COMMENTARY If the Trump administration wants federal judges to buy its deportation crusade, maybe it shouldn't admit every country it wants to deport migrants back to is a human rights hell hole.
If the Trump administration wants to know why it keeps getting blocked in the federal courts on immigration policy, maybe it should listen a little more closely to its foreign policy.
Its declarations on the latter are blatantly contradicting its efforts on the former — and the past week has only made that disconnect more glaring, especially when we’re talking about booting migrants back into the hell-hole situations of countries like Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela.
Venezuela is the most cinematic showcase at the moment — because a western-hemisphere version of Argo, the Oscar-winning Ben Affleck thriller about the 1980 rescue of American diplomats from Iran, seems to have just played out there.
On Tuesday night, Secretary of State Marco Rubio lit up X with his announcement that a “precise operation” had yielded “the successful rescue of all hostages held by [Venezuela’s] Maduro regime at the Argentinian Embassy in Caracas.”
Rubio wrote that all five of those Venezuelan opposition leaders, who’d taken asylum refuge in the embassy to escape arrest by Venezuela's dictatorship, are “now safely on U.S. soil.”
READ MORE: Deport everyone! Deport no one! As usual we're stuck between America's immigration extremes
That’s certainly something to cheer, considering those Venezuelans had been holed up in the Argentine mission for more than 400 days.
Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro had bogusly accused them of “sedition” simply because they’d been running an opposition presidential campaign that ended up defeating him by a landslide last summer — before he stole the election and brutalized anyone who protested.
We don’t know much yet about the rescue operation Rubio hailed, or what part the U.S. actually played in it. But we do know what Rubio and the Trump administration think of conditions in Venezuela. Starting with Rubio’s Tuesday night X post, which in part said:
“Maduro's illegitimate regime has undermined Venezuela's institutions, violated human rights, and endangered our regional security.”
That second part — “violated human rights” — is especially true, according to recent reports like Human Rights Watch’s scathing review of the Maduro regime’s murder, torture and imprisonment of dissidents.
Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela, in other words — no, in the Trump administration’s words — are not places you condemn people to return to lightly.
Venezuela, in other words — that is, in the Trump administration’s words — is not a place you condemn people to return to lightly.
And yet, the Trump administration, with Rubio’s backing, is working overtime to strip hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants of benefits like Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, and humanitarian parole that shield them from deportation.
It wants to make them all deportable to Venezuela, even though Venezuela is a hemispheric Iran.
Trump hopes to haul every last one of them back to a human rights moonscape where Argo-style operations have to be mounted to rescue people from the clutches of a criminal regime that last year held 2,000 political prisoners behind bars, the most in all of Latin America.
Gang governance
That, by the way, is almost twice as many jailed in communist Cuba — which the Trump administration sees as another ripe destination for mass deportation.
It’s hard to square that impulse, though, with what we heard this week from Republican Miami Congressman, ardent Trump supporter and Cuban exile Carlos Gimenez.
At a House subcommittee hearing on China’s burgeoning military intelligence in Cuba, Gimenez said the island’s dystopian dictatorship “is experiencing one of its worst economic moments in over six decades. They cannot feed their people or maintain the country’s basic infrastructure.”
Cuba is, Gimenez declared, a “failed regime."
No matter. Trump's yearning to return hundreds of thousands of Cuban migrants back across the Florida Straits — back to a nation where Gimenez now recklessly insists the U.S should sever all travel and commercial contact, including the cash remittances so many families in Cuba depend on for survival.
TPS and humanitarian parole for Haitians are also in Trump’s anti-immigration crosshairs — meaning his administration thinks it’s also OK to send those migrants back to Haiti.
But wait: the Trump administration a few days ago declared the violent criminal gang confederations that are now Haiti’s de facto rulers to be “Specially Designated Global Terrorists.”
Trump is effectively acknowledging that the hundreds of thousands of potential Haitian deportees he’s targeting would be tossed back to Mad Max terrorist governance. To life under gangbangers responsible for 5,600 murders last year and the displacement of a million people.
Who, then, can blame a federal judge for siding with the migrants over MAGA?
