--:-- Noel King: The Trump administration is defying a federal judge who's demanding details about a flight to El Salvador. It carried almost 200 men who the administration says are gang members and who were flown from U.S. soil after the judge said don't.
--:-- Noel King: President Trump and El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, posted video of the shackled men being pulled from the plane by guards in riot gear and transported in white buses to prison. The official White House Twitter account also reposted a remix of the video set to Semisonic's "Closing Time."
--:-- Noel King: Semisonic responded, the song is about joy and possibilities and hope, and they have missed the point entirely. Lest we all, let's focus up.
--:-- Noel King: The administration hasn't offered any proof that these men are gang members and acknowledges many don't even have criminal records in the U.S.
--:-- Noel King: All this coming up on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again.
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--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Ted Hessen.
--:-- Ted Hessen: Ted is an immigration reporter at Reuters.
--:-- Ted Hessen: President Trump is using the Alien Enemies Act to target a gang called Trende Aragua. Who are they?
--:-- Ted Hessen: Trende Aragua is a Venezuelan gang, a prison gang, And the name translates to train from Aragua, which is a state in Venezuela.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And within Venezuela and within the region, they have a reputation, a notorious reputation for extortion and kidnappings and even contract killings.
--:-- Ted Hessen: We've seen them increasingly talked about in the U.S., particularly in the political context.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And this goes back to the presidential election last year.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And what we're hearing, of course, Martha, is that people are terrified by what has happened with some of these Venezuelan gangs.
--:-- Ted Hessen: They're dealing drugs. They're getting arrested. It's not just Lake and Riley.
--:-- Ted Hessen: I can give you dozens of examples of people who've been victims of crimes.
--:-- Ted Hessen: What we saw under former President Joe Biden was an increase in immigration generally and illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and also hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who entered both by crossing the border illegally and through legal entry programs that Biden himself had launched.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And then during the election, we noticed that as President Trump made illegal immigration a major theme and even legal immigration, a major theme of his reelection campaign, he was focusing also on the Venezuelans who had come into the country and particularly portraying many of them as affiliated with this gang, Tren de Aragua, or with gangs in general or criminality.
--:-- Ted Hessen: criminality. They allowed terrorists. They allowed common street criminals. They allowed people to come in, drug dealers, to come into our country.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And they're now in the United States and told by their countries like Venezuela, don't ever come back or we're going to kill you.
--:-- Ted Hessen: Now, that said, even though this gang does have a fearsome reputation within Venezuela and within the region, there are not yet signs that they're operational on a large scale in the U.S.
--:-- Ted Hessen: There have been individual cases of alleged members of the gang arrested and charged with crimes, including very serious crimes.
--:-- Ted Hessen: But that said, it's just not clear that they're operational here in the way that they might be in another country.
--:-- Ted Hessen: What does the Alien Enemies Act allow the president to do about this perceived threat?
--:-- Ted Hessen: So the Alien Enemies Act is an obscure, rarely used wartime statute that dates back to 1798.
--:-- Ted Hessen: and it's really just been used three times in U.S. history and always in times of war.
--:-- Ted Hessen: It's best known or most notoriously known for its use in World War II to justify internment camps for Japanese Americans, Italian Americans, and German Americans.
--:-- Ted Hessen: The Trump administration has been building the case that this law could be used against a quote-unquote invasion at the U.S.-Mexico border.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And in a proclamation that he issued on Saturday, President Trump said that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which he said was present in the U.S., was part of this invasion and essentially was conducting what he was calling irregular warfare in the U.S., enough to justify invoking this wartime statute.
--:-- Ted Hessen: They invaded our country. So this isn't, in that sense, if this is war.
--:-- Ted Hessen: In many respects, it's more dangerous than war because, you know, in war they have uniforms. You know who you're shooting at. You know who you're going after.
--:-- Ted Hessen: Now, part of the reason that he would like to do this is that when you have the statute in effect, you can bypass due process in these cases.
--:-- Ted Hessen: So you don't have they wouldn't have to go through immigration courts. They may have a pending asylum claim. They may have even a legal status in the U.S.
--:-- Ted Hessen: President Trump's proclamation exempted citizens and green card holders, but it could be applied to other Venezuelans in the U.S. ages 14 and up, so actually children as well.
--:-- Ted Hessen: Do we know that the 200 or so men who've been deported so far are all members of this gang?
