Audio excerpt — Kristi Noem:

“First of all I want to thank El Salvador and their president for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here and to incarcerate them…”

DANIEL:

It looks like a scene from a very different period of history.

US Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, standing in front of a prison pen, filled with gaunt, shirtless men. Their heads shaved, staring silently at the cameras.

Audio excerpt — Kristi Noem:

“Do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed and you will be prosecuted.”

DANIEL:

The footage is from El Salvador, where the US government had whisked away over 200 Venezuelan migrants to be held in a notorious prison.

It’s just one of the surreal propaganda posts the Trump administration has put out, bragging about imprisoning men they deemed murderous gang affiliated terrorists.

But looking at these images, one woman saw not a terrorist but her husband.

NOAH:

She recognises a tattoo on his neck of a hummingbird and she said he got it because it symbolises good vibes, good energy. So she recognised that and she was like that’s my husband.

DANIEL:

Another person who viewed the footage is reporter Noah Lanard who set out to find out who was taken and why.

NOAH:

So the way that we wanna go about finding this is it's quite bleak in a lot of ways. My colleague Isabella and I were on Facebook and TikTok, googling things like ‘justicia El Salvador, Venezuela’, or like ‘Justice El Salvador’. And you would see these videos from families that are heartbreaking saying, please, we're looking for proof of life. We're looking for them to be released.

Audio excerpt — Family members of detainees:

[Calling for their release in Spanish]

NOAH:

I mean, it was just searching, you know, these cries for help that exist on social media almost entirely in Spanish.

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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Daniel James. This is 7am.

Today, Noah Lanard reporter at Mother Jones, on the people America is disappearing and what the spectacle of deportations says about where America is headed

It’s Monday, April 7.

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DANIEL:

Noah, you've been trying to find out about these men living in America who were suddenly deported to El Salvador. So to start with, can you tell me a little bit about Neri Alvarado Borges.

NOAH:

Yeah, absolutely. So Neri Alvarado Borges is someone who I spoke to for a story that my colleague Isabella Diaz and I were doing. He's 25 years old. He just turned 25. He's from a kind of more rural part of Venezuela and came to the United States seeking asylum, also looking for economic opportunity. Obviously Venezuela's economy has suffered one of the worst collapses in modern history.

At the time he was picked up by ICE, he was working at a bakery and his boss who I interviewed said he was working basically seven to seven every day, was an extremely hard worker and just kind of a great guy. And then on February 4th, he gets picked up by ICE, our immigration enforcement agency. They come out right in front of his apartment looking for him by name. And then they bring him into the ICE kind of office and say, hey, you're here because we're picking up people with tattoos. We're interrogating people with tattoos who are Venezuelan, looking to see if they belong to this gang that has become a bigger news item recently in the US because of the Trump administration called Tren de Aragua.

DANIEL:

So they detain him and ask to see his tattoos to check whether he’s affiliated with a gang. What does Alvarado do?

NOAH:

What he showed them was an autism awareness tattoo with the name of his brother, a 15-year-old with autism that's on his leg. And then he has two other tattoos. One is in English, it says “brother” again, about his brother. And the other says “familia”, family. What is so strange about this case is that the ICE agent, said, you know, basically you're clean. We know you're not in a gang. That's kind of absurd here, because despite all that, he a little over a month later ends up being sent to El Salvador accused of being theoretically a gang member and he is there and no one in his family has spoken to him since.

DANIEL:

When you were speaking to these families was there any evidence that the people in their family that were being sent to El Salvador were actually gang members?

NOAH:

Nothing that I saw that, you know, nothing that would really hold up in a court. And what was strange is we spoke to, you know, 10 families, all 10 said their relatives had tattoos. And that's why they believed that their relatives had been picked up.

DANIEL:

And so, can you tell me a little bit about the process of getting these men to El Salvador? Were they told where they were going, why they were going there, what the process was, what their rights were? Can you give us any insight to what, if any, process was involved in this deportation?

