Proof of Life

 

I said my main goal of this trip was to meet with Kilmar. Tonight I had that chance. I have called his wife, Jennifer, to pass along his message of love. I look forward to providing a full update upon my return. pic.twitter.com/U9y2gZpxCb

— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) April 18, 2025

At least we know he's alive--there was a part of me that wondered if the White House dug in because they were trying to cover up that they had gotten a man killed. But no, it's just that they want to be able to do anything they want to do to anyone without regard for their rights under the US Constitution. And being the sort of person I am, while this proof of life is a welcome sign that both the US government and El Salvador feel the need to respond to pressure--this is not yet a good sign, it's a photo op--

See, he's alive, but he is still held, it's because the US is paying for El Salvador to keep him, and the Trump Administration feels no shame about any of that. 

Yet.

I think it is important that we look at the opinion authored by Judge Harvie Wilkinson rejecting a request from the DOJ to pause an order that they facilitate Garcia's release from custody in El Salvador:

"The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order," Wilkinson, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, wrote. "Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear."

The Human Backdrop/ UPDATED

 

Kristi Noem, who has approached her job as head of DHS with what one might call "theatrical flair", made a video in an El Salvador prison. Keeping in mind that we are sending people into conditions like those behind her without due process--for reasons which the Trump Administration now alleges is a state secret. 

MAGA probably see the use of the human backdrop behind Noem a bit differently than I do. There is a gulf between seeing people being dehumanized and seeing them as not human. Someone like Noem does not grasp that difference. I wish more people in this country did. 

I like to point out that these MAGA airheads are inept, but they are also, nonetheless, fairly horrific. 

UPDATE: Just as a small clarification, if you go to her video on Twitter, the app formerly known as X, you can see this backdrop is actually a green screen with a looped video. The optics of dehumanization are very deliberate. 

UPDATE: That's a nice bit of hardware our girl has on her wrist--allegedly a $60K Rollie. I don't know what she paid for it or even that she DID pay for it (or how), but I just want to personally say I wouldn't wear my very nicest watch to the prison tour, so I'm guessing she must have nicer ones at home. 

Red Sky At Morning, Everyone Take Warning

Fires across the West are raging, driven by wind on a landscape shaped for blazes by climate change. “This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history," said Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon. https://t.co/VL9NCLt1vI

— NYT Climate (@nytclimate) September 9, 2020

I started this year blogging about Fire and Water to mark that climate change is real and disastrous, and its effects were manifest around the world. These days the fires are close to home on the West Coast, and it's a terrible time to be made aware that not only does our current administration care little about it but they have tried to politicize federal aid in the case of west coast wildfires, and in the case of hurricane-related damages. (People are still looking into the exact death toll of Hurricane Maria, which still may not be wholly known. The power has never been fully on in Puerto Rico since then.) The images from California and Oregon are eerie, like something from some future dystopia we are living right now.

People are displaced and rendered homeless by such events, and by now, one can almost speculate that Trump does not care about this, because does he even seem to care about the folks rendered homeless and displaced by the economy that exists in the wake of his COVID-19 response? Don't displaced people lose the address from which they once could vote, for example?

Even Trump's neglect can be construed as purposeful, once you've fathomed how shitty a soul can actually be.

No, They Are Not There to "Help"

The Portland moms were hit with CS gas overnight, as federal officials refuse to remove “heavy” force presence https://t.co/lyC0oj6Zlu

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) July 20, 2020

The federal not-that-secret-anymore-police in Portland are not wanted, aren't trained for riot control, are causing bodily harm to nonviolent protesters, and have tear-gassed non-violently protesting women, some of whom were visibly pregnant. Their presence makes the situation more fraught, not less and renews interest in the ongoing protest, not decreasing it.

If this were a test-case to see what a full roll-out of such "help" nationwide would be like, I'd suggest that it was a failure and the Trump Administration should bag it. But it isn't supposed to help. I don't know what Trump wants from visions of "American carnage" under his watch, but he seems set on having them. He's a disgrace and so is his little jumped-up non-confirmed security spiv, Chad. I don't know if this is a prelude for some kind of shenanigans in the street in November, or if Trump is once again just trying to be seen "doing something" so as not to appear hapless.

But I'm pretty well convinced that actual "help" was not the big idea around this decision.

Cages Where Sick Babies Sleep on the Floor

There's a weird familiarity I feel with regards to the recent argument over whether the term "concentration camps" should be used regarding the detention centers where the US government is currently holding undocumented migrants. It's not that long ago, really, that former DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was raked over for disputing whether "cages" was the right term for the wire holding pens in which children were being kept. 

But leaving aside the semantics of "dog pound" and "freezer" and all that, the facts are, themselves, very grim. There are children without their parents in filthy, miserable conditions, being asked to watch after younger, more miserable children.  Conditions that children (and adults) are being held in are ideal for the spread of disease and the potential for preventable deaths.  The family separations, and even the process of reuniting families are handled indifferently with shitty logistics and negligence bordering on the insane. Whatever one might prefer to call the conditions under which human beings are being kept, they are inhumane. 

And yes, despite what no less an expert on inhumane activity as Rep. Liz Cheney is might claim, it is very reasonable to call these shelters "concentration camps."

