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      Danish PM accuses US of ‘unacceptable pressure’ over planned Greenland visit

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      Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, has accused the US of putting “unacceptable pressure” on Greenland – which she has vowed to resist – before an unsolicited visit to the Arctic island by members of the Trump administration.Later, just hours after her comments, the White House sprang a fresh surprise, as the US vice-president, JD Vance, announced he would join his wife on a trip to the territory this week.“There was so much excitement around Usha’s visit to Greenland this Friday that I decided that I didn’t want her to have all that fun by herself, and so I’m going to join her,” Vance said in a video on X.“Speaking for President Trump, we want to reinvigorate the security of the people of Greenland because we think it’s important to protecting the security of the entire world.”Even before Vance’s announcement, Frederiksen told Danish channel TV 2: “I have to say that it is unacceptable pressure being placed on Greenland and Denmark in this situation. And it is pressure that we will resist.”The Danish leader also dismissed the idea of the trip being a private visit, saying: “You cannot make a private visit with official representatives from another country.”Trump’s threats to acquire Greenland, she said, should be taken seriously. “President Trump is serious … He wants Greenland. Therefore, it cannot be seen independently of anything else,” she told Danmarks Radio (DR).She said: “It is clearly not a visit that is about what Greenland needs or what Greenland wants from a visit. Therefore, no matter how we twist it, it is a completely unacceptable pressure on Greenland, the Greenlandic politicians and the Greenlandic population, but it is also on Denmark and thus the kingdom.”Copenhagen, Greenland’s former colonial ruler, retains control of security and foreign policy in the autonomous territory, which is still part of the kingdom of Denmark. Trump has repeatedly stated his desire for the US to gain control over the island, which he has said is crucial for American security.Greenland’s prime minister, Múte Bourup Egede, has accused Washington of “foreign interference” in relation to the planned visit, amid political uncertainty in the territory as coalition talks continue less than a fortnight after a general election.The US president responded by saying the delegation had been invited by “officials” on the Greenlandic side. “People from Greenland are asking us to go there,” he told reporters on Monday.The Nuuk government, however, disputed that. “For the record, the Greenlandic government has not issued any invitations for visits, either official or private,” it said in a statement. “The current government is acting as an interim government pending the formation of a new coalition, and we have kindly requested all countries to respect this process.”Also due to participate in the visit from Thursday to Saturday are the White House national security adviser, Mike Waltz, now embroiled in an embarrassing security leak, and the energy secretary, Chris Wright.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe territory is led by a caretaker government as the Greenlandic Democrats continue with coalition talks following an election earlier this month. On Monday, Greenland’s most US and Trump-friendly party, Naleraq, left negotiations over their belief that Greenland should rapidly declare independence.Kuno Fencker, a member of parliament for Naleraq, which came second to the Democrats in the election, said the party had been “thrown out” of coalition talks, in part because of the upcoming US visit.“It has an effect because many of the members think that we, especially me, are selling the country to the US,” he said, adding that it was not in his authority to do so.Accusing the Danish media of “fear-mongering” over the US and Trump, he said: “Divide and rule is being used extremely towards Greenland and fear-mongering about the United States. And especially Donald Trump is framed as the big villain, big bad wolf, here.”The White House has said Waltz and Wright will visit the US space force base in Pituffik, in the north of Greenland, for briefings from US personnel, and they are expected to join Vance to visit historical sites and attend a dog-sled race.The White House National Security Council has said the delegation aimed to “learn about Greenland, its culture, history and people”. More

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      The Guardian view on the Signal war plans leak: a US security breach speaks volumes | Editorial

