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      Does Nayib Bukele’s campaign against democracy give a blueprint for Trump?

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      “I have no doubt the government are watching,” said Ingrid Escobar, an activist lawyer who has proved a thorn in the side of El Salvador’s authorities. “There are cars that follow me – I have them identified.”Since president Nayib Bukele launched a sweeping crackdown on gangs, Escobar has advocated for the tens of thousands locked up without due process. She points to a photo of Geovanni Aguirre, a childhood friend and trade unionist who worked in San Salvador’s mayor’s office. He disappeared into the prison system in 2022.“The threat is real,” said Escobar. “There are activists and unionists in prison. There are others with arrest orders out for them. Yes, we are afraid.”This is the dark side of the “Bukele model”, which extols an ultra hardline approach to crime spearheaded by a populist leader – but also entails an assault on civil society and democratic institutions, and the accumulation of near absolute power. All with soaring approval ratings.It has made Bukele, 43, the envy of populist authoritarians worldwide, including many in and around the Trump administration. “President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador,” TV host Tucker Carlson gushed after interviewing him. “He may have the blueprint for saving the world.”But El Salvador’s embattled civil society and independent press – the only counterweights to Bukele’s power that remain – warn the regime may yet take a still darker turn.View image in fullscreen“Bukele still benefits from his popularity, but El Salvador could go the way of Nicaragua, where public opinion has swung against the regime,” said Pedro Cabezas, an environmental defender. “And then it comes down to military control.”Fears that Donald Trump might take cues from Bukele spiked last month when he deported more than 200 migrants to Cecot, El Salvador’s mega-prison, and then defied the supremecourt when it ordered that his administration “facilitate” the return of one of them, Kilmar Ábrego García.For Salvadorians, this was reminiscent of Bukele’s actions back in 2020, when he defied a supreme court ruling to stop detaining people for violating quarantine during the pandemic.Some now see this is a turning point.Over the following years Bukele went on to march the army into the legislature to intimidate lawmakers; fire judges who opposed him; modify the electoral system in his favour; and start a state of exception, suspending Salvadorian’s constitutional rights, which shows no sign of ending.Bukele followed the authoritarian playbook – with great success. Last year Salvadorians voted to give him an unconstitutional second consecutive term.All of this has to be seen in the context of what life was like under the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs, said Amparo Marroquín, a professor at the Central American University. “The levels of violence were brutal, especially in the poorer neighbourhoods. It paralysed the social life of the country.”By locking up 85,000 people without due process, many of whom likely have nothing to do with the gangs, Bukele provided a brutal solution. The gangs’ territorial control was broken, homicides fell, and many Salvadorians enjoyed a kind of freedom they had not experienced for years.On the outskirts of San Salvador, one taxi driver pointed to the side of the road. “The gangs dumped bodies here like it was nothing,” he said. “Sometimes in pieces, over hundreds of metres.”“It used to be that every time you left home you ran the risk of being robbed or even killed,” he said. “The president changed that.”Bukele has ridden this wave of relief, with approval ratings consistently around 80% – even if this figure masks an undercurrent of fear.“Around the same number say they would be afraid to express an opinion that was not aligned with the president,” said Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal, a human rights organisation. “And nobody in this country has any doubt that the government can do whatever it wants to whoever it wants.”One veteran of El Salvador’s civil war, who asked not to be named, said he lost a teenage son to a gang shooting in 2010, and that he had been happy to see the gangs brought low.View image in fullscreen“But now the soldiers bother us. I don’t feel safe, I don’t know how to explain it,” he said, searching for the words. “It’s like there are more gangsters with credentials in their hands.”Now the only counterweights to Bukele’s power that remain are civil society organisations and the independent press – and he is turning the screws on both.Bukele has portrayed both as political enemies working against him and the Salvadorian people, and the message has been faithfully amplified by his media machine.“Bukele is like an antenna,” said Cabezas, the environmental defender. “Then there are the repeater antennae: the ministries, the legislative, all the institutions of the state. And then comes the army of trolls.”At the same time, Bukele pressures civil society through regulations, audits and exemplary persecution, such as in the case of five environmental defenders who were at the forefront of El Salvador’s campaign to ban metal mining – which Bukele recently overturned.“These leaders are known at the national and even international level,” said Cabezas. “Now, imagine you are someone who doesn’t have that kind of profile, and you see the state persecuting them. You’d wonder what they would do to you.”Cristosal found that 86% of civil society organisations in El Salvador now self-censor to avoid reprisals.Meanwhile journalists are subject to harassment and targeted with spyware.“It has become normalised for security forces to demand journalists’ phones in the streets, to threaten them with arrest, or even hold them for a time,” said Sergio Arauz, president of El Salvador’s association of journalists.Trump’s freezing of USAID, which supported 11 media outlets in El Salvador, and various civil society organisations, was a gift to Bukele.View image in fullscreenYet the government stops short of all-out repression – and journalists continue to produce damaging investigations into corruption and the negotiations Bukele’s government held with the gangs.“I think Bukele understands that there is an international cost if he attacks journalists too much, and the question is whether he is willing to pay that cost,” said Marroquín.“When you cross that line, there is no going back,” added Marroquín.When Bukele was in the Oval Office last month, denying that he could return the wrongly deported Ábrego García, Trump was sat next to him, visibly admiring the spin and aggressive handling of the press.“Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands,” said Bukele, as he defended his mass incarceration spree. “I like to say that we actually liberated millions.”Trump smiled and asked: “Who gave him that line? Do you think I can use that?”To what extent Trump wants to emulate the “Bukele model” is an open question, but it’s far from clear Bukele’s methods would work in the US, which both lacks a social crisis of the gravity of El Salvador’s gangs and still has a range of formal checks on Trump’s power, from the independent judiciary to the federal system.“American democracy is more resilient – but Americans should not take it for granted,” said Juan Pappier of Human Rights Watch. “Bukele managed to destroy the Salvadoran democracy in two or three years. And putting institutions back to together is a daunting task.” More

