his actions fit within somethingresembling the law, there is no more
appropriate term to describe the situationthan Kafkaesque, which Merriam Webster

(01:03:53):
defines as "having a nightmarishlycomplex, bizarre, or illogical quality."
Nailed it.
Now, we also talked recently on SOLVED!
about the nature of people to eitherforget or romanticize periods of the
past, when they are long ago enough thatthey cannot be remembered firsthand.

(01:04:15):
For instance, the inability of mostpeople to remember the time before
wildly successful vaccines is helpingdrive a disastrously dangerous desire
to go back to a sort of pre-vaccine eraimagined to be more pure and healthy.
Similarly, Americans have been extremelycomfortable for a very long time living

(01:04:36):
in a society with people in governmentwho, despite other disagreements,
all basically believed in thesanctity of law and democracy itself.
I mean, Richard Nixon was a majoroutlier, and the bipartisan response
against him was something we reallycouldn't imagine happening today.
It was that sense of comfort, that lack ofinstitutional memory about the dangers of

(01:04:58):
those who would happily ignore the law inpursuit of their own aims, that has helped
elect and reelect the most blatantlylawless president we've ever had.
So there's not that much positiveto look to, other than the evidence
that many are seeing clearly what ishappening and are horrified by it.
And the distinct possibility thatwitnessing these horrors today may

(01:05:21):
somewhat inoculate us as a societyagainst this kind of hate-driven
politics, at least for a while.
The fallout will continue to beterrible and last long into the future.
Not unlike the projection that I justsaw, that measles is on track to,
again, become endemic in the country,killing hundreds of thousands in

(01:05:42):
the coming decades, if vaccinationlevels remain at their current rate.
But in both cases, living throughthe political horrors of the Trump
era and the medical horrors of theanti-vax movement will undoubtedly
create a backlash that pulls usback in a more thoughtful direction.
it may not sound allthat positive right now.
But you know, that's just what passesfor positivity in these particular

(01:06:06):
days that we're living through.
And now we'll continue to divedeeper on four topics today.
Next up, section A. Deportation practicesfollowed by Section B, victims of the
regime, section C, Venezuela and ElSalvador, and Section D resistance.
Could you just remind us of where weare in this case and what exactly did
Judge Zinis order the government to do?

(01:06:27):
The judge originallyordered for two items.
First for the government tofacilitate Abrego Garcia's
release and return from seko.
This is the mega prison in El Salvador.
The White House has said that hisdeportation was an administrative error.
Second, to ensure that if he is broughtback to the US his immigration case.
Due process within immigration courtsDuring Tuesday's hearing, judge

(01:06:50):
Zinis said that she had receivedinformation of little value on what
had been done to fulfill any of this.
So she granted a request from AbregoGarcia's lawyers for the government.
Team to undergo a processcalled expedited discovery.
This means that government officialsfrom Homeland Security, immigration,
and Customs Enforcement andState will be deposed under oath.

(01:07:11):
She gave both sides two weeks tocomplete the discovery process.
Did the judge say why she's grantingthis expedited discovery process?
She said that this would be donespecifically to determine whether
the government is abiding by heroriginal court order, whether they
intend to abide by it, and if not,whether that's in good or bad faith.

(01:07:32):
How did the government respond?
The administration has so farcontinued to argue that it cannot
force another government to extraditesomeone that they're holding.
Back to the US on Tuesday.
Drew en signed the lawyerfor the Justice Department.
Also brought up two documents.
One was a status report onwhere the DOJ stands on bringing
Abrego Garcia back to the us.

(01:07:52):
In this, A DHS official said that AbregoGarcia could be let in through a legal
port of entry, but that if he did arrive,DHS would either move to deport him to
a third country or back to El Salvador.
Anyways, na Zini said that this wasalready getting too far ahead since.
The government hasn't shown that ithas facilitated his return at all.

(01:08:14):
And sign then pointed to the OvalOffice press conference transcript
from Monday during which Trump metwith Salvadoran President Nale.
Both leaders said that they didn'thave the power to return him, but
to that zine said that those answersthat EN Z is pointing to during
this press conference would not beconsidered responsive in a court of law.
So let's talk a bit aboutthe stakes of this case.

(01:08:36):
I mean.
For example, what have we learnedabout the relationship between
the president and the courts?
The takeaway from Tuesday'shearing is that this is another
judge growing, frustrated with theadministration's answers on what it's
doing in response to court orders.
But the administration has ina way, set up for many of these
policy debates to take place.
In the courts and even maketheir way up to the Supreme
Court as we've seen in this case.

(01:08:57):
But not every decision is gonnago the administration's way.
So we have continued to see thatthere's also a growing tension between
the courts and the administration.
And you know, on Monday in frontof El Salvador's leader, Trump
criticized the quote, liberaljudges that are blocking his agenda.
This is of course, not new as he'spreviously criticized, those who have
issued orders against his immigrationdirectives, especially those related

(01:09:20):
to the flights, to El Salvador.
Let's back up a second though.
And, and Kate, I think you're sortof gesturing toward this in, in your
comment, but we have a federal judgewho is issuing an order finding probable
cause that the government was in criminalcontempt of that judge's order and
that they willfully disregarded it.
And that is a big, huge deal, right?
Yeah.
So I mean, we're talkingabout practicalities now.

(01:09:41):
What happens next?
Predictably, the government has saidthat it's going to appeal this, um,
it's my understanding that it's notappealable, but that might not stop the
Supreme Court from intervening here.
So, you know, put a pin in it.
We will see.
But Judge Boberg gave the governmentthe option to cure contempt by simply
returning those individuals that ithad expelled in violation of his order.

(01:10:05):
He also instructed the government toidentify the individual who gave the
relevant directives to ignore hisorders and not return the planes.
So.
There are things that thegovernment can do and, and
maybe they're pretty easy to do.
I mean, he is not askingfor a kidney here.
He's just like, let me knowwho put you up to this.
Let turn the planes around, fixit, or we can play hardball.

(01:10:26):
We can do this the easy way, orwe can do this a hard way and
that's a big deal.
Yeah,
we said the fact that an order offinding probable cause for contempt isn't
appealable, might not stop the SupremeCourt, and it certainly doesn't seem like
it's gonna stop the DC circuit, a two toone DC circuit panel with the two being
Trump appointees issued an administrativestay of Judge Berg's order finding

(01:10:48):
probable cause for criminal contempt.
Please note that Judge Berg's orderdid not find anyone in particular
in contempt and it contemplatedfurther proceedings before the
court would actually do anything.
That is not an appealable order, but thatwasn't going to stop the best lawyers.
This administration neverhad Judge Rao and Judge Katz.
Now some of you might be wondering howis criminal contempt possible if the

(01:11:11):
Supreme Court concluded that Judge Berg'sorder halting the expulsions was invalid
because the case had been filed in thewrong court via the wrong mechanism?
There's actually a prior Supreme Courtdecision that said you can still find
an individual in contempt of a courtorder even if the underlying order is

(01:11:33):
invalid, and that is a pretty infamousdecision, I think, of the Supreme
Court Walker versus City of Birmingham.
And it's infamous, of course, becausethere the Supreme Court upheld a
criminal contempt finding against theReverend Martin Luther King Jr. Who
was denied permission to March, marchedanyway, and then was held in contempt.

(01:11:57):
Of the court order thatdenied permission to march.
So that's the law.
And you know, if you're thinking that's aWarren Court precedent, Leah, I don't know
if the Supreme Court will abide by it.
Fair.
I hear you.
But this is a bad Warren Courtprecedent and one that upheld
the conviction of Dr. King.
So I think Sam Alito will be fine with it.

(01:12:19):
He will be very crosspressured, that's for sure.
That's true.
At least there's cross pressure.
Yeah.
Wow.
Um, alright.
I showed up today.
You sure did.
You did.
I'm just gonna let you cook.
Okay.
Judge Palus, who is handling theAbrigo Garcia case also seems to be
plum out of patience with these goons.

(01:12:40):
In a hearing last week, she read thegovernment lawyers for absolute filth
and told them to get their shit togetherand start answering her questions.
There is no passing in.
This cold call.
Bitches was basically the energyand, and I'm not gonna lie, I, I
have to say her energy was reallysomething and it just sort of jumped
off the pages of the transcript andshe basically was like, Hey bitches.

(01:13:02):
Have you read Laura Hillenbrand'sepic book about an underdog horse
who comes back to be War Admiral?
No, you haven't.
Well, you should because I'm aboutto ride You like sea biscuit if
you don't answer these questions.
That was basically the energy.
Like, what the fuck do you mean?
Like, you don't have answers for me?
You better have some answers.
Yeah.
Anyway, I was very black mom.

(01:13:24):
I, I, I, I felt seen in a lot of ways.
Um, so we will say more aboutthose proceedings in a second, but.
As the courts work through whetherthey can prod this administration
along toward observing constitutionalnorms and returning someone who is
wrongfully expelled because of aquote unquote paperwork error, and who
received no due process in the courseof his rendition to a foreign gulag.

(01:13:46):
We just wanted to note that this week wealso got some very pointed reminders of
why due process is in fact so important.
Yeah.
So first, the administration ismistakenly, I hope, mistakenly, um,
sending deportation notices to citizens.
So Nicole Mia posted on Blue Sky thatshe had received a notice of deportation.

(01:14:11):
Um, she's a United States citizen andlike, are, are they seriously going
to mistakenly deport US citizens?
Like air quotes mistakenly second, theadministration could not even spell.
Mr. Abrego Garcia's first or last namecorrectly, in some of the district
court filings over the last week.
This is sloppy af, which iswhy due process is important.

(01:14:34):
That is how mistakes get made anddue process is how we identify
those mistakes and rectify them.
And that is why I think people actuallyare pretty exercised correctly about
Abrego Garcia, but the fact that theclaims they are making apply with full
force to anyone, yes, lawful resident.
Unlawful resident, naturalizedcitizen, somebody born a citizen.

(01:14:56):
Literally, if they say, oncewe have mistakenly sent you
away, the law can't help you.
Like that applies to everyone.
But you know, who doesn'tagree with a claim?
I just made our esteemed vice presidentwho took two X last week to basically
whine about how due process makesa lot of work for the government,

(01:15:16):
and so we should dispense with it.
I mean, this was a pretty stunning, Ithought real men liked hard work, put
those men to work observing due process.
Not, not this guy.
I mean, it, it was,first of all, I didn't.
I don't know, I guess X has completelydispensed with character limits.
I'm not on it anymore, so I willoccasionally see, but you literally
wrote a whole ass essay, I mean areally bad one, but a whole ass essay

(01:15:38):
on X that is essentially a claimthat due process is expensive and
inconvenient and so no longer required.
And I just, Melissa,you, you wanna get it.
Lemme just say one thing, whichis that, first of all, if I had
taught this guy constitutional law,I would hide my head in a bag to
borrow a phrase from Justice Scalia.
Um, and I will just say, I do hopethat there is some soul searching

(01:15:59):
happening at Yale Law School right now.
And the last thing I'll say iseverything he says about due process
being expensive and burdensomeapplies equally to potentially
respecting First Amendment rights.
The lawmaking process in which Congresshas to agree on language and then pass
the law, the president then signs.
It also applies to theappointment and confirmation
process for principal officers.
I mean, essentially the wholeconstitution is pretty inconvenient

(01:16:19):
when you stop to think about it.
And I welcome that, that wisdom emanatingfrom the mouth of JD Vance because
I think that's where this takes us.
Melissa, sorry.
No, no, no.
I, I just wanted to note that there wasa period around, I don't know, 2017 when
all of the men's were crowing about howimportant due process was when people were
posting on Twitter and making spreadsheetsabout whether or not there were men who

(01:16:43):
had sexually harassed 'em or assaultedthem or whatever, and gotten away with it.
And during those moments, Itoo agreed that due process was
vitally important because thesecouldn't be itinerant commitments.
But here we are.
Yes.
Well, I also think they are going to haverenewed interest in due process during

(01:17:04):
any contempt proceedings that may arise.
Um, my guess is good point.
My guess is there due process,maybe due process, um, will be.
Demanded and insisted upon.
Amy, what exactly did the court dotoday and maybe just as important.
What didn't they do?
So what the court did was the courtbarred the federal government until the

(01:17:26):
Supreme Court said, O says otherwisefrom removing Venezuelan migrants who
were at a particular detention facility.
Really the, the.
Case comes out of the NorthernDistrict of Texas where a facility
known as the Blue Bonnet DetentionFacility in Anson, Texas is located.
And so lawyers from the A CLU hadcome to the Supreme Court filing an

(01:17:49):
emergency appeal asking the justicesto block the removal of Venezuelan
migrants from that facility.
To El Salvador and the Supreme Court at1:00 AM on Saturday morning issued an
order that said, until further noticefrom this court, the federal government

(01:18:09):
can't remove anyone from this district.
The Supreme Court hasn't said anythingabout the substance of the President's
order, which he issued back in March.
Relying on this Alien EnemiesAct, this 1798 law that.
Gives the president the power toorder the removal of enemy aliens

(01:18:32):
without, you know, to, to havethem be removed relatively quickly.
You know, the order has only been, thelaw has only been invoked three times in
US history during the war of 1812 duringWorld War I and during World War ii.
And so.
Some lawyers and legal, legal scholarssay that the president can't rely
on this law at all to remove anyone,um, right now, but the Supreme Court

(01:18:58):
isn't weighing in on that right now.
At least
as we said, the court acted,not known for its speed, but
had remarkable speed last night.
Uh, they did this just hoursafter the case was filed.
They didn't wait for theappeals court to act.
What does that say to you?
It says that they wanted tobe, they wanted to act quickly.
You know, not only did they not wait forthe appeals court to act, they didn't wait

(01:19:21):
for the federal government to weigh in.
You know, they directed the federalgovernment to file a response as soon
as possible, which is also unusual.
Usually they set a. Deadlinefor the federal government.
But in this case, they just saidas soon as possible after the
court of Appeals has weighed in.
Um, and I think they wanted to act.
They wanted to make sure thatthese flights didn't take place.

(01:19:43):
You know, it's interesting becauseduring a different hearing involving
these flights in Washington, DCbefore Chief Judge James Bosberg
on Friday, a government lawyer.
Represented to Judge Bobergthat there weren't gonna be any
flights on Friday or Saturday.
Um, and yet the f the Supreme Courtstill took the, the really unusual step

(01:20:06):
of issuing this order to make clearthat, that these flights should not take
place and that no one should be removedfrom this part of Texas to El Salvador.
Much has been made about the government'sreaction, the administration's reaction
and response to the earlier Supreme Courtruling, uh, in the Abrego Garcia case.
Do you think that hadanything to do with it?

(01:20:26):
I think it probably hada lot to do with it.
The, I. Lawyers from the A CLUreferenced it obliquely in their briefs.
They said, you know, if you are goingto send people over to El Salvador
and if a mistake is made, you know,just sort of throw up your hands and
say there's nothing we can do, then itis doubly important to make sure that

(01:20:50):
there is due process and that the su.
The courts of this country can reviewthese removals before they take place,
and then also they're very clear intheir wording in this order saying, you
know, until further notice from thiscourt, you know, the government should
not remove anyone because they've seensome of the, the sort of word games that
have been played right now in the courts,sort of about what exactly it means for

(01:21:14):
the federal government to facilitateAbrego Garcia's return from El Salvador.
As you said, the no court hasruled on the, uh, whether the
administration has the right to usethe, uh, uh, the, uh, alien Enemies
Act in the way they're using it.
Is it possible, or do you think it'slikely or unlikely that the court
could do that now in this case?