NOAH:

The short answer is no. And then to explain and expand on that, basically you had Venezuelans calling their family members on Friday night, March 14th saying, okay, we've been told we're gonna be sent to Venezuela.

And they, as far as we know, while they're on that plane in the air, they believe they're going to Venezuela. And it may only be when they land and basically walk out of the plane and they're in chains. And then they see basically the Salvadoran military and police apparatus in masks kind of waiting for them and they are then kind of frog-marched off the plane onto buses and into this prison.

But most of these people had open immigration cases, meaning they were scheduled to be in court tomorrow or last week. And in many cases, people we spoke to, like the judge would say, hey, where's the guy? And the government's own attorney would say we're not sure. And then the defence attorney would have to say, well, I think he might be in El Salvador. And that would kind of be the end of the case because the judge no longer has jurisdiction.

DANIEL:

And has anyone heard from them since? Has anyone actually spoken with them?

NOAH:

Not that I’m aware of. They have no way to contact these family members. They don't know when they're going to get out, are they ever going to get out? And so it's just every day is torture.

DANIEL:

After the break, the message the Trump administration wants to send to all of us.

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DANIEL:

Noah, can you tell me about the prison where these men have been sent? What do we know about this place?

NOAH:

Yeah, so this is known as one of the world's most infamous prisons. It was built only a few years ago as part of President Bukele's state of exception, essentially martial law. And it was theoretically built to hold kind of the worst of the worst MS-13 gang members, the people who had made El Salvador into one of the world's most brutal and violent countries.

It’s called the Terrorism Confinement Centre in English and it is a very extreme environment. It is known for having horrendous conditions. Prisoners spend about 23 and a half hours a day in their basically barracks. I think it's about 80 people per unit and they live in bunks that are stacked four high with no mattresses, no calls to family. It's even a stretch to call it a prison. I think it's nothing like what people think of a prison. A lot of the images frankly are reminiscent of what you saw in concentration camps in the twentieth century.

DANIEL:

Noah, can you explain why the Venezuelan community is being singled out like this?

NOAH:

Yeah, so during the Biden administration, Venezuelans were the largest group of migrants coming to the United States. It really was off-scale and record-setting numbers in the hundreds of thousands each year. And that was totally unprecedented. Even though Venezuela's economy had been in a terrible position for many years, it didn't translate to that kind of massive numbers at the borders and many of those people ended up being bussed all around the United States, including to where I live in New York City, by the tens of thousands. And so it became this big, it's a big national issue. But the Trump administration now kind of needs, I think a villain here or a bogeyman to kind of target here and Tren de Aragua, this gang, which most Americans still probably have never heard of or certainly had never heard of one year ago has become that.

Audio excerpt — Donald Trump:

“As we speak, heavily armed Venezuelan gangs are taking over entire apartment buildings and apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado, terrorising the residents and taking over. In the old days, you had to pay to buy that building.”

NOAH:

So the Trump administration declared Tren de Aragua a foreign terrorist organisation. And for people who like, who don't live in the United States, like there are probably some issues with Tren de Aragua. I'm sure there are some crimes committed by people affiliated with it, but it's not a major gang. It's not MS-13. Also, importantly, it's known for tattoos being an identifying mark for its members, despite that being one of the main things the Trump Administration used. And the second thing they did, which is probably more important here, is for only the fourth time in the entirety of American history, they invoked a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act. And that is only supposed to be used when America is in times of war or invasion. So this has not been used since we were using it basically to round up potential Nazis at the height of World War II. In this case, obviously we're not at war with Venezuela. Of course, we're not, so they have to say we are “under invasion by this gang”. And it's patently absurd.

DANIEL:

And so the Trump administration's gone into sort of full propaganda mode when it comes to exaggerating the reasons as to why they're being sent. What is the administration getting out of that?

NOAH:

I think they're getting, I would say, two things that immediately come to mind to me. One you could argue there's putting pressure on Venezuela to resume taking deportation flights. So that would be one. And the second is the spectacle of it.