The messengers, here, are part of the problem for me, too--this is where the familiarity really sets in. It wasn't that long ago that Liz Cheney was extolling the virtues of what she would call "enhanced interrogation" techniques, and simple bloggers like myself would call "torture", with its embrace of tactics like "stress positions" and "rectal feeding."  Euphemizing horrible things to try to make them palatable is. itself, a form of abuse. It's gaslighting. It's telling all of us that our eyes and ears and minds aren't working right--that we are crazy for thinking there is something seriously wrong with seeing a problem with cages where sick babies sleep, or try to, on the floor, or that a system that hides the deaths among its inmates is trying to minimize its violence, or that is staffed with people who use dehumanizing language is unable to humanely deal with a humanitarian crisis.

What I can see is that when the Trump Administration argues that soap and toothpaste and bedding are too much to provide detained children, we are seeing people who have no concept of duty of care regarding their fellow human beings--even the smallest and least offending among us. And while it is true that facilities are overwhelmed, how can it be that this much is not viewed as inhumane--when it is asked of children that they rest on the concrete on as much space as a severely overcrowded area affords (sleep deprivation has been used as a form of torture) and somehow stay healthy when little basic hygiene exists?  When people are denied their reproductive rights for political reasons?

The US is housing migrants now where we once kept Japanese-American citizens during WWII. The Trump Administration has also considered keeping migrants at Guantanamo Bay.  The number of migrants coming to seek asylum or work or anything else here has not abated because of the administration's deterrence approach, and the decision to cut aid to Central America only seems likely to make things worse.  (And I'm not saying the Obama Administration had superb answers about what to do with detained migrants and asylees either--they deported at a greater rate than currently, conditions in facilities were also not ideal.)

The argument over whether to call the facilities "concentration camps" just seems to be one of throwing words at a physical and immanent issue. There are some people who can be moved by words. The people who most need to be, will perhaps already be beyond shame.  And have been for a long time.

It is useful, however, to see who falls into which group.

Nielsen Bites the Dust

One of the worst moments, perhaps, of outgoing DHS chief Kirstjen Nielsen's tenure was probably the time she sat in a Mexican restaurant and got hollered out by DSA activists. How in the hell was she there appreciating the food of Mexican culture, likely prepared by people of Mexican and maybe other non-US western hemisphere descent, after defending policies that treats these human beings like they are not properly human? Because this is the inflex point between understanding people are people, and not seeing them as such. She didn't think about where she was and how it connected to what she was doing. What was happening at the border was not supposed to intersect with her life.  Who were these illegal entrants to the US, and who were their support group, anyway? 

There are so many really bad moments to choose from in Nielsen's DHS admin. Her hearings were closemouthed and clueless. Who admits they don't exactly know how much how much border wall there is and how many kids have died in CBP or ICE custody or acts shocked that separation policy psychologically damages children? She boldly stated that asylum seekers were illegally entering the US, when this is the only way they can seek asylum, and denied there was a separation policy, when this very policy had to be later defended and was rejected by the courts. 

(And they still do.)  ("Defensive asylum" can be claimed wherever the claimant got through, and it should be up to a court to determine the validity of the claim, however loose the proofs of such might be--but this isn't up to DHS. This is why Trump is currently going fucknuts about judges.  He just hates immigration he can't control, period.)

Anyway, a more detailed story about her resigfiring (my term for people who have been told by the administration to go get up on their shield and ride it out) might be made that includes her attempts to warn Trump of how continuing legally-scrapped policies would be unwise or how isolated she was in terms of supporters, but I can't see how it matters. When being asked to do immoral things, she declined to leave.

I don't know what I should think about the removal of Secret Service director "Tex" Alles, either--especially having happened so precipitously on the heels of the arrest of the woman who was rather conspicuously not supposed to be at Mar-A-Lago.

(Can I just address this bit:

Secret Service agent Samuel Ivanovich, who interviewed Zhang on the day of her arrest, testified at the hearing. He stated that when another agent put Zhang’s thumb drive into his computer, it immediately began to install files, a “very out-of-the-ordinary” event that he had never seen happen before during this kind of analysis. The agent had to immediately stop the analysis to halt any further corruption of his computer, Ivanovich testified. The analysis is ongoing but still inconclusive, he said.

Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article228963409.html#storylink=cpy

Um, I think Q did this sort of thing in Skyfall  and everyone was like, "Shit, this millennial Q is such a rookie why is he even?" and it was one of the only bad things in Skyfall.)

Anyway, my theory of Trump is he wants all his shit super compartmentalized to maintain lots of control, so of course he does not like Secret Service being really hands-on. He loves people having access at his Winter WH and probably tries to maintain an own-brand security perimeter that keeps actual government agency professionals at a distance.

Because he loves crimes. Also hates transparency. And also needs lackeys to keep up his super dubious border crisis position. So that is my opinion of Trump and I know, I have said all these things before.

UPDATE: Here is part of Nielsen's legacy. I don't know if CNN or Fox has an option on her already, but please, think about whether what she accomplished was truly reprehensible before offering her ass a job in any opinion-making forum. Her opinions are contemptible.