...Dude. These were people who were living here legally (
literally what "legal resident" means: "living here legally"), and then were abducted and deported on
false or specious pretenses and
without due process. Hell, in at least one case Ice abducted and unilaterally deported them
while they were driving to the court case for the incident that Ice was using as justification.
In another, the student visa of
Dogukan Gunaydin was just revoked on the pretext of a DUI that he got in 2023 . Notably, not only was he not afforded the opportunity to either leave voluntarily or challenge the revocation before he was arrested by immigration agents (or even notice), records show that his visa wasn't revoked until seven hours
after he was taken into custody.
Rümeysa Öztürk was similarly abducted from campus in Massachusetts in apparent retaliation for an Op-ed she had written for her school newspaper last year (denouncing Netanyahu's campaign). And then when the courts warned Ice not to remove her from Massachusetts without notice, they shipped her to Louisiana without notifying the court, her counsel, or even the Department of Justice counsel, and are now insisting that judge cannot hear the case because they moved her to Louisiana. She resides here legally on a student visa, and has not been charged with any crime. Even so, the US government is insisting that
since it defied the order and moved her to Louisiana, the Massachusetts courts have no jurisdiction, that the case against her detainment should be dismissed, and that she should be deported immediately.
Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident was taken from his apartment on March 8. The agents said the State Department had revoked his student visa...until it was pointed out to them that he had a green card, at which point they changed tunes and said
that had been revoked instead. Once again, he was immediately shipped to Louisiana pending immediate deportation. He has not been officially charged with any crime, nor to have engaged in any activity prohibited to US citizens, nor has his green card been revoked.
It's become a set of recurring themes in these cases is not only that Ice is consistently 1) trying to blitz through deportation and bypass due process (notably including the
immigration hearing that they are entitled to) in what amounts to playing a jurisdictional shell game to prevent the detainees from mounting a legal defense before they're deported, 2) engaging in brazen double-speak regarding the people they're detaining, treating them as high-profile criminals (even incarcerating them as such in maximum security prisons) and describing them as such to the general populace, while pointedly refusing to actually charge them with a crime so as to deny them a means to meaningfully dispute the accusation, and 3) after rushing them out of the country before giving them the due process
that they are entitled to under law, they've been throwing up their hands and going "whoops! Already done! Nothing we can do about it now! Sorry, not sorry! Get over it! You have no right to question our actions!" when the courts finally catch up and determine that their accusations were baseless and the actions based upon them lawless.
Seriously, the sheer audacity of it is
terrifying. They're literally arguing that since the people they've unlawfully deported have already been delivered to the foreign prison
that they are specifically paying to incarcerate these people at their behest - on pretenses
that they themselves have acknowledged as false, no less - that the US government no longer has the power to do anything about it. Which is genuinely horseshit and doesn't even withstand perfunctory scrutiny even. Once again, these people are not in that prison because El Salvador wants them there, but because Trump is having the US
pay El Salvador to put them there.
Even so, they go a step further and declare that - because they rushed them into their outsourced prison - any court case against that lawless action should be dismissed for jurisdictional reasons. That they should just treat it as a done deal, a fait accompli, and not worth even
trying to correct the circumstance, hold the responsible parties accountable (parties whom, I might add, have been making it clear that they are quite unrepentant and explicitly intend to keep operating this way), or fix the procedures to make sure that it doesn't happen again. And indeed, they argue that their actions being subjected to legal scrutiny is inexcusable because it "undermines the president's constitutional authority to address national security threats".
They are literally arguing that they shouldn't be accountable to the law because red tape would be inconvenient.
Here's a fun little news flash. Three weeks ago, 238 Venezuelan immigrants were deported straight to a maximum prison in El Salvador, known as
CECOT (perhaps you've
heard of it). They have been denied contact with both their families
and legal representation. Some of them - such as
Andry Hernandez Romero - were seeking asylum
through official channels and were scheduled to have their cases heard in the extremely near future (in Romero's case, the very next day), when Ice just up and arrested them and ultimately deported them to prison CECOT on what's broadly very specious and unconvincing reasoning. Want to know the official (
and only) reason given to the court for why Romero was treated as de-facto guilty and warranting a prison sentence without trial, chance to appeal the government's claim, and why the courts shouldn't even bother thinking about contesting it?
