News Summaries in April 2025

Please note that summaries of stories have been added below dated April 21 and April 22 on the death of Pope Francis, the first Latin American pope. 

“Texas Judge Rules Use of Alien Enemies Act for Deportees is Illegal,” New York Times, May 2, 2025

 

A federal judge appointed by President Trump permanently barred his administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport from the southern district of Texas Venezuelans it had deemed to be criminals. The May 1 ruling said the administration’s use of the statute was illegal. The decision by Fernando Rodriguez, Jr., “was the most expansive ruling yet by any of the numerous jurists who are currently hearing challenges to the White House’s efforts to employ the powerful but rarely invoked law as part of its wide-ranging deportation plans,” reported Alan Feuer, Mattathias Schwarz and Charlie Savage of the Times. The Supreme Court previously ruled that any Venezuelan the Trump administration wants to expel under the Act must first be given a chance to challenge their removal in court. The Rodriguez ruling went beyond that by saying the Act couldn’t be used in this context because it applies when there’s an attack by military forces against the United States, not to the activities of a street gang like the Venezuelan gang Tren de Arugua, of which those deported were alleged by the Trump administration to be members. A New York Times investigation found that very few of the 238 Venezuelans deported on the basis of membership in Tren de Arugua had clear ties to the gang (see April 17 story below).  The ruling only applies to the southern district of Texas, which includes cities like Houston, Brownsville and Laredo, but could influence other cases involving the use of the Act. Six of eight lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in other parts of the country challenging the use of the Act to deport alleged Tren de Arugua members have resulted in provisional orders stopping its use. ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said the Rodriguez decision “correctly recognized that the president cannot simply declare there’s an invasion and invoke a wartime authority during peacetime. As the court recognized, Congress never intended this law to be used in this manner.” The Trump administration has claimed that even judges do not have the power to intrude on presidential decisions in matters of foreign policy, such as use of the Alien Enemies Act. But Rodriguez said judges still have the power to determine whether a president is using the Act correctly. Though largely able to stop the administration from continuing to use the Act to deport alleged Tren de Arugua members, the ACLU “has not been a able to bring back to the United States the first batch of nearly 140 Venezuelans who were removed under the law to El Salvador on March 15,” the Times said. “Those men remain in the custody of jailers at a notorious prison known at the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.” Last week the ACLU asked a federal judge to order the administration to return the men to U.S. soil so they could get the due process they would have gotten had they not been rushed out of the country. ACLU noted that the Supreme Court determined the administration must “facilitate” the return to the U.S. of a man deported to El Salvador the administration admitted was mistakenly deported, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. 

“Even El Salvador’s President Questioned Trump Team on if Migrants Being Sent Were Actually Gang Members: Report,” The Independent, April 30, 2025

 

El Salvador’s President Nayeb Bukele wanted evidence from the Trump administration that all 238 Venezuelans deported to his maximum-security prison in March were actually part of the notorious gang Tren de Aragua, wrote Independent reporter Rhian Lubin. Bukele behind the scenes expressed concern about who Trump was sending, said the Independent story, based on portions of an  April 30, 2025 New York Times story, “Five Takeaways from the Times’ examination of the Salvadoran Prison Deal.” [Referring here briefly to The Independent story because of its framing and specific headline].  “During the negotiations,” the Times reported, “Mr. Bukele told U.S. officials he would take only what he described as ‘convicted criminals’ from other countries. He made it clear that he did not want migrants from other nations whose only crime was being in the United States illegally.” U.S. officials then “rushed” to provide Bukele the information he wanted, a “haphazard” maneuver that “deepened questions about whether the Trump administration sufficiently assessed whom it sent to a prison designed for terrorists.” It designated people as gang members using a scorecard which assigned points based on “certain affiliations and activities, such as having a range of tattoos.” A separate New York Times story on April 17, 2025 (see below) concluded that most of the 238 men sent to the prison had no criminal offenses other than immigration violations. Bukele had another specific request, the Times said April 30. He wanted certain Salvadoran MS-13 gang leaders to be released from U.S. custody as part of the deal and to be sent back to El Salvador. He wanted them interrogated by his own security officers. That worried some U.S. officials because of suspicions Bukele made a secret deal with MS-13 leaders to give them special privileges behind bars if they kept homicides down in El Salvador, something Bukele denies. But U.S. officials agreed to release about a dozen MS-13 leaders, including one in U.S. custody awaiting trial on charges of narco-terrorism. The Times examination also found that Trump aides recognized well before his second term that the Alien Enemies Act could be used to deport people with little or no oversight. It quoted Trump aide Stephen Miller as telling a right-wing podcaster in September 2023 that the law “allows you to instantaneously remove any noncitizen foreigner from an invading country, aged 14 or older,” and “allows you to suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding.” The Times story also suggested that the Trump administration had confidence its use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport the Venezuelans would be affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court.  

“Blackout Disrupts Life in Spain and Portugal,” New York Times, April  29, 2025

 

A major power outage in Spain and Portugal shortly after noon on April 28 left tens of millions of people stranded across the Iberian Peninsula, according to a team of Times reporters – Jonathan Wolfe, Amelia Nierenberg, Azam Ahmed, Rachel Chaundler and Catherine Porter. Officials couldn’t identify the cause, but several denied foul play was involved. By evening about 50 percent of the electrical supply had been restored, said the president of Spain, Pedro Sánchez. Electricity from France and Morocco helped restore some of the power. After the power went down long lines formed outside of A.T.M.s and traffic lights and electric road signs went out. Spanish news media “showed scenes of chaos in Madrid, the Times said. “With no traffic lights working, vehicles blocked the city’s wide, leafy avenues, and the traffic police improvised, doing their best to keep things moving. By late afternoon, commuters had ditched their vehicles, choosing instead to walk. Train passengers were stranded for hours in the middle of nowhere. They “climbed down from their carriages and were sitting beside the tracks in the sunshine, waiting to be rescued.” In the city of Valencia in Spain emergency workers were busy rescuing people from elevators all day. Spanish hospitals had to run on generators. In Portugal, banks and schools closed. Renfe, the Spanish train company, said trains had stopped operating in all stations and subways in cities including Valencia and Madrid stopped operating. Sánchez said 35,000 passengers had been trapped on about 100 trains. He said about 20 percent of Spain’s air traffic had been grounded. In Lisbon people scrambled to buy water and dried goods but many were shut out when big grocery stores were closed by afternoon. Since bank card readers weren’t working, people could only pay in cash if they had it. “At his neighborhood grocery store, Rajan Basnet let grateful shoppers picking over his emptying shelves leave with the supplies they needed even if they couldn’t pay.” Bajnet, who moved to Portugal four years ago from Nepal, remarked by way of explanation that he might be the one that needs something tomorrow. In a downtown Lisbon barber shop the buzz of clippers was replaced by the softer sound of snipping scissors. “The Portuguese are pretty relaxed about most things,” said one of the barbers. “It takes us a while before we start to freak out.” He joked that things don’t always work that well in Portugal anyway. “If this was Belgium, it might be different.” A boat restorer in the old part of Lisbon said “it’s a reminder of how dependent we are on things outside of our own control." 

Trump Embraces Mass Arrest to Fuel Deportation Drive

 

The New York Times reported April 28 that federal and state law enforcement agents arrested hundreds of people in Florida and Colorado in recent days as the Trump administration accelerates  mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. The sweeps in Florida included “collateral arrests,” which allowed agents to pick up migrants  not initially targeted, said Times reporter Hamed Aleaziz (“Nearly 800 Arrested by ICE Over Four Days in Florida”). Tessa Petit of the Florida Immigration Coalition said that given the scale of the operation there is a chance that many of those arrested were in the U.S. on some sort of legal status and did not have criminal records, Aleaziz said. Deportation tactics employed by the Trump administration led to a court ruling and accusations by immigration lawyers that it has violated due process rights in a number of cases. The Times coverage of the Florida arrests and those in Colorado (“114 Migrants are Detained in Raid at a Colorado Club”) did not specify whether due process rights were violated. The effort in Florida was reportedly the first to involve coordination of federal and state officials rather than federal agencies alone. According to an ICE official, officers picked up more than 275 migrants with final deportation orders. Petit said the arrests were the biggest escalation of immigrant enforcement in Florida since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration. “It’s going to break up families,” she said. In Colorado, federal agents raided an underground nightclub in Colorado Springs 70 miles south of Denver and detained 114 people they said were undocumented, Eduardo Medina of the Times reported. More than a dozen active-duty members of the U.S. military were among the detained. Agents found weapons and illegal drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine, officials said. Jonathan C. Pullen of the Drug Enforcement Administration said the nightclub had been under surveillance for months and drug trafficking, prostitution and violent crime had been occurring inside the club. He said officers saw members of the Hell’s Angels, MS-13 and Tren de Aragua inside the club during the investigation but did not know whether they were there at the time of the raid, early the morning of April 27. Those detained were put on buses “for processing and likely eventual deportation,” the DEA said. Both the Florida and Colorado arrests were seen by Times reporters as an amping up of efforts to meet President Trump’s deportation goals, which he has struggled to meet. “The administration has publicized its raids in big cities and its deportation flights to Latin America, using tactics steeped in showmanship that have profoundly unnerved immigrant communities,” wrote Medina. “President Trump’s administration has been criticized for wrongly deporting people, including U.S. citizens, who have been caught up in the crackdown,” he noted. Authorities have stepped up warnings to the undocumented to leave.  “President Trump and I have a clear message to those in our country illegally: LEAVE NOW,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in an April 21 statement. 

