IN THIS WEEKEND’S international edition of the New York Times, my former Baltimore Sun colleague, Luke Broadwater, makes the case that Nazis got better treatment decades ago under the Alien Enemies Act than deportees labeled as “gang members” are getting now under the Trump administration.
It’s not the only Nazi link to Donald Trump’s actions involving gangs.
There is a cultural site not far from my home in Berlin that attests to a story that is as predictable as it is emotionally draining.
While Adolph Hitler was looking for a way to test the waters for his genocidal plans, the Topography of Terror museum explains on a placard, he chose an easy target: Alleged gang members.
Using what he called Bandenbekämpfung – anti-gang measures – Hitler systematically checked to see if anyone would pay attention to his mass deportations. Finding little resistance, he moved on to larger groups of people. We know how the rest turned out.
I would love to be able to say that, thanks to the miracles of modern technology, we have a better system now for seeing who is and isn’t in a gang, in a way that would completely obviate due-process concerns surrounding Trump’s mass deportations of “gang members.”
Nothing, unfortunately, could be farther from the truth.
As I wrote for South Charlotte Weekly a few years ago, many policing organizations that use social media monitoring tools have been slow to release the policies governing their use, which the Brennan Center for Justice says increases "the danger of misuse and abuse."
Teenagers and tweens, for example, have been placed on lists of potential gang members, based solely on posturing they've done on Elon Musk’s X platform, sometimes leading to arrests and extended jailings of young people based on flimsy evidence. Those incidents can interrupt schooling, and the supposed evidence often doesn't hold up in court, according to anti-carceral publication The Appeal.
My Charlotte newspaper story was mainly focused on the relationship between police in North Carolina and Dataminr, a company that plays a key role in “helping” some police departments to determine who is and isn’t a gang member online. An October 2020 investigation by The Intercept reported that in many cases, Dataminr sent out police-bound alerts that were "nothing more than garden-variety racial profiling, powered not primarily by artificial intelligence but by a small army of human analysts conducting endless keyword searches."
To make it onto a list of likely gang members, in other words, you don’t have to be convicted of anything. Just type the wrong word or flash the wrong hand symbol online as a way to impress your friends at age 12, and … POOF! Gang member. Forever.
As Broadwater hints in his Times piece, which is worth reading in its entirety, the lack of due process now being used to deport “gang members” en masse to a gulag in El Salvador is not unintentional. It is part of the plan, and it will get worse, unless direct action is taken very soon.
This is where it gets ugly. We’re going to need judges to start actually using the U.S. Marshals Service to enforce their court orders against administration officials. That’s not unheard of, as the Marshals pledged loyalty to the constitution – a document whose mandates are now being blatantly violated – but it’s going to be a big step to take.
There is currently a court order that directs the Trump administration to negotiate the return of Maryland resident Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. The White House claims he was deported to El Salvador by accident. Top officials in the administration have repeatedly shown that they intend to ignore the order. It’s beyond time for them to see on a more direct level what detention feels like.
It is already possible to visit a museum in Berlin singing a tragic ballad of mass deportations and killings. If the people who still care about judicial checks and balances do the toughest part of their jobs, we may yet avoid having to someday build one in San Diego, Miami or San Antonio.
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Highlighted links:
Selected additional links from this piece:
A video on the topic from Last Week Tonight, released a week after my post:
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The image of the El Salvadorean CECOT prison at the top of this essay is from Casa Presidencial , El Salvador, and is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Sourced via Wikipedia.
