NOT DEPORTATION

The right term for what the USA is doing now is kidnapping

In the USA, the definition of deportation goes something like this...

A person can be deported if they are found to be unlawfully present in the U.S., violate the terms of their visa, or are convicted of certain crimes. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the agency responsible for enforcing immigration laws and can initiate deportation proceedings.

(you can test that definition using search and chat AI tools)

In the USA, deportation is a PROCESS. And, to state the obvious, the details of that process are written into law.

What the Trump version of ICE is doing goes something like this…

1. Go into a community in teams of 10 to 20 men wearing military gear, no name tag, and a mask that hides your identity so the image searches cannot turn up information about who you are.

2. Pull a person or persons off the street and force them into a van.

3. Drop these persons into a detention facility with little or no ability to contact people who might help them.

4. Quickly bundle up these people and get them on airplanes with undeclared destinations.

5. Send these people to dangerous countries that have agreed to place these people into their prisons for a fee paid by the Executive branch of the Federal government. (These tend to be war torn countries run by dictators who can pocket the fees the USA is paying. Trump admires that capability.)

That process is not deportation. The best term I have come up with for this process is kidnapping and expulsion.

Deportations are legal. Kidnapping is a violation of the law in every country in the world.

So long as the news media keeps calling the Trump/ICE actions “deportations,” we will all keep implying that there is some level of quasi-legal explanation for what is going on. That’s not the case.

These are human rights violations. All nations and world courts would hold Trump and his top cabinet members accountable for illegal activities EXCEPT FOR ONE - The United States of America.

The 213 men sent to prison in El Salvador were all kidnapped and expelled. The very worst gang member out of these 213 people was not deported. He was kidnapped and expelled.

For perspective; Barack Obama once had the nickname the deportation president. His administration formally removed 3 million noncitizens from the U.S. during his two terms in office (Source: Department of Homeland Security). That is the net number of people permanently removed. President Obama actually deported 5.4 million people in total but 2.4 million of those people pursued a process in their home country that allowed then to return legally. Our courts and our system were more than capable of handling that massive amount of deportations using the process (due process) that our nation used to require before Trump.

Under Obama, ICE was very busy indeed. But, ICE members felt no need to hide their names and faces because they were not kidnapping people.

Obama used a legal process. That was deportation. Trump is using his own methods that ignore our laws. That is kidnapping.

I don’t know how this observation could be wrong but I invite push-back because there must be some reason that all news media outlets are failing to accurately describe this activity.