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    Kristi Noem compares antifa to MS-13, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic State

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    The homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, on Wednesday compared antifa to MS-13, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic State, calling the loosely affiliated network of antifascist street activists “just as dangerous” as designated terrorist organizations during a White House roundtable discussion.“They are just as sophisticated as MS-13, as TDA [Tren de Aragua], as Isis, as Hezbollah, as Hamas, as all of them, they are just as dangerous,” Noem said. “They have an agenda to destroy us, just like the other terrorists we’ve dealt with for many, many years.”The roundtable featured rightwing social media journalists such as Andy Ngo, Nick Sortor, Katie Daviscourt and others who cover leftwing protests.Some of the groups Noem cited – Hamas, Hezbollah and Isis – are formally designated terrorist organizations that control territory, operate military wings, maintain command structures and have carried out mass casualty attacks including bombings, kidnappings and assassinations.Extremism experts have long described antifa, by contrast, as having no centralized leadership, formal membership or organizational structure, and it has generally been described by federal law enforcement as a decentralized movement of activists who engage in protest activity, some of which has included property destruction and street violence.The roundtable comes after Donald Trump signed an executive order in September designating antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization”.Days before the announcement, Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader who was convicted and then pardoned for his role on January 6, posted on X: “Who’s ready to go ANTIFA hunting? Because I know a few guys.”During Wednesday’s roundtable, the attorney general, Pam Bondi, sat beside Trump and repeated his condemnations of antifa. “This is not activism, it’s anarchy,” she said. “We can’t and we will not let masked terrorists burn our buildings, attack our law enforcement and intimidate our communities.”Trump also listed examples of attacks against federal agents which he has attributed to antifa, and suggested that the man charged with shooting Charlie Kirk was a member of the group. Law enforcement officials have not established a link between Tyler Robinson and any specific group.“The epidemic of leftwing violence and antifa-inspired terror has been escalating for nearly a decade,” Trump said.All of the witnesses who spoke during the roundtable were conservative influencers or partisan rightwing journalists, who all claimed that antifa was a terror organization without presenting any evidence. More

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      Kristi Noem calls Chicago a ‘war zone’ after federal agents shoot woman

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      Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, called Chicago “a war zone” on Sunday after federal agents shot a woman and the governor of Illinois accused the administration of fueling the crisis rather than resolving it.Speaking on Fox News Sunday morning, Noem took aim at the city’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, who has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s Ice raids and deployment of the national guard in Illinois, a measure he called “unhinged and unhealthy”.“It’s wrong, there should be consequences for that and for leaders that stand up and knowingly lie about the situation on the ground,” Noem said. “His city is a war zone and he’s lying so that criminals can go in there and destroy people’s lives.”Noem’s remarks followed Trump’s authorization to deploy 300 members of the Illinois national guard to Chicago, with orders to protect federal officers and property. The move came just weeks after national guard troops were sent to Washington, where the president federalized the city’s police force in what he described as a “crackdown” on crime, a pattern now extending to a string of other US cities. “We’re going to be doing Chicago probably next,” Trump had said at the time.Noem defended the administration’s course of action, insisting on Fox that residents supported the government intervention. “They understand that where we have gone we have made it much more free,” she said. “People are much safer, we have got a thousand criminals that are off the streets of Chicago, just because we’ve been there.”Appearing on CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper on Sunday, the Democratic Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, accused the administration of fueling the crisis rather than resolving it. “They are the ones who are making it a war zone,” he said.“They need to get out of Chicago. If they’re not going to focus on the worst of the worst, which is what the president said they are going to do, they need to get the heck out.”Border patrol agents on Saturday shot and injured a woman while firing at someone who tried to run them over. The woman who was shot was a US citizen and was armed with a semi-automatic weapon, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said, noting that the woman was accused in a US Customs and Border Protection intelligence bulletin last week of doxing agents.Pritzker also condemned the deployment in a post on X on Saturday, writing: “The Trump Administration’s Department of War gave me an ultimatum: call up your troops, or we will.” Pritzker called the decision “absolutely outrageous and un-American,” and added that it had been made “against our will”. More

