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      in US Politics

      ‘I just ask God that he’s OK’: family of Venezuelan musician sent to El Salvador prison agonizes over his fate

      by

      In a recording studio in downtown Santiago, where the dad she has never met once sung, a four-month-old baby girl snuggles in her mother’s arms, noise-cancelling earmuffs shielding her tiny ears from the sound.Nahiara Rubí Suárez Sánchez is equally oblivious to the plight of her father, a Venezuelan musician who is thought to be languishing in a maximum-security prison thousands of miles away in El Salvador after being swept up in Donald Trump’s anti-migrant crusade.Arturo Suárez Trejo, 33, is one of more than 200 Venezuelan men sent to the Central American country from the US, accused by Trump’s administration – with no evidence – of being terrorists, rapists and gang members.More than a month later, Suárez’s relatives – who insist he is innocent – remain completely in the dark about his whereabouts, his wellbeing or how long he might be trapped behind bars.View image in fullscreen“Right now I have no idea what’s happening to him – I just ask God that he’s OK,” said Suárez’s 27-year-old wife, a fellow Venezuelan called Nathali Sánchez, who lives with their child in Chile’s capital. “If something happens to my husband, I will hold Donald Trump and [El Salvador’s president] Nayib Bukele responsible.”Critics have decried Trump’s decision to banish asylum seekers and immigrants to a jail in an authoritarian foreign land as part of a disturbing democratic backslide in one of the world’s largest democracies. “This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror,” the historian and author Timothy Snyder recently warned.For Suárez’s loved ones, the policy represents an emotional sucker punch that follows years of hardship after they, like nearly 8 million Venezuelans, fled economic and political turmoil in their South American homeland.“[It’s] fucked up, man,” said Denys Zambrano, a rapper known as Nyan who became one of Suárez’s best friends in Santiago after they migrated there from different parts of Venezuela.Suárez’s elder brother, Nelson, said they had left Venezuela in 2016 after joining anti-government demonstrations that were sweeping the country amid food shortages and hyperinflation. For challenging Nicolás Maduro’s government, the siblings were threatened by armed pro-regime gangs called colectivos.View image in fullscreen“It was a really difficult time,” recalled Nelson Suárez, 35, whose brother relocated to Cartagena and Bogotá, in Colombia, before moving to Chile, where hundreds of thousands of uprooted Venezuelans have migrated over the past decade. Nelson Suárez headed north to the US.In Santiago, Arturo Suárez built a new life, fixing fridges as he chased his dream of becoming a famous singer-songwriter, under the stage name is SuarezVzla. He became a relentless promoter of Venezuelan music, founding an event called Urban Fresh to showcase budding reggaeton and trap stars. “Arturo’s my mentor,” said Mariangelica Camacho, 20, a dancer and singer who fled Venezuela with her parents at age 14 and whose career he helped launch.At one gig he met his future wife.But making ends meet was a struggle, particularly after the Covid pandemic hammered Chile’s economy. Last May, Suárez decided to join his brother in North Carolina and embarked on a five-month odyssey to the US that involved crossing the treacherous jungles of the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama.Sánchez, who was pregnant, decided not to risk the journey having suffered a miscarriage the previous year, and remained in Santiago. Before setting off from their shoebox apartment looking out across the Andes, Suárez wrote a message to his “lioness” and his unborn child on a whiteboard hanging over her cot. “Soon we’ll be together again,” it says. “I love you both with all my life.”By September, after two months toiling in a Mexico City tortilla shop, Suárez reached the southern border, crossing into San Diego after making an immigration appointment on the Biden-era smartphone app called CBP One. From there he made a beeline for New Bern, North Carolina, where he found work as a handyman, mowing lawns and cleaning pools to support baby Nahiara, who was born in early December.But Suárez’s American dream quickly crumbled. In February, three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, he was detained by immigration officials while making a music video in Raleigh. After a stint in an Atlanta detention centre, he was moved to Texas and then – to his family’s horror – sent to El Salvador after being told he was being deported to Venezuela.View image in fullscreenOn 16 March, 24 hours after Suárez was incarcerated in Bukele’s terrorism confinement centre (Cecot), Sánchez spotted her shaven-headed husband in a propaganda photo released by the Central American country’s government. She recognized him because of tattoos on his neck and thigh and a childhood scar on his scalp. “I felt like the world had collapsed on top of me,” Sánchez said. Since then she has heard nothing and, in her darkest moments, fears he may not even still be alive.“We’ve lost all communication,” said Krubick Izarra, 26, a music producer who is godmother to the couple’s child.Trump’s El Salvador deportations – which activists call enforced disappearances – have grim echoes in Latin America, where such tactics were common during the US-backed dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn Santiago, a brutalist museum commemorates the hundreds of people spirited into custody during Gen Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year regime – most never to return. “Nobody believed that in Chile people could disappear,” reads an entry in a picture book displayed in one exhibition room about the dictatorship’s dungeons.Half a century later, campaigners say the scores of Venezuelans sent to El Salvador find themselves in a similar void, deprived of contact with their families and lawyers, without due process and, in most cases, never having been convicted of any crime.“It’s a legal black hole – and in that legal black hole, I think it’s unlikely the families should expect a judicial remedy,” said Noah Bullock, the director of Cristosal, a rights group which has spent the last three years denouncing the plight of the 85,000 Salvadoran citizens incarcerated as part of Bukele’s hardline anti-gang crackdown. At least 368 of them have died as a result of torture, according to the Cristosal’s count.View image in fullscreenBullock believed the fate of prisoners such as Suárez hinged on whether it was “politically viable” for Trump and Bukele to keep them behind bars, despite mounting evidence of their innocence. “The only option for them, I think, is public advocacy and building sufficient political pressure for their freedom,” he said.Making noise is something Suárez’s musician friends in Santiago are good at.One evening last week, they gathered in a rehearsal room to practise for their latest concert and defend a man they called a cheery, kindhearted, teetotal dreamer whose only crime was seeking a better life.“Arturo has never harmed anyone – and he certainly isn’t a terrorist,” said Heberth Veliz, a 29-year-old musician who suspected his friend had been targeted because of his numerous tattoos, which include a tribute to his late mother, a map of Venezuela, a palm tree, some musical notes and the phrase “The future will be brilliant.”Veliz, whose body is also covered in tattoos, said he struggled to contain his anger when he saw the US president on television smearing Suárez as “the worst of the worst”. “I feel like jumping into the screen and slapping him so he stops talking nonsense. ‘Shut up, Trump! You don’t know what you’re talking about!’” he fumed, although he admitted he was not surprised by his friend’s treatment. “Everyone knows that the most ruthless people wear suits and ties,” he said.Cradling baby Nahiara in a pink shawl, Sánchez said she was determined to stay strong for the sake of her daughter and her absent husband. “It’s up to me to be the pillar of the family now,” she declared, vowing to continue denouncing her husband’s capture. “When he gets out, I want him to see that I didn’t give up – and I want him to feel proud.”View image in fullscreenSpeaking from the US, Nelson Suárez said he believed Trump was using innocent Venezuelans such as his sibling as “guinea pigs” to show off to his base. He felt “morally and psychologically shattered” by his disappearance.“I always wanted my brother to become world famous,” Suárez said. “But not like this, you know?” More

