Andry Is Free. Trump’s Barbarous Immigration Regime Is Just Getting Started.
Plus: The president’s new Epstein avoidance strategy.
Bill’s out today, but in his place we’ve got a dispatch from Tim on the weekend release from CECOT of Andry Hernández Romero. Also, keep Andrew in your thoughts this week—he’s moving tomorrow. Happy Monday.
Keeping Rage Alive
by Tim Miller
Andry is alive. And for now he is freed from a horrid detention center in El Salvador. Thank God.
This morning his mother is awaiting his arrival, supposedly today or tomorrow. They spoke by phone on Sunday for the first time in more than four months, according to his attorney. I cannot imagine her relief.
For 125 days Andry and hundreds of other men were held in a torture prison where they got a “beating for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner.” They had been kidnapped by our government and left in that hellhole to rot with no due process, no access to legal counsel, no phone call home. They were completely stripped of their humanity. In many cases their only crime was existing in Stephen Miller’s America while being Venezuelan. For some, their sin was having the wrong tattoo.
On Friday, these men were released, at long last, in what was described by the participating governments as a “prisoner exchange” between El Salvador and Venezuela. In reality this was a hostage swap between the United States and the Nicolás Maduro regime. A hostage swap in which the Americans were the villains, using a tactic previously deployed by despots like Putin, who imprisoned an American athlete for minor cannabis crimes in order to extract concessions from the earnest West.
It’s remarkable that our administration’s actions were so depraved that they somehow made Maduro seem like the good guy. We gave him a domestic public relations victory, so he can crow about the humanitarian aid he brought to Venezuelans who had been tortured by the capitalist American devil.
That is Marco Rubio’s legacy in this story. He became the despot enabler he claimed to hate. First by wrongfully imprisoning and permitting the abuse of people who, like his ancestors, had fled communism and come to America in the hope of finding freedom. And then by using them as pawns in a trade for Americans who had themselves been tortured in Venezuela. In the process, he handed a massive geopolitical win to the communist dictator whom he has said in the past should be toppled by military coup.
As for the pawns in this game of caudillo chess, we can at least have the comfort of knowing they survived. My sense is that there is cautious optimism among the families of the Venezuelans and their legal teams that these men will be treated better back in Venezuela than they may otherwise have been so that Maduro can look good and cash in on this political gift from the Americans.
Hopefully that turns out to be true. Because watching them deplane in Venezuela, knowing what our government had done to them, it was hard not to be overcome with emotion.
This video of a man named Ysqueibel, for one, took my breath away.
But as Andry’s lawyer Lindsay Toczylowski told us in our livestream following the hostage release Friday night: “If I had to sum up how I feel right now, I feel relief he won’t be sleeping in a torture prison tonight, but I have outrage at the situation.”
That sentiment resonated with me in a deep way. After spending months thinking about Andry, wondering about his well-being, worrying about how they must be treating him in that hell, I wanted to just feel joy that he could go home and be with his mother and friends.
But I couldn’t. What I felt, instead, was rage over how fucking outrageous it was that he was in this situation in the first place. It seems like the Germans should have invented a word in the ‘40s that sums up the feeling when a person survives fascist barbarity, but my search for such a term that describes that cyclone of emotion came up empty.
At some level, I think it’s important for both reactions to live together. The relief is real. God willing, Andry and the rest will be able to move on with their lives, find purpose and meaning and love and not be consumed by this nightmare to which we subjected them. At least they will be able to be with their loved ones and not worry at every moment that they might not survive the day.
But the rage is important as well. The administration that subjected these men to this crime against humanity is plotting more such atrocities. Congress gave them a $45 billion slush fund for domestic detention. The Supreme Court has greenlit deportations to war-torn countries with little to no due process.
The CECOT experiment might have failed (for now) thanks in part to the legal and political pushback this administration received.
But the fight against this barbarous immigration regime is only just beginning.
If the fight for Andry resonated with you, please support the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Their work is ongoing.
Squirrel!
by Andrew Egger
Donald Trump seems to have realized that just commanding people to stop paying attention to the Jeffrey Epstein story is not having the desired effect. So he’s moving on to Plan B: Ginning up a bunch of new red-meat stories to try to redirect the attention of his Epstein-riled fans. Check him out up there, spinning the big prize wheel: So I heard y’all like . . . sports teams with racist names!
“My statement on the Washington Redskins has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way,” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday afternoon. “I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’ I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington.”
A few hours later, he spun the wheel again. “HOW DID SAMANTHA POWER MAKE ALL OF THAT MONEY???” he wrote over an AI-generated meme depicting mugshots of Barack Obama, James Comey, Susan Rice, Samatha Power, Valerie Jarrett, James Clapper, Ben Rhodes, and John Brennan in prison jumpsuits.
Then he posted a meme seemingly depicting a gaggle of congressmen in handcuffs in front of the Capitol building. “Until this happens,” it read, “nothing will change.”
Shortly after that, he got more specific. “Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff is in BIG TROUBLE! He falsified Loan Documents,” he posted. “Now Shifty should pay the price of prison for a real crime, not one made up by the corrupt accusers!”1
All of this is thuddingly stupid stuff. Threatening to blow up a private company’s business plans unless it agrees to get more racist is the sort of galaxy-brain Trump antic nobody else could even dream up. “Let’s prosecute all my enemies” is far less creative—Trump has been making versions of this threat for a while—but he knows that’s no matter. The bloodlust of his base is boundless; they never get tired of this shit. They’ll strap a few siren emojis onto their quote tweet and gleefully hit post.