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      It is jaw-dropping that senior Trump administration figures would accidentally leak war plans to a journalist. But the fundamental issue is that 18 high-ranking individuals were happy discussing extremely sensitive material on a private messaging app, highlighting the administration’s extraordinary amateurishness, recklessness and unaccountability.The visceral hostility to Europe spelt out again by the vice-president, JD Vance, was glaring. So was the indifference to the potential civilian cost of the strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, designed to curb attacks on Red Sea shipping. The Houthi-run health ministry said that 53 people including five children and two women were killed. The response by the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, to the attacks was to post emojis: a fist, an American flag and fire. The lack of contrition for this security breach is also telling. Individually and together, these are far more than a “glitch”, in Donald Trump’s words. They are features of his administration.Mr Waltz appears to have organised the Signal chat and inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of the Atlantic. The magazine says that the secretary of defence, Pete Hegseth, posted details of the timing and sequencing of attacks, specific targets and weapons systems used, though the administration denies that classified information was shared. Other members included Mr Vance; the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard; the CIA director, John Ratcliffe; Steve Witkoff, special envoy to the Middle East; and “MAR”, the initials of the secretary of state, Marco Rubio.These conversations would normally take place under conditions of high security. While Signal is encrypted, devices could be compromised. Foreign intelligence agencies will be delighted. Legal experts say using Signal may have breached the Espionage Act.The hypocrisy is glaring. Mr Trump’s first presidential campaign – and several members of this Signal group – lambasted Hillary Clinton for using a private email server to receive official messages that included some classified information of a far less sensitive nature, and for the autodeletion of messages. These Signal messages too were set to disappear, though federal records laws mandate the preservation of such data.In many regards, this leak hammers home what US allies already knew, including this administration’s contempt for Europe, which the chat suggests will be expected to pay for the US attacks. The vice-president characterised an operation carried out to safeguard maritime trade and contain Iran as “bailing Europe out again”. Mr Hegseth responded that he “fully share[d] your loathing of European free-loading”. Concerns about information security are familiar territory too. In his first term, the president reportedly shared highly classified information from an ally with Russia’s foreign minister, and after leaving office he faced dozens of charges over the alleged mishandling of classified material, before a judge he had appointed threw out the case against him.The UK and others cannot simply walk away when they are so heavily dependent on and intermeshed with US intelligence capabilities. Their task now is to manage risk and prepare for worse to come. It may be that this breach is not chiefly distinguished by its severity, but by the fact that we have learned about it.Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More

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      Outrage after White House accidentally texts journalist war plans: ‘Huge screw-up’

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      A catastrophic security leak is triggering bipartisan outrage after the Atlantic revealed that senior Trump administration officials accidentally broadcast classified military plans through a Signal group chat with a journalist reading along.On the Senate floor on Monday, the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, called it “one of the most stunning breaches of military intelligence I have read about in a very, very long time” and urged Republicans to seek a “full investigation into how this happened, the damage it created and how we can avoid it in the future”.“Every single one of the government officials on this text chain have now committed a crime – even if accidentally,” the Delaware senator Chris Coons wrote on Twitter/X. “We can’t trust anyone in this dangerous administration to keep Americans safe.”The New York representative Pat Ryan called the incident “Fubar” (an acronym for “fucked up beyond all recognition”) and threatened to launch his own congressional investigation “IMMEDIATELY” if House Republicans fail to act.According to reporting in the Atlantic, the editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally invited into a Signal chat group with more than a dozen senior Trump administration officials including Vice-President JD Vance, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, national security adviser, Mike Waltz, secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, and others.The reporting exposes not only a historic mishandling of classified information but a potentially illegal communication chain in which sensitive military plans about airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen were casually shared in an encrypted group chat with automatic delete functions.“It has made us look weak to our adversaries,” the California congressman Ro Khanna told the Guardian. “We need to take cybersecurity far more seriously and I look forward to leading on that.”As the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, Jim Himes has overseen countless classified briefings. But the Signal group chat leak of impending war plans has made him “horrified”.“If true, these actions are a brazen violation of laws and regulations that exist to protect national security, including the safety of Americans serving in harm’s way,’ he said. “These individuals know the calamitous risks of transmitting classified information across unclassified systems, and they also know that if a lower-ranking official under their command did what is described here, they would likely lose their clearance and be subject to criminal investigation.”Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, posted on social media: “This administration is playing fast and loose with our nation’s most classified info, and it makes all Americans less safe.”The Republican senator John Cornyn described the incident more colloquially, telling reporters it was “a huge screw-up” and suggesting that “the interagency would look at that” to determine how such a significant security lapse occurred.The White House confirmed the leak. The national security council spokesperson, Brian Hughes, told the Guardian: “This appears to be an authentic message chain, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”But the White House attempted to defend the communications, with Hughes describing the messages as an example of “deep and thoughtful policy coordination between senior officials”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The ongoing success of the Houthi operation demonstrates that there were no threats to troops or national security,” Hughes said.But most lawmakers don’t see it that way. The Rhode Island senator Jack Reed said on X that the incident represented “one of the most egregious failures of operational security and common sense I have ever seen”.The echoes of past document controversies are also coming back to haunt some of the senior officials in the chat, who previously criticized similar security breaches. In 2024, Waltz – the current national security adviser – had said “Biden’s sitting National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sent Top Secret messages to Hillary Clinton’s private account. And what did DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing.”In 2023, Hegseth had his own critique of the Biden administration handling classified documents “flippantly”, remarking on Fox News that “If at the very top there’s no accountability”, then we have “two tiers of justice”.The bombshell revelation also potentially violated federal record-keeping laws. The Federal Records Act, which mandates preservation of government communications, typically mandates that records are kept for two years, and the Signal messages were scheduled to automatically delete in under four weeks.The New York Republican representative Mike Lawler summed up the bipartisan consensus: “Classified information should not be transmitted on unsecured channels – and certainly not to those without security clearances. Period.” More