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      Trump says he ‘doesn’t rule out’ using military force to control Greenland

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      Donald Trump would not rule out using military force to gain control of Greenland, the world’s largest island and an autonomous territory within Denmark, a fellow Nato member with the US.Since taking office, the US president has repeatedly expressed the idea of US expansion into Greenland, triggering widespread condemnation and unease both on the island itself and in the global diplomatic community. Greenland is seen as strategically important both for defense and as a future source of mineral wealth.In an interview on NBC’s Meet The Press on Sunday, Trump was asked whether he would rule out using force against the territory.“I don’t rule it out. I don’t say I’m going to do it, but I don’t rule out anything. No, not there. We need Greenland very badly. Greenland is a very small amount of people, which we’ll take care of, and we’ll cherish them, and all of that. But we need that for international security,” Trump said.The exchange came as part of wide-ranging interview following Trump’s first 100-days in office last week and he was also asked about the idea of using military force against Canada – an idea once unthinkable but now a subject of speculation amid Trump’s repeated assertion he would like to make Canada the US’s 51st state.“It’s highly unlikely. I don’t see it with Canada. I just don’t see it, I have to be honest with you,” Trump said.Trump said he had spoke with Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, and confirmed that the pair had not spoken about making his country part of the US.But he said they could discuss the topic when Carney visits Washington DC “this week or next week”. Carney, along with around 90% of Canadians, oppose the idea of folding Canada into the US. But Trump said he was open to a discussion.“I’ll always talk about that. You know why? We subsidize Canada to the tune of $200bn a year,” Trump said. “We don’t need their cars. In fact, we don’t want their cars. We don’t need their energy. We don’t even want their energy. We have more than they do. We don’t want their lumber. We have great lumber. All I have to do is free it up from the environmental lunatics.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTrump said that if “Canada was part of the US it wouldn’t cost us. It would be great … it would be a cherished state. And, if you look at our map, if you look at the geography – I’m a real estate guy at heart. When I look down at that without that artificial line that was drawn with a ruler many years ago – was just an artificial line, goes straight across. You don’t even realize.”“What a beautiful country it would be,” he added.A poll published last month found that 68% of Americans believe Trump is serious about the US trying to take over Greenland, and 53% think Trump is serious when he talks about the US trying to take control of Canada.But the survey, commissioned by ABC News found that respondents didn’t think either annexation would be a good idea. About 86% said they opposed the US trying to take control of Canada, and 76% opposed trying to take control of Greenland. More

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      Geography has given the US unrivaled security. Trump is destroying it | Gil Barndollar and Rajan Menon