“What is Tren de Aragua and Has the Group ‘Invaded’ the United States?”, The Guardian, April 27, 2025

 

The Trump administration repeatedly portrays the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a state-sponsored international terror group that has invaded the United States. “Donald Trump uses the argument to justify extreme enforcement measures against Venezuelan immigrants and cast a cloud across the Venezuelan diaspora, especially communities in the US,” says Guardian reporter Alexandra Villarreal. Trump says its hostile actions in the US should allow immigration agents to arrest Venezuelans and exile them to Guantánamo Bay or El Salvador’s Cecot prison without so much as a court hearing. But experts say that’s not so and that Trump “has concocted a bogeyman to fuel his extreme immigration crackdown,” she adds. Tren de Aragua was formed in Venezuela but has spread to other countries in Latin America alongside the diaspora of 7.7 million Venezuelans fleeing the autocratic rule of President Nicolás Maduro. Some scholars trace the gang back to 2005 when the members of a trade union started embezzling funds and extorting contractors while working on a railroad project in the Aragua region of Venezuela – hence the use of the word “tren” (train) in its name. It took off in that region in 2014 inside the Tocorón prison. There, members had access to restaurants, a swimming pool, a zoo, a nightclub, and other amenities. The leaders of the gang inside the prison directed crimes outside of it until 2023 when the Venezuelan government raided the prison and the gang began to break up. One scholar wrote that the gang is only of modest prominence and not nearly as established as other gangs in Central and South America. But the gang has been powerful enough to “torment and exploit” Venezuelans at home and abroad. For example, it forces women into the sex industry to pay off debt from being smuggled into countries such as Colombia, Chile and Peru. Gang members also infiltrate groups of immigrants and collude with Mexican cartels to extort them. Although Tren de Aragua is present in the United States, it is smaller, more diffuse and less coordinated than Trump’s dire warnings might make it seem. Tren de Aragua is not invading America, three experts wrote in the New York Times.  But the gang has caused real harm and suffering for many communities across the U.S., suggests the Guardian’s Villarreal. In Miami a former Venezuelan police reportedly was abducted and killed by a member of the gang and in New York a supposed gang member allegedly shot two police officers. The gang is seemingly sex trafficking Venezuelan women who paid it to bring them into the U.S. But the think tank Insight Crime says the gang is weakening and now is more a loose collection of franchises than a cohesive organization. Earlier in April U.S. authorities brought new federal charges against 27 people accused of being members and associates of the gang. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the actions would devastate the gang’s infrastructure. In late 2024 the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was investigating whether some 600 immigrants had ties to the gang, but it was unclear how many of them were victims or witnesses or gang members. The 600 figure is fewer than 0.09% of the 700,000 Venezuelans in the U.S., “many of whom feel they are being smeared.” Is Tren de Aragua acting at the behest of Venezuelan President Maduro? An assessment in the Washington Post based on information from various U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that the gang was in no way commanded by Maduro though it had some low level contacts in the Maduro government. 

 

“Mother and Son Who Helped Expose ‘Extermination Camp’ Killed in Jalisco, Mexico,” CNN, April 25, 2025

 

A mother and son who publicized what they called an “extermination camp” tied to organized crime were killed April 23 in the Mexican state of Jalisco, according to Mexican authorities and activists.  María del Carmen Morales, 43, and her son Jaime Daniel Ramirez Morales, 26, were active in Warrior Searchers of Jalisco, a group dedicated to finding missing people. In March, the group announced the discovery of the Izaguirre ranch, “a site with secret crematoriums and buried human remains, believed to have been a criminal group’s center of operations,” reported CNN’s Veronica Calderón and José Alvarez. [A March 14 CNN report said that advocates alleged the ranch was a cartel killing ground used to murder missing persons. Advocates said disappeared people were presumably taken there to be recruited and trained against their will. They said they found personal items such as clothing, hundreds of pairs of shoes, backpacks and IDs. The existence of these types of “forced recruitment and extermination” centers was an open secret, said an activist, but  actually hadn’t been seen before March. Human rights groups and relatives of the disappeared suggested that local authorities may have been covering up the existence of the “extermination camp.”] Morales’s other son, Ernesto Julián Ramirez Morales, disappeared February 24, 2024, in Jalisco in  Las Villas de Tlajomulco, according to Warrior Searchers. In the most recent case, the Jalisco Attorney’s office, which did not name the victims, said in a statement a pair of men on a motorcycle attacked the woman’s son Jaime around 11:30 p.m. on April 23. “While trying to defend him, his 43-year-old mother was also injured,” the statement said. “They both lost their lives.” The office said there was no evidence linking the activism of the mother and son to their violent deaths. But such a link is under investigation, it added. Warrior Searchers of Jalisco said Morales was the woman referred to in the statement. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said “this must be thoroughly investigated. There can be no conclusion like ‘it had nothing to do with [Morales’s] work.’ It must be thoroughly investigated.” Earlier in April, another woman, Teresa González, died after six days in the hospital following a gun attack in Jalisco.  González was attacked during an attempted kidnapping, said Luz de Esperanza Desaparecidos Jalisco, which also was involved in the investigations at the Izaguirre ranch. She was searching for her brother, who disappeared in February 2024 in the  city of Guadalajara, an area that has seen the most disappearances in Mexico in recent years. According to a March 20 Reuters report, the discovery of what local media called “the ranch of horror” has “shocked Mexico, a country numbed by nearly two decades of bloody cartel violence. While discovery of mass graves is not uncommon…the possibility this ranch was a site of systematic killing has caused a deep sense of horror.”  The Reuters report said dozens of families came to the ranch from across the country searching for lost loved ones and were finally given access to the ranch. One woman told the wire service she found a blue backpack and sweatshirt belonging to her son. Reuters said that more than 124,000 people have disappeared in Mexico and few have ever been found. The powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel is widely thought to have operated the ranch, according to Reuters, and has taken aim against the search groups, claiming they distorted facts to create a horror movie to damage the cartel’s image. 

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“Costa Rica Tells Deportees They Can Stay or Move On,” New York Times, April 24, 2025

 

Costa Rica says it is making it possible for dozens of migrants deported to the country from the United States to legally stay in the Central American country, or to leave if they want to. The head of Costa Rica’s migration authority, Omer Badilla, said officials were returning passports and other personal documents belonging to people detained since February in a remote facility hours from San Jose, the capital city. “If the person has a well-founded fear of returning to their country, we will never send them back,” he told The Times. “We will protect them.” Times reporter Emiliano Rodríguez Mega noted that in February, “200 migrants from countries including China, Iran, Russia and Afghanistan arrived in Costa Rica from the United States as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans.” They weren’t allowed to leave the remote facility, a former pencil factory near the Panamanian border, unless escorted by the police. “And they were held until they agreed to be repatriated to their homelands, which many had fled, or sought asylum by either Costa Rica or another country, according to the lawyers who filed a lawsuit last week against Costa Rica before a United Nations committee.” The suit charged that dozens of children lacked access to schooling or pediatricians or legal counsel while detained. More than 80 migrants are still at the facility, mainly families with children, according to Badilla. He said 87 returned to their countries of origin, 23 requested asylum in Costa Rica and six migrants from India, Pakistan and Afghanistan left without permission. A lawyer who was part of the lawsuit against Costa Rica said the country recognizes the urgent need for humanitarian aid of those detained, but more needs to be done, he said. A resolution published April 21 by the Costa Rican government provides for a three-month permit to leave the detention center though people can remain if they need a place to stay. But it does not allow migrants to work in Costa Rica. Badilla said they could all apply for asylum in the country, which would give them a legal path to employment. 

“Haitians Face Record Hunger as Gang Violence Grips Country in Throes of Economic Crisis,” Associated Press, April 17, 2025

 

[Posting out of chronological order to call attention to an earlier story.]