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      in US Politics

      The America I loved is gone

      by

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      View image in fullscreenThe first impression America gave me was gentle carelessness. We were driving down from Canada to visit family friends in Texas sometime in the mid- to late 1980s, and a young border patrol agent at a booth, crouched over a newspaper, leaning back in his chair, carelessly waved my family’s station wagon across without looking up. You didn’t even need a passport to enter the United States until I was 33.You need clear eyes at the border today. Europe and Canada have issued travel advisories after a series of arbitrary detentions, deportations to foreign jails without due process and hundreds of valid visas pulled or voided amid a sense of general impunity. While I have crossed the border a hundred times at least, sometimes once a month when I lived there, I cannot say when I will see America again, and I am quite sure I will never return to the country I once visited.The America I knew, the America I loved, has closed.And so I find myself like a man who has been admiring bubbles floating in the air, trying to recall their shape and swerve and shine after they’ve popped.America was a country of bubbles. I loved it as one loves anything that is both real and fantastical.Donald Trump has blown himself into a bubble of gilded ceilings, ersatz Roman murals, sycophants on tap and midnight rants of imperial conquest on personally owned social media networks. He is only one story. America was millions of bubbles. For some reason, I find myself remembering Tom Waits in a junkyard making Bone Machine, turning rusted fenders and tossed-out dry cleaners and cracked sheet metal into a scrap marimba of his own invention. Even its dumps could give birth to magic.Golf course palaces and wrecking-lot percussion: twin American truths.You felt the meaning of America the moment you entered. In Canada, wilderness is wilderness. The northern forests I come from resist interpretation; that is their power. But when you cross the border from, say, Quebec into Maine, you can feel myth accruing around the bark of the trees. You are in the haunted forests of New England, redolent with burned witches and ghost stories. Further south, the foggy murderous oaks loom gothically. Out west, the deserts beg for cowboys to cross them. Canada is a country that disillusions you. America is one illusion after another, some magnificent, others treacherous or vicious.Every landscape in America is setting, and you have to pose inside them. In my 20s, I drove Highway 1 from San Francisco to Los Angeles. An older and wiser friend told me to rent a convertible, and I laughed the suggestion off, since it felt like something you would do in the movies. Huge mistake. That drive down the California coast – cows by the big-wave Pacific, condors in the clefts of Big Sur – demands an open roof.I learned then: when you go to America, always pick the option that feels like what you would do in the movies.In San Francisco, right by the Yahoo offices on Mission Street, was a small homeless encampment. I could just see inside one of the tents through an open flap, where a boy – he would have been about 10 years old – was playing with little treasures on a small tray – a ring, a toy car, a key chain. Even the tents of the homeless were little bubbles.In Malibu, at a sushi bar, elegant Japanese surf bums lounged between orders, watching Game 7 of the World Series, languidly curling out cucumber spirals the chefs used instead of seaweed. That was their thing – cucumber-based rolls. That restaurant is ash now.View image in fullscreenSometimes, you can see the bubbles better from the air. Flying into Palm Springs, the desert circumscribed, encroaching, revealed the furious machinery working to push it away. Palm Springs is pure delight on the ground: the misted pools, the cocktails filled with the exactly the right ice shapes, the street names hanging on to the faded glamour of the tacky talkshow guests from half a century ago.The airport has no roof; that’s how crazy a city it is. A glistening shivering bubble, effortless once inside.The sheer prosperity of the country could be breathtaking. I had just come back from Senegal when the Guardian sent me on assignment to rust belt Ohio, during the first stirrings of Trumpism, back in 2015. I was there to report on the growing swell of populism by way of the postindustrial immiseration of middle America.I was stopping for gas on the way to a rally, and at the station they were selling a hotdog with as much chilli and cheese as you liked for $1.99. The chilli and cheese came out of the wall. You pressed two buttons, one for chilli and one for cheese.On the streets of Dakar, children hawk packs of peanuts and plastic bags of clean water on the street, and I wondered if you could even explain to them that there existed a place, on the same earth, where chilli and liquid cheese came out of a wall, and you could have as much of it as you liked for the equivalent of 20 minutes’ work at the minimum wage, and that some of the people in that place considered themselves so hard done by that their resentful fury threatened the political order, that they just wanted to burn it all down.It was more than money and grandeur, though. The openness, the generosity of ordinary people, floated free over the country.When I was researching my book The Next Civil War, the far-right people I met, the militia folks, in Oklahoma and in Ohio, at gun shows and Trump rallies and prepper conventions, were, without exception, polite in person – no doubt because I’m white, with blond hair and blue eyes, so I can pretend to be a good ol’ boy when required. They lived in dark bubbles, bubbles of serpentine paranoia and weird loathings and strange fantasies of breakdown.They welcomed me into their bubbles as equably as concierges. Militia pie is delicious; the crusts are richer, flakier. I think they use lard. Anyway, they talked to me about their hopes for the destruction of their government cheerfully and frankly, because they were living the movies playing in their minds and they wanted me to witness the projection.At one prepper convention I remember, a vendor was selling gluten-free rations for bunker survival. That was America in a bucket to me: even at the end of the world, don’t let a gluten allergy interfere with your active lifestyle.View image in fullscreenMuch later, for another publication, I attended a human-fairy congress in rural Washington state. Both humans and fairies were welcome to attend but only humans could enroll in the courses on fairy gardening and fairy marriages. They were the residue of the hippies, I suppose. The final event was a big dance where the fairies joined them and parlayed a message from the spirit realm. A young man dressed in Tibetan shaman robes ran into the luscious meadow set between ponderosa pines shouting “I! Feel! Better!” He was a definitive American type – a seeker who just went with his seeking.In America, one bubble was as good as another: the next week, many of the human-fairy enthusiasts were headed to a cosmic Sasquatch festival.On the other side of the state, in the Olympia forest, I interviewed illegal lumber poachers who cut a cord of firewood a day from the dead trees on public lands for meth and food and gas money, a primitive existence not that far from stone age tribes or medieval peasants. As I approached their compound, a coagulation of wrecked cars and rotten RVs and driftwood lean-tos with hanging tarps, a turkey strutted out to defend their ad hoc architecture of detritus. They had a guard turkey. The guard turkey was the shine of their bubble, like something in a dream.The American dream. For technocrats, a dying breed in the US, the term was shorthand for each generation doing better than the one before, for generally upward social mobility. There was more to it than that. There was an idea, an assumption