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.

Senate Republicans voted Thursday to overturn a $5 cap on bank overdraft fees, leaving working-class people vulnerable to exploitation from financial institutions.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau adopted the cap late last year. It was scheduled to take effect later in 2025.

The rule was meant to protect consumers from unreasonable fees levied by banks and credit unions, saving consumers an estimated $5 billion per year total.

Chuck Bell, the advocacy program director at Consumer Reports, warned that repealing the fee limits “will hurt working families who are already struggling with high prices and inflation.” While Donald Trump has made plenty of promises to make the cost of living more affordable, he has functionally rubber-stamped the efforts of Republicans to undermine that very promise.

The resolution to repeal the rule was introduced by Senator Tim Scott, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, and done through the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to undo recently adopted regulations through a simple majority vote.

The resolution passed in the Senate on a nearly party-line vote of 52–48.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley was the only Republican to oppose the measure. “Why would we help the big banks at the expense of working people?” Hawley said, after the vote. “I just don’t understand it.”

Every Senate Democrat voted against the measure.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee who helped establish the CFPB, slammed her Republican colleagues for undermining the consumer to help big banks. “Senate Republicans would rather you didn’t find out they just voted to give the biggest banks billions in profits from overdraft fees that kick working people when they’re down. Disgraceful,” she wrote on X Thursday.

The resolution is now expected to move to the House.

Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg urged voters Thursday to contact their representatives to “ask how they’ll vote.”

“Moment of clarity today in the Senate where Republicans sided with big banks & against customers. Higher fees, lower transparency,” Buttigieg wrote on X.

The CPFB’s rule previously faced a legal challenge from the American Bankers Association, which claimed that the agency had overstepped its authority to impose the rule, which would ultimately hurt consumers. Rob Nichols, the trade group’s chief executive, issued a statement applauding the resolution’s passage in the Senate.

“If implemented, the C.F.P.B.’s 11th-hour rule imposing government price controls would force many banks to limit or eliminate overdraft protection as we know it,” Nichols said. “Many Americans would be driven to less regulated and higher risk non-bank lenders to cover unexpected or emergency expenses.”

The Trump administration seems interested in eliminating the CFPB altogether. “CFPB RIP 🪦,” Elon Musk wrote on X in February.

New York has blocked Texas from filing a legal action against a local doctor accused of prescribing and sending abortion pills to a resident in the Lone Star State.

“In accordance with the New York State Shield Law, I have refused this filing and will refuse any similar filings that may come to our office,” Taylor Bruck, the acting clerk of Ulster County, said in a statement Thursday. “Since this decision is likely to result in further litigation, I must refrain from discussing specific details about the situation.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Dr. Margaret Carpenter in December, accusing her of mailing the pills to a Collin County resident who allegedly consumed the medication when she was nine weeks pregnant. The lawsuit did not mention whether the woman was successful in terminating her pregnancy.

Paxton wanted Carpenter to cough up $100,000 for every violation of the state’s near-total abortion ban—a potentially relatively light sentence, considering that violators of Texas’s draconian abortion law can also face life in prison and have their Texas medical license revoked.

The lawsuit was Texas’s first attempt at suing an abortion provider across state lines, and is New York’s first use of its shield law, which protects doctors and providers providing abortion care from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions.

Abortion rights advocates have argued that banning the procedure only bans safe abortions, forcing women in need of abortion care to find alternative solutions. Last week, news broke that a Pennsylvania teenager and her mother were under investigation after fetal remains were reported in the family’s backyard following a self-managed abortion, reported Jezebel.

And recent reports have shown that the lack of access to abortion care has actually made pregnancies drastically less safe. In Texas, where abortion hasn’t been permitted despite the legislature’s medical emergency clause, sepsis rates have skyrocketed by as much as 50 percent for women who lost their pregnancies during the second trimester, according to an investigative analysis by ProPublica.

But Texas has still been brutal in enforcing its post–Roe v. Wade laws. In the last couple of weeks, two Houston-area abortion providers have been arrested and charged with providing illegal care, reported The Texas Tribune.

The prescription commonly referred to as the “abortion pill” is a two-step process of taking mifepristone and then misoprostol. The procedure accounts for more than half of all the abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute, and has become a crucial tool as abortion restrictions limit access to in-person medical visits. It is more than 95 percent effective at ending pregnancies when used before 10 weeks of pregnancy, according to statistics by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Access to mifepristone has become an increasingly fraught political issue since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In October, the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho—a cohort of states with some of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the nation—sued the federal government to limit access to the drug, arguing that the medication should be illegal for minors (misoprostol is fully legal as it is used for other conditions).

The Supreme Court unexpectedly saved mifepristone access in June, when it unanimously ruled that a group of different plaintiffs, represented by the right-wing Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, did not have legal standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration and that the legal organization had failed to demonstrate how its clients were personally harmed by the drug’s existence on the market.

By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 12 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 69 percent believe that it should be legal in the first trimester of pregnancy.

The Trump administration has decided that it will not investigate itself, even though the reckless actions of some of its key officials purportedly endangered the lives of American soldiers.

Attorney General Pam Bondi indicated Thursday that the Justice Department would not launch a criminal investigation into some administration officials’ use of Signal to communicate attack plans on Houthi targets in Yemen earlier this month.

Bondi also declared that the details shared in the chat—which included down-to-the-minute scheduling for the launch of U.S. F-18 attack planes toward Yemen, “trigger based” strikes, and the launch of sea-based subsonic cruise missiles—were “not classified.”

Instead, Bondi praised the coordination among Trump officials, claiming that the nation’s focus should be on the mission’s success rather than the magnitude of the administration’s national security failures.

