So given that everything else about the Trump regime's plot to traffic over 250 migrants to a forever torture prison in El Salvador without due process under the guise of fighting an "invasion" by a "narco-terrorist" gang turned out to be a lie, illegal, or straight up fascist fuckery, would it surprise you at all to learn that US intelligence agencies do *not* think Tren de Aragua is working with the government of Venezuela to invade the United States? Yeah, me neither; but the fact that the Trump regime knowingly just made up the so-called "invasion" fundamentally undercuts their entire argument for invoking the Alien Enemies Act, which in turn means they have no legal basis whatsoever for all the fascist repression and unconstitutional criminality they've engaged in here.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-venezuelan-gangs

'They Just Made Sh*t Up': Declassified Spy Memo Undercuts Trump Pretext for Deportations to El Salvador

"A memo released Monday by the Trump administration in response to a Freedom of Information Act request confirmed that U.S. intelligence agencies never agreed with President Donald Trump's claim in March that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro controls the criminal gang Tren de Aragua—an assertion that was used to justify sending hundreds of migrants to a notorious Salvadoran prison.

The document said that "while Venezuela's permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States."

As in several previous cases it's important to understand that the regime's lies and illegal manipulations of US law are being exposed by their own internal memos; this isn't a political attack or about motivated reasoning because the Trump administration itself wrote down that they knew Trump was lying, or at least that US intelligence didn't agree with his assessment of Tren de Aragua as an arm of the Venezuelan government. The regime tries to cover that up with vague nonsense about FBI intelligence but one of these groups is paid to monitor the activities of foreign governments the US is actively sanctioning, and one of them gets paid to convince unstable people they're secretly in ISIS to justify an ongoing counterterrorism program that's worth billions of dollars in funding; so I'll let you decide for yourself which of these two groups is more likely to know what they're talking about here. In other words, folks arguing that Trump was governing by fascist conspiracy theory and the regime literally made up a fake war to do white nationalist mass deportations, were completely, and totally correct; full stop.

"So you mean kidnapping folks off the streets and sending them to a foreign gulag was not justified by our own intelligence?" said the Arkansas Justice Project. "They just made shit up to dog whistle their base. The AEA argument was never legitimate and they knew it all along."

Frankly I do understand the temptation to scoff "so, what; we already knew that" in response to this news. But I need folks to realize that while it may have been obvious to anyone paying attention that the regime literally made up a whole invasion to justify their fascist mass deportation theater operation, the entire US establishment has more or less been pretending that it's somehow *possible* Trump is right about Tren de Aragua working for Venezuela to undermine American national security. As the article notes, until very recently not one judge has questioned the underlying logic of Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act or its debunked claims that Tren de Argua is an arm of the Venezuelan government. While the regime has received a modicum more pushback in the media, without direct confirmation that Trump is definitely (instead of just obviously) lying, news outlets have been reluctant to push back when the regime claims they're fighting a narco-terrorist invasion to justify their fascist repression and criminality. Will that change now that we've caught the regime lying through their own memos? Who knows, but it probably won't hurt.

The big picture analysis here is that Trump hacked the imperial presidency and an American war machine already in largely bipartisan agreement that Venezuela represents an "enemy" of the United States, to do his fascist mass depuration schemes. The machine couldn't, or didn't want to see that Trump was obviously lying, because lying about Venezuela and portraying Nicolás Maduro as a international supervillain is already such a normalized part of American foreign policy that pushing back on Trump would undermine the American imperial project. With the declassification of this memo however, the fig leaf has been shredded and the US establishment is going to have choose between imperialism and preventing a fascist takeover in America.

Honestly my friends, I'm running out of new ways to say that the Trump administration are a bunch of lawless fascists whose maximalist views on power put them in direct opposition to a US constitution and American legal tradition that is on the whole, extremely friendly to the exercise of executive power. There appears to be no article of law, no regulation, no rule they won't violate in their objectively nazi quest to create a white ethnostate; at this point I half expect the Trump regime to try to find a workaround to the rarely-remembered Third Amendment so they can force every American family to quarter an ICE agent in their home.

If you think I'm being hyperbolic, keep in mind that I'm only going off the information the Trump regime writes down in its own internal memos. Take for example this Department of Justice guideline arguing that ICE has the legal authority to conduct warrantless home invasions in search of "suspected" Venezuelan gang members, because Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act as a kind of Uno-reverso card to every piece of civil rights legislation in US history.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/ice-warrantless-search

DOJ Memo Shows Trump Admin Ordered ICE to Conduct Warrantless Home Invasions

"Lee Gelernt, the ACLU's lead counsel in cases challenging use of the AEA, told USA Today: "The administration's unprecedented use of a wartime authority during peacetime was bad enough. Now we find out the Justice Department was authorizing officers to ignore the most bedrock principle of the Fourth Amendment by authorizing officers to enter homes without a judicial warrant."

Monique Sherman, an attorney at the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network, expressed alarm over the DOJ memo.

"The home under all constitutional law is the most sacred place where you have a right to privacy," Sherman told USA Today. "By this standard, spurious allegations of gang affiliation means the government can knock down your door."

As Georgetown University Law Center professor Steve Vladeck said, "There's no Alien Enemies Act exception to the Fourth Amendment."

As I've indicated elsewhere, I'm not a lawyer; but as someone who has spent many years studying fascism, authoritarianism, and police states, I'm pretty sure you don't issue a Department of Justice order like that unless you *intend* to use ICE to start going house to house in American communities; and once a fascist government has granted itself the power to do that, it really doesn't matter why they claim they're doing so anymore. This is quite literally the beginnings of the dystopian police state winger prepper reactionaries are always going on about, and in anything resembling a functioning democracy US Attorney General Pam Bondi would be arrested immediately for even signing it. As both the article and your middle school civics class note, absolutely none of this is legal no matter what ancient laws Trump tries to invoke and the DoJ is basically telling ICE to ignore the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, "because we say so."

The question then remains, does the Trump regime even care if the fascist bullshit they're doing is legal? Even under a Calvinball winger interpretation of US law? Signals on that front are so far mixed; on one hand the regime continues arguing its nonsensical theories in court, but on the other hand they stand in violation of several court orders already and are for example, making no effort to bring Abrego Garcia home from a torture prison in El Salvador, despite a 9-0 SCOTUS ruling that they must do so.

On some level I imagine that ICE goons might ignore a DoJ order that tells them to violate the Constitution, but the reason Trump has always used ICE as his personal Gestapo gives me pause. The agency self-selects for nativists who don't mind authoritarian repression or violence, and Trump's vast power over immigration matters as president, means ICE is largely his to control - at least through a Department of Homeland Security the regime has stacked full of white nationalists and fascist freaks. In other words, I don't really know what happens if and when the Trump regime orders ICE to go for the full V for Vendetta experience; but it probably isn't good, and I'm not keen on finding out if Der Leader's private Gestapo cares about the Constitution at all.

I'm not a psychic, but it is increasingly becoming clear to me that the fascist Trump administration knows it cannot accomplish its goals without a loyal, empowered, and ideologically aligned force of police state thugs. The fact that they're casting about the margins of the US legal system to empower ICE to be that army of goons, tells you they have plans to use that power. For what? I don't know, but authoritarian police state powers to enter American homes to fight a made up war against "gangs," have far more potential uses to a fascist regime than just mass deportations.