really, that if you had enough talent and worked hard and did the smart thing, with a little luck you could live life just as you wanted. The country’s founding promise, after all, is “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.That promise is why success in America does not lead to gratitude but to an intense sensation of loss. The elite take any deviation from their fantasy existence as a broken contract. They’ve been ripped off. That is a big feeling among the most successful people in America: the sense of being ripped off.The country clubs are rife with men and women, in incredible luxury, complaining bitterly about the state of the country. The richest and most powerful, the Americans who have won, who have everything, are still not happy, and why? Their answer is that the American dream must be broken. There is no one who feels more betrayed by the American dream than the world’s richest man. Why else do you think he’s out there with a chainsaw?The American elites of the past 20 years have called their foremost principle freedom, but what they meant was impunity. That’s what the original slave masters built: a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, without consequences. That’s what the techlords dream of today.The truly frictionless world they seek eludes them exactly because it is a dream, because it is unreal. The ultimate truth of bubbles is that they pop.Another bubble: when I was teaching Shakespeare in Harlem, at the City College of New York, I had a homeless student who slept in his car and never missed my seminar on revenge tragedy. You can only live that way if you live in a bubble buoyed by dreams.I, too, have floated in American bubbles. I have inhabited its intoxication. If it were not for America, I would be working part-time in a coffee shop.In the early 2010s, I was a writer stuck between Toronto and New York, and I had written my attempt at the great Canadian novel, about Alberta and Quebec and the unspoken fascination between them – between Montreal, with its wild heart, and the wild prairies filled with longing for a distant recognition. Nationalism was completely out of fashion then. No one in Canada would even look at the manuscript. My friends at small presses stopped accepting my invitations for drinks. You can be a loser and you can be a nag, but nobody wants both at the same time – even in Canada.View image in fullscreenI had been sitting on the book for a year when David Granger, my editor at Esquire, invited me down to New York, rented out a room at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, and threw a party for me, just to give a speech to the gathered editors of Hearst about what a great writer I was. I returned to Canada, asked myself what the hell was I thinking trying to tell the stories of people who didn’t care if their stories were told, rewrote the novel so it was set in New York, and sold it in a few weeks for six figures.People used to say, about New York: “If you can make it here you can make it anywhere.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point of New York was that it was the city that wanted you to make it. David Granger blew a bubble around me, and the David Grangers on this planet are all American; that’s the fact of the matter.You work hard, you play hard. So many Americans will do whatever it takes to prevent their bubbles from bursting. The second Trump administration has clarified this national trait. As the authoritarian impulse strips America of any motivating ideals, the only -ism surviving is careerism.The past decade has demonstrated that there is nothing that will cause an American politician to resign. There is no line they won’t cross. To keep the bubble from popping, they will drink their own blood until there’s nothing left but a husk. There are currently people in America who are racist, not because they actually think other races are inferior, but because they think it will advance their careers, just as there were people pretending to be civil rights activists when they thought it looked good on a résumé.At the same time as there can be a terrible indifference to those outside the bubbles, there is no other group of people, in the world, happier to see others succeed than Americans. In Florida, there was a private poker room I used to go to, under a dog track in Sarasota, where you could meet the full spectrum of the Floridian population – grill-fronted southern bubbas, Jewish grandmothers, tweakers.They were just so much fun to sit playing cards with, discussing whether life had any purpose or discernible order. I remember, cancer had struck one of the dealers, who was in her mid-20s, and, to help with the medical bills, the house gave all the profits from a night over to her. It wasn’t just the rake, either. They held a silent auction, old customers forked over fistfuls of dollars straight up, and it was magnificent, a sheer festival of generosity.View image in fullscreenBut my little Canadian heart reserved an obvious thought: “You don’t have to do all this.” You don’t have to live this way. No other industrialized country in the world has to throw parties to raise money for its sick people. They could not see their own strangeness. Their bubbles reflect themselves back to them as the world.But it was a hell of a fun night.Fun. America was fun.Other countries do pleasure or luxury or celebration. America did fun. The Beatles were fun because they played American music. McDonalds conquered the world because they put a fun-for-five-minutes piece of plastic in with the fries and called it the Happy Meal. “What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest,” Andy Warhol once wrote. “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.”Everyone drinks the drink of bubbles, the fun drink.The bubbles by which they lived were the subject of their greatest works of art. In the great one-hit wonder paintings, like Christina’s World by Andrew Wyeth or Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, you can feel the souls pressed up against their bubbles or sinking back in them. This year is the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, and obviously it is the great American novel, the novel of the careless people who smash up the world and retreat into their money and their supreme indifference, the novel of bubbles.But the definitive work of American art isn’t Gatsby; it’s the roadrunner cartoons. If Coyote keeps running, he can run over air. It is only when he looks down that he falls.In Judaism, it is forbidden to throw out sacred books. They keep the shreds of exhausted texts in a storage room called a genizah.View image in fullscreenThe American text is exhausted. I am going to keep my memories of America in a genizah in my mind, the ones I have written here but also: dawn over the Shenandoah seen from the flatbed of an F-150; Broadway Boogie Woogie by Piet Modrian in the MoMA; a New Orleans band that must have played When the Saints Go Marching In 10,000 times playing it as if it were the first time; the smell of tacos al pastor in a Tulsa parking lot; low-limit craps in Vegas; a western oriole strutting in pine needles; the stump of the “Tree of Hope” in Harlem; the Siesta Key Oyster Bar, where the walls were covered with Iraqi money stapled there by returning soldiers; the sausages at the Wrigley Field ballpark in Chicago; the New York hustler who went down the A train selling his romance novels out of a box; that wave at the border I may have half-imagined.Countries fall out of the free world. They fall back in, too. These memories are not yet dead. They are only closed.But for now, a great foam is lifting, drifting, blowing through unsettled air, and all I can hear, in the distance, is the sound of bubbles popping.View image in fullscreen

      Stephen Marche lives in Toronto and is the author of The Next Civil War and On Writing and Failure More

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      Kilmar Ábrego García ‘traumatized’ by threats in prison, Maryland senator says

