Hear the death threats Republican senator received about Trump
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., his staff and family have been the target of harassment and death threats, according to a memo released by his office on Thursday afternoon.
Voicemails shared by Tillis' team, which were filled with profanity and fueled by discontent with President Donald Trump, reveal a frightening new reality. The senator's senior advisor, Daniel Keylin, said "the volume of threats and harassment directed at members of Congress and their staff is the new normal."
"Yeah, Thom Tillis, afraid of death threats? Then get the f--- out of office," one caller said in a voicemail.
Keylin said Tillis' office in Greenville, North Carolina, received a handwritten and unsigned letter postmarked in Greensboro last month calling his staff members "sacrificial lambs" and insisting they "signed up to be his shield." The anonymous writer, while reiterating "in no way is this a threat," said people are going to start "coming in filled with rage."
Meet The Far-left Groups Funding Anti-doge Protests At Gop Offices Across The Country
The voicemails released by Tillis' office express outrage over Trump's policies and include violent threats to Tillis and his staff.
Read On The Fox News App
"You are not going to destroy my country," one woman said. Another caller told Tillis he is "not one of the good guys anymore" and said to "get the f--- out of government."
South Carolina Man Faces Federal Charges For Allegedly Threatening To Assassinate Trump
"…When things get really bad, people are going to stop calling and writing. They're going to start coming in, and they're going to be coming in filled with rage… And you signed up to be his shield. Resign, please resign, or find a Groupon for self defense class because America's transition to oligarchy is going to be a wild ride for us peons," reads the anonymous letter sent to Tillis.
The anonymous writer references "America's transition to oligarchy," a term that has been used by the left to describe the alleged rising power of the billionaire class.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has drawn thousands of supporters to his "Fighting Oligarchy" rallies across the country, with stops in Michigan and Wisconsin this past weekend. The events are billed as an opportunity to "discuss how we take on the greed of the billionaire class and create a government that works for all and not just the few."
Democrats were outraged by Trump inviting billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg to sit behind him at his inauguration inside the U.S. Capitol. Former President Joe Biden also used the term "oligarchy" in his farewell address to the nation.
"Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead," Biden told Americans on Jan. 13.
Two weeks after Tillis' office received the letter, Indivisible Guilford County, a local arm of a progressive political action group, organized a protest at Tillis' Greensboro office. While the protest's press release encouraged peaceful signs and "solidarity," Keylin said the protesters attempted to break into Tillis' office.
"They angrily yanked and attempted to open the office's locked door, yelling at Tillis' staff to open it: 'Come back, we see you! Open the door!' and reminding the staff they had no way to exit their office," Keylin said in the memo.
Keylin said Tillis' office received several media inquiries questioning if Tillis would attend the protests or town halls planned in Republican-held districts. Outlining years of targeted threats that have only escalated since Trump returned to office, Keylin said, "I imagine anyone with a modicum of sanity would understand what a silly question that is."
The memo says that "out of an abundance of caution," law enforcement has directed the senator's office to work from home on the days protests are planned.
"We will not make any apologies for prioritizing the safety and security of our staff," Keylin said.
The memo outlines two more instances in which the North Carolina senator was subject to death threats.
"Senator Tillis, his staff, and even his family have long been subject to threats, harassment, attempted intimidation, and verbal abuse from unstable individuals who don't agree with his political view," Keylin said.
A U.S. citizen living abroad was arrested for threatening to kill Tillis and cut off the hands of his staffers in 2023, and a Minnesota man was indicted in 2022 for threatening to kill Tillis, the memo confirmed.
Protests have shut down town halls and disrupted local legislative offices in the past two months, and Republicans have opted for tele-town halls instead of in-person town halls as a result. Democrats have accused Republicans of ignoring their constituents' concerns by avoiding in-person town halls.
Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., will host town halls on Friday in Republican-held congressional districts in Iowa and Nebraska "to lend a megaphone to the people." Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has reportedly started planning her own rallies in Republican-held congressional districts as well.