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      Texas Ice facility shooting: Republicans blame ‘radical left’ as Democrats focus on victims and gun control

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      A deadly shooting at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Dallas has been met with markedly different reactions from the political right and left.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed shortly after the news broke that detainees were the victims of the sniper attack on the facility and that no federal agents had been injured. The president and his allies, however, were quick to frame the shooting as an attack on Ice and place blame on the “radical left”.The department previously said two detainees were killed, but later issued a clarifying statement saying the shooting killed one detainee. It said two other detainees were shot and are in critical condition.Official statements have lacked focus on the victims having been detainees, and at a press conference officials said the identities of the victims would not be released at this time. Figures on the left have centered on the victims’ families, pushed for greater gun control and urged a rejection of anti-immigrant sentiment.Donald Trump rushed to politicize the incident, blaming the violence squarely on “Radical Left Terrorists” and the Democratic party. “This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to “Nazis,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.JD Vance called the shooting an “obsessive attack on law enforcement” that “must stop”. The vice-president claimed it was carried out by “a violent left-wing extremist” who was “politically motivated to go after law enforcement”.Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem also said: “This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about Ice has consequences. Comparing Ice Day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences.”The FBI said authorities recovered shell casings with “anti-Ice messaging” near the shooter, but officials said the investigation was continuing and have neither confirmed the motive behind the attack, nor corroborated claims about the shooter’s ideological background.The FBI is investigating the incident as an act of targeted violence. The DHS said the shooter “fired indiscriminately” at the Ice facility, “including at a van in the sallyport where the victims were shot”. The attacker died from a self-inflicted gun wound.Greg Abbott, the Republican Texas governor and staunch Trump ally, called the attack an “assassination” and said that “Texas supports Ice”. He wrote on X: “This assassination will NOT slow our arrest, detention, & deportation of illegal immigrants. We will work with ICE & the Dallas Police Dept. to get to the bottom of the assassin’s motive.”Texas senator Ted Cruz also invoked the killing of rightwing commentator Charlie Kirk as he told reporters that political violence “must stop” and rebuked politicians who have been critical of Ice. “Your political opponents are not Nazis,” Cruz raged at Democrats, who he accused of “demonizing” Ice. “This has very real consequences,” he said.Later, after a reporter brought up reports that the victims were detainees, Cruz acknowledged that the motive of the shooter was not known.The attack comes amid fears the Trump administration plans a crackdown on leftwing organizations and amid the censorship of critical or nuanced commentary in the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, targeting people from visa holders to late-night talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel.Marc Veasey, a Democratic representative for Texas who represents the area where the shooting took place, told the Notus website that political “gamesmanship” was spiraling out of control, and said he was “sickened” by officials’ focus on law enforcement and lack of acknowledgement that the victims were detainees.He added that he lacked trust in the FBI, which had become “overly political” under Trump, and said smears against Democrats were not helpful, citing that the GOP also routinely call colleagues on the left “Marxists”.“We have to start condemning this rhetoric from both sides,” Veasey said. “I was hoping that after the assassination of Charlie Kirk that we would have learned lessons and that we realize that this is not about gamesmanship. This is not about one-upsmanship … This is about public safety.”Former Arizona congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who leads the gun violence prevention group Giffords, said her heart broke for the victims’ families and urged leaders to take action against the “gun crime crisis” gripping the country.Congresswoman Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, wrote on X: “Leave it to this administration to use a shooting against immigrant detainees to score political points and further provoke violence. We have to get guns off our streets and reject xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiment that makes all of us less safe.”Pennsylvania state representative Malcolm Kenyatta said: “Kristi Noem couldn’t get to Twitter fast enough to use the Dallas Ice shooting for political points. But local news now says it was detainees who were shot – not Ice agents.” More

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      Texas Ice facility shooting: one dead and two injured, and ‘anti-Ice’ shell casings found