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      Trump’s tariff obsession is a lose-lose proposition | Steven Greenhouse

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      I’ve been writing about manufacturing in the US since the 1980s, and it’s been heart-wrenching to report on dozens of factory closings and the devastation they have done to workers and communities. As the nation grasped for ways to slow these plant closings, I also wrote about Washington’s use of carefully employed trade measures, like targeted tariffs, and how they helped save some plants and jobs, especially in the steel industry.Carefully targeted tariffs can be a winning strategy, but Donald Trump’s obsession with tariffs – especially across-the-board ones that are neither careful nor targeted – has already shown itself to be a lose-lose strategy. Perhaps it’s too generous to use the word strategy to describe what the president is doing, because his tariffs seem based on fiat and whim, not on thoughtful planning.Trump is like Elmer Fudd with his shotgun, shooting every which way: Canada today, China tomorrow and perhaps Champagne country the day after, with tariffs imposed one day, suspended the next and then re-imposed a few days later, but, wait, those re-imposed tariffs might be canceled next week. It’s a “strategy” of chaos and capriciousness, with some viciousness thrown in.Obsessed as he is with tariffs, Trump calls tariffs “the greatest thing ever invented”, and “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”. He talks as if tariffs will create an economic nirvana, but the opposite is happening. Stock markets are plummeting, corporate confidence is tanking, consumers fear higher prices and economists warn the measures might push the US into recession.Let’s count the ways Trump’s tariffs are a lose-lose proposition.First, at a time when Americans are feeling beaten and bruised from the pandemic-era burst of inflation, the tariffs – which are really a tax on imports – will inevitably push up prices. Trump’s tariffs will hit less affluent Americans hardest because they spend a higher percentage of their income on clothes and other imported goods. Many of those Americans voted for Trump, believing him when he said he’d reduce prices.Second, even though Trump boasts that tariffs will make American industry great again, it’s dubious whether Trump’s tariffs will do much to spur manufacturing. Trump has evidently forgotten that if you want to persuade corporations to build new factories – in this case, to bring back operations from overseas – then you need to reassure business executives that there will be economic and policy stability. But that’s the opposite of what Trump, the emperor of chaos, is all about. If you were a CEO, would you shell out $200m to build a new factory in the US in response to Trump’s tariffs when you know that Trump might lift those tariffs tomorrow or in two weeks or whenever a foreign leader flatters him or promises to let Eric and Don Jr build a Trump hotel at a beautiful seaside resort in their country?Trump is eager for hundreds of companies to build new factories in the US, but with his on-again-off again, here today-gone-tomorrow tariffs, he has made many stability-craving CEOs too scared to build new plants. Moreover, if Trump wants to attract the manufacturing industries and jobs of tomorrow, he’s been shooting himself and the US in the foot with his ideological war against the industries of the future, including electric vehicles, renewable energy and semiconductors. Trump is even threatening to kill Biden’s hugely successful subsidy program to build sophisticated new semiconductor plants in the US.Third, Trump’s tariffs are undermining economic growth; even Trump’s team has acknowledged the threat of recession. His tariffs are sabotaging supply chains, and that will disrupt production at many factories. His scattershot tariffs are so alarming companies that many are hesitating on plans to invest in new plant and equipment. That also undercuts growth. In addition, the widespread fears that tariffs will push inflation skyward have caused consumer sentiment to fall sharply. That could cause consumer spending, the major engine of the US economy, to decline.Fourth, Trump’s tariffs are hitting various U.S. industries hard. Trump’s hefty 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports will hurt US auto makers by raising the cost of vital raw materials and making US-made cars less competitive vis-a-vis foreign automakers. Not only that, trade retaliation from Canada, Europe and China is already harming many US industries – including agriculture, motorcycles and Kentucky bourbon—and that, too, will push the economy toward recession. And let’s not forget that Trump’s tariffs are hurting the targeted countries, and that’s slowing their – and worldwide – economic growth.Fifth, another big way we lose is that Trump, by slapping tariffs on Canada, Mexico and the European Union, has further angered and alienated many of our closest allies, and that comes on top of his disparaging Nato and increasingly allying the US with Russia. In this way, Trump may destroy the Atlantic Alliance, which has been pivotal for maintaining peace and prosperity, though not perfectly, since the second world war.Sixth, any honest, fair-minded cost-benefit analysis will show that Trump’s tariffs will cause far more damage than gain. Although Trump says his tariffs will “create jobs like we have never seen before”, economic studies have found that the tariffs Trump imposed in his first term failed to increase the number of jobs. Those tariffs created a small number of jobs in some industries, but retaliation and supply-chain disruptions caused job losses in other industries. A study by economists at MIT, the World Bank, Harvard and the University of Zurich concluded that Trump’s first-term tariffs “neither raised nor lowered US employment” and didn’t “provide economic help to the US heartland”.With Trump’s tariffs changing day to day, it’s impossible to predict how many jobs those tariffs will create or destroy. Thus far, his tariffs have caused US stock markets to lose $4tn in value, and those losses could grow. If Trump’s tariffs were to create 100,000 jobs, which some economists say is unrealistically optimistic, the cost would be an astronomical $40m per job ($4tn divided by 100,000). If his tariffs created 10,000 jobs, the cost would be $400m per job.With Trump’s tariffs slowing economic growth, if they result in a 1 percentage point drop in annual GDP, that would mean a loss of $300bn a year in economic output. (1% of the nation’s $30tn GDP). If Trump’s tariffs yielded 100,000 jobs, the cost would be $3m per job. Or if Trump’s tariffs raise inflation by 1%, that would cost American consumers roughly $200bn a year – which would mean a cost of $2m per job created.Returning to Elmer Fudd, his goal was always to shoot Bugs Bunny, but his gun often blew up in his face by mistake. With his tariffs, Elmer Trump seems well on his way to shooting the US economy by mistake.