(01:21:35):
I. Uh, it's not clear whenit's going to do that.
I mean, it seems inevitable thatit's going to have to do that.
And as some legal scholars have pointedout, the, you know, the Supreme Court
could save everyone a lot of trouble ifit went ahead and, and ruled on this.
You know, if it were to rule thatthe Trump administration could rely
on the Alien Enemies Act, then we'dstill need to have this process before

(01:21:57):
someone could be removed to El Salvador.
But if it were to rule that the.
The Trump administration can't relyon the Alien Enemies Act, then,
uh, it would certainly obviate theneed for all of these proceedings
because people couldn't be removed.
So
what's next?
Uh, what's next is we now wait forthe federal government to file its
response, um, to the application forthe stay because the Supreme Court

(01:22:22):
temporarily put the proceedings onhold, but we'll see what the federal
government has to say next and whatthe Supreme Court says after that.
Now entering Section Bvictims of the regime.
Today we're gonna hear the storiesof two of those men starting
with 25-year-old Neddy Alvarado,Boez, Noah takes it from here,

(01:22:47):
Maria.
So one of the first people Icalled was N's, older sister.
Maria Daniela,
she still lives back in Venezuela,in their hometown of Yari Tagawa,
and she tells me her family is devastated.
To know Neri is having toexperience this injustice.

(01:23:11):
She tells me they know Nerihas never done anything wrong
and that her brother wouldn't hurt to fly.
She says he is a person who in all hislife and in all his years, has never
had an ounce of evil in his heart.

(01:23:33):
Maria Daniella says that Neri hadalways been a really hard worker.
Their father is a farmer in Yaarit.
And Neri had been helping him inthe fields since he was young,
but she says that like every youngperson, he had dreams and goals,
so he left for the US in late 2023.

(01:23:57):
Maria Daniella tells me that he'dnever been to another country before.
Mary first went to Mexico and triedto apply for asylum in the us.
At first, he tried requesting anappointment through CBP one that
was an app the Biden administrationused so that migrants supplying for
asylum could schedule an interviewat an official port of entry.

(01:24:18):
Neri ended up waiting in Mexicofor about four months, but
he never got an appointment.
So Maria Daniella says he decided toturn himself in at the border instead.
Mm-hmm.
Records show the borderpatrol only held RY for a day.
He was then released into the us, allowedto apply for asylum and ended up in
Dallas, Texas, where he eventually meta man named Juan Enrique Hernandez.

(01:24:47):
Enrique is an American citizen andhas been in the US for 27 years.
He owns two Venezuelan bakeries and nehe started working for him last year.
Showing up every day from 7:00 AMto 7:00 PM That is until immigration
agents arrested ne outside his apartmentin early February, just weeks after
Trump took office, despite the factthat ne willingly turned himself in

(01:25:09):
at the border nearly a year earlierand was allowed to apply for asylum.
The Justice Department was now charginghim with a misdemeanor alleging that
he entered the country illegally.
Enrique went to visit himin detention the next day
in Blue Bond Detention Center in Avi Ne
tells Enrique that one of the firstquestions he was asked by an ICE agent was

(01:25:30):
cater twice.
Do you have any tattoos?
We responded, yes, I have three tattoos.
His sister, Maria Danieladescribes them to us.
There's a tattoo on hisforearm that says brother

(01:25:53):
and another.
That's his family.
The biggest tattoo is on his leg.
She says it's a symbol forautistic children with the name
of the 15-year-old brother Neon
has autism.

(01:26:14):
And Maria Daniella says Nerihas always been devoted to him.
I've seen a picture of the tattoothat he got for his brother.
It's a large autism awareness ribbon madeup of different colored puzzle pieces.
His brother's name is written in cursivealong the side, Enrique tells me that Neri
explained the tattoos to an ice agent,

(01:26:39):
telling him the tattoos aren'treligious or political or
symbols of any criminal gang.
Enrique also says Neri was asked tohand over his phone so the agents could
review it for evidence of gang activity.
They don't find anything
into the,

(01:26:59):
and Enrique says the ICE agenttold Neri, he would write down
that he is not a member of rag.
He tells ne, as far as I'm concerned.
You don't have to be here,
but for reasons that remain unclear.
Other officials in ICE's DallasField office decided to keep Neri

(01:27:21):
in detention during that time.
Enrique says Neri went before animmigration judge and was given a choice.
Keep fighting for asylumand stay locked up her.
Get deported back to Venezuela NE's.
Eager to get out detention.
So he agrees to go back home to Yari.
Tagawa.
Enrique spoke to Neri shortlybefore he was going to be deported.

(01:27:47):
Told him, look, the only concernI have here, boss, is that the
90 people detained with me.
They all have tattoos.
It's as if ne is starting torealize that something was up.
Maria, Daniella says she and herfamily were in contact with ne
every day he was detained, but thatstopped after Friday, March 14th.

(01:28:11):
At the same time, Maria Daniellastarts seeing that Venezuelans
have been sent El Salvador.
And then on March 20th NE's25th birthday, it was confirmed.
CBS News published the full listof Deportees and Ne Alvarado.
Borges was one of the names.

(01:28:37):
Enrique says, do you think a bad personwould work with autistic children
or work at a bakery from7:00 AM to 7:00 PM every day?
He tells me It's an incrediblydifficult situation.
What is he supposed to tell NE's mom,

(01:29:01):
she's in Venezuela, andask for updates every day?
What can I tell her?
How do I respond?
Back in Venezuela ne actuallytaught swimming classes to kids
with developmental disabilities.
It was a place called Club Orino, andthey actually released a video after they

(01:29:23):
learned what had happened to Neri in it.
We hear from the president of theclub and he says, we wanna make clear.
Neri is not a gang member.
He demands the immediaterelease of his friend.
Then the video cuts to severalkids and parents from the club,

(01:29:43):
including his brother Eren, whosay Ner is an honest, good person.
And not a criminal.
They all
demand justice for Neri.

(01:30:10):
My reporting partner, Isabel and I haveseen many videos like this one online.
Venezuelans both here in the US andback in Venezuela are outraged at the
thought that their friends and familymembers could be treated this way.
We've spoken to nearly adozen of them ourselves, and
we continue to hear from more
So let's drill down into the specifics.

(01:30:31):
Trump claimed he wasactually handed something.
If so, what it would've been is thegang field interview sheet filled out
by a Prince George's county cop whenAbrego Garcia was detained in 2019.
As we reported at the New Republic,that cop was subsequently suspended
and indicted for serious misconduct.
But put that aside for a sec. Thegang field interview sheet makes

(01:30:54):
two key claims tying him to MS 13.
We're gonna go throughboth of them slowly.
The first one is that he was wearinga Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie
with imagery of rolls of money withthe eyes, ears, and mouth of the
presidents on the bills covered.
It's a little cryptic from thereport what that exactly means, but

(01:31:15):
Eric, is this clothing necessarilyindicative of membership in MS 13?
And what do you make of thisdescription of the imagery?
Well, first of all, I, I don't thinkthat, um, I'm aware of any research
that would identify that clothingas somehow emblematic of MS 13.
What I would say is that in our research,looking into the presence and the nature

(01:31:39):
in organization activities of MS 13 inthe greater Washington DC area, one of
the things that we found quite strikingwas the degree to which law enforcement.
Officials were not able tocorrectly identify who was part
of the gang and who was not.
So the idea that this gangidentification sheet is authoritative
information, certainly based on ourwork several years ago, including in

(01:32:03):
Prince George County, we would nothave, uh, have of considered that,
um,
a reliable source.
Eric, can you tell us a little moreabout the work that you did in the PG
county and DC metro area and what it saidabout the difficulty that authorities
have in identifying members of the gang?
I.
Yes.
Well, and one of the things that wedid in the project was we would ask

(01:32:25):
law enforcement officials to enableus to interview, uh, people who were
detained under their jurisdiction,uh, and who were members of gangs.
And we would find them that some of thepeople they refer us to were clearly, as
best we could tell, not part of the gang.
It just seems like this wholeenterprise is really deeply flawed
and, and for understandable reasons.

(01:32:46):
This is complicated stuff.
These are complex social phenomenonwe're talking about here.
The second claim in the Maryland Copp GangField interview sheet that's supposed to
tie Abrego Garcia to MS 13 is the claimthat a confidential source said that
he's a member of the Western clique.
His lawyers point out thatthis operates primarily in
New York where he never lived.

(01:33:08):
Eric, what do you make of this assertion?
Would you place much stockin this confidential source?
And is the general claim credible?
Well, the general claim is plausible,but I wouldn't, I don't see precisely
why an anonymous source whoseinformation we have no basis for
verifying, uh, and, and we don't seeany other profile that would enable us

(01:33:32):
to associate this individual with MS.
13. I think we don't have any informationabout particular criminal activity that
this person is said to have carried out.
Uh, we don't have any, um, whetherit's robbery, whether it's car theft
or whatever it might be, uh, thatwould associate him, uh, with a

(01:33:56):
click of MS 13 operating in Maryland.
The whole thing that makes this soridiculous, which you just put your finger
on, is that he was never charged with,let alone convicted of any crime related
to gang activity or any crime at all.
I wanna bring up anotheraspect of all this.
I. One of the reasons that Rego Garciareceived withholding of removal status

(01:34:17):
in 2019 is because he feared thatif he were sent back to El Salvador,
he'd face harm from the Barrio 18gang, which had threatened his family
with death in attempting to extorthis mother over her OSA business.
I've heard this described as supposedevidence that he was an MS 13 and that.
This is why he feared a rival gang.
But Eric, my understanding is thata threat like this doesn't have to

(01:34:40):
do with membership in a rival gang.
It's more that Barrio 18 isthreatening him for not doing
their bidding in territory.
They've marked as theirs.
Kind of similar to how gangs carvedup territory in The Godfather.
If you remember all the, you knowthe chieftains sitting around saying
that, you know who's gonna have what?
Can you talk about this?
The way that Barrio 18 or MS 13 operatesin El Salvador is that they extort

(01:35:07):
local businesses, self-employed, cornerstores, bodegas, and so on and so
forth, bus drivers, um, and you haveto pay, um, or else you get torched.
And what seems to have happenedis that his mother didn't pay.
And at that point, not only is shesubject to violence, but anybody
related to her is also subject.

(01:35:27):
Violence and the fact that he fled isitself an act of defiance, um, that
is subject to retribution by the gang.
And it's also the case that even if heweren't a member of MS 13, if he lived
in a territory that was governed byMS 13, then he automatically becomes

(01:35:50):
a target of violence from barrio.
Um, so there's all sorts of reasonsto treat credibly, the basic narrative
that led the immigration court to,um, withhold the order of removal.
So speaking of this broader narrative,my understanding of the way MS 13
functions is that to, to bring people in,you're usually getting teenagers, right?

(01:36:12):
Not people in their twenties.
So the whole narrative that theTrump administration is spinning
makes you wonder, why didn't AbregoGarcia get drawn into gang activity
earlier when he was a teenager?
I mean, he would've been more vulnerable.
He arrived in the UnitedStates at the age of 16.
And so if he had been drawn into MS 13.

(01:36:33):
As a teenager, there'd be apaper trail, there'd be a record
of activity, of gang activity.
There's none of that.
Am I right about this?
Is, is it likely that he'dbe pulled in in his twenties?
Well, I think, you know, one of thethings that we just don't understand, um,
on in this case is what is the criminalactivity that he's associated with.

(01:36:55):
And so if he were an active memberof the gang, he would be involved in
criminal activities, and there's beenno charge, as best I can tell of his
participation in any such activities.
Recruitment into the gang typicallyhappens during one's teenage years.
Um, the gangs, um, target, uh, youngpeople who are directionless, who

(01:37:15):
don't have roots in their community.
They off often have broken families,and they offer a kind of family.
They offer a community, theyoffer membership in something.
And so yes, typically the entry into.
Gang activity, gang networkshappens during the teenage years.
And so yes, it would be rather unusualfor somebody to first connect to the gang,

(01:37:38):
um, in their twenties, um, at an enviin an environment where he was working.
Doesn't really hold together very well.
Right.
Uh, putting it all together, a lot of whatwe actually know about MS 13 and Abrigo
Garcia's specific overall trajectory castseven more doubt on the claim that Trump
is making, which again, he is basing onsomething that he said was handed to him.

(01:38:02):
Is that about the size of things?
The facts just don't addup in any way, do they?
Well, the facts don't add up in anyway, but I think they do in the sense
that we know that for years, Trumphas demagogued the image of MS 13.
This is the person who talksabout migrants poisoning the
blood of the United of Americans.

(01:38:22):
This is the person who talksabout vermin, who talks about
contamination, and there's no.
Loyalty here to facts orto decency or to civility.
Um, this is somebody who is an opportunistand who deploys, um, fear of outsiders,
um, who deploys resentment againstmigrants and for whom to be able to

(01:38:46):
say, MS 13, MS 13, transnational gangterrorist organization is all just
part of a demagogic, um, um, toolkit.
Among Amir MLA's clients is anactivist who has been charged in
connection with a pro-Palestinianprotest at the University of Michigan.
MLA said he believes that isthe reason why he was stopped.

(01:39:08):
He told me more of what happenedwhen we spoke on Wednesday.
I. So, as I understand, you werereturning home from vacation with
your family, then you were pulledaside by some federal agents.
Pick up the story from there andjust start to tell us what happened.
Well, as soon as I got to thepassport check line, the agent
looked over to another agent andasked, is the TTRT team available?
I didn't know what that acronym stood for.

(01:39:29):
Right?
So I did a quick Google search.
At that point, I realizedit meant the ter.
Task Force on terrorism,something along those lines.
Tactical terrorism responseteam is what the acronym was.
And at that point, my gutjust, you know, my heart fell
into my stomach at that point.
I was so, you know, concerned and worried.
Um, I looked over at my wife and I toldher we're probably gonna be stopped
and, and detained and questioned and so.

(01:39:51):
They eventually took meover to an interview room.
My family was waiting for me, anxiouslynot knowing what was going on.
Um, and at then a plain clothes officerwalks in and says, we know that you're
an attorney and we know that you've beenhandling some high profile cases lately.
Um, and then I said, okay,well what can I help you with?
And he said, um.
We would like to look at your phone.

(01:40:12):
And he handed me a, a pamphlet with afederal statute that says that at the
border they're allowed to confiscatemy phone for a number of days.
Um, and at that point I was just shockedthat they wanted to take my phone.
Well,
let me ask you this.
At that point, did you have any senseof why they wanted to see your phone?
What did they tell you?
Well, it was, it was apparent to me atthat point that they had already done
their homework about me before I arrivedbecause they, they knew that I was taking

(01:40:35):
on some, some cases, he knew who I wasand he knew where I was coming from
and, uh, he knew I was at an attorney.
So it wasn't a random selection.
They were prepared to talk tome and discuss things with me.
Um, and he was adamant thathe wanted to see my phone.
What did you do then?
Did you give him your phone?
No.
At that point I said, listen,you know that I'm an attorney.
Everything in my phone couldbe privileged information.

(01:40:56):
I have emails that go back over 10 years.
I have text messages with clients.
I have all my, my, uh, court filingsand, and my office filings are in my
cloud, which is available on my phone.
Mm-hmm.
You're not getting full andunfettered access to my device.
It's not gonna happen.
Um, and so that puzzled this agentand he had to go to a supervisor.
The supervisor comes backand says, here's a legal pad.

