It Could Happen Here - Trump's Concentration Camps in El Salvador

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

Gare and James discuss a meeting between Trump and El Salvador President Nayib Bukele on expanding CECOT style prisons to hold US citizens and immigrants. Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogLw7I2BWO0 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/14/el-salvador-president-return-wrongly-deported-trump-00289234 https://documentedny.com/2025/04/14/ice-bukele-cecot-tren-de-aragua-el-salvador-new-york-deported/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coolzone Media This is It Could Happen Here. I am not going to El Salvador. It's not going to happen. No way. No thank you, Mr. President. I'm Garrison Davis. I'm joined by James Stout.

Hi, Garrison. We're here to talk about possibly the most upsetting thing I've seen in American politics in like the past six months to maybe even, I don't know, this really had hit me for like the past few years. Like, yeah, what happened on Monday in the Oval Office was is kind of the most black pill I've ever been, which is not a great way to start an episode. Yeah, like, it made me feel like I found 2023 very hard, like going out and seeing people freezing in the desert and then coming home and seeing Joe Biden the ice cream on the timeline.

But like this was different. This was so like blatant. There's like a level of like intentional depravity that you're reminded of more blatantly. Yeah. And like Bukele's trolling of everyone. Yes. So, we're going to be talking about an Oval Office meeting between President Trump and El Salvador President Bukele.

I guess I could learn his first name. Naib Bukele? There you go. You know he's Palestinian-Salvadorian. Are you fucking serious? No, his dad's an imam. I don't even have time for that. This is just fucking...

I'm sorry if anyone's driving and has had an accident upon hearing that. So as you probably know, recently the El Salvador Terrorism Confinement Center, this prison black site that people never return from. I guess I could point to, for a pop culture reference, which feels a little bit in bad taste, but you could point to like the prison in the TV show Andor as being a very comparable facility, frankly. Except, they turn off the lights in Andor, they do not turn off the lights in Seacat, lights are on all the time, they put 10 to 20 people per cell. It's pretty bad. Jameson has done episodes on Seacat in the past, will probably keep doing more.

The lights thing by the way was a specific policy change by Bukele. There was a particularly violent weekend in El Salvador, and as a result, he stopped letting people who were detained for gang crimes go outside and stopped building windows into the prison and just put the lights on, like as a way of punishing, I guess, the gangs by punishing the people who were detained there. Yeah, they can't go outside. They stay in their cell for almost 24 hours a day. They might occasionally get 30 minutes outside. But that's not even confirmed because no one's even allowed inside to see what's going on in there. And we've sent upwards of 300 immigrants there, the vast majority of which have no criminal record.

Even if you do have a criminal record, being renditioned to a foreign prison camp is still bad. But this is something that Trump hopes to expand on greatly, and they are currently defending their ability to do so in the courts, since it has been learned that a few people sent there may have been partially sent by accident, but the Trump administration is refusing to return these people and is instead still trying to convince the public that these are dangerous terrorists that deserve to be disappeared. So let's kind of start with that main case. The case that's receiving the most public attention right now is of a Maryland man named Kilmer Abrego Garcia, who's the subject of a district

court case that has been sent up to the Supreme Court and then sent back to the district court on whether this man can be returned home to his US citizen wife and child. And then on Monday, April 14th in the Oval Office meeting, President Bukele said that he will not return this Maryland immigrant with protected legal status back to the United States, who ICE admits was sent to CICOT based on a quote-unquote administrative error. Bukele said, quote, How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? Of course I'm not going to do it. The question is preposterous, unquote.

The El Salvador president also balked at the idea of releasing Garcia from CCOT since he can't have a quote-unquote terrorist free in his country, lying about Garcia being a criminal. I am going to play a few clips in this episode because I think it is necessary to listen to these people actually say the words that they are saying in the tone that they're saying them, and the exact phrasing on these I think is actually pretty important right now. So unfortunately you are gonna have to hear the voices of a few people who you might not rather hear from, including the president of El Salvador. So I'll play

this first clip. Can President Bukele weigh in on this? Do you plan to return him? Well, I'm supposed to have suggested that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right? They totally see that. How can I smuggle? How can I return him to the United States? It's like if I smuggle him into the United States, or whether I do it, of course, I'm not going to do it. It's like, I mean, the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United

States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States. But you could release him inside of the hotel room. Yeah, but I'm not releasing... I mean, we're not very fond of releasing terrorists into our country. I mean, you just turned the murder capital of the world into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere and you want us to go back into releasing criminals so we can go back to being the murder capital of the world. That's not going to happen.

