Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Corbin Hiar reports at the Scientific American that the big banks are now banking on a 5.4º F. (3º Celsius) rise in global temperatures above the pre-industrial average.
Morgan Stanley let the conclusion slip in a report on air conditioner sales, which it expects to double, what with the extra heat. Hiar says that especially after the election of Trump, the banks accept that that is just the way it is going to be.
Air conditioners run on electricity, and reliable electricity may be a problem if the average temperature of the earth’s surface skyrockets 5.4º F.
Remember, that is an average increase. In some places it may be 10º or 15º F. That’s not going to be a pretty picture in Phoenix, Az., Miami, Fl. or for that matter Orlando, Fresno, Ca. and a bunch of other cities that are already sweltering in the summer
I’ve lived a lot of my life in hot places. I was in Cairo once in the summer and there was an article in the Arabic newspaper al-Ahram [The Pyramids] about the heat in Aswan in Upper Egypt, where it was about 115º F. The article said that there was a big electricity outage because the insulation of the electrical wires melted.
There are lots of ways ambient heat can interfere with the transmission wires. It can melt the insulation, or it can overheat components, it can cause oxidation. And here’s the thing. Hot wire shows more electrical resistance, which reduces its efficiency.
Moreover, overheated wires or components can cause fires. California is a big tinderbox at certain times of year, with dry forests, which overheated electrical wires can set off. The smart thing to do will be to bury all the electrical wires, but that is an expense the power companies do not want to bear. Another possibility is that people will put up solar panels and use home batteries, and disconnect from the grid.
Hot river water causes nuclear plants to go offline because they can’t cool the rods. Heat and droughts reduce hydro-electric production. Just generating electricity for the air conditioners can be a challenge. Your best bet will be solar panels, an industry Trump is trying to crush, and the banks are happy to help because of their fossil fuel investments and their willingness to kowtow to Trump’s diktats.
Then there is the air conditioner itself. It isn’t magic. AC’s don’t function well at over 100º F. They may break down. They may not be able to displace the heat outside. Cooling down things by more than 26º F. is a challenge. So if it is 120º F. out, don’t count an getting lower than the 90s inside.
In fact, it has recently been discovered that a combination of 122º F. and 80 percent humidity will just kill you dead right there.
All this is not to mention the massive hurricanes that will repeatedly knock down the electricity poles. Already, Duke Energy filed with the state of Florida for $1.1 billion in compensation for all the grid repair work it had to do after the 2024 hurricane season. What if the costs rise so much that the state can’t bear them, and Duke Energy goes bankrupt? I mean, these are little dinky storms compared to the ones we’ll be having if temperatures rise another couple degrees Fahrenheit. Some scientists argue that the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, which only goes up to 5, is increasingly inadequate, and that we are already seeing sixes. Can force 7 hurricanes be far off?
Duke’s press release says, “Given the severity of these three storms, the filing covers a range of costs, such as deploying hundreds of Duke Energy crews from the entire span of the company’s service territories and acquiring significant mutual assistance from across the country and even Canada; standing up staging sites, basecamps and temporary lodging, while also providing meals for thousands of lineworkers and field personnel; and repairing, rebuilding and replacing critical infrastructure, including poles, wires and transformers, that were damaged and/or destroyed by catastrophic storm surge and wind.”
I don’t think they’re going to be getting that help from Canada anymore. And this is just the beginning.
Hurricanes are caused by warm ocean water. The oceans off Florida are already getting up to 100º F. in the summer. That kind of temperature whips up a lot of wind. It is now clear in the data that the intensity of hurricanes is increasing because we are burning so much coal, fossil gas and petroleum.
Not only will the hurricanes be fiercer, damaging homes and businesses and knocking down those made of wood, but they will dump more and more water, causing massive flooding.
Stefan Rahmstorf writes, “our planet’s current coastlines are home to more than 130 cities larger than a million inhabitants, plus other infrastructure such as ports, airports, and some 200 nuclear power plants with seawater cooling (such as Sizewell B on the British North Sea coast). Even 1 m [3 feet] of sea rise would be a disaster.”
Those banks that see a 5.4º F. temperature increase as an opportunity to sell more consumer goods such as air conditioners are not reckoning with the likelihood of climate chaos and climate breakdown at that level, of a sort that will make maintaining current levels of civilization challenging. We’ll survive it. We’re unlikely to survive it in style.
And the billionaires who think that they can sell us gasoline and coal and gas for another century and just protect their families with big mansions in the mountains or on islands are fooling themselves. The mansions will slide down the side of the mountain in a massive downpour, and the seas will swallow up the ones on islands with storm surges.
Booker began the all-night speech by making his intentions clear:
“I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis.
“In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety; financial stability; the core foundations of our democracy. These are not normal times in America. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate.”
While we were writing this piece, Booker was every bit as impassioned as he condemned the Republican budget plan that would slash Medicaid and the social safety net so billionaires and corporations could have (more) huge tax cuts, adding trillions to the US debt, asking, “If you’re a Christian conservative, how can you hurt the weak to benefit the rich and powerful? The people of the United States have to stand up and say ‘NO!’”
This man does not look like he’s been speaking for more than 14 hours. Here’s the AP’s live feed. Watching this, we’re even feeling some hope — especially if other senators follow up with marathon speeches of their own.
(And it’s still running! -A)
Also too, we’re going to go ahead and call this a filibuster anyway, if only because the Washington Postwent out of its way to explain in its subhead (archive link) that it’s not actually a filibuster because Booker isn’t delaying a vote on legislation. Just seems like the sort of nitpick best saved for the body of the article, which is where all the other outlets have placed it. So why did we mention it in our subhed? Because fuck WaPo is why.
Booker received help throughout the night — and still, this morning — from other senators, because he is allowed to take questions, which tend to come in the form of brief speeches ending with a question mark. But it’s not just a tactic to help him preserve his voice; it’s also a chance for fellow Democrats to show their unity, with multiple voices pointing out how completely not normal the last two months have been. Booker and other senators called out Trump and co-president Elon Musk for multiple assaults on democracy, like their attempts to shut down federal agencies created by Congress, to cancel spending authorized by Congress, to withhold grants to nonprofits that were already awarded, to fire large segments of the federal workforce without regard to worker protections, and to effectively dissolve America’s alliances by siding with Russia against Ukraine and our European allies. And much more.
We should also note that, unlike the longest talking filibuster on record, old racist Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond’s 25-hour filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights bill, Mr. Booker doesn’t have the opportunity to take restroom breaks. Now that’s impressive.
“Senator McCain, I know you wouldn’t sanction this, I know you would be screaming, I’ve seen how angry you can get, John McCain. I’ve seen you tear people apart on this floor, Democrat and Republican, for doing the same stupid thing over and over again. Listen to John McCain explain why he voted ‘no’ the last time the Republican Party tried to unite and tear down health care with no idea how to fix it, threatening to put millions of Americans in financial crisis and health care crisis. I can’t believe we are here again.”
Booker returned again and again to that theme: Why on earth are we allowing this madness to happen? How on earth are we in a situation where a US president is threatening to invade our allies and help our adversaries?
As we wrap up here, Booker’s voice is beginning to get a little raspy, but his overall energy isn’t flagging so far. At the moment, he’s having a colloquy with Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) about the importance of US foreign assistance, which Trump and musk have unconstitutionally slashed. Coons called attention to how those cuts have left us unable to provide help to the victims of the earthquake in Myanmar — and Booker immediately pointed out that by wrecking America’s soft power, Trump has handed all that influence to China.
We hope Booker keeps going a couple more hours. And that as many of his Democratic colleagues follow his example with filibusters of their own. (snip)
If you can’t find the strength to take a stand, at least lie down.
