Americas

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      China promises ‘countermeasures’ after Trump threatens additional 10% tariff

      by

      Donald Trump has threatened China with an additional 10% tariff on its exports to the US, prompting a promise of “countermeasures” from Beijing and setting the stage for another significant escalation in the two governments’ trade war.The US president also claimed he planned to impose tariffs on Canada and Mexico starting next Tuesday, having delayed their imposition last month after talks with his counterparts.Posting on Truth Social on Thursday, Trump said illicit drugs such as fentanyl were being smuggled into the US at “unacceptable levels” and that import taxes would force other countries to crack down on the trafficking.“We cannot allow this scourge to continue to harm the USA, and therefore, until it stops, or is seriously limited, the proposed TARIFFS scheduled to go into effect on MARCH FOURTH will, indeed, go into effect, as scheduled,” the Republican president wrote. “China will likewise be charged an additional 10% Tariff on that date.”If Trump makes good on this latest threat, the move would further strain relations between the US and its largest trading partners.In response, China’s commerce and foreign ministries on Friday vowed to retaliate if Chinese companies were affected by the tariffs, accusing the US of using fentanyl as a “pretext” to threaten China.“Such behaviour is purely ‘shifting blame and shirking responsibility,’ which is not conducive to solving its own problems,” a commerce ministry spokesperson said. “If the US insists on proceeding with this course of action, China will take all necessary countermeasures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.”Canada and Mexico have promised to retaliate if the US imposes tariffs on their exports. China hit back swiftly when Trump imposed a 10% tariff on its exports earlier this month.The Trump administration has repeatedly raised the threat of tariffs, vowing to rebalance the global economic order in the US’s favor. A string of announced measures have yet to be introduced, however, as economists and businesses urge officials to reconsider.The duties on imports from Canada and Mexico have been repeatedly delayed; modified levies on steel and aluminum will not be enforced until next month, and a wave of “reciprocal” tariffs, trailed earlier this month, will not kick in before April.This week, the US president vowed to slap 25% tariffs on the EU, claiming the bloc was “formed to screw the United States”, although details remain sparse. Duties will be applied “generally”, Trump said, “on cars and all other things”.The prospect of escalating tariffs has already thrown the global economy into turmoil – with consumers expressing fears about inflation worsening and the auto sector possibly suffering if the US’s two largest trading partners in Canada and Mexico are slapped with taxes.The prospect of higher prices and slower growth could create political blowback for Trump.Associated Press contributed reporting More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      More than 150,000 Canadians sign petition to revoke Musk’s citizenship

      by

      More than 150,000 people from Canada have signed a parliamentary petition calling for their country to strip Elon Musk’s Canadian citizenship because of the tech billionaire’s alliance with Donald Trump, who has spent his second US presidency repeatedly threatening to conquer its independent neighbor to the north and turn it into its 51st state.British Columbia author Qualia Reed launched the petition in Canada’s House of Commons, where it was sponsored by New Democrat parliamentary member and avowed Musk critic Charlie Angus, as the Canadian Press first reported over the weekend.Born in South Africa and helming US companies including electric vehicle-maker Tesla, aerospace company SpaceX and the social media platform Twitter/X, Musk has Canadian citizenship through his mother, who is from Saskatchewan’s capital, Regina. He has been crusading to slash the US federal government’s size at the behest of the US president, who has consistently challenged Canada’s sovereignty since returning to the White House for a second presidential term on 20 January.Reed’s petition – filed on 20 February – accuses Musk of having “engaged in activities that go against the national interest of Canada” by acting as an adviser to Trump. Trump has invited the scorn of Canada’s 40 million residents by making threats about imposing steep tariffs on Canadian products and openly boasting about having the US annex the country, including shortly before its national hockey team defeated a selection of American opponents in a politically charged 20 February tournament final.The petition asserts that Musk’s alignment with Trump makes him “a member of a foreign government that is attempting to erase Canadian sovereignty”. It asks Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to take away Musk’s Canadian passport and revoke his citizenship with immediate effect.Trump has often mocked Trudeau as “governor”, the title given to US states’ chief executives. And Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he bought in 2022 for $44bn to relish Trudeau’s announcement in January that he would resign as the head of Canada’s Liberal party after it selected a new leader, with the tech billionaire praising clips of the prominent Canadian Conservative party chief Pierre Poilievre.As the Canadian Press noted, petitions like Reed’s require 500 or more signatures for them to gain the certification necessary to be presented to Canada’s House of Commons and potentially garner a formal government response. Reed’s petition evidently had no trouble clearing that threshold, having collected about 157,000 signatures as of late Sunday, with no indication that the number would soon stop rising.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCanada’s House of Commons is scheduled to resume its work on 24 March, though the country could call for a general election before parliamentary members return. The signing period for Reed’s petition was set to expire on 20 June.Musk’s directive to ostensibly cut federal spending – after Trump lost re-election in 2020 to Joe Biden but then secured it in November at the expense of Kamala Harris – has affected hundreds of thousands of US government civil servants. The cuts include thousands at the Departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense, Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service and the National Parks Service, among others.An Economist/YouGov poll of nearly 1,600 respondents recently found Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) are far less popular with the public that they claim to be serving than many of the areas they are targeting.Nonetheless, on Friday at a gathering of conservatives in Maryland, Musk made light of his involvement in the Trump administration by giddily waving a giant chainsaw in the air.And on Sunday, Musk boosted an X post reading: “Of course we support Doge! Those who don’t support it are unAmerican.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Mexico’s Sheinbaum wins plaudits for cool head in dealings with Trump

