Trump's Chain of Failure

I've always been interested in history, and one of the aspects of history that I have most enjoyed was learning about how events are connected. One thing can often lead to another in a very unexpected way. Every day now in the United States, we see history being made right before our eyes as cult leader, convicted felon, and failed President Donald Trump transitions our once-great country into something akin to Vladimir Putin's Russia or Viktor Orbán's Hungary. Autocratic rule joined with corruption is the order of the day. That and incompetence. Combine all three, and the results are not only likely to be unexpected but unwanted. For instance, who would have predicted that the arrest of a gay make-up artist at a U.S. border crossing, the similar detention at another border crossing of a former professional soccer player, the seizure of an employee of a bakery who had an autism awareness tattoo, and the arrest of hundreds of similar men would ultimately lead to the release of a three-time murderer into the United States? Yet, this is exactly what happened. Let's connect the dots.

First, there was incompetence. U.S. immigration officials were determined to prevent the entry of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and to remove any members already in the country. That is a goal that would likely have widespread support in the U.S., but agents of the Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies did not have a foolproof method of identifying such members. As a result, they tended to rely on the presence of tattoos. Andry Hernández Romero, a gay make-up artist who had fled his native Venezuela due to threats related to his sexual orientation, had two tattoos of crowns on his wrists. One was labeled "Mom" and the other "Dad". Jerce Reyes Barrios, a former professional soccer goalie and coach in Venezuela, had a tattoo of his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid. Neri José Alvarado Borges has an autistic brother and has a tattoo of a rainbow-colored ribbon composed of puzzle pieces, a symbol for autism awareness, with his brother's name on it. All three were identified as Tren de Aragua members due to their tattoos. Hernández and Reyes Barrios were detained when they appeared at U.S. border crossings for prearranged interviews. Alvarado was arrested while on his way to work at a bakery in Texas.

Next was autocracy. From day one of his second term, Trump has been eager to deport migrants without providing for due process. He would like to be able to grab anyone believed to be a migrant off the street and deport them immediately without a judge having any say in the matter. Unfortunately for Trump, things haven't worked out to allow that. To speed things up where Venezuelans were concerned, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that previously had only been invoked during the War of 1812 and the First and Second World Wars. Multiple federal judges have since ruled that the Act was unlawfully invoked. Nevertheless, Immigration officials immediately loaded more than 250 Venezuelan men onto airplanes in order to remove them from the United States. However, the planes were not destined for Venezuela, but rather El Salvador, where the men would be confined to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT). Just prior to the aircraft being loaded, lawyers for a few Venezuelans likely to be sent to El Salvador rushed to court in Washington, DC. The judge assigned to the case was the Federal District Court's Chief Judge James Boasberg. After a brief hearing, Boasberg issued an order from the bench prohibiting the planes from departing and ordering them to return to the U.S. if they had already taken off. Subsequently, government lawyers informed Boasberg that the aircraft had already reached international airspace and would not return. Their explanation was that they had waited for a written, rather than the verbal order, before acting to stop the aircraft.

Then came the corruption. Boasberg would later find that Trump officials had acted in "willful disregard" of his order to return the flights. He initiated contempt proceedings which were later halted by an appeals court. However, it appears that there was more to the failure of the government to adhere to Boasberg's order than was initially apparent. At the time of Boasberg's hearing, Emil Bove was serving as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General. Bove has since been nominated by Trump for an appellate judgeship and is awaiting Senate confirmation. Since Bove's nomination, three whistleblowers have come forward with information about his actions in the Justice Department. Specifically, it has been alleged that, with regard to the flights to El Salvador, Bove told lawyers working under him that "a judge might try to block them — and that it might be necessary to tell a court ‘f--- you’ and ignore the order." That, of course, is exactly what happened in Boasberg's court.

With the Venezuelan men confined to CECOT in violation of Boasberg's order, a number of legal battles regarding the men's fate continued in the United States. Many of these focused on an El Salvadoran rather than the Venezuelans. Kilmar Ábrego García was an El Salvadoran migrant who was detained in Maryland. Despite a judge's order preventing his deportation to El Salvador, he was included on a flight taking men to CECOT. In Ábrego's case and others, U.S. officials repeatedly argued that they did not have custody of those at CECOT and had no ability to influence what happened to them. They contended that the men were El Salvador's responsibility and the U.S. had nothing to do with them. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but these were lies. They were clearly lies at the time, and subsequent events made that even more clear. Ábrego, for instance, was later returned to the U.S. after Trump officials were able to manufacture a criminal case against him. He is currently facing charges in a federal court in Tennessee.

