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    The Trump administration trapped a wrongly deported man in a catch-22

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    It is difficult to find a term more fitting for the fate of the Maryland father Kilmar Abrego García than Kafkaesque.Abrego García is one of hundreds of foreign-born men deported under the Trump administration to the Cecot mega-prison in El Salvador as part of a macabre partnership with the self-declared “world’s coolest dictator”, Nayib Bukele.The US government has admitted it deported Abrego García by mistake. But instead of “facilitating” his return as ordered by the supreme court, the administration has trapped Abrego García in a catch-22 by offshoring his fate to a jurisdiction beyond the reach of legality – or, it would seem, basic logic or common decency.The paradox is this: the Trump administration says it cannot facilitate the return of Abrego García because he is in a prison in El Salvador. El Salvador says it cannot return him because that would be tantamount to “smuggling” him into the US.The absurdity of the position played out on Monday during an Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump and Bukele where the two men appeared to enjoy mocking the powerlessness of the US courts to intervene in the fate of anyone caught in the maws of the Trump administration’s deportation machine.“How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I’m not going to do it,” Bukele said when asked about whether he would help to return Abrego García.There is no evidence that Abrego García is a terrorist or a member of the gang MS-13 as the Trump administration has claimed. But that is not really important here.“I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” Bukele said during a meeting with the US president on Monday. “They’d love to have a criminal released into our country,” Trump added.Trump’s lieutenants also jumped in on Monday, arguing that they could not intervene in the case because Bukele is a foreign citizen and outside of their control.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“He is a citizen of El Salvador,” said Stephen Miller, a top Trump aide who regularly advises the president on immigration issues. “It’s very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens.”A district court injunction to halt the deportation was in effect, he added, an order to “kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here”.Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, repeated one of the Trump administration’s mantras: that US courts cannot determine Trump’s foreign policy. Increasingly, the administration is including questions of immigration in that foreign policy in order to defy the courts.Monday’s presentation was in effect a pantomime. Both sides could quickly intervene if they wanted to. But this was a means to an end. Miller said this case would not end with Abrego García living in the US.More broadly, it indicates the Trump administration’s modus operandi: to move quickly before the courts can react to its transgressions and, when they do, to deflect and defy until the damage done cannot be reversed. More

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      Another Lawsuit, This Time in Colorado, Over Trump’s Use of the Alien Enemies Act

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      The American Civil Liberties Union filed another lawsuit on Monday seeking to stop the Trump administration from using a powerful wartime statute to deport to El Salvador immigrants from Venezuelan who have been accused of being violent gang members.The lawsuit, brought in Federal District Court in Colorado, was the third of its kind filed in recent days, joining similar legal challenges that were filed last week in Texas and New York.Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. brought the suit on behalf of two men — known in court papers only by the their initials, D.B.U. and R.M.M. The men claim they have been wrongly accused by the administration of being members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua.Court papers say that D.B.U., 32, was arrested on Jan. 26 at a gathering that federal drug and immigration agents have repeatedly described as a Tren de Aragua party. After his arrest, the papers say, he denied being a member of the gang and has not been charged with any crime.Federal agents arrested R.M.M., 25, last month after they saw him standing with three other Hispanic men near their vehicles outside a residence in Colorado that was under surveillance as part of an investigation into Tren de Aragua, court papers said.R.M.M. has claimed that he had nothing to do with the gang and had gone to the location with friends “to meet a prospective buyer for his vehicle at a public meeting,” the papers said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘He is not a gang member’: outrage as US deports makeup artist to El Salvador prison for crown tattoos

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      For as long as anyone can remember Andry José Hernández Romero was enthralled by the annual Three Kings Day celebrations for which his Venezuelan home town is famed, joining thousands of fellow Christians on the streets of Capacho to remember how the trio of wise men visited baby Jesus bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh.At age seven, Andry became a Mini King, as members of the town’s youth drama group Los Mini Reyes were known. Later in life, he tattooed two crowns on his wrists to memorialise those carnival-like Epiphany commemorations and his Catholic roots.“Most Capacheros get crown tattoos, often adding the name of their father or mother. We’ve lots of people with these tattoos – it’s a tradition that began in 1917,” said Miguel Chacón, the president of Capacho’s Three Kings Day foundation.The Latin American tradition appears to have been lost on the US immigration officers who detained Hernández, a 31-year-old makeup artist, hairdresser and theatre lover, after he crossed the southern border last August to attend a prearranged asylum appointment in San Diego.Hernández, who is gay, told agents he was fleeing persecution stemming from his sexual orientation and political views. Just weeks earlier, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, Nicolás Maduro, had unleashed a ferocious crackdown after being accused of stealing the presidential election to extend his 12-year rule.But Hernández’s tattoos were deemed proof he was a member of Venezuela’s most notorious gang, the Tren de Aragua, and a “security threat” to the US.View image in fullscreen“Detainee Hernandez ports [sic] tattoos ‘crowns’ that are consistent with those of a Tren de Aragua member,” an agent at California’s Otay Mesa detention centre claimed, according to court documents published this week.Those 16 words appear to have sealed the fate of the young Venezuelan stylist, who friends, family and lawyers say has never committed a crime.On 15 March, after more than six months in custody in the US, Hernández was one of scores of Venezuelans flown from Texas to a maximum security prison in El Salvador as part of Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign. To the horror of their relatives, some detainees were paraded before the cameras and filmed being manhandled by guards and having their heads shaved before being bundled into cells.“Let my son go. Review his case file. He is not a gang member,” Hernández’s mother, Alexis Dolores Romero de Hernández, pleaded as she came to terms with her son’s disappearance into the notorious Central American “terrorism confinement centre”, known by the Spanish acronym Cecot.“Everyone has these crowns, many people. But that doesn’t mean they’re involved in the Tren de Aragua … He’s never had problems with the law,” said Hernández, 65, who has not heard from her son since he called on the eve of his transfer to let her know – incorrectly – that he was being deported to Venezuela.View image in fullscreen“We know nothing. They say nothing. They give no information. That’s the trauma – not knowing anything about these young men, especially mine,” Alexis Hernández complained.Her son’s plight has caused outrage in Táchira, the western state where he grew up, with people packing Capacho’s picturesque 19th-century church, San Pedro de la Independencia, to demand his freedom.“We’re talking about someone who has been part of Capacho’s Three Kings Day celebrations for 23 years,” said Chacón, who is leading the campaign. “That’s why I’m doing everything I can to get this young man released. He is completely innocent.”Krisbel Vásquez, 29, a manicurist, denied her “calm, kind and humble” childhood friend was a villain. “I’ve known him all my life. He doesn’t bother anyone,” Vásquez said, urging Trump and El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, to backtrack.Xiomara Ramírez, 57, said her son had grown up with Hernández, with the pair doing homework together at her house. “I wonder why so much injustice. Why doesn’t the US give good people like Andry opportunities?” Ramírez asked.Melissa Shepard, an attorney from the California-based Immigrant Defenders Law Center, representing Andry, was perplexed that her “very sweet, kind and thoughtful” client had been incarcerated in “one of the worst places in the world.“The fact that this administration has taken somebody who is so vulnerable and put them into such a terrifying situation has just been horrific. We fear that if it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone,” she said.View image in fullscreenGrowing indignation over Hernández’s plight, and that of other apparently innocent Venezuelans deported to El Salvador on the basis of their tattoos, is spreading to unexpected places.“It’s horrific,” Joe Rogan, a Trump-endorsing podcaster, said on his latest show. Rogan supported Trump’s offensive against Venezuelan “criminals” the president claimed terrorised the US. “But let’s not [let] innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs,” he said, asking: “How long before that guy can get out? Can we figure out how to get them out? Is there any plan in place to alert the authorities that they’ve made a horrible mistake and correct it?”But the Trump administration has shown no sign of reconsidering its decision to send so many Venezuelans to El Salvador on the basis of such flimsy evidence.On Monday, Trump thanked Bukele for receiving another group of alleged Latin American criminals “and giving them such a wonderful place to live!”Bukele said the deportations were “another step in the fight against terrorism and organised crime”, claiming the 17 detainees were all “confirmed murderers and high-profile offenders”.The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, bristled when questioned about agents’ use of a “points system” to classify detainees as gang members based on their tattoos or attire. “Shame on you and shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover for these [criminal] individuals,” she replied, claiming “a litany of criteria” was used to correctly identify “foreign terrorists” or “illegal criminal aliens” for removal.View image in fullscreenShepard questioned the administration’s assertion that detainees such as Hernández were being “removed”. “He has been disappeared,” she said. “I know the government tries to use the language that he was ‘removed’ [but] … he has absolutely been disappeared.”Thousands of miles away in Capacho, Hernández’s mother spoke sorrowfully of how her son had decided, against his family’s wishes, to abandon their economically damaged country last May and make the perilous journey north through the Darién jungles between Colombia and Panama. “He left because he wanted to help us … and to fulfil his dream,” Hernández said, adding: “Now the reality is different.”On a recent evening, she and hundreds of protesters filled the San Pedro church for their latest vigil in support of Hernández. The crowd included three men dressed as the Three Kings, who wore theatrical beards and diadems dotted with fake jewels and carried plaques bearing the words: Conscience, Justice and Freedom.“We, his family, and the entire town vouch for [Hernández’s] innocence. It’s not possible that in Capacho having a crown tattoo is a symbol of pride, but for him, it makes him a criminal,” Chacón said, appealing directly to the presidents of the US and El Salvador.“I know Trump is a good man and Bukele is a good man,” Chacón said. “But it cannot be that they have sent this young man to prison. There must be many others like him.” More

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      Trump Officials Say Deportees Were Gang Members. So Far, Few Details.

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      Families and immigration lawyers argue not all of the deportees sent to a prison in El Salvador over the weekend had ties to gangs.In the days since the federal government sent hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants to a prison in El Salvador, Washington has been debating whether the White House did indeed defy a federal judge who ordered the deportation flights to turn around and head back to the United States.But beyond the Trump administration’s evident animus for the judge and the court, more basic questions remain unsettled and largely unanswered: Were the men who were expelled to El Salvador in fact all gang members, as the United States asserts, and how did the authorities make that determination about each of the roughly 200 people who were spirited out of the country even as a federal judge was weighing their fate?The Trump White House has said that most of the immigrants deported were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which, like many transnational criminal organizations, has a presence in the United States. Amid the record numbers of migrants arriving at the southern border in recent years, the gang’s presence in some American cities became a rallying cry for Donald J. Trump as he campaigned to return to the White House, claiming immigrants were invading the country.After Mr. Trump returned to power in January, Tren de Aragua remained a regular talking point for him and his immigration advisers, and the deportation flights last week were the administration’s most significant move yet to make good on its promise to go after the gang. But officials have disclosed little about how the men were identified as gang members and what due process, if any, they were accorded before being placed on flights to El Salvador, where the authoritarian government, allied with Mr. Trump, has agreed to hold the prisoners in exchange for a multimillion-dollar payment.The Justice Department refused to answer basic inquiries on Monday about the deportations from the federal judge in Washington, D.C., who had ordered the deportation flight to return to the United States. On Tuesday afternoon, he ordered the Justice Department to submit a sealed filing by noon on Wednesday detailing the times at which the planes had taken off, left American airspace and ultimately landed in El Salvador.More than half of the immigrants deported over the weekend were removed using an obscure authority known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which the Trump administration says it has invoked to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members age 14 or older with little to no due process. The rarely invoked law grants the president broad authority to remove from the United States citizens of foreign countries whom he defines as “alien enemies,” in cases of war or invasion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Venezuelan Families Fear for Relatives as Trump Celebrates Deportations to El Salvador

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      Mirelis Casique last spoke to her 24-year-old son on Saturday morning while he was being held in a detention center in Laredo, Texas. He told her he was going to be deported with a group of Venezuelans, she said, but he didn’t know where they were headed.Shortly after, his name disappeared from the website of U.S. immigration authorities. She has not heard from him since.“Now he’s in an abyss with no one to rescue him,” Ms. Casique said on Sunday in an interview from her home in Venezuela.The deportation of 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador this weekend has created panic among families who fear that their relatives are among those handed over by the Trump administration to Salvadoran authorities, apparently without due process.The men were described by a spokeswoman for the White House, Karoline Leavitt, as “terrorists” belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang and “heinous monsters” who, she said, had recently been arrested, “saving countless American lives.” But several relatives of men believed to be in the group say their loved ones do not have gang ties.On Sunday, the Salvadoran government released images of the men being marched into a notorious mega-prison in handcuffs overnight, with their heads newly shaven.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Sends Hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador in Face of Judge’s Order

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      The Trump administration has sent hundreds of Venezuelans accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador, pushing the limits of U.S. immigration law seemingly after a federal judge ordered that the deportation flights not proceed.President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador posted a three-minute video on social media on Sunday of men in handcuffs being led off a plane during the night and marched into prison. The video also shows prison officials shaving the prisoners’ heads.“Today, the first 238 members of the Venezuelan criminal organization, Tren de Aragua, arrived in our country,” Mr. Bukele wrote, adding that “The United States will pay a very low fee for them, but a high one for us.”The Trump administration hopes that the unusual prisoner transfer deal — not a swap but an agreement for El Salvador to take suspected gang members — will be the beginning of a larger effort to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to rapidly arrest and deport those it identifies as members of Tren de Aragua without many of the legal processes common in immigration cases.The Alien Enemies Act allows for summary deportations of people from countries at war with the United States. The law, best known for its role in the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, has been invoked three times in U.S. history — during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II — according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy organization.On Saturday, Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington issued a temporary restraining order blocking the government from deporting any immigrants under the law after President Trump issued an executive order invoking it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What Is Tren de Aragua?

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      A gang with roots in a Venezuelan prison, the criminal group was at the center of President Trump’s order invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.President Trump’s executive order on Saturday invoking the Alien Enemies Act targeted Venezuelan citizens 14 years and older with ties to the transnational gang Tren de Aragua, saying they “are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”Mr. Trump’s order was quickly challenged in court, but the gang has been a growing source of concern for U.S. officials over the last year. The Biden administration labeled Tren de Aragua a transnational criminal organization in 2024, the New York Police Department has highlighted its activity on the East Coast, and the Trump White House began the process of designating it a foreign terrorist organization in January.Here is what we know about the gang:A rising force out of VenezuelaTren de Aragua (Train of Aragua, or Aragua Train) has roots in Tocorón prison in Venezuela’s northern Aragua state, which the group’s leaders had transformed into a mini-city with a pool, restaurants and a zoo. They reportedly recorded executions and torture there to maintain control over other prisoners.As Venezuela’s economy collapsed and its government under President Nicolás Maduro became more repressive, the group began exploiting vulnerable migrants. Tren de Aragua’s influence soon stretched into other parts of Latin America, and it developed into one of the region’s most violent and notorious criminal organizations, focusing on sex trafficking, human smuggling and drugs.Colombian officials in 2022 accused the gang of at least 23 murders after the police began to find body parts in bags. Alleged members have also been apprehended in Chile and in Brazil, where the gang aligned itself with Primeiro Comando da Capital, one of that country’s biggest organized crime rings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kenyan Police Officer Deployed to Tackle Gangs in Haiti Killed

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      The officer’s death appeared to be the first among the Kenyan forces that were sent to Haiti last year as part of an international effort to subdue gang violence.A Kenyan police officer was fatally injured in Haiti on Sunday in an operation that was part of the international effort to help combat gang violence and restore order to the Caribbean nation, officials said.It appears to be the first death of a Kenyan officer working as part of the Multinational Security Support Mission, the international contingent that has been deployed in the Caribbean nation since June. The force is mostly made of Kenyan officers.The officer was injured during an operation in the Artibonite region, north of the capital, Port-au-Prince, on Sunday, the Multinational Security Support Mission said in a statement on social media. The officer, who was not identified, was airlifted to the hospital but died later in the day, the mission said.Hundreds of Kenyan police officers have been stationed in Haiti since June as part of a U.S.-sponsored mission to restore order. Since 2022, Haiti’s prime minister had appealed for a foreign armed intervention to help stop the rampant gang violence that has upended the nation.The Multinational Security Support Mission, which also includes officers from Jamaica, the Bahamas, Belize, Guatemala and El Salvador, was deployed to Haiti to try to wrest control of Port-au-Prince from well-armed and highly organized Haitian gangs that had seized control of much of the capital.This is a developing story that will be updated. More

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      How Sweden Could End Its Epidemic of Gang Violence

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      We used to believe in Sweden that the rights and well-being of children should always come first. But over the past two decades, a surge in gang violence has shaken that commitment. In 2023, 363 shootings took the lives of 53 people; this year, over 100 bombings stemming from gang violence had already been recorded by November. Our country now has one of the highest per capita rates of gun violence in the European Union. One key factor in the phenomenon: Gangs are grooming and recruiting children as young as 11, the police say, as contract killers.Swedes aged 15 to 17 who commit crimes are usually placed in government-run residential homes instead of prison.Such youth homes have come under scrutiny for mixing children who need housing because of family problems alongside those who have committed serious crimes.A basic tenet of the country’s juvenile justice system was that long prison sentences hurt both children and our society. Until recently, young people who committed crimes were likely to be placed in residential homes, where they received treatment for addiction and mental health disorders. Imprisonment was extremely rare. Offenders ages 18 to 21 often received sentence reductions, known as “youth rebates,” and were also placed in treatment homes.As crime among young people rises, though, the government has moved to toughen sentences for these offenders and eliminate most youth rebates. As a result, two teenage boys were ordered to serve 10 and 12 years in prison in August — the longest sentence Sweden has given to such young people in modern history — after being convicted in connection with a shooting spree that left three dead and injured two others, including a 2-year-old child.Essa Kah Sallah was about 11 years old when he began committing minor crimes. He later founded the Chosen Ones, one of Sweden’s most dangerous gangs. “The gang gives you an illusion of togetherness,” Mr. Sallah said. “But there is no brotherhood, no loyalty — just pointless violence and death.” He left the Chosen Ones four years ago and now works for a program that helps others leave gangs.Politicians have laid the blame for the gang violence on Sweden’s generous refugee policies, and the country has moved to tighten its borders. Some on the far right argue that aggressive repatriation of foreigners, particularly Muslims, is the only solution. And in the aftermath of a deadly shooting this past spring, Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson denounced “a kind of inhumane, an animalistic attitude” among the group of youths said to have committed the crime.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More