Well, they'd love to have a criminal, you know, with Mr. Joy. Yeah. I mean, there's a fascination. They would love it. Yeah. They're sick. These are sick people. It's just insane. Like, the whole pretence of any, like, serious engagement with reality there. It's just gone.

Yeah. And they're both like miming that neither of them have the ability to make any kind of deal between each other, to send people back, even though they have the ability to make a deal to send people there. Yeah, as they sit in the same room. The whole time Bickeli is talking, Trump has this growing smirk on his face, as Bickeli is talking about this preposterous notion of smuggling a US immigrant back into the United States, despite a Supreme Court order to facilitate the return of this immigrant back into the country. The whole smuggling framing is obviously absurd with him saying, like, I don't have the power to return him to the United States.

All he needs to do is release him from CCOT and the US can fly him back, right? Just as we flew him to El Salvador. Like the two heads of state are sitting right next to each other. They could agree to do this at any time, but now everyone's pretending that suddenly they don't have the power to undo what they seemingly had the power to do in the first place. Like, Bukele has ruled, and we're going to do a whole episode on Bukele and like his rise to power and then his use of power,

but he's ruled under a state of exception for years in El Salvador, which allows him to detain people without warrants, without trials, right? And it's that state of exception that is now the norm there. And that's kind of what he seems to be referring to, right? Like, we just get to lock people up. Why would I not do that? In effect, they are arguing that every single human being that is sent to Seacat by the United States

is unable to ever leave the prison alive. Yeah. Like that's basically what they're saying. They're saying both both parties, both Trump and Bukele, are unable to have someone who's been sent there returned. So they're just they're saying like, have someone who's been sent there returned. So they're just saying like no one's able to do anything. Like they're just stuck there until they die.

And like this is part of the design of CICOT. The person who runs like the CICOT like security has said that they do not intend in any person ever being released from CICOT. You are not designed to get out. You are stuck there forever. No one's ever left there. It's just where to get out. You are stuck there forever. No one's ever left there. It's just where you get disappeared. And that's all that it is.

And I think part of why they're so unwilling to send Garcia back is because then you have someone, like the first person who's ever gotten out and can talk about what it's actually like in there. When you don't have like a Christy gnome and like propaganda cameras pointed at at the prison bars. Yeah. Bukele is very reticent to release anyone for that reason. And like there are plenty of allegations and like I think in like Time magazine has published this is not hugely controversial that he made deals with gangs in the past in El Salvador, right? To get them to reduce the murder rate. And like he certainly wouldn't like to hear that testified to certainly

not in the United States court, right? So like, he doesn't want people to be released from there either. Like you say, they don't want anyone to be able to go to any international human rights courts and testify as to what happened to them there. So it's kind of in his interest to never have anyone be released. It's not just also, I guess, like in his interest. He's also being paid right. Twenty thousand dollars per detainee per year by the United States right now. So he also has a financial interest in keeping people in there. Even this per year deal makes now kind of makes zero sense

because both of them are arguing that there's no way to send anyone back. Right. So like, it's not that it's even like, oh, they're only going to be there for one year. It's like, oh, they're only going to be there for one year. It's like, they're just they're just there. And like, who knows if they're going to like still be alive by the time that some of these people would be able to get out, whether that's through the miraculous Donald Trump impeachment of 2026, which will never happen or like, however, like these people are, they, they are just stuck there because he's not gonna release them into his country

We are seemingly unable To take anyone back from there. I think I'm unwilling right like like the US is theoretically able It's argued that we're unable as as as we will get into more. Yeah after this ad break. Okay, we are back. One thing that we've seen across the Trump administration the past 80 days or so, something that we saw very evident in this meeting, is that whenever a single person is asked a question about the outrageous, possibly illegal, possibly not but just immoral or evil things that are being done, the first instinct is always to pass the buck on to

someone else. We saw this a lot with Signalgate, how it was always someone else's fault. No single person could get hammered down of being like, okay, you are the person that's going to be accountable for this. And throughout this Oval Office meeting eventually they start taking questions from from journalists and reporters and Propagandists who are in the room and you saw this trend of you know, if someone asks Trump about what's going on He passes the buck to Stephen Miller who passes the buck to Bukele Who then passes the buck to Mark Rubio and it's like this big circle of like Bukele, who then passes the buck to Mark Rubio.