Ali Davis March 31, 2025
Hello, Congressional Republicans who still care about the republic! I know you’re out there because I kept hearing how differently Trump’s cabinet confirmations would have gone if only the votes have been secret.
We have reached a crisis point. We have reached so many crisis points. We reached like three new crisis points between me starting and finishing this article.
We have flipped our foreign policy so radically that we are now the villain of the world. All decision on that end seems to have been handed over to Putin and a bunch of preening technofascists. Our economy is crashing toward a depression and the only trick the Trump Administration pony has is more insane tariffs. High-level cabinet members endangered the lives of our servicemembers by discussing classified information on the already-hacked Signal app, and that doesn’t even cover gloating over civilian deaths, adding a journalist to the group text, and further damaging our relationship with Europe. The Trump administration is trying to start wars with freaking Denmark and Canada. DENMARK AND CANADA, for chrissakes.
And the most insane thing is that this is an abridged list. There are paragraphs and paragraphs of human rights horrors that I have skipped.
This is it. You are a part of an authoritarian government, a twisted and vile parody of what we once had. Elon Musk is stripping it for parts and awarding himself lucrative contracts while Donald Trump threatens Republican judges and lobs all of our state secrets straight to Putin.
The window for stopping this is small and vanishing. The most patriotic thing you could do is stand up and impeach Donald Trump, but, whether it’s due to a fear of Trump or fear of his zealots, you’re not doing that. The second most patriotic thing you could do is resign and leave your seat open to a flip by the Democrats. But you don’t seem to be doing that either. So here it is: The third most patriotic thing you can do, your last option for saving your beloved country from falling completely into authoritarianism: Get sick.
Get terribly sick and refuse to discuss your personal health information during this challenging time. Or get just a little bit sick and keep insisting that you’ll be as right as rain in a week or two. Have a family emergency. Or just take some dearly needed personal time.
Just drop out for a while. Hole up at home or get out of the country if you need to and let some trusted Democrats know that they’ll have the majority for a while and the time and leeway to move. (BE SURE YOU KNOW WHO IS ON THE SIGNAL CHAT.)
But what if someone is blackmailing me?
No offense, but this is bigger than you. Putin wants to break the United States. And he wants to break the United States so that he can roll over Western Europe. Do you really want to go to your grave knowing that you held onto your secret at the expense of Permanent Global Fascism? For that matter, do you really think complying now will stop them from burning you with it when you become inconvenient later?
Let’s be honest: A lot of us are already kind of assuming that you’re being blackmailed. And the fact that you’ve abandonedyour principles when the stakes are so high is making people think that the thing you’re being blackmailed over is much worse than what it probably really is. If Matt Gaetz can brazen it out, what on earth must you be hiding?
The good news is that there is nothing better for blowing your blackmail material straight out of the news cycle than a fiery Presidential impeachment that the nation can’t stop watching. There’s no better time to get out from under someone’s thumb.
But if the Democrats are smart, they’ll remove Johnson and prosecute Vance for the Signal debacle. That means a Democratic President will be in. I’ll lose some of my own power. What about that?
More real talk: Donald Trump has screwed the Republican party’s chances for decades at a minimum. You are now the party that let the Nazis in. You are the party that closed the national parks and tried to put Grandma out on the street. You are the party that kneecapped scientific research right when it looked like there might be a cure for pancreatic cancer. You are the party that crashed the stock market, the party that made us hated by the world, the party that let Musk and Putin take the reins. You are the party that just came out as pro-measles and made room for polio. The Republican Party is going the way of the Know-Nothings. You’re going to have to scrap it and start over.
And that’s if we ever have real elections again.
The only hope of you, personally, ever coming back into power is if Trump gets impeached and you become a zealous reformer. Toss out everyone who helped Trump, Musk, Thiel and Putin, support real jail time, and legislate us back out of Citizens United. Throw the bastards out and keep on throwing or you are surely getting tossed out yourself.
You can start right now, of course. That would be ideal. But you can also start after you take a little break to let the Democrats get the ball rolling.
Can’t I just keep my head down and appease Trump until things are magically better?
No. If you have read this far instead of screaming about George Soros and fake Venezuelan gang members, you are a Republican who thoughtcrimes against Trump. He and his barrel of vipers who the nonbelievers are. You won’t make it.
Fascists always need a villain to rail against. They always have a list. It is not a question of whether you are on the list, it’s a question of how far down you are. Right now, it’s foreign students and random brown people with innocent tattoos, but Trump is going to crave new meat and fresh news stories soon. You know that he needs to ritually humiliate and cast out a Republican every so often to reassert his dominance. You’re higher up the list than you think.
And if we hit the era of No Real Elections, which is more likely every day, there is no way you are keeping your elected position. Only perfect toadying cult members will make it through, and there is no way you can tap dance fast enough to make up for the past.
Besides: Is “enthusiastic supporter of the fascist regime” the way you want your grandchildren to remember you?
If you aren’t moved by the idea of saving the democratic republic we’ve all grown fond of, think about the fact that your only path to staying in your elected office is to get Trump out of his, and your chance to do that is slipping away.
It’s time to come down with a severe but undefined and conveniently curable medical issue. Play hooky. Go AWOL. Bunk out. Chuck a sickie. But do it quickly.
If you can’t bring yourself to impeach Donald Trump, you need to get the hell out of the way so someone else can. (snip)
OK again it is another old one. I should have saved the Disney board standing up to the hateful anti-LGBTQ+ anti-DEIA and the board voting to keep the policies and associations even as they did agree to end the idea of a trans character in a show and do more conservative story lines / characters. But think how tRump at every rally and in front of every courthouse claimed Biden was weaponizing the DOJ and government against him. Remember how bad it said it was that Biden was using the government against his enemies which meant every republican criminal. But now tRump is doing it and his maga cult that used to be called republicans are fine with it. Just like the debt and debt ceiling doesn’t matter now under tRump and did not matter under the first tRump term, but during Biden’s term those two things were constantly shouted by maga on every right wing media show. It is like the party who used to champion family values and law and order was never a believer in those things. Hugs
The US Federal Communications Commission is prepared to block mergers and acquisition proposals from companies that promote “invidious” DEI policies, according to chairman Brendan Carr.
The move could threaten billions of dollars worth of deals in the communications sector, with Carr specifically mentioning Paramount Global’s merger with Skydance Media, Verizon’s acquisition of Frontier Communications, and T-Mobile, which is seeking to purchase US Cellular Corp.’s wireless operations.
“Any businesses that are looking for FCC approval, I would encourage them to get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination,” Carr said in an interview Friday.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr is vowing to use every tool at his disposal to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs from the companies his agency regulates, and has enlisted the help of a high-profile conservative activist in the effort.
Carr met with activist Robby Starbuck on Wednesday to discuss ways the agency can use its enforcement powers to stamp out DEI in the telecommunications sector. The two discussed ways the agency can enforce existing civil rights laws along with President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders targeting DEI in the public and private sectors.
“It’s my hope that this meeting is a wake-up call for businesses within the FCC’s purview that the days of violating the law with DEI are over,” Starbuck told Fox News Digital.
Robby Starbuck has successfully bullied multiple major firms into dropping LGBTQ support with threats of national boycotts.
Since becoming FCC chair, Carr has launched investigations into NPR, PBS, and the east coast flagship broadcast affiliates of ABC, CBS, and NBC.
Carr first appeared here in 2022 when he supported Trump’s demand to ban TikTok. Trump famously reversed on banning TikTok once he found out that GOP megadonor Jeffrey Yass holds a $15 billion stake in the platform.
In 2023 Carr accused then-Rep. Adam Schiff of running a “secret and partisan surveillance machine.” He has also accused the World Health Organization of “beclowning itself” with COVID mitigation advice.