      by

      As Donald Trump swings his sights from one region to the next, upturning diplomatic relations and confounding allies, leaders of former US partners have clashed with him and come off much the worse.But so far, one – Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum – has emerged relatively unscathed.With the US-Mexico border and the trade, drugs and migrants that cross it a focus of the Trump administration, Mexico is under intense pressure. Yet while Sheinbaum has made some concessions, she has also charmed Trump and won plaudits at home, with approval ratings that touch 80%.“Sheinbaum has kept a cool head, and the capacity to hold firm and react to Trump,” said Carlos Pérez Ricart, a political scientist. “But Mexico is in a situation of emergency with the US. And it will have to play this game for four years straight.”Sheinbaum led Morena, a leftwing populist party, to a landslide victory in June last year, and had barely taken power when Trump won re-election in November.Many wondered how Sheinbaum, a climate scientist before she became a politician, would handle the US president. But the two have struck up a relationship, with Trump describing Sheinbaum as a “marvellous woman” even as he claims Mexico is “essentially run by cartels”.Since Trump announced a plan to hit all goods imported from Mexico with a 25% tariff, citing its alleged failure to stop migrants and fentanyl entering the US, Sheinbaum has offered to negotiate, while avoiding gestures of obeisance – such as Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s trip to Mar-a-Lago – or defiance – like Colombian president Gustavo Petro’s tirade against Trump on X.Sheinbaum has also shown a willingness to do more on fentanyl, with Mexican security forces notching a record seizure just days after Trump’s announcement, and underlined that Mexico was already doing a great deal to keep migrants away from the US-Mexico border.View image in fullscreenAt the same time, she picked battles that allowed her to show strength to a domestic audience while avoiding direct confrontation with Trump himself – for example, threatening Google with a lawsuit after it bowed to Trump and renamed international waters in the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America on Google Maps.She has pledged to expand legal action against US gun manufacturers who produce the majority of weapons used in Mexico, and implicitly turned Trump’s rhetoric on its head by warning that her country would not tolerate an “invasion” of its national sovereignty by US forces.“Sheinbaum found the sweet spot between the submission of Trudeau and the bravado of Petro,” said Pérez Ricart.The first real crunch came earlier this month, as the deadline for Trump’s tariff threat loomed.Sheinbaum was poised to announce retaliatory measures when last-minute talks defused the situation, with Trump agreeing to delay the tariffs for a month in exchange for Mexico sending 10,000 more soldiers to the border.It is unclear how those extra soldiers will reduce the flow of fentanyl, a substance so potent that only relatively small volumes are moved, and the great majority of which is trafficked through ports of entry by US citizens.“What I see is a show for the Mexican and American publics,” said Martha Bárcena, a former Mexican ambassador to the US. “It’s clear that Trump is talking to his base and Sheinbaum to hers. But we don’t know what is happening in the conversations between them.”“The president bought time – but the negotiation is not over,” Bárcena added.The next deadline, on 4 March, for Trump’s tariffs will likely bring another round of feverish talks, as Mexico tries to convince the US of results made on fentanyl and migration.“But if we don’t know what they want or how they want to measure it, then Trump can keep threatening us from here to the end of his government,” said Bárcena.The US has also ratcheted up the pressure by adding six Mexican organised crime groups – including the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels, two of the world’s biggest drug trafficking organisations – to its list of foreign terrorist organisations (FTOs).While the designation of cartels as FTOs itself does not authorise US military action in Mexico, some fear it is a first step towards it.Defense secretary Pete Hegseth recently said “all options will be on the table” when it comes to dealing with the cartels. “Ultimately, we will hold nothing back to secure the American people,” he added.Meanwhile, Mexico’s economy edges towards recession. The mere threat of tariffs has already helped dragged growth projections down, with Mexico’s central bank predicting 0.6% GDP growth for 2025.That makes staving off tariffs and holding the US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement together only more important for Sheinbaum.“For 30 years, Mexico anchored itself to a policy of trade and development in North America. It bet its growth, its identity, on integration into North America,” said Pérez Ricart. “And now this idea is being challenged. Trump doesn’t believe in it. This is a very delicate situation for Sheinbaum, and for the country.” More