      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author focusing on labor and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues More

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      Anger in Greenland over visits this week by Usha Vance and Mike Waltz

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      Greenland’s prime minister has accused Washington of interfering in its political affairs with the visit of an American delegation this week to the Arctic island coveted by the US president, Donald Trump.“It should be said clearly that our integrity and democracy must be respected without foreign interference,” Múte Egede said on Monday, adding that the planned visit by the second lady, Usha Vance, along with the national security adviser, Mike Waltz, “cannot be seen as just a private visit”.Vance, the wife of the US vice-president, JD Vance, will travel to Greenland as Trump clings to the idea of a US annexation of the strategic, semiautonomous Danish territory.Vance will visit Greenland on Thursday with a US delegation to tour historical sites, learn about the territory’s heritage and attend the national dogsled race, the White House said. The delegation will return to the US on 29 March.Waltz and the energy secretary, Chris Wright, will also travel to Greenland to visit a US military base, a US official said. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Trump has made US annexation of Greenland a significant talking point since taking office for a second time on 20 January and has said it will become part of the US “one way or the other”.Speaking on Sunday to the Greenlandic newspaper Sermitsiaq, Egede said: “The only purpose is to show a demonstration of power to us, and the signal is not to be misunderstood. He is Trump’s confidential and closest adviser, and his presence in Greenland alone will certainly make the Americans believe in Trump’s mission, and the pressure will increase after the visit.”Greenland’s strategic location and rich mineral resources could benefit the US. It lies along the shortest route from Europe to North America – vital for the US ballistic missile warning system.The governments of Greenland and Denmark have voiced opposition to such a move.The Greenlandic government, which is in a caretaker period after an 11 March general election won by a party that favours a slow approach to independence from Denmark, did not reply to requests for comments.The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said in a written comment reacting to news of the visit that “this is something we take seriously”. She said Denmark wanted to cooperate with the US but it should be cooperation based on “the fundamental rules of sovereignty”.She added that the dialogue with the US regarding Greenland would take place in close coordination with the Danish government and the future Greenlandic government.Reuters contributed to this report. More