More than half of the population in Haiti is expected to suffer severe hunger through June, according to a report by a United Nations initiative called Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. Known as the IPC, the project also found that 8,400 people living in makeshift shelters in Haiti will experience “catastrophic” levels of hunger, or famine, meaning more than 20 percent of  them will die. The IPC uses a sliding scale of one to five to analyze global food insecurity and malnutrition to prioritize action https://www.ipcinfo.org/ipcinfo-website/ipc-overview-and-classification-system/en/. The number of Haitians facing severe hunger has increased by more than 300,000 since last year, the report said, to some 5.7 million people. Among those going hungry interviewed by AP was Jackie Jean-Jacques, who along with his wife and three sons lost their home to gang violence last year. “There are days when the kids have to live on sugar water and bread,” he said. “It hurts me to see that.” The family has been living in a crowded makeshift shelter for more than a year.  Jean-Jacques had been making money as a bus driver but could no longer afford to rent the bus or buy gas. “Besides, he worries that one day gangs would open fire on his public transportation vehicle like they have on others,” said the AP report by Evens Sanon and Dánaca Coto. Gang violence also contributes to hunger by disrupting transportation from the countryside, causing inflation. Jean-Jacques’ wife sells small plastic items on the street like cups and lunch boxes. “This is not enough to feed us,” he told AP. Food and potable water distributed at shelters began to dwindle after President Trump decided in February to end 90 percent of USAID foreign aid contracts. In the year that ended in February, nearly a million Haitians received monthly humanitarian food aid, though rations have been cut by half. It’s not enough, said Jean-Jacques. Some 2.85 million Haitian children – about a quarter of its child population – “are facing consistently high levels of food insecurity,” according to UNICEF, which faces a 70 percent funding shortfall. It has been helping only 4 percent of the estimated 129,000 Haitian children with severe malnutrition expected to need life-saving treatment in 2025. The U.N. World Food Program says it urgently needs $53.7 million to continue life-saving operations in Haiti over the next six months. Only 2 percent of Haiti was food-insecure in 2014. But Hurricane Matthew destroyed crops and livelihoods in 2016. Inflation and gang violence made matters worse. Jean Rose-Bertha told AP she can barely feed her two sons after gang violence chased them from their home. “I sometimes do things I’m not supposed to do,” she said, referring to engaging in prostitution.

“Fighting Against Drug Cartels, Mexico Targets Narco Ballads,” New York Times, April 24, 2025

 

Luis R. Conriquez took the stage earlier this month at a popular fair in Mexico, drawing a crowd attracted to his specialty of narcocorridos – “a version of the traditional Mexican ballads that celebrates drug cartels,” wrote Times reporter James Wagner. But instead of playing the songs he’s best known for, Conriquez said he’s joining a movement across Mexico to phase out narcocorridos. Critics say they promote the violence and other crime ravaging the country. When Conriquez and his band left the stage, the crowd booed and trashed their instruments. Despite the popularity of narcocorridos, “over the past month, more and more municipalities and states have virtually banned the genre, making it a crime to play music that celebrates the drug trade and other crimes,” said Wagner. In Mexico state, authorities said the songs could result in fines and jail sentences. “We believe that society has to start rejecting content that advocates for violence, drugs or misogyny,” Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said after the Conriquez concert. Corridos began in the middle of the 19^th century, according to José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, a sociology professor who has written extensively about the genre. They told stories about war heroes like Pancho Villa and important moments in history. As drug cartels gained power in the 1970s, lyrics dealt more with famous cartel leaders such as Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán. Singers became international stars. For example, Natanael Cano drew a record 310,000 people to a concert last year in Mexico. In 2023, Peso Pluma received 8.5 billion views on YouTube. But the current backlash against the genre is the strongest yet because of the position taken by Sheinbaum, experts say. She has announced a national talent contest offering record deals for corridos free of lyrics related to drugs and violence. She has rejected flat-out bans on the genre, however. Also, the Trump administration “has essentially pressured Mexican officials to act while also scaring musicians,” noted Wagner. The band Los Alegres del Barranco had their U.S. visas canceled last month when they performed with the picture of a top cartel leader displayed on stage. Nine major artists contacted by the Times would not comment. “Since February, at least seven cities or states have either effectively banned or introduced regulations for narcocorridos,” the Times reported. But Jesús Rosales Reza, playing narcocorridos one afternoon recently while working at his family’s clothing shop said “it’s up to each person. You can listen to corridos and not be a bad person.” 

“Mexico is Becoming a Beacon,” New York Times, April 23, 2025

 

There’s another type of migration taking place in the world – people from wealthier countries seeking new lives elsewhere, including in poorer countries, says writer Lydia Polgreen in a New York Times opinion piece. Mexico City illustrates the trend – for many years a point of departure for many of its most ambitious citizens who headed north to the United States. “These days, Mexico City is itself a beacon, drawing millions of visitors from across the world,” says Polgreen. “It is a pulsing center of global culture that rivals any of the great European capitals. Its historic parks and plazas have been reborn. It is a culinary juggernaut, where securing a seat to top restaurants requires ingenuity and once-obscure taco stands garner viral, TikTok-fueled fame.” The city’s thriving economy includes busy factories, high-tech start-ups, banking and insurance companies and an expanding global film and TV business. Many migrants are settling down in Mexico City, thwarted by the Trump administration sealing off the U.S. border. Young, educated Americans went to the city when the pandemic let them work outside their offices. Polgreen says Mexico City “offers the classic bargain enjoyed by citizens of wealthy countries who move to poorer ones. But young Americans I spoke to also talked about a sense of dwindling opportunity at home and, with Donald Trump’s return to the White House, a sense of political alienation. Offering the chance to live well for less under the leadership of a popular leftist president [Claudia Sheinbaum], Mexico provides a welcome antidote to both dissatisfactions.” Employers are looking for workers in Mexico City, creating opportunity for migrants from poor countries. But they face a system for processing asylum requests that is overwhelmed. In 2013, 1,295 people applied for asylum in Mexico. By 2023, that number rose to more than 140,000. The surging number of people seeking asylum led to migrants camping out in public squares without regular access to toilets or showers. Local residents began pressuring the Mexican government to move the migrants elsewhere. Journalists, writers, artists and scholars living in Mexico City complain that they’ve had to move out of neighborhoods popular with “global nomads” because of skyrocketing rents, said Polgreen. “In conversations with middle- and upper-class Chilangos, as the residents of Mexico City are called, it often seemed the wealthy interlopers from the north were a bigger problem than poor people coming from the south.” 

“Mexico’s President Punches Back Against Kristi Noem’s Anti-Migrant Ads,” New York Times, April 22, 2025

 

Ads broadcast on Mexican TV during prime time and during soccer games show U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blaming migrants for violent crime and drug trafficking in the U.S. In them she warns: “We will hunt you down.” They are a line in the sand for Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who has agreed to one demand after another by U.S. President Donald Trump to try to avoid or lessen his tariffs. On April 21 she called the ads “discriminatory” and asked Mexican broadcasters to remove them. “She went further on Tuesday [April 22],” reported Simon Romero and Paulina Villegas of the Times, “saying she will ask Mexico’s Congress to approve a measure to ban such ads from ever appearing again in Mexico.” In her daily news conference she said “we are going to change the law to prohibit foreign governments from carrying out political and ideological propaganda in our country.” The ads are part of a multimillion-dollar campaign by Noem’s department to persuade migrants not to cross illegally into the U.S. Another scheduled ad “shows Noem calling undocumented immigrants rapists, murderers and child molesters, and telling them to self-deport.” Among the steps taken by Sheinbaum to respond to complaints by Trump are deploying ten thousand troops to stop migrants from reaching the border; handing over to U.S. authorities dozens of Mexican cartel operatives; and receiving intelligence from C.I.A. drone flights to find others. It also has made record seizures of fentanyl and imposed its own tariffs on imports from China. However, Sheinbaum has made it clear that she opposes threats by Trump and other Republicans to take unilateral military action against cartel operations inside Mexico. Coordination yes, submission never, she says. She also has sought to reassure Mexicans inside the U.S. who are facing expulsion. Her initiative “Mexico Embraces You” plans reception centers along the border with massive tents and mobile kitchens. Mexican natives make up the largest number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. 

“Colombian President Says US Has Revoked His Visa and Appears to Mock Trump as ‘Donald Duck,’” The Independent, April 22, 2025

 

Colombian President Gustavo Petro says the Trump administration has yanked his U.S. visa. The U.S. State Department did not immediately confirm the claim. In January, Petro had refused to accept Colombian deportees from the U.S. and then relented. “I didn’t really need a visa, but anyway, I’ve already seen Donald Duck several times, so I’ll go see other things,” he said during a televised meeting of his cabinet. While it wasn’t immediately clear whether he was referring to Trump or the Walt Disney character, Trump has been mocked before as Donald Duck, notably by former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. Christie did so for Trump’s refusal in 2023 to debate candidates for the Republican presidential nomination. Petro had blocked two deportation flights in January on grounds that those being deported were not being treated with dignity. He criticized the U.S. deportation policy more recently, saying “no democratic-minded person in Latin America can accept that all of the Venezuelan people in exile are criminalized because of the crimes of the so-called ‘Tren de Aragua.’” The Independent’s John Borden reported that nearly 200,000 Colombian nationals were living in the U.S. without legal status in 2022, citing a Pew Research Group analysis. 