And it's like this big circle of like, everyone's just talking around each other because no one really has the authority to to speak on what's going on or how to fix this problem, because they don't see it as a problem. So instead, they just talk in a circle. And I think Miller was one of the most effective at this. And unfortunately, we're going to play the longest clip in this episode, just just under two minutes from Stephen Miller, where he lays out the Trump admin thought process and strategy behind what they are doing. And I apologize for this, but it is useful to hear from Himmler too.

So here we go. With respect to you, he's a citizen of El Salvador. So it's very arrogant even for American media to suggest that we would even tell El Salvador how to handle their own citizens as a starting point. As two immigration courts found that he was a member of MS-13, when President Trump declared MS-13 to be a foreign terrorist organization, that meant that he was no longer

eligible under federal law, which I'm sure you know, you're very familiar with the INA, that he was no longer eligible under federal law, which I'm sure you know, you're very familiar with the INA, that he was no longer eligible for any form of immigration relief in the United States. So he had a deportation order that was valid, which meant that under our law, he's not even allowed to be present in the United States and had to be returned because of the foreign terrorist

designation. This issue was then, by a district court judge, completely inverted, and a district court judge tried to tell the administration that they had to kidnap a citizen of El Salvador and fly him back here. That issue was raised to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said the district court order was unlawful and its main components were reversed 9-0 unanimously, stating clearly that neither

Secretary of State nor the President could be compelled by anybody to forcibly retrieve a citizen of El Salvador from El Salvador, who again is a member of MS-13, which as I'm sure you understand, rapes little girls, murders women, murders children, is engaged in the most barbaric activities in the world, and I can promise you if he was your neighbor you would move right away. But the Supreme Court is asking to... And what was the ruling in the Supreme Court Steve, was it nine to nothing? Yes, it was a nine zero in our favor.

In our favor, against the district court ruling, saying that no district court has the power to compel a foreign policy function of the United States. As Pam said, the ruling solely stated that if this individual at El Salvador's sole discretion was sent back to our country, that we could deport him a second time. No version of this legally ends up with him ever living here because he is a citizen of El Salvador. That is the president of El Salvador. Your questions about the court can only be directed to him. I have a question. So there's a lot there. Yeah. I think I'm going to start with, I can promise you if he was your neighbor, you would move right away.

And I think that is really the heart of what this Trump administration is doing. Like it's appealing to this most basic, like suburban crime panic fear racism of, well, if he was your neighbor, you wouldn't want him living next to you. Yeah, like a Vegas, a neighborhood kind of. Well, just completely lying about like the context of this case with, you know, Miller saying it's arrogant to suggest that we, the most powerful country in the world, or used to be before the tariffs, can tell El Salvador how to handle its citizens, falsely claiming that immigration courts deemed him a member of MS-13, which just is not true,

talking about kidnapping him from CCOT to return him to the United States, as if ICE didn't just kidnap hundreds of people with no criminal records and send them to a foreign gulag, and then also lied about the Supreme Court ruling, saying they found the District Court order to return Garcia unlawful, and grossly mischaracterizing the scope of what the Supreme Court ruling was, and how it was sent back to the District Court to work with the details on what facilitate the return actually means. And again, I think like the, one of the most telling parts is how he ends by saying, quote, no version of this ever ends up with him living here.

And yeah, like they're gonna look for any way to like make this test case to work, right? And if they can do this to someone with protected legal status, who is not a terrorist, who is not a actual MS-13 gang member, right? This is kind of ideal for them because that means they can paint anybody as a foreign policy threat enough to be sent to a foreign gulag. Then at the very end of the clip, he passes the buck off to Bukele to have him answer

this question, again, perfectly laying out their strategy. There's a lot to break down in what Millicent... It's also just kind of interesting, Cambler is like amongst the press. He's not one of the people, like, sat on the couches supposed to be giving the press conference, right? He just kind of wades in to, I guess, like, offer this opinion and kind of like be the kind of embassy of this, of their response, I guess, in a sense. Yeah. be the kind of embassy of their response, I guess, in a sense. I think crucially, like, Abrago Garcia's protection was from being returned to El Salvador, right? Because he had been harassed by gang members when leaving El Salvador and when