He had tattoos with crowns on them (crowns
over the words "mom" and "dad"). These were used to
simply assert that he
must be part of Tren de Aragua and therefore a security threat worth throwing in a maximum security prison. That conclusion was not the result of a trial or the judicial process, it was ICE's justification for using the Alien Enemies Act to
bypass a trial or court ruling. Yeah, the case is that weak. And it bears more than a passing resemblance to another case in which they declared someone to clearly be part of the same gang
because they were wearing Chicago Bulls paraphernalia (
no, seriously).
60 Minutes did some digging, checking the internal documents, domestic court filings, and international court filings. And you want to know something interesting? They could not find any criminal records for
75% of the 238 Venezuelans that were shipped to CECOT. And I don't mean that they weren't sure whether they existed (that was only true for 3%, with only the remaining 22% having confirmed criminal records, most of which consist solely of minor offenses), I mean that
75% simply don't have a criminal record and have never been convicted of a crime. Worse still, you know what the Trump administration's response was?
That a lack of criminal record didn't prove that they weren't in a gang or not dangerous. That many without criminal records "are actually terrorists, human rights abusers, gangsters, and more; they just don't have a rap sheet in the U.S." Forget our foundational legal principle of "innocent until proven guilty". That's straight up "guilty just because we say so. End of discussion."
They are literally just unilaterally declaring them guilty and throwing them in prison without even pressing charges - much less prosecuting or convicting them - and explicitly
don't care that their claim is unsupported by the evidence. Fuck's sake, they even invoked the
State Secrets Privilege to argue that the courts had no right to investigate, much less dispute, their presumption of guilt! That's an
egregious violation of the fundamental legal principle of both due process and innocent until proven guilty. To say this is "not okay" is an
extreme understatement.
But let's be completely honest here. You've made it more than clear that
you don't care about any of that. You clearly aren't making even the
slightest effort to understand or even learn about the situation. You only care that your preconceptions are being contradicted, and are digging your feet in out of nothing more than sheer obstinacy, to the point of even trying to turn the issue into a semantic argument over the exact verbage used to avoid talking about the
substance of the issues that you had already decided to dismiss out of hand. It's not that you have reason for your beliefs, it's that you
feel entitled to them being true and - as you've shown so many times before - genuinely lack the emotional maturity to accept correction.
You aren't trying to keep abreast of current events or make sure that you have an informed opinion. You're just taking your preconceptions as a given and looking for soundbites that will give you a
pretext to stop looking further on the
presumption that finding that soundbite means your prejudices have been validated. And you have consistently stubbornly insisted on that
well past the point of reason even as people have
repeatedly and at length explained to you that the sources you pull those soundbites from don't support the conclusions you are pushing with them. And usually to the tune of simply repeating your assertion ad nauseum and simply refusing to accept any explanation purely because it doesn't align with that same assertion.
You're not providing an informed or well-reasoned perspective, you're just acting like a spoiled brat who's getting his hackles up as a matter of principle simply because you're offended that somebody told you 'no, that's wrong'. Fuck's sake, you've consistently demonstrated that you can't even be bothered to read your own sources through to completion, much less take the time to verify that you understand them. On several occasions, you've even spent
months falsely insisting that the source validates your conclusion while dismissing
its own data and analysis as ridiculous and impossible when people start quoting it back to you as part of their explanation that your source did not make the conclusions you attributed to it, and that the soundbite you were invoking had been removed from necessary context.
It's
never been about the truth for you, just placating your damn overinflated ego by telling yourself that you can't have been wrong.
So let me be perfectly direct here: If you can't be bothered to do your damn homework and insist instead on only declaring that your personal prejudices and incredulity
must be true (which is practically all you ever seem to do),
then you have nothing to add to the topic and shouldn't bother contributing to it.
