US Deported A Legal Refugee To The Salvadoran Slavery Prison Because 'Tattoo'
And this lady who's been here since she was 7, they want her too.
Donald Trump’s War on All Immigrants keeps slouching along, as we learn this week that at least two men who were granted legal refugee status were nonetheless among the more than 200 people disappeared without due process by ICE and flown to that supermax prison in El Salvador. That’s in addition to several other people whose families and attorneys say they have no criminal records or connections to gangs. An ICE agent also admitted in a court hearing that many of those deported have no criminal records in the US but insisted they were all super dangerous anyway, and no you can’t have proof.
On the upside, in a separate case, a federal judge ruled that Columbia University student Yunseo Chung, 21, a permanent US resident born in South Korea, can’t be detained in immigration prison while the government tries to deport her for participating in a sit-in protest against the war in Gaza.
Deporting people without due process is plenty evil enough. But in the case of people who have already completed the arduous process of applying for and being approved as refugees, which requires vetting through international and US background checks, it’s a negation of the due process they’ve already been through. It isn’t easy!
Normally, the detainees could have made their case before a judge and shown that they aren’t members of the Tren de Aragua gang, but Trump short-circuited due process by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, meaning that we are “at war” with the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, even though it isn’t a national army. The administration says that means courts have to let Trump do what he wants, especially if it’s illegal.
Sorry, You Can’t Even Live Like A Refugee
The Miami Herald details the case of a 29-year-old man whom the paper only identifies by his initials, EM, and of his girlfriend, Daniela Palma, who escaped from Venezuela to Colombia. The 17-month vetting process they underwent verified their claim that they qualified as refugees because they
had been targeted by authorities and colectivos — Venezuelan armed paramilitary groups — in their hometown, his girlfriend said, for exposing government shortcomings and for their efforts to help their local community.
As part of the process, their case was evaluated not only by US immigration officials in the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, but also by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Organization for Migration, all of which involved extensive interviews and background checks. Any criminal record in either Venezuela or Colombia would have barred them, but they had none.
Ah, but EM and Ms. Palma both grew up in the state of Aragua, and EM had some tattoos, which his uncle said EM got as a boy: “a crown, a soccer ball and a palm tree.” The USCIS officer in Colombia asked about them and didn’t consider them a problem, possibly because he had too much common sense and knew some facts about Tren de Aragua, like how not everyone in Aragua is automatically a member. And as the Herald points out, gang experts agree that Tren de Aragua, unlike many other gangs, doesn’t have any particular tattoos associated with it. What’s more, many TdA members have no tattoos at all. But what do experts know anyway?
In any case, hooray for EM and Palma, who made it through the refugee application process and as a result were legally qualified for permanent residency once they arrived in the US, and could eventually apply for citizenship. Not to belabor the point, but refugee status is far more difficult to establish than other ways of entering the US, such as requesting asylum, which can be done at the border (if the US allows it, but we stopped). In asylum cases, people are conditionally allowed to live and work in the US as they wait for a hearing, at which they have to prove they qualify as refugees. To oversimplify a bit, the difference is that asylum seekers make their case after arriving here, while refugees have already proven theirs.
No, the deport ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out crowd doesn’t care about any of it. Everyone granted either status is a murderous gang member who’s just lying, because no one in Latin America has ever been murdered by their government or placed in danger because their own governments don’t enforce the law.
With their hard-earned Golden Ticket of refugee status, EM and Ms. Palma flew to the US, looking forward to a new life. But when their flight landed in Houston on January 8, an immigration officer decided EM’s tattoos made him a TdA member, even though he’d been cleared by the USCIS already and had no criminal record. Officially, the immigration guy had the power to negate all that, so EM was arrested and got sent to a string of ICE detention facilities, while Palma agreed to be deported back to Colombia.
