A Judge Ordered Trump Not to Use the Alien Enemies Act. He's Doing It Anyway
Do you understand what's happening yet?
When a judge tells you to stop doing something, you stop, or you face penalties.
That’s their job, and even a President in the United States is meant to be bound by the law; checks and balances exist to prevent government abuse and overreach. They’re there to protect the people of the U.S. from being abused and oppressed by a tyrannical monster if one so happens to be elected into office.
It turns out they’re absolutely worthless. It turns out you can just shrug your shoulders, ignore the order and keep doing whatever you like.
As you might be aware, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act—the one that let American citizens of Japanese, Italian and German descent to be put into concentration camps during World War II—to allow for the mass, swift deportation of ‘gang members’ from the country.
What’s the proof that the over two hundred people arrested so far belonged to a gang? Nothing that we know of. So far as anyone can tell, the administration simply accused them of having gang membership and shipped them off to concentration work camps in El Salvador.
The Act is only supposed to be used in times of war. What war is the United States fighting?
Because you can’t declare a formal war against a gang; it isn’t a government entity. That’s not how anything works.
But frankly, it doesn’t even matter at this point. We know damn well this is just a smokescreen. It provides for people as young as 14 to be rounded up and deported on the spot, literally picked up off of the street and put on a plane without any time to go home, to pack, or to inform their families of what’s going on.
I’m not making this up to be sensational. The executive order specifically states that these individuals, accused of membership to Tren de Aragua, are not protected by 50 U.S.C. 22. That’s the rule that gives you time to go home, collect your things and make arrangements before you leave the country.
The only qualification for this seems to be that they are Venezuelan. How do you prove that they’re members of a gang? What’s the process by which you determine a 14-year-old child poses a threat to public safety due to gang membership?
Quoted from the executive order wherein Trump invoked the Act:
Based on these findings, and by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including 50 U.S.C. 21, I proclaim that all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA, are within the United States, and are not actually naturalized or lawful permanent residents of the United States are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies. I further find and declare that all such members of TdA are, by virtue of their membership in that organization, chargeable with actual hostility against the United States and are therefore ineligible for the benefits of 50 U.S.C. 22. I further find and declare that all such members of TdA are a danger to the public peace or safety of the United States.
People are being rounded up and shipped out of the country, to a foreign nation they may never have set foot on in their lives, and put into camps. For the crime of being born somewhere else, with the bad luck to have the wrong skin colour for Trump’s America.
This is atrocious. This is obscene.
Obscene enough that a judge ordered Trump to stop; he even ordered that the planes that were already in the sky must be turned around and returned to U.S. soil, because there was no grounds to deport those people.
The government ignored that order, and today, Marco Rubio more or less announced that they will continue to do so. He acted like the judge never said anything at all.
The rule of law does not matter in the United States anymore.
Remember, convincing you that these people pose a threat to you and your families is how governments manufacture consent for horrors.
This is a nightmare. It’s only going to get worse from here.
Solidarity wins.
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I've been reading about this all morning, and it gets better. ICE just deported, without due process, a Lebanese Dr. who was in the U.S. on a valid H-1B visa, back to Lebanon. She went home and was detained at Boston's Logan airport for 36 hours when she tried to return, according to news reports, then put on a plane to Paris, presumably to be returned to Lebanon and barred from returning.
Trump is brazenly defying the courts now and daring the judicial system from enforcing any court orders. Since the U.S. marshals fall under the jurisdiction of the DOJ, and Trump owns the DOJ, he will keep defying the courts until someone stops him, forcibly.
The U.S. is rapidly being hijacked by this nut job and his cronies. This immigration war is just the beginning. Given how divided the U.S. population is over all of this, I have to wonder where it all will lead to. I see this but, what are the other political powers in the U.S. going to do? That, it seems, is the open-ended question that no one is answering right now. If they don't do something very quickly, it may be too late. Maybe that is what Trump is counting on. A blitzkrieg on the rule of law and the U.S. constitution, much like what Hitler did to Poland in 1939. Hit them quick before anyone can muster up a defense, and just sit on it, defending it by force. Is this what the DOJ and its federal marshals are going to become? Trump's new military? His Brown Shirts?
Holy fuck