The US says it can’t aid in his return as he’s in El Salvador; El Salvador says to help would be like ‘smuggling’ him back
It is difficult to find a term more fitting for the fate of the Maryland father Kilmar Abrego García than Kafkaesque.
Abrego García is one of hundreds of foreign-born men deported under the Trump administration to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador as part of a macabre partnership with the self-declared “world’s coolest dictator”, Nayib Bukele.
Continue reading...Trump officials claim they’re not legally bound to bring Kilmar Abrego García back despite supreme court ruling
The president of El Salvador said in a meeting with Donald Trump in the White House on Monday that he would not order the return of a Maryland man who was deported in error to a Salvadorian mega-prison.
“The question is preposterous,” Nayib Bukele said in the Oval Office on Monday, where he was welcomed by Trump and spoke with the president and members of his cabinet. “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it.”
Continue reading...Secretary of state says ‘criminals’ were taken to country thanks to alliance between Trump and Nayib Bukele
The US has deported another 10 people that it alleges are gang members to El Salvador, secretary of state Marco Rubio said on Sunday, a day before that country’s president is due to visit the White House.
“Last night, another 10 criminals from the MS-13 and Tren de Aragua Foreign Terrorist Organizations arrived in El Salvador,” Rubio said in an Twitter/X post.
Continue reading...Justices uphold judge’s order and say Trump officials must ‘facilitate’ return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to United States
The US supreme court upheld on Thursday a judge’s order requiring Donald Trump’s administration to facilitate the return to the United States of a Salvadoran man who the government has acknowledged was deported in error to El Salvador.
US district judge Paula Xinis last week issued an order that the administration “facilitate and effectuate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in response to a lawsuit filed by the man and his family challenging the legality of his deportation.
Continue reading...Erez Reuveni no longer on Kilmar Abrego Garcia case after not ‘vigorously’ defending Trump administration
A federal justice department attorney has been placed on leave by the Trump administration for purportedly failing to defend the administration vigorously enough after it says it erroneously deported a Maryland man to El Salvador, which a US judge called a “wholly lawless” detention.
The action against justice department lawyer Erez Reuveni came after US district judge Paula Xinis had ordered that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant who lived in the US legally with a work permit, be returned to Maryland despite the Trump administration’s position that it cannot return him from a sovereign nation.
Continue reading...White House has said US courts can’t order return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose wife has been protesting outside court
A federal judge on Friday afternoon ordered the US to return a Maryland man mistakenly deported to an El Salvador prison after a Trump administration attorney was at a loss to explain what happened.
The wife of the man, who was flown to a notorious Salvadoran prison had earlier joined dozens of supporters at a rally before a court hearing on Friday, where his lawyers had asked the judge – Paula Xinis – to order the Trump administration to return him to the US.
Continue reading...Appeals court had upheld block on flights using Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Venezuelan gang members
The Trump administration on Friday asked the US supreme court to intervene to allow the government to continue to deport immigrants using the obscure Alien Enemies Act.
The request came one day after a federal appeals court upheld a Washington DC federal judge’s temporary block on immigrant expulsions via a wartime act that allows the administration to bypass normal due process, for example by allowing people a court hearing before shipping them out of the US.
Continue reading...Vicente Gonzalez tirelessly promoting Nayib Bukele, including reposting calls to ‘impeach corrupt judges’
A Texas Democrat is co-chair of a congressional caucus that has tirelessly promoted El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, including on the caucus’s X account by reposting calls to “impeach the corrupt judges” who impede the actions of Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
Bukeke is also currently at the center of a scandal in the US involving the transport of hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they have entered the country’s notorious prisons for gang members – despite clear evidence that some of them have no gang links.
Continue reading...One detained man’s lawyer says he is gay artist who had fled persecution in his home country, not a gang member
A lawyer for one of the Venezuelan immigrants sent from the US to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador has accused the Trump administration of waging a “sickening” campaign of psychological warfare against asylum seekers and migrants.
“In my 15 years of representing people in removal proceedings in the United States, this is the most shocking thing that I’ve ever seen happen to one of our clients,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, a California-based lawyer for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) group.
Continue reading...Administration claims it didn’t stop flights despite judge’s instructions because he did not write it in the formal order
The Trump administration claimed to a federal judge on Monday that it did not recall deportation flights of hundreds of suspected Venezuelan gang members over the weekend despite his specific instructions because that was not expressly included in the formal written order issued afterwards.
The administration also said that even if James Boasberg, the chief US district judge in Washington, had included that instruction in his formal order, his authority to compel the planes to return disappeared the moment the planes entered international airspace.