(01:41:17):
Here's a pen.
Write down everything thatyou believe is privileged.
We won't go through that.
I look, I looked at himwith, you know, astonishment.
How do you expect me to go through10 years and more of information
that's in my device and see thisis privilege and this isn't.
It was a ridiculous conversation.
You said in other interviews thatI've heard that you believe that

(01:41:38):
you were targeted because you wererepresenting a pro-Palestinian protestor.
You said that they seemed toknow who you were, they seemed to
know that you were an attorney.
What led you to make the connection thatthis protestor might have been the reason
that you were detained, interrogated.
They wanted your phone.
I. This is the only case of,of any high profile action
that I'm involved in right now.
This is the only one that we've beenmaking a lot of noise about because
in Samantha Lewis's case, my clientat the University of Michigan,

(01:42:01):
they're criminalizing free speech.
They're charging seven students,um, with resisting and opposing
police officers, which are felonies.
And all they were doing wasengaging in peaceful protest
about the war in, uh, on Gaza.
So that we've made a lot of noise aboutand that we're vigorously defending,
why else would they mention that?
I'm, they we, that I know that you'reengaging in high profile cases.

(01:42:25):
I just wanna note that NPR has reachedout to Customs and Border Protection, and
at the time of our conversation, we'venot yet heard back, but A CBP spokesman
named Hilton Beckham told the DetroitFree Press, which he spoke to, that
searches of electronic media have notgone up during the Trump administration.
And I'm gonna quote here, allegations thatpolitical beliefs trigger inspections or
removals are baseless and irresponsible.

(01:42:46):
Your response.
I had say to them that, you know, whatwas the purpose of searching my device?
Then I, if you know that I'm not a,there's, there's no probable cause,
there's no warrant, there's no concernthat I'm a, a threat to national
security or anything of that nature.
The purpose of searching my phone doesn'thave anything to do with terrorism.
Um.
There's only a chilling effectand it's done to be intimidating.

(01:43:11):
Um, in my opinion, for thecauses that I was engaging in.
I'm standing up for students, I'm standingup for immigrants and, and political
dissenters, and I think this was a, a,um, a way to try to, uh, uh, dissuade
me from taking on these types of cases.
Ultimately you did not consent tojust hand over your phone, but if
I understand correctly, you didat some point let them look at the

(01:43:31):
contexts that are in your phone.
Can you tell us a bit about that?
Well, they kept threatening to takemy device and they said they had,
they had the legal right to do so,so I didn't want to walk away, uh,
from that meeting or interrogation ordetention without my device in my hand.
So I did acquiesce to allowingthem to see the list of my contacts
that's stored in my phone only.
Um, and they agreed with that.
They said, okay, we'll lookat your contact list and, um,

(01:43:54):
and, and we'll go from there.
So at that point, they took mydevice for maybe seven or eight
minutes and they came back.
Um, they apparently had downloaded mycontact list and then began to ask me
further questions about who contactsin my phone were, and that's when I
said, no, this is getting into too much,uh, you know, uncharted waters here.

(01:44:14):
If anybody that's in my phoneis gonna be a friend, a family
member, or a client, right?
I'm not gonna tell you if these folksare clients or not, but that's all
the information you're gonna get.
Okay?
If this is part of a much broader effortto intimidate lawyers who work, whose
work runs counter to administrationpriorities, I wanna ask you in a minute
or so that we have left, is this working?
No, I think it's doingthe opposite effect.

(01:44:37):
The outpouring support that I've receivedfrom members of the bar, not just in
Michigan, but nationally and members ofthe community is, is a showing that people
are offended by this type of conduct.
This is not what America's all about.
We are a, a, a nation of laws.
We have protections, we have amendments.
The fourth amendment included of yourright to privacy, which includes not, um.

(01:44:59):
Having your personal effects and papersbe searched, um, and it's setting a
terrifying precedent if, if governmentagents can target a lawyer at the
border, what's stopping them fromdoing to anyone who dares to speak out.
Well, we understand, uh, ifwe're paying attention that the
Trump administration is not justinterested in so-called criminals.

(01:45:21):
You know, when we read that they aretracking anyone, immigrant citizen, no
matter who expresses criticism of thedeportation agenda on social media.
So it, it seems clear that this is.
Ideologically based on its face,or at least piece of it is, is that
not a legal front to, to fight on

(01:45:44):
A lot of things that would be entirelyillegal if the government went after a US
citizen for them are in fact historicallyconsidered okay for the government to
do in the context of immigration law.
Mm-hmm.
For example, the grounds thatare being used for many of these
student visa revocations are this.
Your regulation that the State Departmentcan revoke the visa of anyone it deems to

(01:46:08):
be a foreign policy problem for the UnitedStates, which does open itself up to
deporting people for speech, for protectedpolitical activity, for, again, the sort
of thing that would be, you know, a poorconstitutional right for US citizens.
But that in the context in which USimmigration law has developed, which was a
lot of people being very concerned about.

(01:46:29):
You know, communist infiltration,immigrants have kind of been carved out.
I think in general, it's really importantfor people to understand that while the
Trump administration loves to imply thatit's going to use all of its powers,
maximally, that no one is safe andthat everyone should be afraid, uh.
In fact, you know, citizens do have moreprotections than green card holders.

(01:46:49):
Green card holders do havemore protections than others.
For example, the one green card holderwho they've tried to use this State
Department thing on, the judge in thatcase as of when we're talking, has told
the government to give me some evidencein 24 hours, or I'm ordering this guy
released because it does take moreto deport somebody on a green card.
So how.
Scared people should be, it shouldn'tjust be a function of what the

(01:47:10):
government is saying, although youknow what it's doing is more relevant.
But it should also be a function ofhow many layers of protection the
government would have to cut throughin order to subject you to its will.
Well, and that gives uspoints of intervention.
You know, and I appreciate the idea thatwhile we absolutely have to be concerned
about what's being said, it's helpfulto, to keep a, a clear eye on what

(01:47:34):
is actually happening so that we see.
Where the fronts of the fight are.
But I, I then have to ask you, youknow, when you hear analysts say,
well, you know, this person had adisputed status, this person had a
green card, and make those distinctions.
But then you hear Trump say, well, heckyeah, I'd love to send US citizens.

(01:47:57):
To, uh, prison in El Salvador.
You know, it, he's making clear he doesn'tthink it's about immigration status.
He says, if I, if I decide you're acriminal and you bop people on the
head, or whatever the hell he said, youknow, um, you're a dangerous person.
Well, I, I would love the law to letme send us citizens to El Salvador

(01:48:17):
also, so you can understand why folks.
Feel the slipperiness of it,even as we know that laws have
different layers of protection.
I do.
The thing that strikes me aboutthese US citizens to El Salvador
comments is that like I was reportingon Trump, you know, back when the
first time he was a presidentialcandidate, so it's, you know, I've been

(01:48:38):
following what he says for a minute.
Mm-hmm.
It's really, really rare forDonald Trump to say if it's legal,
we're not sure it's legal, right.
But he said that about this andpress secretary, Caroline Levitt
has also said that about this.
And like that caveat is just so rarethat it does make me think that this is.
Different from some of the otherthings where Trump says it and then

(01:49:00):
the government tries to make it happen.
Right?
But they are a little bit aware that likethere's a bright line and even they are
a little bit, you know, leery of steppingover it and kind of insistent about that.
Mostly because I worry a lotabout people being afraid to.
Stand up for more vulnerable peoplein their communities because, because

(01:49:21):
they're so focused on the ways inwhich they're vulnerable, right?
And so what I don't wanna see is a worldwhere non-citizens can be, you know,
arrested and detained with no due process.
And citizens are afraid to speak outbecause they heard something about
citizens being sent to El Salvadorand they worry, they will be met.
I, I I hear that.
I hear that.
And, and following from that, I, Iwanna just quote from the piece that

(01:49:43):
you wrote for the New York Timeslast November about focusing on
what is actually really happening.
And you said that the detailsmatter, not only because every
deportation represents a life.
Disrupted and usually more than one sinceno immigrant is an island, they matter
precisely because the Trump administrationwill not round up millions of immigrants

(01:50:06):
on January 20th, but millions of peoplewill wake up on January 21st not knowing
exactly what comes next for them.
And the more accurate the press andthe public can be about the scope
and scale of deportation efforts.
The better able immigrants in theircommunities will be to prepare for
what might be coming and try to findways to throw sand in the gears.

(01:50:29):
What I hear in that.
Is that there is a real historymaking moment for a press
corps that's worth its salt.
Absolutely, and to, to be honest, inthe weeks since the flight percent El
Salvador, we've seen some tremendousreporting from national and local

(01:50:50):
reporters about the human livesthat were on those planes we know.
So much more about thesepeople than we would have.
But what that means is that thesepeople who arguably the administration
would love to see disappear,Elli, would love to see disappear.
They're very, very visible tous, and that's so important in,

(01:51:11):
you know, making it clear that.
Things like due process aren'tjust, it's not just a hypothetical.
Nice to have due process is theprotection that prevents in general
gay makeup artists from gettingsent to a country that they've never
been to because of their tattoos.
Mm-hmm.
That it's an essential way to make surethat we're not visiting harm on people

(01:51:31):
who have done nothing to deserve it.
Well, finally, I, I do understand that.
We have to fight wherever there'sa fight, but I do have a kind
of fear of small amendments orreforms as a big picture response.
You know, we can amend this here,or we can return that person.
You know, it feels a little bit like arestraining wall against a flood, and I,

(01:51:54):
I just feel that it helps to show that.
We are for something, you know?
Mm-hmm.
We're not
just against hatefulness and bigotryand, and the law being used to,
to arbitrarily throw people out.
We have a vision of a shared future,you know, that that doesn't involve,
uh, deputizing people to snitch on theirneighbors who they think look different.

(01:52:19):
You know, we have a vision aboutimmigration that is a positive vision
that we've had in this country,and I guess I wish I'd see more of.
Of that right now in media and elsewhere.
What makes it particularly hard frommy perspective is that most Americans
know very little about immigration law.
Right?
You know, it's extremely complicatedand most people have never had

(01:52:41):
firsthand experience with it.
So in order to get people toeven understand what is going on
now, you need to do more work.
Than you do for areas where peopleare kind of more intuitively familiar
with what the government does and thattakes up space that otherwise could
go to imagining different futures.
The other problem here is that frankly,you know, there it, it's not that new and

(01:53:05):
radical ideas on immigration are needed.
It's a matter of.
Political will to a certain extent.
Right, right.
Like the reason that the the Trumpadministration's use of this registration
provision is such a sick irony tosome of us is that there was a way
that Congress proposed to allow peopleto register with the US government.
It was called comprehensive immigration.

(01:53:27):
Form.
Yeah.
You know, that there, there havebeen proposals to, to regularize
people, to put people on the books,to bring people out of the shadows.
And the absence of that and the absenceof a federal government that was in
any way equipped to actually process.
People rather than figuring out themost draconian crackdown and hoping

(01:53:48):
that everybody got the message is wherewe've gotten to a point where everyone
agrees that the system is broken andthe only solutions appear to be these
radical crackdowns on basic rights.
It was a short time ago, Supreme Courtagreed to hear oral arguments in the
case about ending birthright citizenship.
How confident are you that the court willrule in your favor and allow that order to

(01:54:12):
end birthright citizenship to go forward?
Well, you're just telling me thatfor the first time, I am so happy.
I think it, the case has been somisunderstood that case birthright
citizenship is about slavery.
If you look at the, uh, details of it,the signings of it, everything else.
That case is all about slavery.

(01:54:32):
And if you view it from thatstandpoint, people understand it.
But for some reason,lawyers don't talk about it.
The news doesn't talk about it.
That's not about tourists coming inand touching a piece of sand and all
of a sudden they're a citizenship.
You know, they're a citizen.
That ship that is all about slaveryand even look at the dates on which it

(01:54:53):
was signed, it was right at that eraduring, right after the Civil War, I.
And if you look at it that way,the case is an easy case to win.
And I hope the lawyers talk aboutbirthright citizenship and slavery
because that's what it was all about.
And it was a very positive,it was meant to be positive.

(01:55:15):
And uh, they use it now andinstead, not for slavery.
They use it for people that comeinto our country and they walk in
and all of a sudden they becomecitizens and they pay a lot of money
to different cartels and others.
It's all about slavery, and if you lookat it that way, we should win that case.
Um, this is some breaking news we gotwhile recording, and that is that the

(01:55:38):
Supreme Court has scheduled four argument.
The Trump administration's requests tostay insignificant, respects to put on
hold, insignificant respects the orders.
That prevent them from implementingtheir wildly unconstitutional plan

(01:55:59):
to strip birthright citizenshipfrom certain individuals.
Now, I wanna quickly explain whatissue was actually before the court,
because the administration did not askthe Supreme Court to review whether.
Their efforts to stripbirthright citizenship are legal.
Instead, the question they askedthe courts to take up is whether

(01:56:19):
it was permissible for the lowercourts in these cases to issue
nationwide injunctions to prevent theadministration from implementing this
policy on a nationwide basis, butthe practical effect of the court.
Ruling against nationwide injunctions herewould give the administration ostensibly
a green light to implement this policyin large swaths of the United States.

(01:56:42):
And, uh, we, we will, we are, we aregonna go off on this shit in a second,
but I just want to note at the outsetthat the idea that the court would
take up the nationwide injunctionissue in this case is utter garbage.
One, they had numerous opportunitiesto do so when courts were enjoining
Biden administration policies,they turned away those efforts,

(01:57:05):
apparently no concern there.
And second, if there is any casein which a nationwide injunction is
appropriate, it would be an injunctionagainst the birthright citizenship
eo, because how are you going toimplement an injunction against that
policy on a state by state basis?
Determine where people are born and like,can they travel in the United States?

(01:57:26):
Like it makes no effing sense.
Thoughts.
Who are the four?
I took four people to Grant Cert here.
Yep.
Who do you think they are?
Well, Gorsuch has beenrailing against these Yes.
Nationwide injunctions for a while.
Yeah, I am sure.
Gorsuch.
Yeah.
Um, my guess is Justice Thomas.
I think he has, uh, indicatedrather selective views, um, on the

(01:57:48):
propriety of nationwide injunctions,
um, Alito.
'cause this could help the administration,
right.
Alito, because this couldhelp the administration.
And then you probably get a J four right.
From one of Brett orAmy or even the Chiefy.
Yeah.
And okay, so here, hereis my goblin villain.
Take on what is happening.
Mm-hmm.
Um.

(01:58:08):
I think there is a chance and still agreater than 50% chance that the court
rules against the Trump administration onthese birthright citizenship applications.
So I, I think they're gonna reject theadministration's request to narrow the
scope of the injunctions in this case.
And I think the chief probably andother justices love the idea of

(01:58:30):
buying themselves some goodwill, somecredibility and cover for when they
inevitably give the administration agreen light on a host of other atrocities.
Yeah.
Be it refusing to get Mr. RegoGarcia back in the United States.
Right.
Be it allowing the administration toimplement this insane, a EA policy, be
it dismantling the administrative state,be it unconstitutionally, coercing law

(01:58:54):
firms, the media educational institutions,like who knows what they're gonna do.
But my guess is they saw this askind of like a freebie for them.
Hey, guess what?
Citizens?
We're going to acknowledgethat you're citizens.
Wait.
That, that's literally, you're welcome.
The best case scenario to hope for here.
Yeah.
I think that's astuteand very likely, right.
The thing that's hard for me to, to figureis that I think that the credibility that

(01:59:18):
they could buy is only gonna come on thesubstantive question if, if they're gonna
reject, but gonna, the policy people thatwhen the headlines people are not mm-hmm.
Are
Trump administration getsruled against, right.
Supreme Court rules against Trumpadministration on birthright citizenship.
That's what the headlines are gonna say.
Mm-hmm.
The thing I'm worried about is whatif that means they're ultimately
gonna allow, they're gonna ruleagainst it on this sort of don't

(01:59:39):
rule it out injunction issue rule.
And then next fall, uh, they'regonna have the actual rule it out,
actual substantive question, rule andallow, I mean, they can't possibly
allow this order in its entirety.
They can't allow it to peoplewho are lawfully here and have
kids as the order purports to do.
And I also think there's the statutoryquestion, which is like whether or not
the constitution requires birthrightcitizenship, which it definitely does.