“It was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released,” Bondi said at a news conference in Virginia. “What we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission.”

National security experts have said otherwise.

“This information was clearly classified,” an unidentified former senior defense official told Fox News’s Jennifer Griffin.

“These were ‘attack plans,’” a second former senior U.S. defense official told Griffin. “If you are revealing who is going to be attacked (Houthis—the name of the text chain), it still gives the enemy warning. When you release the time of the attack—all of that is always ‘classified.’”

The Atlantic was the first to report on the Signal fiasco Monday after national security adviser Mike Waltz made another critical security error by accidentally adding the magazine’s chief editor to the chat.

Donald Trump has stood by Waltz in the wake of the scandal, reiterating his confidence in the former Florida representative, despite revelations that Waltz has made a string of careless mistakes.

But rather than take responsibility for actions taken entirely by their chosen representatives, conservatives have once again opted to deflect and misdirect blame onto some of their favorite targets, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Joe Biden.

“If you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was in Hillary Clinton’s home,” Bondi said Thursday. “Talk about the classified documents in Joe Biden’s garage that Hunter Biden had access to.”

But those scandals were not the same. Clinton was accused of using an alternative email server to conduct state business, while a 345-page Justice Department report on Biden’s classified offense predominantly fixated on the aging president’s health and mental bandwidth. Both Democrats were the subject of respective DOJ investigations. Trump was, as well, though the classified documents case against the forty-fifth president was dropped after he won reelection in November.

And the American public has noticed the difference, with the majority of people believing that the Signal scandal matters more than Republicans’ scapegoats.

A YouGov survey published on Tuesday found that 53 percent of nearly 6,000 polled Americans felt that the Trump administration’s Signal leak was “very serious,” while another 21 percent described it as “somewhat serious.”

Meanwhile, a survey conducted in the wake of Clinton’s email scandal by YouGov and The Economist in March 2015 found that 30 percent of polled Americans felt that Clinton’s server was “very serious.” Another 26 percent noted that it was “somewhat serious” to them.

At a press conference Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio refused to give a specific justification for the arrest and detention of Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts, by masked immigration authorities on Tuesday.

“A year ago [Ozturk] wrote an opinion piece about the Gaza war. Could you help us understand what the specific action she took led to her visa being revoked?” A reporter asked, referring to Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar from Turkey, co-authoring a column for her university’s student newspaper.

Rubio responded with a long-winded answer attacking vandalism and rioting but failing to say exactly what Ozturk was responsible for that resulted in her F-1 student visa being revoked and masked, plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcements brazenly arresting her on a public street.

“If you apply for a visa to enter the United States and be a student, and you tell us that the reason why you’re coming to the United States is not just ’cause you want to write op-eds, but because you want to participate in movements that are involved in doing things like vandalizing universities, harassing students, taking over buildings, creating a ruckus, we’re not going to give you a visa,” Rubio said.

“If you come into the U.S. as a visitor and create a ruckus for us, we don’t want it. We don’t want it in our country. Go back and do it in your country,” added Rubio.

Rubio noted during the press conference that he has personally revoked dozens of visas, possibly “more than 300 at this point.”

“We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas,” Rubio said.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told The Guardian that “DHS and ICE investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans,” but did not offer any specifics either.

In a move reminiscent of ICE’s arrest and detention of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, Ozturk was sent to a detention center in Louisiana without speaking with a lawyer and despite a court order. U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, who initially ordered that Ozturk not be removed from Massachusetts, issued a new order Thursday requiring the government to justify Ozturk’s detention by Friday.

If Rubio’s words are correct, there are possibly hundreds of visitors in the United States who have had their visas revoked for pro-Palestine speech or activism, or any political speech and activism for that matter, without any due process. They may not even know that their visa status has been revoked. They could be disappeared off the street just like Khalil, Ozturk, or University of Alabama doctoral student Alireza Doroudi, who has yet to be connected to any kind of political activism and whose whereabouts are unknown.

There have been plenty of fires blazing in the background as Signalgate dominates the airwaves this week.

Here are four stories you may have missed amid the fallout of that war plans group chat:

1. The Trump administration continues to disappear pro-Palestinian college students with no other justification. On Tuesday, Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar from Turkey, was abducted in broad daylight by masked ICE agents and later transferred to a detention facility in Louisiana. Ozturk had previously co-authored an op-ed for her student newspaper criticizing the university’s response to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later refused to explain why she was arrested or had her visa revoked.

2. The Department of Health and Human Services plans to fire 10,000 employees in a wave of massive DOGE-induced cuts. According to The Wall Street Journal, the cuts will include:

• 3,500 full-time employees from the Food and Drug Administration—or about 19% of the agency’s workforce.
• 2,400 employees from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—or about 18% of its workforce.
• 1,200 employees from the National Institutes of Health—or about 6% of its workforce.
• 300 employees from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—or about 4% of its workforce.

“We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said.

3. Trump withdrew Representative Elise Stefanik’s nomination for U.N. ambassador to help the Republicans maintain their tiny House majority. Stefanik—one of MAGA’s favorite congressional attack dogs—is likely to return to defend her New York district seat, which Democrats view as vulnerable.

4. Hamdan Ballal, the Palestinian Oscar-winning director of No Other Land, was blindfolded and brutally beaten by Israel Defense Force soldiers after they detained him for allegedly “hurling rocks” as Israeli settlers attempted to kill him on Monday night. Ballal recounted that he heard the IDF guards mention the word “Oscar” while beating him. “I realized they were attacking me specifically,” he said after being released to a hospital in the West Bank. “When they say ‘Oscar,’ you understand. When they say your name, you understand.”