--:-- Ted Hessen: The Trump administration has said that these are alleged members of the gang.
--:-- Ted Hessen: We still have few details about them.
--:-- Ted Hessen: In a court filing that came out this week an official with U Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE said that many of the people who were deported actually had no criminal records in the U Some of them had been either charged or convicted of crimes including some serious ones but many of them had not
--:-- Ted Hessen: That said he said that some of them had criminal convictions in other countries, including Venezuela, and still could potentially pose a threat because of the lack of information about them.
--:-- Ted Hessen: Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said something similar.
--:-- Ted Hessen: But in the same breath, Secretary of State Rubio also said that if it turns out some of them are not gang members, well, El Salvador, where they've been sent to, can just deport them back to Venezuela.
--:-- Ted Hessen: Now, assuming, let's just assume, and I'm not saying this is the case, because I think there's high fidelity and confidence that, in fact, that's exactly what every single one of them was.
--:-- Ted Hessen: But if one of them turns out not to be, then they're just illegally in our country, and the Salvadorans can then deport them to Venezuela.
--:-- Ted Hessen: But they weren't supposed to be in our country to begin with. They were here illegally.
--:-- Ted Hessen: We're all here illegally, all the people that that they're on that list.
--:-- Ted Hessen: Okay. All right. So there are legal challenges flying back and forth. Where do things stand legally right now?
--:-- Ted Hessen: Since President Trump implemented this policy on Saturday, there has been a legal battle going on led by the American Civil Liberties Union.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And they actually sued preemptively before the policy was public to prevent the use of this act against five Venezuelan clients they had in the U.S.
--:-- Ted Hessen: In that case, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., his name's James Boasberg, he issued a temporary restraining order for 14 days that essentially said the Trump administration needs to put this policy on hold.
--:-- Ted Hessen: There are serious questions being raised here as to whether it could cause irreparable harm, which is the standard for that, and that they should stop.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And what we learned after the fact is that two flights, at least two flights, were in the air, leaving the U.S. and bound for – eventually for El Salvador.
--:-- Ted Hessen: In his order, Judge Boasberg had said that even if there are planes in the air, you need to stop the planes and turn them around and bring the people back.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And it's kind of kicked off a legal battle, first of all, about the policy, and then secondarily about whether the Trump administration was honoring the spirit of his restraining order and whether they followed it.
--:-- Ted Hessen: These planes continued on to their destination, which was El Salvador.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And after the fact, the Trump administration has made the argument that they had already left the continental U.S. They were no longer in U.S. airspace and that fundamentally by the time he issued this order, the people had been removed or deported from the U.S.
--:-- Ted Hessen: So it no longer applied to them.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And all this is still playing out in court.
--:-- Ted Hessen: So we don't necessarily know where the judge will land on it or what the final result will be.
--:-- Ted Hessen: We're going to be talking about the prison in El Salvador where these men were sent in the second half of the show.
--:-- Ted Hessen: It's really a remarkable place, a very difficult place to get out of.
--:-- Ted Hessen: If some of these men are able to prove that they are not members of Trende Aragua, will they be released?
--:-- Ted Hessen: That's completely unclear to me at the moment.
--:-- Ted Hessen: Bukele has said that they'll be held there for a one-year period that could be renewed.
--:-- Ted Hessen: It's not clear that they're facing any charges in El Salvador.
--:-- Ted Hessen: It's not clear that they're facing any charges in the U.S. or other countries either, or that they even have criminal convictions.
--:-- Ted Hessen: So they are really in a legal black hole at the moment.
--:-- Ted Hessen: At this moment, we don't know what sort of access they're going to be getting to attorneys or what might ultimately happen with them.
--:-- Ted Hessen: What we have seen in the Trump administration is a kind of similar effort to send Venezuelan migrants and people from other countries as well, to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, another place that's known as a legal black hole for long-term detention.
--:-- Ted Hessen: And in those cases, the people who were there were not ultimately held for long periods.
--:-- Ted Hessen: In the case of the Venezuelans, they were able to be removed back to Venezuela.
--:-- Ted Hessen: So there is a question, is this a way to pressure the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro there to agree to accept these deportees and maybe just open the door generally to accepting more deportees.
--:-- Ted Hessen: Ted Hessen, he's an immigration reporter for Reuters based in Washington, D.C.
--:-- Ted Hessen: Ted, thanks so much for your time.