(02:00:00):
Congress has passed lawsconferring citizenship.
So you can't by executiveorder, do this anyway.
Whatever the constitutionhas to say about it.
Laws are for losers,
Kate.
Correct?
That's true.
Constitutions are for tss.
Are for
suckers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is some good literation.
Ladies.
Kate, you and you're reading, whydo you keep reading the Constitution
as though the
words matter?

(02:00:21):
We're, we're reading itand they're reading it.
I guess
Leah, you, you make an excellent pointthough about the selectivity of this court
antipathy for nationwide injunctions and.
I also think it's a really astute pointand a clarion call to the media to
think about how it chooses to cover thiscase, because the media will absolutely

(02:00:41):
shape the narrative around what theultimate disposition of this, and
they really have to get it right here.
what kinds of questionsare, are you thinking of?
I mean, I'm talking to people withresidency, people with citizenship who
are concerned about potentially, youknow, because there's this, been this
warning about within the, the last 10years, I think it's actually supposed
to be five, but they're saying if theycan prove any, you know, what, what
they call terrorists or antisemiticassociations within 10 years, they

(02:01:02):
might come for people's citizenship.
Uh, but just, you know, routine travel.
Can I go see my sick mother?
You know, should I go tothis conference abroad?
Is it safe for me justto, to go on vacation?
You know, these are people that havehad residency for years in some cases.
You know, and, and certainlystudent visas are at more risk
than ever, but it's a new world.
We're adjusting to it.
But, you know, I do think thatthis is really sending a message.

(02:01:24):
It's, it's elevating things becauseit's one thing, you know, and, and what
happened to Mahmud, Khalil was, wasterrible and should never have happened.
But they came to his house, whichis a fairly routine way for ice
to enforce, uh, for ESA ostrich.
They met her on the street and wherethey'd been surveilling her, they
knew she was going to be, but there'san extra route level of cruelty.
Even, even I think, beyond coming toyour house to when you think you're
gonna be going in to finalize yourimmigration status as a citizen

(02:01:46):
to cross that final threshold.
And they do it because they know forsure that you're not gonna be armed.
For example, you're gonna begoing into a federal building, so
it's safe to intercept you there.
But, uh, I, I do think that it's reallysending a message in a, in a way that
every one of these arrests is a message.
But I think this one's really deep.
So when people are, when people areasking you about what, if anything,
they can do in terms of travel, what,what advice, knowing that you're

(02:02:09):
not giving people legal advice, butwhat are, what are you telling them?
Like, what should people knowabout traveling right now?
The most important thing is that ifyou've ever had any contact with the
criminal legal system, make sure thatyou have certified copies of that case.
Because that's, that's thebiggest thing that gets people
intercepted coming back in.
And CBP is relentless about this,even if they know the case was
dismissed, even if they've beenthrough this three or four times with

(02:02:30):
you before in secondary screening.
So I've been providingletters and certified copies
that people need to travel.
You know, assuming that yourcase is dismissed and that
you're, you're safe to travel.
Uh, if you do have an, a pending caseor you do have a conviction of some
kind, you've gotta talk to a lawyerbefore you even think about traveling.
But otherwise, you know, for a lot ofmy clients who are politically active,
have been very active on social media,who've been outspoken, unfortunately,
I, I hate to have to tell anybodythis, but locking down your social

(02:02:52):
media and just scrubbing your phone, beunderstanding that they can take your
phone at any time when you come back in.
You know, just be prepared for acomplete scouring of your history.
You know, I just, I, I can'tbelieve I have to give this
advice, but I have to do it.
You mentioned that the mode in whichthe administration is targeting
these students is sending a message.
What is that message?
It's a message to student protestorsobviously to start with, but it's a

(02:03:14):
message to all of us that our freespeech is, is, is a liability, the,
the things that we say, and certainlyfor people who are on student visas,
which are very tenuous and ISISterminating illegally terminating, uh,
as far as we can tell, hundreds andhundreds of student visas right now on
spurious grounds and almost nothing.
Uh, so I really think that startingwith the most vulnerable populations,
people that they can easily target fortheir free speech and then moving down

(02:03:35):
is, is the way to go here for them.
And I, I do think that it is a directmessage that we are gonna come for people
that say things that we don't like.
I was posting a couple weeks ago abouta client that I had who was disappeared.
There was a, a scholar of, ofRussia, who's from Russia, uh,
who's, who looks a lot at, at howRussia got to where it is today.
And I'm still thinking aboutwhat she said because she.

(02:03:57):
Posted this and, and said, nextthey'll be coming For the lawyers
who speak out next, they'll be comingfor the lawyers who complain to the
government and to the public aboutwhat they're doing to their clients,
because that's what happened in Russia.
Not to make it about me, but,uh, it, I never thought that I'd
be at all even have to considerliability to myself for doing my job.
Right.
And, and returning to Malawi's case,I also wanna emphasize that the

(02:04:20):
government is preparing to deportMalawi back to the West Bank where
he was born in a refugee camp.
This is what he told,uh, AJ plus a year ago.
And when I was 12 years old, theykilled seven Palestinians from the
refugee camp in the middle of the night.
I collected their bodyparts with my own hands.

(02:04:42):
I peeled their skin of the wall.
I put their body parts in plastic bags.
No child should experience this.
I was 12 years old at that time.
It's a truly horrific situation.
And we also know that violence againstPalestinians continues and has escalated,
particularly in the wake of October 7th.
Madi told me that, uh, his father'sstore was blown up a few months ago

(02:05:06):
in retaliation, and this is a veryactively dangerous situation that the
government is about to throw him into.
So we know that Mahmud, Khalil and RuMeza Ozturk, the Tufts grad student you
mentioned and and who we spoke about lastweek with Representative Aana Presley are
being held in ice detention in Louisiana.
Louisiana holds the second largest numberof people after Texas where more than

(02:05:28):
12,000 people are being held nationwide.
Nearly half of the roughly 50,000immigrants detained have no
criminal record, and many onlyhave minor infractions like traffic
violations according to track.
So why have Texas and Louisianabecome hubs of immigration
detention for this administration?

(02:05:49):
I've actually been to Louisiana, tocentral Louisiana where they, uh,
Jayna and Oakdale facilities are.
And, uh, I can tell you, well, for onething, I think it's cheap real estate.
Uh, it seems like there'snot a lot down there.
So I, it makes sense that they,they purchase these vast tracks of
land, but, um, they're also in theFifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
And I, I can't think that's a coincidencethat the immigration infrastructure,
and this has been coming, I mean, thesefacilities have been here, I've been

(02:06:12):
doing this since 2006 and, you know,certainly under Bush, they were doing
a lot of the same things, moving peoplearound the country in the same way.
Not quite as, uh, dramaticallyas we're seeing right now.
But, you know, this is veryintentional that they go to these
places where they can offer jobs.
And sometimes it's the only formof employment in these areas.
And where they're isolated fromeverybody where there are not attorneys.
You know, there certainly is not athriving immigration bar in Janna,

(02:06:35):
Louisiana and, and or in the other placesin Texas where they're holding them.
And you know, I, Congresswoman Pressleylast week was, was absolutely right.
And she's my congressman oneby the way, very proud of her.
She was absolutely right to say that theseare political prisoners and that they're
being treated like political prisoners.
People really need to understand that.
There are other ways they, they maybethat they could have gotten to this,
but, uh, they're, they're taking thehardest possible approach on people for

(02:06:59):
their political opinions and they'reputting 'em in these facilities.
And I can tell you, having been theremyself, uh, the, the other thing
is that the immigration judges inthese facilities are unforgiving.
And you can look at their records.
They're all available on the TRAC website.
You can look at any givenimmigration judge's outcomes,
their asylum grants are pretty bad.
You know, in some cases I, there,there's a judge in New Mexico I was
just dealing with who has a hundredpercent asylum grant rate denial.

(02:07:22):
From last year just deniedevery case in front of him.
Hmm.
And I've been being told that I hada client who was disappeared a couple
weeks ago, and I talked to him yesterday.
He said, every single person, you've gotpeople in the facility from all around
the world who are all around the country,who have all been sent to this place
in New Mexico, and they're all beingdenied bond, which is, uh, extraordinary.
I mean, you can't have a day whereyou just, you know, a week where

(02:07:44):
you just deny everybody's bond.
You have to have somebodywho's eligible for bond.
Uh, and of course the government'sposition is that people charged
under these foreign policy groundsthat, uh, the three people we've been
talking about are, are being chargedunder, are mandatory detainees.
I believe they're saying theycan't release them in bond.
So it's just, it really emphasizes,and, and I I, to the point that I
looked up Amnesty International'sdefinition of a prisoner of conscience

(02:08:05):
in, you know, Khalil and, and Auster,and they all meet this definition.
I mean, that's, that's to that point.
So this is where we're sending them.
Now ICE gets the $45 billionthat it's looking for.
I don't think that people understandwhat that's going to look like.
Even Trump voters I don't think areprepared for what it's gonna look
like when immigration, unfortunately,is that involved in our lives.

(02:08:25):
You've reached Section C,Venezuela and El Salvador.
Now, at this time, this time period wherethey, where, where this was happening,
did the Venezuelan government let peopleleave or did you, or did they always
have to do it through illegal means?
No, actually a lot of peoplewent through legal means.

(02:08:45):
So when people started leaving atfirst, um, the very first wave is with
the first story, which is people whoworked for the oil industry and, and
similar, a lot of those people ended upmoving to other o uh, petroleum hubs.
So there's a lot ofVenezuelans in Houston, Texas.

(02:09:07):
There's a lot of Venezuelansin Calgary in Canada.
A lot of them in the Gulf.
Uh, so that was the firstimmigration wave, mostly legal.
Then eventually in 2016 therewas a ma a default, and it
start, people start pouring out.
So a lot, a lot of middle class.

(02:09:28):
Went out kind of like me to, to do amaster's with the excuse of getting
a job, but most of it was legal.
And then within the, the South Americancontinent, it was also legal because
Venezuela used to be part of mesour, I don't dunno if you're aware
of it, but it's kind of like one ofthose regional, um, organizations.

(02:09:49):
And one of the things that they had was.
Work per immediate work permitsas soon as they immigrated.
So a lot of people when they left,they were legal migrants because they
were within the me sur Then Mer Seurinvalidated Venezuela because they
hadn't, they didn't pay their, theirdues and of course, like the whole
authoritarian regime, et cetera.

(02:10:10):
And that's when the illegalimmigration started happening.
Um, basically because sincethe economy collapsed.
The economy shrunk by a factorof five, something like that.
So the real impact was a famine, anunrecognized famine when I moved out.

(02:10:34):
We were seeing people, like familiesforaging in, in the parks, just like
going to parks and picking fruit,or going to garbage cans and picking
out, uh, food rests because there wasnot, there were not enough supplies
out in the market, and so peoplehad a choice between staying and.

(02:10:59):
Basically facing hunger or leaving,and, and at that point when it's
that violent people must leave.
And so that's, that's when it startto be a, a humanitarian crisis.
You, uh, have a background in economicsand one of the drivers of, uh,
political upheaval is income inequalitybetween, uh, the country's business

(02:11:21):
people and the government leadershipand the, and the regular people.
Do you have any insights on howbest to address that kind of
inequality for other people?
Inequality, is it, it, it looksdifferent in every country.
Um.
So it's very difficult to, to givelike a one silver bullet answer.

(02:11:47):
The, the bottom line is that the reasonwhy Chavez got to where he was, the, the
president got to where he was is becausethere was a lot of inequality and a lot
of people felt that something had tochange because no matter what they did.
They were falling back and they,no matter how many jobs they had,

(02:12:11):
how many eights they had, theycouldn't afford basic living.
And the promise that was made as someother people have made was very similar.
We're gonna lower the price of eggsand we're gonna lower the price
of milk, and we're gonna lower theprices of this and that, and we're
gonna, and for a time it happened,but through very controversial means.

(02:12:34):
And a problem that's faced with thiskind of Soviet left socialism, which
is what they attempt to implement verylike a Soviet style of, of central
planning, is that they, they broke themarket, they broke market mechanisms.

(02:12:56):
And with that on the moment like.
When as, as soon as oil prices wentdown, which is what was feeding the
redistribution mechanism went out,the entire thing collapsed, and
whatever gains were done in tryingto reduce inequalities were magnified

(02:13:21):
because now you had tons and tonsand tons of people fully depending
on a system that was unsustainable.
Um, and just left to in free fall.
Basically, they were left in freefall in, in a, in a crash that was
extremely similar to the fall of theformer Soviet unions in East Europe.

(02:13:47):
Like the, the parallels when you studythe economics are very similar, so.
Inequality is not the same everywhere,but it always creates a political
problem because the majority feelthat there's no matter, like no matter
what they do, they don't have enough.
And that fuels this sensation that youneed a strong man to come and fix it.

(02:14:13):
Yeah.
Especially when you have somebodythat is, uh, lusting for power
and uses that to their advantage.
Right.
I.
Absolutely, because it'svery easy to make promises.
It's extremely easy to make promises.
However, once they get to power,at least in majority of cases.

(02:14:34):
They usually don't do.
The only thing that truly changesthe situation, which is raise taxes
on the richest people that that is,I mean, there's a limited amount
of resources, there's a wholediscourse about this, et cetera.
But when you have enormous inequalityand you have to buy social peace, you
have to get that money from somewhere,and that somewhere is usually taxes.

(02:14:58):
And if the richest peopleare not paying taxes.
There's no way for redistribution, andit's a myth that the, the, the bottom
90% of G are gonna be able to make itthrough, through market mechanisms.
So it's very easy to come and say,yes, we're gonna lower the prices.
But yeah, exactly.
How, how is it, are yougonna make transfers?

(02:15:19):
Like, are you gonna, are you gonnapay the x are gonna subsidize things?
'cause if you're not, thenthere's very little evidence that
you're gonna be able to do it.
What exactly is the US up to in Venezuela?
A New York Times report from 2018 claimsthat the Trump administration held
secret meetings in 2017 with Venezuelanmilitary officers to discuss their plans

(02:15:42):
to overthrow President Nicholas Maduro.
That would not have been thefirst time a US administration has
meddled in Venezuela's affairs.
In fact, US involvement inVenezuela dates back decades.
Well, it's not new.
As, as, uh, um, the historyrecord proves the US has sought
regime change in Venezuela.
Since the election of Ugo Chaz,
this has been going on a long time.