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      One detainee has been killed and two others injured in a shooting at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Dallas, officials said.Authorities have also confirmed that the shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. NBC News, citing multiple senior law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation, reported that the suspect has been identified as 29-year-old Joshua Jahn.The Dallas police department said officers responded to a call at approximately 6.40am on Wednesday.“The preliminary investigation determined that a suspect opened fire at a government building from an adjacent building,” the police said in a statement. “Two people were transported to the hospital with gunshot wounds. One victim died at the scene. The suspect is deceased.”Department of Homeland Security officials previously said two detainees were killed, but later issued a corrected statement saying that the shooting killed only one detainee. It adds that two other detainees were shot and are in critical condition.“The shooter fired indiscriminately at the Ice building, including at a van in the sallyport where the victims were shot. Three detainees were shot,” the department said.One of the detainees in critical condition is a Mexican national, Mexico’s foreign ministry confirmed in a statement. The ministry said they had contacted the victim’s family to provide support and legal assistance. “The consulate is in ongoing communication with the authorities in charge of the investigation and is waiting for authorization to visit the hospitalized Mexican citizen,” it reads.At a news conference on Wednesday morning, Joe Rothrock, the head of the FBI field office in Dallas, said that “rounds that were found near the suspected shooter contain messages that are anti-Ice in nature”.One of the unspent shell casings recovered was engraved with the phrase “ANTI ICE”, according to a post from the FBI director, Kash Patel.Authorities said the FBI was investigating this incident as an act of targeted violence. They said they were not releasing the identities of any of the victims at this time, but confirmed that no members of law enforcement were injured during the attack.Trump wrote on social media that had been been briefed on the shooting, calling it “despicable” that the shell casings contained anti-Ice messaging. He immediately cast blame for the shooting on “radical left Democrats”, instructing them, in capital letters, to “stop this rhetoric against Ice”.“The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, must be stopped,” Trump wrote. “ICE Officers, and other Brave Members of Law Enforcement, are under grave threat. We have already declared ANTIFA a Terrorist Organization, and I will be signing an Executive Order this week to dismantle these Domestic Terrorism Networks.”There was no indication the shooter had any connection to any organizations, including antifa.At the news conference, the Republican senator Ted Cruz, who represents Texas, said “politically motivated violence is wrong”, adding that “this is the third shooting in Texas directed at Ice” or Customs and Border Protection.Parkland hospital in Dallas confirmed to the Associated Press that it had received two patients from the shooting. The hospital spokesperson did not have any details about their conditions.Earlier on Wednesday, Kristi Noem, the DHS secretary, confirmed in a statement that the suspected shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and said details about the incident were “still emerging”, but confirmed that there were “multiple injuries and fatalities” at the Ice field office.“While we don’t know motive yet, we know that our Ice law enforcement is facing unprecedented violence against them,” Noem said. “It must stop.”Law enforcement officials told CNN that at least two of the victims were Ice detainees.Todd Lyons, the acting Ice director, told the network that the “scene is secure” and said three people were shot and taken to the hospital.An Ice spokesperson has also told NBC News that all three people shot were detainees.Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, said the agency was “fully engaged, in conjunction with our state and federal law enforcement partners, at the crime scene in Dallas”.JD Vance called the shooting an “obsessive attack on law enforcement” that “must stop”.“I’m praying for everyone hurt in this attack and for their families,” the vice-president wrote on X.Vance alleged the suspect was a “left-wing extremist”, which has not been corroborated by law enforcement. A motive was still unknown as of Wednesday afternoon.“There’s some evidence that we have that’s not yet public, but we know this person was politically motivated,” Vance said, without providing or describing the evidence. “They were politically motivated to go after law enforcement.”John Cornyn, another Republican senator who represents Texas, called the shooting “horrific”.“While law enforcement investigates, I am keeping everyone impacted in my prayers,” he said. “My staff have been in touch with federal & local officials in Dallas, and we will make sure all resources are brought to bear in the investigation.”Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, said in a statement that “Texas fully supports Ice”.“This assassination will NOT slow our arrest, detention, & deportation of illegal immigrants,” he said. “We will work with ICE & the Dallas Police Dept. to get to the bottom of the assassin’s motive.”During the news conference, Eric Johnson, the mayor of Dallas, urged residents to “be patient, remain calm, and let our law enforcement partners, and our police department, do their job”. 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      Louisiana prison chosen for immigration detainees due to its notoriety, says Noem