“Pope Francis, the Argentine Pontiff, Never Returned Home,” Reuters, April 22, 2025

 

After he left Argentina in 2013 to become head of the Catholic church, Pope Francis never went back, disappointing many who longed for him to make a return visit. “One of the great curiosities of his papacy was the fact that, unlike his predecessors, Francis never visited his native country,” said Jimmy Burns, author of the 2105 biography “Francis, Pope of Good Promise.” Burns said he thought Francis did not want to appear to be siding with either the left or the right in polarized Argentina, and any visit would have been exploited by one side or the other as an endorsement. Sergio Rubin, author of the papal biography “The Jesuit,” said “there are those who say that he should have come anyway because it wouud have helped close the political rift a little.” Rogelio Prifter, ambassadeor to the Vatican from 2016 to 2018 and at one time a student of Francis, said “I have no doubt that everything Argentine and the homeland itself is something that has a special place in his mind and in his heart.” But of one his greatest legacies has been “making a papacy for everyone.” Reuters reporter Lucila Sigal wrote that last year Pope Francis talked about returning to Argentina, saying “these are my people,” but said there were other matters he had to attend to first. He made more than 45 international trips during his papacy, including places no pope had visited before such as Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Myanmar, North Macedonia, Bahrain and Mongolia. “I’m very sad,” 83-year-old Buenos  Aires resident Rita Hernandez told Sigal, alluding to other trips he made to the region but not to Argentina. “Sometimes I ask (in prayer) why he didn’t return to see his children? I feel a pain. It’s as if he had walked past the patio of his house but never came in.” 

 

“Pope Francis, the First Latin American Pope, Dies at 88,” New York Times, April 21, 2025

 

Born far from Rome in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Pope Francis, the first Jesuit and Latin American pontiff, brought a more global dimension to the Catholic Church. “He clashed bitterly with traditionalists in his push for a more inclusive Roman Catholic Church,” and “spoke out tirelessly for migrants, the marginalized and the health of the planet,” wrote Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley of the New York Times. “He traveled to often-forgotten and far-flung countries and sought to improve relations with an antagonistic Chinese government, Muslim clerics and leaders from across the fragmented Christian world.” Perhaps the most surprising thing about his 12-year papacy was that he became pope at all. In his first remarks from the balcony as pontiff, “he joked about being from Argentina, noting that in  fulfilling their duty to produce a pope, ‘it seems that my brother cardinals have gone almost to the ends of the earth to get him.’” Influenced by his Latin American roots, he saw the world differently than popes before him, the Times reporters said. He was the first to take his name from St. Francis of Assisi, who dedicated his life to the poor. With the church facing increasing competition in Latin America from Protestant evangelicals and Pentecostals, “he soon tried to move the church away from divisive issues like abortion and homosexuality and shifted its emphasis to global problems like climate change, poverty and migration,” the Times obit said. He “linked Catholic theology to protecting the environment and championing those on the margins, while denouncing the excesses of global capitalism in exploiting the poor.” He repeatedly visited people and places often overlooked. Before he became pope his name was Jorge Mario Bergoglio. Ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1969, he embraced the Jesuit legacy of resisting the worst colonial abuses by remaining close to the poor, respecting Indigenous peoples, and resisting European expansion. During an era in which Argentina’s military government was torturing and killing thousands of opponents, church higher-ups aligned with the ruling class while many Jesuits embraced liberation theology calling on the church to be an agent of change siding with the poor. Bergoglio shared the view of local church leaders that liberation theology was too political and came under fire as leader of the Argentine Jesuits for doing too little to protect two priests who were kidnapped and tortured by the government. Biographers challenged those allegations, but one of the two priests remained bitter toward him. Viewed as too autocratic a leader of the Jesuits, church authorities exiled him with an assignment in Germany. He regained a prominent role, however, and as archbishop of Buenos Aires during Argentina’s 2001-02 economic crisis he set up food kitchens, tripled the priests working in the slums, and built schools and drug rehab centers. “His suspicion of secular ideologies and theories, including capitalism, deepened,” the Times said. “He contended that left-wing ideologies deified the state and economic neoliberalism eviscerated it.” His papacy was of a piece with his focus on the poor in Argentina. He brokered a reconciliation between the United States and Cuba, and his diplomats helped negotiate a peace deal that ended the decades-long civil war in Colombia. He spoke up for the migrants trying to reach Europe in 2015 and suggested that Donald Trump was not a Christian because he preferred to build walls than bridges. He battled with U.S. bishops and cardinals who viewed his inclusiveness on issues such as homosexuality and communion for divorced and remarried Catholics as watering down church doctrine. Some opponents wanted to remove him from the papacy but he outmaneuvered them. The naming of Francis as pope appeared to signal a church crackdown on protection of priests who sexually abused children and the bishops who protected the priests, but he was initially a disappointment to those victims. He defended  a bishop in Chile accused of covering up for an abusive priest, telling a Chilean reporter that the bishop was a victim of slander. But the strong backlash against him outside and even in the church caused him to reverse himself and admit “grave errors” in the handling of sex abuse cases. He accepted the resignation of the Chilean bishop and befriended victims he earlier accused of slander. He called bishops from around the world to Rome in 2019 to a meeting on protecting minors. He issued a seminal document requiring church officials around the world to not only report cases of sexual abuse to their superiors but also attempts to cover them up. It did not require officials to report abuse accusations to police and prosecutors, outraging abuse victims. Perhaps his biggest impact on the church, the Times obit suggests, was his willingness to open up questions for debate, perhaps opening the way for eventual deep changes. “Francis did not stifle views he disagreed with and believed in a patient process – he called it discernment – in which ideas and proposals could be weighed before going forward,” wrote Horowitz and Yardley. “’Bosses cannot always do what they want,’ he told Reuters in 2018. ‘They have to convince.’"

“El Salvador Proposes Freeing Deported Venezuelans in Deal to Maduro,” New York Times, April 21, 2025

 

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador proposed April 20 sending the 252 deported Venezuelans jailed in his country’s megaprison back to their home country  of Venezuela in exchange for the release of an equal number of  prisoners imprisoned in that South American country.  Those prisoners would include key members of the Venezuelan opposition.  Bukele made the proposal in a post on X directed at President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. The Venezuelan attorney general responded to Bukele by demanding the release of all of the detained Venezuelan prisoners. Tarek William Saab did not say whether the Venezuelan government would consider the proposal. Bukele said he would  require the release of “nearly 50 detained citizens of other nationalities” including Americans. The Venezuelan watchdog group Foro Penal said that as of last month at least 68 foreign passport holders were wrongfully imprisoned in Venezuela. According to a New York Times investigation (see next story), most of the 238 Venezuelan men who were in the first planes sent by the U.S. government to El Salvador did not have criminal records other than immigration violations and few had clear links to Tren de Aragua, the violent Venezuela-based gang.  President Trump had cited membership in the gang as the reason for expelling the men from the U.S. and to the El Salvador prison. Times reporters Annie Correal and Julie Turkewitz reported that “the detention of critics and other politically useful figures comes as Mr. Maduro has lost support at home and abroad and has sought new forms of leverage. His goals include pushing the United States to renegotiate sanctions on his government.” [Unclear from the story was why Times editors chose to refer to the proposed release of the detained Venezuelans as “freeing” them.  Although they would escape the reportedly brutal conditions of the El Salvador prison, returning to Venezuela could also expose them to brutality. According to media reports, many Venezuelans have left their home country because of government repression and an impoverished economy].

“Labeled ‘Alien Enemies’ and Banished, With Little or No Evidence,” New York Times, April 17, 2025

 

Most of the 238 men deported in the middle of March under the Alien Enemies Act -- and sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador with little or no opportunity to contest the allegations against them --“do not have criminal records in the United States or elsewhere in the region, beyond immigration offenses,” a New York Times investigation concluded April 17. “And very few of them appear to have any clear, documented links to the Venezuelan gang” Tren de Aragua, a finding at odds with the Trump administration’s justification for deporting the men on the grounds that they were all members of the violent Venezuelan gang. “As they were being expelled, the detainees  repeatedly begged officials to explain why they were being deported, and where they were being taken,” the Times recounted, citing statements in court by one of their lawyers. “At no point, the lawyer said, did officers indicate that the men were being sent to El Salvador or that they were removed under the Alien Enemies Act.” Last week, the  U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that individuals targeted under the Act must be given time to contest their removal before it occurs. The administration has said that the men can still challenge their imprisonment, but that’s hard if not impossible to do because they are in a foreign prison beyond the reach of the U.S. system with little [or no?] access to lawyers or family members. “They should stay there for the rest of their lives,” said Kristi Noem, U.S. homeland security secretary. Officials said they used criminal records, social media, surveillance data, interviews with migrants and other information including tattoos as the basis of their accusations. The Times drew starkly different conclusions talking to law enforcement officials and  examining court documents and media reports in multiple countries. The newspaper said reporters and researchers ran the 238 names through three U.S. public records databases; checked backgrounds in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Chile; scrutinized court records and news articles; spoke to dozens of family members; and interviewed experts on Tren de Aragua. Though most did not have criminal records or evidence of ties to gangs, “some of the prisoners do appear to have committed grave crimes,” the Times said. At least 32 of the men have been accused or convicted of serious crimes in the U.S. or overseas. Examples include a man accused of taking part in an assault in Chicago, a man convicted of trying to smuggle arms out of the U.S. and “others accused of theft, strangulation, domestic battery or harboring undocumented immigrants.” Both El Salvador and the U.S. have refused to release a list of the names of the men deported to the El Salvador prison or to confirm to their families they are there. The Times obtained an internal government list of the names it used to carry out its investigation.  An uncle of one of the men detained, a pastor in Venezuela, told the Times that he used to believe that the United States was “God’s policeman on earth.” In Caracas the family had become used to seeing people taken away without a trial. Now “what we have seen here” in Venezuela “we are also seeing there,” he said. 