--:-- Ted Hessen: Thank you for having me.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up about that prison, we're going to talk to a reporter who's been on the inside.
--:-- Noel King: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards. These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars.
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--:-- Noel King: Estar escuchando a Hoy Explicado.
--:-- Noel King: Today, Explained.
--:-- Noel King: Lilia Luciano is a national correspondent at CBS News.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Lilia was allowed inside of SICOT, a prison which was built to hold men who Salvadoran officials call the worst of the worst, gang members from MS-13 and Barrio 18.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: I was inside last month. I wanted to get in and experience for myself what has become the biggest symbol of this tough-and-crime model that Bukele established under a state of exception where certain rights were suspended so that they could carry out these massive detentions to the point that they've detained around 2% or more than 2% of their population.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: population, and by doing so, reducing crime.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: El Salvador is the country with the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And of course, that translated to a significant drop in crime.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: That was my interest. I wanted to see how they did it.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: I had been asking for over a year and a half to get access to the prison and see how it worked.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And finally, they approved the visit in February.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Prisons are often viewed as very private places. Why do you think that the Salvadorian government lets you in?
--:-- Lilia Luciano: This is a very different prison. This is probably the most famous prison in the world by now.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: The images that have emerged from this prison are the symbol that have gained Nayib Bukele an unparalleled level of popularity, not just in his country, but in the entire region.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: I have heard from countless different nationalities, we need a Bukele.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And when people think of Bukele, they're thinking about this prison.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Tell us what you saw in this prison. What's it like?
--:-- Lilia Luciano: You know, when you walk into the prison, it's clear that this is the ultimate maximum security.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: There are multiple layers of gates.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: The first thing you notice when you approach the area of the prison, about a mile outside of the prison gates, is that there is a suffocation of communication.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Cell phones stop working.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: You're taken in buses because it's massive.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And you see dozens of towers with surveillance and everything you can expect from a prison.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: But the thing that's really striking is just how quiet everything is.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: The inmates are all within these modules that contain a number of cells inside.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Inside each cell, there is anywhere from like 80 to 100 or even more prisoners.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: But it's all extremely quiet, which, you know, when you think about 80 men, gang members inside one cell, and you can't hear a thing, that's when you really come to understand the level of force. and strength that the guards impose.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: So there's no communication.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: There is no visits ever. No family visits.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Those prisoners are within these modules.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Imagine like a big airplane hangar and inside those hangars is where the cells are.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: They never leave the module.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: So they never see the light outside.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: There's no outside time.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: They can only be outside the cell in the hallway that divides all the cells for about 20 to 30 minutes per day.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: They don't have mattresses.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: They don't have sheets.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: They just sleep in these metal cots.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: It's these multiple dozens of bunk beds.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And that's where they are all the time.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: What's striking is that it just feels like these human beings who are in there are stripped outside of their tattoos, of course, because they can't take away the tattoos, but they're stripped of anything that makes them stand apart.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: It's a mass of shaved heads, all dressed the same.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Their uniforms, which are all the same, all white.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: They're wearing Crocs or shoes that are kind of like Crocs.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And they're all staring from within the cell outside completely quietly.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: I asked, why are they so quiet?
--:-- Lilia Luciano: What happens if They talk, and they said, you'll have a time to talk to somebody, but if they speak out of line, they're going into solitary.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: We are not allowed to interact, to speak to any of the prisoners.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: They are all staring at us.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: It's so striking to see them.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: I only spoke to one prisoner.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: They only made one prisoner available for me to talk to, who spoke English, who said that he was from L.A., and shared a little bit of his experience.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Are you going to be here the rest of your life?
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Yeah, the rest of my life.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: We murdered a lot of people.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And this is the consequence of what happened to us.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: It's like that Titanic that we were big and strong gang, but we got hit with the iceberg.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And he said, you know, you have to act tough, but you can't fight.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And at night, he said, we, you know, you just kind of cry. You cry at night.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Yeah.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Who are these men? Who does El Salvador say they are?
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And what do we know about how accurate what the government portrays of them is?