In 2020, Carr told Fox News host Lou Dobbs that “far-left” social media platforms had “hopped from hoax to hoax to hoax” in attacks on Trump.
Carr is a vehement opponent of Net Neutrality and opposed efforts to block Elon Musk from purchasing Twitter.
Last year Carr wrote a full chapter in the Heritage Foundation’s book in support of Project 2025.
March 31, 1492 King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella ordered the expulsion from Spain before August of all Jews who refused to convert to Christianity under penalty of death.
March 31, 1776 Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John (later to be the second U.S. president): I long to hear that you have declared an independancy—and by the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation. That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity. Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness.
March 31, 1968 President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek re-election, ordered a partial bombing halt in Vietnam, and appointed W. Averell Harriman to seek peace negotiations with North Vietnam.
March 31, 1970 The Oakland, California, Induction Center revealed that over the prior six months, half those drafted for the Vietnam War had failed to appear, and 11% of those who reported then refused induction into the U.S. Army. Later that Spring 2500 University of California-Berkeley students at once turned in their draft cards to the Oakland Center.
March 31, 1972 Protesters – singing, blowing horns and carrying banners – launched the latest leg of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament’s 56-mile Easter march from London to Aldermaston, Berkshire, England. The banner used in the 1960s Aldermaston marches.
March 31, 1985 Throughout Australia, 300,000 demonstrated in peace and anti-nuclear rallies.
March 31, 1991 Before dawn on Easter, five Plowshares activists boarded the USS Gettysburg, an Aegis-equipped Cruiser docked at the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. They proceeded to hammer and pour blood on covers of vertical launching systems for cruise missiles. “We witness against the American enslavement to war at the Bath Iron Works, geographically near the President’s home.” They also left an indictment charging President George H.W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, the National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff with war crimes and violations of God’s law and international law, including the killing of thousands of Iraqis. Remembering Aegis Plowshares
March 31, 1997 Four East Timorese were arrested in Warton, England, at the British Aerospace factory where Hawk fighter jets were built for the Indonesian military, who used them in the ongoing occupation and genocide of their homeland.
March 31, 2004 Air America, intended as a liberal voice in network talk radio, made its debut on five stations.
They are not arresting people. They are vanishing them.
Rumeysa Ozturk wasn’t read her rights. She wasn’t told why she was being detained. She was walking to break her fast in Somerville, Massachusetts when masked men in an unmarked SUV pulled up, took her phone, slapped on handcuffs, and dragged her into a vehicle like she was some kind of national security threat.
She’s a doctoral student. A Fulbright scholar. A trauma researcher. But in Donald Trump’s America, she fit the profile: Muslim, foreign-born, sympathetic to Palestinians.
Now she’s locked in a for-profit detention center in Louisiana, hundreds of miles from her lawyer, after a federal judge specifically said she wasn’t to be moved.
They moved her anyway. Because rules no longer apply to those with badges — real or fake.
A MOVEMENT BUILT ON CHAINS AND COWARDS
Alireza Doroudi is gone too.
He’s a doctoral student at the University of Alabama, born in Iran, studying mechanical engineering. No criminal record. No warning. Just scooped off the grid.
ICE refuses to say where he’s being held. No public charge has been announced. His only crime appears to be existing in the wrong body, from the wrong country, in the wrong era.
Mahmoud Khalil was next — a Columbia student, arrested for leading pro-Palestinian protests. Trump labeled him a “radical foreign Hamas sympathizer” on Truth Social. Days later, he was gone.
Jeanette Vizguerra was taken from her Target shift in Colorado, chained at the waist.
Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez, a farmworker organizer, was dragged from his car at dawn in Washington. His window was smashed by federal agents. His voice silenced.
These aren’t isolated incidents. These are deliberate acts of political intimidation.
They are testing the system — testing us — to see how many people they can disappear before we stop calling it democracy.
WHEN ICE IS A BADGE — AND A COSTUME
While the real ICE disappears scholars, organizers, and mothers, the fakes are circling like vultures.
In South Carolina, Sean-Michael Johnson posed as an ICE officer. He pulled over a van of Latino men, screamed slurs, jiggled their keys, and knocked a phone out of someone’s hand. “You’re going back to Mexico!” he shouted. He wasn’t an agent — but he played one with conviction.
In North Carolina, Carl Thomas Bennett used a fake badge to sexually assault a woman at a motel. He told her if she didn’t comply, he’d have her deported. He held up a counterfeit ID and pretended to be the state.
And in Philadelphia, a Temple University student in an “ICE” shirt tried to storm a dorm building with two accomplices. They were dressed for the part, intoxicated by the illusion of authority, emboldened by the climate.
This is what happens when the state makes cruelty a brand. When a badge becomes a fetish object. When the line between enforcement and cosplay disappears altogether.
THE WHOLE SYSTEM IS THE CRIME
Let’s stop pretending this is a coincidence.
This is a unified strategy. The Trump administration is using ICE like a personal strike force — targeting international students, protest leaders, organizers, and mothers with surgical precision.
They invoke secret designations. They bypass due process. They manufacture pretexts out of thin air and rely on the fog of bureaucracy to hide the blood on the floor.
The point isn’t law enforcement. The point is deterrence. Spectacle. Control.
This is what political cleansing looks like when it’s dressed up in the language of national security.
They’re showing the world that resistance has a cost — and the cost is your freedom, your voice, your visibility, your future.
SILENCE IS CONSENT. AND WE ARE LOUD.
There is no middle ground here. No fence to sit on. No neutral position when people are being kidnapped in the name of the state.
ICE doesn’t need your applause. It needs your silence. Every time a student vanishes and the media shrugs, every time a woman is cuffed and the public looks away, the machine gets stronger.
They are daring us to ignore it. They are counting on our numbness. They are betting that we’ll keep scrolling.
We cannot let them win.
This is not border policy. This is not visa enforcement. This is not safety.This is authoritarianism with a PowerPoint presentation.This is fascism disguised as formality.
This is the state stripping people from the land and pretending it’s order.
Let the record show:
They took people.
And we did not look away.
We saw it.
We named it.
We raised hell.
And we did not stop.
(I didn’t write this. Credit goes to Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge)
The above is the tRump admin trying to get other countries with higher standards in their food to send us their eggs to protect tRump from the soaring prices.
This scares me because the fundamentalist and white cis straight male supremacists will demand it be used here. First on trans people to protect the children then expand it to the entire LGBTQ+ as they have been doing everything else they tried to use against trans kids / people.
Famed Navajo Code Talkers Axed From Pentagon Sites
Yes I know that these were restored. But now tRump is demanding Vance who is on the board of the Smithson and the National Zoo to remove all illegal (purge) references to race, gender, the LGBTQ+ and so much more. He is demanding a national landmark the US government doesn’t control to toe the fundamentalist straight cis white supremacy Christians agenda to deny anything but them into history or society. We really are seeing a complete take over of society and we must do all we can to prevent the rollback of all rights and equality of anyone not white straight cis Christian males. This is horrifyingly scary. Because these hate groups have learned if they can control information, control education, control what is considered good or bad by their standards they can force the youngest people in the country to voice that belief and grow up to enforce it. It is what theocratic Islamic nations do. Are we now a nation taken over by theocratic Christian fundamentalist demanding a change in even the constitution to force everyone to follow their god and their rules? Please kill me first.
