The Trump administration took a victory lap for deporting 238 men to a prison in El Salvador, calling them gang members or violent criminals. None of them had a trial, a hearing, or any due process. Bloomberg News now reports that few of those deported had criminal records.
Trump administration officials have described the men deported to El Salvador prisons last month as “the worst of the worst,” suggesting they were gang members involved in murder, rape and kidnapping.
The reality is that of 238 migrants — mostly Venezuelan — that officials accused of belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang and expelled to the Central American country in mid-March, just a small fraction had ever been charged with serious crimes in the US.
Hundreds of pages of US legal records and American government statements reviewed by Bloomberg News found five men charged with or convicted of felony assault or firearms violations. Three men were charged with misdemeanors including harassment and petty theft. Two others were charged with human smuggling.
For the rest of the men, there was no available information showing they committed any crime other than traffic or immigration violations in the US.
The findings raise questions about how the Trump administration determined that the migrants sent to El Salvador were violent criminals. The US maintains that all of the Venezuelans on the flights had committed a crime because they were in the country illegally, a senior official with the Department of Homeland Security said in an interview.
There is more to the story. When I read it, it was not behind a paywall. No guarantees.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is a bitter irony in Trump’s attack on Venezuelan migrants in particular. The right wing, which stands behind Trump without fail, is now victimizing the same people victimized by the hated communists Hugo and Madero, who have been conservative whipping boys for years. You know, those democrats are wanting America to be like Venezuela.
Between American sanctions and Madero’s autocratic ineptitude, the poor Venezuelan people have taken it on the chin as lawlessness has spread across the country. That is why they came here. These people would be the staunchest supporters of a conservative agenda if the conservatives were really serious about their fear of communism and its autocratic nature, but of course, they never were. What American conservatives hate is regulated commerce, embodied in the New Deal. Realizing that the New Deal was the preservation of democratic values, they began even in the 30s to gaslight the people about the nature of government. After a generation, we got Reagan on our way to Trump, who now sheds any pretense of fighting communism because it is autocratic. When he uses phrases like Marxist, he knows his public has no idea what that means. He can make reference to Marxism and then behave like a Bolshevik. No supporter will care.
LikeLike
We got a lot of haters in this country who get joy out of seeing innocent immigrants thrown into a gulag.
LikeLike
Trump’s appointees are acting like the lawless thugs that the Trump administration claims these immigrants are. They are applying the deportation laws indiscriminately without any regard for civil rights or even human decency. The Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador, but who knows if Trump and Homan will comply, since Trump believes he is above the law.
LikeLike