Theatrical release poster for John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness.

“You can be sincere and still be stupid.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

Back in April, Jesús Escalona Mújicas was on his way to his job at a construction site when he was pulled over by federal immigration officers and Texas police in a joint raid near Bryant, Texas. Escalona Mújicas, a 48-year-old native of Venezuela, was pressed against his car as his hands were bent behind his back and cuffed. He was taken to a neaby gas station where he was interrogated. He was then arrested and thrown in the immigration detention jail (aka, “Processing Center”) in Conroe, Texas. The officers who arrested him claimed to have a deportation order for Escalona Mújicas based on the Alien Enemies Act, which Trump had recently invoked to speed up deportations of alleged gang members from central and south America. An agent told him: “the President does not want to see Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, or Venezuelans here.” Escalona Mújicas protested that he wasn’t a gang member and had a temporary work visa. But his denials were smugly dismissed by the arresting agents.

Soon after his arrest, ICE sent out a press release including a photo of Escalona Mújicas in handcuffs, wearing a John Deere sweatshirt with the caption: “documented Tren de Aragua gang member.” But the arrest report didn’t even get Escalona Mújicas’s nationality right, claiming that he was “an alien of El Salvadorian origin without legal status in the United States.” So it’s no surprise that they falsely arrested and then publicly smeared him as a “Tren de Aragua gang member,” even though his name was not listed in the admittedly problematic (for false positives) TxGANG database. What was the evidence the Trump administration used to as proof of Escalona Mújicas’s gang affliation? His Air Jordans.

In fact, Escalona Mújicas had no criminal history and had never heard of the Tren de Aragua gang until he got to the United States. When he lived in Venezuela, he worked as a forklift operator at Empresas Polar, the Venezuealan subsidary of Pepsi. Escalona Mújicas was deported back to Venezuela in May, but the Trump administration hasn’t rescinded its false accusation that he is a gang member, a slander that may well keep him from immigrating to any other country.

ICE photo of Jesús Escalona Mújicas, which falsely referred to him as a “documented member of Tren de Aragua gang.

Last week, Angel Minguela Palacios, a strawberry delivery driver with no criminal record, was on his last stop of the day when he pulled up at the Japanese-American Museum where Gavin Newsom was speaking to drop off fruit to a tea room, when he was arrested by Border Patrol agents, who had surrounded the building as a show of force against the governor.........

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