The Trump gang, in its feverish determination to deport as many people as possible, has been running roughshod over constitutional protections such as due process. It has argued that this is allowed because the US is currently being invaded by foreign forces. This would come a surprise to pretty much anyone given the lack of fighting in the towns and rural areas of the country. Few would be even able to tell you who the invading forces are. To put you out of any suspense, the invading army is supposed to consist of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua acting under the direction of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. As a result Trump is invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify the arbitrary arrest, detention, and deportation on various trumped up charges that the people are members of this invading army.
The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to use a 1798 wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport Venezuelan migrants it accuses of being gang members, ending the temporary halt on deportations ordered by a federal district judge.
But the court also ruled that the administration must give Venezuelans it claims are gang members the chance to legally fight any deportation orders. The ruling did not address the constitutionality of the act.
The Monday ruling came after the wartime law was used last month to fly more than 130 men accused of being members of the gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador, where the U.S. has paid to have the men held in a notorious prison. The Trump administration argues that the gang has become an invading force.
The Venezuelans deported under the act did not get a chance to challenge the orders, and attorneys for many of the men say there’s no evidence they are gang members. It remains unclear how the ruling will affect those men.
So what is this law?
In 1798, with the U.S. preparing for what it believed would be a war with France, Congress passed a series of laws that increased the federal government’s reach. The Alien Enemies Act was created to give the president wide powers to imprison and deport noncitizens in time of war.
Since then, the act has been used just three times: during the War of 1812 and the two world wars.It was part of the World War II legal rationale for mass internments in the U.S. of people of German, Italian and especially Japanese ancestry. An estimated 120,000 people with Japanese heritage, including those with U.S. citizenship, were incarcerated.
…Trump’s critics insist he is wrongly invoking an act designed for use during declared wars.
“Trump’s attempt to twist a centuries-old wartime law to sidestep immigration protections is an outrageous and unlawful power grab—and it threatens the core civil liberties of everyone,” Scott Michelman, legal director of the ACLU of the District of Columbia, said in a statement after the Monday ruling.
The National Intelligence Council is a body tasked with providing intelligence analyses to policy makers and its personnel studied this issue and issued an internal memo saying that there was nothing to indicate that Tren de Aragua was coordinating with the Venezuelan government, which meant that the administration’s claim was spurious. This became known when the memo was released to reporters under the Freedom of Information Act.
So what did Tulsi Gabbard, US director of national intelligence, do with this information? She fired the two highest-ranking officials of the NIC.
Mike Collins was serving as acting chair of the NIC before he was dismissed alongside his deputy, Maria Langan-Riekhof. They each had more than 25 years of intelligence experience.
The two were fired because of their opposition to the US president, Gabbard’s office said in an email on Wednesday, without offering examples.
“The director is working alongside President Trump to end the weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community,” the office said.
Note that the NIC officials did not say anything publicly about their findings. They also did not leak their conclusions. Their job is to provide the best analyses to policy makers so that they can make informed decisions. But they have been fired for doing so.
The message that this will send to other professionals in all branches of government is that they should not give their superiors their honest analyses, even confidentially, if those contradict what the Trump message wants it to be. It s not hard to predict what the consequences are going to be. People are only going to tell their superiors what they think they want to hear. If there is anything that perfectly captures the “weaponization and politicization of the intelligence community”, it is this kind of action.
It is going to be dishonesty and sycophancy all the way down as everyone drinks the Kool Aid.
oh, this is excellent tho. this is the bullet train to the bunker scene, as reality rains down upon the sheltered like mortar fire. can’t wait to see it, i just hope the body count of innocents along the way won’t be too catastrophic. not looking too well in that regard.
Interesting point about that FoI request… These things normally take ages, especially in the case of anything related to “national security”. The natural instinct of the bureaucracy is to stonewall and delay, and wait times measured in years are not unheard of.
This one was fulfilled in full in just six working days.
This is standard practice in many organisations. Above a certain level of seniority and below a certain level of basic competence managers simply WILL NOT be told the truth. Trying to tell them the truth is, I was told early in my life, a “career-limiting step”. Another word for telling senior management the truth is “brave”, or “courageous”. An interpreter will tell you that in English the word is “stupid”.
One might assume that managers so wilfully blind to reality would be swiftly identified and weeded out and sent to stack shelves in Aldi instead of lounging in a corner office. In my experience this does occasionally happen, in fact -- but only to managers who have risen to their position from the ranks after a state school/non-Russel-group university education or Bod forbid a fucking apprenticeship. Managers who deserve to be managers because their dad was rich and sent them to the fee-paying school will be redeployed to marketing or some such harmless bollocks until their network can find them a position at a competitor’s business. Sometimes they won’t leave immediately -- they’ll be offered a 40% salary hike to stay, which they’ll take, then 12 months later they’ll leave anyway for a more senior (and better paid) position at that competitor’s business, and the whole thing will start again there.
I’ve seen this exact thing happen multiple times, across a number of organisations, always to people who, if you try to tell them the truth, will react badly. Anyone with any sense learns rapidly to feed such parasites only what they want to hear. Anyone with any experience can identify them on the day they start work, and if communication in the lower levels of the organisation is efficient, that parasite will NEVER, in the entire time they work at that place, EVER know what’s really going on. Which is fine, because in most organisations, they certainly don’t want to, and they actually don’t need to, because people who are far better than them are running the business from the lower levels. As long as the dull witted fucks keep out of the way of the people who really run the business and don’t start believing their own hype and thinking they know anything, the business can continue to run. Employing such vermin is the cost of doing business. Every now and then one of them might just actually do the business some good by mentioning something to one of their chums on a golf course or at a formal dinner or while they’re setting fire to a tramp or something, but in general their function in a large organisation is mainly decorative and to protect people of value from having to be photographed or having to talk to e.g. members of parliament or the press.
The unfortunate people here who’ve been fired are presumably ones who, until recently, spent their careers dealing with qualified public-sector professionals. They’ve now learned what it’s like in quite a lot of the private sector. I hope they’ve learned their lesson.
Thankyou for this explanation and summary — it’s sorted out my confusion about the current situation.
I had been very confused between Salvadorian gangs or Venezuelan gangs, and who is at war with whom in which state in the USA, and to which country they were being deported, or provided with margarita cocktails to drink at government expense.
Now I realise it’s USA gangs drinking manhattans who are abducting their own citizens at non-combatants’ expense to provide cover for there being no war.
From what I understand of the alien enemies act it sounds like the clearest way to invoke it would involve an area of the US being under the control of a foreign entity. While a candidate, Trump found it convenient to claim some apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado were controlled by gangs. And that immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Since these sound a little too obviously like government failure, such claims have disappeared once he took office. I’d say call him on it but I feel like one of his dishonest advisors would suggest using it as an excuse to camp the army in big Democratic cities.
If Trump genuinely believed that the Venezuelan regime was controlling an invading force in the USA, Venezuela would have been either invaded or bombed by US forces. Have any journalists asked Trump why he has failed to respond adequately to the Venezuelan invasion? (I know Trump is very selective about which journalists can ask him questions.) Or any lawyers raised that point in court?