they were in El Salvador. He's lived in the States since 2011, and he left El Salvador to flee harassment and abuse from gang members. Yeah, the gangs that he's been accused of being a part of. But like, it then follows that like, it would be legal for them to deport him to a third country, right? And that is the path that they've followed with all the Venezuelan migrants, right? They've accused him of being members of Tren de Agua. I have not seen a compelling case made that any of them are yet. I'm sure people from Tren de Agua have come to this country, but they have not

provided any evidence that the people they have sent to Segot are those people. No, like we said, like 14 people are like accused of some kind of like violent crime, like murder or rape. And the other like 275 do not have a criminal record whatsoever. Yeah, and the bulk of this is reliant on some kind of idea that they have entirely created from fiction that there are tattooing practices when one enters Tren de Aragua and for them, right, even if they can't be returned to Venezuela, they feel like they have this end-rom, which is okay, we'll send them to El Salvador, but for the Salvadorians, that's a different question, right?

And that is what they're trying to find here. And that is worrying because the case here that is getting the most publicity that seems to be the one that the Supreme Court has taken up is about the Salvadorian man. And I hope that doesn't mean that like the ship has sailed for the Venezuelans, right? That essentially, like they don't have a case because that was the vast bulk of them. I think there was something like 60 Salvadoran citizens and the rest Venezuelans. No hundreds of people have been like forgotten in this After Miller's rant there Marc Rubio jumped in to state that quote No court in the United States has the right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States

Unquote and Stephen Miller hopped back in to talk about this Supreme Court case that they're falsely saying they won 9-0, which is not how that case went. And they start talking more broadly about what can be allowed if it has to do with the foreign policy of the United States and how the courts don't have the ability to intervene in that process. No, the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court. And no court in the United States has a right to, the foreign policy of the United States is conducted by the President of the United States, not by a court. And no court in the United States has a right to conduct the foreign policy of the United States.

It's that simple. End of story. And that's what the Supreme Court held, by the way. So, Marko's point. The Supreme Court said exactly what Marko said, that no court has the authority to compel the foreign policy function of the United States. We want a case nine zero, and people like CNN are portraying it as a loss as usual because they want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children.

Part of what I find so disturbing about this idea of, you know, no habeas corpus, no due process if you aren't on foreign soil is that like this idea of the courts having no jurisdiction over foreign policy decisions means that as long as you, whether you're a citizen, whether you're a permanent resident, a documented or undocumented immigrant, as long as you are forcibly removed from the United States soil, your rights and your due process has been forfeit and the US has neither the obligation nor sometimes the ability to return you to US soil if that is their foreign policy interest.

And this is such a troubling broad concept that the portions of the courts are kind of allowing them to claim right now. And the complete removal of due process is like slowly getting encroached upon at first with undocumented immigrants and green card holders. But as we will see in the next section, they are also absolutely going to be targeting US citizens. Yeah, I think we should just point out, obviously, the court is not conducting the foreign policy of the United States.

It's ruling on the legality of the action taken by the president, which is exactly what it's supposed to do. Yeah, and as it relates to your rights for due process, if you are in the United States. Yeah, yeah, like every single US person, right? US person would be anybody who resides in the US, be they documented or undocumented migrants, citizens, what have you, like has a stake in this.

We're going to go on break and then come back to discuss the expansion of the CICOT detention program and the possible targeting of US citizens. OK, we're back. So on April 7th, a few weeks ago, while on Air Force One, President Trump told reporters that he would be quote-unquote honored for the president of El Salvador to take U.S. citizens, quote-unquote, American grown and born criminals, and put them in CICOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center Prison Black Site, saying, quote, Why should it stop just at people that cross the border illegally? Unquote. A few days later, the White House press just at people that cross the border illegally? Unquote.

A few days later, the White House press secretary reiterated that this is something that Trump is discussing both publicly and privately. And later, during the April 14th Oval Office meeting, Trump said that if Salvador was to build more of these torture mega prisons, the United States would quote unquote help them out if the Trump administration could disappear more American immigrants and US citizens to these prison black sites. Are you willing to pay for those facilities to be opened if new ones were going to be built? I'd do something, we'd help them out.