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      In Canada, I saw how Trump is ripping North America apart – and how hard its bond will be to repair | Andy Beckett

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      As wealthy but lightly defended countries have often learned, being close to a much more powerful state – geographically or diplomatically – can be a precarious existence. All it takes is an aggressive new government in the stronger state and a relatively equal relationship of economic and military cooperation can suddenly turn exploitative, even threatening.Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, this realisation has been dawning across the west, but nowhere more disconcertingly than in Canada. Its border with the US is the longest in the world: 5,525 miles of often empty and hard to defend land, lakes and rivers. Canada’s two biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal, are only a few hours to the north, were you to approach them in a US army tank.Earlier this month, I spent a week in some of this particularly vulnerable stretch of Ontario and Quebec, visiting my daughter at university and encountering a new, more anxious Canada. At times, as the trains I took crawled along the congested trans-Canadian rail corridor, the roofs of individual American buildings were visible, glinting in the cold sun across the border. The feeling of being a foreigner in a tense, contested place reminded me of when I lived in West Germany, near the East German border, during the early 1980s, one of the most fraught phases of the cold war.Until Trump started talking so insistently about making Canada his country’s “51st state”, that would have been an absurd comparison. But not any more. “The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country,” said the new Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, in his first speech as Liberal leader. “If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life.” Supposedly one of the most harmonious – and strategically important – relationships between rich western countries appears to have changed radically.The Canadians I spoke to, in shops, at bus stops and stations, at home and by email, were generally less dramatic about the situation than Carney, who has a reputation as a leader to establish, and now an election to win next month. There was some anger at the US – and at Britain’s failure to condemn Trump’s threats against a Commonwealth country. “The king is proud to align himself with a despot for … a dangled trade agreement,” a Montreal academic told me, referring to King Charles’s recent invitation to Trump to make a second state visit to Britain. “A bold response from us in Canada would be to cut our ties with the monarchy.”More often, however, people shook their heads or rolled their eyes at Trump’s behaviour. He was crazy, chaotic, totally inconsistent, people told me – not like a steady and realistic Canadian, they implied. There were satisfied smiles at the tariff-driven slide in the US stock market. And yet, people also said, Trump’s threats meant that Canadian life would have to change profoundly. Though what those changes might be was a topic they generally avoided – except for a baker in Montreal, who sold me some sourdough while we discussed whether Canada would need to get nuclear weapons.Relations between America and Canada have not always been peaceful. The US invaded Canada in 1775 and 1812, without success. During the 1920s and 1930s it drew up a more hypothetical invasion scheme, War Plan Red. In fundamental ways, fear of the US shaped Canada, encouraging its unification out of what had originally been disparate territories, and also the decision to site its capital in Ottawa, further from the border than its other eastern cities.As in Britain, in the mid-20th century the Canadian state sought to create what it called a “special relationship” with the US. Canada’s export-oriented economy – necessary because of the country’s relatively small and scattered population – got access to US markets. US businesses got access to prosperous Canadian consumers, often close to America’s manufacturing heartlands. During the cold war, both countries saw Canada as a key place to build defences against Russian attack.With Trump seemingly much closer to Moscow than Ottawa, that North American alliance may in effect be dead. By area, Canada is the world’s second-biggest country after Russia, but its armed forces are tiny, about half the size of Britain’s. The feeling that Canada has been abandoned militarily by the US possibly explains the huge “Fuck Trump” flag I saw flying from the back of a pickup truck in the usually polite city of Kingston, Ontario, home of the Royal Military College of Canada.Economic ties will take longer to unravel. There were still California carrots on Montreal supermarket shelves, and my trains were passed by endless goods wagons from the famous old American freight company Union Pacific. Yet the number of Canadians visiting the US is already plummeting: last month it was as low as during the latter stages of the pandemic. In this, as in much else, Canada may be an early adopter of new habits regarding the US which then spread across what is left of the liberal west. For left-leaning foreigners, Americana and American places may lose much of their appeal, because the US has been made so authoritarian and hostile to outsiders by such a quintessentially American figure.Canada is self-consciously following another path. “Canada is a mosaic,” says Carney, and pro-diversity messages pour out of its government and businesses, as if calculated to wind up US conservatives. As well as vast, increasingly coveted supplies of water and minerals, Canada – despite its considerable inequalities and very heavy per capita carbon footprint – offers an increasingly different model of how to live on the North American continent.Will Trump or any hard-right successors in the White House allow this provocation to continue? Another US invasion may not actually be imminent. Trump already has too many ambitious policy goals. Conquering, let alone occupying, as enormous and physically extreme a country as Canada would be an intimidating prospect even for the fantasy-driven Republicans.Yet it’s equally hard to imagine US-Canadian relations returning quickly to their former state. Too many imbalances and contrasts between the countries have been pointed out, too many threats offered. Trust has been lost. Political careers are being made on both sides by acting tough towards the neighbouring government.Canadians are less known than Americans for flying the flag, but there were a lot of them fluttering along the border this month. It may be many years before they come down.

      Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Trump revokes legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans

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      Donald Trump’s administration will revoke the temporary legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans in the United States, according to a Federal Register notice on Friday, in the latest expansion of his crackdown on immigration.It will be effective 24 April.The move cuts short a two-year “parole” granted to the immigrants under former president Joe Biden that allowed them to enter the country by air if they had US sponsors.Trump, a Republican, took steps to ramp up immigration enforcement after taking office, including a push to deport record numbers of immigrants in the US illegally. He has argued that the legal entry parole programs launched under his Democratic predecessor overstepped the boundaries of federal law and called for their termination in a 20 January executive order.Trump said on 6 March that he would decide “very soon” whether to strip the parole status from some 240,000 Ukrainians who fled to the US during the conflict with Russia. Trump’s remarks came in response to a Reuters report that said his administration planned to revoke the status for Ukrainians as soon as April.Biden launched a parole entry program for Venezuelans in 2022 and expanded it to Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans in 2023 as his administration grappled with high levels of illegal immigration from those nationalities. Diplomatic and political relations between the four countries and the United States have been strained.The new legal pathways came as Biden tried to clamp down on illegal crossings at the US-Mexico border.The Trump administration’s decision to strip the legal status from half a million migrants could make many vulnerable to deportation if they choose to remain in the US. It remains unclear how many who entered the US on parole now have another form of protection or legal status. More

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      ‘He is innocent’: family of deported Venezuelan rebukes Trump claims

