TECOLUCA, El Salvador: US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday visited the high-security El Salvador prison where Venezuelans who the Trump administration alleges are gang members have been held since their removal from the United States. The tour included two crowded cell blocks, the armory and an isolation unit.
Noem’s trip to the prison — where inmates are packed into cells and never allowed outside — comes as the Trump administration seeks to show it is deporting people it describes as the “worst of the worst.”
The Trump administration is arguing in federal court that it was justified in sending the Venezuelans to El Salvador, while activists say officials have sent them to a prison rife with human rights abuses while presenting little evidence that they were part of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang.
Noem notably dodged questions by the press about if the Venezuelan deportees were going to be in the prison indefinitely and if the Venezuelans could ever be brought back to the US if a court orders the administration to do so.
“We’re going to let the courts play out,” she told reporters following the visit.
Noem toured an area holding some of the Venezuelans accused of being gang members. In the sweltering building, the men in white T-shirts and shorts stared silently from their cell, then were heard shouting an indiscernible chant when she left.
In a cell block holding Salvadoran prisoners, about a dozen were lined up by guards near the front of their cell and told to remove their T-shirts and face masks. The men were heavily tattooed, some bearing the letters MS, for the Mara Salvatrucha gang, on their chests.
After listening to Salvadoran officials, Noem turned her back to the cell and recorded a video message.
If an immigrant commits a crime, “this is one of the consequences you could face,” Noem said. “First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”
Noem also met with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, a populist who has gained right-wing admiration in the US due to his crackdown on the country’s gangs, despite the democratic and due process implications that have come with it.
“This unprecedented relationship we have with El Salvador is going to be a model for other countries on how they can work with America,” Noem said to reporters Wednesday.
Since taking office, Noem has frequently been front and center in efforts to highlight the immigration crackdown. She took part in immigration enforcement operations, rode horses with Border Patrol agents and was the face of a television campaign warning people in the country illegally to self-deport.
Noem’s Wednesday visit is part of a three-day trip. She’ll also travel to Colombia and Mexico.
The Venezuelans were removed from the US this month after Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and said the US was being invaded by the Tren de Aragua gang. The Alien Enemies Act gives the president wartime powers and allows noncitizens to be deported without the opportunity to go before an immigration or federal court judge.
An appeals court Wednesday kept in place an order barring the administration from deporting more Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act.
A central outstanding question about the deportees’ status is when and how they could ever be released from the prison, called the Terrorism Confinement Center, as they are not serving sentences. They no longer appear in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s online detainee locator and have not appeared before a judge in El Salvador.
The Trump administration refers to them as the “worst of the worst” but hasn’t identified who was deported or provided evidence that they’re gang members.
Relatives of some of the deportees have categorically denied any gang affiliation. The Venezuelan government and a group called the Families of Immigrants Committee in Venezuela hired a lawyer to help free those held in El Salvador. A lawyer for the firm, which currently represents about 30 Venezuelans, said they aren’t gang members and have no criminal records.
The US government has acknowledged that many do not have such records.
Flights were in the air March 15 when a federal judge issued a verbal order temporarily barring the deportations and ordered planes to return to the US
The Trump administration has argued that the judge’s verbal directions did not count, that only his written order needed to be followed and that it couldn’t apply to flights that had already left the US
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that about 261 people were deported on the flights, including 137 under the Alien Enemies Act.
Bukele opened the prison in 2023 as he made the Central American country’s stark, harsh prisons a trademark of his fight against crime. The facility has eight sprawling pavilions and can hold up to 40,000 inmates. Each cell can fit 65 to 70 prisoners.
Prisoners can’t have visitors. There are no workshops or educational programs.
El Salvador hasn’t had diplomatic relations with Venezuela since 2019, so the Venezuelans imprisoned there do not have consular support from their government.
Video released by El Salvador’s government after the deportees’ arrival showed men exiting airplanes onto an airport tarmac lined by officers in riot gear. The men, who had their hands and ankles shackled, struggled to walk as officers pushed their heads down.
They were later shown at the prison kneeling on the ground as their heads were shaved before they changed into the prison’s all-white uniform — knee-length shorts, T-shirt, socks and rubber clogs — and placed in cells.
For three years, El Salvador has been operating under a state of emergency that suspends fundamental rights as Bukele wages an all-out assault on the country’s powerful street gangs. During that time, some 84,000 people have been arrested, accused of gang ties and jailed, often without due process.