    • 150 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      US deportees moved from Panama City to Darién jungle region, lawyer says

      by

      A group of immigrants deported from the US to Panama last week have been moved from a hotel in the capital to the Darién jungle region in the south of the country, according to a lawyer representing an immigrant family.Susana Sabalza, a Panamanian immigration lawyer, said a family she represents was transferred to Metetí, a town in the Darién, along with other deported people. La Estrella de Panamá, a local daily, reported on Wednesday that 170 of the 299 people who had been in the hotel had been moved to the Darién.Panama’s government did not respond to a request for comment.The 299 immigrants had been staying at a hotel in Panama City under the protection of local authorities and with the financial support of the United States through the UN-related International Organization for Migration and the UN refugee agency, according to the Panamanian government.Immigrants in the hotel were not allowed to leave, and at least one person tried to kill themselves, while another broke his leg trying to escape, according to media reports.Panama’s migration service said on Wednesday that a Chinese woman had escaped from the hotel. It asked her to return and accused unspecified people outside the hotel of aiding his escape.On Wednesday afternoon there were still migrants on the hotel. One family came to a window and gestured to a journalist outside they had no phone. Police later came to move reporters away from the hotel.The group includes people from Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, according to Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino, who has agreed with the US to receive non-Panamanian deportees. The deportation of non-Panamanian immigrants to Panama is part of the Trump administration’s attempt to ramp up deportations of people living in the US illegally.One of the challenges to Trump’s plan is that some people come from countries that refuse to accept US deportation flights, due to strained diplomatic relations or other reasons. The arrangement with Panama allows the US to deport people of these nationalities and makes it Panama’s responsibility to organize their onward repatriation. Human rights groups have warned that immigrants risk mistreatment and may be endangered if they are ultimately returned to violent or war-torn countries of origin, such as Afghanistan.Sabalza said she had not been able to see her clients while they were held at the hotel in Panama City and she is seeking permission to visit them at their new location. She declined to identify their nationality, but said they were a Muslim family who “could be decapitated” if they returned home.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSabalza said the family would be requesting asylum in Panama or “any country that will receive them other than their own”.Mulino said previously the immigrants would be moved to a shelter in the Darién region, which includes the dense and lawless jungle separating Central America from South America that has in recent years become a corridor for hundreds of thousands of people aiming to reach the United States. Panama’s security minister said on Tuesday that more than half of the people deported from the United States in recent days had accepted voluntary repatriations to their home countries.With reporting by Reuters More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump’s comments on Canada prompt surge of patriotism – in a Canadian way

