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Americans are sleeping on Trump sending migrants to death camps of the country we're gearing up to war against.
...on the face of that it can be reasonably assumed the Trump regime originally intended for those migrants - all but Kilmar Abrego Garcia eventually repatriated to their home countries after the administration clumsily skirmished with the courts - to be collateral targets of their escalating military buildup being arrayed against Venezuela.
On Friday, the Pentagon announced it would send the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford from Europe to the Caribbean to join the other military forces in the region. Observers reasoned this week that the carrier would likely will be conducting strike operations on land, and providing close air support for special operations troops.
One other explanation is that Trump is gearing up our military to war against the Maduro regime in Venezuela. Indeed, Trump has already made clear that land assault of Venezuela is among their plans for the military deployment.
"They promised they would never again get involved in a war, and they are fabricating a war," Maduro told state media a week or so ago. Indeed, Trump himself confirmed he'd authorized CIA operations in Venezuela and was looking into land strikes. "We are certainly looking at land now," Trump said.
"I authorized for two reasons, really. Number one, they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. They came in through the, well, they came in through the border," Trump said as he took reporter questions in the Oval Office.
"And the other thing are drugs, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela, and a lot of the Venezuelan drugs come in through the sea. So, you get to see that, but we're going to stop them by land also," Trump added.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-confirms-authorized-cia-operations-venezuela-land-strikes/story?id=126563281
It should be noted that it's about 1000 miles to the U.S. from where these extrajudicial killings by our military were carried out, under orders from Trump.
It should, more importantly, be remembered that Trump has been using claims of an 'invasion' of the U.S. by Venezuelan-based drug gang, Tren de Aragua, as the pretext for the deportation of the 200 migrants to Venezuela, as well as justification for many other 'emergency' actions he's declared, despite having produced zero evidence or documents to back those claims up with actual evidence.
Right now, the Supreme Court is dithering on the question of whether the Trump regime is justified in their broad-brush use of the terrorist gang affiliations, like in their invented designation of the drug gang as a domestic terror concern.
But it shouldn't go unnoticed how easily and opportunistically the administration attached the drug gang label to the migrants they're trying to deport, despite failing to produce any evidence the vast majority of immigrants in the U.S. they're accusing actually have any ties to any organization or any violent act.
Michael Popok, today:
Kilmar Abrego Garcia's lawyers have pointed out to a Federal Judge in a new filing that the Trump DOJ has produced absolutely 0 evidence to prove to the Court that they are NOT vindictively prosecuting him, no witnesses and no documents, so the Court should just dismiss the criminal indictment immediately. Popok reports on this development and Judge Xinis making a decision soon on whether Garcia goes free for violations of his civil rights and liberties.
watch:
It's easy to see that Trump's wavering on Maduro (Biden admin. put a bounty on this head) is more than just a dangerous provocation that could lead to American soldiers fighting in Venezuela.
It's also a ruse to justify and advantage his immigration war at home as he advantages the Supreme Courts neglect in making a definitive ruling on the merits of their claims of an 'invasion' of Venezuelans
But what about this escalating military action outside of Venezuela that promises to reach their shores with military strikes?
___In late January, President Nicolás Maduro and President Donald Trump’s special envoy, Richard Grenell, smiled as they shook hands in the Venezuelan leader’s gold-embossed Caracas palace.
The deal they'd just sealed meant six Americans detained in the country would be freed in exchange for hundreds of Venezuelan migrants whom the Trump administration said belonged to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
Nine months after Grenell and Maduro's pact, eight U.S. warships are circling the waters off Venezuela, and the largest U.S. aircraft carrier and its three escorts are cruising toward the region. Roughly 10,000 troops are stationed in the area. B-1 and B-52 bombers have approached Venezuelan airspace three times in two weeks, in an undisputed threat of force.
At least 61 people, many of them Venezuelans, have been killed in U.S. strikes on boats in international waters, which the Trump administration said, without providing evidence, were carrying drugs. The strikes, which the Trump administration has said are part of an "armed conflict" with cartels, were ordered without congressional approval.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/30/trump-marco-rubio-maduro-venezuela-war/86930242007/
The deal they'd just sealed meant six Americans detained in the country would be freed in exchange for hundreds of Venezuelan migrants whom the Trump administration said belonged to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.
Nine months after Grenell and Maduro's pact, eight U.S. warships are circling the waters off Venezuela, and the largest U.S. aircraft carrier and its three escorts are cruising toward the region. Roughly 10,000 troops are stationed in the area. B-1 and B-52 bombers have approached Venezuelan airspace three times in two weeks, in an undisputed threat of force.
At least 61 people, many of them Venezuelans, have been killed in U.S. strikes on boats in international waters, which the Trump administration said, without providing evidence, were carrying drugs. The strikes, which the Trump administration has said are part of an "armed conflict" with cartels, were ordered without congressional approval.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2025/10/30/trump-marco-rubio-maduro-venezuela-war/86930242007/
But this escalated deployment which has been characterized by it's relatively small size and it's activity, and most importantly, by the administration as a drug interdiction effort, is a classic end-around the War Powers Act which allows any president to deploy troops for 60 days without informing Congress and getting authorization to continue, in either defensive or offensive operations.
That period has expired, so...
