In court, Trump team backs away from its public deportation claims
Amid all the controversy over the Trump administration’s deportations, it’s always important to emphasize where these undocumented migrants are being sent. It’s not just that the administration has deported people without legal due process; it’s that it has deported people without legal due process to a brutal prison in El Salvador.
The administration says these are gang members and even “terrorists.” But its evidence has been suspect. It has made established mistakes. And a “60 Minutes” report found that most of the deportees had no apparent criminal records.
All of which raises the prospect that the administration has sent not just noncriminals but even non-gang members to one of the world’s most notorious prisons.
The brutality of the conditions there works for the administration in a way, of course. And that’s as a deterrent. The administration has been happy to play up the severity of El Salvador’s Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), as best evidenced by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem’s photo op there.
But in a remarkable new legal filing, the administration has now attempted to walk away from the idea that it is sending people to CECOT to punish them or deter others. And it downplays the rhetoric of Noem and others as “vague statements” that don’t actually signify its intent.
One clear incentive for trying to recast the comments: This being about punishment and deterrence could be a legal problem.
And that’s not even the only public statement they’re distancing themselves from in what has increasingly become a losing legal battle.
Noem in March declared of her trip to CECOT: “People need to see that image.” She added at another point that people were sent there “to incarcerate them and have consequences.”
She’s hardly the only one to signal that these deportations were about punishment and deterrence. Trump sarcastically labeled CECOT “a wonderful place to live” and recently said he likes it better than domestic prisons because it’s “a greater deterrent.” White House news releases have played up the prison being labeled “the world’s most feared prison” and being “much worse for” migrants than their home country of Venezuela. [Continue reading…]