Bukele offered to hold US deportees in the prison when US Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited in February.
At the prison Wednesday, El Salvador Justice Minister Gustavo Villatoro showed Noem a cell holding Salvadorans he said had been there since the prison opened. “No one expects that these people can go back to society and behave,” he said.
Homeland Security Secretary Noem visits El Salvador prison where deported Venezuelans are held
https://arab.news/nwk3q
Homeland Security Secretary Noem visits El Salvador prison where deported Venezuelans are held
- About a dozen prisoners were lined up by guards near the front of their cell and told to remove their T-shirts and face masks
- Kristi Noem: ‘Know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people’
Serbia expels Croatian doctor married to Serb over security threat
She said a police officer called and said there was a problem with her residence.
"When I went to the police station I was given a piece of paper that said I was an unacceptable threat to the security of Serbia and its citizens. I was given one week to leave," she said.
"How can you pack up a life in a week?"
Stojanovic Ivkovic is one of about 20 Croatian citizens who have been ordered to leave Serbia in the past three months, according to Croatian embassy data. Dozens of others have been refused entry at the border. Relations between Croatia and Serbia, which fought a bitter war in the 1990s, have been strained in recent months after a wave of anti-corruption protests, which Serbian pro-government media have accused Croatia's security service of backing. Stojanovic Ivkovic said the only thing she can think of that may account for her being identified as a security threat after 12 years of living in Serbia was her support for the student-led protests, which included attending several rallies.
"However, we do not know if this is the real reason," she said. "We as a family we do not deserve this."
She has filed a complaint and hopes she will be allowed to stay with her family.
Serbia's Interior Ministry did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
"We are extremely worried that in three days last week we had five cases of expulsion (of Croatian citizens)," Hidajet Biscevic, the Croatian ambassador to Serbia, said.
UK Supreme Court rules that equalities law defines a woman as someone born biologically female
- Britain’s highest court scheduled to rule whether a transgender person with a certificate that recognizes them as female can be regarded as a woman under equality laws
LONDON: The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the UK equalities law defines a woman as someone born biologically female.
Justice Patrick Hodge said five judges at the court had ruled unanimously that “the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refer to a biological woman.”
The ruling means that a transgender person with a certificate that recognizes them as female should not be considered a woman for equality purposes.
The case stems from a 2018 law passed by the Scottish Parliament stating that there should be a 50 percent female representation on the boards of Scottish public bodies. That law included transgender women in its definition of women.
The women’s rights group successfully challenged that law, arguing that its redefinition of “woman” went beyond parliament’s powers.
Scottish officials then issued guidance stating that the definition of “woman” included a transgender woman with a gender recognition certificate.
FWS sought to overturn that.
“Not tying the definition of sex to its ordinary meaning means that public boards could conceivably comprise of 50 percent men, and 50 percent men with certificates, yet still lawfully meet the targets for female representation,” the group’s director Trina Budge said.
The challenge was rejected by a court in 2022, but the group was granted permission last year to take its case to the Supreme Court.
What are the arguments?
Aidan O’Neill, a lawyer for FWS, told the Supreme Court judges – three men and two women – that under the Equality Act “sex” should refer to biological sex and as understood “in ordinary, everyday language.”
“Our position is your sex, whether you are a man or a woman or a girl or a boy is determined from conception in utero, even before one’s birth, by one’s body,” he said on Tuesday. “It is an expression of one’s bodily reality. It is an immutable biological state.”
The women’s rights group counts among its supporters author J.K. Rowling, who reportedly donated tens of thousands of pounds to back its work. The “Harry Potter” writer has been vocal in arguing that the rights for trans women should not come at the expense of those who are born biologically female.
Opponents, including Amnesty International, said excluding transgender people from sex discrimination protections conflicts with human rights.
Amnesty submitted a brief in court saying it was concerned about the deterioration of the rights for trans people in the UK and abroad.
“A blanket policy of barring trans women from single-sex services is not a proportionate means to achieve a legitimate aim,” the human rights group said.
Bangladesh restores ‘except Israel’ clause in passports after public pressure
- Bangladesh’s previous government dropped the wording in 2021 without public notice
- Immigration says it may take several weeks to finalize procedures to print it again
DHAKA: Bangladesh is reinstating the “except Israel” clause in its passports, the Department of Immigration said on Tuesday, after public pressure to reverse its removal by the previous government.