Every accredited organization except those directly driven by fundamentalist religiously motivated agree this is simply torture. The religious just simply refuse to believe sexual orientation is not a choice and no one wants to be like that no matter what has to be done to change it. Including electroshock therapy to the genitals. Think of yourself, gay straight, or any other orientation. If you are cis and straight, how much conversion therapy would it take to make you believe you were gay / lesbian and desire that. How could who you are attracted to be changed. That all comes from the idea that it is a mental illness and a sickness that needs to be cured. Which the majority of medical organizations reject, agreeing it is an inborn part of a fetus development. Plus if you could change a sexual orientation … look at my childhood. I was forced to please sexually both males and females. But the only rapes that totally crashed me in the military was the one by a woman with more rank than me who demanded I have sex with her … four times. The last time I was so upset and humiliated that I ran nude up the stairs of the housing unit for higher enlisted and pounded on my soon to be E-7’s door. I was sobbing incoherently. I have been raped all my life and was able to stand that. Why did what this woman force me to do reduced me to that state? Because it was against my very nature of who I was. I was having same sex relations with another young guy and loving it. What she was forcing me to do was against everything I felt inside. That is what the people of these gay conversions want to do.
Some of them think that being gay is a choice because … well when did they decide instead of men they would like to have sex with women? No they just felt it, but what gay / lesbian people feel is not valid and must be forced to change. The rest of this group feels their interpretations of their view of what their god wants must be enforced on everyone even those that don’t follow their god. Because it is their god and he must be pleased because their god hates what they hate. Even if it is not in the bible or they misunderstood it, their hate preacher told them it was so. They can not let others live their lives, everyone must live by their church dictates. Why??? Because only that way their god will love them? I am an atheist that is willing to let religious people believe as they wish as long as they don’t try to force their beliefs on others. You do you … but why can’t they do the same. They insist that no one can be different from them and their beliefs. That is scary just that they think like that and more that they are now running the US government.
PS. When James was a newly teen of 13 his parents went to the Florida Keys with a group of us. They always stayed apart even though they asked to be part of the caravan of RV going. Well I caused an issue. His … maybe abusive parents had lots of tattoos and were highly Catholic religious … even had a statue of the mother Mary in the entrance of their home. Yes the husband ruled the house and told the wife what she would do at all times. Which included the abuse of the child which is where we came in. In a year or so after this even the boy started staying at our home because he was not allowed home until the mother was there. I had seen a young kid come in with a Mohawk. The boy had his hair shaved on both sides of his head and long in the front and back. We had already talked to their son at our table because the parents they were trying to force the boy to get Christian tattoos.
When I spoke up and said there is …. next hair cut … it will look grand on him. His stepdad exploded and said he wouldn’t ever allow the boy in the house with that and he would hold him down and shave all his hair off. As anyone can imagine I got triggered, I had been held down and had my hair cut. I flew up from the table as Ron was grabbing at me and yelled you want him to have tattoos which is against the bible but a simple haircut which can be changed or grow back and has no mentioned in the bible upsets you so much you’re threatening the kid. I loudly said, “What the fuck is wrong with you”! They took the boy from our table and left his meal uneaten. I was furious. Others who did not know of my childhood tried to calm me down. The family of the boy left that day from our group at the campground. Next time the boy came to our home his hair was cut short and the parents never went on another trip with us. Hugs
Again an attempt to turn the country into a while male cis straight only nation. How much clearer can it be. And all these republicans or most of them are fundamentalist Christians who were funded by their church in a steal run to get elected. This not what the publican wants. But these republican fundamentalist groups understand … politicians can force change in public opinion if they support something loud and forcefully enough. Which is one why Kamala Harris l think lost the election, the democrats refused to respond to the attacks on trans people fearing it would hurt them. That is how you bring people along to a new understanding. The republicans are doing it in reverse of what the progressive movement did with government support in the early 2000s. Now that democrats have retreated only the hard right republicans are getting their voices heard returning the countries view to pre-rights for LGBTQ+ people. Hugs
March 30, 1891 Signaling a growing movement toward direct political action among desperate western farmers, “Sockless” Jerry Simpson called on the Kansas Farmers’ Alliance to work for a takeover of the state government. “Sockless” Jerry Simpson Simpson was one of the most well-known and influential leaders among Populist-minded western and midwestern farmers of the late 19th century. Angered over low crop prices, high-interest bank loans and unaffordable shipping rates, farmers began to unite in self-help groups like the Grange and the Farmers’ Alliances. Initially, these groups primarily provided mutual assistance to members while agitating for the regulation of railroads and grain elevators. Increasingly, though, they became centers of support for more sweeping political change by uniting to help form the nationwide third-party movement known as the Populists. More about Populist “Sockless” Jerry Simpson
March 30, 1919 Shops were closed and thousands demonstrated in protest against Rowlatt Acts in New Delhi, Amritsar, and other Indian cities. The hastily passed law permanently extended wartime civil liberties restrictions such as trial without jury and internment without trial.
March 30, 1948 Henry Wallace, former vice-president (under Franklin D. Roosevelt) and then Progressive Party presidential candidate, lashed out at the Cold War policies of President Harry S. Truman. Wallace and his supporters were among the few Americans who actively voiced criticisms of America’s Cold War mindset during the late 1940s and 1950s. Read more on his warnings about American fascists
March 30, 1976 Land Day, 1978. (Photo: Gidon Gitai) Became known as “Land Day” when Palestinians in occupied territories stood strong against the Zionist entity’s attempted confiscation of thousands of acres of land. Their grassroots protests were met with aggressive violence in which the Zionist police force killed six and injured hundreds of its Palestinian citizens. What is LandDay? | more 1982 AP photo/Castelnuove; Marchers protest for Land Day on March 30, 1982 in the Arab village of Sakhnine in northern Israel. 2018 Palestinian people mobilized en masse along the Gaza border to demand an end to a brutal “Israeli” blockade and to demand the rights for displaced Palestinians to return to their homeland. On that day, tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza put their lives on the line to participate in demonstrations that continued every Friday for over a year. Over 250 Palestinian demonstrators have been killed and over 30,000 injured. Rightfully called the Great March of Return, this unwavering display of strength solidified the Palestinian commitment to liberation and sent a clear message that Palestinians will not be silenced.
March 30, 1980 80,000 demonstrated against construction of a commercial nuclear reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf, Germany. The project was ultimately abandoned.
The man in the MAGA cap and the “Size Matters” T-shirt allowed me to take his picture. The “size” in question had to do with bullets, represented on the shirt in a line from pistol- to bazooka-grade. Not far from us stood a man in a T-shirt that read “MAKE MEN MEN AGAIN.” Women walked past in red-white-and-blue outfits. Many had Bible verse numbers or slogans on their T-shirts, though quite a few sported images of guns, some of which were aimed at “RINOs.” At a booth nearby, a group of women was raising money for the “patriots” of January 6 incarcerated in “the DC gulag.”
It was a hot summer day in 2023, and there was little new for me at this gathering of right-wing activists in Las Vegas. Yet as I took in the January 6 memorabilia, I couldn’t help thinking back on another, very different event four years earlier. In 2019, I found myself in a seventeenth-century palazzo in Verona, Italy, for a gathering of the World Congress of Families, where I sat in on speeches and discussions with American, Russian, and European political activists on “the LGBT totalitarians” and the evils of “global liberalism.” The message was in some sense the same as the one in Las Vegas, but it’s safe to say that among the well-heeled, stylishly-dressed, highly-educated, and well-traveled participants there, members of the Nevada T-shirt crowd would have stuck out like a platter of corn dogs at a fine Italian trattoria.
The last of the speakers in Verona was a diminutive white-haired academic in a nondescript jacket and tie, the dean of a small law school in California, whose brief tirade about “gender confusion” among the “radical Left” didn’t leave much of an impression on me. I did, however, take note of his name: John Eastman. The same Eastman would later show up at the podium on the White House lawn on the morning of January 6 and he would subsequently turn up as “Co-Conspirator 2” in the federal indictment of Donald Trump for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election. He himself would be indicted in Georgia for the same conspiracy and disbarred in his home state of California. (He’s pled “not guilty” to conspiracy fraud and forgery charges.)