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      The secret to American power and pre-eminence was best summed up more than a century ago.America, observed Jean Jules Jusserand, France’s ambassador to the United States during the first world war, “is blessed among the nations”. To the north and south were friendly and militarily weak neighbors; “on the east, fish, and the west, fish”. The United States was and is both a continental power and, in strategic terms, an island – with all the security those gifts of geography provide. No world power has ever been as fortunate. This unique physical security is the real American exceptionalism.Americans take this providential geography for granted: their country’s wars are always away games, and their neighbors are trading partners and weekend getaway destinations, not rivals or enemies. The ability of the United States to project power around the globe depends on technology and logistics, but it rests ultimately on the foundation of secure borders and friendly neighbors. But that may not be the case much longer. In threatening war with both Canada and Mexico, Donald Trump is obliterating America’s greatest strategic advantage.In normal times, one would be hard-pressed to find a pair of friendlier nations than the United States and Canada. Canadians and Americans share a common language (aside from the Québécois), sports leagues, $683bn in trade, and the world’s longest undefended border, more than 5,000 miles (8,000km) long. Americans and Canadians have fought side by side in both world wars, as well as in Korea and Afghanistan.Trump’s coveting of Canada is easy to mock and dismiss. Since returning to office in January, he has said repeatedly that he wants to make Canada the 51st state and taken to calling former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau “Governor Trudeau.” In what could be a satire of the post-9/11 ambitions of some American neoconservatives, Trump called the border with Canada “an artificial line” that “makes no sense”.But Canadians aren’t laughing. Living next door to a superpower that has fought multiple wars over the last 20 years and now practices a post-truth politics, they are angry and rattled.Liquor stores in Canada have pulled American-made alcohol from their shelves. The singing of the Star-Spangled Banner during hockey and basketball games has provoked boos from the stands. Airline travel from Canada to the United States has cratered, with ticket sales dropping 70%. Trudeau, not knowing he was on a hot mic, told his ministerial colleagues that Trump’s territorial avarice was “a real thing” and that they should not dismiss it as typical Trumpian bluster. Mark Carney, Trudeau’s successor, warned Canadians that the longtime partnership with the US, “based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation, is over”.Earlier this year, Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative party’s candidate in Canada’s national elections, enjoyed a huge lead in the polls and seemed destined to become the next prime minister. But Canadians’ dislike of Trump apparently helped Carney, a political newcomer and the Liberal party’s candidate (despite Trump’s criticism of Poilievre in a Fox News interview, perhaps because Poilievre, reacting to his falling poll numbers, pivoted to criticizing the American president). Carney’s poll numbers surged, Poilievre’s plunged, and this week, Carney won the election – but he’s not about to preside over Canada’s annexation. By Carney’s account, in conversations, Trump has brought up his vision of Canada as the United States’ 51st state, something Carney has dismissed outright.Americans are apt to find the idea of a security threat from Canada ridiculous. Some of Trump’s antipathy to Canada rests on its paltry defense spending, less than 1.5% of GDP, making Canada one of Nato’s laggards. But Canadian capabilities are critical for the defense of the American homeland. Canadian long- and short-range radars provide the bulk of the North Warning System (NWS), which guards against airplanes and missiles entering North America via the North Pole. A Canadian withdrawal from the jointly run NWS would diminish the United States’ capacity for strategic defense and deterrence. While such a move by Canada would normally be unthinkable, if it fears invasion, as it has reason to do now, it may take steps that have hitherto been beyond the realm of possibility.If Trump’s actions against Canada boggle the mind, his stance toward Mexico is more explicable, albeit far more dangerous. Trump came down that golden escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 and announced his first presidential bid with a diatribe against Mexican immigrants. In the decade since, the Republican party has come to view Mexican drug cartels, if not the Mexican state itself, as a major threat to the United States, even as Mexico has displaced China to become the US’s largest trading partner.With Trump back in power, the reality is starting to match the rhetoric. Active-duty US troops are now on the southern border and Mexican drug cartels have been officially labeled as foreign terrorist groups, providing the legal pretext for the president to order US soldiers to enter Mexican territory and destroy them. US surveillance drones are monitoring fentanyl labs in Mexico – by mutual agreement – but the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has ruled out their being used to strike drug cartels, something US officials have reportedly discussed.Although Trump issued an executive order on the first day of his second term, declaring an emergency on the US-Mexican border, the active duty troops he has deployed there aren’t currently engaged in law enforcement, which US law prohibits, only providing logistical support to Customs and Border Protection. But were Trump to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act at some point, that could change and the military could begin apprehending and detaining Mexican migrants.Any unilateral US military intervention in Mexico would be reckless. With some of the US’s largest cities just a few hours from the border, the cartels would have ample opportunities for retaliation, which in turn would provoke American escalation. Civilian deaths caused by US military strikes could unleash major domestic strife in Mexico, a country of 130 million people, to the point of creating a tidal wave of refugees. US geography shielded it from most of the consequences of its disastrous post-9/11 wars in the greater Middle East. But US luck would finally run out if Trump tried to rerun a version of the “war on terror” across the southern border.With wars raging in Europe and the Middle East and Trump toying with unprecedented tariffs on many US partners and allies, the fallout from Trump’s “America first” policies seem to be primarily in Europe and Asia. But the most gratuitous and serious threats to American security and prosperity lie closer to home.Barely three months into his second term, Donald Trump has damaged, perhaps even irrevocably, relationships with his country’s two neighbors and largest trading partners. Few US presidents have committed greater strategic malpractice. None have done it with such speed. If the president wants to identify something he has achieved that none of his modern-day predecessors have, this feat would certainly qualify.