 

“Literary Voice That Thundered Beyond Borders,” New  York Times, April 15, 2025

 

Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa died April 13 in Lima at the age of 89. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010, Vargas Llosa “combined gritty realism with playful erotica and depictions of the struggle for individual liberty in Latin America, while also writing essays that made him one of the most influential political commentators in the Spanish-speaking world,” wrote Times reporter Simon Romero. He was never fully enamored of the magical realism of other Latin American novelists of his era. He broke away from the leftist idealism of many other writers in the region, disillusioned by Fidel Castro’s persecution of dissidents in Cuba. His first novel was “Time of the Hero,” a critical account of military life published in 1963. His 1969 novel, “Conversation in the Cathedral,” is often considered his best work. It depicted “Peru’s malaise under Gen. Manuel Odrila’s military dictatorship during the 1950s,” Romero said. He wrote a fortnightly column called “Touchstone” that appeared in newspapers throughout Latin America and the United States. “We do have a number of venerable newspaper columnists in the United States, but who among them has the stature of Vargas Llosa in Hispanic civilization?” asked literary critic Ilan Stavans in 2003. “He’s a polymath who wears his wisdom lightly, with eyes and ears everywhere and a voice as loud as thunder.” Vargas Llosa campaigned unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1990. He championed free-market causes, among them the privatization of state enterprises and reducing inflation by cutting government spending including through layoffs of what Romero described as a “bloated” civil service. In an appraisal that also appeared April 15 in the Times, Dwight Garner called him “the world’s savviest and most accomplished political novelist.” The intense research involved was akin to that of the biographer Robert Caro, said Garner. The committee that awarded him the  Nobel Prize praised his “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.” 

“Ecuador’s Noboa Re-elected in  Vote Seen as Test of His ‘War on Drugs,’” The Guardian, April 14, 2025

 

Ecuador’s right-wing president, Daniel Noboa, defeated left-wing candidate Luisa Gonzalez in a presidential run-off April 13, winning 55.6 percent of the vote to her 44.4 percent. Noboa said the victory, which keeps him in office until 2029, was historic – “a victory by more than 10 points, a victory by over a million votes, leaving no doubt about who the winner is.” U.S. President Donald Trump congratulated Noboa, calling him a “great leader” and saying “he will not let you down,” reported The Guardian’s Tiago Rogero.  Gonzalez said she wouldn’t accept the results, saying there’d been “grotesque” fraud and that she would request a recount.  But the Organization of American States, which observed the election, expressed confidence April 14 in the results. “The margin of victory – more than 1.1m  votes – was significantly larger than suggested by opinion polls, which had indicated a technical tie, as well as the first round in February, when Noboa had beaten Gonzalez by just 16,746 votes (o.17%),” noted Rogero. Noboa’s record as president has been marked by the use of the armed forces against violent drug traffickers. Ecuador was once among the safest countries in Latin America but in 2024 had the region’s highest homicide rate. Noboa’s mano dura (iron fist) offensive at first led to a drop in crime but was followed by a surge in reports of human rights violations and then a return to earlier levels of violence. 

“The Constitutional Crisis Is Here,” The Atlantic,  April 14, 2025, by Adam Serwer

 

In this analysis in The Atlantic magazine,  staff writer Adam Serwer says the Trump administration faced a choice between outright defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court and following its order to “facilitate” the return of mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador’s infamous Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (see next story). The Trump administration “has chosen a third way: pretending it is complying while refusing to do so,”  Serwer said. El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, speaking to reporters  April 14  during a visit to the White House, ridiculed the idea that he could return a “terrorist” to the United States. Writes Serwer:  "This rhetorical game the administration is playing, where it pretends it lacks the power to ask for Abrego Garcia to be returned while Bukele pretends he doesn’t have the power to return him, is an expression of obvious contempt for the Supreme Court—and for the rule of law.” The Trump administration “is maintaining that it has the power to send armed agents of the state to grab someone off the street and then, without a shred of due process, deport them to a Gulag in a foreign country and leave them there forever.” Trump’s " defiance of a Supreme Court order is a new step into presidential lawlessness, in that it suggests that the administration will not abide by any court orders it does not feel like complying with." Now the U.S. Supreme Court faces a moment of truth. "The Roberts Court will now have to decide whether to side with the Constitution or with a lawless president asserting the power to disappear people at will." Evidence that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist or a gang member is “negligible,” said Serwer. On March 15 Abrego Garcia was sent to the Salvadoran prison along with hundreds of other men, 90 percent of whom have no criminal record. He has “fewer criminal convictions than the current president of the United States.” The Trump administration has stated in federal court that it deported Abrego Garcia “in error.” But Trump adviser Stephen Miller claimed on Fox News the morning of April 14^th that the acknowledgement of wrongful deportation was made by a “saboteur” in the Department of Justice and that it was not a mistake he was sent to El Salvador. “This is a lie – the admission of error was made by an ICE official in a court filing,” said Serwer.  The Trump administration has seized on language in the Supreme Court ruling saying that the lower court order to bring Abrego Garcia back should be clarified “with due regard for the deference owed to the Executiv Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.” Trump officials interpret that to mean they don’t have to follow the order at all. “During the Oval Office meeting, Rubio chimed in to say that ‘no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.’”  Serwer continues, “The crucial point here is that the administration’s logic means that it could do the same to American citizens—after all, if deporting someone under a protective order to a Gulag without so much as a hearing is a ‘foreign policy’ matter with which no court may interfere, then the citizenship of the condemned person doesn’t matter." Trump already is looking at deporting U.S. citizens to the prison in El Salvador. “Aside from numerous public statements to that effect, Trump told Bukele, in an exchange posted on Bukele’s X feed, 'Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places.' Loud laughter filled the Oval Office."

“El Salvador’s President Says He Won’t Return Mistakenly Deported Man to U.S.”, NBC News, April 14, 2025

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said at the White House April 14 he won’t return a man mistakenly deported from the United States and imprisoned in his country, claiming the man is a “terrorist.” Sitting beside President Donald Trump in the Oval Office, Bukele asked “How can I return him to the United States: Like if I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.” Trump said the assembled reporters would “love to have a criminal released into our country. These are sick people.” The deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, “has never been charged criminally in the United States or El Salvador, according to court filings,” reported Dareh Gregorian, Katherine Doyle and Lawrence Hurley of NBC News. At the Oval Office, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he was puzzled by the “confusion” over the U.S. Supreme Court order that the Trump administration “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia while instructing the lower court handling the matter to do so consistent with the authority of the Executive Branch. Rubio said “the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the president of the United States, not by a court, and no court in the United States has a right to conduct foreign policy of the United States.” Trump advisor Stephen Miller denied that Abrego Garcia had been deported to El Salvador because of an administrative error, despite filings by the Trump Justice Department saying so. “This was the right person sent to the right place,” he told Fox News. He added that if Bukele returned Abrego Garcia to the U.S. “he would be deported the second time to El Salvador.” U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said “if they want to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane. That’s up for El Salvador if they want to return him. That’s not up to us.” During the Oval Office meeting with the press, no Trump administration officials asked Bukele to return Abrego Garcia. His lawyers said the U.S. has more control over prisoners in the jail where he is being held than it claims, noting that the Trump administration is paying El Salvador $6 million to keep prisoners there. At first, the Trump administration ignored an order by the lower court judge that it provide an update on Abrego Garcia’s whereabouts and well-being. Later, in a filing April 12, it said he “is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. He is alive and secure in that facility.” Maryland U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat, said “they are clearly just snubbing their nose at the courts, including the Supreme Court. And the courts, in my view, need to exercise their ability to sanction people who ignore court orders.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Bukele’s comments were “pure nonsense.” Schumer said “the law is clear, due process was grossly violated. He should be returned to the U.S. immediately.” 

“Panama Opposition Party Accuses U.S. of ‘Camouflaged Invasion,’” April 12, 2025

Politicians in Panama discontent with the government’s concessions to U.S. President Donald Trump say the United States has launched a “camouflaged invasion” of their country. Following a three-day visit to Panama by U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump said April 10 “we’ve moved a lot of troops to Panama.” Hegseth said the U.S. is increasing its military presence at three former U.S. bases in Panama to secure the Panama Canal from Chinese influence. Under the 1997 Torrijos-Carter treaty, the U.S. agreed to a neutrality provision which says no foreign power can “maintain military forces, defense sites and military installations within its national territory.” Guardian reporter Mat Youkee wrote that the comments by Hegseth and Trump “have prompted outrage in Panama.” Ricardo Lombana, leader of the opposition Other Way Movement, said “this is a camouflaged invasion. An invasion without firing a shot, but with a cudgel and threats.” A new memorandum of understanding signed by the U.S. and Panama does not impinge on the latter’s sovereignty, said Frank Abrego, Panama’s minister of public security.  He added that Panama would not accept military bases. But the memorandum included aerial photos of Fort Sherman, Rodman naval base and Howard air force base. They showed areas outlined for “training,” “humanitarian activities,” and the “installation of U.S. property.” Lombana said that “if you have an installation which is for the use of foreign soldiers and they have control over what happens inside – and Panama has to ask in advance to enter – that’s a military base.” Youkee noted that the return of U.S. armed forces to Panama even if for supposed “joint operations” will bring back disturbing memories for many Panamanians. During Operation Just Cause in 1989, “American troops killed hundreds of civilians,” Youkee wrote. Trump declared his intent in his January 20 inauguration speech to “take back” the Panama Canal. Since then, all conversation on that topic has mainly been through Panama’s president, José Raúl Mulino. Frustration is growing with his handling of the crisis. Details of his negotiations with the U.S. have largely been kept secret. Also, Mulino has chosen to avoid engaging with Canada and Mexico and other countries to enlist support for his country’s cause. The Panamanian chapter of Transparency International said “the country requires transparency in order to achieve unity against this threat to our sovereignty.” Two-thirds of Panamanians disapprove of the way Mulino is running the country, according to one consulting firm survey.  Under a second agreement with Trump agreed to by Mulino, U.S. navy ships can be reimbursed for the fees they pay the Canal. “That preferential treatment would appear to violate the neutrality [agreement] and could open the door to further attempts to negotiate down the fees charged by the canal,” The Guardian said.  

 “Trump DoJ Unable to Tell Court Where Man Wrongly Deported to El Salvador Is,” The Guardian, April 11, 2025

After the U.S. Supreme Court April 10 upheld the order of a federal judge to return to the United States a migrant wrongly deported to El Salvador, lawyers for the Trump administration were unable April 11 to answer the judge’s directive that they tell her court where and how the man is. “I’m not asking for state secrets,” said U.S. district judge Paula Xinis, referring to Kilmar Abrego García, who after his deportation was imprisoned in El Salvador’s notorious megaprison that holds thousands of gang members. “All I know is that he is not here,” said Xinis, who originally ordered the return of Abrego García by April 7, an order paused by the U.S. Supreme Court. “The government was prohibited from sending him to El Salvador, and now I’m asking a very simple question: where is he?” The Supreme Court later upheld the order of the judge to facilitate the return of Abrego García and instructed Xinis to clarify the meaning of her original order to “effectuate” his return (see next story). She quickly filed a new order telling the Trump administration to “take all available steps” to ease his return “as soon as possible” and to report on his status by 9:30 the morning of April 11. Guardian reporter Lucy Campbell, based on her own reporting and coverage by news agencies, said “the administration defied her order for details on how or when it would retrieve Abrego García and claimed she had not given them enough time to prepare.” Xinis said “I’m not sure what to take from the fact that the supreme court has spoken quite clearly and yet I can’t get an answer today about what you’ve done, if anything, in the past,” Campbell reported. Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign said the administration would provide the information requested by the end of Tuesday, April 15, after it evaluated the Supreme Court ruling. Xinis then asked “have they done anything?” Ensign said he had no personal knowledge of what had been done. “So that means they’ve done nothing,” Xinis responded. An administration filing earlier April 11 said “foreign affairs cannot operate on judicial timelines, in part because it involves sensitive country-specific considerations wholly inappropriate for judicial review.” Lawyers for Abrego García said “the government continues to delay, obfuscate, and flout court orders, while a man’s life and safety is at risk.” Xinis instructed the administration to provide her with daily updates on what it is doing to bring Abrego García, a Maryland resident, home. Some observers assert that the Trump administration is now entering into defiance of the judicial branch. Administration filings suggested other possible avenues away from compliance that would lead to further delay. An April 7 filing asserted that while it was an error to deport him to El Salvador, it was not an error to deport him. Another filing said the court hasn’t clarified what it means to facilitate the return as it relates to this case as the plaintiff is in the custody of a foreign sovereign nation. “Defendants request – and require – the opportunity to brief that issue prior to being subject to any compliance deadlines,” the filing said. Xinis said April 11 “we’re not going to slow-walk this,” according to a Newsweek report cited by The Guardian. “We’re not relitigating what the supreme court already put to bed.” 

Excerpt From “Morning Shots,” The Bulwark, April 11, 2025, by William Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift 

The last 12 hours have seen major developments in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the migrant wrongfully deported to prison in El Salvador earlier this year despite a judge’s order barring exactly that. Last night, the Supreme Court issued an unsigned, unopposed opinion ruling that the White House must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, saying a lower court’s order “properly requires the Government . . . to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”

SCOTUS ordered the Maryland federal court to clarify its order compelling the administration to try to retrieve Abrego Garcia—which Judge Paula Xinis promptly did in a filing last night, ordering the government  to “take all available steps” to facilitate the prisoner’s return “as soon as possible” and to report on his status by 9:30 this morning. The ball is now back in the White House’s court. Will they defy the order or merely play games with the language of it? We anxiously await.

“In a Flash, a Dominican Club Became a Graveyard,” New York Times, April 10, 2025

The roof collapse April 7 in Santo Domingo of Jet Set, an iconic disco in the capital of the Dominican Republic, turned a joyful gathering spot into a scene of mass suffering in which at least 124 lives were lost. Jet Set “was known as an upscale hangout for the city’s elite and political class, where top artists performed,” wrote Times reporter Frances Robles. Prominent among the victims was Rubby Pérez, the merengue singer who was performing at the time slabs of cement began falling down on people in the nightclub. Pérez was known as the loudest voice in merengue, recounted Robles. “Jet Set was a symbol,” said José Antonio Rodriguez, former Dominican minister of culture. “You have to understand: The Dominican is a partyer. They like to get together with friends – and Jet Set was a place for that.” Also among the dead was the owner of one of the country’s most prestigious banks; Nelsy Cruz, the governor of the province of Monte Cristi and the brother of all-star Major League Baseball player Nelson Cruz; and former Major League Baseball players Octavio Dorel and Tony Blanco. “Pedro Martinez, a Hall of Fame pitcher, said in a social media post that several family members were still in the club’s rubble,” the Times said.  After more than 150 rescues, no other people had been brought out alive since the afternoon of April 8.  Rosa Rabin, a South Florida singer who used to perform at Jet Set, recalled  Pérez as  a charismatic entertainer who would be especially missed. Pérez had started his career as lead vocalist for the merengue band leader Wilfrido Vargas. “He was a very important figure in our music and our culture,”  said Rabin. “He was part of our culture.” Carlos Santos, a TV and radio producer, said “with Jet Set they bury the capital’s tradition of musical group performances. At the moment, there is no club that has the history, the trajectory or the time that Jet Set had.” Said Rabin: “There was no group that didn’t go there.” 

 

“The IMF Reaches a Deal with Troubled Argentina on a $20 Billion Bailout,” Associated Press, April 9, 2025

 

Under a preliminary agreement announced April 6 by the International Monetary Fund, Argentina will receive a $20 billion bailout, welcome news for President Javier Milei as he seeks to overhaul the economy. The measure still requires approval from IMF’s executive board. AP reporter Isabel Debre describes the package as a “lifeline” for Milei. “His policies have reversed the reckless borrowing of left-wing populist governments that had brought Argentina infamy for defaulting on its debts. The country has received more IMF bailouts than any other.” It comes at a critical moment for South America’s second-largest economy, she added. “Pressure had been mounting on Argentina’s rapidly depleting foreign exchange reserves as the government tightened rules on money-printing and burned through its scarce dollar to prop up the wobbly Argentine peso.” Fears had grown that without the loan the government’s austerity-measures would veer off-track. 

 

“Indigenous March in Brazil to Demand More Land Be Set Aside for Their Stewardship,” Associated Press, April 8, 2025

Thousands of Indigenous people marched April 8 in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, demanding a guarantee and an expansion of rights to their traditional lands as part of countering the world’s climate crisis. The first U.N. climate talks in the Amazon are approaching. “Indigenous territories are the most preserved and contribute to slowing the climate crisis we’re facing,” said one marcher, Luene Karipuna of the Amazonian state of Amapà.  “But they are also the first to be impacted. We feel it directly in our lands where we lost our entire cassava crop – our staple food in my community,” she told AP reporter Fabiano Maisonnave. “Thirteen percent of Brazil’s territory consists of recognized Indigenous lands, most of it in the Amazon,” he wrote. Indigenous leaders plan to attend the climate talks, known as COP 30, in the Brazilian city of Belem in November. “This is a historic COP for the social movement,” said Juan Carlos Jintiach, an Indigenous leader from Ecuador. “It’s a key moment for all Indigenous peoples to show that we are alive.” Another Indigenous leader, Dinamam Tuxá of Brazil, said COP “does not engage directly with Indigenous peoples at the negotiation tables – even though we are the main defenders of these territories and are actively fighting climate change.” The Amazon basin the past two years has recorded its worst drought ever. It led to “a surge in wildfires, isolation for river communities, crop losses and the death of wildlife, including the endangered pink dolphin,” Maisonnave reported. “Some studies have linked the region’s extreme weather to climate change.” The Amazon is a region roughly twice the size of India. It is the world’s largest tropical forest, a major carbon sink and climate regulator, and contains 20 percent of the fresh water in the world. 

“Supreme Court Permits Trump to Use Wartime Law for Deportations, for Now and With Limits,” Iowa Capital Dispatch, April 7, 2025

The U.S. Supreme Court decided April 7 that, for now, the Trump administration can keep using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to quickly deport Venezuelans suspected of being gang members but they must first have a chance to challenge the deportation in court. The 5 to 4 decision says immigrants subject to the wartime law must have “reasonable notice” to challenge the deportation before it occurs, wrote Ariana Figueroa of the Iowa Capital Dispatch. However, the plaintiffs who brought the case against their removal, originally five men in Texas but later a class action suit, erred in bringing it in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia when it should have been filed in Texas, Justices ruled. They did not address whether the government interpreted the Act correctly or the argument of the plaintiffs that they did not fall in the category of aliens that should be removed. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in dissent that “the Court’s legal conclusion is suspect.” She faulted the majority opinion for failing to note the harm that could come to those deported under the Alien Enemies Act. A total of 238 men have already been deported under the Act and are now in a brutal megaprison in El Salvador. Nor did the majority address “the Government’s attempts to subvert the judicial process throughout this litigation,” she said. “Because the Court should not reward the Government’s efforts to erode the rule of law with discretionary equitable relief, I respectfully dissent.” The effect of the ruling was to lift a temporary restraining order on use of the Act put in place by U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg. The American Civil Liberties Union had asked the Supreme Court to keep the temporary restraining order in place because it said it was increasingly clear that many of the men deported to the El Salvador prison were not members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang and were “erroneously listed” as such because of their tattoos. [The Justices did not address the issue of what should now happen with the  238 men who were deported under the Act to the prison in El Salvador but were not given a chance to challenge their deportations – should they be returned to the U.S. for example to give them a chance to file a challenge.] 

“Supreme Court Temporarily Blocks Order Requiring Return of Wrongly Deported Migrant,” New York Times, April 7, 2025

Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., acting on his own, temporarily blocked the order of a federal judge that  the Trump administration return  by the end of April 7 a migrant it mistakenly deported. The “administrative stay” is intended to give the Supreme Court some time to consider the matter. The Trump administration had asked the high court to block the order by Paula Xinis, a federal district court judge in Maryland. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said Xinis exceeded her authority by practicing “district court diplomacy” because the order would require working with the government of El Salvador to secure the release of the migrant, Kilmar Armando Garcia, from a notorious El Salvador prison.  “If this precedent stands, other district courts could order the United States to successfully negotiate the return of other removed aliens anywhere in the world by close of business. Under that logic, district courts would effectively have extraterritorial jurisdiction over the United States’ diplomatic relations with the whole world.” Abrego Garcia’s lawyers responded said he “sits in a foreign prison solely at the behest of the United States, as the product of a Kafka-esque mistake.” They said “the district court’s order instructing the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return is routine. It does not implicate foreign policy or even domestic immigration policy in any case.” A three-judge federal appeals court panel  had rejected the Justice Department’s request to pause the order to return Abrego Garcia. 

“A Judge Refused to Pause Her Order That the Trump Administration Return a Deported Maryland Man,” New York Times, April 6, 2025

After the Trump administration April 5 slammed a judicial order that a wrongly deported Maryland man be returned to the United States no later than Monday, April 6, the federal judge who issued the order rejected a request by the Justice Department that it be paused while a federal appeals court considers its validity. The Trump administration committed a “grievous error” that “shocks the conscience” by inadvertently deporting the Salvadoran migrant to a notorious prison in El Salvador and then declaring there was little it could do to bring him back, judge Paula Xinis said April 6. [According to an April 5 Washington Post account headlined “DoJ Says Judge Can’t Order Return of Salvadoran Man Wrongly Deported,” the Justice Department had attacked the judge’s order to return  Kilmar Abrego García by saying it was “indefensible” and that the U.S. had “no authority” to make a sovereign nation to release the man.]   Xinis said April 6, according to the Times, that “as defendants acknowledge, they had no legal authority to arrest him, no justification to detain him, and no grounds to send him to El Salvador – let alone deliver him into one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western hemisphere. Having confessed grievous error, the defendants now argue that this court lacks the power to hear this case, and they lack the power to order Abrego García’s return.” Although the administration acknowledged that it was an error to send Abrego García to El Salvador, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said April 6 that according to testimony from immigration agents Abrego García was a gang member. Xinis said that claim was based on a “singular unsubstantiated allegation.” She said “the ‘evidence’ against Abrego García consisted of nothing more than his Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and a vague uncorroborated allegation from a confidential informant claiming he belonged to MS-13’s ‘Western’ clique in New York – a place he has never lived.”

“Costa Rica Looks to El Salvador’s Gang Crackdown for Path to Stopping Violence,” Associated Press, April 4, 2025

Costa Rica’s top security official toured El Salvador’s maximum-security gang prison April 4 “to see the good practices of the Salvadoran people with the goal of combating crime and [of] returning rights to all citizens.”  So said Costa Rica Justice and Peace Minister Gerald Campos Valverde, who is undertaking a review of the security measures El Salvador has employed during a three-year crackdown to cut violence caused by powerful street gangs.  AP reporter Marcos Alemán said Campos was visiting on the orders of Costa Rica’s president Rodrigo Chaves. “Costa Rica continues to struggle with historically high homicide numbers,” observed Alemán. “In 2023, Costa Rica set a homicide record with 907, down somewhat in 2024 to 880. So far this year, the country is on nearly the same homicide pace as last year, according to government data.” The mass jailing of gang members in El Salvador in the maximum security prison has caused the country’s extremely high rate of homicides to plummet. [Brutal conditions in the huge facility have attracted wider press attention in recent days because of the imprisonment there of Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration, many of them without a criminal record, according to media reports].  Campos, the Costa Rican official, said “the good practices” of El Salvador will be taken back to Costa Rica to give people  “a place of peace and tranquility.” Homicides there have risen largely because of drug trafficking. The country has become “a key way station for cocaine exports to Europe and the United States,” Alemán wrote. In November, Costa Rica gave its highest diplomatic honor to El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, for lowering gang violence. “El Salvador’s rescue from those nefarious claws is also helping the peace in our region,” said Chaves, the Costa Rican president. “The fight against organized crime in any part of Central America is welcome. The reach and influence and bad example of the gangs must be reduced.” Bukele declared a state of emergency in launching the three-year crackdown which suspended such fundamental rights as access to a lawyer. Bukele has a legislative majority and has remade the courts to remove opposition, unlike Chaves. Campos said after his tour of the prison complex that Costa Rica would not keep allowing criminals arrested by its police to be quickly freed by the judicial system. 

A Reader Reacts……

David Klein, a longtime American resident of Costa Rica, offers his views on the question of whether Costa Rica has a problem with criminal violence on a scale that El Salvador once had.  

“Well, no.  We do not have a problem like what El Salvador was facing every year before Bukele came into power and took a totally new approach.  The homicide rate in El Salvador was like five times what ours is here nowadays. 

.

Costa Rica had one-half of the U.S homicide rate when I moved here in 1995.  But now we have a homicide rate three times higher than what you have in the States.

 

Costa Rica was in a three-nation 'island'-- Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua -- that had low homicide rates. To the south of our 'island' was Colombia with its drug cartels and homicide rates like what El Salvador once had. To the immediate north of our island were four high-homicide nations, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and non-Latino Belize. The three Spanish-speaking nations in that group were deeply afflicted by maras, street gangs that extorted money from everyone and killed whoever they chose with impunity. To the north of them was Mexico with its terrible cartel violence, kidnappings, disappearances and femicide.  Totally out of control then, and regionally it still is. No government, whatever its approach, was able to defeat the cartels and bring peace and safety to the people.

 

Here in Costa Rica, we were plagued by property theft and opportunistic burglaries. Homicides were more in the high drug-use, low-income areas and the usual domestic violence.  But as the decades have gone by, cartels have taken note of Costa Rica as a useful transit point in their drug distribution and have infiltrated our ports as a route to ship hidden drugs in our exports (to Europe especially).  And increasingly we have been used like Honduras as a stopover place on the route from Colombia to Mexico and the U.S.A.  Being a low-profile nation with no army and a pretty lax police and justice system, we have been gradually invaded by these operators.  We have worked with the U.S.A. to stop shipments and to track down drug criminals, but still the problem, and its associated violence has been on the increase.  Lately, this has seemed to reach a more stable plateau, but our president has wanted to take stronger steps to turn this around more dramatically.

 

Bukele created a unique situation in El Salvador thanks to their extreme desperation and willingness to do anything to get relief from the maras who were plaguing them. He represented someone new and outside the political system and they gave him an unusual level of support.  Then, seeing the results of what he was able to accomplish, they renewed his mandate emphatically.  That mandate includes supporting his political party so that he has a united, rubber-stamp legislature. And the people continued their support as he took total control of the judiciary and prison systems. There is no dilution or compromise that holds back Bukele, which

would exist in virtually any other nation with free elections and a multi-party system. No other nation has been able to follow his example and achieve his results.