It’s a long way from the palazzo populists of Verona to the RINO hunters of Las Vegas, but they’re clearly part of the same story—the rise of an antidemocratic political movement in the United States. Though diverse and complicated, the movement is united in its rejection of the Enlightenment ideals on which the republic was founded and represents the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War.
They don’t want a seat at the table—they want to burn down the house
The American idea, as Abraham Lincoln saw it, is the familiar one articulated in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It says that all people are created equal; that a free people in a pluralistic society may govern themselves; that they do so through laws deliberated in public, grounded in appeals to reason, and applied equally to all; and that they establish these laws through democratic representation in government. While the American republic has often fallen short of this idea, many people rightly insist that we should, at the very least, try to live up to it. And in its better moments, the United States and its revolutionary creed have inspired freedom movements around the world.
But in recent years a political movement has emerged that fundamentally does not believe in the American idea. It claims that America is dedicated not to a proposition but to a particular religion and culture. It asserts that an insidious and alien elite has betrayed and abandoned the nation’s sacred heritage. It proposes to “redeem” America, and it acts on the extreme conviction that any means are justified in such a momentous project. It takes for granted that certain kinds of Americans have a right to rule, and that the rest have a duty to obey.
No longer casting the United States as a beacon of freedom, it exports this counterrevolutionary creed through alliances with leaders and activists who are themselves hostile to democracy. This movement has captured one of the nation’s two major political parties, and now controls the Presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court. It claims to be “patriotic,” and yet its leading thinkers explicitly model their ambitions on corrupt and illiberal regimes abroad that render education, the media, and the corporate sector subservient to a one-party authoritarian state.
How did such an anti-American movement take root in America?
The antidemocratic movement isn’t the province of any single demographic, or even ideology. The real story of the authoritarian Right features a rowdy mix of personalities, often working at odds with one another: “apostles” of Jesus; atheistic billionaires; reactionary Catholic theologians; pseudo-Platonic intellectuals; woman-hating opponents of “the gynocracy”; high-powered evangelical networkers; Jewish devotees of Ayn Rand; pronatalists preoccupied with a dearth of (White) babies; COVID truthers; and battalions of “spirit warriors” who appear to be inventing a new style of religion even as they set about undermining democracy at its foundations.
To repeat the obvious: this movement represents a serious threat to the survival of American democracy. Today’s political conflicts aren’t simply the result of incivility, tribalism, “affective partisanship,” or some other unfortunate trend in manners. All will be well, the thinking goes, if the red people and the blue people would just sit down for some talk therapy and give a little to the other side. In earlier times this may have been sage advice. Today it’s a delusion.
American democracy is failing because it’s under direct attack, and the attack isn’t coming equally from both sides. The authoritarian movement isn’t looking for a seat at the noisy table of American democracy; it wants to burn down the house. It isn’t the product of misunderstandings; it advances its antidemocratic agenda by actively promoting division and disinformation. In my book, Money, Lies and God, I bring the receipts to support these uncomfortable facts.
The fall has been swift, but it was decades in the making
When did the crisis begin? It can sometimes seem that the antidemocratic reaction snuck up on us and suddenly exploded in our living rooms when Donald Trump descended on the escalator and announced his candidacy. Looking back over the decade and a half I’ve spent reporting on the subject, the escalation of the threat is breathtaking. In 2009, I was reporting on an antidemocratic ideology focused on hostility to public education that appeared to be gaining influence on the Right. By 2021, I was writing about an antidemocratic movement whose members had stormed the Capitol—and about a Republican Party whose leadership disgracefully acquiesced in the attempted overthrow of American democracy. Yet the swiftness of the fall should not distract from the long duration of the underlying causes.
The present crisis is deeply rooted in material changes in American life over the past half century. The antidemocratic movement came together long before the 2016 election, and the forces hurling against American democracy will long outlive the current political moment. Their various elements have emerged along the fissures in American society, and they continue to thrive on our growing educational, cultural, regional, racial, religious, and informational divides.
This antidemocratic reaction draws much of its energy from the massive increase in economic inequality and resulting economic dislocations over the past five decades. In the middle of the twentieth century, capitalist America was home to the most powerful and prosperous middle class the world had hitherto seen. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, capitalism had yielded in many respects to a form of oligarchy, and the nation had been divided into very different strata. At the very top of the wealth distribution arose a sector whose aggregate net worth makes the rich men of earlier decades look like amateurs. Between 1970 and 2020, the top 0.1 percent doubled its share of the nation’s wealth. The bottom 90 percent, meanwhile, lost a corresponding share.
For the large majority of Americans, the new era brought wage stagnation and even, within certain groups in recent years, declining life expectancy. In the happy handful of percentiles located just beneath the 0.1 percent, on the other hand, a hyper-competitive group has managed to hold on to its share of the pie even as it remains fearful of falling behind.
While the political conflicts of the present cannot be reduced to economic conflicts, the great disparity in wealth distribution is a significant contributor. It has fractured our faith in the common good, unleashed an epidemic of status anxiety, and made a significant subset of the population susceptible to conspiracism and disinformation.
Different groups, of course, have responded differently. The antidemocratic movement isn’t the work of any one social group but of several working together. It relies in part on the narcissism and paranoia of a subset of the super-rich who invest their fortunes in the destruction of democracy. They appear to operate on the cynical belief that manipulation of the masses through disinformation will enhance their own prosperity. The movement also draws in a sector of the professional class that has largely abdicated its social responsibility. Much of the energy of the movement, too, comes from below, from the anger and resentment of those who perceive that they’re falling behind.
As these groups jockey for status in a fast-changing world, they give rise to a politics of rage and grievance. The reaction may be understandable. But it’s not, on that account, reasonable or constructive. Although the antidemocratic movement emerged, in part, out of massive structural conflicts in the American political economy, it does not represent a genuine attempt to address the problems from which it arose. This new politics aims for results that few people want and that ultimately harm everybody.
The rocket fuel of the new American authoritarianism
What are the main features of this new American fascism grounded in resentment? In America, just as in unstable political economies of the past, the grievances to which the daily injustices of an unequal system give rise inevitably vent on some putatively alien “other” supposedly responsible for all our ills. America’s demagogues, however, have a special advantage. They can draw on the nation’s barbarous history of racism and the fear that the “American way of life” is slipping away, abetted by an out-of-touch elite.
The story of this movement cannot be told apart from the racial and ethnic divisions that it continuously exploits and exacerbates. The psychic payoff that the new, antidemocratic religious and right-wing nationalism offers its adherents is the promise of membership in a privileged “in-group” previously associated with being a White Christian conservative—a supposed “real American”—with the twist that those privileges may now be claimed even by those who aren’t White, provided they worship and vote the “right” way. At the same time, the movement is the result of the concerted cultivation of a range of anxieties that draw from deep and wide roots.
Anxiety about traditional gender roles and hierarchies is the rocket fuel of the new American authoritarianism. Among the bearded young men of the New Right, it shows up in social media feeds bursting with rank misogyny. In the theocratic wing of the movement, it puts on the tattered robes of patriarchy, with calls for “male headship” and female subordination, and relentlessly demonizes LGBT people. On the political stage, it has centered around the long-running effort to strip women of their reproductive health rights and, in essence, make their bodies the property of the state. That effort has had significant consequences at the ballot box—which is why a sector of movement leadership is starting to speak openly about stripping women of the right to vote. The tragedy of American politics is that the same forces that have damaged so many personal lives have been weaponized and enlisted in the service of a political movement that’s sure to make the situation worse.
