“It was a kidnapping.” Jonathan Blitzer’s reporting on how the Trump Administration declared war on Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. Plus:
Deicy Aldana and Andrés Guillermo Morales Rolón.
Photograph by Fabiola Ferrero for The New Yorker
David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker
The staff writer Jonathan Blitzer is the author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” the definitive contemporary book on immigration and, now, mass deportation. In an extraordinary piece of reporting in this week’s issue, he makes plain how the Trump Administration has used the Alien Enemies Act, which prior to this year had been used only three times in the nation’s history, to detain and deport immigrants who were lawfully in the United States. Just a day after invoking the act, in March, the government sent more than two hundred Venezuelan men to CECOT, a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador, without due process. Deicy Aldana, whose partner was one of the men deported, told Blitzer, “It was a kidnapping.”
Much of the Administration’s effort has focussed on the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. But, as Blitzer demonstrates, the evidence presented to prove affiliation with the gang has been, at best, tenuous. One former Homeland Security official told him, “Border Patrol was using Tren de Aragua as a shorthand for any Venezuelan men who were doing anything criminal.” Often, though, there was no criminal activity at all. Tattoos or posts on social media became enough evidence for officials to allege membership and make arrests. One man Blitzer spoke to—who was imprisoned at CECOT—was arrested in Houston, partly because he was wearing a pair of Air Jordans.
Blitzer has been reporting on Trump’s immigration efforts since his first term—writing a remarkable Profile of Stephen Miller, the architect behind many of the President’s border policies, and cataloguing the disastrous effects of Trump’s family-separation policy. He’s continued to keep a close eye on the Administration’s crackdown in its second term, explaining Trump’s flurry of executive orders and illustrating the consequences of ICE’s expanded power. Now Blitzer’s reporting paints a vivid—and horrifying—portrait of the lives that have been upended by the Administration’s most cruel policies. The men Blitzer interviewed reported regular abuses and instances of torture inside CECOT. One man told him, “They beat me with metal chains. They kicked me. They hit me in the ribs. They said, ‘You’re going to die in here, and we’re going to throw your body in a pot of acid.’ ”
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“Liberty,” 2016.Art work by Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo) / Photograph by Will Ragozzino / Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art and Balice Hertling
The Chilling Opposition to Trans Art
The Trump Administration’s assault on trans rights extends beyond sending trans women to men’s prisons and restricting access to passports and health care. It is also attacking trans art, a move that is creating a “domino effect,” Grace Byron writes, in which artists are facing censorship and exclusion from private institutions and in the wider cultural landscape. Read the story »
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How Bad Is It?
The Supreme Court on Monday lifted limits that had been imposed on federal agents conducting immigration raids in Los Angeles. In an unsigned opinion, the Court suspended a previous order issued by a federal judge, who found that agents operating in the city had been illegally detaining people based on their race, language, job, or location—and were “conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion.” The Court’s three liberal Justices dissented from today’s opinion. We reached out to Cristian Farias, a legal journalist who has written about various Trump-era court cases for The New Yorker, to better understand the ruling.
“Just the other day, I was in the audience at Lincoln Center when Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, while promoting a new book, that she doesn’t think the United States is in a constitutional crisis,” Farias told us. “Today, the Supreme Court, without offering a single line of reasoning, more or less declared that the Fourth Amendment, which protects everyone from unreasonable searches and seizures, nonetheless allows the Trump Administration to arrest and detain anyone who looks Latino, citizen or not, on account of the language that they speak or the kind of jobs they do. The ruling putatively covers the Los Angeles area, but the effect could be national,” he continued. “If that’s not a constitutional crisis, then what is?”
“Your protein needs are getting on my nerves.”
Cartoon by Sarah Morrissette
Puzzles & GamesToday’s Crossword Puzzle: People who avoid using the can in public—ten letters.Laugh Lines: Test your knowledge of classic New Yorker cartoons.Name Drop: Guess the identity of a notable person in six clues.
P.S. Today would have been Peter Sellers’s one-hundredth birthday. You may remember the shape-shifting actor from Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” in which he played three roles. What you might not know is that nearly everything in that farce about nuclear weapons was actually true. 💣
Ian Crouch and Hannah Jocelyn contributed to today’s edition.