      by

      A lone figure takes to the stage, a giant maple leaf flag rippling on a screen behind him as he gingerly approaches the microphone.“I’m not a lumberjack, or a fur trader,” he tells the crowd. “I have a prime minister, not a president. I speak English and French, not American. And I pronounce it ‘about’ – not ‘a boot’.”The crowd, indifferent at first, grows increasingly enthusiastic as the man works his way through a catalogue of Canadian stereotypes, passing from diffidence to defiance before the climactic cry: “Canada is the second largest landmass! The first nation of hockey! And the best part of North America! My name is Joe! And I am Canadian!”The ad, for Molson Canadian beer, was immensely popular when it aired in 2000. And now, with Canada’s identity and sovereignty under threat, it has roared back into the public consciousness.In recent weeks, Canadian patriotism has surged in response to Donald Trump’s suggestion that the US could annex its northern neighbour. His threats have prompted an outpouring of disbelief and defiance, but – in a very Canadian way – they has also revived questions over the complexities of national identity.View image in fullscreenTrump began his campaign of diplomatic trolling before he had even assumed office, questioning Canada’s viability as a nation, suggesting that it could become the 51st American state, and deriding the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, as a “governor”.In response, Canadians have taken to acts of patriotism, small and large: one pilot flew his small plane in the shape of a maple leaf; sports fans have booed US teams; hats insisting “Canada is not for sale” have gone viral; consumers have pledged to buy only Canadian-made products – a pledge skewered in a viral sketch in which one shopper berates another for buying American ketchup.“What the hell are you doing?” he asked “We’re in a trade war, you traitor!”“It’s been absolutely crazy and overwhelming,” said Dylan Lobo, who runs MadeInCa, a website that catalogues products made in-country. “We’re struggling to keep up with all the listings. People are really frustrated and they want to find a way to support Canadian and buy Canadian.”Politicians, aware of a looming election, have wrapped themselves in the flag. And in a show of bipartisan unity, five former prime ministers have called for Canadian unity.“We all agree on one thing: Canada, the true north, strong and free, the best country in the world, is worth celebrating and fighting for,” the leaders wrote in a statement.A recent poll found pro-Canadian sentiment has surged in recent weeks – with the biggest leap towards patriotism found in francophone Quebec, a region historically ambivalent towards federal patriotism.View image in fullscreenThe shift marks a dramatic rebound from 2020, when the divisive policies of the coronavirus pandemic shifted how many Canadians viewed the flag – especially after the maple leaf was appropriated by the by far-right Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa.At the same time, new stress has been put on Canadian national identity amid growing recognition of the historical injustices perpetrated against Indigenous peoples. Statues of monarchs and founding statesmen have been pulled down, and buildings renamed amid a heated national discussion about the legacy of colonial rule.“Trump’s comments on annexation have certainly awakened something in people,” said Wilfred King, the chief of Gull Bay First Nation. “But I think we also need to remember on both side of the border, that Indigenous people in Canada are the only ones that can really speak about true sovereignty in this country.”Unlike in other colonial conquests, King said, the Crown made alliances with Indigenous peoples in what is now Canada. “There was no surrender to outside forces.”“When crisis and conflict came, we answered the call. Indigenous people volunteered more than any other group to fight alongside their allies in both world wars,” said King, whose father served in the second world war. “When they returned home, they were marginalized. They saw what it was like to be betrayed by a friend.”And so the fraught nature of Canada’s relationship with the US is jarringly familiar to the country’s first peoples. “They’re only feeling what we’ve been feeling for the last 175 years. It’s how the government has treated First Nations in Canada.”View image in fullscreenFor Jeff Douglas, who played Joe Canada in popular the 2000 ad campaign, the recent surge of nationalism has brought mixed feelings.“Patriotism wasn’t something that ever really resonated with me and I was very ignorant about the totality of Canadian history when we made the ad,” he said.Douglas, who later became an acclaimed radio host for the CBC, says decades spent meeting different groups across the country has deepened his understanding of Canada’s complicated, and dark, history.“I think that we can still be proud. We just have to be aware – and then being aware of the wrongs of the past and the continuing wrongs in the present doesn’t mean that we can’t be proud to be Canadian. Pride in being Canadian cannot come at the cost of that awareness,” he said.And while he says a “blind” shift towards patriotism doesn’t serve the broader goals of fixing injustices, it also reflects the “dynamic” nature of people’s relationship with their country.“There are going to be times where you’re going to need to just say, ‘We need to be strong and face forward if that’s what the country needs to get through the existential threat we’re facing,’” he said.Douglas is hopeful the current fixation on buttressing Canadian identity in the face of threats to the country will serve a broader purpose.“My love of the country, or rather the people of the country, is a love of what we potentially could achieve, and it is richer when I understand the complexity of where we’ve been and where we are. We can grow. But it’s important to remember that you can love something that’s imperfect.” More

    • 238 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Cruelty and staggering financial costs: why expanding Guantánamo is a grave mistake | Karen J Greenberg and Mike Lehnert

      by

      Nine days into the country’s 47th presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive memorandum that contained his latest mass deportation plan. The three-paragraph, 148-word order called for a migrant facility located at the US Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to be expanded “to full capacity”. The US president later said the camp would house 30,000 migrants.Troop deployments quickly followed and on 4 February, the first planes carrying a few dozen migrants arrived at Guantánamo, with officials sending more each day.If the past is any guide, rather than accelerating Trump’s drive for unprecedented mass deportations, the Guantánamo migrant detention plan is destined to repeat the cruelty, confusion, protracted legal battles and staggering financial costs that have defined US detentions at Guantánamo since the September 11 attacks.Today we know Guantánamo mainly as the detention facility that held a total of 780 war on terror detainees over the past 23 years. The cruelty of Guantánamo has been exhaustively documented, notably in the 2023 UN special rapporteur’s report on the detention facility which described “the depth, severity, and evident nature of many detainees’ current physical and psychological harms”, both those still in Guantánamo and those who had been released as constituting human rights violations.Instead of acting as an effective deterrent, Guantánamo has become a worldwide symbol of US hypocrisy.View image in fullscreenThe US has also found it impossible to bring to trial those who are charged with conspiring in the attacks of September 11. In sum, once detention in Gitmo was set up, it has seemed doomed to perpetual limbo, all too easy to fill up and nearly impossible to empty.And the prison complex, which currently holds 15 prisoners, has served taxpayers poorly as well. It now operates at an astounding estimated cost of $44m – per prisoner per year – up from $13m in 2019 when the prison held 40 detainees. Every ounce of water used on the base must be created by a single desalinization plant. Food, construction material and all other supplies must be brought in by barge. Troops for security and logistics support must be deployed. Medical personnel as well.The war on terror’s prison is not the only warning sign from the past. For decades before September 11, Guantánamo served as a warehouse for migrants, a zone where laws were conveniently pushed aside, and legal resolution remained elusive.Originally established as a coaling station in 1903, the island military base took on a new role in the 1990s when Cubans, and then Haitians fleeing the overthrow of the democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, were apprehended at sea while seeking asylum in the United States.Culminating in Operation Sea Signal, 50,000 migrants were detained over time, with 24,000 in place at the peak, housed in vast expanses of tent cities where conditions were dangerously unsanitary, legal processes slow to nonexistent, and treatment of the migrants reportedly harsh. Despite the Clinton administration’s promises of processing their cases for asylum, most of the Haitians were summarily returned to Haiti. Cubans as well often remained in legal limbo in one “sad camp” or another.Since then, the Migrant Operations Center (MOC) has continued to serve as a holding facility for migrants apprehended at sea. In 2020-2021, the MOC held an average of 14 detainees at a time. By 2024, 37 migrants were housed there, reportedly living in legal limbo, under unsanitary conditions and reported mistreatment and abuse.View image in fullscreenThe sense of deja vu is unsettling. Tom Homan has referred to those who will be sent to Guantánamo as “the worst of the worst”, the same words used by the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, when he first set up the post-9/11 prison camp. Tellingly, the first troops sent last week to facilitate the new operations were marines from Camp LeJeune, just as they had been after September 11. And the essential policy parallel holds as well: an administration has given up trying to tackle complex policy problems and has instead embraced viral images of shackled prisoners and tough-talking soundbites that energize its political base.Guantánamo makes a mockery of our claim that we are a nation of laws, prudence and common sense. It has become a global symbol of the US inability to address complex challenges, in this case the unprecedented level of mass migration under way worldwide, with an eye towards a realistic, long-term solution. Nor is there a compelling argument that the threat of detention at Guantánamo will deter those seeking asylum from fears of persecution in their home countries and are willing to risk the dangers of the migration routes.In a 1996 after-action manual based on interviews with military personnel who had served at Guantánamo during the detention operation of the 1990s, the authors made a series of recommendations. The manual highlighted the need to clarify the “legal basis for the operation” and “for understanding the nature and scope of the mission at the outset”.Such clarity, Gen Joseph Hoar, the head of USCentcom at the time wrote, was “paramount”.The general’s warning was ignored after September 11. It is absent today as well in the rapid, indiscriminate, legally vague and underprepared operation currently under way.It’s time to finally take a lesson from the past. The throughline of Guantánamo represents one thing and one thing only: it exists outside the law. It is ineffective, exorbitantly expensive, and will not solve complex, insufficiently addressed policy messes. Using it to tackle migration will lead predictably not to solving a problem but to creating new ones.

      Karen J Greenberg is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days

      Mike Lehnert (MajGen USMC ret) served as the joint task group commander of the Cuban and Haitian migrant camps during Operation Sea Signal (1995) and the first joint task force commander of JTF GITMO (2002) More

    • 175 Shares139 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We no longer go out alone’: what happens after Trump revokes temporary protected status?

      by

      The Trump administration’s decision to end temporary humanitarian protections for Venezuelans who came to the United States seeking refuge in recent years has plunged hundreds of thousands of people into uncertainty. Many worry they could be deported back to the autocratic regime they tried to flee.“We lived in fear and we are still afraid,” said Jesús, who fled Venezuela with his wife and children, crossing through Colombia, the Darién jungle in Panama and then Mexico, before arriving in Texas in 2021. His wife had worked as a civil servant in Venezuela, and had grown increasingly alarmed by the government’s crackdown on free speech and resisted participating in pro-government demonstrations. That’s when the couple began receiving threats. “They even chased us into our home,” Jesús said.In 2023, his family secured temporary protected status (TPS) – allowing them to legally live and work in the US – and assumed they would be safe for a while.But earlier this month, the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, abruptly decided to end TPS for approximately 350,000 Venezuelans in the US, including Jesús. Within 60 days, the administration plans to strip away the designation, saying that the situation in Venezuela has “notably improved”.“You can imagine – this came as a shock,” Jesús said. “We suffered a political persecution in our country and now we are doing it here as well.”Send us a tipIf you have information you’d like to share securely with the Guardian about the impact of the Trump administration’s temporary protected status decision, please use a non-work device to contact us via the Signal messaging app at (929) 418-7175.For the past 35 years, TPS has offered immigration status to people who have fled countries experiencing ongoing armed conflict, environmental disaster or extraordinary conditions that make it unsafe to return there. What is especially harrowing for many people with temporary protections, now that it’s being taken away, is how easy they will be to find, and deport. In order to secure TPS, they had to submit all their information, their home addresses and histories to the government.Immigrant advocacy groups have been encouraging Venezuelans with temporary protections to find a legal service provider as soon as possible. They have also been providing “know your rights” training. “This is the same information that they’re giving to people who have been long-residing undocumented immigrants – because the same rights will apply to people who have TPS, who may lose their status,” said Laura Vazquez, director of immigrant integration at UnidosUS.View image in fullscreenAs the Trump administration tries to ramp up deportations, people with expired protections who have not managed to apply for asylum or other avenues to remain in the US permanently could be easy targets. Jesús and his family are keenly aware of this.Though they have applied for asylum and are awaiting an appointment with the immigration courts in 2027, and would be protected from deportation while their case is pending, Jesús still worries about being caught up in raids. “I hear a lot about how some people don’t have their papers respected,” he said. “We no longer go out alone – only when it’s necessary for work.”His four kids – ranging from preschool to high school-aged – have been feeling the tension too. Amid news that Ice agents are conducting raids in major cities, and will be authorized to enter schools, they have asked him “Papá, they won’t look for us, will they?”Jesús and his wife have started ordering all their food and supplies online, rather than trying to stop by the grocery store after their shifts. They also started looking into selling their home and their car, so that they will have enough funds to pay legal fees and cover expenses in case they are unable to legally work if their temporary status is taken away.In recent days, they have also started thinking about where else they could go if they are not allowed to remain in the US. More than anything, they want to avoid getting deported to Venezuela. “It’s like they’re trying to throw us into the lions’ cage, as we say in my country,” Jesús said. “Because they would be sending us to persecution and certain death.”Trump had previously tried to terminate protections for people from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan during his first term. Back then, however, officials proposed allowing those who were affected to keep their protected status for 12 to 18 months before it ended. But that was challenged in court, and people with temporary status were ultimately able to keep their status when Joe Biden took office and rescinded Trump’s TPS terminations.This time around, the administration has moved to end protections earlier, revoking the outgoing Biden administration’s decision to extend the protections for Venezuelans until October 2026. About 350,000 Venezuelans who received TPS in 2023 will lose their temporary status 60 days from when the administration posted notice this month, and another 250,000 who received the status in 2021 will lose the protections in September. The move is likely to face legal challenges.View image in fullscreen“Once again you have the Trump administration actively trying to strip immigration status of several hundred thousands people who are lawfully present and employed,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a UCLA law professor who led the lawsuit that blocked Trump from terminating TPS protections during his first term. Doing so will strip away work permits for people who work in industries across the US, and could have a “catastrophic economic impact” in communities across the US.“There’s also the humanitarian impact of telling 300,000 people they should just go back to a country that is, in this case, extremely unsafe. Everybody knows it. I mean, everybody knows Venezuela is a very precarious and dangerous place to live, which is why millions of people have fled,” he added.In Noem’s termination notice, she argued that Venezuelans no longer needed protection, because there had been “notable improvements in several areas such as the economy, public health, and crime”. She also added that it was “contrary to the national interest” to allow TPS holders to stay in the US, claiming that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had come to the US, and that US cities could not bear the financial burden of helping new arrivals settle.Advocates questioned the logic of rescinding immigrants’ ability to work and contribute to the communities. Experts have also questioned how the administration could cite improvements, given the state department’s warnings that Venezuela remains in crisis. In recent months, the government of the authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, has been rounding up hundreds who protested against fraudulent election results – as well as people who happened to be near protests but seemingly had no involvement in politics. The Biden administration had also issued a $25m bounty for Maduro’s arrest.Immigration advocates are encouraging all Venezuelan TPS holders who might be eligible to apply for asylum in the US as soon as possible – as doing so would allow them their best chance of staying in country. But the process is complex and can be expensive. “It’s not a small thing, especially when the asylum law is so complicated and very difficult to do without an attorney,” said Arulanantham.Mary, a mother of four in Georgia, said she has been having panic attacks and nosebleeds since learning that she and her family could lose their protected status. “I’ve spent six days crying in my bedroom,” she said. “My kids have been crying too. They run into the closet every time they hear a knock on the door.”Her husband was nearly killed in Venezuela, escaping the country with a crack in his skull. Mary, too, was persecuted. As a young law student in Venezuela, she had studied with a prominent opposition leader. “It is impossible to return there,” she said. “If I set foot again in Venezuela I am sure that they will either put my husband in prison or kill him. And they’ll do the same to me.”She had tried to apply for asylum once already, only to discover later that she had been swindled by her immigration lawyer – who had failed to properly file her paperwork, and that she had been issued a deportation order. Her temporary status has been the only thing protecting her. The family now has an appointment with another lawyer at the end of March, but she worries that there won’t be enough time to sort out their affairs before their protected status expires. She worries about where her family could even go, and how she will be able to provide for her youngest son, who is autistic. Even if they do survive returning to Venezuela, she said, how could she possibly find the special education programs her son needs there?“When the secretary of security told us that all of us, all of us who crossed the border were criminals, we were from the Tren de Augua gang, that really affected me,” she said. “After nearly four years here, my husband and I don’t have a single ticket, we don’t have a single fine.”Now, all she can do is wait and hope, she added. “I am clinging to God’s word,” she said. “He’s our only protection.”The names of TPS holders in this piece have been changed to protect their safety and the safety of their families More

    • 188 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘A human rights disaster’: immigrants sent into Guantánamo black hole despite no proof of crime

      by

      Handcuffed and shackled, the men appear in government propaganda photos being herded towards military cargo planes that will carry them to an uncertain future in an infamous land.“These individuals are the worst of the worst that we have pulled off of our streets,” Donald Trump’s homeland security chief, Kristi Noem, thundered against the supposedly “criminal alien murderers, rapists, child predators and gangsters” being packed off to Guantánamo Bay.In interviews and on social media, Noem alleged those being sent to the notorious US naval base in Cuba included South American “child pedophiles”, drug traffickers and “vicious gang members” guilty of “heinous crimes”.But 10 days after the Trump administration began sending immigrants to Guantánamo, authorities have yet to provide proof of those claims as mystery continues to surround their identities and doubts grow over whether many have committed any crime at all.“It sounds like this picture the government is painting of them being people who are dangerous and violent is patently false,” said Jessica Vosburgh, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is part of a coalition of rights groups that this week sued the Trump administration for access to the Guantánamo detainees. “It’s clear the folks who we suspect have been sent to Guantánamo are not, on the whole, dangerous people,” Vosburgh added, even if people in immigration detention “may have a mix of criminal backgrounds”.View image in fullscreenJ Wells Dixon, a lawyer with nearly two decades’ experience working with prisoners in a place critics call “America’s gulag”, said: “It is almost impossible to know exactly what is happening at Guantánamo at this moment. I’m not sure the Trump administration really understands what is happening.”The pictures US authorities have released of people they call “highly dangerous criminal aliens” have inadvertently shed some light on the identity of Trump’s Guantánamo internees.According to the website Migrant Insider, relatives identified one member of the first 10-member group flown to Guantánamo on 4 February as Luis Alberto Castillo Rivera. The 23-year-old Venezuelan was detained seeking asylum on the southern border on 19 January, one day before Trump took power vowing to return “millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came”. “He’s innocent,” Castillo’s sister, Yajaira Castillo, told the Spanish news agency EFE, denying her brother was part of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang.A second man spotted in the photos is Tilso Ramón Gómez Lugo, 37, a car mechanic from north-west Venezuela who had been sent to an immigration detention facility in Texas after being picked up on the border in April 2024. “I’ve known him since he was a child. He’s an educated boy who has no problems with anyone. He is someone with good parents, a hard worker and a good family – and very well-liked in the town we are from,” a friend, who asked not to be named, told the Guardian.“Trump had and has my support – but I do not agree with these extreme measures, especially against our compatriots,” added the friend, who like many fellow Venezuelans backed Trump believing he would take a hard-line stance on their home country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro.A third detainee is reportedly 25-year-old Yoiker David Sequera, a Venezuelan barber who was reportedly picked up by border agents last September after making the perilous journey through the Darién jungles between Colombia and Panama to reach the US. “My son is no criminal,” one relative, who suspected Sequera had been targeted because of his tattoos, told Migrant Insider.For the most part, however, the life stories of the immigrants remain an enigma.View image in fullscreen“The US government has shared close to nothing … they’re being completely evasive with sharing names,” said Vosburgh, whose conversations with other detainees and relatives of those suspected to be in Guantánamo led her to believe that Noem’s descriptions of the detainees as “vicious” criminals were “bald-faced lies”.A senior Department of Homeland Security official said all of those sent to Guantánamo had “committed a crime by entering the United States illegally”. “In addition to holding violent gang members and other high-threat illegal aliens, Guantánamo Bay is also holding other illegal aliens with final deportation orders. Every single alien at Guantánamo Bay has a final deportation order,” the official added, without offering evidence that any of the detainees had links to gangs or crime.The official declined to disclose precisely how many detainees were being held at Guantánamo but said it was “less than 100”. “In total, there have been eight flights in eight days,” the official added on Wednesday. On Thursday the New York Times said 98 men had been sent to the island base by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) between 4 and 11 February.“We don’t know who these individuals are yet. In that sense, it is reminiscent of Guantánamo’s past,” said Dixon, recalling the base’s post-9/11 conversion into a prison for “enemy combatants” captured in the “war on terror”.“People may forget [that] after Guantánamo opened in early 2002, it took quite a long time to learn who was detained [there], why they were there and what had happened to them. That information only started to become public when lawyers like me started traveling to Guantánamo to meet these individuals.”Back then, US authorities also called those held at Guantánamo “the worst of the worst”, recalled Dixon.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The reality was something very different. The reality was that you had people like the Uyghurs [Turkic Muslims] who had fled persecution in China and were rounded up in the aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan … and ended up in Guantánamo … The reality was something very different from the propaganda – and I think that’s undoubtedly what you’re going to see here.”Lee Gelernt, a lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union, said all of the detainees were thought to be Venezuelan men. “But until we’re down there, we can’t be sure. And the government’s … threatening to send thousands [of people, so] I suspect at some point it’ll move beyond Venezuelans,” he added.If the identities of the Guantánamo detainees remain cloaked in secrecy, activists say there is little doubt over the conditions that await them at an isolated island base that has become synonymous with human rights abuses and torture.Fifty-three of the 98 detainees have reportedly been sent to a medium- to high-security military prison called Camp 6. It has previously been used to house “war on terror” prisoners, in some cases for years. The other 45 people are being held in “a lower-security building” on the other side of the base and being guarded by members of the US Coast Guard, according to the New York Times.A 2007 Amnesty International report painted a dire picture of life inside Camp 6, which was originally built to house 178 detainees. The US government claimed the facility combined “humane treatment with security needs” but activists called conditions there “unacceptably harsh”.The cells had no access to natural light or air and were lit by fluorescent lighting 24 hours a day, Amnesty said. Detainees “consistently complained of being too cold in the steel cells” as a result of air conditioning controlled by guards.Five Uyghur prisoners cited in the report told lawyers Camp 6’s strict regime left them feeling “despair, crushing loneliness, and abandonment by the world”. One previously smiley, “gentle and pleasant” man now “appeared to be in despair” and said he was “beginning to hear voices”.Dixon said it was possible detainees could be held in isolation for 22 hours each day.Yael Schacher, the director for the Americas and Europe at Refugees International, said the Guantánamo detainees had fallen into “a legal black hole”.“You can’t call your relatives and you can’t get contact with your lawyers. So it’s really, really isolated. It’s basically just like warehousing away people without recourse … and the inability to contact the outside world is intense,” she said, calling for an end to Trump’s transfers.Schacher believes the Guantánamo transfers were designed to please Trump’s base. “It’s political theater … cruelty theater … harsh-on-immigrants theater,” she added.“All we really know is that the Trump administration is trying to evoke the terrible images of Guantánamo in order to appear tough on illegal immigration in the United States. That’s what this is about,” said Dixon. “This is not about law or policy … It’s a catastrophic human rights disaster.”Additional reporting by Clavel Rangel More