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Why didn't Trump and ICE send Venezuelan "gang members" to Guantanamo instead of El Salvador? [1]

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Date: 2025-04-08

This is a question that has been waking me in the middle of the night. There had to be an answer to this. After all, it is so much easier to deport folks to Guantanamo--well, maybe not any easier to be fair, but it doesn't cost us extra money. We are reportedly paying El Salvador six million bucks this year to take the 200 or so Venezuelans deported. Because ostensibly they are members of Tren de Aragua, a notorious Venezuelan gang. (A different story--at this point in early April, news outlets have discovered that there were possibly only 12 or so Tren de Aragua "dangerous" gang members.)

The first part of the answer to this question: it has been reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a personal chat with the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, self-described as the "world's coolest dictator.”

El Salvador offers to house violent US criminals and deportees of any nationality in unprecedented deal with Trump administration | CNN “accept for deportation any illegal alien in the United States who is a criminal from any nationality, be they MS-13 or Tren de Aragua and house them in his jails.” Rubio is referring here to two notorious transnational gangs with members from El Salvador and Venezuela. Following their meeting Rubio said to US media that Bukele has offered to

But this doesn't make any sense at all because there is still Guantanamo, ready and waiting for, according to Trump, at least 30,000 deportees. Oh, but wait. After the bare minimum of internet research here's the scoop.

The United States government, under Trump, was stopped from deporting Venezuelans to Guantanamo in early February. But not before almost 200 Venezuelans were sent there and then summarily put on flights to their own country. Enter three Venezuelan men whose lawyers stopped this from happening before they could deported: The government wasn't permitted to summarily deport these three guys because the American judge ruled that they had been denied any due process. Bingo. No Guantanamo without due process.

The Alien Enemies Act, passed in 1798, grants the U.S. president broad authority to detain and deport individuals from “enemy” nations during times of war or when an invasion is threatened. Originally enacted amid fears of war with France, the law has rarely been used in American history. What is Alien Enemies Act? Trump uses it to deport Venezuelans - World News | The Financial Express Now of course, the same should hold for El Salvador, correct? No deportations without due process? Well, apparently not--in part due to a very slick misreading and misuse of the Alien Enemies Act (of 1798),

However, there is still the pesky question: why not simply invoke this act and use Guantanamo? Why send deportees to what is described as hell on earth, the infamous prison in El Salvador, The Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca. Welp, after a lengthy search using all sorts of questions and topic labels, there is no answer I could find.

So, hypothesizing here: it was just easier and quicker to grab up these "gang members" and put them on planes to El Salvador, using as the excuse the Alien Enemies Act, no due process of course because the act is fine with denying it, and then contend that if the administration lost in court, they couldn't get them back anyway. After all, El Salvador is a sovereign country so we can't just order them around. Right. Never mind Trump is trying to order Greenland, Canada, Panama, and at this point just about the entire world to do his bidding. But El Salvador? No? Really.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/8/2315306/-Why-didn-t-Trump-and-ICE-send-Venezuelan-gang-members-to-Guantanamo-instead-of-El-Salvador?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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