      Gil Barndollar is a non-resident fellow at the Defense Priorities Foundation. Rajan Menon is Spitzer professor emeritus of international relations at the Powell School, City College of New York, and a senior research scholar at the Saltzman Institute at Columbia University. More

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      This hockey town in Michigan has deep ties to Canada. Then came Trump’s tariffs

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      There are few entities that embody the close, fraternal ties between the US and Canada quite like the Saginaw Spirit junior ice hockey team.In a place whose fortunes have been more down than up in recent decades, the Dow Event Center hockey arena in Saginaw, Michigan, comes alive with more than 5,000 fans once these young stars take to the ice. A huge banner depicting the players adorns the main street into the city.Nearly all the players, aged 16 to 20, come from Canada, and stay with local Saginaw families during the regular playing season, which runs from September to April.“They are family, almost literally,” says Jimmy Greene, the Spirit’s vice-president of marketing and community relations, “because players come over here and stay with American families. It’s more than just sport.”One of the top prospects of this year’s National Hockey League entry draft is forward Michael Misa, the Spirit’s 18-year-old Canadian captain. Last year, the Saginaw Spirit won the Memorial Cup of the Ontario Hockey League for the first time. In the season that recently finished, the Spirit played 28 times on Canadian soil.So the fallout from Donald Trump’s tariffs regime on Canadian goods has been felt more keenly in Saginaw than most other communities – as has the fight over the Canadian election, with the US president’s jibes over Canada becoming the US’s 51st state looming over the contest amid a fierce backlash against such comments.“We’ve had this relationship for decades and all of a sudden, in the last couple of months, it’s been uprooted,” says Greene.“Of course, you’re going to be concerned because you just don’t know [what will happen next]. At some point, it’s going to end up costing us. I just don’t know what extent and by how much.”As the largest city in the northern half of Michigan located within a short drive of three Canadian border crossings, Saginaw has closer ties to Canada than perhaps any other community of its size. Canadian companies own close to 4,000 acres (1,600 hectares) of farmland in the county, and last year, Saginaw established its first sister-city ties with a Canadian counterpart.What’s more, it is a key political bellwether and manufacturing county that helped push Donald Trump over the line in last November’s presidential election, but today the community faces uncertainty around the trade war with Canada.Michigan, with its vast automotive manufacturing industry, is set to be affected by Trump’s trade battle with Canada more than perhaps any other US state.After Trump announced 25% tariffs on Canadian vehicles and parts – with some exemptions – Ottawa responded with its own 25% tariff on certain US automotive products. Canada says the tariffs are unjustified, but on 23 April Trump warned that the tariff figures could go up.While Trump has claimed the US doesn’t need goods produced by its northern neighbor, Canada buys more American products than any other country, at $356bn worth of purchases. Nearly 40% of Michigan’s exported goods go to Canada. In 2023, $1.7bn worth of goods made in the Saginaw metropolitan area were exported, one of the highest amounts for any Michigan city, with much of that sent to Canada.Nexteer Automotive employs around 5,000 people in Saginaw while Means Industries, an automotive parts company headquartered in the city, also has a base in London, Ontario. Repeated calls and emails sent by the Guardian to Saginaw’s chamber of commerce seeking information on specific local industries potentially affected by the tariffs were not responded to.‘Sport right now triumphs over politics’Saginaw is no stranger to economic ups and downs.On a recent Friday afternoon, the downtown area is almost dead. Despite the recent success of the hockey team, there isn’t a sports bar for blocks in any direction as most of Saginaw’s commercial activity is now concentrated around miles of strip malls north of downtown.For Brad Pyscher, an officer at a correctional facility and former union president who, on a recent Saturday afternoon, is manning the Saginaw county Republican party office in one of these strip malls, the tariffs on Canada were something of a shock.“People are concerned, and they hope this works itself out,” he says. “The shock and awe [of the tariffs] really took everyone by surprise.”The 54-year-old says he had voted independent all his life before backing Democrat Barack Obama, and then Trump for president in 2016.“The thing with Trump, whether you like him or don’t like him, there’s transparency,” he says. “I’m drawn to him because he is not a politician.”But Pyscher concedes that Trump could have negotiated with Canada before “hitting them with that shock and awe. I think it’s on purpose, to let the world know he can do it,” he says.“[With] Canada, it should have been negotiated a bit better, a lot better. I’m expecting the deals with Canada to come soon, and we can all put this behind us.”Trump has said one of his main motivations for issuing tariffs on Canada was to stop the flow of illicit drugs into the US. However, reports indicate the opposite may be happening. Last month, $11m worth of cocaine was seized at the Port Huron border crossing, 80 miles (130km) east of Saginaw – on its way into Canada. In December, around 1,000lb (450kg) of cocaine were also seized in a semi-truck attempting to enter Ontario from the same border crossing.Back in the world of ice hockey, Greene of Saginaw Spirit says he feels most people he interacts with have been able to park their political feelings, starting with the organization’s Canadian players, who have been essential to the team’s recent success.“I think we all made a concerted effort, while not to keep [the players] dumb and naive, we did enough to make them feel comfortable in our environment and away from the political stuff. We kept them in a mindset of sport,” he says.But Greene also realizes the strained ties with Canada fueled by the White House’s policies are a very real dynamic.“I’m not immune to the idea that at some point Canada had some hostile feelings towards us, but people have, until this point, been able to park the politics away from sport. I think sport right now triumphs over politics,” he says.“Because we play in Canada, and [because of] the tariffs. I’m more concerned about how they feel about us. Our feelings towards Canada have been and always will be favorable and friendly. I’m concerned not just because of the economic tariffs, but because of the emotions that come from that. I’d be foolish to pretend otherwise.”Saginaw residents are hoping the kind of fraternal ties that were on display across the city last May, when hundreds of Canadian hockey fans from as far away as Saskatchewan descended on the region for the Memorial Cup, won’t become a thing of the past.“Everybody’s been super friendly. You guys have been incredible hosts,” one Canadian hockey fan who drove 11 hours from Quebec for the tournament told local media. More