--:-- Lilia Luciano: El Salvador says these are people who were known who and even the human rights advocates I talked to told me, yeah, yeah, the people who are in El Secot are for sure these criminals.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: However, when I asked the director of the prison about people being there without convictions, he looked at me and said, no, no, but these are really bad guys.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: It's almost like the notion of, you know, innocent until proven guilty does not exist in there.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And so this is something that I started to understand a lot better when I spent some time and I interviewed their defense minister and their minister of safety and security who is the person who is in charge of implementing what known as this Bukele model where the defense minister was telling me in the past we had to wait for people to commit a crime Now we arrest them first So you don need to show evidence You don need a warrant I mean, they just take somebody on suspicion of gang affiliation.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: There's kind of these mass hearings where people are charged with the crimes of the gang, of the organization.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And then it's very hard to prove that you're not part of that organization.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: I also asked how many people have been released who proved that they were innocent.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And this security and justice minister told me about 8,000 of almost 90,000 who've been detained.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: All right. 8,000 of about 90,000 have been released, or so you were told. Or so I was told.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: So there is a possibility, again, according to Salvadorian officials, there is a possibility that if you are innocent, if you were wrongly incarcerated, you can get out.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Yeah, maybe.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: People get hearings.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Part of the issue that somebody brought up is that so many people are incarcerated.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: There's no way there's enough attorneys to deal with every case.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: It's just very hard to really get your day in court.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: So even if there's hope, people spend years before they can complete their case and be released.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: There seems to be a huge burden on people, on family members to prove somebody's innocence.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And the biggest, I think, obstacle that these families who have family members or loved ones imprisoned who claim that they're innocent, the biggest burden I think they have is public opinion, is the overwhelming popularity of this model in El Salvador and really throughout the region.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: I walked the streets with the minister of defense and people were stopping him to take photos, to hug him, to thank him like a celebrity.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: It felt like I was walking around with, I don't know, some famous singer or something.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And people just expressed all of this gratitude.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: You know, I was looking around on YouTube and Instagram earlier today, and there are a lot of videos of SICOT, of this prison, not just from traditional media outlets like CBS News, like yours, but also from seemingly random YouTube influencers.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: What you see behind me is the world's strictest and largest prison.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And if seeing all these images, it is easy to suddenly be moved, to touch your heart, to say, wow, what harsh mistreatment inside the prison.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: But when you learn of the inhumane atrocities they have committed, it makes sense.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: It's pretty amazing to think about it, what Naibu Kele has been able to do with this country.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: The streets are as safe as they've ever been because all these guys are out.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Naibu Kele is not hiding this. If anything, he's publicizing this.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: He invited influencers in. It's the opposite of hiding.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Nayib Bukele is by profession a marketer. He's a publicist, a PR professional before he became president.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: He is absolutely a marketing genius.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: He knows how to get to people and his popularity goes way beyond his own country.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: So he wants to be a global figure.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: I think he is a global figure.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: He has been talking to the GOP directly.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: He has been celebrated by leaders of the Republican Party for a long time.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: You know, we've seen Matt Gaetz go to El Salvador.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: We've seen him speak at CPAC.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Against all adversity, we transform El Salvador from the most dangerous country in the world to the safest in the Western Hemisphere.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: He uses every opportunity he can to both export himself as a brand, his security model as a brand, so that his security model and his prison model is sustainable.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And this is something he said over and over.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: So we're safer than Canada, safer than Chile, safer than Uruguay, safer than the U.S., safer than any country in the Western Hemisphere.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: He offered the U.S. to take in the U.S.'s deportees, to take in the convicted U.S. criminals and to even take in convicted U.S. citizens in exchange for what he calls a small fee that to El Salvador would signify a big amount.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: You report and travel around Latin America. You talk to people who say our country is also suffering from instability. We need a bukele here.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Do you envision that being possible?
--:-- Lilia Luciano: I think others will try to emulate it.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: I also think that there's a lot more communication now with the Trump administration, a lot more recognition of what has happened in El Salvador and potentially an even bigger and expanding cooperation because the rights that have been suspended under the state of exception exist in the U.S.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: So it's a lot harder for the U.S. to implement the kinds of policies that Bukele implemented.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: And so it seems like outsourcing of a security system now in terms of deportees, now in terms of immigration.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: But we'll see where it gets.
--:-- Lilia Luciano: Lillia Luciano, CBS News.
--:-- Noel King: Today's show was produced by Amanda Llewellyn and Avishai Artsy.
--:-- Noel King: Amina El-Sadi edited, Laura Bullard fact-checked, and Patrick Boyd engineered.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained.
--:-- Noel King: Thank you.
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