MoveOn.org, which has accepted millions of dollars from billionaire George Soros and his Open Society Policy Center, announced in a press release last month that it was mobilizing resources as part of a "Congress Works for Us, Not Musk" initiative "aimed at pressuring lawmakers to fight back against the Trump-Musk agenda." The group planned protests at congressional-led town halls and congressional offices.Original article source: Hear the death threats Republican senator received about Trump
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time Magazine
27 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
Inside Donald Trump's Mass-Deportation Operation
Trump is testing the moral and legal extremes to which the government is willing to go 'Pay attention to the noise,' says Belarmino Garcia, the warden of El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center. He ushers a group of foreign visitors inside CECOT's Module 8, a unit unlike others at the sprawling facility situated at the base of a volcano. This one holds 238 Venezuelan nationals who were shipped from the U.S. on March 15 to be held in one of the world's most infamous prisons at the behest of President Donald J. Trump. The cacophony is overwhelming. Inmates climb out of their bunks, lean on the bars, and plead and whistle for attention. Module 8 is different from a typical CECOT unit in several ways, Garcia explains. The detainees are allowed blankets and pillows. They eat fast food. They are rambunctious and defiant. As the warden leads the visitors out, the prisoners appear on the verge of mutiny, chanting 'Libertad! Libertad!' Next, Garcia takes the visitors into Module 7. It's silent inside. The prisoners are Salvadoran nationals, some of whom have been at CECOT for years. They wear white shirts, white shorts, and face masks, and sit upright, staring blankly through the bars. Their cells contain nothing but a pila —a tub they use as a toilet—and bare steel bunks. Inmates spend all day inside, emerging only for 30 minutes of calisthenics or Bible study, according to the warden. There are no TVs or radios. The prisoners can't make or accept phone calls. They can't receive visitors, or even letters. They have spoken to no one outside the prison since their arrival. Staff remind them what El Salvador's President, Nayib Bukele, has said publicly: No one who goes into CECOT will ever come out. 'They have lost the will to fight or resist us,' Garcia says. The prospect of the U.S. sending migrants to a foreign prison notorious for alleged human-rights violations would have been unimaginable less than a year ago. But it is only one dramatic component of Trump's unprecedented deportation project. The President has revoked the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of people and expanded the power of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to round up and remove millions of others. He is authorizing ICE to direct a network of law-enforcement agencies, from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to the DEA and U.S. Park Police, to assist the effort. He has pressed the Internal Revenue Service and the Postal Service to share information to identify targets. Homeland Security Operations has developed new software technology, called RAVEn, to consolidate data about migrants. Trump has used federal powers to coerce cities and counties to cooperate with the mission and threatened to withdraw federal funding if they don't. Working with sheriffs and local police departments, ICE has raided schools, parks, and restaurants across the U.S., detaining some 82,000 people in a few short months. The work is only beginning. On June 7, Trump ordered National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell anti-ICE protests. The Department of Justice is weighing arresting and prosecuting public officials who impede their immigration agenda, according to Administration sources familiar with the matter. The White House is considering suspending habeas corpus, a protection against illegal government detention enshrined in the Constitution that grants every person the right to have a judge review their imprisonment. 'We're looking at every option,' Trump border czar Tom Homan tells TIME. In addition to sending Venezuelans to CECOT, Trump has deported asylum seekers to Panama and sent others to Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and South Sudan. Homan says the Administration is in talks with three more countries to accept U.S. deportees. It also plans to build and expand other detention centers in the U.S., he says, with the goal of doubling capacity to hold detainees awaiting deportation to 100,000. So far, the Administration has deported more than 139,000 migrants, which is behind pace to reach Trump's aggressive targets. Even so, the number in immigration detention has spiked 30%. This sweeping effort has few analogues in recent world history. Its ambition goes beyond anything attempted in the U.S. since the Eisenhower-era Operation