Real Housewives of Gitmo:Noem's propaganda visit to a foreign prison

[struggle4progress]

Yesterday at 4:11 p.m. EDT

... Her visit was encapsulated in a video produced and published on Noem’s own X feed. Meticulous blowout? Check. Impeccable makeup and jewelry, including a watch that online sleuths have speculated is a $60,000 Rolex? Check. Formfitting T-shirt, skinny drawstring pants, combat boots and a baseball hat with an ICE logo — yaaas, Madam Homeland Security ...

CECOT prison is where the Trump administration, using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, has deported hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants that it claims are violent gang members. CNN reported that a lawyer representing about 30 of the deported men said they aren’t gang members; the U.S. government has admitted that many of the men did not have criminal records. A federal judge issued a temporary order in mid-March barring the deportation, instructing planes carrying the Venezuelans to turn around. The planes did not turn around ...

The men were crammed by the dozens into non-air-conditioned, multitiered cells, which they are never allowed to leave. Their sleeping arrangements were metal bunks without mattresses. The standard-issue CECOT uniform apparently includes white T-shirts but, for this visit, dozens of prisoners were made to remove their shirts and present themselves, thin, bare-chested and stone-faced, for Noem’s inspection.

It wasn’t immediately clear, at least not to me, what the purpose was of the nudity. Perhaps officials were trying to showcase the tattoos that many of them sported, creating an appearance of malevolence and replacing American due process with guilt-by-inking. Whatever the reason, the nudity did not make these men, locked indefinitely behind bars, look scary. It made them look vulnerable. It made Noem’s cohort, meandering around like tourists at a poorly conceived Epcot Center attraction, look lewd and predatory. It made the whole thing look exploitative, the kind of photo op someone should be fired for ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/03/27/kristi-noem-prison-visit-real-housewives/

[struggle4progress]

1. Noem's $50,000 Rolex in a Salvadoran prison

When Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem visited El Salvador’s most notorious mega-prison on Wednesday, she sported an eye-catching piece on her wrist that experts have identified as an 18-karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that sells for about $50,000 ...

“You’re in front of all these people in a very poor country, who are in the bottom 10 or 20 percent of their country … and it looks like you’re just flaunting your wealth while you flaunt your freedom,” said Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, a human rights group.

“This is an administration that is trying to be populist, anti-elite, appeal to the common man,” he added. Meanwhile, there's “people stacked up like cordwood behind her.”

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin confirmed the make of the watch in a statement, saying that “then-Governor Noem chose to use the proceeds from her New York Times best selling books to purchase an item she could wear and one day pass down to her children” ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/03/27/kristi-noem-rolex-controversy/

The woman is a soulless sadistic shithead

[snowybirdie]

2. To me

It looked like soft porn. All those semi naked men salivating behind the sexy porn queen. Only missing a whip

[struggle4progress]

3. "You're Here Because of Your Tattoos"

Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias
March 26, 2025

On Friday, March 14, Arturo Suárez Trejo called his wife, Nathali Sánchez, from an immigration detention center in Texas. Suárez, a 33-year-old native of Caracas, Venezuela, explained that his deportation flight had been delayed. He told his wife he would be home soon. Suárez did not want to go back to Venezuela. Still, there was at least a silver lining: In December, Sánchez had given birth to their daughter, Nahiara. Suárez would finally have a chance to meet the three-month-old baby girl he had only ever seen on screens.

But, Sánchez told Mother Jones, she has not heard from Suárez since. Instead, last weekend, she found herself zooming in on a photo the government of El Salvador published of Venezuelan men the Trump administration had sent to President Nayib Bukele’s infamous Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. “I realized that one of them was my husband,” she said. “I recognized him by the tattoo [on his neck], by his ear, and by his chin. Even though I couldn’t see his face, I knew it was him.” The photo Sánchez examined—and a highly produced propaganda video promoted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the White House—showed Venezuelans shackled in prison uniforms as they were pushed around by guards and had their heads shaved.

The tattoo on Suárez’s neck is of a colibrí, a hummingbird. His wife said it is meant to symbolize “harmony and good energy.” She said his other tattoos, like a palm tree on his hand—an homage to Suárez’s late mother’s use of a Venezuelan expression about God being greater than a coconut tree—were similarly innocuous. Nevertheless, they may be why Suárez has been effectively disappeared by the US government into a Salvadoran mega-prison.

Mother Jones has spoken with friends, family members, and lawyers of ten men sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration based on allegations that they are members of the Venezuelan organized crime group Tren de Aragua. All of them say their relatives have tattoos and believe that is why their loved ones were targeted. But they vigorously reject the idea that their sons, brothers, and husbands have anything to do with Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration recently labeled a foreign terrorist organization. The families have substantiated those assertions to Mother Jones, including—in many cases—by providing official documents attesting to their relatives’ lack of criminal histories in Venezuela. Such evidence might have persuaded US judges that the men were not part of any criminal organization had the Trump administration not deliberately deprived them of due process ...

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/trump-el-salvador-venezulea-deportation-prison-cecot-bukele/

[malaise]

4. Rec for the Headline

Too good