Bulwark Takes - Trump Is Sending Migrants to a Robocop Hell Without Due Process

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Tim Miller joins Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC's Deadline: White House to discuss the Trump administration's deportation of migrants without due process. He highlights the case of a gay Venezuelan asylum seeker who was allegedly sent to El Salvador’s brutal prison system simply for having tattoos. Tim questions what separates the U.S. from authoritarian regimes like Russia and China if we treat people fleeing communism and seeking freedom as criminals.

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And I'm just so outraged. My blood is boiling so hot on this case that I just I made the case that sometimes we got to focus on what is right, what this country is about, on the moral and ethical obligations and let the politics figure themselves out. So I went off on that on MSNBC. Wanted to share it with you all. So up next is me and my girl, Nicole Wallace. Give it a watch. And Tim Miller, this seems to be the political nexus that the Trump White House hopes no one crosses. Right. They would love for everybody in the media to be pressing on the substance of who has been deported. But I think it's the process here that is the bigger story, right? You take a group for whom the facts are there, literally 0% of Americans are sympathetic to their legal

rights, but they have rights, they're human beings. And if we don't actually know if people as young as 14 are actually members of a gang, it feels like the process is what should focus our mind. Yeah, and it should scare people, you know, to give the government this kind of power when they've shown that they're going to act so recklessly across so many verticals. You know, look, I hear you on how the specific cases are, you know, sometimes, you know, get you bogged down into an area that gets onto Trump's turf. But why don't I try you on one of the cases here for one of these uh the venezuelans that allegedly has been sent to el salvador uh according to a lawyer that we interviewed for the bulwark that uh this person

is a gay venezuelan that has tattoos because they're in the arts they're into arts they were in america in a detention center so they're not roaming the streets. This was not a dangerous person. So somebody that was fleeing a communist country. So again, thinking of what Republicans had traditionally been for, this is somebody that fled communism to come find freedom in America. And according to this person's lawyer, I will have to see the details. They have been disappeared by our government, put on a plane, sent to El Salvador to a dystopic robocop penal camp. And you've seen the images from this. It's like nothing that we would do in this country. So I don't know, Nicole.

Maybe that's popular with people. Maybe the American people are for Donald Trump and Elon Musk willy-nilly choosing to send people who are fleeing communism to disgusting prison camps in other countries with no due process. I'm not for that. I find that absolutely despicable. And I think that it's worthwhile to at least make the case. And we need to know more. We don't know more about some of these cases. And I think that you're right at the biggest picture, you know, talking about the process here, talking about the fact that these people did not get a chance to defend themselves in a court of law. And and again, I think it's OK to say that if in some of these cases they're really gang members, they're out in the street doing crimes, then great.

Like send send them send them out. Everybody's for that. But this process for like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan and Elon and Donald Trump just get to decide that somebody gets sent to El Salvador because they had a tattoo. I mean, that is not America. Say more, Tim Miller. Well, it just is. Look, it's fundamentally what the country has been about. I don't know. You know, I remember when I was younger, one of the things that made me a Republican, actually, that kind of radicalized me was the Elian Gonzalez situation, right, when the Clinton folks were in charge.

And obviously, all these things have complicated specifics. But, like, we are, like, America is a country that welcomed people that were fleeing persecution, fleeing religious persecution, free fleeing government persecution. That's like why we exist. That is the whole point of America. And particularly in this case, when it comes to people fleeing a communist country, to come here to find freedom. And if they came here to do crimes, then send them back. But if they came here to find freedom, and we are going to treat them in the same way that a authoritarian country would, that we're going to send them to some other country where they're going to shave off their hair and put them in shackles and put them in chains and not feed them and

treat them like they're subhuman with no due process? What is the difference between us and China then or Russia? Honestly, what is the difference between us and authoritarian countries if this is how we're going to treat people that are coming here looking for a chance to live a life? Again, we can argue at the policy. If you want to say, sorry, we can't take any more refugees from Venezuela. We've taken too many. You have to go home.

Okay. But we're just going to pick you up off the street because you have a tattoo and send you to an El Salvador robocop dystopia? No.