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      Woman in Florida deported to Cuba says she was forced to leave baby daughter

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      A mother deported to Cuba reportedly had to hand over her 17-month-old daughter to a lawyer while her husband, a US citizen, stood outside unable to say goodbye.Heidy Sánchez was told she was being detained for deportation to Cuba when she turned up at her scheduled Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) check-in appointment in Tampa, Florida, last week.She was told her child, who has health problems and is still breastfeeding, had to stay in the US but could visit her in Cuba, NBC reported.The Trump administration is embroiled in controversy for removing children who are US citizens from the United States with a parent when the adult is deported. In this case, the child was reportedly not allowed to leave with her mother even though it was what both parents said they wanted.The administration’s anti-immigration crackdown has put many people in a difficult position because they risk being summarily detained and deported when turning up for routine Ice check-ins. Many people have followed this process without issue for years, and do not have a criminal record – but failing to turn up can bring an order for forcible removal from the US.“They never gave me the option to take my daughter,” Sánchez told NBC.Sánchez’s husband, Carlos Valle, is a US citizen. Both parents separately told NBC that their daughter is now crying all the time and calling for her mother, while Sánchez struggles to get wifi service in Cuba to sing her daughter to sleep.Valle was not allowed into the room where Sánchez was being interviewed by Ice agents with their daughter, attorneys told NBC. When told she was being deported, she was denied the chance to see her husband or hand over their daughter to him, with a lawyer having to fulfil that role instead.Claudia Cañizares, a Miami-based attorney for the family, said she tried to prevent the deportation but was given “the runaround” by the authorities. The Florida Democratic congresswoman Kathy Castor has said she is lobbying the administration on the family’s behalf.Ice did not respond to a request for comment from NBC. The Guardian has submitted a request for comment. More

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      Canada has long been seen as the cool cousin next door. Here’s the truth | Noel Ransome

