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When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem compared antifa to the transnational criminal group MS-13, Hamas and the Islamic State group in October 2025, she equated a nonhierarchical, loosely organized movement of antifascist activists with some of the world’s most violent and organized militant groups.
“Antifa is just as dangerous,” she said.
It’s a sweeping claim that ignores crucial distinctions in ideology, organization and scope. Comparing these groups is like comparing apples and bricks: They may both be organizations, but that’s where the resemblance stops.
Noem’s statement echoed the logic of a September 2025 Trump administration executive order that designated antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” The order directs all relevant federal agencies to investigate and dismantle any operations, including the funding sources, linked to antifa.
But there is no credible evidence from the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security that supports such a comparison. Independent terrorism experts don’t see the similarities either.
Data shows that the movement can be confrontational and occasionally violent. But antifa is neither a terrorist network nor a major source of organized lethal violence.
Antifa, as understood by scholars and law enforcement, is not an organization in any formal sense. It lacks membership rolls and leadership hierarchies. It doesn’t have centralized funding.
As a scholar of social movements, I know that antifa is a decentralized movement animated by opposition to fascism and far-right extremism. It’s an assortment of small groups that mobilize around specific protests or local issues. And its tactics range from peaceful counterdemonstrations to mutual aid projects.
For example, in Portland, Oregon, local antifa activists organized counterdemonstrations against far-right rallies in 2019.
Antifa groups active in Houston during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 coordinated food, supplies and rescue support for affected residents.
The FBI and DHS have classified certain anarchist or anti-fascist groups under the broad category of “domestic violent extremists.” But neither agency nor the State Department has ever previously designated antifa as a terrorist organization.
The data on political violence reinforces this point.
A 2022 report by the Counter Extremism Project found that the overwhelming majority of deadly domestic terrorist incidents in the United States in recent years were linked to right-wing extremists. These groups include white supremacists and anti-government militias that promote racist or authoritarian ideologies. They reject democratic authority and often seek to provoke social chaos or civil conflict to achieve their goals.
Left-wing or anarchist-affiliated violence, including acts attributed to antifa-aligned people, accounts for only a small fraction of domestic extremist incidents and almost none of the fatalities. Similarly, in 2021, the George Washington University Program on Extremism found that anarchist or anti-fascist attacks are typically localized, spontaneous and lacking coordination.
By contrast, the organizations Noem invoked – Hamas, the Islamic State group and MS-13 – share structural and operational characteristics that antifa lacks.
They operate across borders and are hierarchically organized. They are also capable of sustained military or paramilitary operations. They possess training pipelines, funding networks, propaganda infrastructure and territorial control. And they have orchestrated mass casualties such as the 2015 Paris attacks and the 2016 Brussels bombings.
In short, they are military or criminal organizations with strategic intent. Noem’s claim that antifa is “just as dangerous” as these groups is not only empirically indefensible but rhetorically reckless.
So why make such a claim?
Noem’s statement fits squarely within the Trump administration’s broader political strategy that has sought to inflate the perceived threat of left-wing activism.
Casting antifa as a domestic terrorist equivalent of the Islamic State nation or Hamas serves several functions.
It stokes fear among conservative audiences by linking street protests and progressive dissent to global terror networks. It also provides political cover for expanded domestic surveillance and harsher policing of protests.
Additionally, it discredits protest movements critical of the right. In a polarized media environment, such rhetoric performs a symbolic purpose. It divides the moral universe into heroes and enemies, order and chaos, patriots and radicals.
Noem’s comparison reflects a broader pattern in populist politics, where complex social movements are reduced to simple, threatening caricatures. In recent years, some Republican leaders have used antifa as a shorthand for all forms of left-wing unrest or criticism of authority.
Antifa’s decentralized structure makes it a convenient target for blame. That’s because it lacks clear boundaries, leadership and accountability. So any act by someone identifying with antifa can be framed as representing the whole movement, whether or not it does. And by linking antifa to terrorist groups, Noem, the top anti-terror official in the country, turns a political talking point into a claim that appears to carry the weight of national security expertise.
The problem with this kind of rhetoric is not just that it’s inaccurate. Equating protest movements with terrorist organizations blurs important distinctions that allow democratic societies to tolerate dissent. It also risks misdirecting attention and resources away from more serious threats — including organized, ideologically driven groups that remain the primary source of domestic terrorism in the U.S.
As I see it, Noem’s claim reveals less about antifa and more about the political uses of fear.
By invoking the language of terrorism to describe an anti-fascist movement, she taps into a potent emotional current in American politics: the desire for clear enemies, simple explanations and moral certainty in times of division.
But effective homeland security depends on evidence, not ideology. To equate street-level confrontation with organized terror is not only wrong — it undermines the credibility of the very institutions charged with protecting the public.
Art Jipson is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Dayton. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Filed Under: antifa, dhs, hamas, isis, kristi noem, ms-13, terrorism
Here’s how you know the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case represents something fundamentally broken in government accountability: within hours of two federal judges ordering his release and explicitly warning the government not to play games with him, DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin went on X to repeat laughably false claims about Abrego while declaring that he “will never walk America’s streets again” and calling one of the judges “lawless” and “unhinged.”
That’s a Department of Homeland Security official publicly announcing the government’s intent to defy court orders while repeating laughable claims that judges have already called “bordering on fanciful.”
It would be almost comically stupid if it weren’t so dangerous—and if it weren’t the inevitable result of months of the US government accidentally trafficking a man to El Salvador’s torture camps, then fabricating evidence to cover their tracks when they got caught.
The backstory matters because it shows this isn’t just bureaucratic incompetence—it’s a pattern of lawlessness that continues even when judges explicitly call it out.
As a reminder: despite having an order from an immigration court that Abrego cannot be deported back to El Salvador, the government sent him there anyway. First they said it was an “accident,” then claimed it was intentional after firing the lawyer who admitted the mistake. They refused to facilitate his return even after the Supreme Court told them to do so, claiming it was up to El Salvador (which was demonstrably false).
Of course, once they had cooked up a completely bogus indictment, based off of letting actual traffickers go free in exchange for claims about Abrego, suddenly it turned out that they were able to bring him back to the US… to face these laughable charges.
Multiple judges have called out the frivolous nature of the charges, and the US government said “well if you free him, we’ll just traffic him to some random third country that isn’t El Salvador.”
Which brings us to this week’s judicial smackdown—and the government’s immediate decision to make its intentions to ignore it clear.
On Wednesday, Judge Waverly Crenshaw ordered that Abrego be released from detention. There’s a lot to the ruling, but in short, the court is not persuaded that Abrego is a flight risk:
The insufficiency of this evidence is underscored by what is not in the record that normally warrants a finding that a defendant is at risk for nonappearance. The Government has presented no evidence that Abrego has failed to appear for court proceedings in the past, that he failed to abide by the protective orders Ms. Vasquez took out against him, or that he has otherwise ever shown a pattern of disrespect for the law. Nor has the Government presented evidence that Abrego has the financial means to finance flight, even if he wanted to. To the contrary, the Court has evidence before it that suggests that if the Court released Abrego on conditions, he would comply. As the Pretrial Services Report demonstrates, Abrego has reported to an ICE officer on four separate occasions from October 23, 2020 to January 2, 2024. Further, as the THP body camera footage from November 30, 2022 demonstrates, when Abrego was pulled over that night, although not fully truthful, he did not flee or attempt to flee, was cooperative, answered the officer’s questions, and provided the officer with the information requested to the extent he was able to do so. This cuts against the notion that Abrego disrespects the law so much that he would voluntarily avoid future court proceedings or court orders if released.
Perhaps more importantly, the judge sees no reason to believe that Abrego is “a danger to the community.”
As the Court discussed above, the Government’s general statements about the crimes brought against Abrego, and the evidence it has in support of those crimes, do not prove Abrego’s dangerousness. See supra, Section III.B.2.a. Although the Government has presented evidence by a preponderance that Abrego transported minors, there is no solid evidence in the record indicating any of them, or others transported, were physically or emotionally harmed by Abrego. And Abrego is correct that these crimes are not those that are considered typically violent such that a presumption of detention is warranted. See supra, Section III.B.2.a. While the Court does give some weight to Agent Joseph’s testimony that CW-1 and CW-1 stated Abrego was involved with guns and drugs while participating in the human smuggling conspiracy, the Court notes that this testimony was based on witness statements that evolved throughout the interview process, and so it alone cannot show that Abrego is a danger to the community such that he cannot be released.
Those “evolving” witness statements are detailed by the court and make the claims by the informant—again who asked for and received protections from the US government for making these claims against Abrego—look pretty sketchy.
Indeed, the court calls out the DOJ’s “poor attempts” to claim that Abrego is a high-ranking member of MS-13. Or even connected to MS-13 at all, saying that the DOJ’s argument “border[ed] on fanciful.”
Nor does the Government’s poor attempts to tie Abrego to MS-13 get it there. Of the three witnesses Agent Joseph testified about that discussed Abrego’s purported affiliation with MS-13, the closest any of them come to stating that Abrego is a member of MS-13 is two witnesses stating he was “familial” with gang members and a third witness stating she “believed” him to be a member. Entirely absent from the record, however, are any indications that such “belief” is rooted in fact or that such “familial” nature came from his actual membership in or support of MS-13 rather than the simple fact that he, like many members of MS-13, is El Salvadorian. For instance, there is no evidence before the Court that Abrego: has markings or tattoos showing gang affiliation; has working relationships with known MS-13 members; ever told any of the witnesses that he is a MS-13 member; or has ever been affiliated with any sort of gang activity.12 To the contrary, Agent Joseph presented testimony based on statements from cooperating witnesses that Abrego transported both Barrio 18 and MS-13 members alike, and was cordial with both during those trips. This cuts against the already slim evidence demonstrating Abrego is a member of MS-13. Based on the record before it, for the Court to find that Abrego is member of or in affiliation with MS13, it would have to make so many inferences from the Government’s proffered evidence in its favor that such conclusion would border on fanciful.
The magistrate judge on that same case (the one who initially argued Abrego should be freed) has put a 30-day stay on the ruling to allow the government to appeal (meaning that Abrego Garcia will spend today, which apparently is his 30th birthday, still detained).
Around the same time, over in Maryland, Judge Paula Xinis, who is handling the original Abrego case (the “facilitate his return” case), issued an order saying that Abrego needs to be returned to Maryland, but more importantly put a ton of restrictions on the federal government not to fuck with Abrego:
By Order of this Court, Defendants (1) are prohibited from taking Abrego Garcia into immediate ICE custody in Tennessee; (2) must restore him to his ICE Order of Supervision in Baltimore; and (3) if they initiate third-country removal proceedings, must provide seventy-two (72) business hours’ notice to Abrego Garcia and his counsel of the intended third country, as more fully detailed below.
Judge Xinis reminds everyone how badly the DOJ fucked around on this case and notes in passing that sanctions are still on the line.
For three months after this Court issued the injunction, Defendants disclaimed any authority to facilitate his return and disregarded court orders. Defendants’ defiance and foot-dragging are, to be sure, the subject of a separate sanctions motion. ECF No. 195. The Court will not recount this troubling history in detail, other than to note Defendants’ persistent lack of transparency with the tribunal adds to why further injunctive relief is warranted.
Eventually, on June 6, 2025, Defendants returned Abrego Garcia much the same way they had removed him—in secret and with no advance notice. Nonetheless, he is back, and the first part of this Court’s injunctive relief has been met. But Defendants have demonstrated no appetite for fulfilling the second part: to restore Abrego Garcia to the status quo ante.
In a footnote, Judge Xinis separately notes that to this day, the government hasn’t even explained how Abrego got back and no one in the government—at any point—informed his family or lawyers, who all found out about it on the news.
The judge isn’t saying that the government can’t start immigration proceedings against him, but that it must actually allow for the kind of due process he’s been denied this year:
That said, once Abrego Garcia is restored to ICE supervision in this District, he may be ordered to appear at the Baltimore Field Office for commencement of immigration proceedings, and these proceedings may or may not include lawful arrest, detention and eventual removal. So long as such actions are taken within the bounds of the Constitution and applicable statutes, this Court will have nothing further to say.
But Judge Xinis wasn’t born yesterday. She knows how much the DOJ has been lying to her.
Defendants have done little to assure the Court that absent intervention, Abrego Garcia’s due process rights will be protected.
And this is where McLaughlin’s immediate violation becomes so telling. Rather than acknowledge the judicial findings or express any intent to comply with court orders, DHS doubled down on the same fabricated narrative that judges have systematically dismantled.
McLaughlin’s tweets weren’t just inappropriate—they were a confession. Hours after one judge ordered Abrego’s release and another explicitly prohibited DHS from taking him into ICE custody, McLaughlin declared he “will never walk America’s streets again”—publicly announcing the government’s intent to violate both orders.
Separately, Abrego’s lawyers filed a motion with Judge Crenshaw arguing that McLaughlin’s statements violate local court rules designed to protect defendants’ right to a fair trial. The filing makes clear this isn’t just about inappropriate tweeting:
These are exactly the kinds of statements that Local Criminal Rule 2.01 recognizes are likely to prejudice Mr. Abrego’s right to a fair trial, as Mr. Abrego has already argued about similar statements the government has made. (See Dkt 69 at 11-13; Dkt 94 at 2). The government has persisted in its efforts to use press statements outside of court to persuade the public of its allegation that Mr. Abrego is a member of MS-13—an allegation the Court described, just yesterday, as “border[ing] on the fanciful.” (Dkt. 95 at 32). These repeated public statements are likely to taint the jury pool. They are likely to endanger Mr. Abrego and his family. And they violate this Court’s Local Criminal Rules and Mr. Abrego’s due process rights.
Indeed, McLaughlin’s unhinged tweets seem only likely to help Abrego, as it makes it clear that since the government can’t stop lying about him, there’s no way he can get a fair trial.
But the real story here isn’t legal strategy—it’s the gleeful lawlessness on display. This isn’t bureaucratic incompetence or even garden-variety cover-ups. This is a government so committed to never admitting error that they will fabricate evidence, defy court orders, and publicly attack federal judges rather than acknowledge they accidentally trafficked an innocent man to a torture camp.
The cruelty isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. McLaughlin’s tweets weren’t a communications mistake—they were a deliberate middle finger to two federal courts and a public declaration that this administration considers itself above judicial oversight. They’d rather destroy one man’s life than admit their “mass deportation” strategy is a lawless mess that sends innocent people to be tortured.
That’s not just evil. It’s really fucking stupid evil, performed for an audience that cheers when government officials brag about ignoring judges. And that should terrify anyone who thinks courts might someday protect them from an out-of-control executive branch.
Filed Under: abrego garcia, dhs, doj, maryland, ms-13, paula xinis, tennessee, tricia mclaughlin, waverly crenshaw
The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement has revealed itself to be not just cruel, but fundamentally backwards: They’re literally freeing dangerous criminals while manufacturing cases against innocent people. And they’re doing it all to cover up their own massive legal fuckups.
Take the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. We covered this last week when Magistrate Judge Barbara Holmes ordered his release, noting that the Justice Department appeared to have leaned on actual criminals to fabricate evidence against him. Now the Washington Post has the full story, and it’s even more damning: The Trump admin is literally freeing a repeat violent offender in exchange for testimony against Abrego—a man with no criminal history who was working and raising a family.
The Trump administration has agreed to release from prison a three-time felon who drunkenly fired shots in a Texas community and spare him from deportation in exchange for his cooperation in the federal prosecution of Kilmar Abrego García, according to a review of court records and official testimony.
Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes, 38, has been convicted of smuggling migrants and illegally reentering the United States after having been deported. He also pleaded guilty to “deadly conduct” in the Texas incident, and is now the government’s star witness in its case against Abrego.
Let that sink in: They’re freeing someone, who drunkenly fired shots in a community, to help them prosecute someone whose only “crime” was being the victim of the government’s own illegal deportation, making the Trump administration look totally incompetent in the process.
Remember, the Trump regime insisted that it was focused on going after the worst of the worst, the most hardened criminals of all. Yet, over and over again we’re finding out that they can’t actually find all those criminals they insisted were out there, so they’re randomly grabbing anyone they can find. In the case of Abrego, that meant taking a man who had no criminal history, and appeared to be gainfully employed, and raising a family, and shipping him to the one place an immigration court had forbidden the US to send him.
That set the DOJ off on a wild goose chase to try to justify their own massive fuckup, leading to these questionable criminal charges against him, which they used to try to distract from the fact that they accidentally sent a man to a foreign concentration camp after being forbidden from doing so.
But to make that work, apparently it involves freeing the actual hardened, dangerous criminal, in hopes that he’ll testify against Abrego.
Hernandez is among a handful of cooperating witnesses who could help the Trump administration achieve its goal of never letting Abrego walk free in the United States again. In exchange, he has already been released early from federal prison to a halfway house and has been given permission to stay in the U.S. for at least a year.
“Otherwise he would be deported,” Peter Joseph, a Homeland Security Investigations special agent, testified at Abrego’s criminal hearing June 13. The government is also likely to give him a work permit, the agent told the court.
There’s no way to look at this other than “we’ll release a hardened criminal who is here illegally, and who has already been deported multiple times, including letting him stay in the US with working apers, so long as he concocts a story that lets DHS and the DOJ save face after we fucked up royally in renditioning a man illegally.”
That should be an embarrassment to the Trump regime, but it will barely get any attention.
But the Abrego case isn’t an isolated incident—it’s part of a pattern. At the same time Trump is manufacturing criminal cases against innocent people, he’s also cutting deals to free actual MS-13 gang leaders.
The NY Times has reported that for all of Trump’s promises to destroy the MS-13 gang, he’s cut a deal with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele to let actual top MS-13 gang leaders go free:
Even among the brutal ranks of the transnational gang called MS-13, Vladimir Arévalo Chávez stands out as a highly effective manager of murder, prosecutors say.
Known as “Vampiro,” he has been accused of overseeing killings in at least three countries: of migrants in Mexico, rivals in El Salvador and his own compatriots in the United States.
His arrest in February 2023 was a major triumph for American investigators, who only months earlier had accused him and 12 other gang leaders of terrorism, bloodshed and corruption in a wide-ranging federal indictment on Long Island.
But this April, the prosecutors who brought those charges suddenly — and quietly — asked a federal judge to drop them. Citing “national security concerns,” they said they needed to return Mr. Arévalo to El Salvador, his homeland.
The report details how these actual MS-13 leaders have evidence of Bukele’s corruption, and Bukele asked for them back, rather than letting them tell their stories to American courts:
But the Trump administration has not acknowledged another reason Mr. Bukele would want them back: U.S. prosecutors have amassed substantial evidence of a corrupt pact between the Salvadoran government and some high-ranking MS-13 leaders, who they say agreed to drive down violence and bolster Mr. Bukele politically in exchange for cash and perks in jail, a New York Times investigation found.
The deal with El Salvador heralded by Mr. Trump as a crackdown on crime is actually undermining a longstanding U.S. inquiry into the gang, according to multiple people with knowledge of the initiative. Two major ongoing cases against some of the gang’s highest-ranking leaders could be badly damaged, and other defendants could be less likely to cooperate or testify in court, they said.
So let’s be clear about what’s happening here:
This isn’t “tough on crime”—it’s the opposite. It’s law enforcement theater that makes everyone less safe while covering up the administration’s own legal violations.
All that seems really bad! It’s almost as if the Trump regime is much more focused on public relations claims than actually helping to stop gang activity.
Meanwhile, the judge in his criminal case has agreed that even though they’ve ruled that he should be released, Abrego is probably safer in federal prison, because were he released, ICE would likely ship him halfway around the world to some dangerous war zone.
Think about that: A federal judge is keeping someone in prison not because they’re dangerous, but because they’re safer there than in the hands of immigration enforcement. That’s where we are now—federal prison as sanctuary from ICE’s lawlessness.
This is what happens when immigration enforcement becomes completely divorced from actual public safety and becomes, instead, a machine for generating propaganda victories, no matter how many innocent people get ground up in the process.
Filed Under: abrego garcia, criminals, deportations, ice, kilmar abrego garcia, ms-13
The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn’t what the DOJ is claiming — it’s what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump administration cobbled together to justify their illegal deportation of a man courts had barred the US from sending to El Salvador.
That should tell you everything about the quality of this “case.” But let’s walk through exactly how the DOJ manufactured criminal charges to cover up their own constitutional violation.
After months of claiming it was “impossible” to bring Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador — where they illegally shipped him, despite a court order, due to an “administrative error” — they have now brought him back.
For months they resisted doing so, as everyone realized it would mean admitting the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration program made mistakes. So the administration pivoted: they fired the DOJ lawyer who had initially admitted that it was a mistake to deport him, and began claiming that Abrego Garcia was obviously a terrible criminal, a “leader” of the MS-13 gang, and a “human trafficker.” The US government then began searching high and low for literally anything they could use to try to justify those claims about him, so they could falsely pretend that they were correct in shipping him out of the country.
The best they can do was… finding a 2022 traffic stop.
In that stop, Abrego Garcia was driving a van with eight passengers from Texas to Maryland — construction workers, he said, being transported between job sites. The officers at the time found nothing worth charging. They didn’t even cite him for speeding.
Difficult to see that as evidence of anything horrible.
But desperate times call for desperate measures. And the Trump administration desperately needed something. So it appears the DOJ used that non-incident to secretly indict Abrego Garcia on two counts of “transporting” undocumented workers. That indictment was unsealed today, along with the announcement that Abrego Garcia was being brought back to the US to face those criminal charges.
Oh, so they could bring him back…
This proves that the administration has been lying, repeatedly, in claiming that they had no control over him and couldn’t bring him back.
Remember: Trump himself admitted multiple times that he could get Abrego Garcia back. Meanwhile, AG Pam Bondi was insisting in public that Abrego Garcia would never return to the United States.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was even more definitive: “there is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again.”
Kristi Noem less than a month ago: "There is no scenario where Abrego Garcia will be in the United States again."(No matter what happens, bringing him back to the US is a climbdown for the administration)
All proven false. Today, Bondi tried to claim this was different because they “presented El Salvador with an arrest warrant.” But that only proves the lie — there was never anything stopping them from making that request. They just chose not to, while claiming it was impossible.
El Salvador readily agreed to the request — exactly as everyone knew they would, despite Salvadoran President Bukele’s claims that it was “preposterous” to even think of returning him as he would have to “smuggle a terrorist” into the US.
Turns out all of that was theater.
We’ve seen this playbook trotted out multiple times: whenever someone is denied due process, we hear about how awful they are, how violent, how dangerous, as if that means they don’t deserve due process. But that’s garbage: everyone deserves due process, because without it, there’s simply no way to know for sure that they are all those things anyone is claiming.
The new criminal indictment
It’s now clear that the DOJ went on a fishing expedition to find anything they could possibly dig up to pin on Abrego Garcia. The evidence was so weak that, according to ABC News, the local DOJ prosecutor resigned rather than put his name on the filings:
The decision to pursue the indictment against Abrego Garcia led to the abrupt departure of Ben Schrader, a high-ranking federal prosecutor in Tennessee, sources briefed on Schrader’s decision told ABC News. Schrader’s resignation was prompted by concerns that the case was being pursued for political reasons, the sources said.
Schrader, who spent 15 years in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Nashville and was most recently the chief of the criminal division, declined to comment when contacted by ABC News.
When experienced federal prosecutors walk away from cases because they believe they’re politically motivated, that tells you everything about the integrity of the charges.
But the DOJ pressed forward anyway, transforming a routine traffic stop into something much grander. In their detention motion, two years after police found nothing worth citing, the government now claims:
Over the past nine years, the defendant has played a significant role in an undocumented alien smuggling ring that has resulted in thousands of undocumented aliens being illegally transported into and throughout the United States, including members and associates of La Mara Salvatrucha (“MS-13”), a recently designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, as well as unaccompanied minor children
This represents a remarkable evolution in the government’s case. In 2022: not worth a speeding ticket. In 2025: international human trafficking kingpin.
At today’s press conference about this, Pam Bondi also appeared to accuse Abrego Garcia of being a “child-groomer” and a murderer. When reporters pointed out that the indictment says nothing about such things, she got angry, insisted he’s really bad, and then ended the press conference abruptly.
Everything is backwards
Here, the entire process has been backwards:
The Promise: Rigorous deportation processes targeting only dangerous criminals. Once deported, impossible to bring anyone back.
The Reality: They accidentally shipped someone with no criminal record to El Salvador against a court order barring him from being shipped there. Then, they were able to easily bring him back two and a half months later, as soon as they asked, but only after they scraped together a very weak looking indictment to try to turn him into a criminal.
That’s not protecting Americans from violent criminals. It’s turning people into criminals to justify a monumental fuckup and human rights violation.
Filed Under: abrego garcia, ben schrader, deportation, dhs, doj, donald trump, el salvador, human trafficking, kristi noem, ms-13, nayib bukele, pam bondi, traffic stop
Late last year, Pro Publica and the NY Times published an incredible, long and infuriating article, mostly about how a high school in NY destroyed an immigrant student’s life, due to a mixture of moral panics about “MS-13” gang activity (whipped up by the federal government), over-aggressive policing within schools, and deeply troubling decisions by ICE. The story touches on a number of things that we normally write about — and I’ve been stewing over writing a post for weeks. The topics herein are most frequently covered on this site by Tim Cushing, rather than me. But I took this article, because the high school at the center of the article, Huntington High School in Suffolk County, New York, is the high school I attended. It’s the high school I went to for 4 years, and it’s the high school where I gave a speech at graduation on the same football field you can see in one of the photos used to illustrate the story.
Everything about the article is infuriating in so many ways, that it’s been difficult to figure out where to even start, but if we have to start someplace, let’s start with this: the rise of embedding police into schools — so-called School Resource Officers (SROs), who are employed by the local police, but whose “beat” is a school. Those officers report to the local police department and not the school, and can, and frequently do, have different priorities. We’ve long raised concerns about the increased policing of schools. Traditionally, schools handled their own disciplinary matters directly, within the school, with a focus on what was best for the learning environment of the students. They were not always good at this, but adding in an element where the end result could be criminal charges has always seemed misguided, and never more so than in this particular story and the case of “Alex” in the news story.
As the article notes, this trend of putting police in schools came about as a result of the original “famous” school shooting, the one in Columbine, which resulted in a variety of moral panics:
CONGRESS FIRST PROVIDED funding to bring full-time police officers into schools after the 1999 Columbine shooting. The number of these resource officers has doubled in the last decade, according to the National Association of School Resource Officers. Some 80 percent of high schools with more than 1,000 students have them. Schools with large populations of black and Latino students are more likely to have a resource officer than schools that are majority white. After the school shooting this year in Parkland, Florida, Trump called for police officers on every campus.
The position of school resource officer is a hybrid of conflicting roles: counselor, teacher and cop. ?You have to have a person who can be caring and loving, but on the flip of a switch, turn into a law-enforcement warrior,? said Mac Hardy, a spokesman for the resource officers association.
That was a few years after I had graduated from the school. We had security guards, but they were not actually police. They didn’t carry guns. They didn’t have the power to arrest people. And they certainly didn’t write up secret reports and send them to ICE leading to the deportation of students. But, apparently, we live in different times.
The second disturbing moral panic in the story is around gang activity, and specifically worries about MS-13.
Huntington High administrators say there has never been any MS-13 presence at the school. Unlike a number of other Long Island high schools, Huntington High says nothing about gang activity on its website; instead it offers guidance on throwing snowballs (?dangerous?) and keeping the hallways clear (?essential?).
That sounds about right. I’m sure there is some gang activity and some violence among students at the school. There was when I was there. I don’t know how accurate it is, but I do remember when I was there being told that Huntington had been selected for some study because the population there was a pretty close match to the population diversity of the entire US. You had some rich families, some poor, and plenty of middle class. You had kids of every color and nationality. There were all sorts of groupings. The first time I saw a handgun was when a student (who I barely knew) was showing it off in his locker. There were fights and localized gangs, but hardly anything that crazy. It really doesn’t sound like that much has changed. But, with the President and others continually exaggerating the idea of “MS-13 gangs,” some police and some schools seem to have bought into the moral panic — including the police sent to high schools. And even though some have suggested not going overboard with these things, that kind of nuance appears to have gotten lost.
In Suffolk County, although resource officers have been in the schools for two decades, their roles are expanding. In 2017, the Police Department sent officers into Huntington High and other schools to train administrators and teachers to identify gang members. The presentations focused on items like plastic rosaries, blue bandannas, anything with horns and the numbers 504 and 503, written in notebooks or on hands. One slide, which was used in community presentations, featured a group of young men holding up the Salvadoran flag at a Central American pride parade.
Some police officers cautioned that these symbols could also mean a student was being pressured to join or just trying to look cool, and that symbols can have multiple meanings. The same way metal-heads might draw a pentagram, or wannabe punks might draw the anarchy sign (a letter A inside a circle), some students might draw MS-13 symbols, unaware that adults could take those doodles as proof of membership. One law-enforcement officer told me about being called in by a Long Island school after a student drew the signs for both MS-13 and a rival Mexican gang in his notebook. The officer explained that a real gang member would not draw signs of a gang he wasn?t a member of ? the drawings were not incriminating, just dumb. But not all officers were as clear about these nuances.
In the case of Alex, in this story, these kinds of warnings apparently created the problem. His problems started… because he wore some blue sneakers and a security guard thought it was a gang symbol:
Alex knew that MS-13 claimed Nike Cortez shoes and blue bandannas, so he made sure to avoid them. In the spring of 2017, school security guards stopped him as he walked down the hall wearing bright blue sneakers that his mother picked out for him as a gift for accompanying her to an immigration appointment in Queens. They said the blue of the shoes was the color of MS-13. They also searched Alex?s bag, on which he had written ?504,? and found that he had doodled the name of his Honduran hometown and a devil with horns. Without explaining why, the security guards photographed the drawings before giving Alex his books back. When Alex got home that day, he buried the shoes in a closet and didn?t wear them again, even on weekends.
Even trying not to wear anything that looked like a gang member was interpreted… as being a gang member:
He stopped wearing his Honduran sports jerseys and his bracelet with the colors of the flag. He avoided talking to anyone he didn?t already know well. He and his two best friends decided it was safest to wear all black to school to avoid being tagged as gang members. But when they showed up in their matching outfits, the security guards said they couldn?t dress like that because it looked as if they were trying to start a gang.
Oh, and about that “devil” drawing mentioned above. That apparently was a key part of where everything went wrong for Alex. Except… the freaking school mascot is the “Blue Devil” and has been since at least well before I went to the school. And that’s what the drawing was:
A few weeks later, on May 4, 2017, Alex was daydreaming as his algebra teacher introduced yet another indecipherable math operation. Without thinking, he began doodling in pencil on the school calculator he was using. When the bell rang, he handed it back in. That afternoon, security staff pulled Alex out of English class and took him to the office of Brenden Cusack, the principal. When Alex walked in, he saw the calculator on Cusack?s desk. Through an interpreter, Cusack asked Alex if he had drawn the number 504 on the case, and Alex said he had. Then Cusack produced the security guard?s photos of Alex?s drawing of devil horns and told him that the doodles signified MS-13.
Alex told me he would never have written on a wall or desk in this American school, and he knew it was wrong to draw on the school-issued calculator, but he was surprised to be taken to the principal for something he saw as a form of fidgeting. He tried to defend himself; the devil was the school mascot, after all, and 504 was the Honduras country code. ?For the police, it?s a gang thing, but for us, it?s about being proud of your country,? he later told me. To Cusack, Alex?s distinctions didn?t seem to matter. The principal signed an incident report that said Alex had been caught in possession of ?gang paraphernalia? and had been ?defacing school property with gang signs.? Alex said that Cusack told him that he would be suspended for three days and that the doodles would be reported to Fiorillo.
Indeed, Alex appears to have been proud to show off his school spirit:
When his parents had extra money, he asked for a T-shirt, sweatshirt or backpack emblazoned with Huntington High?s name and its mascot, the blue devil with horns.
But combine all of this and you end up with him being deported as a supposed MS-13 member. First, as mentioned above, he was suspended for three days over this moral panic concerning his doodling of the school mascot. Then, apparently, the local school police officer, Andrew Fiorillo, was given the “incident report” about this, leading him to share that with his police department… which later (of course) shared the information with ICE.
It is most likely that as Alex sat at home during his suspension, Fiorillo received word of the doodling incident. While Fiorillo told me he didn?t remember details about Alex?s case, Huntington High has a policy of calling him in as soon as a staff member sees something that could be gang-related, according to a former principal, Carmela Leonardi, who retired in 2015. ?The minute you see a gang sign, you need to intervene,? she said. ?First, we?d try to get Drew involved, and say, ?Have you seen this kid outside of the school talking to people?? Because sometimes you do that in your notebook because you?re trying to seem cool, or because you?re a little idiot.?
Once Fiorillo knew about Alex?s drawings, he would have had to fill out a form and send the information on to the department?s criminal-intelligence unit. Although Suffolk County school resource officers are allowed to use their judgment about reporting infractions like marijuana possession or writing on school walls, their 2017 handbook requires them to write up gang activity, no matter how trivial. School resource officers are not detectives, and they don?t generally go further than passing on what they are told and observe themselves, according to Gerard Gigante, Suffolk County?s chief of detectives.
There’s a lot more in the story, but a few months later, out of the blue, ICE showed up at his house and detained him. He had no idea why, but that was the last time he saw his home in Huntington.
… when the ICE agents came to Alex?s house on June 14, 2017, he was shocked into silence. It was only when they were far from Huntington, passing through unfamiliar, rundown Long Island towns, that he was able to get out the words to ask why he was being arrested. Alex says the agent first asked him to guess, and then told him, ?We received a report a while ago from the school that you were a gang member, and that?s why.? Behind the tinted windows, his confusion resolved into fear for himself and his parents. ?I felt so bad,? he said, ?because I was thinking that my mom and dad were going to suffer.?
The article details how everyone just kept passing the buck, rather than taking responsibility for this weird game of disciplinary telephone, where a doodle of the school mascot eventually leads to deportation:
When I asked Fiorillo if he had known that his information was shared with ICE, he demurred. ?I can?t speak to what they do, they being a federal government agency,? he said. ?I don?t work with them.? Testimony at an immigration hearing by another Suffolk County school resource officer, George Politis of Brentwood High, whose information collected in school was found in ICE memos, shed some light on the process. Asked what happened after he wrote a report, he said: ?It?s submitted, and then I don?t know how it?s disseminated from there. We enter it on a computer, and then it goes to whoever wants to read it within the department.?
Meanwhile, the high school — my freaking high school — did nothing to help. In fact, they appeared to actively block any attempt to help, with the school principal claiming they couldn’t help for privacy reasons:
Palacios asked his client?s teachers for letters of support. But the teachers refused, saying the administration wouldn?t allow it. Alex?s father and the parents of many of the other detained Huntington students also approached their children?s teachers for letters and were also turned down. Cusack, the principal, told me he had been caught off guard by the requests and worried that having staff write about students to third parties would violate students? privacy rights.
The article notes that the ACLU sued over a large number of similar situations (though, because Alex had just turned 19, and was no longer considered a minor, his case was not included). The result of that lawsuit showed that this combination of moral panics, school police officers, and ICE gone nuts, meant a bunch of kids being detained (and some deported) over little more than random accusations that some of them might have done something vaguely gang like.
The lead case involved a Brentwood High student, Noel (his middle name), who ICE said was dangerous because he had been seen with suspected MS-13 members and had written the number 503 in a school notebook. ICE labeled Noel a ?gang member? when he was detained, then downgraded him to a ?probable member? and finally, on the day of his hearing, settled on calling him a person identified by a school resource officer as ?associated? with the gang. In an immigration courthouse in lower Manhattan, Judge Aviva Poczter ordered Noel?s immediate release, noting that 503 is a country code. ?I think this is slim, slim evidence on which to base the continuing detention of an unaccompanied child,? Poczter said.
In other hearings, ICE presented evidence pulled from the Suffolk Police Department?s gang database. Again and again, judges found that the material ? a student cited for a gang tattoo who didn?t have a tattoo; a photo of a group of suspected gang members that did not include the student in question ? was far too weak or inaccurate to detain the students. In the cases involving Huntington students, the ?Huntington High resource officer? kept coming up. In one case, he reported that one student was ?found to be in possession of MS-13 drawings in his school work.? In another, he reported that a student had written ?MS13? on his arm. Ultimately, 30 of the 32 teenagers in the ACLU lawsuit were freed, including Palacios? client, who returned to school.
The article goes on and on with much more detail, and background about Alex and his family — and how a judge in his asylum case ignored the (lack of) evidence and ordered him deported. And then, the government kept pressuring him not to fight deportation, basically making his life a living hell until he felt he had no choice but to accept deportation.
All because he’d drawn the freaking school mascot. And because we’ve put police where they don’t belong. And because of moral panics over “gang violence” that is not nearly as big a problem as gets hyped up by the media… and the President of the United States (for a good backgrounder on the actual threats of MS-13, I recommend the thorough This American Life episode, which shows (1) that MS-13 is much smaller than people claim, (2) that the violence is mostly directed at other immigrant kids, (3) that the police who claim to be so concerned about MS-13 seem to mostly ignore or deny actual reports of MS-13 violence when it involves immigrant kids, and (4) that the police only really care in the rare instances when it impacts white, American-born people).
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is celebrating this program of detaining and deporting kids who probably haven’t done anything wrong as they continue to expand it:
But across Long Island, immigrant students who get in trouble for minor offenses still risk the same chain of overreactions that led to Alex?s deportation. In August 2018, the school district for Bellport High banned students from drawing devil horns and the numbers 503 and 504, or posting them on their private social-media pages. By December, the ACLU identified about 20 new minors around the country arrested by ICE on shaky gang claims, and it sued to force ICE to reveal the total number of minors who have been detained. ICE now says Operation Matador will be permanent on Long Island. This fall, the initiative won an annual award from the Department of Homeland Security for best new ICE program.
After the article came out, the school district posted a letter in response, which calls the details of the article “upsetting,” but hardly seems to suggest that the school is going through any serious self-reflection of its role in all of this:
While it would be simple to argue statements and context in numerous places within the article, it does not change the fact that the events, as presented, are beyond upsetting. We deeply regret the harm faced by any family in our community who has been separated from a child. In that light, systems and processes at the high school will be reviewed thoroughly in an effort to maintain a safe haven, as well as the happiness and well-being of all students. We could not ask for a more caring and compassionate group of school staff members, who routinely place the needs of children before their own.
And while it says that it will do this “thorough” review, the letter, at the same time, suggests only minor modifications to having a police officer in the school:
We have enjoyed a productive working relationship with the area?s SRO through the years. He has helped and guided numerous students and families in our district and others. In light of current national and local concerns, however, we believe that we must advocate for an additional layer of organization addressing the relationship between schools districts and the Police Department. This can be accomplished through formulation of a Memorandum of Understanding. It is our firm belief that such an agreement would establish formal procedural guidelines associated with the SRO position, as well as with information flow and restrictions. It is our additional belief that this would not only provide guidance and protection for schools, school staff and students, but for the SRO?s and Department as well.
That seems like too little too late.
Honestly, so much of the article is a demonstration of how little things snowball and overreactions create horrific situations. Putting police in schools was never a good idea — but extra fear about high profile school shootings encouraged doing that as a “solution” that isn’t much of a solution (how often have you heard about SROs stopping a school shooting?). The panic over MS-13 and “gangs” has resulted in people freaking out over anything they perceive as a gang indicator. In many ways, it actually reminds me of the “Satanic Panic” from back in the 1980s, where adults were freaking out about “the kids” somehow being evil, and freaking out over even the slightest “evidence” to support their own delusions.
It is deeply disturbing that this happens anywhere, but the fact that I’m so familiar with this particular school makes it that much more painful to me, personally. That school, its teachers and other students, are certainly a big part of who I am today. And today I’m ashamed that that very same school had any role in this travesty, completely ruining a kid’s life because he had a little school spirit (likely much more school spirit than I ever had).
While writing this, I was trying to recall the details of the graduation speech I gave 25 years ago at Huntington High School. It’s possible that the printed out text is in a box somewhere at my parents’ house — which is still mere blocks away from the school. I don’t remember it exactly, but I do recall, with tremendous clarity, that the key theme was about learning how to keep things in perspective, and about not getting carried away, especially based on trends or peer pressure. It probably was not a very good speech (a friend at the time noted that the other speaker that day gave a “reach for the clouds” message, while mine was a “but keep your feet planted on the ground” kind of speech). However, it certainly seems that many, many people these days could gain from internalizing that message — including at the very high school I went to.
Filed Under: blue devil, gangs, high school, ice, immigration, mascot, moral panic, ms-13, police, refugees, school resource officers, sro, suffolk county police, suspension
Companies: huntington high school
Back in August, the DOJ headed to court, hoping to obtain some of that sweet sweet anti-encryption precedent. Waving around papers declaring an MS-13 gang conspiracy, the DOJ demanded Facebook break encryption on private Messenger messages and phone calls so the government could eavesdrop. Facebook responded by saying it couldn’t do that without altering — i.e., breaking — Messenger’s underlying structure.
Not that breaking a communications platform would give the FBI any sleepless nights. Worthless encryption is better than good encryption when it comes to demanding the content of communications or, as in this case, operating as the unseen man-in-middle when suspected gang members chatted with each other.
Unfortunately (for the FBI), this ended in a demurral by the federal court. The details of the court’s decision are, just as unfortunately, unknown. Reuters was able to obtain comments from “insiders familiar with the case,” but the public at large is still in the dark as to how all of this turned out.
The EFF and ACLU are hoping to change that.
In our petition filed today in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, EFF, the ACLU, and Riana Pfefferkorn of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society seek to shed light on this important issue. We’re asking the court to release all court orders and related materials in the sealed Messenger case.
Given the importance of encryption in widely used consumer products, it is a matter of public interest any time law enforcement tries to compel a company to circumvent its own security features.
The petition [PDF] points out the First Amendment guarantees access to courtroom proceedings and the courts are supposed to adhere to this by operating with a presumption of openness. Only in rare, rare cases should they side with the government and allow the public to be cut out of the loop by sealing documents.
This is doubly true in cases of significant public interest. Any time the DOJ is in court agitating for broken encryption, it’s safe the say the public will be affected by the case’s outcome. At this point, we don’t know anything more than the DOJ didn’t get what it wanted. What we don’t know is why, or what impact the ruling here will have on similar cases in the future. And we should know these details because, if nothing else, the FBI has proven it cannot be trusted to deal with device encryption honestly.
Filed Under: breaking encryption, compelled access, doj, encryption, facebook messenger, fbi, going dark, ms-13, public records, sealed court documents, transparency
Companies: facebook
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