They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games. I'd like to go a step further. I mean, I said it to Pam. I don't know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws. But we also have homegrown criminals that push people into subways, that hit elderly ladies on the back of the head with a baseball bat when they're not looking, that are

absolute monsters. I'd like to include them in the group of people to get them out of the country, but you'll have to be looking at the laws on that, Steve, okay? So this is just the start of a long process that is going to be deeply troublesome and worrying. And again, like, this is something that they keep talking about. I think they're still looking for some kind of legal justification or they're looking for something that maybe, if not allows for this,

explicitly prohibits this in a way that they can't like get around. Yeah, did you notice he called out Miller? He said you'll have to look at the laws on that Steve. Obviously Miller is not the attorney general. He also did mention Attorney General Pam Bondi. Pam Bondi Yeah, who's also looking into this option right now, right? But Miller is often credited with being the kind of mastermind between behind title 42, right? Which was an extremely obscure piece of public health law that was immobilized by the first Trump administration to

Immediately return migrants to Mexico without giving them their right to an asylum hearing, right? And like, that's what I'm wondering if they're going for again, like Steve Miller has been very good at this, at finding obscure justifications in the United States federal law for the shit that they want to do. I think this is why they're definitely trying to stretch this foreign policy claim as far as they can, that if it's outside US soil, there's a limited way US courts can actually interfere or undo things that have already been done. And again, the idea that we're going to fund the construction of even more of these El Salvador mega prisons just to house American grown and born criminals as well as immigrants. Like we're just funding like gulag camps on foreign soil to send the undesirables to.

And no matter how much Trump talks about how we're only going to send quote unquote like American criminals there, as we've seen with CICOT so far, like no. The majority of people they are sending do not have criminal histories. I don't think anyone can trust the Trump administration's definition of what is and isn't criminal to this extent anymore. Later in the same meeting, Trump reiterated the same idea about sending US citizens who his administration deems criminals to this foreign black site. Here's another clip. Just a follow-up question on clarification.

You mentioned that you're open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens but are criminals to El Salvador. Does that include potentially US citizens fully naturalized in the area? If they're criminals and if they hit people with baseball bats over their head that happen to be 90 years old, and if they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island, Brooklyn, yeah, yeah, that includes them. Why do you think there's a special category of person? They're as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones, too, and I'm all for it.

We have others that we're negotiating with too. But no, if it's a homegrown criminal, I have no problem. He's really obsessed with this baseball bats thing. I don't quite know what that's about. It seems like a specific case that he's referring to. Maybe it's something he remembers like 30 years ago that really got stuck in his head. Right.

But also later he says that they're negotiating with other countries to send US citizens to, not just El Salvador. Yeah. I mean, they've sent migrants, third country migrants to Panama before, right? And detained them there. Honduras, I believe, is building like a prison that's not dissimilar to Secort. Like I'd be guessing this will be their sort of way of courting allies in the hemisphere, like, they'll sort of pay them

a relatively large amount in order to attempt to offshore people they don't like. Yeah. And again, like, as we've seen the past few years, and increasingly so now, the efforts to label like activists or people who are vocally opposed to the United States foreign policy the United States and state of Israel deeming them terrorists and then by extension if you charge them with a crime then criminals the idea that they can be housed in a place like Seacat now With very very limited to no due process. The whole due process question is still very up in the air for how they're going to handle that aspect. But you can't just take this as like, oh, you know, that's just Trump talking. Like, no, this is something they really want to do.

And it's like one of the freakiest things that I've seen in, like, domestic US politics in a long time. Earlier, Trump was recorded half-whispering to Bukele, telling him that El Salvador needs to build five more Seacot-style torture prisons to house US citizens, as Trump says, homegrown criminals. Bukele replies that they will have enough room, and then the entire Oval Office laughs. I said, home groans are next. The home groans. You gotta build about five more places. Yeah, that's better. All right?

It's the bleakest clip I've like ever seen before. Yeah. Talking about home groans are next, gotta build five more places. Oh, we have enough space. Everyone laughs. And then Trump shows off the new gold frames for the portraits in the Oval Office. Yeah. It's like a dinner party joke for them.

It might just be worth noting that like every totalitarian regime has housed its dissidents outside of the Imperial core, right? Like Germany did this in the East, right? Russia sent people to Siberia for Russia, Soviet Union. Creating these like stateless zones where like the regular laws of your like fatherland state do not apply. Right. And where the horrors are so far from the populace that the populace can't really grasp them. Yeah. No, this is like elementary school stuff. It says like, this is like elementary school stuff.