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      Canada has been canonized – safely, predictably.It’s the great, grave story we’ve exported – retold in economic rankings, stitched into tourism ads, held up in classrooms and cable news panels. We’re the cooler, mellower cousin nextdoor. The country that has it figured out. Where healthcare is universal, democracy is calm and diversity is politely managed.This image has been shared like a TikTok meme for decades – forwarded, favourited, lightly interrogated. Over time, we’ve become more vibe than nation; contradictions, history and horrors flattened into brand energy. Place that flag in your Twitter bio, mention how “we’ll never become like America,” and you’ve bought into the sauce. You’re not the problem, you’re proof the problem lives somewhere else.This kind of deception has always been fundamental to our story. But we need only a glimpse at our neighbour’s constitutional preamble – “We the people of the United States” – to get a hint of the delusion. Canada’s constitutional language, by contrast, never used the populist “we”. From the start, there was no sweeping assertion of collective identity. Instead, the Constitution Act, 1867, opened with:
      Whereas the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick have expressed their desire to be federally united into One Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland …
      Granted, Canada’s constitutional framework evolved. But from the beginning, the difference in language spoke to the shaping of our identity – through agreements, compromises, legal frameworks, not a people-centered vision. This historical nuance, while subtle, now echoes in modern politics.All that to say: times are spooky for the average Canadian forced to define and defend Canada’s sovereignty. Spooky in ways that can cause one to reflexively feed into a myth, rather than confront the truth of who we are. The gap between our negotiated past and our branded present has never been more plain. Our current leaders are no exception.To any Canadian progressive, it’s stating the obvious to say that Justin Trudeau, the figure most associated with Canada’s progressive identity, was more committed to feeding the myth than confronting it. With his well-timed, photogenic smile – post-blackface, naturally – Trudeau was the perfect mascot. Our self-image personified: tolerant, polished, unthreatening. But branding aside, his government sidestepped moral clarity at home – from pipeline expansions and broken promises to Indigenous communities, to a foreign policy on Gaza that rarely strayed from Washington’s script. In moments that demanded progressive definition, he was formless.It would have been naive to think many Canadians would take Donald Trump seriously when he half-jokingly suggested in November 2024 that Canada become the 51st state. After all, those words came from someone familiar to us – a man and a Maga movement forged in the belief that something sacred was always being stolen. The enemy, the fuel for his fervor, shifted with the news cycle: migrants, trans youth, teachers, climate scientists, Muslims, Black Americans, DEI initiatives, and the very idea of truth.But the speaker of those words wore the same jacket as Pierre Poilievre, who, just before Trump’s threat, was the undeniable favourite among Canadians to become the next prime minister.His rhetoric tapped into the same fears and scapegoating, presenting itself as the antidote to a broken system. Poilievre ticked off his own list of Trump-style grievances: DEI initiatives? “Garbage.” Trans women in women’s spaces? “No place at all.” Immigration policies? “Destroying” a system that requires caps over compassion to curb economic and social pressure. It’s as if he were part of the same tired flock – one that targets the marginalized while promising to fix what he claims is broken. The popular sentiments of a supposedly morally superior land.And this isn’t new. In 2008, as the country prepared to confront the brutal legacy of residential schools, Poilievre dismissed the moment sanctimoniously, arguing that Indigenous people needed to learn “the values of hard work” more than they needed compensation for past abuses. That’s who was in line to lead the country, as anointed by our polls.In the end, his opponent Mark Carney was victorious. But it should be clear that a shift toward the Liberal leader isn’t clarity about who we are, as much as it is a hedge against a man who seeks to claim us from afar.Carney is no antidote – just a bandage. Cutting ministries for gender equality and disability rights isn’t healing; it’s harm. His economic nationalism is safer than the far-right’s bluster, but it’s closer to US centrism than a remedy.As one union representing more than 80,000 educators put it, the move signals “an unwise change of direction” for a country where vulnerable groups are already living in fear. And while Carney served as an executive at Brookfield Asset Management, the company faced accusations of violating Indigenous rights.What Canadians and others need to confront is that the Trump machine wasn’t purely fueled by cultural resentment. It was powered, in no small part, by the United States’ historic desire to promote and believe the best of itself – even when the evidence said otherwise.For me, as a Black Canadian, home has rarely been the gentle myth so many sing about. Always polite and tolerant it wasn’t. I’ve seen just as much of the opposite: unmarked graves, flickers of grief, and then silence. I’ve seen headlines and acknowledgments of systematic racism turn to indifference: police brutality, missing Indigenous women, gone like breath during our winters. And yes, I’ve seen the Proud Boys, too. Their founder, Gavin McInnes? Canadian.Canada holds beauty, but it harbours moral rot just as much as the neighbour it claims to rise above. Myth-making can’t save us. If we want to hold onto our sovereignty in this moment, maybe it’s time we stop lying like them – to others, and most of all, to ourselves.