 

Perhaps there will be a consensus to build another prison that is more tightly controlled and restrictive than our existing major facility here.   But as the Costa Rican official pointed out, even when the police do their detective work and make the arrests, judges sometimes screw up and release people awaiting trail who should never be free on the streets.   We do have prisons for people awaiting trial and there is no excuse sometimes for the bad decisions some judges have made.  Costa Rica is known for its protection of human rights and sometimes victims’ rights are sacrificed in favor of the arrested person’s rights." 

“A Federal Judge Orders the Trump Administration to Bring Back a Migrant It Deported to El Salvador,” New York Times, April 4, 2025 

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to return to the U.S. by the end of Monday, April 7,  a Maryland man officials admitted they’d mistakenly deported last month. The administration says it will appeal the decision by Federal District Court Judge Paula Xinis. She ruled that there was no legal basis to arrest  Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and put him on a plane with no due process to be imprisoned in a notorious Salvadoran megaprison. “In court papers filed this week, administration officials had said there was little they could do to get Mr. Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador, even after acknowledging that his deportation on March 15 had been a mistake,” wrote Times reporters Aishvarya Kavi and Alan Feuer. “The judge’s ruling could put her on a collision course with the White House,” the reporters said. “President Trump and some of his top aides have repeatedly and aggressively attacked other federal judges who have questioned their attempts to carry out their deportation policies.” There was no immediate comment from a spokeswoman for El Salvador’s president on whether Abrego Garcia would be turned over to U.S. authorities.

“Argentine Senate Rejects President Milei’s Supreme Court Appointees in Blow to Libertarian Leader,” Associated Press, April 3, 2025

The Argentine Senate  April 3 rejected two Supreme Court candidates appointed by decree by President Javier Milei, dealing him a major blow. The defeat “could complicate the implementation of Milei’s radical state overhaul of Argentina, as analysts say the president had hoped to fill the Supreme Court vacancies with appointees who would rule favorably on challenges to his economic reforms,” said AP reporter Isabel Debre.  Milei in February appointed the two controversial candidates by decree without the approval of the Argentine Senate. He did so during the legislature’s summer recess. But lawmakers called that an overreach of executive power. They said a president has extremely limited power to make judicial appointments during a congressional recess. “What we are discussing is an institutional assault,” said Sen. Anabel Fernández Sagasti. Milei’s picks were federal judge Ariel Lijo and conservative law professor Manuel García-Mansilla. Lijo has been accused of laundering money, abusing judicial authority, and stalling anti-graft cases that came before him. He has denied the charges. García-Mansilla, who holds conservative positions on social issues like abortion, is opposed by the left-leaning Peronist movement, which has almost half the seats in the Senate. The two candidates each needed two-thirds of the Senate to vote to approve them. Lijo drew 43 “no” votes and 27 “yes” votes and 51 senators voted against García-Mansilla and 21 for him. Milei’s office said he “repudiated” the vote and that leaving the two seats empty on the five-judge Supreme Court was an effort to obstruct justice. His office said Milei would work to “restore people’s confidence in the institutions using all the tools that the constitution and popular vote have placed in his hands.” Others saw the rejection of the two appointments as a sign of life for Argentina’s democracy. “Today the Argentine Senate put a stop to one of the most serious attacks on judicial independence since the country’s return to democracy,” said Juan Pappier of Human Rights Watch. 

“Mexico Celebrates Dodging US Tariffs But Feels the Effects of Global Economic Uncertainty,” Associated Press, April 3, 2025

 

Mexico dodged sweeping global tariffs announced April 2 by U.S. President Donald Trump, but must still cope with the impact of his previously announced 25 percent tariff on the import of autos, steel and aluminum. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said her country had been shielded by the free-trade agreement signed by the U.S., Mexico and Canada. “During my last call with President Trump, I said that, in the case of reciprocal tariffs my understanding was that there wouldn’t be tariffs (on Mexico) because Mexico doesn’t place tariffs on the United States,” Sheinbaum said. AP correspondents María Verza and Fabiola Sánchez reported that Mexican exports had escaped U.S. tariffs on agricultural products like avocados, clothing and electronics. But the Mexican official who said that, Economy Secretary Marcelo Ebrard, noted that “in a new commercial order based on tariffs it’s very hard for a free-trade agreement to survive.” But as it exists now, Mexico has a competitive advantage, because “it’s going to be cheaper to produce in Mexico than in any other part of the world.” The United States “is closing off to the rest of the world and in relative terms closing off less with Mexico and that is an opportunity,” said Oscar Ocampo of the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness. But the uncertain impact of the automobile tariff is having an impact on Mexico. Stellantis, which makes Dodge and Jeep brand vehicles, said it would pause production for the month of April at its assembly plant outside of Mexico City.  The company has some 15,000 employees in Mexico.  Sheinbaum is encouraging companies producing in Mexico, such as German automobile makers,  who have not been exporting under the free trade agreement to take the steps needed to qualify. But at the same time she is also advocating Plan Mexico, which aims to stimulate more domestic production. One example is a collaboration to make electric buses in Mexico for public transit. 

“Caribbean Leaders Oppose US Policy Targeting Cuban Medical Missions, Saying They’re Critical,”  Associated Press, March 11, 2025 

[Posting out of chronological order to catch up to an earlier story.] 

 

The U.S. has adopted a new policy to crack down on Cuban medical missions to other countries, drawing protests from the leaders of Caribbean nations.  The Trump administration has threatened to withdraw the visas of those involved with the Cuban medical missions, which U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has termed “forced labor.” The issue was the subject of a recent meeting of the 15-member Caribbean trade bloc known as Caricom. Guyana’s foreign minister, Hugh Todd, said “the U.S. is a strategic partner to Caricom, but this  very important issue has to be dealt with at the level of heads of government.” Cuba has some 24,180 doctors working in 56 countries, including missions in the Caribbean that provide impoverished nations with limited medical services. “Their presence here is of importance to our health care system,” said Jamaica’s foreign minister Kamina Johnson Smith. There are more than 400 Cuban doctors, nurses, biomedical engineers and technicians in Jamaica, Smith said. Two influential leaders in the Caribbean, the prime ministers of Trinidad and Tobago and of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, criticized the new policy. “I will prefer to lose my visa than to have 60 poor and working people die,” said Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister of St. Vincent. He was referring to 60 dialysis patients who receive care from Cuban doctors. Trinidad Prime Minister Keith Rowley likewise said he is willing to lose his visa. “We rely heavily on health care specialists whom we have obtained from India, the Philippines, and mainly from Cuba over the decades,” he told the Daily Express, a local paper in Trinidad. Rowley said those doctors are paid the same as local ones “but we’re now being accused of taking part in the program where people are being exploited. That is someone’s interpretation.”  

 “Nobel Laureate and Ex-Leader of Costa Rica Loses U.S. Visa,” New York Times, April 3, 2025

Nobel laureate and former president of Costa Rica Oscar Arias Sánchez says his visa to enter the United States has been revoked without explanation. “A vocal critic of President Trump, Mr. Arias appears to be the most high profile in a string of individuals who  have had their visas canceled or been denied entry as the Trump administration bars people who it says have ‘hostile attitudes’ toward the United States,” wrote Times reporter Yan Zhuang. Arias said the e-mail he received revoking his visa cited Section 221(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. That law lets the secretary of state and consular officials cancel visas at their discretion. “I don’t know if the revoking of my visa is some sort of punishment because I say what I think,” Arias said. He recently likened Trump online to a Roman emperor who tells the world what to do. Arias was president of Costa Rica from 1986 to 1990 and 2006 to 2010. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987 for negotiating a plan to end the civil wars in Central America. He now runs a foundation that promotes peace and democracy. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says he has signed perhaps more than 300 letters revoking visas of students, visitors and others and expelling them from the United States because of their foreign policy views or criminal activities. He has instructed diplomats to examine the social media posts of some visa applicants to deny them entry if they show a “hostile attitude toward U.S citizens or U.S. culture (including government, institutions, or founding principles).” 

“U.S. Deports More Detainees to El Salvador, Calling Them ‘Violent Criminals,’” New York Times, April 1, 2025

 

A U.S. military plane transported 17 more people accused of being gang members to a prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration said it used a different legal authority than the Alien Enemies Act, the use of which was blocked by a federal judge. Administration officials said all 17 men were gang members and were deported under regular immigration law and had final orders of removal. Seven of the men are Venezuelans and 10 Salvadorans. But officials referred to the deportation  as a counterterrorism operation, similar terminology to that used to describe earlier deportations of more than 200 deportees to El Salvador  under the Alien Enemies Act. The Times said the latest deportation is likely to be challenged in court. The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, said the latest arrivals “are confirmed murderers and high-profile offenders.”. The Times said that “according to a list furnished by a White House official, each of them has either been convicted or accused of a crime that would make them eligible for deportation, including murder, manslaughter, assault and theft.”  Under a law recently passed by  Congress, a person can be eligible for deportation for simply being charged with a serious crime. Separately, Democrats who visited Guantanamo Bay over the weekend condemned its use to detain migrants. They said its use “is seemingly designed to undermine  due process and evade legal scrutiny.” [The Times made no mention of a March 28 court order preventing the Trump administration from sending anyone with a final deportation order to a country where they are not a citizen without first having an opportunity to seek humanitarian protection in the United States. See March 28, 2025 Washington Post story summary.]