The autocrat's prison
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The Trump administration is defying a federal judge who's demanding details about a flight to El Salvador. It carried almost 200 men who the administration says are gang members and who were flown from U.S. soil after the judge said, don't. President Trump and El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele posted video of the shackled men being pulled from the plane by guards in riot gear and transported in white buses to prison. The official White House Twitter account also reposted a remix of the video set to Semisonic's closing time. Semisonic responded, the song is about joy and possibilities and hope. And they have missed the point entirely. Lest we all, let's focus up. The administration hasn't offered any proof that these men are gang members and acknowledges many don't even have criminal records in the U.S. All this coming up on Today Explained.
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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Ted Hessen. Ted is an immigration reporter at Reuters. Ted, President Trump is using the Alien Enemies Act to target a gang called Trende Aragua. Who are they?
Tren de Aragua is a Venezuelan gang, a prison gang, and the name translates to train from Aragua, which is a state in Venezuela. And within Venezuela and within the region, they have a reputation, a notorious reputation for extortion and kidnappings and even contract killings. We've seen them increasingly talked about in the U.S., particularly in the political context. And this goes back to the presidential election last year.
And what we're hearing, of course, Martha, is that people are terrified by what has happened with some of these Venezuelan gangs.
They're dealing drugs. They're getting arrested. It's not just Lake and Riley. I can give you dozens of examples of people who've been victims of crimes.
What we saw under former President Joe Biden was an increase in immigration generally and illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border. and also hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who entered both by crossing the border illegally and through legal entry programs that Biden himself had launched. And then during the election, we noticed that as President Trump made illegal immigration a major theme and even legal immigration a major theme of his reelection campaign, he was focusing also on the Venezuelans who had come into the country and particularly portraying many of them as immigrants affiliated with this gang, Tren de Aragua, or with gangs in general or criminality.
They allowed terrorists. They allowed common street criminals. They allowed people to come in, drug dealers, to come into our country. And they're now in the United States and told by their countries, like Venezuela, don't ever come back or we're going to kill you.
Now, that said, even though this gang does have a fearsome reputation within Venezuela and within the region, there are not yet signs that they're operational on a large scale in the U.S. There have been individual cases of alleged members of the gang arrested and charged with crimes, including very serious crimes. But that said, it's just not clear that they're operational here in the way that they might be in another country.
What does the Alien Enemies Act allow the president to do about this perceived threat?
So the Alien Enemies Act is an obscure, rarely used wartime statute that dates back to 1798. And it's really just been used three times in U.S. history and always in times of war. It's best known or most notoriously known for its use in World War II to justify internment camps for Japanese Americans, Italian Americans, and German Americans.
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