Continue reading...Trump administration used Alien Enemies Act to deport about 250 alleged gang members to El Salvador
The White House has denied allegations that it engaged in a “a blatant violation” of a judge’s order by deporting about 250 Venezuelan alleged gang members to El Salvador on Saturday, with the US border czar appearing to contradict the denial on Monday by declaring: “I don’t care what the judges think.”
The US district judge James E Boasberg has scheduled a hearing for Monday afternoon to demand an explanation about why his Saturday order temporarily blocking the deportation flights had apparently been ignored.
Continue reading...Human rights groups alarmed as Marco Rubio, US secretary of state, meets with Nayib Bukele during overseas trip
El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has offered to accept deportees from the US of any nationality and hold them in his jails, including “dangerous American criminals”, Marco Rubio said on Monday.
The US secretary of state, who this week made his first overseas trip as the top US diplomat, visited El Salvador on Monday as part of a wider trip through Central America and the Caribbean.
Continue reading...Press secretary says at least two deportation flights to Cuban base of undocumented immigrants ‘under way’
The Trump administration has begun flying undocumented immigrants from the US to a military detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said on Tuesday.
Leavitt told Fox Business Network that at least two deportation flights were “under way”, but gave no further details.
Continue reading...Critics decry ‘politically motivated’ decision to revisit civil war-era charges against leaders of anti-mining campaign
Five Salvadorian environmental defenders who were exonerated of bogus civil war charges will face retrial this week amid growing evidence of political interference.
Miguel Ángel Gámez, Alejandro Laínez García, Pedro Antonio Rivas Laínez, Antonio Pacheco and Saúl Agustín Rivas Ortega, were acquitted in October over the alleged killing of an army informant in 1989. The court in Cabañas in northern El Salvador ruled that the state had failed to prove a crime had taken place, or that the defendants, former leftwing guerrilla fighters, were linked to any wrongdoing.
Continue reading...US secretary of state to visit region amid concern over Trump threat to ‘take back’ canal and tensions over China
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, will travel to Central America this week on a five-country tour that will focus on limiting migration to the United States, curbing Chinese influence in the region and on securing Donald Trump’s ambitious goal of reasserting US control over the Panama canal.
Rubio will travel to Panama, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic from Saturday to Thursday this week, meeting with the presidents of each. It is the first time in more than a century that a secretary’s first official visit abroad will be to Central America.
Continue reading...Journalists from countries that have seen challenges to democracy give their view on the second Trump presidency
What is the view of US democracy from abroad, and what can Americans learn from other nations with a history of political tumult?
During his first term Donald Trump tested democratic norms by undermining trust in fair elections, encouraging political violence and demonizing the media and public servants. He has promised to be a dictator “on day one” of his second term.
Continue reading...US president moves to shield roughly 230,000 Salvadorans and 600,000 Venezuelans against Trump administration
The Biden administration on Friday extended temporary humanitarian protections for about 230,000 Salvadorans and 600,000 Venezuelans living in the US, in an effort to shield those groups from an incoming Trump administration that has promised to deport them.
The decision in the dying days of Joe Biden’s presidency came after immigrant advocates and lawmakers urged the Department of Homeland Security to extend temporary protected status (TPS), designed to protect immigrants from being deported to countries that are engulfed in disaster or conflict.
Continue reading...Study warns region’s exponential rise in incarceration is fuelling the disease, with cases increasing by 19% between 2015 and 2022
High incarceration rates in Latin America – the region with the world’s fastest-growing prison population – are exacerbating tuberculosis in a region that is bucking the global trend for falling incidents of the disease, experts have warned.
A study published in The Lancet Public Health journal has estimated that, contrary to previous assumptions, HIV/Aids is not the primary risk factor for tuberculosis in the region – as it remains in Africa, for example – but rather imprisonments.
Continue reading...President Nayib Bukele pushed for the legislation that will grant government sole authority over mining activities
El Salvador’s legislature has overturned a seven-year-old ban on metals mining, a move that the country’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, had pushed for to boost economic growth, but that environmental groups had opposed.
El Salvador became the first country in the world to ban all forms of metals mining in 2017. Bukele, who took office in 2019, has called the ban absurd.
Continue reading...Army killing of six priests, their housekeeper and her daughter was one of civil war’s most notorious crimes
A court in El Salvador has ruled to bring a former president and retired military officials to trial for their alleged roles in the prominent murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her teenage daughter during the country’s civil war 35 years ago.
The former president Alfredo Cristiani, a former congressman and nine retired military officials are charged with murder and acts of terrorism over one of the most notorious crimes committed during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war, which left 75,000 civilians dead and only formally ended in 1992.
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