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American Stasi [1]
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Date: 2025-04-11
The actions of many government organizations are more like the extinct East German Stasi, than those with former American values. On 26 March, as Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish Ph.D. student at Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts walked to class, masked plain-clothed DHS agents surrounded and arrested her. The secret agents then placed here in an unmarked black van and drove off. Quickly they would ship her out of state ending up in a Louisianna detention facility. Without notification or warning the US State Department had revoked her student visa. She was not accused of any crime.
Later Secretary of State Marco Rubio would lie to the press about the rationale for the visa revocation. Without providing evidence, Rubio stated that Ozturk didn’t “tell us that the reason you are coming to the United States is not just because you want to write op-eds but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus.” While she was a coauthor on an op-ed addressing the plight of Palestinians in Gaza there was no indication of Ozturk “vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, or creating a ruckus.” There is little doubt that Rubio was playing to Trump who frequently denigrates immigrants regardless of their status.
On 31 December 2018, Paul Whelen was in his hotel room in Moscow dressing for a wedding when FSB agents barged in without warning and arrested him. Like Ozturk, Whelen disappeared for several days. Unlike Ozturk, Whelen was charged with a crime, espionage after being set up by an FSB agent he had known. After a sham trial Whelen was sentenced to 16 years in prison. In 2025, Whelen was released as part of a prisoner swap. It is the beginning, not the end of this story that should frighten everyone.
Like authoritarian countries around the world, the United States is now disappearing people at an alarming rate. For Trump, the rule of law has no meaning. Evidence and due process seem irrelevant to Trump and the DHS. To expedite the deportation, Trump used the Alien Enemies Act for the fourth time since 1798. If his assertion that that Tren de Aragua, a violent Venezuelan gang, is a terrorist organization and we are at war (a formal designation) then the deportees would be prisoners of war and afforded their rights under the Geneva Convention. It also means Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, is a war criminal. Specifically, she posed for photos of the alleged deportees (POWs according to Trump) in the CECOM (Terrorism Confinement Center) prison in El Salvador. Article 13 of the Geneva Convention states that “prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity”. These are the words generally considered relevant to photographs. It appears that Kristi Noem is not aware of the damage done to American credibility when the photos from Abu Ghraib in Iraq were made public.
In general, the USG has failed to produce even basic information about the deportees. Several of them had lawyers and were involved in legal proceedings regarding their immigration status. It appears the rapid movement of detainees from one jurisdiction to another is an intentional ploy to evade the American jurisprudence system. At times they have failed to follow specific orders from Federal judges. That was certainly true in the 16 March case in which three planes flew from Texas to El Salvador after DC District Court judge, James Boasberg issued an order to return the prisoners to the US. Not only did the flights continue, but the USG representatives also lied about the status of those prisoners. There are many USG offices that are complicit in the Stasi-like actions. That does include the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and Trump himself who continues to denigrate immigrants and calling them criminals.
According to CNN, “Immigration attorneys and civil rights advocates have sharply criticized many of these facilities for mistreating migrants and preventing them from properly defending their cases. They say the isolated nature of these rural detention facilities makes it difficult for migrants to communicate with attorneys, family and friends.”
Continuing, CNN noted “The isolation and difficult conditions in these facilities is a form of coercion, the nonprofit advocacy group Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights said in a 2024 report on the Louisiana immigration detention system. ‘In NOLA ICE detention, officials isolate people with viable defenses to deportation from the legal and language resources needed to fairly present their claims,’ the report stated. ‘And they use abusive treatment in punitive conditions to coerce people into renouncing those claims and accepting deportation to escape the misery of detention.’”
It appears that tattoos are a primary source that ICE uses to identify Tren de Aragua membership. It is already clear that there have been a number of identifications based on simple tattoos. Even a crown, a soccer ball, or a rose could bring a deportation sentence. Experts agree that tattoos are not a reliable source for gang identity. The cretin-in-charge of deportations, Border Czar Tom Homan, told us that they would concentrate on “the worst of the worst criminals.” That was a lie. In fact, after Judge Boasberg issued his ruling, Homan stated, “I don’t care what the judge thinks.” To be sure there is a number of extralegal, Stasi-like elements operating in the Trump administration. Homan’s worst-of-the-worst included a Sackets Harbor, NY ICE raid that included a mother and her three children, one a third-grade student. All were zipped away. Sackets Harbor, a town of about 1300 residents, had about a thousand people come out to protest.
Growing up in Wisconsin, after WW II we knew the Soviet Union was an enemy. There were many stories about how under Joseph Stalin thousands of citizens of the USSR were rounded up and disappeared to Siberian prison camps. It still seems unfathomable in America today people can be rounded up, denied any due process and shipped off to the equivalent of Siberia (CECON in El Salvador).
The last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked was during WW II. That led to a shameful history of detention camps for tens of thousands of loyal Japanese Americans. Lessor known is that there were also Germans caught in the US and some were Nazi sympathizers. As DC Circuit Court Judge Patricia Millett noted, "Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here." During WW II we were actually at war with the Nazi’s. Such is Trump’s Administration today.
Undoubtedly there are some American supporters who believe none of this applies to them. That is not true. The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from Baltimore proves that DHS Gestapo does make mistakes. Once done, they claim it cannot be rectified and the deportee returned. Worse, the AG, Pam Bondi, suspended the lawyer, Erez Reuveni, who admitted in court that the government had made a mistake, because he was not sufficiently strenuous in his defense of the government’s position. In other words, Bondi appears to believe that Reuveni should have lied to the court rather than tell the truth. That was her message to all DOJ attorneys as the Trump Administration continues their attack on America’s foundational rule of law.
As I was finishing this draft article, SCOTUS handed down an unsigned finding that told the Trump Administration to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. If you want to understand just how evil Pam Bondi’s DOJ is, look at what her lawyers stated. “In a Supreme Court brief had argued that the judge's order, by requiring the Trump administration to "effectuate" Abrego Garcia's return, had impermissibly encroached on presidential authority on foreign relations in violation of the U.S. Constitution's separation of powers between its judicial and executive branches.” Rather than acknowledge a mistake, they focus on their right to keep an innocent person in prison as a matter of foreign policy. There is no doubt Pam Bondi lied during her confirmation hearings when she stated she would take the politics out of DOJ. Bondi’s loyalty is solely to Donald Trump, not the US Constitution or the American people.
To be clear, Trump is exploring ways to send American citizens to CECOM in El Salvador. As Vanity Fair reported, “Now, President Donald Trump is openly flirting with the prospect of deporting American citizens to the same explicitly cruel and dehumanizing mega-prison, too.” This has been confirmed by the White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt who said Tuesday (8 April) “that President Donald Trump is exploring legal pathways to “deport” U.S. citizens to El Salvador. Remember, Trump has thrown so many people under the proverbial bus, there are too many to count. Most started thinking they were Trump’s friend- until they weren’t. You could be next, and CECOM is a death sentence
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