      Noel Ransome is a Toronto-based freelance writer More

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      Trump officials contacted El Salvador president about Kilmar Ábrego García, sources say

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      The Trump administration has been in touch directly with the Salvadorian president Nayib Bukele in recent days about the detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man wrongly deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, according to two people familiar with the matter.The nature of the discussion and its purpose was not clear because multiple Trump officials have said the administration was not interested in his coming back to the US despite the US supreme court ordering it to “facilitate” Ábrego García’s release.The contacts produced no new developments after Bukele rejected the outreach, the people said. The supreme court had ordered the administration to return Ábrego García to the US so that he would face immigration proceedings as he would have, had he not been sent to El Salvador.The discussions appeared to be an effort by the Trump administration to window dress the underlying legal case and build a paper trail it could reference before the US district judge Paula Xinis, who previously ruled that Donald Trump raising the matter in the Oval Office was insufficient.Ábrego García has since been moved out of Cecot, the mega-prison officials known as the terrorism confinement center, to another prison in El Salvador since the supreme court ruling which the administration has repeatedly tried to manufacture uncertainty around or otherwise misrepresent.The recalcitrance from the US administration to comply has been on display for weeks as senior Trump advisers have become increasingly determined to use it as a case to test the extent of presidential power and its boast that the courts have no practical way to ensure quick compliance with orders.At a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, said he would “never tell” if he had been in touch with Bukele. CNN earlier reported Rubio has had discussions with Bukele directly. The New York Times reported there had been a diplomatic note sent to Bukele.“I would never tell you that. And you know who else I’ll never tell? A judge,” Rubio said as he sat next to Trump, adding it was “because the conduct of our foreign policy belongs to the president to the united states and the executive branch, not some judge”.And in an interview with ABC News that aired the night before, the US president himself said he “could” tell El Salvador to return Ábrego García.When it was raised to him that he had the ability to call Bukele and say “send him back right now”, Trump deflected responsibility. “I’m not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don’t want to do this,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe remarks could yet pose major headaches for the justice department in court as it prepares in the coming weeks to face a series of probing questions from Ábrego García’s lawyers, in writing and in depositions, about the administration’s efforts to comply with the supreme court ruling.By Trump saying that his lawyers had told him not to call Bukele, it could open the department up to bruising questions about whether they were deliberately flouting the order and place them in threat of contempt.After a closed-door hearing on Wednesday in federal district court in Maryland, Xinis refused the justice department’s request to extend a pause in discovery proceedings, ordering it to respond to questions from Ábrego García’s lawyers about his detention by this Friday.Xinis also said in an expedited deposition schedule that Ábrego García’s lawyers could interview up to six administration officials – including Robert Cerna, a top official at Ice, and Joseph Mazarra, the acting general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security – by next Thursday. More

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      ‘He’s just a kid’: the Maryland teenager swept into Trump immigration dragnet