Bangladeshi passports carried the sentence: “This passport is valid for all countries of the world except Israel” until 2021, when authorities rolled out a new travel document, the phrase was removed without any public notice.
While authorities justified it by saying it was meant to “maintain international standard,” many people in the country — which has no diplomatic relations with Israel — questioned the move.
The new interim government, which took charge of Bangladesh in August after the ouster of its long-standing prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, has decided to undo her cabinet’s decision.
“We’ve received the government’s directive to reinstate the ‘except Israel’ clause in Bangladeshi passports. We are currently working to implement it,” Brig. Gen. Mohammad Nurus Salam, passports director at the Department of Immigration, told Arab News.
“For many years, our passports carried the ‘except Israel’ clause. But the previous government suddenly removed it. We were used to seeing ‘except Israel’ written in our passports. I don’t know why they took it out. If you talk to people across the country, you’ll see they want that line back in their passports. There was no need to remove it.”
Pressure to reinstate the clause has been mounting since the beginning of Israel’s ongoing deadly onslaught on Gaza which began in October 2023.
Over 51,000 people have been killed, 116,000 wounded, and 2 million others face starvation after Israeli forces destroyed most of the region’s infrastructure and buildings, while blocking humanitarian aid from entering.
A clear ban on travel to Israel in Bangladeshi passports was one of the key demands raised during a series of Gaza solidarity protests, which have been held regularly in Dhaka since last month, after Israeli forces unilaterally broke a ceasefire agreement and resumed bombing hospitals, schools and tents sheltering displaced people.
The biggest such protest took place in Dhaka on Saturday, with about 1 million people taking to the streets to call on the international community to “take effective and collective action to end the genocide,” and especially on Muslim countries to immediately sever all economic, military, and diplomatic relations with Israel and to “impose commercial blockades and sanctions on the Zionist state” and begin active diplomatic efforts to isolate it on the international stage.
“People will definitely welcome this new decision. It reflects the feelings of the people of this country,” Salam said, but he was not able to specify when the new passports will be available.
“There are some technical challenges involved with this change. Currently, we import e-passports from Germany under a government-to-government agreement ... It may take another week to finalize the necessary procedures. In the meantime, we are exploring whether there’s any option to modify the existing stock of printed booklets.”
China ‘not afraid to fight’ trade war with US – foreign ministry
- Foreign ministry spokesman: US should stop exerting extreme pressure, stop threatening and blackmailing, and talk to China on the basis of equality, respect and mutual benefit
BEIJING: China warned Wednesday it was “not afraid” to fight a trade war with the United States and reiterated calls for dialogue, after US President Donald Trump said it was up to Beijing to come to the negotiating table.
“If the US really wants to resolve the issue through dialogue and negotiation, it should stop exerting extreme pressure, stop threatening and blackmailing, and talk to China on the basis of equality, respect and mutual benefit,” foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said.
Britain’s audit watchdog probes EY over Post Office scandal
- Hundreds of self-employed workers at the state-owned Post Office were wrongly prosecuted or convicted between 1999 and 2015 for false accounting, theft and fraud, because of glitches in a software
LONDON: Britain’s Financial Reporting Council has opened an investigation into EY over its audit of Post Office Limited, it said on Wednesday, amid the lingering fallout from one of the country’s worst miscarriages of justice.
The FRC said in a statement it will focus on the audit firm’s role in approving the Post Office’s financial statements from 2015 to 2018, particularly the Horizon IT system which was at the heart of the scandal.
“We have been notified of the FRC’s intention to open an investigation into the EY audits of Post Office Limited for the financial years ending March 2015 – March 2018,” a spokesperson for EY said. “We take our public interest responsibilities extremely seriously and will be fully cooperating with the FRC during their investigation,” the spokesperson said.
Hundreds of self-employed workers at the state-owned Post Office were wrongly prosecuted or convicted between 1999 and 2015 for false accounting, theft and fraud, because of glitches in a software system that incorrectly showed money missing from accounts.
Some were jailed, lost their marriages or otherwise saw their lives destroyed while others died before their names could be cleared.
Spurred into action last year by public outcry following a television series that dramatized the scandal, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak sought to quash the wrongful convictions while a police investigation and public inquiry have also been carried out.