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      The Trump administration purposefully chose a notorious Louisiana prison to hold immigration detainees as a way to encourage people in the US illegally to self-deport, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Kristi Noem said Wednesday.A complex inside the Louisiana state penitentiary, an immense rural prison better known as Angola, will be used to detain those whom Noem described as the “worst of the worst” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detainees. Noem was speaking to reporters as she stood on the grounds of the facility near a new sign reading, “Louisiana Lockup.”“This facility will hold the most dangerous of criminals,” Noem said, adding it had “absolutely” been chosen for its reputation.Officials said 51 detainees were already being housed at Angola. But Louisiana governor Jeff Landry said he expects the building to be filled to capacity, expecting over 400 people to come in ensuing months, as president Donald Trump continues his large-scale attempt to remove millions of people suspected of entering the country illegally.The dirt road to the new Ice facility meanders past lofty oak trees, green fields and other buildings – including a white church and a structure with a sign that says, “Angola Shake Down Team”.The facility is surrounded by a fence with five rows of stacked barbed wire. Overlooking the outdoor area is a tower, where a guard paced back and forth.At the prison entrance a sign reads: “You are entering the land of new beginnings.”View image in fullscreenThe Associated Press joined officials for a brief tour of the facility, viewing some of the cells where detainees would be held. The cells, built of three cinder block walls and steel bars on the front, were single occupancy – one bed, toilet and sink in each.Outside were confined enclosures of chain-link fencing, tall enough for multiple people to stand in.“If you don’t think that they belong in somewhere like this,” Landry said of the detainees during Wednesday’s news conference, “you’ve got a problem.”The building holding Ice detainees is not new, but rather refurbished after sitting vacant for years. The rest of Angola, which is made up of many buildings, has remained active. Many of Angola’s 6,300 inmates still work the fields, picking long rows of vegetables by hand as armed guards patrol on horseback.In addition, the prison is home to more than 50 death row inmates. The most recent execution was in March, using nitrogen gas to deprive the inmate of oxygen, causing death. The state’s electric chair, nicknamed “Gruesome Gertie”, is still on display in the prison’s museum.The notoriety of the 18,000-acre (7,300-hectare) prison stretches back well over a century. Described in the 1960s and 1970s as “the bloodiest prison in America,” it has seen violence, mass riots, escapes, brutality, inhumane conditions and executions.The Trump administration has crafted its immigration messaging to reinforce a tough-on-crime image and create a sense of fear among people in the US illegally, most pointedly with the detention center dubbed Alligator Alcatraz that it built in the Florida Everglades.View image in fullscreenThe Everglades facility may soon be completely empty after a judge upheld her decision ordering operations there to wind down indefinitely.Racing to expand the infrastructure necessary for increasing deportations, the federal government and state allies have announced a series of new immigration detention facilities, including the “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana and the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska.The approximate 400 people the Angola immigration facility will be able to hold is just a tiny percentage of the more than 100,000 people that Ice seeks to detain under a $45bn expansion for immigration detention centers that Trump signed into law in July.The prison traces its history back to a series of wealthy slave traders and cotton planters who built an operation known as Angola Plantation. An 1850s news report said it had 700 slaves, who historians say were forced to work from dawn to dark in Louisiana’s brutal summer heat.The plantation became the state prison after the Civil War, with a former Confederate officer awarded a lease that gave him control over the property and its convicts.“The majority of black inmates were subleased to land owners to replace slaves while others continued levee, railroad, and road construction,” the museum’s website says. White inmates at the time worked as clerks or craftsmen.Inmate leasing ended in the late 1800s amid a public outcry, and the state took direct control of the prison in 1901. More

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      South Park has become the most important TV show of the Trump 2.0 era | Jesse Hassenger