This is like the first thing you learn about is concentration camps and gulags, and how that's like this symbol of evil. And now it's something you laugh about in the Oval Office to send home groans to five disappearing torture camps. Yeah, and like, just to be even clearer, I guess what distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison is that there is no due process, right? People are sent there because of who they are, not because of what they did. Like if you're a Venezuelan man who may or may not have a tattoo. Yeah, like, we are... I don't know what it will take for some people to realize what's happening here.

And like, the president of El Salvador is so on board for this. Yeah, I mean, he doesn't hide from that reputation, right? He embraces it. His Twitter for a while had world's coolest dictator in the bio. I don't know if it still does. It's like both him and Trump have openly aligned themselves with, quote unquote, nationalism and nationalists. They're openly saying this.

Trump said dictator on day one, that wasn't just a rhetorical device, that was literal. This is what he's doing. The El Salvador president told Trump, you have 350 million people to liberate, but to liberate 350 million people, you have 350 million people to liberate. But to liberate 350 million people, you have to imprison some. That's the way it works, right? You cannot just free the criminals and think crime is going to go down magically. You have to imprison them so you can liberate 350 million Americans that are asking for the end of crime and the end of terrorism. And you can be done. I mean, you're doing it already. So I'm really happy to be here honored and eager to help.

This whole like liberation through imprisonment thing is elementary school stuff here. You don't have to have a PhD in the history of the 1930s to have someone tell you that like liberation of the chosen nation by purging of the undesirables is fascist shit. But I'm here with one to tell you if that's what you need. This is textbook stuff like Garrison's saying. This is not debatable. I know we spent the last four years debating is Trump a fascist or not.

I don't think that matters hugely. This is a fascist thing. It's so much more disturbing that now according to polls, around half the population, maybe a little bit less, just agree with the current way that deportations are happening and Trump's immigration policy on a completely flat basis. And if you spend any time on X, the Everything app, watching videos of these press conferences, it's full of people just cheering this this on completely, like completely blankly. I think that's a very skewed sample of people who totally paid for Elon Musk. Of course, of course.

But like the number of people. Yeah, it's real humans. Like these are real people who just just completely, completely blankly think this is a this is this is a net good. And like, those people are unreachable. You cannot come back from that. Like, there is no coming back from that. If you believe that the way deportations

are currently happening is fair, just, and right, like, I cannot understand you as a human anymore. That is so, like, divorced and, like, alien. Yeah, you've gone past the point of no return, right? Liberals who, like, shield their eyes from, like from the horrors at the border, like I don't agree with that, but in some ways I can understand it. The open cheering on of this is like a whole other level. Yeah, it's not like I can't bear to see it.

I'm going to ignore it because it'll cause me to confront the contradictions. I'm seeing it, I'm watching it, and I think it's fucking great. The last thing I'm going to play here, a CNN reporter asked Trump if he would obey a Supreme Court order to return someone to the United States. Instead of answering this question, Trump attacked the reporter and complained about how she wasn't praising him for deporting criminals. Well, Mr. President, you said that if the Supreme Court said someone needed to be returned, that you would abide by that. You said that on Air Force One just a few days ago.

And they said that it must be facilitated. Why don't you just say, isn't it wonderful that we're keeping criminals out of our country? Why can't you just say that? Why do you go over and over and that's why nobody watches you anymore? You know, you have no credibility. Please go ahead. President Trump. Yeah, mad. Very textbook authoritarian, like blanket stuff. There's nothing to like commentate

about that. It just is what it is. I guess we do have some breaking news because we're recording this on Tuesday. James, do you want to in possibly five minutes or less fill us in about the update from the district court on Garcia's case, since it was sent back to the district court from the Supreme Court last week regarding his possible facilitated return to the United States. Right. So much of this is hinged over what facilitate means, right? They found a legal concept that they can argue ad nauseam. And in this case, it's the word facilitate. The DOJ didn't present any new information

today, but we see that there's some hopeful things from district court judge, and then it kind of all goes up in flames. But I think Chinis is X-I-N-I-S is how the name is spelled. I believe it's Chinis. I said that every day that he's there is a day of further irreparable harm. And then she talks about the process being at the roots of the constitution, right? She's ordered for like two weeks more of discovery, which is going to mean that both sides have more time to repair their cases, right? She wants people to testify in front of the court. So the administration has argued that facilitating his return would consist of them allowing him to enter the United States if Bukele released him.