Audio excerpt — Kristi Noem:

“This facility is one of the tools in our toolkit we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”

Audio excerpt — Unidentified man 1:

“I’m shocked there wasn’t a prison break because that’s like a riot right there. You know, I’m surprised. If they could walk Tom Homan through that jail and you’d think he’s hot at that point. But Kristi my god…”

Audio excerpt — Unidentified man 2:

“You know what I love about that visit? She stood in front of criminals in their environment, because usually Democrats, when they want you to see criminals…”

NOAH:

Part of it here is, you know there are only so many ICE agents in the United States and there are 12 million or so undocumented immigrants in the United States. They don't have the capacity to arrest even a large percentage of those people and what they're relying on and hoping for is self-deportation, essentially. So in some sense, the fact that there are innocent people, clearly innocent people in this prison now, has a benefit to them because it is horrifying. It makes people, even people who are following all the rules here, who have open court cases feel that they could be next and maybe then they'll get on a plane and go back home, which is what the Trump administration wants them to do.

DANIEL:

And what's been the general reaction to these deportations of people being picked up off the streets? I mean, what's happening and what's the discourse on the streets of America around this? Is this something that people are talking about?

NOAH:

Yeah, initially the Trump administration, and I did a lot of stories on the attitudes of Latino voters before the election. And they were really sure. They said, well, I'm all for criminals being deported and that's what Trump says he's gonna do, so it doesn't bother me. And I think initially, and if you look at the polling right now, still Trump's kind of immigration approval is still favourable. I think it was about 58/42 approve of his overall deportation efforts. But if you will get this El Salvador Venezuela operation, that polls quite negatively. So I think it's starting to shift as people start to realise, oh, this is not just all hardened criminals and gang members who are being sent there.

DANIEL:

Could this approach affect other movements within American society, like the pro-Palestinian movement for instance.

NOAH:

Yeah, I mean, I think that is, you know, you have to see these as linked. You're having, for example, someone like Mahmoud Khalil, who's a green card holder, married to an American citizen whose wife is pregnant, eight months pregnant at the time of the arrest being arrested at his Columbia University student housing apartment and sent to an immigration detention centre in Louisiana.

I used to report on the detention centre during the first Trump administration. The idea that a green card holder is now there because of political speech and he's not alone, you know, they were going after a Columbia University junior, you know which is one of our most elite universities and an Ivy league school. She had come to the United States when she was seven years old. And that's all just because of pretty milquetoast pro-Palestine activism.

DANIEL:

Right, so at the end of the day, Trump is doing what he said he'd do. The polls indicate that what he is doing is popular. But when it comes to these men, what happens to them now? What does their future look like?

NOAH:

Yeah, it is very unclear. There's a very contentious and high drama court case right now happening in the United States. You know, the judge had ordered that these jets be turned around while they're in the air to El Salvador. And the Trump Administration, an extremely rare move, basically ignored that court order. So that court case is continuing to heat up.

It’s bleak to say, but the best possibility would be that they are let out and allowed to be deported to Venezuela. I mean, I mean I think the odds of them returning to the United States are quite slim but there's no timeline at all. So if you're a family member who has a son or a husband there, you have no idea not only when you'll see your loved one, but when you might even ever be able to know that they're alive.

DANIEL:

Noah, thanks so much for your reporting and thanks so much for your time.

NOAH:

Yeah, no, thank you for having me on.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news today,

Prime minister Anthony Albanese has pledged $2.3 billion dollars to be spent on subsidising home batteries should his government be re-elected.

Labor released data showing that while one in three Australian households have solar panels, only one in 40 have a battery.
Batteries can push household bills down and reduce reliance on the grid.

The new plan will make the cost of installing a new home battery 30 per cent cheaper and is designed to fund 1 million more units by 2030.

And,

Peter Dutton has promised to cut the number of international students in Australia by 80,000 per year, if elected.

The opposition leader has argued that international students are contributing to the housing crisis.

The policy would allow 30,000 fewer foreign students than Labor’s plan, announced last year.

I’m Daniel James, this is 7am. Thanks for listening.

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