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      I’ll admit it: I’m more of a Simpsons guy than a South Park guy. Nothing really against those South Park guys – I’ve caught plenty of episodes over its astonishing near-30-year run, and loved the 1999 big-screen movie. But while I haven’t always maintained clockwork viewership of The Simpsons, either, those characters have proved durable enough to revive my interest in episodes old and new. South Park has a thinner bench by comparison, and as the show itself astutely pointed out years ago, it’s difficult for a satirically minded animated sitcom to explore ground that The Simpsons hasn’t covered already. South Park’s political bent, too, has often seemed less varied than the warmer (but still sometimes cutting) social ribbing of Matt Groening’s signature show. It’s a fine line between omnidirectional satire and libertarian crankiness.And yet the 27th season of South Park has accomplished something vanishingly few of its peers, whether in animation or topical comedy, have been able to do: getting laughs taking shots at the second Trump administration. It’s not that the White House is beyond reproach. Quite the opposite problem, much-documented: the Donald Trump cabal is so outsized in its stupidity and cruelty that it’s hard to distend it into a “funny” caricature, even a bleak one. In Trump’s second term, it has only gotten bleaker; jokes that were worn out by the end of 2020 are getting retold with a nasty vengeance, and the bar for cathartic laughter has been raised considerably.For a comedy fan, this winds up translating to an aversion. The occasional shots taken by The Simpsons somehow don’t land as squarely as they did when aimed at presidents I liked much, much more. I watch Saturday Night Live every week, and mostly dread James Austin Johnson’s accurate but ultimately defanged impression. (Some weeks, Johnson himself seems bummed out to be doing it.) I respect the hell out of Stephen Colbert, but I have never sought out his Trump commentary; I don’t need any more clapter – the reaction encouraged by comedy that wants your approval more than your laughter – in my life. South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone seemed to agree; Parker’s 2017 announcement that they’d grown bored of taking shots at Trump – then barely into his first presidential term – was one of the show’s many controversies over the years.So how is it that South Park’s revived anti-Trump blows this season have managed to land? A big part of it is precisely Stone and Parker’s allergy to clapter and the grandstanding that inspires it. They obviously resent anything they read as putting on airs and sometimes in the past, this came across as its own form of preachiness, with “everybody chill”-style speeches at an episode’s end that would secretly sound just as prescriptive as the self-righteousness they wanted to send up. With their most recent Trump parody, though, there isn’t much moralizing – just gratifyingly mean caricatures of deserving figures such as Trump, JD Vance and homeland security secretary Kristi Noem. Some (not all) of their past roastings have verged on point-and-laugh bullying; here are targets worthy of that derision.Some of this derision speaks through the language of South Park itself. Trump isn’t vocally or visually imitated; he’s depicted in a series of repurposed photos, with the same voice and animation technique that Parker and Stone used to bring Saddam Hussein to life in the South Park movie. He’s also given the same sexual partner: a muscled-up and put-upon version of Satan, who has found himself in another toxic relationship. Calling Trump a wannabe dictator doesn’t break new ground, but there’s something satisfying in Stone and Parker using their personal toolkit to draw a line between Trump and Hussein; if they thought it was a histrionic comparison, they’d be making fun of it instead of making it. Similarly, there’s real spite animating the depiction of Noem as a dog-murdering zealot whose glamorous face needs to be repeatedly lacquered and reaffixed to her head as she commands an army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement thugs.Not all of the season’s satire has involved making real-life figures regulars on the show. Because South Park’s ensemble has rarely felt as vast or believably developed as Springfield of The Simpsons (or even Arlen on King of the Hill), it’s also flexible enough to turn Randy, Stan’s desperately trend-following dad, into a ketamine-microdosing, tech-bro moron addicted to the soothing, empty reassurances of ChatGPT – the focus of the most recent episode, to the point where most of the core child cast doesn’t appear. Surprisingly, this season has deployed forever favorite Cartman more sparingly so far, again getting self-referential in the season’s second episode, where the id-driven and arguably evil little kid is incensed to find out that podcasters have stolen his “shtick” – his pervasive hatefulness, repackaged as a challenge to debate where the aggressor is always the self-appointed winner. Ascribing this “master debater” title to Cartman (alongside a fellow kid serving as an obvious Charlie Kirk/Ben Shapiro stand-in) somehow manages to make this ridiculous behavior funny in its petty smallness without glorifying it.A South Park diehard would probably describe this praise as a fair-weather fan only enjoying the show when it goes after the “right” targets. Maybe that’s true, but it’s also a lot easier to take some joy in savaging Vance as a meme-faced version of a Fantasy Island sidekick than, say, accusing George Lucas and Steven Spielberg of cultural rape. It’s probably wishful thinking to wonder if Parker and Stone might actually move the needle of the perception on tech bros, debate-me podcasters and Trump-world ghouls, especially among the dude demo. But it’s also just a blessed change of pace to see say-anything, first-amendment types finding a fresher target than the wokeness bogeyman. While countless standups continue to whine about being silenced, Parker and Stone seem highly aware of their rarified position (and, as Paramount contractors, also aware of what actual political-corporate interference looks like). In a world where Trump’s actual political opponents seem terrified to actually fight him, some well-deserved, point-and-laugh meanness has become a surprising novelty. More