Expressions of pain, not plans for the future
The bulk of this movement is best understood in terms of what it wishes to destroy, rather than what it proposes to create. Fear and grievance, not hope, are the moving parts of its story. Its members resemble the revolutionaries of the past in their drive to overthrow “the regime”—but many are revolutionaries without a cause.
To be sure, movement leaders do float visions of what they take to be a better future, which typically aims for a fictitious version of the past: a nation united under “biblical law”; a people liberated from the tyranny of the “administrative state”; or just a place somehow made “great again.” But in conversations with movement participants, I have found, these visions quickly dissipate into insubstantial generalizations or unrealizable fantasy. There is no world in which America will become the “Christian nation” that it never actually was; there’s only a world in which a theocratic oligarchy imposes a corrupt and despotic order in the name of sectarian values.
These visions turn out to be thin cover for an unfocused rage against the diverse and unequal America that actually exists. They’re the means whereby one type of underclass can be falsely convinced that its disempowerment is the work of another kind of underclass. They’re expressions of pain, not plans for the future. This phenomenon is what I call “reactionary nihilism.” It’s reactionary in the sense that it expresses itself as mortal opposition to a perceived catastrophic change in the political order; and it’s nihilistic because its deepest premise is that the actual world is devoid of value, impervious to reason, and governable only through brutal acts of will. It stands for a kind of unraveling of the American political mind that now afflicts one side of nearly every political debate.
Yet there is method in this phenomenon. The direction and success of the antidemocratic movement depends on its access to immense resources, a powerful web of organizations, and a highly self-interested group of movers and backers. It has bank accounts that are always thirsty for more money, networks that hunger for ever more connections, religious demagogues intent on exploiting the faithful, communicators eager to spread propaganda and disinformation, and powerful leaders who want more power.It takes time, organizational energy, and above all, money to weaponize grievances and hurl them against an established democracy—and this movement has it all.
To be clear, there’s no single headquarters for the antidemocratic reaction. There are, however, powerful networks of leaders, strategists, and donors, as well as interlocking organizations, fellow travelers, and affirmative action programs for the ideologically pure. That matrix is far more densely connected, well-financed, and influential at all levels of government and society than most Americans appreciate.
History shows, however, that better organization does not always flatten the contradictions. On the contrary, it can sometimes amplify the conflicts. This is perhaps the most difficult to appreciate aspect of the antidemocratic movement—and the source of both its weakness and its strength. This movement is at war with itself even as it wages war on the rest of us. It consists of a variety of groups and organizations, each pursuing its own agendas, each in thrall to a distinct set of assumptions.
Viewed as a whole, it seems to want things that cannot go together—like “small government” and a government big enough to control the most private acts in which people engage; like the total deregulation of corporate monopolies and a better deal for the workforce; like “the rule of law” and the lawlessness of a dictator and his cronies who may pilfer the public treasury; like a “Christian nation” that excludes many American Christians from the ranks of the supposedly righteous. It pursues this bundle of contradictions not merely out of hypocrisy and cynicism but because the task of tearing down the status quo brings together groups that want very different things and are even at odds with one another.
Hope despite—and because of—the chaos
While a survey of the antidemocratic reaction in the United States is bound to provoke alarm and perhaps even a feeling of hopelessness, the self-contradictory nature of this reaction should be a source of hope for those who want to defend American democracy. MAGA is in many regards a weak movement, not a strong one. It draws on multiple factions, including oligarchic funders, the Christian Right, the New Right, libertarians, Q-Anoners, White nativists, “parent activists” radicalized by disinformation, health skeptics, a small segment of the Left, and others, all of whom worked together to bring slim majorities of voters to their side. These groups don’t really belong together, and they probably won’t stay together indefinitely.
In spite of their differences, for now these groups are rowing in the same boat. They told us ahead of the 2024 election that they were going to smash the federal bureaucracy, which they view for ideological reasons as interfering with their agenda. Trump said in no uncertain terms that he would turn the Department of Justice into his personal vendetta machine, and that’s what he’s attempting to do. He promised trade wars and let everybody know he would trash vital international alliances, and that’s what he’s doing.
So this is no time to retreat under the covers. Now is the time for moral courage. There are more Americans who would prefer to live in a democracy than a kleptocratic, Christian nationalist autocracy.We need to come together in broad coalitions and stay focused on organizing—from developing pro-democracy strategies and infrastructure to taking local action to improving voter turnout operations—now and in the long term.
When they lost in 2020, the MAGA movement didn’t roll over. They simply resolved to organize better and fight harder. Above all, they found new populations to evangelize with untruths. We wouldn’t wish to emulate their most craven tactics, of course, but we can learn something from their strategic resolve.
Mother Jones illustration; Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times/Getty; Photos courtesy Génesis Lozada, Joseph Giardina, Arturo Suárez, and María Alvarado
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On Friday, March 14, Arturo Suárez Trejo called his wife, Nathali Sánchez, from an immigration detention center in Texas. Suárez, a 33-year-old native of Caracas, Venezuela, explained that his deportation flight had been delayed. He told his wife he would be home soon. Suárez did not want to go back to Venezuela. Still, there was at least a silver lining: In December, Sánchez had given birth to their daughter, Nahiara. Suárez would finally have a chance to meet the three-month-old baby girl he had only ever seen on screens.
But, Sánchez told Mother Jones, she has not heard from Suárez since. Instead, last weekend, she found herself zooming in on a photo the government of El Salvador published of Venezuelan men the Trump administration had sent to President Nayib Bukele’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. “I realized that one of them was my husband,” she said. “I recognized him by the tattoo [on his neck], by his ear, and by his chin. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew it was him.” The photo Sánchez examined—and a highly producedpropaganda videopromoted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House—showed Venezuelans shackled in prison uniforms as they were pushed around by guards and had their heads shaved.
The tattoo on Suárez’s neck is of a colibrí, a hummingbird. His wife said it is meant to symbolize “harmony and good energy.” She said his other tattoos, like a palm tree on his hand—an homage to Suárez’s late mother’s use of a Venezuelan expression about God being greater than a coconut tree—were similarly innocuous. Nevertheless, they may be why Suárez has been effectively disappeared by the US government into a Salvadoran mega-prison.
Mother Jones has spoken with friends, family members, and lawyers of ten men sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration based on allegations that they are members of the Venezuelan organized crime group Tren de Aragua. All of them say their relatives have tattoos and believe that is why their loved ones were targeted. But they vigorously reject the idea that their sons, brothers, and husbands have anything to do with Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration recently labeled a foreign terrorist organization. The families have substantiated those assertions to Mother Jones, including—in many cases—by providing official documents attesting to their relatives’ lack of criminal histories in Venezuela. Such evidence might have persuaded US judges that the men were not part of any criminal organization had the Trump administration not deliberately deprived them of due process.
On March 14, President Donald Trump quietly signed a proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act—a 1798 law last used during World War II. The order declared that the United States is under invasion by Tren de Aragua. It is the first time in US history that the 18th-century statute, which gives the president extraordinary powers to detain and deport noncitizens, has been used absent a Congressional declaration of war. The administration then employed the wartime authority unlocked by the Alien Enemies Act to quickly load Venezuelans onto deportation flights from Texas to El Salvador.
In response to a class action lawsuit brought by the ACLU and Democracy Forward, federal judge James Boasberg almost immediately blocked the Trump White House from using the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport Venezuelans, and directed any planes already in the air to turn around. But in defiance of that order, the administration kept jets flying to El Salvador. Now Suárez and others like him are trapped in the Central American nation with no clear way to contact their relatives or lawyers.
