The surreal horrors reached a grisly nadir this weekend when our racist overlord, citing an 18th-century wartime edict while defying a court order, disappeared - no charges, evidence, due process - about 260 Venezuelans, nine of whom were maybe gang members, into the "ravenous maw" of a torturing El Salvador prison for looking like "bad people," then giddily posted a Robocop snuff porn video to celebrate the achievement. Confirmed: The gang members we should be most worried about are in the White House.
Our new shock-and-awe reality is now a relentless-if-mere-two-month conflagration marked by bigotry, irrationality and casual cruelty that J.D. Vance has called "a hell of a lot of fun." Take Elon 'I am become meme' Musk (please): After flourishing his "chainsaw for bureaucracy" and blocking food for the world's poor, he declared, "We’re trying to get good things done, but also, like, you know, have a good time doing it (and) have, like, a sense of humor." For Kari Lake, "We are in a win-win-win mode." For most of America, we are struggling to survive a violent idiocracy where an alcoholic sexual predator and Christo-fascist who runs the military quickly fired the guys who decide what's legal in "a crystal clear step toward authoritarianism"; and where, after they fired the black guy, the Joint Chiefs of Staff will be run by Dan 'Razin' Caine, a former National Guard and "serial entrepreneur" who meets none of the job's criteria but did tell his King, "I think you're great, sir. I'll kill for you." Every time we think things, appointees can't get worse, "Trump says ‘Hold my beer.’ Still waiting for a slot to open up for David Duke or Charles Manson."
Now, the bone-spur mob boss who always wanted "the kind of generals Hitler had," apparently unaware they tried to kill him, has upped the carnage. At war with everyone - "illegal" media, enemy lawyers, agencies doing good, brown people seeking refuge,
Europe committing “civilizational suicide" by taking in those people - he and his fellow sociopaths are expelling from our pristine white shores anyone they don't like the looks of. They've deported European tourists and those with green cards, countless Latinos without probable cause, a Laotian mother of 5 who came here as an infant and has never seen Laos; they're trying to eject Columbia grad student Mahmoud Khalil for opposing genocide; they just sent back to Lebanon after a visit to her family kidney transplant surgeon Dr. Rasha Alawieh, who has a visa for foreign professionals, did six years of fellowships at three U.S. medical schools, worked at Brown Medicine with transplant recipients and had a judge's court order to keep her here. Still, says Marco Rubio, "We don't want people (who'll be) committing crimes and undermining our national security," like his mob boss.
Then, this weekend, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, proclaimed the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua "a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization" and "transnational criminal organization...perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States" whose "thousands of members (are) conducting irregular warfare (against) the United States," and secretly vanished 260 brown men without vetting, charges, evidence of crime or identification, including what are likely some U.S. citizens among them. The law he "absurdly" cites has been used just three times, most famously for detaining thousands of Japanese Americans, and some of German and Italian ancestry, as “alien enemies” during the Second World War in what has been called "one of the most shameful times in U.S. history. It plainly states it is only operative in a war in order to remove enemy forces and "repel a declared invasion." Tren de Agua does exist, and nine gang members in Aurora CO were arrested last year for violent crimes. But police say there is no evidence of organized gang activity, never mind them "taking over" Aurora or anywhere else.
Still, Trump brayed on Air Force One, "These were bad people. This was a bad group of, as I say, hombres." (Eye roll here, and the factual note he means they were brown, spoke Spanish and many had tattoos, which Tren de Agua members usually don't have.) "You take a look at the crimes they've committed - you don't get worse than that," he said, ignoring the cumbersome reality, once again, that none of the 260 men had been convicted or even charged with any crime, unlike him. Asked about the legality of using a wartime law, he blathered "this is a time of war" and don't forget Biden let in all those imaginary "millions of criminals, many of them at the highest level." But facts still owe, said scores of lawyers and advocates. "The United States is not at war, nor has it been invaded," said the ACLU and Democracy Forward in a swiftly filed lawsuit that noted it remains illegal to deport anyone based on accusation alone, without due process to protect those possibly targeted. "(Trump's) invocation of wartime authority, which is not needed (for) lawful immigration enforcement, (is) the latest step in an accelerating authoritarian playbook."
Of course it then quickly accelerated. Judge James Boasberg of D.C's District Court issued a restraining order to block the removal of hundreds of unnamed, uncharged people. Trump defied the order, claiming because the planes were over international waters - though at least one hadn't left the ground - the ruling "has no lawful basis" and the judge "lacks jiurisdiction" under the vast presidential authority of the Alien Enemies Act. Monday, the constitutional crisis everyone's been dreading arrived as Trump's DOJ (sic) formally requested the removal of Boasberg, markedly escalating the right wing assault on an independent judiciary, aka the rule of law. Reflecting the regime's righteous stance on the subject, thug Tom Homan declared, "We're not stopping. I don't care what the judges think." They celebrated their defiance when, soon after the clash, both Trump and his "Rapid Response" team posted an obscene, giddy video, complete with Tom Cruise-like action music, of their triumph. "These are the monsters sent into our country by Crooked Joe Biden and the Radical Left Democrats," he sneered. "How dare they!"
