Homeland Security Secretary’s El Salvador Stunt Just Got Worse

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s latest propaganda skit was not only barbaric, it may also have violated the Geneva Conventions, according to The Bulwark.

Noem posted a short video on X Thursday that documented her visit to Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador where Donald Trump has left 261 Venezuelan nationals to rot after he deported them earlier this month by invoking the Alien Enemies Act. Multiple judges have rebuked his invocation of the act.

A freshly blown-out Noem stood in front of a large prison cell where more than a dozen prisoners, all with shaved heads, some with tattoos, were posed as Noem’s backdrop. They silently looked on as she delivered a short statement.

Noem thanked the prison for holding the alleged “terrorists” over the “violence they have perpetuated in our communities.”

“Do not come to our country illegally,” Noem warned. “You will be removed, and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

It’s worth noting the lies in Noem’s speech. An ICE official said in a sworn statement that “many” individuals deported under the AEA did not have a criminal record in the U.S. or Venezuela, so it’s not clear that they “perpetuated” anything in their communities. Also, several of the individuals deported were lawfully awaiting asylum determinations and were not in the U.S. illegally.

The U.S. government claimed that all of the deportees were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, declared by Trump to be a terrorist group, and subjected them to a swift deportation without due process.

In doing so, the government did not afford the detainees the right to challenge their designation as alleged TdA members under the AEA. Lawyers for several deportees alleged their clients were wrongly identified as gang members and tried to have the deportations stopped, but they were too late. Many of the deportees didn’t even know where they were going, and neither did their families or their lawyers.

But if Trump wants to declare a war against the TdA by invoking a wartime law, then he must play by wartime rules—specifically, the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit the public exploitation of prisoners of war.

According to The Bulwark, the Trump administration and CECOT may have violated other aspects of the Geneva Conventions in their war on TdA by not quickly providing the “names, serial numbers, and addresses of all prisoners so that the next of kin can be promptly advised”; not allowing every prisoner to “write directly to his family telling them about his situation, his health, and giving them his address” within a week of capture; and then not allowing the prisoners to “send and receive not less than two letters and four cards each month.”

In a filing on Monday, Judge James Boasberg said that by sending the prisoners to CECOT, which is notorious for human rights abuses, the Trump administration had likely violated the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, which states that “it shall be the policy of the United States not to expel … any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

Trump is holding U.S. automakers hostage by scaring them into not raising prices while he puts massive 25 percent tariffs on all of the materials they need to make their product. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that the president told automakers at an event earlier this month that he would look “unfavorably” on any price increases after his tariffs, causing automakers to fear retribution unless they just grin and bear the incoming cost increases. He also told them that they should be happy and thankful for him ridding them of Biden’s electric vehicle mandate, and that the tariffs would actually just be “great.” 

“You’re going to see prices going down, but going to go down specifically because they’re going to buy what we’re doing, incentivizing companies to—and even countries—companies to come into America,” Trump told the CEOs.  

This is a huge contradiction. The president claims he’s trying to lower inflation and reinvigorate the domestic manufacturing industry while simultaneously making everything more expensive. Trump’s new 25 percent automobile tariffs will go into effect on April 2. Almost half of all passenger cars in the U.S. are manufactured outside of our borders in places like Mexico and Japan. Carmakers already have begun to stockpile new, completed cars to try to offset the tariffs until May. 

“It is difficult to see how imposed tariffs over time would not have some impact on prices,” American Automotive Policy Council President Matt Blunt, who represents General Motors, Stellantis, and Ford Motor, told the Journal. 

It’s unclear how the Trump administration will punish car companies that do indeed raise prices—something they’ve been forced into doing by Trump himself.

On Saturday, Elon Musk’s Tesla dealerships around the world will be met with protests. 

Organizers are calling it the Tesla Takedown Global Day of Action, and plan to hold rallies at over 200 Tesla locations, including close to 50 in California. They hope to send a message to Tesla CEO Musk and the Trump administration that they oppose their overhaul of the federal government, from the mass purges of federal workers to closing entire agencies. 