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      ‘Cemetery of the living dead’: Venezuelans recall 125 days in notorious El Salvador prison

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      Arturo Suárez struggles to pinpoint the worst moment of his incarceration inside a prison the warden boasted was “a cemetery of the living dead”.Was it the day inmates became so exasperated at being beaten by guards that they threatened to hang themselves with their sheets? “The only weapon we had was our own lives,” recalled the Venezuelan former detainee.Was it when prisoners staged a “blood strike”, cutting their arms with broken pipes and smearing their bedclothes with crimson messages of despair? “SOS!” they wrote.Or was rock bottom for Suárez when he turned 34 while stranded in a Central American penitentiary prison officers had claimed he would only leave in a body bag?Suárez, a reggaeton musician known by the stage name SuarezVzla, was one of 252 Venezuelans who found themselves trapped inside El Salvador’s notorious “Cecot” terrorism confinement centre after becoming embroiled in Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade.After 125 days behind bars, Suárez and the other detainees were freed on 18 July after a prisoner swap deal between Washington and Caracas. Since flying home to Venezuela, they have started to open up about their torment, offering a rare and disturbing glimpse of the human toll of President Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crackdown in El Salvador and Trump’s campaign against immigration.View image in fullscreenSuárez said conditions inside the maximum security prison were so dire he and other inmates considered killing themselves. “My daughter’s really little and she needs me. But we’d made up our minds. We decided to put an end to this nightmare,” he said, although the prisoners stepped back from the brink.Another detainee, Neiyerver Rengel, 27, described his panic after guards claimed he would probably spend 90 years there. “I felt shattered, destroyed,” said the Venezuelan barber, who was deported to Cecot after being captured in Irving, Texas.Trump officials called the Venezuelans – many of whom had no criminal background – “heinous monsters” and “terrorists” but largely failed to produce proof, with many seemingly targeted simply for being Venezuelan and having tattoos.Norman Eisen, the executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, which is helping Rengel sue the US government for $1.3m, called the “abduction” of scores of Venezuelans a stain on his country’s reputation. “It is shocking and shameful and every patriotic American should be disgusted by it,” said Eisen, who expected other freed prisoners to take legal action.Suárez’s journey to one of the world’s harshest prisons began in Chile’s capital, Santiago, where the singer had moved after fleeing Venezuela’s economic collapse in 2016.One day early last year, before deciding to migrate to the US, Suárez watched a viral YouTube video about the “mega-prison” by the Mexican influencer Luisito Comunica.Bukele officials had invited Comunica to film inside Cecot as part of propaganda efforts to promote an anti-gang offensive that has seen 2%of the country’s adult population jailed since 2022. Suárez, then a fan of El Salvador’s social media-savvy president, was gripped. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could afford a package tour to go and visit Cecot?” he recalled joking to his wife. Little did the couple know that Suárez would soon be languishing in Cecot’s cage-like cells, sleeping on a metal bunk bed.View image in fullscreenAfter entering the US in September 2024, Suárez worked odd jobs in North Carolina. In February, three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, he was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents and, in mid-March, put on a deportation flight, the destination of which was not revealed. When the plane landed, its passengers – who were instructed to keep its blinds closed – had no idea where they were. The penny dropped when one detainee disobeyed the order and spotted El Salvador’s flag outside. “That’s when we understood … where we were heading – to Cecot,” he said.Suárez described the hours that followed as a blur of verbal abuse and beatings, as disoriented prisoners were frogmarched on to buses that took them to Cecot’s cell block eight.Suárez said the men were forced to shave their heads and told by the warden: “Welcome to hell! Welcome to the cemetery of the living dead! You’ll leave here dead!”As he was dragged off the bus, Suárez, who is shortsighted, said he asked a guard for help because his spectacles were falling off: “He told me to shut up, punched me [in the face] and broke my glasses.”“What am I doing in Cecot?” Suárez recalled thinking. “I’m not a terrorist. I’ve never killed anyone. I make music.”Rengel had almost identical memories of his arrival: “The police officers started saying we were going to die in El Salvador – that it was likely we’d spend 90 years there.”Noah Bullock, the head of the El Salvador-focused human rights group Cristosal, said activists had heard very similar accounts from prisoners in other Salvadoran jails, suggesting such terror tactics were not merely the behaviour of “bad apple prison guards”. “There’s clearly a culture coming from the leadership of the prison system to inculcate the guards into operating this way, [into] using dehumanising and physical abuse in a systematic way.”View image in fullscreenSuárez said the Venezuelans spent the next 16 weeks being woken at 4am, moved between cells holding between 10 and 19 people, and enduring a relentless campaign of physical and psychological abuse. “There’s no life in there,” he said. “The only good thing they did for us was give us a Bible. We sought solace in God and that’s why nobody took their own life.”The musician tried to lift spirits by composing upbeat songs, such as Cell 31, which describes a message from God. “Be patient, my son. Your blessing will soon arrive,” its lyrics say.The song became a prison anthem and Suárez said inmates sang it, one day in March, when the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, visited Cecot to pose by its packed cells. “We aren’t terrorists! We aren’t criminals! Help!” the Venezuelans bellowed. But their pleas were ignored and the mood grew increasingly desperate, as the inmates were deprived of contact with relatives, lawyers and even the sun. “There came a point where we had no motivation, no strength left,” Rengel said.Only in mid-June was there a glimmer of hope when prisoners were given shampoo, razors and soap and measured for clothes. “They obviously wanted to hide what had happened from the world,” said Suárez, who sensed release might be close. One month later the men were free.Suárez said he was determined to speak out now he was safely back in his home town of Caracas. “The truth must be … heard all over the world. Otherwise what they did to us will be ignored,” said the musician, who admitted he had once been an admirer of Bukele’s populist campaigns against political corruption and gangs. “Now I realise it’s just a complete farce because how can you negotiate with human lives? How can you use human beings as bargaining chips?” Suárez said.A spokesperson for El Salvador’s government did not respond to questions about the prisoners’ allegations. Last week, the homeland security department’s assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, dismissed prisoners’ claims of abuses as “false sob stories”.Suárez hoped never to set foot in El Salvador or the US again but said he forgave his captors. “And I hope they can forgive themselves,” he added. “And realise that while they might escape the justice of man they will never be able to escape divine justice.” More

