PEN America reported on April 24 that authoritarian regimes around the world jailed more journalists and writers last year than ever before, writes Julia Conley.
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At a hearing Wednesday on the status of nearly 140 Venezuelan immigrants whom the Trump administration hastily expelled to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, a federal judge told lawyers representing the detainees that there were “a lot of facts in their favor” regarding whether the White House has the authority to return the men to the United States. During the hearing…
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The largest federal labor union in the U.S. said Friday that tens of thousands of federal workers could soon “have their jobs politicized” and be swiftly fired under a new rule proposed by the Office of Personnel Management. Under the rule, an estimated 50,000 career civil servants would be reclassified as “at-will” employees, removing civil service protections and making it easier for the…
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More than 50 Venezuelan migrants had been “loaded on to buses, presumably headed to the airport” from Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas, when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to halt its plans to deport them early Saturday morning. “The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further…
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Weeks after the Rutgers University Senate passed a resolution to form a “mutual defense compact” — aiming to band together with other universities to protect from the Trump administration’s attacks on academic freedom and free speech — university communities’ push for their schools to stand up to the White House is gaining momentum. Labor unions, Palestinian rights groups…
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Rights advocates who have expressed outrage in recent weeks over the Trump administration’s expulsion of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and other migrants have based their criticism on core tenets of the U.S. Constitution — particularly the right to due process — but President Donald Trump’s top counterterrorism adviser on Tuesday night suggested that defenders of basic constitutional rights are actually…
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As U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen headed to El Salvador on Wednesday morning to demand the release of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, some social media users urged him to find out more about the status of another young man who immigration agents reportedly wrongly sent to the Central American country’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center — despite the fact that he had no criminal record.
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Apr. 14, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
“Everyone here is pretending,” said immigration policy expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick as a video of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele speaking in the Oval Office circulated on Monday.
Bukele, said the senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, was pretending “that he’s incapable of releasing” Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident whom the Trump administration expelled to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in March, while President Donald Trump continued to pretend he’s unable to demand Abrego Garcia’s release.
When reporters asked Bukele to weigh in on Abrego Garcia’s case, the Salvadoran leader scoffed.
“Of course you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States,” he said. “How can I return him to the United States, do I smuggle him into the United States? …I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”
Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant in 2011. He was accused by a police informant of being a member of MS-13 in 2019, but he denied the allegations and was never charged with a crime. He was denied asylum in a hearing, but a judge determined that he should not be deported to his home country of El Salvador, where he had a credible fear of facing persecution and torture.
He had been working as a sheet metal worker and living in Maryland with his wife and children for several years when he was among hundreds of people accused of being criminals and rounded up to be expelled to El Salvador under a Trump administration deal with Bukele last month.
In the Oval Office on Monday, Bukele joined the Trump administration in claiming nothing can be done to return Abrego Garcia to his family in Maryland.
“The U.S. is pretending it doesn’t have the power,” said civil rights lawyer Patrick Jaicomo. “And Bukele is pretending he doesn’t have the power. So who has the power?”
The Supreme Court last week said the administration is responsible for “facilitating” Abrego Garcia’s release, and the Department of Justice claimed in a filing on Sunday that under that order, it is only liable for allowing the man to enter the U.S. once he is freed from the prison in El Salvador.
Trump’s treatment of the case represents “a full-blown constitutional crisis and possibly the watershed moment for what the near future looks like,” said one writer. “If this holds, there is no law but Trump’s law.”
In the Oval Office, said J.P. Hill, both leaders were “openly saying they’ll defy the Supreme Court and maybe even send American citizens to the prison camp in El Salvador. Nobody will be safe if we let this happen.”
As Bukele and Trump both denied responsibility for the hundreds of people they have sent to CECOT, Documented reported on Merwil Gutiérrez, a 19-year-old Venezuelan immigrant who was also sent to El Salvador.
Gutiérrez has no criminal record in the U.S. or his home country, and was not a target of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation operation. An ICE agent said, “He’s not the one,” when a group of officers came to make an arrest at Gutiérrez’s apartment building, but another replied, “Take him anyway.”
Gutiérrez’s story, said Reichlin-Melnick, “comes as Bukele today pretends that he has no power to release people held in his own prison.”
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Julia Conley.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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In a federal court in Maine on Friday, two human rights advocates argued that U.S. President Donald Trump’s economic and travel sanctions against International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan violates their First Amendment rights, because of Trump’s stipulation that U.S. citizens cannot provide Khan with any services or material support as long as the sanctions are in place.
