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Inside One Venezuelan's Last-Minute Escape From a Flight to CECOT - TPM
The way attorney Jamie Diez describes it, visiting the El Valle Detention Center was usually straightforward. After making the 50-minute drive from Brownsville, he told TPM, he would usually stroll in unannounced. Officials would, after a wait, bring Diez, an immigration attorney, whichever client he was seeing that day. He was so used to El Valle that, on March 15, he showed up wearing shorts.
But when Diez arrived at the rural Texas immigration detention center that day, he instead encountered an overwhelming show of force. On that day, he was denied entry, he told TPM. There were law enforcement officers in riot gear. A helicopter flew above. Detainees were being rushed onto buses.
Diez had become a witness to the Trump administration’s secretive operation to remove more than 100 Venezuelans to an El Salvador detention camp under the Alien Enemies Act, the 18th-century wartime power whose invocation Trump premised on the absurdity of a Venezuela-backed invasion of the United States. On that day, Diez’s client, undocumented Venezuelan Zacarias Matos, was slated for removal to El Salvador under the Act, his attorneys say. Diez told TPM he had traveled to the detention center after filing a habeas corpus petition seeking to block his client’s removal, and was checking to make sure he was still there.
Diez didn’t know it at the time, but he had stumbled into the all-out campaign by the Trump administration to shield its Alien Enemies Act removal operation from scrutiny by the courts. Had the removal process involved any kind of notice to those removed or their attorneys, judges could examine how the government was deciding who belonged to Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which, the government contends, would qualify them for removal to El Salvador as an alien enemy. Scrutiny could prompt judges to intervene, potentially imposing significant delays on the effort or shutting it down entirely. After a federal judge, later on March 15, ordered a halt to the effort, the President and senior administration officials argued directly that the government should be able to remove people from the country — potentially for indefinite imprisonment in an El Salvador detention center — without due process.
But when Diez arrived at the rural Texas immigration detention center that day, he instead encountered an overwhelming show of force. On that day, he was denied entry, he told TPM. There were law enforcement officers in riot gear. A helicopter flew above. Detainees were being rushed onto buses.
Diez had become a witness to the Trump administration’s secretive operation to remove more than 100 Venezuelans to an El Salvador detention camp under the Alien Enemies Act, the 18th-century wartime power whose invocation Trump premised on the absurdity of a Venezuela-backed invasion of the United States. On that day, Diez’s client, undocumented Venezuelan Zacarias Matos, was slated for removal to El Salvador under the Act, his attorneys say. Diez told TPM he had traveled to the detention center after filing a habeas corpus petition seeking to block his client’s removal, and was checking to make sure he was still there.
Diez didn’t know it at the time, but he had stumbled into the all-out campaign by the Trump administration to shield its Alien Enemies Act removal operation from scrutiny by the courts. Had the removal process involved any kind of notice to those removed or their attorneys, judges could examine how the government was deciding who belonged to Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which, the government contends, would qualify them for removal to El Salvador as an alien enemy. Scrutiny could prompt judges to intervene, potentially imposing significant delays on the effort or shutting it down entirely. After a federal judge, later on March 15, ordered a halt to the effort, the President and senior administration officials argued directly that the government should be able to remove people from the country — potentially for indefinite imprisonment in an El Salvador detention center — without due process.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/inside-one-venezuelans-last-minute-escape-from-a-flight-to-cecot
If one why not another?