And possibly providing a flight for that to happen, but not crucially ensuring his release from Secord. Right. And so anything else subsequent to that doesn't matter. Gignis said that like their interpretation of the word flies in the face of the plain meaning of the word. Quote, when a wrongfully removed individual is, and then I'm adding to the quote here, I guess, or context, she means when a wrongfully removed individual is taken outside the US,

it's not so cut and dried that all you have to do is remove obstacles domestically. She also said, quote, to the Department of Justice here, you made your jurisdictional arguments, you made your venue arguments, you made your arguments on the merits, you lost. This is now about the scope of the remedy, right? This is a case that Miller is claiming they won. That's pretty unequivocal for a justice. However, she does not seem to think that it is within her power to request his return from El Salvador. So she's, she's calling for things to move quickly, right? They want to conduct depositions by the 23rd of April. She said, quote, cancel vacations, cancel other appointments.

I'm usually pretty good about it. Not this time. I'm going to be available if you need to do it odd hours or weekends. That's what I'm talking about. Anything short of a judge saying you have to go to Secod, remove him from the cell, put him on the plane and bring him back to America is going to be interpreted by the Trump administration to mean that they don't have to do that. Yeah, they're going to weasel their way around it the same way you heard Stephen Miller weasel

his way around every question and with truth being used as a flexible medium to shape a sculpture of their choosing. And like, they've done that right. The word facilitate, I think most people who are first language English speakers have a fairly good grasp of what that means. And it doesn't mean like remove barriers domestically. That's what they've gone for. The only way that he is getting out is a majority Supreme Court decision that is extremely explicit

that directs the Trump administration to go to El Salvador and remove him from that prison. I haven't seen anything to indicate that we're getting that anytime soon. And as the judge said, every day he's there, a reprehensible harm is done to him. And that's where we're at right now, right? With people arguing over the definition of a word, as hundreds of people are locked up having done nothing wrong in a giant torture prison. And this is not the only person who we believe was quote unquote mistakenly sent. There's reporting today coming out of Vacuuminted New York. Yeah. Good outlet, by the way. A father of a 19-year-old legal immigrant from Brooklyn.

This 19-year-old with no tattoos was kidnapped off the streets of New York. The quote from his father reads, The officers grabbed him and two other boys right at the entrance to our building. One said, No, he's not the one, like they were looking for someone else. One officer, to be clear. Correct. Yeah. But the other officer said, take him anyway, unquote.

And now this father, exactly a month later, is still looking for his missing son, who is disappeared into an El Salvador torture prison. Yeah, Jesus. Like I've said before on this show, like one of the things that I learned in the Darien Gat was how much people can care about their kids. And like this shit that I saw people do to ensure their kids have a better life, like broke my heart in a way that war hasn't, that like anything else I've seen in my life hasn't and it's like honestly really hard for me to hear stuff like that and and like not react just being really sad or really angry like it's fucking brutal.

Things are looking a lot more grim in my mind than they were when we recorded that. Should you leave the United States episode? I still think the things I said there, I stand by and I stand by the, the, the only recommendation I have is to create options for yourself. And I think those options should be created as soon as possible. Especially if your citizenship is a topic of debate, according to the United States government. But even that will not keep you safe as we've talked about today. And your options include creating networks to take care of one another, right?

The things that will probably affect more of you than direct state violence are economic downturns, are recessions, right? Things like this, those are things that you can take care of one another through. And like, you should plan to do that too. You should, you should think about how you're going to pay your bills, how you're going to feed each other, how you're going to take care of your medical needs. Uh, because I don't think that the world is going to want to keep doing business with a country that acts like this, both economically and in

terms of its conduct towards migrants. So like your plans don't have to be to leave, like your plan should also include what to do if things get really bad, like in an economic sense. I'm not going to tell you what that means, but it's all the stuff we've already talked about, right, it's mutual aid. It's all the basic preparedness stuff that is not as big and scary as leaving the country, but is nonetheless like vital. We will continue to report on the Garcia case, other court cases regarding these 300 people rendition to El Salvador and CICOT in the next few weeks. Yeah. Just to finish up, as things continue to get worse, people keep reaching out to

us, which we appreciate. If you would like to, you can email us coolzontips at proton.me. We will read it. We might not get back to you. Your email is not end-to-end encrypted unless the email that you're sending from is also encrypted. But you can reach out to us there. See you on the other side. might not get listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening!