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The Department of Justice has come up with yet another African nation with a dismal human rights record to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man wrongfully deported to El Salvador.
In a brief filing Friday, prosecutors described Liberia as a “a thriving democracy and one of the United States’s closest partners on the African continent,” arguing that the country’s constitution “provides robust protections for human rights.”
The government claimed that because Abrego Garcia had not included Liberia on a list of 20 countries to which he feared deportation, he was free to be removed there.
But the U.S. State Department had a vastly different description of the African nation just last year, reporting “significant” human rights issues, including “arbitrary or unlawful killings” and “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”
This is the latest effort by the Trump administration to ship off Abrego Garcia to an African nation.
In August, immigration officials initially offered Abrego Garcia a plea deal: if he admitted he was guilty of charges related to human smuggling, he could be removed to Costa Rica. When he rejected the offer, the Trump administration threatened to deport him to Uganda, Eswatini, or Ghana. But U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland forbade his immediate removal and said that federal law may require him to be removed to a country of his choice. In any case, all three countries refused to take him.
Earlier this month, independent journalist Adam Klasfield reported that Xinis ordered the government to provide testimony on efforts to remove Garcia to Costa Rica, which he had ultimately selected as the country of his choice—but the government’s witness didn’t know anything.
“You come today with a witness that knows nothing about Costa Rica,” Xinis said, referring to Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign.
Ensign claimed that Abrego Garcia had told an immigration judge he was afraid to be deported to Costa Rica, but Xinis found that the exact opposite was true.
“That’s very troubling to me,” Xinis told Ensign.
Costa Rican officials had put in writing that they had no intention to remove Abrego Garcia back to El Salvador once he was in their custody. Klasfield noted on X Friday that the government’s latest filing included no assurances that Abrego Garcia would not be removed from Liberia back to CECOT, the notorious megaprison in El Salvador where he was initially sent.
Even the president’s biggest supporters can’t get behind his most recent pardon.
Earlier this week, Donald Trump wiped the criminal record of crypto billionaire and Binance exchange founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who was sentenced to four months in prison last year on charges related to money laundering. Trump claimed that the Chinese-born Canadian founder was a victim of political prosecution by the Biden administration.
But the news was not well received in MAGA world. One of Trump’s wealthiest supporters, Texas-based venture capitalist and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, wrote on X that the pardons suggested “massive fraud.”
“I love President Trump; this is possibly the greatest admin of my lifetime—except for these pardons,” Lonsdale posted Thursday. “If I’m calling balls and strikes, these are hit-by-pitches!! POTUS has been terribly advised on this; it makes it look like massive fraud is happening around him in this area.”
In separate posts, Lonsdale explained that his comment was an attempt to “influence future policy in a positive direction,” and that he also disagreed with Trump’s decision to pardon another white-collar criminal, Nikola CEO Trevor Milton.
Zhao and Trump’s family are financially tied. The presidential family’s main crypto company, World Liberty Financial, has generated some $4.5 billion since the 2024 election, thanks in large part to a partnership with PancakeSwap, an online exchange platform administered by Zhao’s Binance, The Wall Street Journal reported in August.
But either Trump must think Americans are terrifically stupid to not see the connection, or he’s suffering from serious mental lapses. During a press conference on Thursday, the president played dumb about Zhao, claiming he couldn’t recall the name of the person he had pardoned the day before.
“I don’t know, he was recommended by a lot of people, a lot of people say—are you talking about the crypto person?” Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. “A lot of people say he wasn’t guilty of anything.… You don’t know much about crypto. You know nothing about nothing. You’re fake news.
“I don’t know him, I don’t believe I ever met him, but I’ve been told—a lot of support, he had a lot of support,” Trump said.
While President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to gut essential nutrition assistance for Americans, the Department of Homeland Security has managed to scrounge up a whopping $10 billion to build immigration detention facilities—and they’re using the U.S. Navy to do it.
CNN reported Friday that the DHS had launched a new contracting program with the Department of Defense that would make use of the Navy’s Supply Systems Command for construction and maintenance.
Multiple sources familiar with the program told CNN that the new internment camps would likely be soft-sided tent facilities, similar to the recently revived Alligator Alcatraz, where detainees said they were treated worse than animals, and hundreds of people are still considered missing.
One source said that the new facilities would be built to house as many as 10,000 detainees each. For comparison, Camp East Montana, the country’s largest immigration detention camp recently built on Fort Bliss, has a capacity of 5,000 beds. Within the first 50 days of its operation, the sprawling camp had already racked up 60 federal code violations, according to a September inspection.
The process of organizing contractors to build the apparatus for the Trump administration’s........© New Republic





















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