(02:16:03):
I think the main difference is thatthe Trump administration is much more
aggressive about it and open about it,
but you can't talk about US interventionin Venezuela or even Latin America without
mentioning in nearly 200 year old policy.
Called the Monroe Doctrine.
To put it simply, it basically declaredthat the United States had a kind

(02:16:25):
of supremacy in this hemisphere,
originally designed to blockEuropean powers, claiming
colonies in Latin America.
The Monroe doctrine was later interpretedto mean the US also claimed the right
to overrule the democratic processon the continent through invasions,
coups, and CIA covert operations.
The United States is an empire,and so if you're an empire.

(02:16:47):
You want as many countries aspossible to line up with you.
And so the, the pawns matter,uh, as well, in, in a chess game
in 2013, secretary of State, John Kerryannounced the end of the Monroe Doctrine.
Many years ago, the United Statesdictated a policy that defined the
hemisphere for many years after.

(02:17:09):
We've moved past that era,
but how true is that statement?
It never ended.
In terms of foreign policy, there isvery little difference between liberal
Democrats and conservative Republicanson the matter of exercise of US foreign
power In Latin America, we've hadcoups supported by Democrats and we've
had coups supported by Republicans.

(02:17:30):
Venezuela also checks another keybox of reasons for US intervention.
Oil.
Venezuela's petroleum productionreached an all time high in 1970.
A few years later in 1976,the industry was nationalized.
Venezuela has some of the largest depositsof oil in the world, and potentially
that oil could be of great asset, as Mr.

(02:17:51):
Bolton has said.
Uh, if American companiesare able to exploit it.
Venezuela was always seen asa very willing ally and also
as a constant supply of oil.
But beyond Oil, the US was desperateto prevent this former ally
from becoming a socialist state.
Venezuela was the beginning of a radicalpolitical change in Latin America.

(02:18:12):
Beginning in 1998, Venezuela went frombeing the model democracy, the preferred
option that the US promoted in LatinAmerica, a pacted democracy that always
supported the US to being its nemesis.
When the election of Ugo Chavezwho promoted regional integration,
uh, national sovereignty.
Nationalism and an alternative tothe US promotion of free trade and

(02:18:34):
neoliberalism in Latin America.
Huga Chavez's election wasparticularly concerning for the us.
He not only sought to use Venezuela'soil wealth to fund healthcare, education,
and other benefits for the poor.
But he also aligned with Cuba's,Fidel Castro, Washington's
longtime nemesis in Latin America.
So in that sense, Venezuela becomesa thorn in the side of the us.

(02:18:57):
And you add to that, that the electionof Chavez in Venezuela was quickly
followed by Lula in Brazil, the, uh,kiers in Argentina, corre and Ecuador,
Morales and Bolivia Basha in Chile.
And you saw a change in thegeopolitical, uh, character in
the landscape of Latin America.
And that's threatened the US as hegemony.
So that what's happening now in manycases is an effort to recoup that hegemony

(02:19:20):
and Venezuela is, is part of that effortto recover the US' control and power.
In 2002, after 18, people werekilled in an anti-government protest.
Venezuelan military officers andopposition leaders staged a coup to
overthrow President Chavez, US governmentofficials serving under George W.

(02:19:40):
Bush at the time denied havingany prior knowledge of the coup.
While American officials saidthey would not support any extra
constitutional moves to Alt Chavez.
There were CIA documents thatwere made public that showed that
the United States government hadadvanced knowledge of the coup.
Intervention doesn't always rely on force.

(02:20:02):
President Trump announcedsanctions on Venezuela's.
State-run oil industry in an effortto press for change in the country.
What we're focusing on today isdisconnecting the illegitimate Maduro
regime from the sources of its revenues.
Well, I, I think that from the verybeginning, the US policy towards Venezuela
has been one of isolating Venezuela.

(02:20:23):
This was under the Bush Obama, andnow Trump administration, Venezuela
depends on oil for about 95%.
Of its export earnings, it takesoil profits, purchases, food, brings
it back to the country for sale.
That means it can be easily intervenedand can be easily up upended.
So sanctions means that the countryno longer can, on many levels, be

(02:20:43):
able to utilize its foreign assetsto buy food and bring it home.
Sanctions also means itcan't renegotiate its debt.
Sanction also means it can'tbuy on the international market.
After the death of Hugo Chavezin 2013, his former Deputy
Nicholas Maduro took power.
Since then, Venezuela has beenrocked by political, financial, and
humanitarian crises, and ordinaryVenezuelans are bearing the brunt of.

(02:21:07):
All of them.
The country is facing hyperinflation,poverty and food shortage.
People are struggling to afford basicnecessities, including medicine.
3 million Venezuelans have fled toneighboring countries like Columbia
and Brazil while Maduro blames theUS critics, including many former
supporters and officials of Hugo Chavez,blame corruption and poor governance.

(02:21:30):
President Trump took advantage ofthe chaos and division in Venezuela
to throw his support behind theself-declared interim President Juan Huo.
Keep in mind that the US' involvement inVenezuela fits a long-term pattern of US
intervention in Latin American politics.
So you have a long history of USintervention in the region and

(02:21:52):
it's very anti-democratic, veryoften supported dictatorships.
And in the 21st century, itwas mostly against these.
Left governments who were moreinterested in independence and
self-determination than the priorgovernments that were close to the us.
The Trump administration has nowcalled on veteran foreign policy

(02:22:12):
advisor Elliot Abrams, to actas special envoy on Venezuela.
Abrams certainly has experienced inthe region, but that experience has
not necessarily been in promotingdemocracy throughout the 1980s.
He was a key figure in organizingthe Reagan administration's support.
For dictators and death squads inEl Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, and

(02:22:33):
Nicaragua, he pleaded guilty in 1991 totwo counts of misdemeanor for withholding
information from Congress about illegalUS funding for right wing Nicaragua and
paramilitaries, the Iran Contra affair.
The selection of Elliot Abrams showsthat it's very similar to what they
were doing in the 1980s when theywere trying to overthrow the elected

(02:22:55):
government of, of Nicaragua, and therewas so much resistance to it, uh, by
the way, in the United States, that theReagan administration had to end up.
Funding the Contras illegallywith the arm sales to Iran.
This is the neocons like, uh, JohnBolton coming back and just trying
to do the same thing all over again.

(02:23:17):
I. Whatever the intentions of theUnited States, the opposition to
Maduro is growing and popular.
Years of economic mismanagement,corruption, and authoritarian repression
of the media and political oppositionhas drawn even many supporters
of Hugo Chavez onto the streets.
To demand that the government step down.
So is it possible to wantchange in Venezuela but oppose

(02:23:39):
us involvement in the country?
I agree there needs to be change inVenezuela, but the Venezuelans have
to decide that it's a very slipperyslope when we go down, uh, having
the US become the arbitrary ofinternal politics and any country.

(02:24:02):
Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that.
You know, it is, this is a novel.
So these stories are fictionalized, butthey are based on real experiences of
friends of yours or people that you knew.
Correct.
Correct.
So technically it's five short stories.
It's not one novel because thestories go in chronological order,
but they are not intertwined.

(02:24:23):
So you finish one, youstart something else.
Oh, okay.
Um, but it is a long read.
It is 300 pages long, so it doesread like a novel, uh, because
it exists in the same universe.
However, they are about 80% true story.
I, I took stories that were very realand I just fictionalized them for the
purpose of entertainment, for makingthe, the reading more, more pleasant.

(02:24:48):
But yeah, I would say the bulkof the information is true story.
Now you said you recentlymoved for France, but you
lived there for uh, many years.
Yeah.
Were you involved, was there like aVenezuelan community ex pack community?
That, uh, you got to knowthere really, there's not a
very, no, there's not a very biglink between Venezuela and France.

(02:25:10):
Um, of course at the end of the dayyou find each other just because, you
know, someone is a cousin of someoneor someone is a friend of someone.
So I did have my small communityof Venezuelan friends, but for the
most part, there's not even a verybig Latino community in France.
Their, their majority of their immigrationcomes from their former colonies, which

(02:25:31):
is Africa and somewhat in the Middle East.
Yeah, that is weird.
That's strange.
'cause France does have a big presence inSouth America, so that's, that's weird.
Commercially.
My, my, but not politically.
It's not a, it's not a close tie.
Uh, which of the stories thatyou wrote about in your book

(02:25:52):
were the hardest to write?
From a personal standpoint?
And were, and were any of themclose to your own experience?
I would, I think so.
It's, there's five of them.
Number two and number four wereprobably the hardest to write because.
Actually, because they were so distantfrom my own experience, the first, the,

(02:26:13):
the second one is the Chronicle of aKidnapping, so it's a minute to minute
recount of a kidnapping for ransom.
So it's extremely violent.
That one was.
Excruciating to write because youhave to place yourself in the skin
of someone who is kidnapped andhow would you face the situation.
Although the person who recountedthe story in person remembered

(02:26:36):
a lot of details, so it saved mefrom from Fictionalizing a lot.
And the fourth one.
I think it was the most painful becausethat one is about a political prisoner
that ends up in a torture center.
Mm-hmm.
So it is a heartbreaking story of a personthat I, I knew before, um, like long

(02:26:58):
before he ended up in that situation.
And I, I would've never imagined thatsomething like this would happen to him.
And.
It was so difficult for him to tell thestory that I had to come up with ways to
tell it that were from second sources.
So like reading in the newspapers orlooking at a lot of, um, documentaries

(02:27:22):
and, and trying to capture that.
So there was a lot of trying to imaginebeing in, in, in prison unjustly.
Uh.
Actually without due process andthat, that was so difficult to write.
Honestly, that was the, theone that took me the longest.
Okay.
People don't have an understandingthat, that in a lot of these

(02:27:43):
authoritarian regimes, uh, peopledisappear is what they call it.
That's what know Chile, theydid it and, and Argentina.
They've done it.
Yeah.
You know, all these oppressiveregimes, they disappear.
People.
Correct.
And so that's pretty much what happenedwith Vene in Venezuela, that people
would just disappear or did theyactually know that they were eventually,

(02:28:05):
yes.
So this, this, the fourth story that I'mtalking about is titled, uh, Hugo is the
name of the character that one is about,as a person who disappeared, actually,
they didn't disappear in the sense that.
Their family knew that the governmenthad taken them because they went into
their home at four in the morning,abducted him from his house, and then

(02:28:27):
didn't tell anyone where he was forweeks until they bribed enough officers
that they found out where they were.
But this became a standardpractice, um, and also taking
people from, from street protests.
So yes, they, they did became, they did,they, they haven't been understood as.

(02:28:49):
De, which is what youcall that, but it is.
It is exactly what was, whatwas happening at that point.
And I think it calmed down mostly becausepeople got so scared that they're no
longer protesting the way they used to.
But probably if people went out andtried to confront the government
again, it would happen again.
And I think there's a lot ofAmericans that believe that they'll

(02:29:10):
be protected if they get arrested.
Protesting.
It's like it's, it can happen.
Uh, you know, like that, that
You mean in, in the states or elsewhere?
Yeah.
'cause in the story there is anAmerican who for whatever reason,
went and married a Venezuelan womanand found himself in this prison.
Um, and it took years before theAmerican government could take him out.

(02:29:35):
Right.
And, and Americans just think that dueprocess is everywhere and it's like, Nope.
Yeah.
Well, the due process part is very key inthis, in this part of the story because
the study case that you could, you couldtake from my book is that an authoritarian

(02:29:55):
regime came in and dismantled the due,like the, the rule of law bit by bit and.
15 years later, which is when this storyhappens, the the fourth one that we're
talking about, due process is no longer.
Existing.
So this guy spends, I dunno, six monthsin jail and eventually a friend of his

(02:30:18):
realizes that they, there's not even acase against him, he's just been abducted
and he's kidnapped by the government.
But there is no due process.
Therefore, there's nothingto do with lawyers.
Lawyers have no resourcesto taking a him out of jail.
And it becomes a political negotiation.
He actually ends up leaving jailbecause there is, uh, a pact that

(02:30:41):
happens with the opposition party.
And then we juxtaposethat with Ruben's story.
The first story where the protestinggets, gets him put on a list.
Yeah.
And basically he can't work.
So actually book is an escalation.
Sorry.
Yeah.
The book is an escalation.
So the first one is gonna be Reuben, whois, um, a young guy who's in college.

(02:31:07):
Very typical that college kidsare gonna be very present in
protests, anti-government protestseverywhere around the world.
Students tend to be quite leftand liberal anywhere in the world.
Um, things are happening.
And he signed a petitionto impeach the precedent.
I. This gets him blacklisted for life.

(02:31:28):
Uh, and he discovers later downthe line that he's never gonna
be able to find a government.
Job, like he gets blacklistedfrom federal jobs.
He gets blacklisted from the oil industry,which in Venezuela is a national industry.
And he was studying in,uh, petroleum engineering.
So imagine a petroleum engineeringperson who will never be

(02:31:51):
able to work for the state.
It just becomes impossible for him,uh, to imagine a future in Venezuela.
And then that's.
That, that's one of thefirst building blocks.
It just escalates throughout the bookinto the dismantling of the state.
You mentioned the CIA andits current involvement in
El Salvador's politics, but.
It's the, it did notobviously begin there.

(02:32:14):
Uh, the United States sent billions ofdollars in military aid to El Salvador's
government in the eighties, and itwas a violent, repressive regime.
If you could give us a little bitof that history as we lead into
explaining how bou Kelly fits intothat history, uh, that would be great.
Yeah.
Uh, El Salvador was for the betterpart of the 20th century, one of the

(02:32:37):
longest standing military dictatorships.
In, in the world, in thehemisphere and in the world.
And, um, it's always, itis always been as well.
The one of a, it was the firstplace to launch a a, an indigenous
in communist insurrection againstdictatorship in the Americas in 1932.

(02:32:58):
When, approximately 32,000, Imean, I'm sorry, approximately
somewhere between 10 to 50,000.
We still don't know.
Because the memory of that hasbeen erased in official records.
Um, people were killedby their own government.
And so the, the violence and murderof El Salvador has ingrained itself

(02:33:20):
in the political and even the socialculture of El Salvador, where, for
example, um, dictatorship after DICwas continually torturing, killing.
Uh, disappearing, uh, exiling and, and,and, and perpetuating other actions to
terrorize their way into domination.

(02:33:42):
So, in the sixties and in the fiftiesand sixties, you start seeing the
birth of groups following Ceva andFidel Castro in the Americas that were
revolutionary mostly Marxist Leninist.
Revolutionary organizations thateventually in 19, in the 1980s became
the Faro Martin National Liberation Front

(02:34:07):
and the FMLN, uh, waged a, uh, asuccessful war to dismantle the
military dictatorship, sadly.
Um.
And tragically, the FMLN did notretool itself for the digital age, the
analog age Marus, Leninist politicalmilitary structures, uh, did not

(02:34:30):
get upgraded for, for, for, for theworld that Silicon Valley created.
And so, um, eventually you get in thenineties, um, the right wing fascist arena
party instituting what's known as manura.
Smart hand politics in response to thegang problem that was growing after the

(02:34:50):
war because, uh, Bush administration,one, attorney General Bill Barr, started
targeting gangs in the US making up untilthat time, the most, the largest shift
in, in, uh, FBI resources, from countercounterintelligence to focus on gangs.

(02:35:13):
19 in, in 1992.
In response to LA Riots, he alsobegan the practice of deporting
gang members to El Salvador andthen the rest of Central America.
A region rife with ruins and perfectlyfit to grow US style, LA style gang
structures like the Mexican mafia.

(02:35:36):
So that's where you get MS 13 and 18thStreet growing out of the rotten soil of
US policy in the US of deportations of,of de, of deportations and gang policing.
Right.
Right.
So they fed one another.
Right.
And I guess it created almost a cycle of.
You have, uh, sorry to cut you off here,Roberto, but it's such a key point.

