Thread by @equalityAlec

THREAD. This is one of the more remarkable stories I have seen in my time studying state violence and working in law. But it's also an exercise in propaganda. And it's unbelievable how terrible the U.S. media coverage is. One thing in particular is important to see.

Background: this follows up on U.S. kidnapping people, rushing them onto planes as courts tried to stop it, and then defying court orders, with White House taunting courts and elected officials about how a person they agree was wrongly trafficked will never be coming back.

The kidnapping people off the street and then sending them to a prison (for life?) in a foreign country with no due process and without any law permitting indefinite detention--and then defying court orders--would be enough to end the U.S. legal system as we know it.

Now to today's article. I want to pause on how remarkable this is: El Salvador is now offering to trade the people illegally trafficked for cash and sent to its torture chamber to Venezuela if that country releases people on lists created by the far right.

There is no conceivable reading of U.S. or international law that gives it the ability to grant (i.e. to sell) El Salvador the right to detain these people indefinitely, perhaps for life, and/or to trade them to other countries. It's completely and utterly lawless.

The U.S. media--like this article--talks about this as "deportation." But that's not what this is. It didn't follow relevant settled U.S. law, but more importantly, U.S. trafficked people not to freedom outside its borders, but to indefinite lawless detention in another country.

But nowhere in this NYT article--or pretty much anywhere in mainstream news--is there any indication of on what authority El Salvador claims to be detaining these people. They are just hostages. And the article ignores that there is no lawful basis for their ongoing detention.

The initial news stories suggested it was pursuant to a contract and payment by U.S., that would simply involve paying to detain them on the same legal terms as they would be detained in federal or for-profit facilities in the U.S. But this bizarre development gives up that game.

Incredibly, the NYT uses the situation--in which the U.S. has trafficked people to a foreign torture chamber where they are being confined completely outside any conceivable law--as an opportunity to take jabs at the government of Venezuela using right-wing talking points.

This is all the more remarkable because U.S. government is actively attempting to do this to more people and openly musing about trafficking its own citizens for money in the future, to a place where they can be detained pursuant to no recognized legal principles or sold/traded.

As I discuss in my Copaganda book (just published, all royalties donated to charity), one of the key tactics of modern propaganda is how stories are framed, and what information is included vs. what is left out.

The decision to exclude from the article any discussion of the defiance of court orders, presidential taunting, or the lack of any offered (or conceivable) legal justification changes the nature of the story and prevents people from appreciating just how consequential this is.

Instead it is a story about the authoritarian government in Venezuela and a maverick El Salvadoran leader and his feud with Venezuelan officials.

This failure is how dangerous people like Gavin Newsom can claim, last week, that this whole story is a "distraction" when it is one of the most significant constitutional moments in U.S. history.

What does it say that it is impossible to learn from a news article in *The New York Times* the supposed legal basis of the governments of U.S. or El Salvador in carrying out one of the most consequential actions in modern history.

Do you understand how wild it is that the NYT just proceeds as if El Salvador has the ability to do this, that the U.S. is helpless to stop it? And that the law is irrelevant--so irrelevant as to not merit a single mention, source, or quote?

There's no attempt to give people the tools to understand how much of a departure from law. Just a misleading/false suggestion that U.S. made an agreement about "convicted criminals" with El Salvador, with vague suggestion that "many of them" weren't criminals.

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is to understand the subtleties of how the news framing of this stuff affects what we think and the level of urgency with which we treat stuff like this. I talk about it with lots of (sometimes funny) examples:

https://x.com/equalityAlec/status/1895487737324826710