Due process for illegally deported migrants! Cruelty is the Trump brand

Donald Trump’s Deportation Obsession
Right-wing ideologues have long fantasized about the prospect of mass self-deportation: the Trump Administration is attempting something far more radical. Now all Americans are at risk for deportation at Donald Trump's whim. 

Published in The New Yorker magazine, by Jonathan Blitzer

El Salvador Navib Bukele, president

In 2022, (three years ago), in El Salvador, after the MS-13 gang killed eighty-seven people in a span of seventy-two hours, the country's President Nayib Bukele called on his loyalists in the legislature to declare a “state of exception.” The government could arrest anyone it deemed suspicious, and those taken into custody lost their right to a legal defense. Since then, in a country of six million people, eighty-five thousand have been jailed, many without credible charges; according to the human-rights group Cristosal, three hundred and sixty-eight of them have died. The gangs have been decimated, but the “state of exception” remains in effect, something that has earned Bukele plaudits from the MAGA movement and, last week, an invitation to the White House.

The Trump Administration is now paying El Salvador six million dollars to hold deported immigrants—among them more than a hundred Venezuelans removed under the rarely invoked Alien Enemies Act of 1798—in a supermax prison that Bukele built for his crackdown. He has proudly advertised his services as “outsourcing.” He has also offered to house American citizens convicted of crimes, and Donald Trump appears to be considering it. “Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands,” Bukele told the President and members of his Cabinet in the Oval Office. “I like to say that we actually liberated millions.” “Who gave him that line?” Trump said. “Do you think I can use that?”

Right-wing ideologues have long fantasized about the prospect of mass self-deportation: the idea is that, if the government is sufficiently hostile to immigrants, they will feel that they have no choice but to leave the country. The Trump Administration is attempting something far more radical. In a campaign reminiscent of Bukele’s “state of exception,” it has moved to suspend the rule of law; this is as much an attack on immigrants as it is a fever dream of untrammelled power.

At the White House, Bukele and Trump flaunted their defiance of a unanimous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Justices  instructed the Administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who has lived in Maryland for nearly fifteen years and was deported last month to Bukele’s prison, owing to what government lawyers admit was an “administrative error.” Trump’s initial response was to say that he was powerless to bring Abrego Garcia back. Before long, top officials started calling him an MS-13 gangster and a terrorist, even though he’s never been convicted of a crime. Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, simply asserted that the Court had ruled in Trump’s favor and that “nobody was mistakenly deported anywhere.” 

On April 18, 2025, after Maryland’s Senator Chris Van Hollen travelled to El Salvador and met with Abrego Garcia, who had been transferred to another facility, El Salvadore's Bukele said, “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” 

But, the White House tagged Van Hollen on X, saying that Abrego Garcia is “NOT coming back.”

✸So what changed❓ Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been returned to the United States to face criminal charges CNN reports.

Migrants are human being who deserve due process rights provided by the Constitution❗

William Barr is a fake Attorney General because he lied to Congress

This is an echo opinion published in Bloomberg.

Fake Attorney General William Barr is cornered by Robert Mueller- an echo opinion published in The Spokesman-Review by Timothy L. O'Brien, editor for Bloomberg.

Fake Attorney General Barr lied to Congress and doing so was a crime.  

During a congressional hearing on April 9, Rep. Charlie Crist, a Florida Democrat, asked Attorney General William Barr if he knew why Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators were reportedly upset about a recent letter released by Barr. The missive summarized the Mueller team’s still unpublished findings from its conspiracy and obstruction probe involving Donald Trump, with his advisers and Russia.

“Reports have emerged recently, general, that members of the special counsel’s team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24th letter. That it does not adequately or accurately, necessarily, portray the report’s findings,” Crist said. “Do you know what they are referencing with that?

“No, I don’t,” Barr responded. “I suspect that they probably wanted more put out.”

A day later, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, pursued a similar line of questioning and noted that Barr’s summary went well beyond the Mueller report’s findings by unilaterally absolving Trump of obstruction. 

“Did Bob Mueller support your conclusion?” Van Hollen asked.

“I don’t know whether Bob Mueller supported my conclusion,” Barr replied.

Just how honest and candid Barr was with Congress is now in play. 

As it turns out, Mueller himself wasn’t comfortable with Barr’s take on his work and he wrote to the Justice Department on March 27 to complain about it in detail – almost exactly two weeks before Barr began testifying otherwise to Crist and Van Hollen.

Mueller told the Justice Department (and Barr in a subsequent phone call) that the attorney general’s four-page memo outlining the report’s primary conclusions “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the investigation, according to a copy of Mueller’s letter that the Washington Post disclosed on Tuesday.

“There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation,” Mueller wrote. “This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.”

During his call with Barr, Mueller also told the attorney general that “he was concerned that media coverage of the obstruction investigation was misguided and creating public misunderstandings” about the special counsel’s report, the Post reported. The newspaper also noted that some of Mueller’s investigators felt that “the evidence they had gathered – especially on obstruction – was far more alarming and significant than how Barr had described it.”

Barr testified again on Wednesday before Congress, for the first time since the 448-page Mueller report was released publicly on April 18. The report offered a portrait of Trump and his team acting in much more sinister and purposefully illicit ways than Barr suggested in his summary, and in the odd little bit of media spinning and political theater he engaged in during a press conference ahead of the report’s release.

In prepared remarks he issued hours prior to Wednesday’s testimony, Barr defended the decisions he’s made at the Justice Department and presented himself as guardian of the rule of law. 

“It would not have been appropriate for me simply to release,” the Mueller report’s own inconclusive take on whether Trump obstructed justice “without making a prosecutorial judgment,” Barr allows.

Still, what we have in Barr is a subtler and more emotionally disciplined version of Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s most prominent pit-bull attorneys. Barr often seems content to placate the president’s legal adversaries to keep them off balance or to lay down verbal smokescreens that confuse the media.

At first blush, it’s strange that Barr didn’t seem to see a rebuke from Mueller coming and prepare for that. On the other hand, Barr has moved in and out of Washington’s power circles for years and one of his fortes involves developing ways for presidents to avoid scrutiny or culpability. 

Maybe he doesn’t care too much about what Mueller thinks.

Trump has a long history of co-opting those who spend a lot of time around him, but Barr arrived in the White House ready to rumble and with an expansive view of executive authority. He and his boss were a perfect fit.

Timothy L. O’Brien is the executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion.