“How can I return him to the United States? I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous,” Bukele said. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States. We’re not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country.”

"To liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. That’s the way it works,” Bukele told Trump. Abrego Garcia has not been charged with terrorism.

Archived at https://archive.is/w3Vyt

  • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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    Trump then turned to Bukele and said of the assembled reporters: “They’d love to have a criminal released into our country. These are sick people.”

    Garcia has never been convicted of criminal charges in the US or El Salvador. It’s hard to overstate what a big fucking problem this is. Due process is dead, you’re a criminal because we say so. There is no exaggeration left, justice is dead, we are now, at this very moment, a dictatorship.

    Edit to add that Kilmar being deported wasn’t a “mistake” like the DOJ claims. Here’s Stephen Miller directly using his own words to refute that it was a mistake today. https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/5248143-stephen-miller-doj-man-mistakenly-deported/

    “Nobody was mistakenly deported anywhere. That’s a big fact that all of you, most of you, have gotten wrong. No one was mistakenly sent anywhere. The only mistake that was made is a lawyer put an incorrect line in a legal filing that’s since been relieved. … He is El Salvadorian. He is an illegal alien. He was deported to El Salvador,” Miller told reporters at the White House on Monday.

    And just to be clear about something dollar store Dr. Evil said here: no, he was not, and is not, an illegal immigrant. He was granted asylum and was here legally.

    Edit to also add that you should read The Jakarta Method if you haven’t already. This smacks really strongly of the times laid out in the book right before everything goes to hell in a reactionary takeover.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world
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      EDIT: sorry, not citizen, but nonetheless a legal green card holder who’s been determined to be here legally.


      Garcia has never been convicted of criminal charges in the US or El Salvador

      Also, you can’t, you know, legally deport a US citizen to an El Salvadorian gulag even if they had committed a crime. Trump here is trying to shift the Overton window from a discussion of if they’re a US citizen to if they’ve committed a crime (they haven’t, of course), and it’s fucking disgusting.

      At this point, the only criminal I think who deserves to be sent to a deep, dark hole never to return is Mr. 34 Felonies himself.


      EDIT: sorry, not citizen, but nonetheless a legal green card holder who’s been determined to be here legally.

      • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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        I don’t think Garcia was a citizen, he was a green card holder, but Trump is openly discussing sending citizens to El Salvador anyway. Nobody’s going to stop him anyway, so why the fuck not?

        • gAlienLifeform@lemmy.worldOP
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          Also, in 2019 ICE sought to have him removed but lost their motion argument and ended up with a court order forbidding them from doing so, which ICE never did anything to get lifted. That’s why the Trump administration has had to say they deported Kilmar by mistake, if it was anything other than a mistake (which we all know it was but don’t have smoking gun proof for) that’s intentional violation of a court order, aka the Constitutional crisis all the official people have been trying to pretend isn’t happening.

    • qantravon@lemmy.world
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      Garcia isn’t a green card holder, but he does have legal status. He’s under “withholding removal”, which is kind of asylum lite. He can live and work here, and he made regular checkins to prove he was behaving, but the government is allowed to deport him to anywhere except El Salvador, although until this they hadn’t tried.

    • dhork@lemmy.world
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      Did any of the “reporters” there challenge them on this essential point?

      • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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        Not that I know of, likely because they don’t want to be kicked out. The white house kicked out the AP a while back for asking a question about climate change or some shit. This would get them removed and sued, no doubt, and our news organizations are either complicit or don’t have the balls/finances to push back.

          • Kyrgizion@lemmy.world
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            This part of project 2025 is explicitly labeled “ignore the courts”.

            All going according to plan.

          • mkwt@lemmy.world
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            This ruling was made by a Trump-appointed district court judge, and two Trump-appointed appellate judges declined to grant a last minute administrative stay.

            That goes to show just how much of a loser this AP case is for the Trump administration. Yet the administration ignored the order anyway, and they filed a paper this morning suggesting that the appellate judges merely “forgot” to issue the steady.

        • Eldritch@lemmy.world
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          If they cannot dissent or ask actual valid questions what’s the point of even being there? The fact that all of them have not stopped going until the AP is allowed back in tells you all you need to know about how trustworthy any of these Outlets are. Not.

        • ComfortablyDumb@lemmy.ca
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          Thats what happens when news is either controlled by the rich via share holding mechanism or controlled by the state. News organizations need to be owned by all the people so that they are able to challenge people in power.

          • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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            It’s wild to wake up to a daily reminder that the communists were apparently right all along.

            Everything they said would come true under communism has come true under capitalism.

            • nomy@lemmy.zip
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              Why do you think capitalists spent the last century fighting against communism? It’s a threat to capitalists.

    • SeeMarkFly@lemmy.ml
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      If Trumplethinskin did not like chocolate milk then YOU could disappear FOREVER without a trace…because you like chocolate milk.

      YOU can NOW disappear FOREVER for ANY reason he can make up.