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      When 19-year-old Javier Salazar was loaded on to a bus from an immigrant detention center in northern Texas, he had no idea where he was being taken.He wondered if he was being transferred to another facility or maybe deported back to his native Venezuela. He and the other passengers, their hands and feet shackled, settled into a tense silence. Then a terrifying possibility crept into Salazar’s mind.“My fear was being sent to El Salvador,” he said, to the brutal prison where the Trump administration has dispatched more than 200 Venezuelans into a legal black hole. They are accused of being violent gang members, but reportedly on flimsy evidence for most, deported without even a court hearing.Salazar became stressed “because we’d been listening to the news and the other people at the facility”, he said in a telephone interview from detention.His and other buses in the convoy from the remote Bluebonnet facility pulled over on the side of the road for an unexplained 15 minutes then drove on to Abilene regional airport, about 200 miles west of Dallas. Salazar recognized it as where he landed a few days earlier from detention in Farmville, Virginia, where he had been for about a month after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) arrested him and his father in neighboring Maryland.But once they arrived at the airport in Abilene, the buses abruptly turned around. On the way back to Bluebonnet, a guard told them to be thankful to God, Salazar said. Later he found out the likely reason why. An emergency order in the early hours from the supreme court had temporarily blocked their removal from the US, in the latest clash between Donald Trump and the courts.View image in fullscreen“I thank God that we weren’t sent to El Salvador, but I am still sad knowing that I am in this detention facility when I do not [even] have any tattoos [and have committed] no crimes,” Salazar said in a 25 April phone call, through an interpreter.He is being held in stark conditions, separately from his father, and unable to speak with his ailing mother, who lives in Colombia.Salazar’s case demonstrates that “if your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail,” said his attorney, Travis Collins. Based on court documents, exclusive interviews with Salazar, his brother and his attorney, and a review of an 23 April phone conversation between the 19-year-old and his legal team, the Guardian has pieced together how Salazar was swept into the administration’s dragnet.Javier Salazar came to the US as an unaccompanied minor in 2022 and reunited with his father and some other relatives. The Guardian is using only his middle name, as he fears retaliation in Venezuela.His father had listed him as a beneficiary on his own US asylum application, where an unmarried offspring under 21 gains asylum if it is granted to the parent. Javier has no known criminal record, was at school and, per the justice department website, has an immigration court date in Virginia scheduled for 14 May, where Collins had planned to request Salazar’s release from Ice detention while his legal case progresses.But on an early mid-March morning, agents entered his father’s house in Maryland and took Salazar and his father away in handcuffs.Afterwards, scrolling through his social media on their phones, agents interrogated Salazar and asked him to identify various people in his network. Salazar saw one of the agents writing down in his notes something about a gun – an English word he recognized, he said.View image in fullscreenThe agents did not show him the image, but Salazar remembers insisting to them that whatever they saw was probably a toy water pistol. The Guardian has reviewed an image that Salazar’s family thinks Ice may have been referring to, it shows a person standing near Salazar with a blue-and-white item peeking out of a pants pocket that resembles a small plastic water pistol.Salazar was recorded in the authorities’ computer system as an alleged member of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua criminal gang and was made to wear green prison clothing that signifies an alleged gangster, according to a court filing.Ice was approached by the Guardian for comment but did not respond before publication.Javier’s older brother Daniel described Salazar as the video game-obsessed “baby” of the family.“He’s just a kid, still in the process of growing up,” Daniel told the Guardian in Spanish. Daniel’s full name is being withheld as he has an open immigration case. “Like any human being, he deserves a chance,” he added.The family is in pain. “We miss him, my family, my aunts, my mom, what we do is cry,” Daniel said.He has been posting social media slideshows with photos and videos set to music of Javier making peace signs at the beach, doing bicep curls at the gym, horsing around in a school cafeteria, rolling up a snowball.“You are not a criminal, you are a human being with many dreams and goals, you do not deserve that injustice,” text on one of these slideshows reads in Spanish.On 7 April, the supreme court ruled that immigrants subject to the obscure Alien Enemies Act (AEA) wartime law Trump is using to justify summary deportations must be given due process and time to seek legal remedies “before such removal occurs”.A week later, attorneys heard murmurs that the Trump administration was preparing to ship more migrants to El Salvador. On 14 April, when a 9am video call with Salazar from detention in Virginia was abruptly cancelled via email at 7.11am, Collins knew something was wrong.He scrambled to figure out where his clients were, “fearing the worst”, he said. Only two days later did he learn that they were taken to northern Texas, which at that time was not subject to a court block on summary removals under the AEA.On 17 April, Bluebonnet staff separated Salazar from his father, took him outside and handed him a notice in English. They asked him to sign it without reading it to him in Spanish or giving him a chance to consult his lawyer. When he refused, the agent said: “It ‘doesn’t matter, you’re going to be deported within the next 48 hours. Where you’re being deported to, I don’t know,’” Salazar later recounted to Collins in the phone conversation reviewed by the Guardian.The next thing Salazar knew, he was on that bus. The supreme court order has now bought him some time, but the battle is far from over. In a court filing from 24 April, the administration said it believed a mere 12 to 24 hours was a “reasonable” amount of time for detainees to contest their removal – and that it may continue with removals even if such a petition is pending, if a court denies a request for an emergency pause.Lee Gelernt, the deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)’s Immigrants’ Rights Project vowed that his organization “will continue to fight in courts around the country, including the US supreme court, to ensure there is due process, so that no individual ends up, perhaps permanently, in a brutal foreign prison without ever having had a chance to contest the government’s allegations and use of a wartime authority during peacetime”, he told the Guardian.Salazar’s relatives grapple with their decision to seek refuge and opportunity in the US. Daniel had thought that “the process would have been fair” based on how America has been portrayed on television, he said.“I feel guilty because I told him to come so he could have a better life,” he said. “And look at what happened.” More