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      Wrongly deported Salvadoran man Kilmar Ábrego García has been held incommunicado and faced threats in prison that left him “traumatized”, a Democratic senator said Friday after returning from meeting him in El Salvador.Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, the state Ábrego García had been living in with his US citizen wife and son until he was deported last month in what the Trump administration conceded was an “administrative error”, traveled to the central American country this week to see his constituent. After initially rejecting his request to meet Ábrego García and preventing him from traveling to the prison where he was being held, president Nayib Bukele’s government on Thursday facilitated a meeting at Van Hollen’s hotel.“His conversation with me was the first communication he’d had with anybody outside of prison since he was abducted. He said he felt very sad about being in a prison because he had not committed any crimes,” Van Hollen said at a press conference at Dulles international airport outside Washington DC.He recounted speaking to Ábrego García about his wellbeing, and informing him of the controversy caused by his arrest and Donald Trump’s refusal to let him back into the United States, in spite of a supreme court ruling saying the president should “facilitate” his return.The senator said Ábrego García told him about how he had been arrested by federal agents after a traffic stop while driving with his five-year-old son, who has autism. He was taken to Baltimore, then Texas, where he was shackled and placed with other deportees on an aircraft where they could not see out the windows. The plane flew to El Salvador, where, Ábrego García said, he was taken to the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) and put in a cell with about 25 other people.“He said he was not afraid of the other prisoners in his immediate cell, but that he was traumatized by being at Cecot and fearful of many of the prisoners in other cell blocks who called out to him, and taunted him in various ways,” Van Hollen said, adding that Ábrego García otherwise appeared to be in sound health.Just more than a week ago, Ábrego García was moved to another prison in the city of Santa Ana, where conditions are better, but he still has no contact with the outside world, Van Hollen said. He has also not been told whether he is being charged with a crime, or how long he will be detained.“They haven’t told him anything about why he was sent or how long he would be there,” the senator said.Van Hollen described himself as motivated to make the trip both out of a desire to relay Ábrego García’s condition to his family, and outrage that the Trump administration had deported him despite a judge granting him protection from removal, over a “well-founded fear of future persecution” from gangs in El Salvador, and was now refusing to bring him back.“This case is not only about one man, as important as that is. It is about protecting fundamental freedoms and the fundamental principle in the constitution for due process, that protects everybody who resides in America,” Van Hollen said. “This should not be an issue for Republicans or Democrats. This is an issue for every American who cares about our constitution.”On Thursday, the federal appeals judge James Wilkinson, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan, wrote an opinion blasting the administration’s conduct in the case as litigation over Ábrego García’s deportation continued.“The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order,” he wrote.The Trump administration has countered the criticism by claiming that Ábrego García was a member of the MS-13 criminal gang, with the White House posting on social media that he was “NOT coming back”.Trump administration officials also seized on a claim from Bukele that Van Hollen and Ábrego García drank margaritas during their meeting, which the senator took pains to refute, saying the drinks had been placed on their table by a Salvadoran government employee.“Let me just be very clear: neither of us touched the drinks that were in front of us,” he said, adding that the glass placed in front of Ábrego García contained less liquid, as if trying to create the impression that he had drunk from it.“But this is a lesson into the lengths that president Bukele will do to deceive people about what’s going on. And it also shows the lengths that the Trump administration, or the president, will go to, because when he was asked about a reporter about this, he just went along for the ride.”Van Hollen was joined at the airport by Ábrego García’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who brushed away tears as the senator described meeting her husband. At the White House earlier in the day, Trump had read from a domestic violence protective order Vasquez filed in 2021, which she has said stemmed from a rough patch in their marriage that they later worked through.“When I asked him, what was the one thing he would ask for in addition to his freedom, he said he wanted to talk to his wife,” Van Hollen said of his meeting with Ábrego García. “I told him I would work very hard to make that happen.” More

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      ‘Shocking to the sense of liberty Americans hold dear’: the impassioned US court order in the Ábrego García case

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      Upon review of the government’s motion, the court denies the motion for an emergency stay pending appeal and for a writ of mandamus. The relief the government is requesting is both extraordinary and premature. While we fully respect the Executive’s robust assertion of its Article II powers, we shall not micromanage the efforts of a fine district judge attempting to implement the Supreme Court’s recent decision.It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order. Moreover, the government has conceded that Abrego Garcia was wrongly or “mistakenly” deported. Why then should it not make what was wrong, right?The Supreme Court’s decision remains, as always, our guidepost. That decision rightly requires the lower federal courts to give “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs”. That would allow sensitive diplomatic negotiations to be removed from public view. It would recognize as well that the “facilitation” of Abrego Garcia’s return leaves the Executive Branch with options in the execution to which the courts in accordance with the Supreme Court’s decision should extend a genuine deference. That decision struck a balance that does not permit lower courts to leave Article II by the wayside.The Supreme Court’s decision does not, however, allow the government to do essentially nothing. It requires the government “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador”. “Facilitate” is an active verb. It requires that steps be taken as the Supreme Court has made perfectly clear. The plain and active meaning of the word cannot be diluted by its constriction, as the government would have it, to a narrow term of art. We are not bound in this context by a definition crafted by an administrative agency and contained in a mere policy directive. Thus, the government’s argument that all it must do is “remove any domestic barriers to [Abrego Garcia’s] return” is not well taken in light of the Supreme Court’s command that the government facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.“Facilitation” does not permit the admittedly erroneous deportation of an individual to the one country’s prisons that the withholding order forbids and, further, to do so in disregard of a court order that the government not so subtly spurns. “Facilitation” does not sanction the abrogation of habeas corpus through the transfer of custody to foreign detention centers in the manner attempted here. Allowing all this would “facilitate” foreign detention more than it would domestic return. It would reduce the rule of law to lawlessness and tarnish the very values for which Americans of diverse views and persuasions have always stood.The government is obviously frustrated and displeased with the rulings of the court. Let one thing be clear. Court rulings are not above criticism. Criticism keeps us on our toes and helps us do a better job. Court rulings can overstep, and they can further intrude upon the prerogatives of other branches. Courts thus speak with the knowledge of their imperfections but also with a sense that they instill a fidelity to law that would be sorely missed in their absence.“Energy in the [E]xecutive” is much to be respected. It can rescue government from its lassitude and recalibrate imbalances too long left unexamined. The knowledge that executive energy is a perishable quality understandably breeds impatience with the courts. Courts, in turn, are frequently attuned to caution and are often uneasy with the Executive Branch’s breakneck pace.And the differences do not end there. The Executive is inherently focused upon ends; the Judiciary much more so upon means. Ends are bestowed on the Executive by electoral outcomes. Means are entrusted to all of government, but most especially to the Judiciary by the Constitution itself.The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would lose its meaning.Today, both the United States and the El Salvadoran governments disclaim any authority and/or responsibility to return Abrego Garcia. We are told that neither government has the power to act. The result will be to leave matters generally and Abrego Garcia specifically in an interminable limbo without recourse to law of any sort.The basic differences between the branches mandate a serious effort at mutual respect. The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive’s respect for the courts. Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate.It is in this atmosphere that we are reminded of President Eisenhower’s sage example. Putting his “personal opinions” aside, President Eisenhower honored his “inescapable” duty to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education II to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed.” This great man expressed his unflagging belief that “[t]he very basis of our individual rights and freedoms is the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and [e]nsure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts.” Indeed, in our late Executive’s own words, “[u]nless the President did so, anarchy would result.”Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions. The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.It is, as we have noted, all too possible to see in this case an incipient crisis, but it may present an opportunity as well. We yet cling to the hope that it is not naïve to believe our good brethren in the Executive Branch perceive the rule of law as vital to the American ethos. This case presents their unique chance to vindicate that value and to summon the best that is within us while there is still time.In sum, and for the reasons foregoing, we deny the motion for the stay pending appeal and the writ of mandamus in this case. It is so ordered.