At the same time that Trump officials were arguing in U.S. courts that they had no control over the men imprisoned in El Salvador, a soap opera of sorts was going on behind the scenes. Marco Rubio, who holds the title of Secretary of State among many other titles — but generally confines himself to trying to deport college students — had designated John McNamara, the chargé d’affaires of the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia, to attempt to exchange the Venezuelans for Americans being held in Venezuelan prisons. In May, McNamara seemed to be on the verge of success. As the New York Times reports, both the U.S. and Venezuela were already arranging flights to pick up their citizens. However, that effort collapsed due to the involvement of Richard Grenell, appointed as Special Presidential Envoy for Special Missions by Trump, in a second, conflicting exchange deal. Grenell was in the process of negotiating a different deal for the release of the Americans that the Venezuelans found more appealing. However, it turned out that Grenell did not have Trump's approval for his deal and, as a result, both potential exchanges collapsed. More Trump administration incompetence.

The three-country exchange involving the Venezuelans being held in El Salvador and Americans detained in Venezuela was subsequently revived and came to fruition this month. More than 250 Venezuelans were flown from El Salvador to Caracas, while 10 jailed U.S. citizens and permanent residents were freed from Venezuela. Among the Americans who returned to the U.S. was a U.S. Army veteran named Dahud Hanid Ortiz. His inclusion among those being exchanged was ironic. Trump has always described the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador as brutal gang members, including murderers. In reality, the vast majority had no criminal records at all, and most of those who did had only been charged with minor, non-violent crimes. Hanid Ortiz, on the other hand, is a convicted murderer.

According to the New York Times, in 2016, Hanid Ortiz entered the office of a lawyer in Madrid, Spain. Hanid Ortiz believed that the lawyer was having a relationship with his wife. Inside the office, Hanid Ortiz killed two women and a man whom he mistook for the lawyer. Hanid Ortiz is a dual Venezuelan American citizen. After the murders, he fled first to Germany and then to Venezuela. While Spain attempted to extradite him, Venezuela does not allow the extradition of its citizens, and he was tried in Venezuela instead and sentenced to 30 years in prison. After his return to the U.S., Hanid Ortiz was released and is now free.

This is the Trump administration in a nutshell. Trump proclaimed that he would rid the U.S. of migrants who had committed murders. Instead, he sent a make-up artist, a soccer player, and a loving brother to the hellhole of CECOT. In return, he set free the savage murderer of three innocents. To compound matters even more, Emil Bove, the Justice Department official who had told his staff to say "f--- you" to judges, is very near to being confirmed himself as a federal appellate judge. The icing on this particular cake is that the position that Bove is likely to fill is only open because a handful of Democratic Senators yielded to Islamophobia and refused to confirm former President Joe Biden's nominee for the judgeship who would have been the first Muslim appeals court judge.

Yesterday, Attorney General Pam Bondi submitted a complaint about Judge Boasberg accusing him of misconduct. Bondi claims that Boasberg made "improper public comments" about Trump. According to Bondi, during a session of the Judicial Conference of the United States, Boasberg suggested that the Trump administration would "disregard rulings of federal courts." This is alleged to have happened before the Trump administration, at Bove's direction, ignored Boasberg's own ruling regarding the removals to El Salvador. Not only was Boasberg's alleged concern about Trump not made in public, despite Bondi's claim, but it appears to have been prescient. Moreover, Bondi herself routinely makes inappropriate public comments about ongoing legal matters, including multiple statements involving those sent to El Salvador (and especially Kilmar Ábrego García).

Trump has created an upside-down world. Harmless individuals are sent to hellholes, and a murderer is set free. A complaint is filed against a judge who has clearly been on the right side of justice while a man who wanted to illegally ignore judges is in the process of being confirmed as one. Can you imagine the historians of the future attempting to understand how this could happen?