(02:35:59):
MS. 13 originating in the US prisonsystem informing deportation policies,
sending those folks back to ElSalvador, building up their resources
and creating, almost strengtheningthem, but also tying in us kind of
gang policing into the immigration.

(02:36:21):
Uh, carceral state that's so key in thenineties and into the two thousands.
Oh, and that you, you'reright on point, Emma.
In addition to that, you see thekinda robocop of US policing and El
Salvador's actual influence on it.
You had people like a guy named,uh, the late maximum warring who

(02:36:43):
a former, uh, US, Pentagon, uh,Colonel, uh, who and strategist.
And, um, you know, professor, adistinguished professor in the US
Army College, uh, you know, uh,starting his career focusing on
insurgency, counter insurgent in, inEl Salvador after the war, men warring.

(02:37:06):
What does men warring do?
He goes and he, uh, starts lookingat gangs as the new insurgency
and starts framing gangs.
As, as insurgency, there's aline that runs from that kind
of thinking to the terroristlanguage you see being used today.
And you then some of the 50, someof the many trainers that the US

(02:37:29):
sent to El Salvador after the warended in 1992 went where to San
Francisco, la, New York to train USpolice forces in counterinsurgency.
And then you have, you know, over theyears, US presidents, including Obama for
example, heavily militarizing US police.

(02:37:52):
So you have in El Salvador an outsized,a tiny country with an outsized, uh,
contributions to the militarizationof the United States itself.
Mm-hmm.
And even the militarization of the police.
That's an outgrowth of the War on Terror,which is where we come full circle

(02:38:14):
of the classifying of these folks asterrorists, because we did the same thing.
Uh, with the mujahideen.
We know that the UnitedStates has enabled.
Far right governments not just in,uh, south Amer or Latin America,
but also in the Middle East.
Um, and then that's come back to biteus because they become the, well,

(02:38:36):
maybe not even bite us, but it, itbenefits these people because then
the military budget increases andthe surveillance state increases.
And this is a new group ofpeople, uh, to go after.
It's just a completely.
Incongruent policy if you actually careabout safety and not just the carceral
state and, uh, making some money likethat, that it, it creates cycles of

(02:39:01):
violence, is really what I'm saying.
Um mm-hmm.
And it doesn't seem like there's,we're just, we're diving even
further into, um, just a moredigitized version of that policy.
You, you write about it as a.Digitized neoliberal 21st century
sista, which is so, uh, well said.
Like, how, how does thatlook when you bring in the

(02:39:21):
surveillance technology piece?
Well, it looks like thingsyou see in sci-fi movies.
I don't, you know, I don't teachsci-fi writing, but I'm a fan of
sci-fi writing in sci-fi movies.
One of my favorite being The Matrix.
You're living in the Matrixright now in many ways, as far
as the stimulation of reality.

(02:39:42):
What takes place in the WhiteHouse right now between Buke and
Trump is an entire stimulation.
When you have this terrorist languagebeing applied indiscriminately and
and without any basis in reality,when you, when you're gonna start
seeing it, extend the brand of terror,the terrorist brand, into different

(02:40:02):
groups that are gonna include manyof us unless we build something else
that El Salvador has to teach us,which is our, the social movements.
That can, that are the onlythings that are gonna be able to
challenge the rise of fascism.
We're not gonna liberal progressive ourway out of climate change techno fascism.
We simply, it's proven time and againin, in the case of El Salvador, in

(02:40:23):
the case of gangs, in the case ofimmigration, for example, immigration
by the way, being the, uh, the royalroad that leads to fascism, not just
in the US but throughout the world.
Right.
In Europe and other and,and even in the Americas.
Um, in, in the case of these, the,the, the, the, this escalation of

(02:40:47):
this, this, this techno fascistpractice, we're gonna have to build the
social movements that kind of includeelements of liberal, progressive.
We're gonna have to be a little moreradical and to the left of that,
if we're to, to get through this.
So.

(02:41:07):
I wanna start by asking youabout this mega Prison Sea Cot.
It was built after Buel declareda state of emergency in 2022 to
deal with violent gangs which werecontrolling large parts of the country.
The government suspended somecivil liberties, including
the right to do process now.
Given all of this, what areconditions like in that prison?

(02:41:31):
This mega prison is a posterchild of our prison system.
It's a high securityprison built allegedly to
exclusively hold gang members.
It has been heavily used by Quepropaganda machine producing, as you
might have seen, highly professionalvideos in which every single image.
He's meticulously taken care of.

(02:41:54):
So if you see something fromthat prison, it is because
the regime wants to to see it.
Some people have described this megaprison as, as basically a black hole.
Is that accurate?
I think it is a good description.
No one can enter this prison.
Relatives of the prisonerscannot visit them.
They are not allowed toreceive anything from outside.

(02:42:15):
Um.
According to President Belli, they don'tsee the light of the sun ever, and they
are kept behind bars for most of the day.
Um, this is what we know from theSalvadoran authorities because
we cannot enter this prison.
And right now, thissituation is not exceptional.

(02:42:35):
It's the same situationfor the other 32 prisons.
It sounds like from your reporting, thedirector of this prison system is somewhat
notorious, the director of the SalvadoranPrison System, a man called O Luna has
been sanctioned by the US State Departmentand also by the Treasury Department.

(02:42:57):
Even the El Salvador PoliceIntelligence unit has described him
as an important piece of a criminalorganization that distributes drugs.
His administration of the prison systemhas brought back systematic torture
to our prisons, something we thoughtwas part of our most painful past.
One thing that El Farro reportedis it wasn't just Venezuelans

(02:43:20):
who were deported to El Salvador.
Who else was on those planes?
As far as we know, there are at leastfour different categories of people
that came in those first three flights.
One Venezuelan suspectsof belonging to the trend.
Crime organization, two Venezuelanundocumented migrants, completely

(02:43:42):
unrelated to this criminal organization.
Three Salvadoran undocumented migrants,and four Salvadoran members of the
EMS 13 gang, including at leastone gang boss who was preparing to
stand trial in the United States.
And I gather this is important becauseof reporting El Farro did about Bke and

(02:44:04):
the deal he made with the MS 13 gang.
That's right.
Bke made a secret agreement withthe gangs five years ago that
helped his party win elections.
In exchange.
Mr. Bke free.
Some of the gang of bosses,including a few required by the
United States for extradition.
Some of those freed by Bke wererecaptured in Mexico and sent to the

(02:44:27):
United States where they are expectedto disclose all the details of their
pacs with the bouquet administration.
We also know that when Mr.Buke offered Secretary Rubio to
receive deportes and criminals.
He also demanded that the gang bosseswere also sent back to El Salvador,
and at least one of them was sent toEl Salvador in those first flights.

(02:44:49):
Carlos, as I understand it, itwas El Salvador's ambassador to
the US who said Quele asked forthose gang leaders to be deported.
I guess the idea here is that if youput them in a jail in El Salvador,
then they can't tell their secrets.
That's that's what we think.
As you know, MS 13 is considereda terrorist organization

(02:45:10):
in the United States.
If the trial in New York proves Mr. Bucheldeals with them, it could potentially be
very damaging since it would mean thathe had illegal deals with a terrorist
organization and also illegally freed someof the terrorist organization leaders.
So what happened to the chargesthat the US had against them?

(02:45:32):
We only know of one, because we sawhim in the images of the deportees
that arrived to El Salvador.
In this specific case of this onesingle person, we found documentation
where the, the Justice Departmentinstructs the attorney assigned to
the case to ask the judge to dismissthe charges against this gang leader

(02:45:56):
in order for him to be deported.
Let me ask you a question, just pullingaway from the prison a, a, a little bit.
Yeah.
The Trump administration has praisedBule for slashing crime in El
Salvador, and yet, just two yearsago, the State Department cited
reports of arbitrary killings,forced disappearances and torture.
Is the Trump administration ignoring thisevidence, or is there something in B'S

(02:46:20):
harsh policies that they connect with?
I can't answer that.
I think you know much more about thenature of Mr. Trump's administration.
What I can say is that Mr. Belli hasbeen very successful in grabbing power
and still keep his high popularity.

(02:46:41):
He still enjoys after almost six yearsin power, a popularity that, um, comes
around 75% depending on the polls.
So that makes him.
A very attractive person for allthe people in these extreme rightist
movements all over the world.
So for your typical Salvadorian,life is better because of

(02:47:04):
the moves that he's made.
Mr. Buel has effectively takenthe gangs out of the communities
of Salvadorian people and loweredthe murder rate in the country.
So life is apparently better, but.
We know how in exchange for thisso-called security, one person or

(02:47:25):
one group of people is grabbingpower, dismantling democracy, and
there's no more accountability.
There's no more checks and balances.
There's a lot of violence stillin Alor, but now it's being
inflicted by the authorities.
Police and the army now can makearrests without a judge's order
and hold anyone in prison almost.
Indefinitely.

(02:47:45):
70,000 people have been detained in theseyears, which makes El Salvador the country
with the highest rate of incarceratedpopulation even above the United States.
I don't know of any experience whenonly through repression you really
canceled a violence that has grown outof a society that is not functioning.

(02:48:09):
Let me quote Archbishop Romero, whowas killed in El Salvador in 1980.
He used to say, violence willnot be eradicated unless we
address it root causes, and wehave to know that gangs are just.
The most radical, the most horribleand the most violent expression

(02:48:34):
of a dysfunctional society.
But if we don't address the causesthat built a fertile ground for these.
Young kids to become so violent,then we are not solving any problem.
And finally, section D resistance.
But to be clear, to go back to somethings that they can do, this is something

(02:48:58):
that can be found to be civil contempt.
Yeah.
That is contempt of a judge's order.
The judge then can use the refusalto answer as an inference against the
government in terms of finding facts.
And just as an example, we sawthat with Judge Barrell Howell in
the Rudy Giuliani case, where heviolated multiple discovery orders.

(02:49:19):
And so they were sanctions that includedfindings against him because he hadn't
complied, so they can use it in the case.
They can also, as you said,impose fines on the government.
If the contempt is found to be personal,they can impose it on the person.
They can also, if it's seriousenough, they can actually impose

(02:49:41):
jail as a civil contempt remedy.
The idea is that you jail somebodyuntil they comply with the order.
And that is something that canbe ordered if a judge finds that.
I actually dealt with that a lot whenI was dealing with organized crime
work as a government prosecutor.
I dealt with the sort of various issuesthat come up when a mobster refuses

(02:50:02):
to testify without a valid privilege.
There can be fines, there can be jailterms, and then if it's a lawyer who's
doing this, there can be ramificationsin terms of their bar license.
With referrals.
So there are tools in the arsenal.
It is just so rare to see whenyou're dealing with the government.

(02:50:24):
That's right.
Because the government has an obligation,obviously, as an oath of office.
They have a duty of candor asthe Chief Justice has said.
I mean, you know, a court order is,you know, is something you comply
with and then if you disagreewith it, you can appeal it.
So we may again get to that'cause we're dealing with the
same thing before Judge Boberg.

(02:50:46):
So this is a good segue to speakingabout the Judge Bosberg case, because
people remember that the decisionfrom the Supreme Court there that
said these people are entitled.
To a due process hearingbefore the deprivation.
That is before being removed.
But the issue that the court split on waswhether it has to be habeas or whether it

(02:51:08):
had to be the Administrative ProceduresAct and said it has to be done by habeas.
Well, what happened?
What happened was the plaintiffsread that and complied with it.
Filed habeas.
Exactly.
So they filed habeas in New York.
In Texas.
Why in those two locations?
Because that's where the plaintiffswere that were being represented.

(02:51:29):
The original five plaintiffs.
Exactly.
So two of the plaintiffs, 'cause they hadcounsel, were able to be taken off the
plane and didn't end up in El Salvador.
And so they were.
Housed in are housed in New York.
So the habeas was filed in New Yorkand the judge there, what did he do?
He issued a stay.
The TRO, like you cannotdeport these people.

(02:51:51):
He issued a class certification too.
Not for the nation.
For anybody in the Southern Districtof New York who's either currently
in detention or will be in detention,cannot be deported without notice
of an opportunity to be heard.
Right.
Which is totally in compliancewith the Supreme Court's decision.
Exactly.
And you know what people werethinking when that decision from

(02:52:12):
the Supreme Court came down, oh,it's a ruse to get it to Texas.
And you know that's a favorablevenue for the government.
Well, guess what happened, Mary, whenthe habeas was filed in Texas, temporary
restraining order classcertification applicable there in
the Southern district of Texas.
I think it was the SouthernDistrict Brownsville.
Yes.
That's about almost asfar south as you can go.

(02:52:32):
Yep.
Same thing.
Temporary restraining order.
You cannot deport these people withoutnotice and an opportunity to be heard.
I will also say both judges ordered,they can't be transferred either.
Without noticing an opportunityto be heard so that you
can't pull some shenanigans.
It's like, okay, we're not gonna giveyou notice in New York, so we're gonna
quickly transfer you someplace else sothat it's almost like a whack-a-mole.
Anytime we transfer you, assoon as you file habeas there,

(02:52:55):
oh, you're not there anymore.
Right?
So it's kind of like.
Don't move these peopleuntil they get hearings.
That was like the next dayafter the Supreme Court too.
It was so fast.
This is good news.
In terms of what you are seeing, I wannamake sure people understand this, is you
are seeing judges across the country,judges appointed by, as we've talked

(02:53:16):
about on this podcast, judges appointedby Democrats and Republicans, including
judges appointed by Donald Trump.
Upholding the rule of law.
And so there is good news here interms of what the courts are doing in
terms of upholding what's going on,but it is a real sign of where the

(02:53:36):
administration is that you're seeingthis sort of uniform, almost uniform
sort of resistance to the law breaking.
Hopefully this will happenis I will get my citizenship.
That's Mos Kay Madi, a Palestinianstudent at Columbia University.
I spoke with him the night beforehis scheduled interview with the US

(02:53:57):
Citizenship and Immigration Services.
I've been waiting for this interviewto be scheduled, uh, for over a year
after a decade living in the us Madi,a green card holder was prepared.
He had studied for the test.
He was ready to swear the oath, and hewas hopeful he'd walk out of that meeting.
A naturalized citizen

(02:54:19):
proof that I understand what theConstitution is about, what is
the democracy of this, uh, in thiscountry is about what is the rights
of people in this country about?
Then I, after passing thetest, I hope that I would do.
The Pledge of Allegiance and I will comeout of there as a citizen with rights.

(02:54:44):
But Madi, a leader of the campusprotest movement against Israel's
war on Gaza, also knew the risks.
The second option is I may getout of there with handcuffs as
detained person with no rightstaken to ICE detention Center

(02:55:05):
On Monday, Madi went to hiscitizenship interview, but instead
of grinding him citizenship,immigration agents arrested him.
He now faces deportationto the occupied West Bank.
He's the ninth Columbia student,targeted for deportation as the
Trump administration revokes overa thousand student visas, including
for many students who had noconnection to pro-Palestine protests.

(02:55:28):
The targeting of pro-Palestinevoices and international students
is part of a broader crackdown.
It's part of a mass deportation campaignthat disregards individual's legal
status or rights and punishes themfor constitutionally protected speech.
To discuss Malawi's case, I'm joined byhis representative rep, Becca Ballant,
the Democratic Congresswoman for Vermont.