      This was excerpted from the order by the US court of appeals for the fourth circuit in Kilmar Abrego Garcia v Kristi Noem. It has been edited to remove some legal citations More

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      Wife of Kilmar Ábrego García speaks as White House defiant over US return

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      Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Ábrego García, the man the Trump administration has admitted it mistakenly deported, expressed relief to learn he is alive after a Democratic US senator managed to meet with him in El Salvador – as the White House posted on social media that he is “never coming back” to the US.“It was very overwhelming – the most important thing for me, my children, his mom, brothers was to see him alive, and we saw him alive,” Vasquez Sura told ABC in an interview.Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen revealed on Thursday evening that he had met with Ábrego García at the maximum security prison in El Salvador known as Cecot, where the autocratic regime holds prisoners without due process. Ábrego García was arrested by immigration agents in Maryland, last month, where he was living and working.Despite being undocumented, Ábrego García had been afforded a federal protection order against deportation to his native El Salvador, which the Trump administration ignored last month when it flew him and more than 200 Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador without warning or a court hearing, in a move that has fallen foul of judges in the US right up to the supreme court.In court filings Friday, lawyers for detained Venezuelan nationals said their clients were being loaded onto buses in anticipation of new wave of deportations, for which there had been less than 24 hours’ notice. They asked US district judge James Boasberg for an immediate restraining order requiring 30 days’ notice, as Politico’s Kyle Cheney first reported.Van Hollen posted a picture of himself with Ábrego García in what appeared to be a cafeteria-style setting in the hospital wing of the prison, and the senator said he would provide a full update upon his return to the US. The previous day he has failed to be given access to the prison or his constituent after flying to El Salvador pledging to try to bring him back.Vasquez described her spouse as “a very loving husband, an amazing father” adding they were just parents “trying to live the American dream”.The Trump administration claims Ábrego García is a member of the Salvadorian violent gang network MS-13. But his family and the head of the sheetmetal workers union that represents the trade in which he is an apprentice, have said he is not connected to a gang. He has not been charged with any crimes in the US or El Salvador and the government admitted in a court filing that he had been deported in error, but since has refused to work to secure his return to the US despite court orders to do so.View image in fullscreenFederal judge Paula Xinis has rebuked the Trump administration for resisting the court’s instructions to have the father returned and has said that the government has not submitted any evidence to her court that Ábrego García is a gang member or criminal.The US president posted on social media criticizing the senator and the press in characteristic Trump language, saying Van Hollen “looked like a fool yesterday standing in El Salvador begging for attention from the Fake News Media, or anyone”.Hours later in the White House, Trump reeled off unsubstantiated allegations against Ábrego García as “an MS-13 member, an illegal alien and a foreign terrorist, I assume”. He also read from a domestic violence protective order Vasquez filed against him in 2021 over allegations of domestic violence, describing him as violent and hitting and scratching her. Such a record is normally confidential unless the alleged victim chooses to release it, but the US president read excerpts to reporters.Having previously said it was a bad period in their marriage that they worked through, with counseling, and forged a stronger partnership, Vasquez in the ABC interview declined to discuss the protective order further. “I’m happy he’s alive, and that’s all I can say,” she said.Meanwhile, Vasquez said on Friday that Garcia had been picked up by federal agents as he was pulled over while driving in Maryland. “What we thought was a regular traffic stop, turned out not to be a regular traffic stop,” she said, and reiterated denials that Garcia was a member of MS-13 or any other gang.“He’s not,” she added.Hours later on Friday, the White House made a sensational post on X, mocking the New York Times and Van Hollen and saying that Ábrego García is “never coming back”.In scathing court order, a US court of appeals for the fourth circuit on Thursday denied the administration’s effort to appeal an earlier order from a federal judge in Maryland requiring the government to facilitate Ábrego García’s return, and the judge issued a stark warning about US constitutional democracy, as Donald Trump continues to defy courts’ orders on numerous fronts.The court said the administration’s claim that it can’t do anything to free the father from the prison and return him “should be shocking” to the public.The blistering order further ratcheted up the escalating conflict between the US government’s co-equal executive and judicial branches.Judge James Wilkinson said: “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”“Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done,” he added.The panel emphasized that Ábrego García is entitled to due process. “If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order,” the panel said.“The judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions,” the judges said.Meanwhile, federal judge Brian Murphy on Friday barred the Trump administration from implementing a new policy allowing it to rapidly deport hundreds if not thousands of migrants to countries other than their own without giving them a chance to show they fear being persecuted, tortured or killed there.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Denied, detained, deported: the most high-profile cases in Trump’s immigration crackdown