Wetback in its aims to expel millions of people and change the makeup of the country. Removing that many undocumented immigrants, as Trump has promised, would eliminate a key source of labor. It would end a decades-long wave of migration that has made the country progressively more multiethnic. And it would change how the U.S. has treated those seeking refuge from violence and oppression since before the end of the Cold War. Trump officials say all this is overdue. The U.S. experienced a surge in migrants, including undocumented immigrants, under President Biden, who revoked some of Trump's first-term border policies. Trump officials say they intend to reverse a trend that has displaced American workers, depleted state and local governments of resources, and, they argue, undermined social cohesion. Already, Trump's deportation program is instilling fear in newcomers. 'I can't go back,' says Hilda Espinoza Telon, a refugee from Guatemalan gang violence, whose lawyer says she was recently fitted with an ankle monitor by ICE. 'Nearly my whole family has been murdered over there.' She has given her 14-year-old son instructions for what to do if she disappears from their Virginia home. A TIME investigation, based on interviews with more than 20 Trump Administration officials, exclusive access to detention facilities in the U.S. and abroad, and conversations with numerous migrants, immigration experts, and attorneys reveals how Trump is testing the moral and legal extremes to which the government is willing to go. Catholic bishops and Republican-appointed judges have joined those speaking out against his deportation project. District courts have issued injunctions. Constitutional scholars have alleged Trump's team is not only abusing presidential power but also breaking laws. 'The Administration is treating immigration not as a law-enforcement matter but is trying illegally to repurpose the tools of war and counterterrorism against migrants,' says Brian Finucane, a lawyer at the independent International Crisis Group and former State Department official. 'It's a turducken of illegality.' Trump Administration officials say they are complying with all laws they deem constitutional. Whether they are correct will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, which has halted some of Trump's actions while the Justices consider the merits. But moves to slow or reverse his agenda have only hardened the President's resolve. 'We have to do it,' Trump told TIME in late April, arguing he had been elected on a promise to crack down on illegal immigration. 'People have been let into our country that are very dangerous.' As the Administration escalates its efforts, critics are asking how we got here. Others wonder what took so long. But all Americans have a stake in understanding how Trump is trying to transform the country by deporting millions of its inhabitants—and what it will mean for their communities. When Cristian David Marin Leiva stepped inside the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in New Orleans on April 14, he thought his appointment would take only a few minutes. The agency had summoned Cristian, a boyish teenager with bright eyes and a patchy goatee, for a regular 'check-in.' He had reported for check-ins twice previously without incident—most recently in February—since he crossed the Texas border illegally in April 2021. Cristian moved to the U.S. to escape violence in Honduras, he says, settling with his father and stepmother in Slidell, La. 'Where I lived was full of gangs,' he says. 'They would make the minors join the gang or be killed.' Shortly after he crossed the border, he hired a lawyer, who asked a judge to designate Cristian a Special Immigrant–Juvenile. He had been abandoned by his mother in Honduras, his attorney says, and needed to live with his father in the U.S. The judge approved the petition and granted Cristian four years of 'deferred action from removal,' providing a reprieve from deportation at least until 2027. Now a high school junior, Cristian, 18, walked into the ICE office near the French Quarter around 7 a.m., planning to make it to school in time for his first-period biology class. He approached an officer and handed him the letter requesting a check-in. The agent glanced at the paper, furrowed his brow, and then looked back at Cristian. He pulled out a pair of handcuffs. 'Follow me,' he said. Cristian was led into a small holding cell with dozens of detainees and stripped of his possessions. 'They just called me over and put these on me and kept me here,' he told TIME, shackled at his wrists and ankles. Agents told him he could make a phone call after he was transferred to a processing center in Central Louisiana. There he could choose either to voluntarily board a flight to Honduras or face a judge. Nobody informed Cristian's family what was happening. Rubin Marin, Cristian's father, was oblivious when TIME reached him by phone later that afternoon. He thought his son was in school. Summoning migrants for unexpected detention is one in a range of tactics the Trump Administration has adopted. The message sent is clear: Migrants who entered the country illegally are not only unwelcome but also at risk of sudden removal or imprisonment wherever they are and whether they've followed the law since arriving or not. 'It's just getting them the hell out of here,' Homan says. To understand how the deportation dragnet works, TIME joined ICE officers on a pair of morning raids in the New Orleans area. Inside a truck, ICE officers reviewed files on their targets, including biometric data, arrest and conviction records, work histories, and frequent whereabouts. 'We surveil them for a period of time to identify patterns of behavior,' says Mellissa Harper, director of the New Orleans field office. 'Once we know that they are at a certain location at a certain period of time regularly, we plan out an enforcement operation.' The raids TIME witnessed didn't lead to arrests. In one case, the person had left the state overnight. In another, they simply weren't home. But the target list has multiplied. When he took office, Trump revoked the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of migrants and rescinded memos that limited ICE arrests during raids. Before that, 'if we conduct a targeted enforcement operation for one guy and we show up to his house and there are four other -illegals there, we could only arrest the one guy,' explains Scott Ladwig, Harper's deputy. 'Now we grab them all.' Local police have lined up in support, transferring migrants they arrest on other alleged crimes or even traffic violations. After the fruitless predawn raids on April 14, the ICE officers returned to the New Orleans field office to find 12 migrants transported from the Kenner, La., police department. The detainees walked in a single-file line, wearing handcuffs and leg restraints. When they reached the offices, ICE agents interviewed them using a Spanish translation app on their government phones. One of the detainees, Fernando Milla, 28, had been arrested on suspicion of drunk driving. The officer who ran his license, Milla says, saw he had overstayed a student visa. After two nights in the county jail, police transferred Milla, a Honduran national, to ICE custody. Sitting inside a holding cell, Milla was resigned to his fate. 'I'm not going to hire a lawyer or anything,' he tells TIME. 'I'm going back.' As the migrants in Milla's group were being questioned by the ICE agents processing their paperwork, Cristian emerged from the holding cell. He spent 16 minutes answering questions from an officer. Then he was left waiting again, hoping he ends up back with his father and not on a flight to Honduras. The detention of migrants like Cristian is the first link in Trump's new deportation chain. It's the product of years of planning. Trump left office in January 2021 determined to make immigration a centerpiece of his political comeback. Top aides found refuge at friendly think tanks to plot the next steps. Homan, who was acting ICE director in Trump's first term, took residency at the America First Policy Institute and the Heritage Foundation, where he contributed to the latter organization's manifesto for a second term, titled Project 2025. Russell Vought, the Office of Management and Budget director, founded the Center for Renewing America, where he studied Trump's rally speeches and devised plans to turn promises into policy. Longtime adviser Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump's first-term immigration crackdown that included separating families, founded America First Legal to sue the Biden Administration, and explored legal mechanisms for Trump's deportation goals. Together they sketched the contours of a new, even more aggressive immigration agenda. It would concentrate power in the Oval Office and use federal powers to pressure state and local jurisdictions, withholding funds for sanctuary cities and forcing agencies with access to sensitive data to assist in the deportation effort. Vought and others suggested pulling federal funding from state and local police departments that refused to cooperate. Miller proposed declaring a national emergency to invoke extraordinary powers to round up and remove migrants. Homan wanted to restructure ICE, reassigning employees with desk jobs to conduct field operations and ramping up the agency's capacity to identify and arrest people. They looked for ways to move fast, and studied the law to devise the methods and legal defenses for their most boundary-pushing measures, according to several current Administration officials. Working with Miller at America First Legal was Gene Hamilton, the principal author of Trump's controversial family-separation policy, according to a January 2021 Justice Department inspector general report. All four men now work out of the White House. 'The President and the entire Administration are certainly open to all legal and constitutional remedies to ensure we can continue with the promise of deporting illegal criminals,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. Just how 'legal and constitutional' the White House actions are is a matter of dispute. Normally, Executive Orders are vetted by experts at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, in order to ensure the President is following the law. Trump has reportedly curtailed that front-end review, leaving government lawyers to defend controversial claims of powers granted to the President only in extreme circumstances, like wartime. Asked to illustrate how this approach to following the law differs from the norm, one litigator who left the Justice Department in February tells TIME, 'Draw a horse and put a cart in front of it.' Even those willing to advocate for the broadest presidential powers in pursuit of deportations have found themselves out of a job. Erez Reuveni, a veteran federal litigator who had defended in court Trump's 2017 ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, was fired after Reuveni told a court the Administration had mistakenly sent a Salvadoran man named Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT because of a clerical error. The Department also placed on leave Reuveni's supervisor, August Flentje, who had defended Trump's family-separation policy in court in 2018. Traditionally, Justice Department lawyers have been required to keep their distance from the White House to avoid the appearance of politicization. Attorney General Pam Bondi, by contrast, has emphasized 'zealous' advocacy of Trump's agenda. 'Any attorney who fails to abide by this direction will face consequences,' Bondi said the day after Reuveni's court appearance. Eight hours after his arrest, Cristian was sent to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, La., about four hours from New Orleans, on the edge of a forest of loblolly and longleaf pines. The facility, which holds nearly 1,200 inmates, is run by the private corrections company GEO Group, a Trump donor for which Homan worked as a paid consultant. Most days, the prison is quiet, though on occasion hundreds of protesters show up to demand the release of its most famous inmate, Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student whom the Trump Administration arrested without a warrant in March for his role in the campus' pro-Palestinian protests, and has accused, without supplying evidence, of 'activities aligned to Hamas.' When TIME visited the Jena facility on May 29, nine landscapers in lime green shirts sat in the intake room on long benches, waiting their turn to be formally admitted. Their shirts read Twin Shores Landscape & Construction Services. Two days earlier, they had been starting a project on the Mirabeau Water Garden construction site in New Orleans, part of a $30 million federally funded drainage project to reduce flooding in the area. At 7 a.m., ICE officers surrounded the site, blocking the exits to the park, as a government helicopter hovered overhead. Donald Tercero, 36, was among those arrested. Tercero, who is Nicaraguan, had worked on farms and as a teacher before arriving in the U.S. in 2022. He presented himself to the Border Patrol at McAllen, Texas, seeking humanitarian parole under a program the Biden Administration had started that year. He's not planning to fight his deportation. 'I want to go back,' Tercero says. Manuel Carillo, a 29-year-old from Guatemala, was also among the construction crew arrested in the New Orleans ICE raid. 'Not everyone wants to do the work we are doing,' he says. 'Unfortunately, Donald Trump doesn't want us to stay.' Jimmy Bingham, the warden at Jena, says fewer detained migrants are resisting deportation these days. 'They don't feel like it's worth their time to fight,' Bingham says. Upon admission, inmates are given colored uniforms—red and yellow garb for the most serious felonies, green and orange for lesser offenses, blue for those with no conviction. They are separated according to these classifications and housed in dorms that hold 80 people apiece, with showers, phones, televisions, and a gaming system. They get two hours for recreation in the morning and another two hours in the afternoon, says the prison administrator. When TIME enters one of the dorms, a group of inmates rushes over, asking to tell their stories. Some had been there a few days, others a few weeks, and some even a few months as they waited to have their cases heard. The lucky ones are granted bond and can return home until a judge is ready to determine their fate. Jena is one of around 200 ICE detention facilities across the U.S., but agency officials like to send prisoners there for a few reasons. It's cheaper to detain migrants in Louisiana than in other parts of the country, and the state has a conservative federal Circuit Court that's more likely than some others to rule in the government's favor when it seeks a removal. Jena is also located near the Alexandria Staging Facility, a small airport managed by GEO. On average, the Alexandria facility flies six planes a day to other countries, says Ragan Lewis, an ICE officer who runs the airport. Some days see as many as 12 outgoing flights. As a plane loaded up with prisoners, Lewis waved his hand toward a stretch of grass next to the airfield. If there were money to expand the holding cells, he says, he could fit 2,000 people there. Lewis hopes the broad legislative package moving through Congress will allocate funding to expand the Jena facility to house more migrants, who could then be flown out of the country on planes from Alexandria. Just after dawn on May 29, the swish of chains dragging on asphalt was loud enough to be heard over idling engines. Roughly 70 men shuffled across the tarmac toward a chartered jet that would take them to Nicaragua. Before boarding, guards patted each down, looking for hidden weapons, unlocking and relocking their restraints, and directing them to make the awkward ascent up the stairs to the plane. One of the men, wearing a black hoodie, shook the chains around his wrists at a guard and said, 'Como perros! Como perros!' (Like dogs.) Once the detainees were on board, agents brought in a van with dozens of women, also manacled, to board next. Then came the only migrants without chains: family units. A woman with her teenage son got on first, followed by a woman with her young daughter. By the time the flight lifted off, there were 118 passengers on board. Whether Cristian will end up on one of these planes isn't yet clear. In May he was let out of Jena on a $4,000 bond. He is due back in immigration court in New Orleans on Sept. 2 to find out whether he will be sent back to Honduras or can remain in the U.S. with his father. The deportation chain in Louisiana exemplifies a nationwide operation that is redefining American immigration policy, legally and morally. The fallout is reaching far beyond those who entered the country without permission. Law-enforcement officials have snatched foreign students off the street for engaging in speech the Administration doesn't like. Trump has revoked student visas and put foreign students into deportation proceedings without warning. 'A visa is a gift,' Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters on March 28. 'No one is entitled to a visa.' Trump is targeting younger children too. His attorneys have argued in federal court that he should be allowed to ignore the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship for those born in the U.S. and terminate the rights of children born to parents who were in the country illegally. The President has cut federal funding to social-service nonprofits that offer legal representation to people facing deportation to ensure their cases are fairly decided. 'The very idea of deporting a child without a lawyer should be unthinkable in America,' says Jojo Annobil, the CEO of the Immigrant Justice Corps. Perhaps no other issue has crystallized criticism of Trump's immigration agenda like the deportation of Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador. Like many of Trump's policies, it came about through a series of conversations, rather than a conventional legal process. On the campaign stump, Trump occasionally castigated Bukele, the Salvadoran President, for sending MS-13 gang members to the U.S. Trump ally and former Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, one of Bukele's biggest American fans, told Trump that this wasn't true. Bukele was the most popular leader in Latin America, he told Trump, and attacking him wasn't going to help win over the Hispanic voters Trump was courting. When Gaetz visited El Salvador for Bukele's second inauguration last summer, he and Bukele discussed the idea of the Salvadorans holding some of the migrants whom Trump planned to deport if he won. When Gaetz returned, he tells TIME, he brought the idea to Trump and his team. Shortly after taking office, Trump directed Rubio to cut a deal with Bukele, two senior White House officials say. Rubio came back with an offer in hand, according to U.S. officials: $20,000 per prisoner for a year. There were wrinkles in the deal. Bukele wanted the Trump Administration to send a handful of Salvadoran MS-13 members held in U.S. prisons, including some who the Treasury Department alleged in December 2021 had engaged in secret negotiations with officials of Bukele's government. At the same time, the deportations would require claims of extraordinary presidential powers. Miller and the White House Counsel's office planned to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that grants the President wartime authority during an invasion or 'predatory incursion.' The plan was so closely held that only a few senior members of the Administration knew it was happening, one of them tells TIME. On March 15, the Trump Administration sent 238 Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador, alleging they were gang members or terrorists. Some had recently been arrested. Many of them had not been convicted in U.S. court. The Administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act for the fourth time in U.S. history, and the first since World War II. The declaration was made at 3:53 p.m. The flights for El Salvador were scheduled for 5:26, 5:44, and 7:36 p.m. Prompted by an emergency motion from the American Civil Liberties Union and Democracy Forward, U.S. Judge James Boasberg ordered a virtual hearing on the matter for late that afternoon. Boasberg heard arguments, then ordered the government to halt the removals. 'Whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane, or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you,' Boasberg told the DOJ. 'But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.' Yet two planeloads of migrants had already left ahead of schedule. A third one was still on the tarmac at a Texas airfield, but took off anyway. The Trump Administration has not confirmed the names of the Venezuelans on those flights. Nor has it shown evidence that all of the men belonged to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua. A review by the Cato Institute found that more than 50 of the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador had followed legal steps to enter the country. A CBS News investigation found that most of the Venezuelans had no criminal record in the U.S. or abroad. One of the men on the planes was Abrego Garcia, who the Justice Department would later admit had been mistakenly deported. Another was Franco Caraballo Tiapa, who worked as a barber in Venezuela. In 2023, Tiapa and his wife Johanny trekked across the Darién Gap, sleeping in the open and surviving on scraps of discarded food, until they presented themselves at the U.S. border and asked for asylum. The two lived together in Sherman, Texas, where they made money cutting hair. On Feb. 3, Tiapa visited an ICE office in Dallas for a regular check-in. This time he was arrested, according to Johanny. The Administration says his tattoos show he's a member of the Tren de Aragua gang. One is of his daughter's name. Others depict a lion; a rose; and a razor blade on the side of his neck—a symbol of his work as a barber, according to his wife. She says he has no criminal record in the U.S. or Venezuela. 'They were only looking at his tattoos,' Johanny says. Outside of CECOT's Module 7, Garcia, the warden, brings out a Styrofoam container with a hamburger, French fries, ketchup packs, and Milano cookies. This is a typical meal for the Venezuelan inmates, he says. Their diet was devised by Bukele, who instructed they be fed fast food to gain weight, as a way of trolling critics who argue CECOT's conditions are inhumane, according to Salvadoran sources. 'It's a cat-and-mouse game,' says one person close to Bukele. The maneuver is similar to the photo op Bukele staged when Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen traveled to El Salvador to meet with Abrego Garcia. The pair were photographed sitting poolside with what Van Hollen said were 'fake' margaritas. (Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. in early June.) After the tour of the prison, Garcia allows TIME to interview one inmate in a holding area near the unit's entrance. The man says his name is Hector Hernandez. He appears to be the nightmare that Trump has conjured time and again on the campaign trail. He says he is an MS-13 member, and has tattoos all over his body, from his face and neck to his forearms. The prisoner claims that before he was deported in 2019 and apprehended by Salvadoran authorities, he murdered 50 people in Northern Virginia—more than three times the number of reported murders in Prince William or Fairfax counties for that year. TIME was unable to verify the details provided by the prisoner, including his name, his alleged crimes, or how he came to be there. Inside CECOT, the extreme terminus for Trump's deportation program, the truth, like everything else, is under the control of the authorities. What is clear, however, are the draconian conditions to which the Salvadoran inmates at CECOT are subjected. They are under constant surveillance. The lights never go off. They share cells with rival gang members. Prisoners who get out of line face up to 14 days in pitch-black solitary confinement, says Garcia. For the past 2½ years, the man who identifies himself as Hector Hernandez says, he's had no communication with the outside world. He hasn't spoken to family. He hasn't seen or read a news report. He doesn't know who the President of the United States is. — With reporting by Harry Booth, Leslie Dickstein, and Tharin Pillay More from TIME [video id=28GTRXAF]
Wall Street Journal
28 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Netanyahu Flips the Script
'If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . . ' These lines from Rudyard Kipling's 'If' echoed through my mind on June 8 as I sat down with an intense but cool- and calm-seeming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for an off-the-record conversation in his Jerusalem office. Israel's latest strikes against Iran had not been launched, and the conventional wisdom held that Bibi, as friends and foes alike call the longest-serving prime minister in Israel's history, had his back to the wall. Reports that the Israeli prime minister was on the outs with President Trump were all over the news. Mr. Trump hadn't visited Israel on his recent trip to the region, Mr. Netanyahu's critics pointed out, and the Gulf countries were making deals with the Americans while Mr. Netanyahu's Israel watched from the sidelines. For decades, Bibi's popularity among conservative Americans helped cement his strength among Israeli conservatives. But that seemed to be changing early last week. From MAGA-world voices like Tucker Carlson came a chorus of anti-Israel, anti-Netanyahu critiques. Was Mr. Trump's apparent warmth toward an Obama-style nuclear agreement with Iran a sign that American Republicans were throwing Bibi under the bus? Would Israel lose a historic opportunity to settle scores with Iran because Mr. Netanyahu had mismanaged Israel's relationship with the GOP? Internationally, public opinion had turned against the prime minister and the nation he leads. United Nations resolutions, International Criminal Court arrest warrants, demonstrations, antisemitic outbreaks at elite universities and, most recently, a diplomatic effort from France to get Western countries to recognize a Palestinian state: Many at home and abroad blamed Mr. Netanyahu for Israel's growing isolation.
The Hill
29 minutes ago
- The Hill
White House denies reporting by Guardian on VA benefits: ‘totally FALSE story'
The Trump administration on Monday denied reporting by The Guardian that said new Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals could refuse care to veterans based on factors like marital status and political affiliation due to an executive order by President Trump. The Guardian earlier Monday published a report saying VA hospitals are implementing new rules in response to Trump's executive order in January, which would permit workers to deny care to veterans based on characteristics not protected by federal law. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order titled 'Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,' which ordered the federal government to recognize only two biological sexes. According to the documents it obtained, The Guardian reported that 'doctors and other medical staff can also be barred from working at VA hospitals based on their marital status, political party affiliation or union activity.' VA press secretary Peter Kasperowicz, a former politics editor at Fox News Digital, reportedly did not deny that veteran patients could be denied care and physicians could be dismissed based on their marital status or political affiliation when reached by The Guardian. But White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly adamantly denied The Guardian's reporting. Writing on the social media platform X, Kelly addressed the article's writer, Aaron Glantz, saying, 'Aaron, this is a totally FALSE story that The Guardian should retract immediately. Fearmongering with our Veterans to try to score clicks for your failing 'news outlet' is pathetic and shameful.' The VA also responded on X, writing, 'This story is disinformation. All eligible Veterans will always be welcome at VA and will always receive the benefits and services they've earned under the law.' The Hill has reached out to The Guardian for comment. According to those who work with veterans benefits, some hospitals have begun updating their bylaws, but the extent of what effect these changes are having is unclear. According to Kyleanne Hunter, CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the VA has historically been 'very expansive' in its anti-discrimination policies, which have gone beyond federally protected classes. In response to Trump's executive order earlier this year, some bylaws have 'shrunk' so that anti-discrimination policies only encompass federally protected classes like race, religion and sex. She notes, however, that there don't appear to be any rules that mandate discrimination based on unprotected classes. 'There are over 140 different VA medical centers as hospitals that each have their own set of bylaws that exist. So we don't know how many different hospitals this has actually been changed at,' Hunter told The Hill. 'We're trying right now to really gather the information we can, to see how widespread the changes of bylaws might actually be, as well as to engage and understand how it is actually impacting our veterans,' added Hunter. She lamented that VA employees are getting in the crosshairs of this dispute while they seek to provide care to veterans. 'The VA employees that we have talked to and connected with are personally very, very committed to continue to serve all veterans and are concerned that the way in which this is being discussed will continue to destroy morale among VA employees,' Hunter said.