The organizers describe themselves as grassroots activists who will “protest Tesla for as long as Elon Musk continues to shred public services,” according to their organizing page. The movement is decentralized, with local organizers planning their own protests rather than coordinating with a national group. Musk is “destroying our democracy using the fortune he built at Tesla” and so, in turn, they are “taking action at Tesla,” the website states. 

“Nobody voted for this, and nobody voted for Elon,” Vickie Mueller Olvera, who is organizing protests in California’s Bay Area, said to The Guardian. “He’s an unelected super-billionaire and he’s a thug.”

Olvera advises people not to buy a Tesla or  buy stock in the company and to join the protests, which started shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Since then, Tesla stock has plummeted, with Musk leveraging his influence over the Trump administration to have the president shill for the car company on the White House lawn and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick beg the public to buy Tesla stock.  

Trump’s ill-advised automobile tariffs may even affect Tesla less than other automakers, according to industry experts, raising questions as to whether that is Trump’s real goal. But Musk is largely responsible for damaging his own car company, which makes a fortune not on car sales but on exploiting the carbon credit market. If he’s upset about Tesla’s (and his own) damaged image, perhaps he should stay out of the federal government. But that would mean the end of his gravy train.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney officially broke things off with the United States Thursday, marking a seismic shift in relations between the longtime allies.  

“The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over,” Carney said during a press conference, following a meeting in Ottawa with his ministers to “discuss trade options” in response to Donald Trump’s “permanent” 25 percent tariffs on all imported vehicles and auto parts.

“What exactly the United States does next is unclear, but what is clear, what is clear is that we as Canadians have agency. We have power. We are masters in our own home,” Carney said. 

“We can control our destiny. We can give ourselves much more than any foreign government, including the United States, can ever take away. We can deal with this crisis best by building our own strength right here at home.” 

Carney warned that Canada, which is currently one of the top importers of U.S. goods, would need to reshape its economy to wean itself off its southern neighbor.

“We will need to dramatically reduce our reliance on the United States. We will need to pivot our trade relationships elsewhere. And we will need to do things previously thought impossible at speeds we haven’t seen in generations,” Carney said. 

On Wednesday, Carney called the latest round of tariffs a “very direct attack.” 

“We will defend our workers. We will defend our companies. We will defend our country,” he said at the time.

Back stateside, the Big Three automakers took an immediate hit Thursday as the market digested Trump’s tariff announcement, with new tariffs on vehicles expected to go into effect on April 3 and on vehicle parts one month later.

The White House has pretended that the steep tariffs on Canada are a bargaining chip to help curb illegal drug trafficking—a threat so minor that it warranted no mention in the Trump administration’s first Annual Threat Assessment—but Trump openly admitted that he hoped to use tariffs to bully Canada into becoming a U.S. state. His bullying has since escalated into an all-out trade war, which could potentially devastate states along America’s northern border. 

The Trump administration sent a Venezuelan national with no criminal record to a Salvadoran megaprison based on an administrative error, according to The Miami Herald.

Frengel Reyes Mota, 24 years old, was deported to El Salvador earlier this month along with hundreds of other Venezuelan men whom the Trump administration falsely claims to be Tren de Aragua gang members. Trump invoked the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to bypass any judicial resistance (which has come anyway in the form of Judge James Boasberg). But Reyes Mota’s immigration records contain multiple errors, including marking him as a woman, using a different last name, and filing two ID numbers for him.

Reyes Mota has committed no crime—either in Venezuela or the United States—and has none of the tattoos that the Trump administration is absurdly alleging identify Tren de Aragua members. In fact, he has no tattoos at all. He had a pending asylum case before he was disappeared to El Salvador without a day in court.

“We are facing a novel and extremely concerning situation where people’s immigration court proceedings are still pending but they are being disappeared from the United States without any lawful removal order,” said Mark Prada, Retes Mota’s lawyer. “This is an affront to the rule of law.”

The Trump administration continues to assert that a DHS file notes that Reyes Mota “may be a Tren de Aragua associate.” But his lack of criminal record is mentioned in the very same file.

More bleak stories like this are sure to come, as the Trump administration doubles down on its indiscriminate deportations of tattooed Latino men under the guise of war.