'He's just a kid': the Maryland teenager swept into Trump immigration dragnet

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/30/trump-administration-dragnet-teenager

No paywall link
https://archive.li/CzXhu

When 19-year-old Javier Salazar was loaded on to a bus from an immigrant detention center in northern Texas, he had no idea where he was being taken.

He wondered if he was being transferred to another facility or maybe deported back to his native Venezuela. He and the other passengers, their hands and feet shackled, settled into a tense silence. Then a terrifying possibility crept into Salazar’s mind.

“My fear was being sent to El Salvador,” he said, to the brutal prison where the Trump administration has dispatched more than 200 Venezuelans into a legal black hole. They are accused of being violent gang members, but reportedly on flimsy evidence for most, deported without even a court hearing.
Salazar became stressed “because we’d been listening to the news and the other people at the facility”, he said in a telephone interview from detention.

His and other buses in the convoy from the remote Bluebonnet facility pulled over on the side of the road for an unexplained 15 minutes then drove on to Abilene regional airport, about 200 miles west of Dallas. Salazar recognized it as where he landed a few days earlier from detention in Farmville, Virginia, where he had been for about a month after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) arrested him and his father in neighboring Maryland.

*snip*

[Walleye]

1. We are paying Bukele to imprison these people. He is the agent. We are the boss here. Get these people back.

[JustAnotherGen]

2. I don't think the solution is

Political. I fear those folks may be sitting there until the regime falls. After that - I want a brute force military operation to get them back. Any El Salvador civilians get in their way? Shoot on sight.

This is a case 'Look what you made me do.'

I didn't have to be this way - but the maga repub voter has turned me into this person. At 52 - this is who I am.

[NBachers]

3. And I'll bet you money all these "detention centers" are private contractor prisons.