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      Donald Trump retook the White House vowing to stage “the largest deportation operation in American history”. As previewed, the administration has set about further militarizing the US-Mexico border and targeting asylum seekers and refugees while conducting raids and deportations in undocumented communities, detaining and deporting immigrants and spreading fear.Critics are outraged, if not surprised. But few expected the new legal chapter that unfolded next: a multipronged crackdown on certain people seen as opponents of the US president’s ideological agenda. This extraordinary assault has come in the context of wider attacks on higher education, the courts and the constitution.Here are some of the most high-profile individual cases that have captured the world’s attention so far because of their extreme and legally dubious nature, mostly involving documented people targeted by the Trump administration in the course of its swift and unlawful power grab.Students and academics hunted and ‘disappeared’In recent weeks, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) teams suddenly began arresting and detaining foreign-born students and academics on visas or green cards. In most cases the government has cited their roles in pro-Palestinian campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza following the 7 October 2023 attack. Claims that they “support Hamas” are invoked as justification for wanting to deport them, even though they have not been charged with any crimes. Those taken include:Mahmoud KhalilA recent graduate student of Columbia University in New York, Mahmoud Khalil, 30, is a Palestinian green card holder who was a leader during protests last year. He was arrested in front of his pregnant wife and has been in a detention center in Louisiana since mid-March.View image in fullscreenThe government is using obscure immigration law to make extraordinary claims in cases like Khalil’s that it can summarily detain and deport people for constitutionally-protected free speech if they are deemed adverse to US foreign policy. A far-right group has claimed credit for flagging his and others’ names for scrutiny by the authorities.Rümeysa ÖztürkView image in fullscreenUS immigration officials wearing masks and hoodies encircled and grabbed the Tufts University PhD student in a suburb of Boston and bustled her into an unmarked car, shown in onlooker video. Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar and Turkish national on a visa, had co-written an op-ed in the student newspaper, criticizing Tufts’ response to Israel’s military assault on Gaza and Palestinians. She was rushed into detention in Louisiana in apparent defiance of a court order. Öztürk, 30, says she has been neglected and abused there in “unsafe and inhumane conditions”.Mohsen MahdawiView image in fullscreenMahdawi, a Palestinian green-card holder and student at Columbia University, was apprehended by Ice in Colchester, Vermont, on 14 April, according to his lawyers and a video of the incident, first reported by the Intercept.He was prominent in the protests at Columbia last year. During his apprehension he was put into an unmarked car outside a federal office where he was attending an interview to become a naturalized US citizen, his lawyer said.Yunseo ChungView image in fullscreenAnother student at Columbia, Chung, 21, sued the Trump administration for trying to deport her, and has gone into hiding. She is a pro-Palestinian campaigner and was arrested by the New York police in March while protesting against the university’s punishments of student activists, as first reported by the New York Times. She said a government official told her lawyer they want to remove her from the country and her residency status was being revoked. Chung was born in South Korea and has been in the US since she was seven.Alireza DoroudiView image in fullscreenThe Democrats on campus group at the University of Alabama said of the arrest of Doroudi, an Iranian studying mechanical engineering: “Donald Trump, Tom Homan [Trump’s “border czar”], and Ice have struck a cold, vicious dagger through the heart of UA’s international community.”Less is known about the federal government’s claims against Doroudi but it is understood he was taken to the same Ice processing center in Jena, Louisiana, where Khalil is behind bars, NBC reported.Badar Khan SuriView image in fullscreenMore than 370 alumni of Washington DC-based Georgetown University joined 65 current students there in signing on to a letter opposing immigration authorities’ detention of Dr Badar Khan Suri, a senior postdoctoral fellow at the institution’s Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).The authorities revoked his student visa, alleging the citizen of India’s father-in-law was an adviser to Hamas officials more than a decade ago – and claiming he was “deportable” because of his posts on social media in support of Palestine. He was taken to Louisiana and then detention in Texas and was given court dates in May.Kseniia PetrovaThe Harvard Medical School research scientist was stopped at Boston’s Logan airport by US authorities on her way back from France in February, over what appeared to be an irregularity in customs paperwork related to frog embryo samples. She was told her visa was being revoked and she was being deported to her native Russia.When Petrova, 30, said she feared political persecution there because she had criticized the invasion of Ukraine, she was taken away and also ended up in an overcrowded detention facility in Louisiana.Student visas revokedMore than 1,300 international students from at least 200 colleges across the US have had their “legal status changed” by the state department, including the revoking of visas, between mid-March and mid-April, Inside Higher Education has reported. The specialist publication called it “an explosion of visa terminations”.The schools and students have been given little information, but secretary of state Marco Rubio has lambasted protesters and campus activists as “lunatics”. Some have been cited for pro-Palestinian views, others concluded they must have been targeted because of minor crimes or offenses, such as a speeding ticket. Some can find no specific reason why their visa would be revoked. Many are from India and China, the Associated Press reported, and panic is setting in on campuses.High-profile cases include:Felipe Zapata VelásquezView image in fullscreenThe family of University of Florida student Felipe Zapata Velásquez, 27, said he is “undergoing a physical and emotional recovery process” in his native Colombia after police arrested him in Gainesville in March for traffic offenses and turned him over to Ice. He agreed to be deported, to avoid lengthy detention and legal battles. Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost accused authorities of “kidnapping” Velásquez.Momodou TaalTaal, a dual citizen of Britain and Gambia, was pursuing a PhD at Cornell University’s Africana Studies and Research Center, and was an outspoken activist on the Ivy League campus. He was suspended last year for his role in anti-Zionist protests. He sued the Trump administration over labeling foreign student protesters anti-Semitic and was told to surrender to immigration officials. He has since left the country.Deported by (admitted) mistakeKilmar Ábrego GarcíaView image in fullscreenThe Salvadoran man was deported to El Salvador by mistake, which the Trump administration admitted. But then it essentially defied a US supreme court order to “facilitate” his return to his home and family in Maryland from a brutal mega-prison in the central American country. Ábrego García was undocumented but had protected status against being deported to El Salvador. He was flown there anyway, without a hearing. The administration accuses him of being a violent gangster and has abandoned him, infuriating a federal judge and prompting warnings of a constitutional crisis. He has not been charged with any crimes but was swept up with hundreds of Venezuelans also deported there. Sheet metalworkers union chief Michael Coleman described Ábrego García