But the fact that all this redirection is so blatant doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. In fact, it tells us a lot about Trump’s current mental state (clearly concerned about the Epstein saga) and how ludicrous our system of governance is with him sitting on top of it. Much of Trump’s present-day policymaking involves large swaths of the state and federal bureaucracies being deployed to meet Trump’s political needs of the moment. It’s unserious behavior, but that doesn’t mean it won’t have serious consequences. As long as Trump is president, he’ll have this unfortunate superpower: If he doesn’t like what everyone is talking about, all he needs to do is something insane, and pretty soon they’ll be talking about something else.
AROUND THE BULWARK
If Trump Tried to Fire the Fed Chair, What Would the Supreme Court Do? There are obvious signals in recent rulings, observes KIM WEHLE.
Cops Join Trump’s War on the Press… BILL LUEDERS reports that journalists are being targeted for doing their jobs in covering protests.
Why Democrats Must Think Hard About Voting to Fund the Government… It’s pretty simple: Congress can’t keep giving away its power, argues REP. BRENDAN BOYLE.
Gabbard Garbles 2016 ‘Russiagate’ Intelligence… CATHY YOUNG unpacks a memo full of smoke and mirrors that plays right into MAGA fever dreams and the Kremlin’s hands.
How the New GOP Tax Law Screws the Middle Class… On HOW TO FIX IT, JOHN AVLON talks with NYU law professor DAVID KAMIN about the risks of Trump’s economic agenda and the new GOP tax law.
Quick Hits
TULSI HELPS OUT: After spending much of his first term grinding his teeth over the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had interfered to help him win the 2016 election, Donald Trump seemingly had an assignment for his new loyalist intel chiefs this time around: Go back and find a reason to say that assessment was fake and wrong.
Earlier this month, CIA Director John Ratcliffe released his review of the IC assessment. Amusingly, while that review identified process concerns about the creation of the 2016 assessment, its results largely held up to scrutiny. This didn’t stop Ratcliffe from going much farther than his own analysts’ assessment in public statements: “All the world can now see the truth: Brennan, Clapper, and Comey manipulated intelligence and silenced career professionals—all to get Trump.”
Now, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has turned in her own homework. In a Friday memo, Gabbard claimed the intelligence community “manipulated and withheld” Russiagate evidence in 2016 to “lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup” against Trump. Further, she recommended prosecutions. “These documents detail a treasonous conspiracy by officials at the highest levels of the Obama White House to subvert the will of the American people and try to usurp the President from fulfilling his mandate,” she wrote. “The integrity of our democratic republic demands that every person involved be investigated and brought to justice to prevent this from ever happening again.”
Would it shock you to learn this is all nonsense? Cathy Young breaks it down in a piece for the site today. It’s a must-read, but here’s the précis: “Even a cursory look at the actual substance of Gabbard’s dramatic claims shows . . . a nothingburger. There is no actual substance. Instead, there is blatant sleight of hand and manipulation of evidence, debunking a theory of Russian election interference that the Obama administration never endorsed.”
AN ISSUE OF FOCUS: Remember the cursed “vibecession” discourse we all experienced for years under Joe Biden? Donald Trump may be starting to have a similar issue. Stocks have for now recovered from their post-Liberation Day swoon, but Axios notes this morning that the general public’s outlook on the economy remains somewhat sour:
70% of respondents said the administration isn’t focusing enough on lowering prices in a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday.
The administration is focusing too much on tariffs, according to 61 percent of those surveyed, and 60 percent said they oppose the use of tariffs entirely.
We agree that the administration is focusing too much on tariffs, but also wonder if these sorts of polls should include an element of “compared to what”? It would be nice if the White House were trying to strike free trade agreements instead of pushing protectionist policies. But we’re not sure we mind Trump spending any given moment “focusing” on tariffs rather than, say, hatching his latest scheme to throw political enemies in jail.
Cheap Shots
(Hat tip to r/thebulwark for finding this!)
Greg Sargent has a good breakdown of the substance of the claim against Schiff, which relates to the senator denoting his D.C. residence as “primary” in a mortgage application, which theoretically could have improved his rate. Sacre bleu!
Sargent notes that this isn’t just a case of Trump trying to make fetch happen by whipping up a fake scandal against Schiff. Instead, there’s reason to believe the government went on a fishing expedition against the senator specifically.
I’m going to side with JVL here and say that the vibecession was complete BS. And the median voter, who told exit pollsters that their most salient issue was inflation, very stupidly voted for a candidate guaranteeing more inflation. For the entire campaign, Mona, Sarah, and others coddled these swing voters in their stupidity about inflation. We had a once in a century pandemic!! There was a resulting supply shock due to global supply chains getting whipsawed back and forth. Yet rather than understanding nuance, especially because many of the same voters complained that the recovery from the GFC was too slow, they voted for the guy promising higher prices. So now that guy is doing the things he promised he would do. Although he has chickened out before, maybe he won’t this time. Wall Street’s confidence in Trump’s cowardice is what is keeping the market where it is. But that is separate than a vibecession. Prices are objectively higher today than they were 6 months ago. GDP did drop in Q1. And it’s only going to get worse.
Can I comment about Schiff's mortgage. I say this as an underwriter. So we look at files and verify the facts. Residence is a material fact. But the issue when it comes to a Senator is different than that for most others. Schiff, like most in Congress who don't live close by keeps 2 residences. And here I am not distinguishing between a rental or an owner occupied property.
And this issue for a mortgage or for a home insurer is - is this owner occupied. if Schiff owns 2 properties then both would be in essence owner occupied. This is different from a rental - where the risk is generally higher.
How the law operates... well that is beyond me. But if I were looking as Schiff's file and saw a driver's license in CA and a residence in DC - his occupation would explain everything.