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      Trump wants to ‘remake’ Fema, not eliminate it, Kristi Noem says

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      Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said on Sunday that Donald Trump wants to have the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) “remade” instead of eradicated entirely.In a new interview on Sunday with NBC, Noem defended the Trump administration’s response to the deadly Texas floods that have killed at least 120 people, saying: “I think the president recognizes that Fema should not exist the way that it always has been. It needs to be redeployed in a new way, and that’s what we did during this response.”Noem added: “I think he wants it to be remade so that it’s an agency that is new in how it deploys and supports states.”Her comments follow widespread criticism of the Trump administration’s handling of the Texas floods as reports emerged of thousands of calls from flood survivors being left unanswered by Fema’s call centers due to unextended contracts.Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that Fema did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line. The outlet also reported that Noem, who implemented a new policy that she personally signs off on contracts over $100,000, did not renew the contracts until five days after they expired in the middle of the floods.Noem decried the reports as “fake news”, saying: “That report needs to be validified. I’m not certain it’s accurate, and I’m not sure where it came from, and the individuals who are giving you information out of Fema, I’d love to have them put their names behind it because the anonymous attacks to politicize the situation is completely wrong.”Noem went on to acknowledge her policy of personally signing off on contracts worth more than $100,000, saying: “It’s not extra red tape, it’s making sure everything is getting to my level, and that it’s immediately responded to.”She also praised Fema’s response as the “best response” in years to the Texas floods, saying: “This response was by far the best response we’ve seen out of Fema, the best response we’ve seen out of the federal government in many, many years, and certainly much better than what we saw under Joe Biden.”Despite Noem’s defense of the agency and the Trump administration’s handling of the crisis, many have criticized Fema as the downsized agency has seen approximately 2,000 resignations and retirements since Trump’s inauguration.Speaking to the Guardian, Michael Coen, Fema’s former chief of staff, said: “I’m concerned that Fema is going to be at a disadvantage because they don’t have the resources to respond to the disasters we know could happen, which could be two or three concurrent disasters at the same time.“Fema has eroded capacity since President Trump became president. Staff have departed. There have been cuts to grant programs and they are going to be running into a financial challenge with the disaster relief fund, because the president hasn’t requested supplemental funding from Congress.”Since taking office, Trump has routinely threatened to disband the agency which was set up by Jimmy Carter in 1979 following states’ struggle to handle major disasters. In June, Trump said that he planned to start “phasing out” Fema after hurricane season and that states would receive federal aid to respond to natural disasters.“We’re going to give out less money,” Trump said.Last month, Noem also said that Fema “fundamentally needs to go away as it exists”, adding that states should have more responsibility when handling natural disasters.However, since the Texas floods, which mark Trump’s first major natural disaster since taking office in January, his administration’s rhetoric on eliminating Fema has appeared to shift.Earlier this week, upon being asked whether he still plans to phase out the agency, Trump said it was a matter “we can talk about later”. Similarly, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters that the federal government’s response to natural disasters was a “policy discussion that will continue”. More

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      Judge blocks Kristi Noem from ending temporary protected status for Haitians

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      A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s bid to end temporary deportation protections and work permits for approximately 521,000 Haitian immigrants before the program’s scheduled expiration date.Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded Joe Biden’s extension of temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians through 3 February. It called for the program to end on 3 August, and last week pushed back that date to 2 September.The US district judge Brian Cogan in Brooklyn, however, said the homeland security secretary Kristi Noem did not follow instructions and a timeline mandated by Congress to reconsider the TPS designation for Haitians.“Secretary Noem does not have statutory or inherent authority to partially vacate a country’s TPS designation”, making her actions “unlawful”, Cogan wrote. “Plaintiffs are likely to (and, indeed, do) succeed on the merits.”Cogan also said Haitians’ interests in being able to live and work in the United States “far outweigh” potential harm to the US government, which remains free to enforce immigration laws and terminate TPS status as prescribed by Congress.Donald Trump has made a crackdown on legal and illegal immigration a central plank of his second White House term.Cogan was appointed to the bench by George W Bush, also a Republican.In a statement, Tricia McLaughlin, homeland security spokesperson, said Haiti’s TPS designation had been granted following the 2010 earthquake in that country, and was never intended as a “de facto” asylum program.“This ruling delays justice and seeks to kneecap the President’s constitutionally vested powers,” she said. “We expect a higher court to vindicate us.”Federal courts blocked Trump from ending most TPS enrollment during his first term.Nine Haitian TPS holders, an association of churches and a chapter of the Service Employees International Union filed the lawsuit on 14 March, saying Noem did not do a required review of current conditions in Haiti before ending TPS early.More than 1 million people, more than half of them children, are displaced within Haiti, where gang violence is prevalent despite a United Nations-backed security mission that began last year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“While the fight is far from over, this is an important step,” Manny Pastreich, president of SEIU Local 32BJ, whose members include Haitian TPS holders, said in a statement.Noem shares Trump’s hardline stance on immigration issues, and moved to end TPS for about 350,000 Venezuelans as well as thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon.On 19 May, the US supreme court let TPS end for the Venezuelans, signaling that other terminations could be allowed.Noem has authority to grant TPS for six to eight months to people from countries experiencing natural disasters, armed conflict or other extraordinary events.The Haitian plaintiffs also claimed the suspension of their TPS status was motivated in part by racial animus, violating their constitutional right to equal protection.Trump falsely said in a September 2024 debate with Democratic candidate Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets, sparking fear of retaliation against Haitians. More