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      Donald Trump’s White House has described the Venezuelan migrants deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador as “heinous monsters” and terrorists who “rape, maim and murder for sport”.But relatives of Francisco Javier García Casique, a 24-year-old from the city of Maracay, say he was a hairdresser, not a crook.“He has never been in prison, he is innocent, and he has always supported us with his work as a barber,” his younger brother, Sebastián García Casique, said from their family home in Venezuela.Less than a week ago, the García brothers were preparing to be reunited, with Francisco telling relatives he expected to be deported from a US immigration detention facility to his South American homeland after being arrested by immigration officials on 2 March.The flight was scheduled for last Friday. A family gathering was planned in Maracay. On Sunday those plans were shattered when El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, published a cinematographic propaganda video on social media showing scores of Venezuelan prisoners being frog-marched off planes and into custody in his country’s “terrorism confinement centre”.“It’s him,” a shell-shocked Sebastián told their mother after spotting his sibling among those shackled men.“I never in my life thought I would see my brother like that – handcuffed, his head shaved, in a prison for murderers, where they put rapists and kidnappers. It is very painful because he is innocent,” he said of his brother, who travelled to the US in late 2023 chasing a better future.Lindsay Toczylowski, a California-based immigration lawyer, was another person who found herself scouring Bukele’s sensationalist video for any sign of her client, another Venezuelan migrant she feared had also been unjustly dispatched to El Salvador after seeking shelter from political persecution in the US.“I felt sick … absolute shock,” Toczylowski said of the moment she saw those pictures in which detainees are shown being forced to their knees to have their heads shaved by masked security forces with batons and guns.“It really is such an escalation … and to see it paraded and celebrated by the White House and by Bukele was just an absolutely shocking escalation of human rights abuses against migrants,” said the lawyer who works for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) group.García and Toczylowski’s client – an LGBTQ+ asylum seeker she declined to name out of fears for his safety – appear not to be the only Venezuelans deported to El Salvador despite having no criminal history in their home country or the US. More than 260 people were deported to the Central American country last weekend, 137 of them under 227-year-old wartime powers invoked by the US president called the Alien Enemies Act.In recent days, a succession of Venezuelan families have gone public to demand the release of their loved-ones: young working men whose main “crimes” appear to have been their nationality and having tattoos that US immigration authorities deemed a sign of affiliation to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Experts in South American organized crime reject the idea that tattoos are a meaningful indicator of gang membership in Venezuela.García’s tattoos include one – inspired by a verse from the Book of Isaiah and inked onto his skin during a stint living in Peru – that reads: “God gives His toughest battles to his strongest warriors”. His brother, Sebastián, has the same tattoo.In a video plea posted on social media, Mercedes Yamarte, the mother of another migrant sent to El Salvador, Mervin Yamarte, described her 29-year-old son as “a good, hardworking boy” who had never been involved in crime. But Yamarte, who entered the US in 2023 and had lived in Dallas, also has tattoos – one with the name of his daughter, another paying tribute to his mum – which were seemingly interpreted as an indication of gang membership by US authorities.“Everyone close to him knows he has a big heart and NOTHING TO DO WITH TREN DE ARAGUA,” his brother, Francis Varela, wrote on social media. “My brother went in search of the American dream,” Varela added. “A dream that has now become a nightmare for us all.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionToczylowski’s client also has tattoos which she said immigration enforcement officials used to allege he was a Tren de Aragua member. “[But] they are not gang tattoos and he has no gang membership affiliation at all,” the lawyer insisted.García’s shock incarceration in El Salvador ended a six-year quest to build a better life for himself and his family, which the Venezuelan Zoomer documented on Instagram.After leaving his economically shattered country, in 2019, García migrated to Callao, a seaside city near Peru’s capital Lima, hoping to make enough money to help his family survive back home. “I miss you Venezuela,” he posted the following year, between photos and videos that highlighted his love for hairdressing, football and his numerous tattoos.In late 2023 García, like many Venezuelan migrants, decided to relocate to the US to escape the post-pandemic economic crisis in Peru. An Instagram photo shows him posing outside a train station in the Mexican state of Jalisco as he heads to the southern border. The post is accompanied by a song by the Mexican singer Peso Pluma called Nueva Vida” (New Life) which captured his aspirations.Two months later, another image shows him cutting hair at a Marvel-themed salon in Longview, Texas named after the Incredible Hulk. “May it be everything we dreamed of,” García wrote of his fresh start beside an emoji of the Stars and Stripes flag. Last weekend that dream came to an abrupt and unexpected end in Bukele’s mega prison near San Salvador.Immigration advocates have voiced outrage at the plight of men such as García and the lack of due process in their cases.“It’s enraging because they clearly don’t have any affiliation with Tren de Aragua at all,” said Adam Isacson, a migration expert from the Washington Office on Latin America thinktank.Isacson said that in the past such migrants tended to face detention in a “miserable [detention] centre here in the United States” or were “shipped back” home. “It did not mean that you were sent to some medieval jail of an authoritarian leader in another country. So we’re in brand new ground here,” Isacson warned, adding that while it was possible some of those deported to El Salvador were hardened criminals, many appeared to be innocent.Sebastián García Casique insisted that was the case of his older brother who their mother had raised to be an “honest and good” person. He urged Trump to review his brother’s case and free him.“I believe this is an injustice,” said García, 21. “Maybe one or two [of the prisoners] have criminal records, and if they did something, punish them for it … But the innocent should be sent to Venezuela … What is he doing in El Salvador if he committed no crime there? … Why don’t they say what crimes they are accused of?” More