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Because the Venezuelans were caught up in mass, secret abductions, we have no idea who precisely has been disappeared into the notorious prisons where El Salvador's far-right President Nayib Bukele has funneled nearly 90,000 people since he began his pitiless anti-gang crackdown in 2022. We do know they were sent to its centerpiece, the massive Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), and it is brutal. Holding "the worst of the worst," the complex of eight sprawling buildings on 166 acres can hold 40,000 inmates, with up to 70 souls in each cell. An "eyeless beast," there are no windows; there are also no books, playing cards, letters from home, visitation, recreation, classes, outdoor breaks or "trace of comfort." Lights are on 24/7; spartan meals are eaten in cells; metal bunks have no mattress, pillows, sheets, rights violations are endemic, abetted by the lack of any data base to track loved ones held there. "CECOT is a black site in plain sight. Once you're there, you are gone," says one expert, who adds sending someone "into the digestive tract of such an animal implies a level of lost in the Belly of the Beast as yet unheard of."
The Venezuelans were sent under an agreement whereby the U.S. will pay El Salvador $6 million to "host" them in their Belly of the Beast for one year, pending a U.S. "decision on their long term disposition." Upon delivery, Marco Rubio thanked Bukele for his "assistance and friendship" in agreeing to hold the "alien enemy members of Tren de Aragua in their very good jails at a fair price that will also save our taxpayer dollars," a deal Rubio celebrated as "the most unprecedented and extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world." No, furious observers noted: Bodies of inmates being leased out to foreign countries isn't a "migratory agreement" - it's human trafficking: "If the American Gulag is the biggest baddest prison system on the block, Supermax CECOT is the psychopathic little Joe Pesci...Offload some of the American prison population to EL Salvador? Rack ‘em up." And there's room: CECOT is at just 37% of capacity. Thus, Bukele's response at news a judge had ordered the planes be halted, and Trump sent them anyway. "Oopsie," he posted. "Too late," with a laughing emoji. These guys are so classy.
Many were appalled by "a dark day in our history," "a modern McCarthy moment," the vision of a new "American Gestapo" reminiscent of Nazi warnings about "foreign blood." Most disturbing is the racist targeting - from the rhetoric of "a plane full of rapists, murderers, and gangsters" (about people not even ordered deported) to the actual disappearances - to build the narrative of immigrants as terrorists and invaders. A lawyer for a Venezuelan client likely caught up in the onslaught, a gay artist who happens to have tattoos, was distraught: "We are horrified thinking what might happen to him." A longtime diplomat likened the “relentlessly transactional, bully-boy" Trump to both a velociraptor - "He kills anything he perceives as a threat" - and a mix of mob boss Tony Soprano and Athenian historian Thucydides, who famously said, "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." On Trump's world view: "His vision of a 'great America' is an America that sits in its sphere of influence, king in its own castle, exploiting all the parts of the world for American gain...He's doing it because he can."
And it's getting worse. While cruelty is the right's "default mode," they now push their agenda ever harder and meaner: Prepping a 30,000-bed detention facility at Gitmo, deporting over 10,000 often-innocent people, publicizing their hate so loudly an 11-year-old girl in Texas killed herself after classmates threatened for weeks to sic ICE on her family to deport them. They also use media, specifically "shitposting right-wing influencers," to terrorize. An earlier White House video of men being deported from Seattle offers shots and sounds of chains laid out, hands shackled, feet climbing airplane stairs. The chilling part: It's titled, ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight. FYI: Videos using ASMR, "autonomous sensory meridian response," rely on certain sounds to create tingling feelings of relaxation or euphoria. So, domination and others' pain as sensual pleasure:""Listen to this,' the White House is saying. 'This will make you feel good.'" Comments on X: "Fucking hilarious," “Lmfao the lib mental breakdowns here are amazzzing," "We live in the BEST timeline," and from seig-heiling Musk, a gold medal emoji with, “Haha wow."
Even as the regime scurries to devise new legal justifications for its crimes, the stupid keeps coming. In a batshit post, Trump screeched Biden's pardons to J6 committee members are now VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT (syntax gravitas slippage here) because of the fact they were done by autopen." He went golfing and, Kim Jong Un-like, gave himself an award: "Such a great honor!" He randomly released thousands of pages of files on JFK's assassination. And he posted another awful deportation video, and stole another song for it, Closing Time from Semisonic - "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here" - who didn't authorize it: "The song is about joy (and) hope, and they have missed the point entirely." Maybe he should have stolen Woody Guthrie's prescient, haunting, much-covered Deportee, about a 1948 plane crash that killed 28 Mexican braceros, migrant farm workers; news reports of the crash only named the four white victims, and it took decades for the rest to be gifted their names, and a headstone: "Who are these old friends falling like dry leaves/ All they will call you will be deportee."
The fate of today's deportees remains in limbo, with lawyers warning we are "very close" to a constitutional crisis and the White House reportedly "exuberant" about the case going to the Supreme Court: "We’re going to win." Since Monday's hearing, they're said to be stonewalling Judge Boasberg as their leader raves online: "This Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator was not elected President - He didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!) HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!" Also "IMPEACHED!!!" Totally normal. In stunning juxtaposition, the "intrepid and deeply principled" Mahmoud Khalil, his "opening shot" against free speech, spoke out from detention. "I am a political prisoner," said Khalil, likening his treatment to too many Palestinians under Israeli apartheid and posing a vital question, "Who has the right to have rights?” His reply: "Certainly not the humans crowded into cells here...Justice escapes the contours of this nation’s immigration facilities." Meanwhile, ICE thugs reiterated, “It’s closing time. We are making America safe again." The small, foul, vicious man is wrong again. These are the monsters.
This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Abby Zimet.
Abby Zimet | Radio Free (2025-03-19T06:29:00+00:00) Talk About Monsters: It’s Disappearing Time. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/03/19/talk-about-monsters-its-disappearing-time/
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