(02:55:50):
Welcome to the Show Rep Balance.
Thank you for having me.
So to start, can you tell mehow your office first became
aware of Malawi's situation?
We first became aware because a localum, rep, so a house rep in our state
legislature was there with Maxima.
Mei because she knows him and, um, wasthere hoping that what was happening

(02:56:14):
was the last citizenship hurdle,essentially taking the citizenship test.
And so she was there in real timeposting about what was happening.
And then of course, you know, we weregetting updates as well to the office.
And the thing that isincredibly shocking about this
particular instance is that the.

(02:56:36):
The reasons that are being givenby the Secretary of State Rubio
and Secretary of Homeland Security,uh, Christie Nome is that his, his
statements, his beliefs that in someway he is a danger to, to us interests.
Okay.
Like we can unpack that for a verylong time, which is completely in

(02:56:58):
total, you know, BS on so many levels.
But this is a, this is a man who wasan outspoken critic of people who were
being, uh, violent in, in their protest.
He's a Buddhist, he is someone whospoke out against antisemitism.
He said the, the struggle againstantisemitism and the struggle

(02:57:18):
for people to have a freePalestine are one and the same.
It is about freedom of, ofboth peoples and the fact that
he, they're saying that that.
That somebody who is speaking aboutpeace, who has relationships with Israeli
students on campus, he was building thosebridges that somehow he is a danger.
I mean, it just gives up the entire, theentire scam of, of what is happening here.

(02:57:44):
This is about power, it's about control.
It is about people using thisidea of lawlessness and the people
themselves who are using that idea,the Trump administration, they
themselves are the lawless ones.
It is so perverse and I, I,Vermonters, are completely
outraged by this as they should be.

(02:58:05):
And they're connecting the dots here.
Couple dots.
They're connecting the dots of ifthis can happen to someone like Max
Modally, it can happen to anyone becausethey're not giving people due process.
They're not giving themaccess to their attorneys.
They're not telling them whatthey're being charged with and.
It is this incredible, uh, distractionfrom their own lawlessness and the fact

(02:58:32):
that we are economies in free fall.
Like that's how craven it is.
That's how crass it is.
They are playing to a base of peoplewho delight in cruelty at this point, to
distract from the fact that this presidentis failing on so many other fronts and
they're using people as their pawns.
It's disgusting, it's inhumane.

(02:58:53):
It is illegal.
It is just, you know, so depressingabout this is where we are as a nation.
This is a good segue into theletter that you led on Wednesday.
Sent to the Department of HomelandSecurity and to the Department
of State demanding answers on thegovernment's quote, abduction of madi.
I'll just say it was notable, at leastfor me, to see that kind of language

(02:59:15):
being used by members of Congress.
Um, I'll quote from the lettermasked hooded men in plain
clothes removed Mr. Madi.
He was then handcuffed and taken intoan unmarked van from the U-S-C-I-S
office in Colchester, Vermont.
All Americans should be chilledby this action taken straight
out of dystopian fiction.
Yes.
So to start, why did you think, youknow, a lot of people, you know,

(02:59:37):
months into the Trump administrationhave been asking, where are Democrats?
What are Democrats doing?
Why did you think it was importantto send this letter right now?
My gosh, so many reasons.
Um.
Where to begin?
For me, I mean, I think it'simportant for, for me to speak about
my own family's history in this.
Mm-hmm.
So my grandfather, um, layup PolBallant, he was, uh, a victim of the

(03:00:01):
Holocaust and my family experiencedpeople, uh, you know, ratting them
out as, as Jews, ratting them out,as, as dangers, you know, a danger
to, to society, and that this is aninflection point from our country.
This is about our courage andthis is about our ethical values.

(03:00:26):
Not just as a nation of laws,but also also as human beings.
And it is dystopian for at the, in thesame breath that they are saying that
Harvard University, Columbia University,they need to sign these agreements
that there will be no masks on campus.
They themselves are sendingtheir own brown shirts.

(03:00:48):
You know this, thisessentially paramilitary army.
You know, masked, hooded, can't identifythem if they're so proud of what they're
doing, then show your damn face, thenshow your id, then talk about what
grounds you are holding this person.
But it's being done in secret andit is meant to shock and awe and to

(03:01:10):
get the rest of us to remain silent.
They have no evidence.
They have no details, which iswhat we're demanding of both
Secretary Rubio and Secretary Nome.
If in fact, you claim.
He is a danger to our country'sforeign interests, then provide
the certification to Congress.

(03:01:30):
That is what you have to do ifyou're using this provision.
And I never thought that I wouldsee this kind of behavior from a
democratically elected government.
They, you know, we are, we are, we arecertainly in constitutional crisis when
they are screaming about lawlessness,when they are defying court orders,

(03:01:54):
when they're defying the constitution.
When you have the, the felonin chiefs directing all of
this, you know, if this were.
A novel, you would say it, it wouldbe right out of it was Orwellian.
All of it is Orwellian.
And, and I just, I know that Vermontersunderstand that this is about all of us.

(03:02:16):
If you'll deny due process from somebodywho was in this country with a green
card for 10 years, who is somebodywho, uh, you know, talked about peace
and connection between Palestiniansand Israelis who was looking to build
bridges, if this man is somehow a threatto society, then we are down a sick path.

(03:02:40):
there was reporting in Axios that isdriving a lot of the news coverage as
it relates to kil Mara Bgo Garcia, theimmigrant who was illegally sent to a
maximum security prison in El Salvador.
That reporting reads the secondhouse Democrat who spoke anonymously,
a centrist called the deportationissue, a soup du jour, arguing Trump
is setting a trap for the Democratsand like usual, were falling for it.
Quote, rather than talking about thetariff policy and the economy, the

(03:03:03):
thing where his numbers are tanking,we're gonna take the bait for one
hairdresser, they said, likely referringto Andrew Hernandez Romero, only if
Trump tries to deport US citizens.
The lawmaker argued, well,Democrats need to draw a line in
the sand and shut down the house.
So let's talk about this because Iunderstand that there are people who say
Democrat's worst issue is immigration.
At a moment where Trump is quite literallydestroying our economy, which, you know,

(03:03:26):
2024 showed us anything is a major issueto exploit, a potent issue to exploit.
We should be focusing on that.
Two things here.
One, we should focus on thatand we do focus on that.
I talk about the economy every single day.
I talk about the impacts ofTrump's idiotic tariffs on our
stock market, on our 4 0 1 Ks,on the cost of everyday goods.

(03:03:46):
The reality is that Trump is destroyinga generation of farmers by sending other
countries to Brazil or Australia toget stuff like beef and soybeans where
they used to come to American farmers.
For those things, even if the tariffsare removed, we won't recover to where
we were pre tariff levels becausethey're creating new relationships
with other farmers, other countries.
Aside from that, you know, our carmanufacturers are gonna suffer.

(03:04:08):
Our supply chains are the result ofdecades of close cooperation, uh, with
Canada and Mexico, and that process isgoing to grind to a halt because of what
Trump is doing, which is basically adeath now for American auto manufacturing.
Jerome Powell, just this week announcedslower growth and high inflation.
Inflation was the issue that killedDemocrats in the 2024 election.
So I will continue to beat onthis drum every single day.

(03:04:32):
But talking about the economyand talking about immigration
are not mutually exclusive.
We can walk and chew gum at the same time.
And I'm sorry, but I refuse to believethat Trump disappearing legal residents
to a foreign prison is something thatwe should stay silent about just because
Trump polls better on immigration.
I refuse to believe that moderateRepublicans and independents think

(03:04:55):
that allowing a Maryland dad and legalresident charged with no crime rotting
in a foreign gulag is acceptable.
I refuse to believe that wehave lost every shred of our
humanity in this country.
And look, I'm not saying this, uh,from a political perspective at all.
I'm saying this as a humanbeing with an ounce of empathy.
I am all for the deportationof dangerous criminals.

(03:05:16):
This guy ain't one he was chargedwith, nothing afforded no due process.
He's got three kids with disabilities.
He's a sheet metal worker, a union member.
And the fact that he wore a ChicagoBulls hat in 2019 is the justification
that ICE pointed to in claiming thathe's a gang member of a city that
by the way, he didn't live in again.
I'm all for the deportationof dangerous criminals.

(03:05:38):
Like I live in an American city too.
I want my family to be safe too.
I have the same fearsthat everybody else has.
I'm not, uh, blind to the realitiesof life in America in 2025.
I mean, hell, I can guarantee you, uh,if you've looked at my inbox based on the
amount of threats I receive, um, whichI'm sure are far greater than the average
person, um, that I'm hyper aware of crime,but do it legitimately disappearing.

(03:06:03):
This guy is not legitimate,nor frankly is it American.
We have a constitution.
We have a Fifth Amendmentright, affording you a trial.
If you've got a gang memberwho is here illegally.
We're probably all in agreement thatthose people should be deported, but we
have to know that they are gang members.
And the way to do that is byaffording someone due process,

(03:06:23):
which Garcia was denied.
Again, I'm not defending criminals.
I'm demanding that we know who thecriminals are so that we are not punishing
people who are innocent or even upstandingmembers of society, people who pay
taxes and go to work and take care oftheir kids and enrich our communities.
And I wanna be clear, because Republicansare trying to own this narrative
with every fiber of their being.

(03:06:45):
What I am saying is notan extreme position.
Disappearing innocent people to foreignprisons is the extreme position period.
Full stop.
And if, by the way, the moral imperativeto speak out wasn't enough, which it
should be, but let's say that you'restill, you know, numbers driven and
you just can't bring yourself to want,discuss immigration because of what all

(03:07:05):
the polls say, then just look at thepolls according to the latest yu gov
survey of all the issues in the politicalzeitgeist right now, the following
question, deporting immigrants withoutcriminal convictions to El Salvador
to be imprisoned without letting themchallenge the deportation in court.
That question polls dead.
Last among Americans, 46% ofAmericans strongly oppose it, and

(03:07:27):
15% of Americans somewhat oppose it.
That's nearly two thirds of Americanswho oppose in some fashion what
this administration is doing.
Not exactly a home run hill to die on.
So again, even if the moral argumentisn't enough, the polling backs up.
That position that disappearing innocentpeople to a foreign gulag with zero
due process is not something thatAmericans are responding well to.

(03:07:49):
And in the same way that Trumpdestroyed his lead on the economy,
he's doing the same thing with his lastvestige of support with immigration.
And there's one more reason that Ithink, uh, it's especially important
to discuss this, and that's that ifwe don't speak up now, we embolden
Trump to go after everybody else.
The reality is that while hisadministration promised that it
was only interested in going afterhardened undocumented criminals, they

(03:08:12):
have already undermined their ownpromise by going after this guy, this
guy who was charged with nothing.
He's a legal resident.
In fact, just this past week.
It was reported that UScitizens are now being detained,
including a couple up in Boston.
This is a pattern by theTrump administration.
If you allow them an inch,they will take a mile.
If one law firm, capitulatesTrump realizes how easy it is,

(03:08:32):
and he goes after a dozen more.
If one university like ColumbiaCapitulates, Trump goes after more.
If one tech billionairecapitulates, Jeff Bezos, mark
Zuckerberg, he goes after more.
If one media company like a, B, CNews capitulates, he goes after more.
If we do not stand up and fight him nowon this issue, when he's going after
one legal resident who was not chargedwith a crime, then we don't get to act

(03:08:54):
surprised when he goes after other legalresidents or ultimately American citizens.
We've seen the playbook.
He's already broadcasting it, so wehave to fight now on this issue while
there's still an opportunity to fight
So you guys are both comingto me from El Salvador.
Can you explain, obviouslywhat you're doing there and
what you seek to accomplish?
I.
Well, thanks.
Look, I, we, uh, both, um, bothMaxwell and I have been very committed

(03:09:18):
to the release of Kmar Reo Garcia.
Um, people are probably aware we havebeen fighting like hell to ensure that
this country's a place that actuallylistens to decisions by the Supreme Court.
Donald Trump is defying a nine zero orderby the Supreme Court to return Kmar,
who was illegally taken to El Salvador.
Return him back to the United States.

(03:09:39):
We also know that lowercourts have affirmed this.
The Trump administration hasessentially said, we made a mistake.
We shouldn't have sent him there.
So Maxwell and I requested an officialdelegation to El Salvador, to James
Comer, we're both on oversight.
Um, they denied that official,uh, congressional delegation trip.
And we said, you can deny us and we'regonna come here anyways no matter what.
And so we're here in El Salvador onthe ground now, uh, and Maxwell and

(03:10:03):
I and other, and two other membersare, are committed to this fight.
I.
So given the fact that, that James Comerdenied your, your request for, uh, a
congressional delegation, a ell are, arefirst and foremost, are you guys safe
by virtue of being there without theprotections that would be afforded to
you, uh, if you had done it through a ell,
obviously there there's always risks.

(03:10:23):
Risks associated with all these trips.
Um, but we took that intoaccount as we put together
the itinerary in the schedule.
I mean, there's a reason whyeveryone found out we were here
when we got here already, and it'sreally important to our security.
Um, but the other thing is, um, it,you know, like Robert said, we didn't
want to allow that, this denialof our, of our requests keep us.

(03:10:45):
From doing the work that we need to do.
And the fact of the matter is both ofour offices are receiving tons and tons
and tons of letters, mail, phone calls,emails of constituents who are saying, you
know, go out there, fight for due process.
Or, I've heard from people who'vesaid, I see myself represented in this
situation like, like I'm a rego Garcia.

(03:11:06):
Like this could be me.
And so for us, we don't wanna wait.
I. Um, until this situation getsoutta hand and Donald Trump is
actually doing this to us citizensand even more people, now's the time
when we have to stand up for this.
So, you know, we, we wish we'dbe here on an official Cordell.
Obviously it gives us more resources,the ability to do a little bit more.
Uh, but we didn't run for Congressto just cow away when a Republican

(03:11:29):
idiot like er tells us no.
And so when we got that letter,we, you know, called each other
up and said, let's do it anyway.
Perfectly put.
And, and I, and I would ask too,like, what does it say that.
That James Comer opted if he, whenhe had the opportunity to approve
this codel, that he opted to say no.
Thereby trying his level best to preventyou from, from a going, or B, if you do

(03:11:50):
go, obviously trying to, to prevent youfrom from, from this getting any oxygen.
Well, I think, look, what'swhat's really important for all
is we're not gonna be stopped byJames Coleman and the Republicans.
And let's be really clear, the onlyofficial ELLs that have had members
come here from the house have beenRepublican ELLs with no Democrats, right?
So for for the House, for the Houseof Representatives to have only

(03:12:11):
approved ELLs, for Republicansto come here, to tour of the
prisons, to meet with officials.
Is crazy.
We should be allowed as Democratsin a bipartisan way to check and
not just on the welfare of kmar,but ensure that other people that
are here are getting due process.
We should be here meeting with officialsand yet, because they wanna prove
official s. We're gonna be here anyways,and we're proud that we're here.

(03:12:35):
And more importantly, theAmerican public need to understand
that Donald Trump is defined.
The Supreme Court and thepeople here in El Salvador.
We spoke to, uh, numerous,uh, press from El Salvador.
Um, in English, in Spanish.
We're also, we're, we're obviouslyboth part of the Congressional
Hispanic Caucus, uh, as well.
So it's important for them to hear intheir language, what Donald Trump is

(03:12:55):
doing, and to build pressure here on theground to release Kilmore and others.
That deserve their due process.
And have you been able tomake contact with Garcia?
And also can you give an updatebecause the, the latest reporting
that we have is that he was movedout of Sea Cot to a different prison.
Um, and so what was thesignificance of that move?
So we made an official request to meetwith him to, to make sure he's okay.

(03:13:17):
I mean, know, you know, one of thepeople we're here traveling with, um,
is the, uh, the lawyer of his familythat they want to know where he's at.
They want to know if he's okay.
They, they want to know what's going on.
Um, and so our, our.
Uh, request to meet with himwas denied by the government.
They said because itwasn't an official trip.
Um, which I guess hopefully if an officialtrip happens when more Democrats in

(03:13:39):
the future, there'll be no reason forthem to not let them see each other.
But the other thing that we'refinding is that there's just not,
there's a lack of information.
You know, we went to the embassyto speak with the staff there
and the ambassador, and we left.
With the, you know, we, we left under,with the under with understanding
that the Trump administration hasnot told the embassy to, uh, uh, uh,

(03:13:59):
comply with the Supreme Court rulingat all, um, to facilitate nothing.
And not even that, they don't really knowwhere he's at our embassy, which is very
problematic when we talk about the factthat our Supreme Court in a unanimous
decision, has instructed administrationto facilitate the return of this man.
They are willfully flipping thebird to the Supreme Court, which

(03:14:22):
also shows that we're, we're in aconstitutional crisis right now as well.
So there's, there's manyreasons for this trip.
Um, but everyone should understandthat this can happen to anyone
if we don't stop it now.
That's why we're here.
No, no.
I just wanna add one thing, whichI think is really important.
'cause we were obviously meetingwith the ambassador today.
Um, and, and there's no question that, um.
The embassy has not begun any processto facilitate this release, which

(03:14:45):
the Supreme Court has mandated.
So that's be crystal clear.
Um, they're defined theSupreme Court to be clear.
The second thing is we also understandthat this is an issue, um, that's
bigger than just Kilmore, right?
This is about due process.
It's about the separation ofpowers and it's about other.
People that are here in El Salvador thatare essentially having no due process.
We, we have a story which, um, a lotof folks have covered about an Andre

(03:15:07):
Romero, a young man, 19 years old,a gay hairdresser going through the
asylum process, had an appointment forasylum through our own process that we
approved, and that it's picked up andsent directly to an El Salvador prison.
We have not heard from him.
And no, his family has not,his attorneys have not.
We just wanna know ifhe's okay if he's alive.
We've actually asked the ambassadorif we could get a wellness check

(03:15:29):
or could see um, him as well.
And we have yet to hear back.
But that's also been one of our requests.
So there's a lot of thingsthat we're working on here.
It makes sense because I mean, thereare a lot of people on the right
who say, oh, we're, we're perfectlyfine with immigration, but you
just have to do it the right way.
This is somebody who did itthe right way and yet still was
disappeared to a foreign gulag.
Right.
That that's exactly right.

(03:15:50):
I wanna dig into the point you madejust prior, because I think that's
especially important, this idea that.
That the Overton window shifts so easilywith this administration and we're
seeing it happen to legal residents.
And now we're finally seeingreporting that, that, uh, American
citizens are being detained.
They're being detained at airports,they're being detained at, uh,
at different ports of entry.
And so have you heard of any of yourconstituents, for example, uh, who are

(03:16:14):
American citizens who are being detained?
And can you just speak morebroadly about this idea of, of.
EN enabling Donald Trump to dothis now with no pushback and what
that will mean in terms of givinghim the green light to do it to an
even broader degree in the future.
So we actually just had asituation like this happen in
Florida, um, in North Florida.
Um, we had a person who is a citizendetained, uh, by local police for

(03:16:39):
something completely unrelated.
I think it was a minor traffic infraction.
And then ICE issued what's called thedetainer, which is essentially when
the local police can hold someone.
I believe it's, it can be up to 24 or48 hours for ice to come pick them up.
So they held this guy and he, they, the,the family went to the court proceeding
holding up the birth certificate.
Holding up the paperworksaying, look, he's a citizen.

(03:17:01):
He was born here.
What's going on?
And the judge said, because we have somenew laws in Florida that are horrible.
We have some of the worstimmigration laws in the country.
The judge said, I, because of thelaw, we have to wait for ice to get
here, for ice to tell us what to do.
So it, it's the federal government,but we also can't take our eyes off
the states that are, they're, youknow, it's a race to the bottom.

(03:17:22):
And who can impress Trump the most tomake the worst, most authoritarian.
Um, inhumane laws thateven if you're a citizen.
You get pulled over for having a taillight out or whatever it is that you
can end up being held up to 24 48hours, uh, for ICE to come and get you.
We, we heard about a similarthing happening in Arizona.
It's happening across the country.

(03:17:43):
This is why we're here.
We're not here to be heroes.
We're not here for any of that.
We're here because we need to keeptalking about it, protesting about it.
Members of Congress, we need to doeverything we can with the power
that we have within our institution.
The courts need to keep going.
We can't afford.
To throw any part of the response out.
Everything at full force all the timeright now because we, if we wait till

(03:18:09):
it really gets outta hand when citizensare being sent to foreign countries.
When a Congress person compete, like,I'm not trying to scare people, but this
is what's going on in my state right nowand in certain states across the country.
And that's why we have to,we have to finish it now.
We have to rise up now and makesure that doesn't happen again.
And that's why I said we're, we're thesecond batch of members here, van Holland.

(03:18:30):
Um, really led the charge on this.
We're following his lead.
There's gonna be more people coming.
We've been talking witha lot of our colleagues.
There's more trips.
And Brian, let me add one thingto Matt, what Maxwell said.
Sure.
It's really important that I, Iknow you've, you know, there's some,
some are, some are saying, someDemocrats are out there saying that,
um, this is a distraction or thatperhaps, uh, we should focus on, on,
um, other, you know, other things.

(03:18:51):
And then there are a lotof things to focus on.
Right.
We can do all things at once, right?
We can take on, uh, this injustice thatis happening to Killmore and others.
We can take on Elon Musk andthe billionaire class who are
trying to rip off Americans.
We can take on the destructionof our federal agencies.
We can take on all these big issuesat once, but we've gotta be all in
and we've gotta be in the fight.

(03:19:11):
And being in the fight also means showingup and being wherever we need to be,
including El Salvador, to stand up for
our democracy and our values.
But I actually wanted to start todayby talking about fear, because fear's
clearly a major driver of Trump's span,brand of politics always has been.
And how we all respond tothat fear in this moment.

(03:19:33):
Is gonna determine a whole lotabout the future of this country.
Congressman Jamie Raskinsummed it up pretty well in
the New York Times this week.
He said there's a regime of fearthat's been brought down on society.
People need to see leaders andorganizers standing up and speaking
with authority against what's happening.
Congressman Jamie Raskinsummed it up very well there.
He's here today.

(03:19:53):
We have a lot to talk about.
We're gonna talk to him in just a moment.
But I also wanna talk about a fewother things, because this week we
also saw at least one Republicanacknowledge that that fear too.
I mean, during an event in Alaskathis week, Senator Lisa Murkowski
was asked what she would say topeople who are afraid right now.
And she was way more candid thanI at least expected her to be.

(03:20:14):
What are you gonna have to sayto people who are afraid or who
represent people who are afraid?
We are all afraid.
Okay.
It's quite a statement,

(03:20:35):
but we are, um,
we're, we're in.
In a time and a place where, Idon't know, I, I certainly have
not, I have not been here before.
Um, and I'll tell you, I am, Iam, uh, oftentimes very anxious

(03:20:58):
myself about, about using my voice,um, because retaliation is real
and that's not right.
It's definitely not rightand retaliation is real.
We've seen it.
Those fears are real.
We all know that Trump has vindictiveand he is betting he can gain a lot of

(03:21:22):
leverage by creating even more fear.
But at the same time, we've alreadyseen that giving into his demands
gets you absolutely nowhere.
I mean, when law firms cave,the demands don't stop.
The firms that struck deals withTrump are now learning that the White
House will effectively be choosingtheir pro bono clients for them.
And when universities cave,the demands don't stop either.

(03:21:44):
Columbia's deal with Trump rightnow might now include a court decree
giving the White House controlover the university's management.
And when media outlets cave, thedemands definitely don't stop.
I mean, paramount entered into settlementtalks with Trump over a frivolous
lawsuit, and Trump still pushed theFCC to revoke CBS's broadcast license.
Point is this, capitulatingto Trump won't save you.

(03:22:06):
You'll just be targeted again and again.
Because when you give into Trump'sdemands, you're just sending the message.
His threats and tactics work.
You're not putting the episode behind you.
You're just inviting more demands.
That's how mob bosses work.
And remember, fear is what DonaldTrump sees as his most effective tool.
I, in some ways, it's his only tool,fear of re retribution and fear of

(03:22:29):
him weaponizing the powers of hisoffice is basically what he relies
on, and he is obviously relyingon it to use that office in ways.
We've never seen before.
I mean, he is trying to use the IRS ofall places to target the nonprofit status
of universities, which is the goal ofmaking all nonprofit groups afraid of
continuing the work that they're doing.

(03:22:50):
He's trying to use immigration powers tomake any non-citizen fear that he could
change their legal status and force themout of the country at a moment's notice.
Trump is using his office to instillfear in every single way he can.
And he is doing it in a waythat he thinks, at least is
politically smart, he thinks it is.
He's trying to lure his politicalopponents into making this about

(03:23:12):
just defending elite institutionslike Harvard or Big city law
firms nobody's ever heard of.
He's spreading lies about Kamar,Abrego Garcia, daring people to
defend him personally rather thandefending the rights he's been denied.
And on the issue of Garciaspecifically, some Democrats have
said it's a distraction from theeconomic calamity he's caused.

(03:23:34):
Some have said Kamar, rego Garciais an imperfect hero for this issue.
Maybe he is saying it's playing on Trump'sturf on immigration, and Republicans
really do think this is their turf.
They really do.
I mean, just listen to how StephenMiller described this issue.
President Trump, his policy is foreignterrorists that are here illegally
get expelled from the country,which by the way is a 90 10 issue.

(03:23:57):
It sounds scary.
I mean, 90 10, first of all,Stephen Miller needs a math class.
I think we've all learned,but that's a big bluff from a
little man and his sidekick.
It's true that when pollsters areasked broad questions, when they ask
broad questions to people out thereabout immigration and deportation,
broadly, Trump's policies do well.
But when those questions get morespecific and that's important,

(03:24:20):
it's a totally different story.
A U gov poll this morning found thatsix in 10 this month, sorry, found six
in 10 respondents said they opposeddeporting immigrants without criminal
convictions to El Salvador to beimprisoned without letting them challenge
the deport their deportation in court.
61%. Guys, that's a pretty clearmajority, especially compared to

(03:24:41):
the 26% of respondents who saidthey supported Trump's actions.
It's not exactly 90 10, andStephen Miller's favor on that one.
Is it?
And we're seeing that on the groundin states across the country too.
Even some pretty red states.
Just listen to the earful that Republicansenator Chuck Grassley got from an older,
mostly white crowd in Iowa this week.

(03:25:03):
You gonna bring that guyback from El Salvador?
Why not?
Well, because that's nota, that's not a power of.
Supreme Court said to bring it back.
Judges are
Cantion Constitution HearingCommittee, Trump don't care if I get

(03:25:29):
an order to pay attention for $1,200.
And I just say, no.
Does that stand up?
Because he's got an order from theSupreme Court and he's just said no.
He just said, screw it.
I'm the president of that country.
Is not subject to our US Supreme Court
back.

(03:25:52):
I pissed.
Not sure that was what SenatorGrassley was expecting from that
town hall meeting in Central Iowa.
I mean, I guess people in centralIowa are a part of that 10%.
Steven Miller was talking about, I mean,who knows, and I guess a Reagan appointed
federal judges too on his calculation.
In that federal judge's rulingupholding court decisions requiring

(03:26:13):
the government to facilitate AbregoGarcia's return, judge James Harvey
Wilkinson III did not mince words exactly.
He wrote quote, it is difficultin some cases to get to the
very heart of the matter, but inthis case it's not hard at all.
The government is asserting a rightto stash away residents of this
country in foreign prisons withoutthe semblance of due process.

(03:26:34):
That is the foundation ofour constitutional order.
The government is asserting aright to stash away residents of
this country in foreign prisons.
I mean, that is a pretty cleardistillation of the issue here.
Likewise, the Supreme Court dealt Trumpanother big setback just this weekend,
and in order that they issued at 1:00AM Saturday morning making some of the

(03:26:54):
judges cranky, the court temporarilyblocked the administration from deporting
another group of detainees to ElSalvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
That was a seven two decision by DonaldTrump's Ultra conservative court.
Seven two.
So the courts seem tobe standing up to him.
Some Republicans are standingup to him and the public is
not exactly on his side either.

(03:27:14):
And what's now becoming clear is thereare actually rewards for standing up.
It's morally right, butthere are rewards too.
I mean, after Harvard said itwould stand up to Trump's demands,
it's an outpouring of support andan immediate surgeon donation.
Donations.
The pushback had enough of an effecton the Trump administration that
they came up with a tortured processexplanation as the only way I can

(03:27:35):
describe it, of how this all happenedwith White House officials claiming the
I original demands were sent by mistake.
Okay?
So their decision to fight back,not only shine a bright spotlight
on Donald Trump's power grab, italso made his administration look
kind of silly in the process.
And any intention like that onany of the crazy stuff they're
trying is a good thing right now.

(03:27:57):
When Senator Corey Booker spoke for25 hours on the Senate floor, it
brought attention and news coverage,and also made him a hero to Democrats
because he wasn't consumed by fear.
He just kind of let it rip for 25 hours.
When Senator Bernie Sanders andCongresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
hit the road, they drew tens ofthousands of people, if not more
at the rallies, not just in bluebastions like la, but in places like

(03:28:21):
Tampa, Idaho, and Missoula, Montana.
Even as staunch projectpresses, which they proudly are.
They're appealing to peopleacross the ideological spectrum
because they don't fear fighting.
Back more recently, Senator ChrisVan Holland of Maryland traveled to
El Salvador this week and pressuredthe government there to give him a
meeting with Kumar Abrego Garcia.

(03:28:41):
Not only did v Helen clearly take astand in the process, he also proved
and showed people that Abrego Garciawas alive and forced the Salvadorian
government to play a bit of defense.
And since then, van Halen hascommanded a ton of attention.
I mean, this morning he did a round offive Sunday shows talking about a strip.
So aside from the obvious moralreasons behind all of this pushback,

(03:29:03):
and there are plenty of those, there'salso a big political opportunity
for anyone who's willing to takea stand and look on their own.
Any of these things might not seem likea huge deal, but taken together all of
this pushback is starting to matter.
Yesterday, tens of thousands morepeople gathered across the country for
another day of nationwide protests.

(03:29:24):
They were called no Kings protests.
A follow up to the hands-offprotest that drew millions into
the streets just two weeks ago.
But what will Neva translate to?
Who knows, but standing up for what'sright, trying some things, applying some
pressure, getting some media attentionis far more effective than being fearful
and timid because being fearful andtimid has never worked against the

(03:29:45):
sky and it sure isn't working now.
That's going to be it for today.
As always, keep the comments coming in.
You can leave a voicemail or send usa text at 202-999-3991 and you can
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(03:30:30):
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(03:31:13):
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So, coming to you from far outsidethe conventional wisdom of Washington
DC, my name is Jay, and this hasbeen the Best of the Left podcast
coming to you twice weekly, thanksentirely to the members and donors
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