Fox News propagandists are employing a variety of defenses in response to revelations that the Trump administration has sent people in error to a notorious foreign prison, from alleging that migrants don’t deserve due process to attacking other news outlets for reporting on the “one-offs” to arguing that such mistakes are acceptable because “a lot of people in this country” are “arrested for things that they didn’t do."
The Trump administration last month sent more than 260 largely Venezuelan immigrants whom it alleges are members of Tren de Aragua and other gangs for imprisonment in El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center. The administration is acting in part through the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which allows wartime deportation without a hearing, after President Donald Trump issued a proclamation declaring Tren de Aragua an invading force.
There would be any number of moral and legal problems with transferring individuals from U.S. custody to a foreign prison notorious for abuse, in potential violation of a judge’s order, and under the questionable justification of a rarely used 200-plus-year-old statute that has previously been invoked only during a war declared by Congress — even if those individuals had all been convicted of serious crimes in U.S. courts.
But adding to the dystopian nature of the Trump administration’s policy is that family members and lawyers for several of the people deported to the foreign hell-prison without due process say they have no criminal history or links to any gang — and the administration’s lawyers have claimed in court that they are unable to recover an immigrant who was in the U.S. legally and was, by their own admission, sent to the prison due to “administrative error."
If the Trump administration can do this to a legal resident, it can, through malice or incompetence, do it to anyone.
But to watch Fox in the Trump era is not to wonder whether its personalities will defend the latest atrocities from the administration — it's merely an exercise in finding out how they will do it.