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Undocumented immigrants, who contribute nearly $100 billion in taxes each year and help fund benefits like Social Security and Medicare while remaining ineligible to receive them, are expected to soon lose the privacy afforded to them by a long-standing Internal Revenue Service policy as the IRS nears a deal with the Trump administration to help with immigration enforcement.
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A midwife in the Houston area on Monday became the first person to be criminally charged under Texas’ abortion ban, with Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton accusing Maria Margarita Rojas of providing illegal abortion care and practicing medicine without a license. If convicted, Rojas faces up to 20 years in prison under the state’s near-total ban on abortion.
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After a four-day mission to the West Bank and Gaza, a top official for the United Nations’ children’s welfare agency on Sunday described the effects that Israel’s blockade on all humanitarian aid into the latter territory has had on roughly 1 million children in recent weeks, and demanded that lifesaving essentials — currently “stalled just a few dozen kilometers outside the Gaza Strip” — be…
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In the Trump administration’s latest move to obliterate three decades of work to address the systemic injustices faced by low-income and minority communities across the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday announced plans to shutter all ten of the agency’s environmental justice regional offices as well as its central hub addressing the issue in Washington, D.C.
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Columbia University administrators garnered widespread condemnation last year for overseeing a violent crackdown on students who protested against U.S. support for Israeli war crimes in Gaza, but those actions against pro-Palestinian students didn’t stop the Trump administration from cutting contracts and grants for the school on Friday. The White House announced it was canceling contracts…
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The fragile Gaza cease-fire between Israel and Hamas was thrown into uncertainty Sunday after the Israeli government announced it would not immediately move forward with what would have been the largest single-day release of Palestinian prisoners since the truce was agreed to in January. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israeli forces “are prepared to resume intense…
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The Trump administration’s attempt to freeze all federal grants, including those at the National Institutes of Health, has been temporarily blocked since late last month, when two federal judges ruled that President Donald Trump did not have the authority to pull back the funding — but new reporting on Friday detailed how the administration has circumvented the rulings…
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President Donald Trump’s efforts to rid the federal government and corporations of programs that promote inclusive hiring practices hit a roadblock Friday evening when a federal judge in Maryland granted a preliminary injunction blocking portions of Trump’s executive orders, saying they would “likely” be found to violate the First Amendment. The ruling pertained to two executive orders…
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Indigenous rights and criminal justice reform advocates on Tuesday celebrated as Native American political activist Leonard Peltier, who has maintained his innocence for nearly 50 years since being sentenced to life in prison for the killing of two FBI agents, walked out of a high-security prison in Florida and headed home to North Dakota. “Today I am finally free,” said Peltier in a…
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As a result of what one Democratic leader said was the Trump administration’s latest “direct violation of the law,” institutions that receive grants from the National Institutes of Health have been ordered, starting Monday, to limit indirect costs for research grants — a move that the White House suggested was aimed at reducing unnecessary spending, but which experts said would quickly force…
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Weeks into U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term, Google on Tuesday removed from its Responsible AI principles a commitment to not use artificial intelligence to develop technologies that could cause “overall harm,” including weapons and surveillance — walking back a pledge that employees pushed for seven years ago as they reminded the company of its motto at the time: “Don’t be evil.”…
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Calling a federal grant and loan funding freeze announced by the Trump administration “a massive, massive overreach,” U.S. Sen. Patty Murray was among those expressing fury on Tuesday over a move that could have far-reaching implications for millions of Americans who rely on federal food assistance and education and healthcare programs, among other necessities. “We are talking about our small…
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With the U.S. Senate holding confirmation hearings for several of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees on Wednesday, climate organizers were joined by progressive lawmakers outside the Capitol to speak out against one potential administration official in particular — who they warned poses “a threat to our democracy and our future.” The subject of the press conference…
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As Democratic National Committee members prepare to vote on the next party chair in February, leading progressive advocacy groups on Tuesday launched an open letter to candidates to warn that Democratic leaders “must decisively show that the party is for the people — not billionaires or corporations.” To do that, said the Sunrise Movement and several allied organizations…
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In a decision that was partially underpinned by the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of a 40-year-old legal precedent last year, a federal judge in Kentucky on Thursday struck down President Joe Biden’s expanded protections for transgender youths and other vulnerable students, saying the administration overstepped in introducing the rules. Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District…
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In the wake of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in early December, some political observers were taken aback by the public response to the event, which included morbid humor and expressions of “Schadenfreude,” in the words of one woman who had battled an insurance company to secure treatment for her mother’s cancer. But according to a new poll released by NORC at the…
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With weeks to go until President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office with a Republican trifecta in the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, more that 120 Democratic lawmakers on Sunday called on President Joe Biden to take a crucial step toward protecting millions of Americans from Trump’s far-right MAGA agenda by ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA was passed by…
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