A group of Senate Democrats has written a letter to Donald Trump to demand that he walk back his threat to send prison inmates, and presumably, political opponents jailed on trumped up charges, to a prison in El Salvador.
You can tell things are getting serious when the senators start firing off angry letters.
“You cannot deport Americans to a foreign country for any reason,” the senators wrote in their letter, which is dated April 22. “This nation’s founding fathers declared independence based on ‘repeated injuries and usurpations’ by the then-King of Great Britain, including ‘transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences’ and ‘depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.’ Accordingly, Congress has passed no provision into law that would permit exiling United States citizens to a foreign country for any reason.”
The threat came out from Trump last week during a made-for-TV spectacle with Nayib Bukele, the thug president of El Salvador, in which both asserted that they had no plans to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an El Salvadoran immigrant who the Justice Department has conceded was deported in error, and is, at the same time, actively resisting making efforts at securing his release and return to the U.S., in defiance of a Supreme Court order.
ICYMI
- Virginia Democrats eerily silent on Trump El Salvadoran prison plan
- Tim Kaine and Mark Warner need to be more like Chris Van Hollen
Trump, first on a hot mic, when he thought no one was listening, and then straight up in the press conference, because, what the hell, said he wants to be able to send U.S. citizens that he determines to be criminals the thug Bukele’s prison.
“I don’t know what the laws are, we always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they’re not looking, that are absolute monsters. I’d like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you’ll have to be looking at the laws on that,” Trump told reporters at the April 14 press avail.
One of the signatories on the April 22 letter, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., traveled to El Salvador last week to try to secure Abrego Garcia’s release, and was able to get a meeting with Abrego Garcia, who fled his native El Salvador in 2011, and is a Maryland resident, married to a U.S. citizen and the father of three.
“As the federal courts have said, we need to bring Mr. Abrego Garcia home to protect his constitutional rights to due process. And it’s also important that people understand this case is not just about one man. It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States of America. If you deny the constitutional right of one man, you threaten the constitutional rights and due process for everyone else in America,” Van Hollen told reporters, and the nation, at a press conference on Friday, detailing his journey.
As the story involving Van Hollen was going on, we learned, from a piece in The New Yorker published last week, the details of the deep ties between the Bukele regime and MS-13 leaders, which has the leaders of the trans-national gang demanded “financial benefits,” “control of territory,” “less restrictive prison conditions,” “legislative and judicial changes,” and a promise from Bukele to refuse to extradite the gang leaders to the U.S. for prosecution, in exchange for agreeing to kill fewer people, “which politically benefitted the government of El Salvador, by creating the perception that the government was reducing the murder rate.”
Trump obviously thinks he has this Bukele guy over a barrel, so he’s getting the president of the tiny, impoverished Latin American nation – population: 6.3 million, average monthly family income: $700.94 – to do his dirty work with the political prisoners.
The way these kinds of things tend to work out, it won’t take much for cracks in their unholy alliance to appear – and Van Hollen getting a one-on-one with Abrego Garcia may have been the first one.
I’d like to see more than a letter from Senate Democrats, but at least we got something from one of our senators, Tim Kaine, D-Va., who put his name on the letter, along with Van Hollen and 24 other Dems.
“You must immediately facilitate the return to the United States of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, follow all court orders, and withdraw your dangerous and offensive claims that you may transfer U.S. citizens to a foreign prison. The Constitution demands it,” the senators wrote.
Message sent.
Trump had better be careful. He doesn’t want to get another letter.
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Chris Graham
