Joe Rogan Is Right: It Is ‘Kind of Crazy’ To Deport Innocent People Mistakenly Identified As Gang Members
“You gotta get scared that people who are not criminals are getting lassoed up and deported and sent to El Salvador prisons,” Joe Rogan said on his hugely popular podcast this week. “This is kind of crazy, that that could be possible. That’s horrific.”
Rogan was alluding to Venezuelan makeup artist Andry Hernandez, who was shipped off to El Salvador’s notorious Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) last month. Based largely on innocent tattoos, Hernandez’s supporters say, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) mistakenly identified him as a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang targeted by President Donald Trump’s March 15 proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA).
As Reason‘s Fiona Harrigan notes, Hernandez is by no means the only Venezuelan who seems to have been deemed a member of Tren de Aragua, and therefore subject to immediate deportation under that proclamation, based on iffy evidence such as supposedly suspicious tattoos and clothing. Rogan, who endorsed Trump in last year’s presidential election and supports his efforts to deport violent criminals, nevertheless thinks it’s “crazy” and “horrific” that someone like Hernandez could be consigned to CECOT without due process.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, by contrast, sees nothing amiss in the administration’s use of the AEA. “The president made it incredibly clear to the American public that there would be a mass deportation campaign of not just foreign terrorists but also illegal criminal aliens who have been wreaking havoc on American communities,” Leavitt said on Monday after Andrew Feinberg, The Independent‘s White House correspondent, asked her about ICE’s criteria for identifying Tren de Aragua members. “And shame on you and shame on the mainstream media for trying to cover for these individuals. This is a vicious gang, Andrew.”
Leavitt’s tirade either obtusely or intentionally missed the point of Feinberg’s question: Granted that Tren de Aragua is “a vicious gang,” how does ICE know the people it is sending to CECOT are actually members of that gang? That issue is distinct from the question of whether Tren de Aragua qualifies as a “foreign nation or government” that has “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened” an “invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States,” as would be required to invoke the president’s broad deportation authority under the AEA.
There are good reasons to doubt Trump’s counterintuitive interpretation of that 227-year-old statute. But even if the proclamation were perfectly legal, that would not settle the question of whether any particular individual is subject to it. The uncertainty about ICE’s judgments underlines the importanc
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