as an “apprentice working hard to pursue the American dream” and said he was not a gang member. Trump said he was eyeing Salvadoran prisons for US citizens.Deported to a third country, without due processThe US deported more than 230 Venezuelan men to the mega-prison in El Salvador without so much as a hearing in mid-March despite an infuriated federal judge trying to halt the flights, then blocking others. Donald Trump took extraordinary action to avoid due process by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act (AEA), a law meant only to be used in wartime, prompting court challenges led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). John Roberts, the US chief justice, rebuked the president when he threatened the judge. The justices, by a majority, did not stop Trump from using the AEA but the bench unanimously reaffirmed the right to due process and said individuals must be able to bring habeas corpus challenges.Most of the men are reportedly not violent criminals or members of violent gangs, as the Trump administration asserts, according to a New York Times investigation.Many appear to have been accused of being members of the transnational Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua partly on the basis of their tattoos, with their families speaking out, including:Andry José Hernández Romeroskip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionView image in fullscreenHernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist and hairdresser, entered California last year to attend an asylum appointment, telling the authorities he was under threat in Venezuela as a gay man. But he was detained and accused of being in Tren de Aragua because of his tattoos, then suddenly deported under Trump, deemed a “security threat”.Jerce Reyes BarriosThe former professional footballer, 36, has been accused of gang membership by the Department of Homeland Security, seemingly because of his tattoos, including one of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “dios”.“He chose this tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favourite soccer team, Real Madrid,” his lawyer, Linette Tobin, said, adding that her client fled Venezuela after protesting the government and being tortured.Francisco Javier García CasiqueView image in fullscreenRelatives were shocked when they spotted Francisco Javier García Casique, 24, in a propaganda video from El Salvador showing scores of Venezuelan prisoners being frog-marched off planes and into custody there. He is a barber in his home town of Maracay and is completely innocent of gang involvement, the family said, adding that Francisco and his brother Sebastián have matching tattoos quoting the Bible.Migrants seeking asylum removed to PanamaA US military plane took off from California in February carrying more than 100 immigrants from countries as far flung as Afghanistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, China, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Pakistan, dumping them in Panama. They were shackled and deported to a third country because their nations of origin refuse to accept them back from the US. Shocking scenes unfolded of the people locked in a hotel in Panama City, signaling and writing on the windows pleading for help.The people, including children, were then moved and held at a facility deep in the dense jungle that separates Panama from Colombia. They were later reportedly freed and were seeking asylum from other countries, their futures uncertain. One of those deported from the US was:Artemis GhasemzadehView image in fullscreenGhasemzadeh, 27, a migrant from Iran, wrote “Help us” in lipstick on a window of the hotel in Panama City, as a desperate way of alerting New York Times reporters on the street to her and fellow detainees’ plight. She had thought that, especially as a convert from Islam to Christianity who faces danger in Iran as a result, that she would be offered freedom in the US, she told the newspaper while still in custody.Americans questioned and threatenedAmir MakledView image in fullscreenMakled, a Detroit-born attorney, was questioned at the airport on returning from vacation. He was flagged to a terrorism response team, kept behind and pressured to hand over his phone, then give up some of its contents. The Lebanese American represents a pro-Palestinian student protester who was arrested at the University of Michigan. Experts said the incident was evidence of a weakening of fourth amendment constitutional protections at the border against “unreasonable search and seizure”.Nicole MicheroniView image in fullscreenThis Massachusetts immigration lawyer, a US-born American citizen, spoke out after receiving an email from the Trump administration telling her “it is time for you to leave the United States”. She said it was “probably, hopefully, sent to me in error. But it’s a little concerning these are going out to US citizens.” She told NBC she thought it was a scare tactic.Visitors detainedJasmine Mooney, CanadaView image in fullscreenCanadian Jasmine Mooney was shackled and ended up in Ice detention in the US for two weeks over an alleged work visa irregularity while on one of her frequent visits to California. She spoke out about the harsh conditions and the information black hole and how outraged she was that so many other detainees she met, who helped her, are stranded without access to the kind of resources that ultimately got her out.Rebecca Burke, UKView image in fullscreenThe British graphic artist was stopped at the border when she headed from Seattle to Canada as a backpacker and, because of a visa mix-up, she became one of 32,809 people to be arrested by Ice during the first 50 days of Trump’s presidency. Almost three weeks of grueling detention conditions later, she smuggled out her poignant drawings of fellow detainees when she was released.Jessica Brösche, GermanyThe German tourist and tattoo artist, 29, from Berlin was detained by US immigration authorities and deported back to Germany after spending more than six weeks in US detention, including what she described as eight days in solitary confinement. Her family compared her ordeal to “a horror film”.Fabian Schmidt, GermanyView image in fullscreenThe 34-year-old German national and US green card holder was apprehended and allegedly “violently interrogated” by US border officials as he was returning to New Hampshire from a trip to Luxembourg. His family said he was held for hours at Boston’s Logan airport, stripped naked and put in a cold shower, then later deprived of food and medicine, and collapsed. His case is being investigated and as of mid-April he was in Ice detention in Rhode Island.Sent back‘Jonathan’A man with a US work visa provided his anonymous account to the Guardian of being denied entry into the US after a trip to his native Australia to scatter his sister’s ashes. He was pulled aside on arrival in Houston, Texas, and accused, variously, of selling drugs and having improper paperwork. After being detained for over a day he was put on a flight back to Australia even though he has worked on the US east coast for five years, where he lived with his girlfriend.Denied entry – for criticizing Trump?Alvin Gibbs, Marc Carrey and Stefan Häublein of band UK SubsView image in fullscreenMembers of the punk rock band UK Subs said they were denied entry and detained in the US on their way to play a gig in Los Angeles, after being questioned about visas. Bassist Alvin Gibbs said: “I can’t help but wonder whether my frequent, and less than flattering, public comments regarding their president [Trump] and his administration played a role.” He and the two band mates were kept in harsh conditions for 24 hours then deported back to the UK.French scientistA French scientist, who has not been publicly named, was denied entry to the US after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, according to a French government minister. The researcher was on his way to a conference in Texas.“Freedom of opinion, free research, and academic freedom are values ​​that we will continue to proudly uphold,” Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, told Le Monde. More

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      What can the global left learn from Mexico – where far-right politics hasn’t taken off? | Thomas Graham

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      If you were to summarise the 2024 election year, you might say: grim for incumbents, good for the far right. Yet Mexico bucked both trends. Its governing party, Morena, not only retained the presidency but – along with its partners in the Sigamos Haciendo Historia coalition – gained a two-thirds supermajority in the chamber of deputies, the lower house, while the far right failed to even run a candidate. That a self-described leftwing party could have such success by fixing on Mexico’s chasmic inequality has drawn attention from hopeful progressives worldwide. But Morena’s programme has some not-so-progressive elements too. It is not necessarily one others could – or would want to – copy in its entirety.Morena first notched a historic result in 2018, when Andrés Manuel López Obrador, an old face of the left who ran for president twice before founding the party, won a record 55% of the vote during the general elections. Mexico’s constitution limits presidents to a single term. But this time, Claudia Sheinbaum, a close ally of López Obrador’s, won 60% of the vote. Her victory was reminiscent of the heyday of Latin America’s “pink tide”, when leftist leaders like Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales were reelected for a second term with more votes than their initial victories.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, the far right didn’t even get on the ballot. Eduardo Verástegui, an actor turned activist who produced Sound of Freedom, the surprise box office hit about a US federal agent busting a child-trafficking ring in Colombia, sought to bring Trumpian politics to Mexico but failed to collect the signatures required to run as an independent. Rather than developing a Mexican brand of far-right politics, Verástegui tried to transplant a distinctly American flavour that was heavy with God, guns and individualism. It didn’t take root.Morena’s success in building a leftwing movement stemmed from the party’s focus on socioeconomic justice. López Obrador developed a simple and powerful populist narrative, arguing that the country had been captured by corrupt elites, including the old political parties and their national and transnational business partners. This resonates for people in Mexico, a palpably unequal country in which roughly 27% of income accrues to the richest 1%.López Obrador promised to change that. His charisma and his long track record in Mexico made him a convincing vehicle for the message, which he hammered home in trips to every corner of the country and daily press conferences known as the mañaneras. In these, he touted his government’s achievements and lambasted its critics, shaping the media agenda. Morena’s message was amplified through state and social media, creating a kind of personality cult around López Obrador.And he delivered. López Obrador’s government doubled the minimum wage in real terms, while expanding social programmes and cash transfers for pensioners and the young, among others. It clamped down on the practice of outsourcing workers to avoid paying benefits and legislated that union contracts be put to democratic votes. And it focused infrastructure projects on the historically marginalised south, building trains and a new oil refinery. From 2018 to 2022, the percentage of the population living in poverty fell from roughly 42% to 36%.More from this series@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.woff) format(“woff”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-Light.ttf) format(“truetype”);font-weight:300;font-style:normal}@font-face{font-family:Guardian Headline Full;src:url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff2) format(“woff2”),url(https://assets.guim.co.uk/static/frontend/fonts/guardian-headline/noalts-not-hinted/GHGuardianHeadline-LightItalic.woff) 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      By putting inequality at the centre of his discourse, López Obrador created a committed base of supporters who were willing to overlook the shortcomings of his government. Although he came to power promising to improve corruption, insecurity and impunity, he achieved none of these things. His government had its own corruption scandals, and Mexico’s homicide rate remained high, with about 30,000 murders a year. In some ways, the situation worsened: extortion is now rampant. Despite this, large parts of the population felt increasingly confident in democracy. By 2023, 61% of Mexicans said they had faith in their national government, compared with 29% when he took office.But progressives elsewhere shouldn’t be too sanguine about the prospect of copying Morena’s model. While doing all the above, López Obrador also made expedient moves to the right. He cut deals with big business and swerved on tax reform. He kept fiscal austerity, meaning boosted social spending was funded with cuts elsewhere. He cracked down on US-bound migrants for political capital in Washington, and he refused to take a position on gay marriage or abortion, presumably to avoid limiting Morena’s appeal. And he embraced Mexico’s military, a popular but opaque institution with a record of human rights abuses, relying on them to deliver his programme. And although López Obrador set up several commissions to investigate historical abuses by the army, he later abandoned them.Criticisms came from across the political spectrum, but López Obrador brushed them off – and often insinuated they came from actors in hock to the corrupt elites of his narrative. By the end of his government, he had lost support from some feminists, environmentalists and victims of violence, to name a few. Yet his base continued to grow. He left power with approval ratings of about 70%.Once it became clear that Morena was on the up, politicians of all stripes, including some dubious characters, sought to join. Morena welcomed them, diluting principle with pragmatism. This shortcut to electoral success came at the cost of internal tensions. Still, Morena maintains a membership and grassroots activity that no other party can match. It has 2.3 million registered members, and wants to make that 10 million. Sheinbaum has commanded the party’s activists to get out to every part of the country. (It is an article of faith in the party that López Obrador’s success was born of visiting each of Mexico’s nearly 2,500 municipalities.) All of this no doubt helps ground Morena in local realities – in contrast to the fledgling far right.The party’s connection to local contexts limits how much progressives outside Mexico can draw from Morena’s example. Mexico is marked by its colonial history, and was under one-party rule for most of the 20th century before it transitioned to democracy in the 1990s. Today, organised crime exerts immense influence through violence and corruption, while Mexico’s economic dependence on the US is extreme. This sharp sense of injustice is a mobilising political sentiment.It would be tempting to frame Mexico’s political landscape as a story about the left successfully resisting the right. But progressives elsewhere must ask themselves how much they would want to draw from Morena. The focus on socioeconomic justice, the narrative control and the party organisation were tied up with some uglier aspects of populism, and an expedient adoption of rightwing positions. It’s hard to say whether the latter were necessary for Morena’s electoral success. But there is dissent on the Mexican left, where some, having weighed the results against their values, are no longer on board with the party.

      Thomas Graham is a freelance journalist based in Mexico City More

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      in UK Politics

      Trump expected to make UK state visit and visit King Charles in September

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      President Donald Trump on Thursday said he expects to travel to the U.K. this September and stay with King Charles III as a run-up to next year’s planned state visit at Windsor Castle — an unprecedented second state visit for the American president on account of his serving a second, non-consecutive term.The president confirmed his intention to cross the pond in September during a media availability in the Oval Office in which he was asked if he was planning to visit the British head of state, at which point he replied in the affirmative.When pressed further on what he was looking forward to, he said he’d been invited by the King and called the U.K. a “great country” while remarking on the novelty of his second state visit as an American president, more than six years after he and First Lady Melania Trump visited the U.K. at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth II.“It’s beautiful, and it’s the first time it’s ever happened to one person. And the reason is that we have two separate terms, and it’s an honor to be, you know, a friend of Charles,” said Trump, who added that he has “great respect” for the royal family, including the King and the Prince of Wales and called the invitation “a great honor.”Prince Charles jokes in front of Donald Trump at Clarence HouseTrump also confirmed that his September trip, during which he is expected to stay at Windsor Castle, is not the planned state visit to which he was invited in February. His trip in September is understood to be arranged to lay groundwork for the second state visit, which is tentatively scheduled for next year. “I don’t know how it can be bigger than the last one … which, as you know, is incredible, but they say it’s going to be even more important. So it’s a great honor to be so chosen,” Trump said. The announcement of the timing of Trump’s planned sojourn to Windsor comes as Anglo-American relations have become increasingly fraught on account of the unprovoked trade war Trump launched against most of the world earlier this month.The U.K. is set to find out in June whether it will be hit by tariffs of at least 10 percent or can avoid them by entering into a bilateral trade deal with the United States.Earlier this week, Vice President JD Vance expressed optimism over a trade deal being struck in an interview with the online publication UnHerd, but The Independent has reported that such an accord may only happen if Starmer agrees to repealing hate speech and online safety laws.King Charles meets Ukraine’s President Zelensky at SandringhamYet even if the standoff over tariffs is resolved there is still tension between London and Washington over the White House’s relatively pro-Russian approach to Ukraine compared with the previous Biden administration. Starmer is attempting to put together a coalition of the willing to guarantee peace in Ukraine but is still yet to get Trump’s agreement to a U.S. backstop. While on the surface the relationship between Downing Street and the White House has been very friendly there have been tensions behind the scenes, including on the prime minister’s appointment of Lord Mandelson – who had previously publicly criticized Trump – as the British ambassador to Washington.Despite these tensions, the substance of Trump’s September trip is likely to focus most on arrangements for his state visit next year. It is hoped that the honor will help strengthen the special relationship and ease some of the other diplomatic problems. More