Suárez, whose story has also been reported on by the Venezuelan outlet El Estímulo, is an aspiring pop musician who records under the name SuarezVzla. His older brother, Nelson Suárez, said his sibling’s tattoos were intended to help him “stand out” from the crowd. “As Venezuelans, we can’t be in our own country so we came to a country where there is supposedly freedom of expression, where there are human rights, where there’s the strongest and most robust democracy,” Nelson said. “Yet the government is treating us like criminals based only on our tattoos, or because we’re Venezuelan, without a proper investigation or a prosecutor offering any evidence.” (All interviews with family members for this story were conducted in Spanish.)
“Well, you’re here because of your tattoos,” the ICE agent reportedly said. “We’re finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”
The Justice Department’s website states that Suárez’s immigration case is still pending and that he is due to appear before a judge next Wednesday. Records provided by Nelson Suárez show that Arturo has no criminal record in Venezuela. Nor, according to his family, does Suárez have one in Colombia and Chile, where he lived after leaving Venezuela in 2016. They say he is one of millions of Venezuelans who sought a better life elsewhere after fleeing one of the worst economic collapses in modern history. (Just a few years ago, Secretary Rubio, then a senator from Florida, stressed that failure to protect Venezuelans from deportation “would result in a very real death sentence for countless” people who had “fled their country.”)
The stories shared with Mother Jones suggest that Trump’s immigration officials actively sought out Venezuelan men with tattoos before the Alien Enemies Act was invoked and then removed them to El Salvador within hours of the presidential proclamation taking effect.
“This doesn’t just happen overnight,” said immigration lawyer Joseph Giardina, who represents one of the men now in El Salvador, Frizgeralth de Jesus Cornejo Pulgar. “They don’t get a staged reception in El Salvador and a whole wing for them in a maximum-security prison…It was a planned operation, that was carried out quickly and in violation of the judge’s order. They knew what they were doing.”
Arturo Suárez performing and speaking with his baby daughter from detention.Courtesy Arturo Suárez
The White House has yet to provide evidence that the hundreds of Venezuelans flown to El Salvador—without an opportunity to challenge their labeling as Tren de Aragua members and “terrorists”—had actual ties to the gang. When pressed on the criteria used for their identification, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt pointed to unspecified “intelligence” deployed to arrest the Venezuelans she has referred to as “heinous monsters.” Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has insisted—without providing specific details—that the public should trust ICE to have correctly targeted the Venezuelans based on “criminal investigations,” social media posts, and surveillance.
Robert Cerna, an acting field office director for ICE’s removal operations branch, said the agency “did not simply rely on social media posts, photographs of the alien displaying gang-related hand gestures, or tattoos alone.” But Cerna also acknowledged that many of the Venezuelans deported under the Alien Enemies Act had no criminal history in the United States, a fact he twisted into an argument to seemingly justify the summary deportations without due process. “The lack of a criminal record does not indicate they pose a limited threat,” Cerna wrote. “In fact, based upon their association with TdA, the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates that they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
The relatives who talked to Mother Jones painted a vastly different picture from the US government’s description of the men as terrorists or hardened criminals. Many said their loved ones were tricked into thinking they were being sent back to Venezuela, not to a third country. (The Department of Homeland Security and ICE did not respond to a detailed request for comment asking for any evidence that the Venezuelans named in this articlehave ties to Tren de Aragua.)
Before leaving for the United States in late 2023, Neri Alvarado Borges lived in Yaritagua, a small city in north central Venezuela. His father is a farmer and his mother supports his 15-year-old brother, Nelyerson, who has autism.
Neri Alvarado with his brother Nelyerson in 2023.Courtesy María Alvarado
Alvarado’s older sister, María, stressed in a call from Venezuela that her brother has no connection to Tren de Aragua. She said her brother was deeply devoted to helping Nelyerson—explaining that one of his three tattoos is an autism awareness ribbon with his brother’s name on it and that he used to teach swimming classes for children with developmental disabilities.“Anyone who’s talked to Neri for even an hour can tell you what a great person he is. Truly, as a family, we are completely devastated to see him going through something so unjust—especially knowing that he’s never done anything wrong,” María said. “He’s someone who, as they say, wouldn’t even hurt a fly.”
Still, Alvarado was detained by ICE outside his apartment in early February and brought in for questioning, Juan Enrique Hernández, the owner of two Venezuelan bakeries in the Dallas area and Alvarado’s boss, told Mother Jones. One day later, Hernández went to see him in detention and asked him to explain what had happened. Alvarado told Hernández that an ICE agent had asked him if he knew why he had been picked up; Alvarado said that he did not. “Well, you’re here because of your tattoos,” the ICE agent replied, according to Hernández. “We’re finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.”
The agent then asked Alvarado to explain his tattoos and for permission to review his phone for any evidence of gang activity. “You’re clean,” the ICE officer told Alvarado after he complied, according to both Hernández and María Alvarado. “I’m going to put down here that you have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua.”
For reasons that remain unclear, Hernández said that another official in ICE’s Dallas field office decided to keep Alvarado detained. María Alvarado said her brother told her the same story at the time.
Hernández spoke to Alvarado shortly before he was sent to El Salvador. “There are 90 of us here. We all have tattoos. We were all detained for the same reasons,” he recalled Alvarado telling him. “From what they told me, we are going to be deported.” Both assumed that meant being sent back to Venezuela.
Hernández, a US citizen who moved to the United States from Venezuela nearly three decades ago, searched desperately for Alvarado when he didn’t show up in his home country that weekend. He was nearly certain that Alvarado was in El Salvador when he first spoke to Mother Jones on Thursday. “I have very few friends,” he said. “Very few friends and I have been in this country for 27 years. I let Neri into my house because he is a stand-up guy…Because you can tell when someone is good or bad.” Later that day, on Alvarado’s 25th birthday, Hernández got confirmation that his friend was in El Salvador when CBS News published a list of the 238 people now at CECOT.
A centerpiece of Bukele’s brutal anti-gang crackdown, CECOT is known for due process violations and extreme confinement conditions. Last year, CNN obtained rare access to the remote prison, which can hold up to 40,000 people. The network found prisoners living in crowded cells with metal beds that had no mattresses or sheets, an open toilet, and a cement basin. Visitation and time outdoors are not allowed. A photographer who was allowed into the prison as the Venezuelans arrived earlier this month wrote for Time magazine that he witnessed them being beaten, humiliated, and stripped naked.
The Trump administration has indicated in court records that the El Salvador operation was weeks, if not months, in the making. In a declaration, a State Department official said arrangements with the Salvadoran and Venezuelan governments for the countries to take back US deportees allegedly associated with Tren de Aragua had been made after weeks of talks “at the highest levels”—including ones involving Secretary of State Rubio—and “were the result of intensive and delicate negotiations.”
As part of the deal, the US government will pay El Salvador $6 million to hold the Venezuelan men for at least one year. Calling the agreements a “foreign policy matter,” Rubio has claimed the outsourcing of deportees’ detention to Bukele’s “excellent prison system” is saving money for US taxpayers.
It is unclear if, or when, anyone sent to CECOT will be able to return to Venezuela. A Human Rights Watch program director noted in a declaration that the organization “is not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison.” During an appeals court hearing on March 24, the ACLU’s lead counsel Lee Gelernt said, “We’re looking at people now who may be in a Salvadoran prison the rest of their lives.”
Neri Alvarado working at the bakery and the autism awareness tattoo with his brother’s name.Courtesy María Alvarado
Joseph Giardina’s client Frizgeralth de Jesus Cornejo Pulgar thought he was set to return to Venezuela on a deportation flight. Carlos, Frizgeralth’s older sibling, said his 26-year-old brother called their sister, who lives in Tennessee, from the El Valle detention center in Texas. He said Frizgeralth told her he was going to be deported to Venezuela later that day. “He was happy that he was going to be here with us,” Carlos said from Caracas in a video call with Mother Jones.
But Frizgeralth never arrived. Eventually, the family heard from the girlfriend of another Venezuelan set to be deported on the same flight as Carlos. She had identified him in videos shared on social media of the men who had been sent to the prison in El Salvador. On March 19, Carlos started scouring the internet and spotted his brother in a TikTok video. In it, Frizgeralth has his freshly shaved head pressed down, a rose tattoo on his neck peeking out from under a white t-shirt.
“We felt very powerless and in a lot of pain,” Carlos said. “To see how they mistreat a person who doesn’t deserve any of that. It’s not fair.”
“I never imagined being imprisoned just for getting a tattoo.”
Frizgeralth arrived in the United States in June 2024 after crossing the Darién Gap and waiting several months in Mexico for a CBP One appointment. The Biden-era program, which the Trump administration has since terminated, allowed migrants to schedule a date to present lawfully at a US port of entry. Carlos said Border patrol agents let Frizgeralth’s girlfriend and their other brother, as well as two friends, through but they held Frizgeralth back. He ended up detained at Winn Correctional Center, an ICE facility in Louisiana.
In messages to his family from detention, Frizgeralth expressed concern he was being investigated because of his tattoos. He explained that none of the 20 or so images—including one on his chest of an angel holding a gun—he has tattooed on his body have any connection to gang activity. He also described feeling discouraged from hearing stories in detention of Venezuelans who had recently been redetained and said ICE agents picked them up over suspicions about their tattoos.
Frizgeralth even had a declaration from his tattoo artist confirming the harmless nature of the artwork. “I never imagined being imprisoned just for getting a tattoo,” Frizgeralth, who owns a streetwear clothing brand with Carlos, wrote. “I never imagined being separated from my family. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, not even my worst enemy if I had one. It’s horrible, it’s mental torture every day.”
Like Suárez and Alvarado, Frizgeralth had no criminal record in Venezuela, documents show. Giardina said his client also had no known criminal history in the United States. Nor did he have a final deportation order. During his preliminary court hearings, the US government never claimed or presented evidence that Frizgeralth had ties to Tren de Aragua. “He was doing everything he was supposed to do,” Giardina said. “He got vetted and checked when he came into the country. He was in detention the entire time. It’s insanity.” If anything, Giardina said, his client had a strong claim for asylum based on political persecution. He said Frizgeralth was being targeted by the colectivos, paramilitary groups linked to the Maduro regime.
About a week prior to his deportation, they moved Frizgeralth to Texas. His next hearing, which is scheduled for April 10, still appears on the immigration court’s online system. “To detain them in this maximum security prison with no access to lawyers, no charges, just because you’re saying they’re terrorists…,” Giardina said. “I mean, what the hell?”
Génesis Lozada Sánchez said she and her younger brother Wuilliam are from a rural Venezuelan “cattle town” called Coloncito near Colombia. Following Venezuela’s economic collapse, both she and Wuilliam lived in Bogota, where her brother saved up for the journey to the United States by making pants at a clothing factory. After he reached the border last January, Wuilliam was detained for more than a year, Génesis said.
On Friday, March 14, he called a cousin in the United States to say that he was about to be deported to Venezuela. “But to everyone’s surprise, that’s not what happened. They were kidnapped,” Génesis said. “Why do I say kidnapped? These people have no ties to El Salvador. They haven’t committed any crimes there. And they’re not even Salvadoran. They don’t even cross into El Salvador after going through the Darién Gap on their way to the United States. So, it’s a kidnapping. They tricked these guys into signing papers by telling them they were being sent to Venezuela.”
Like other men sent to El Salvador, Wuilliam has tattoos. But Génesis said that they have nothing to do with Tren de Aragua and that her brother has no criminal record. His goal had been to make enough money in the United States to help support their parents and to save up enough to hopefully open a clothing factory back home.
Other reporting and court briefs further support the families’ suspicions that their loved ones were primarily targeted for deportation because of their tattoos. In one instance, a professional soccer player, whose attorney said had fled Venezuela after protesting against the Maduro regime and being tortured, was accused of gang membership based on a tattoo similar to the logo of his favorite team, Real Madrid.
John Dutton, a Houston-based immigration attorney, said that he started noticing ICE officers detaining Venezuelans during check-ins due to their tattoos earlier this year. “If they notice they have a tattoo, they’re just taking them into custody,” he explained. “No more questions to ask.” Dutton estimated he now has about a dozen clients who have been arrested because of tattoos.
One of his clients, Henrry Albornoz Quintero, was due in court for a bond hearing last Wednesday after being taken into detention at a routine ICE check-in. “I show up. The judge asked me where my client is,” the Houston lawyer said. “I asked the same question to the DHS attorney. She looked at her notes, shuffled papers around as if she’s gonna find the answer in there, looks up, and said, ‘Judge, I don’t know.’”
Dutton told the judge that his client might be in El Salvador; his relatives had recognized him in one of the images of people at CECOT. The judge then decided not to hear the case on the grounds that he no longer had jurisdiction. “You could tell he wanted to help me,” Dutton added. “He just couldn’t. There’s nothing he could do.”
The next day, Albornoz’s name appeared on the list of people imprisoned in El Salvador. So far, Albornoz is the only one of Dutton’s clients to be sent there. His wife is nine months pregnant with their first child.
“They didn’t just deport these people and then set them free,” says Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University. “They sent them to El Salvador, where that country, at the behest of the United States, is incarcerating them for at least a year in their prison system.This is not just deportation without due process. This is imprisonment without due process in a foreign prison system that has terrible conditions. That’s a pretty blatant violation of the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, which says that you can’t take away people’s life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
Until Thursday, March 20, Barbara Alexandra Manzo still wasn’t sure if her brother Lainerke Daniel Manzo Lovera was among those sent to El Salvador and transferred to CECOT. The family hadn’t heard from him since that Saturday, when he called from El Paso, Texas, to say they were deporting him to Venezuela or Mexico. Her confirmation also came when she saw his name on the CBS News list.
Barbara Alexandra told Mother Jones that Lainerke didn’t even have a tattoo before he left Venezuela in December 2023. He got one—a clock on his arm—while living and working in Mexico, waiting for a CBP One appointment. It was a gift from a roommate who had been given a date before he did. Last October, Lainerke showed up at the border and was sent to ICE detention; first in San Diego, then briefly in Arizona. He had a court hearing scheduled for March 26.
“My son went to look for a better future, the American Dream,” his mother Eglee Xiomara said in a video. “And it didn’t come true. That was the worst trip he has ever made in his life.”
Lainerke has yet to meet his six-month-old daughter, who was born in the United States. “He’s never been in prison,” Barbara Alexandra said. “[We’re wondering] if he’s ok or if something is happening to him. And we’ll never know because we have no recourse.”
Nelson Suárez fears that he, too, could meet the same fate as his brother Arturo, the Venezuelan musician. Even during the first Trump administration, the fact that Nelson has Temporary Protected Status and a pending asylum case would have been enough to protect him from deportation. But there are no guarantees that it will be now. If Judge Boasberg’s temporary restraining order is lifted or overturned, he could be immediately deported to Venezuela, or sent to El Salvador, without due process. He doesn’t know if he will walk out of a scheduled check-in with ICE in May free or in chains.
“I’m really scared,” he said last week. “My three daughters are here with me. My wife is here. My kids are in school. I don’t know what could happen. Since this happened to my brother, I really haven’t been able to sleep. I have no peace, no sense of calm. I’m afraid to go out on the street. But at the same time, we have to go out to work and get things done.”
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