Normally, someone accused of being in a gang would have the chance to dispute that before a judge. But as the Herald points out, that 1798 law has a catch: It allegedly strips away the rights of foreign nationals to appeal if they’re accused of gang membership. That’s some catch! And a really helpful one if you want to just broadly accuse a few hundred migrants of being gang members so you can send them to a foreign prison without having to prove they’re actually a danger. They have to be guilty or they wouldn’t have been accused. And after all, we’re “at war,” although of course we are not.
The one bit of hope in this massive fuck-tussle is that Monday, DC Circuit Court Judge James Boasberg ruled that the people targeted for deportation to the slavery prison do indeed have the right to appeal the decisions, since there’s plenty of evidence that many are not gang-bangers, or in some cases even from Venezuela. Plus, there’s that thing about the US not actually being in a war. And also the thing where there are well-established legal processes to do deportations, so the administration needs to follow those and not get sneaky by signing a proclamation “in the dark.” While EM is not a party to that lawsuit, he and Palma may at some point be able to at least get their case heard, depending on how it goes when it eventually reaches the Supremes.
Silly judges, thinking that the US is a nation of laws! We voted to get rid of the whole Constitution, remember?
‘Permanent’ Resident? Not If You Do A Free Speech, You Aren’t
The feds are also trying to deport another permanent US resident for participating in a college protest against US support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old student at Columbia, was arrested during a March 5 protest against the treatment of other student protesters, although she was released with a “desk appearance ticket” from NYPD and hasn’t yet been charged with a crime. She also had been suspended from school for putting up posters saying Columbia had been complicit in genocide. Again, not a crime.
But that was enough for the Trump administration to decide she was a dangerous threat to national security, despite the fact that she was brought to the USA (legally!) as a child at the age of seven, so it stripped her permanent residency and ordered her deported so Americans will not be murdered by her dangerous opinions.
As in the similar case of Mahmoud Khalil, another Columbia student protester, the government seemed confused about what exactly it was doing to deport someone, just that it wanted a deportation RIGHT NOW:
On March 10, an assistant U.S. attorney, Perry Carbone, messaged one of Chung's attorneys to say her visa had been “revoked.” When Chung's attorney explained that she has a green card and doesn't require a visa, Carbone replied: “The secretary of State has revoked that too,” the lawsuit says.
Chung’s attorney argues that Marco Rubio can’t actually revoke a green card, and not just because he’s a spineless lickspittle, but because secretaries of State lack the power to do so.
On Tuesday, some good news in the case: US District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald issued a temporary restraining order preventing the feds from holding Chung in an ICE prison while her deportation case is heard, finding that the government hadn’t proven there’s any reason to hold her. Buchwald said there was no evidence that Chung posed a danger or that she had any contacts with terrorists.
“Nor was it clear why Ms. Chung would pose potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” the judge said, citing a rationale that President Donald Trump’s administration has invoked in Chung’s case and those of other student protesters it’s seeking to deport.
“What is the issue with permitting her to stay in the community and not be subjected to ICE detention while the parties participate in rational, orderly briefing?” Buchwald asked.
Look, there are reasons. Mostly those reasons are that if the number of deportations isn’t high enough, Mad King Donald will pitch a fit, so every conceivable noncitizen must be removed immediately. Can’t have mass deportations if anyone is allowed to stay, now can you?
Buchwald will hold a hearing, with oral arguments and documents submitted by the government, on May 20, unless ICE decides that Ms. Chung should be disappeared before then. The AP didn’t say anything about what tattoos she might have, but since many gang members don’t have ink, not having tattoos is pretty suspicious, too.
[Miami Herald (alternate archive link here) / NBC News / AP]
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This is dangerous for us all. Because as I want to point out again and again, "Here the right way" or "legal" depends wholly on the local bigotry of whomever is interrogating you. This is also expressly why it's a bad idea to elect a transnational ethnonationalist, racist criminal syndicate to run your Executive Branch as that's the one doing your law enforcement (as such).
We're going to need to dig deep to pull back from these horrible consequences that were warned about.
As a tattooed person I’m honestly afraid to leave the country , for this very reason