Constitutional law scholar, Steve Vladeck, joined Katie Phang to answer the question “Is this s—t legal?"
___So there are sort of two different understandings of war powers when it comes to the federal government. Obviously Congress can authorize uses of military force whether through the big kahuna of declaring a war or through the sort of lesser form of what we call AUMFs authorizations for the use of military force.
We still have right the 9/11 AUMF on the books. In those circumstances when a president uses military force the question is just is that a permissible application of the statute? A drone strike in eastern Afghanistan against a suspected al-Qaeda target - is that covered by the statute?
That tends to raise sort of important questions but not super messy separation of powers questions because we all agree in those cases it's about the statute then there is the claim by presidents of both parties going back certainly at least to World War II um that presidents also have some degree of unilateral war power of the power to use military force without statute authorization. And the best way to sort of summarize this very very dense rich body of academic debate is almost everyone agrees that presidents have defensive power.
So, you know, on the morning of December 7th, 1941, right, FDR did not need Congress to shoot down the Japanese planes as they're dropping bombs and torpedoes on Pearl Harbor. Okay, the question is how far back that sort of chain is defense versus offense, right? So, shooting down the Japanese planes over Pearl Harbor, defense, right? Shooting down the planes after they've launched from the aircraft carriers on their way to Pearl Harbor, defense. Attacking the aircraft carriers on December 6th, harder, right? ....where's the defense offense line?
That's been a matter of debate. That's not an issue here. We are not under attack by any of these nalleged drug cartels. Congress has not authorized military force against any of these alleged drug cartels. And so we have sort of on the one hand a body of law and precedent that has gotten far murkier with regard to the outer bounds of what a president can do. And then we have this which is still so far beyond even the murkiest understanding of what those outer bounds are.
The other piece of this is you hear very sort of loose efforts by the folks who are speaking about this for the administration to tie this to the fact that these are quote designated terrorist organizations DTO. Um so first DTOS are not a thing. That's not a thing.
Federal law has a category called foreign terrorist organizations or FTO's. The DTO thing is trying to blur the distinction between foreign and domestic and that's a whole separate So this is just a made-up designation.
I mean, so at least some of these drug cartels have been designated um to my mind, not entirely obviously like correctly, as foreign terrorist organizations by Secretary Rubio. And there is a very detailed statutory procedure that Congress has, you know, provided since 1996 for the Secretary of State to say, "Hey, this foreign group is a terrorist organization."
(The person who's allowed to make that designation is the Secretary of State.) Yes. And he does that on his own. There's no kind of checking to publish it in the Federal Register and then it can be challenged, right?
There's like notice and process right to contest, the but this is where things get really wild which is let's assume that these are validly designated FTO's foreign terrorist organizations I think there's a debate about that but let's just assume they are okay it doesn't matter the FTO designation process is not a gateway to military force the FTO designation process is a gateway to economic sanctions and civil and criminal penalties um right providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization is actually a critically important federal criminal statute that had become for some time after 9/11
The most common charge in counterterrorism cases and that's why we use like we use economic sanctions against terrorist organizations like Hamas for example - and so even if you accept the predicate that these drug cartels are foreign terrorist organizations that still doesn't get you anywhere close to legal authority to use military force, right?
That they're they're trying to blur and sort of collapse the distinction between two regimes. We have, right, we have this regime for using military force against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and we have this separate regime for leveling civil and criminal penalties against all designated foreign terrorist organizations. But those two are distinct. One's about military force, one's about everything else.
So what's happening in the Caribbean and also now apparently in the Pacific um really does not seem to have any Eastern Pacific. Yesterday it was a vessel in the Eastern Pacific that Hegseth said was carrying illegal drugs and they killed four people on and so there's one and so let me just throw in one more one more problem.
I mean, so my Georgetown colleague Marty Lerman has been, you know, I think quite vocal about this on social media. There's one other problem, which is even the most of there's also the the pesky little matter of something called the War Powers Resolution.
So the War Powers Resolution is a 1973 statute Congress passed that is supposed to rein in sort of unilateral presidential warming, whether it is offensive or defensive, by basically imposing a 60-day clock on how long the president's allowed to use force and how long he's allowed to introduce military forces into scenarios in which hostilities are likely.
Um, and it's 60 days. Um, that 60-day clock started on September 2nd. Um it is today October 30th. Um I know math is hard but like the 60 days are up and who challenges this now then - who has standing to come and say so? This is the rub and the problem is that there is historically not a lot of judicial accountability for military force.
We still have right the 9/11 AUMF on the books. In those circumstances when a president uses military force the question is just is that a permissible application of the statute? A drone strike in eastern Afghanistan against a suspected al-Qaeda target - is that covered by the statute?
That tends to raise sort of important questions but not super messy separation of powers questions because we all agree in those cases it's about the statute then there is the claim by presidents of both parties going back certainly at least to World War II um that presidents also have some degree of unilateral war power of the power to use military force without statute authorization. And the best way to sort of summarize this very very dense rich body of academic debate is almost everyone agrees that presidents have defensive power.
So, you know, on the morning of December 7th, 1941, right, FDR did not need Congress to shoot down the Japanese planes as they're dropping bombs and torpedoes on Pearl Harbor. Okay, the question is how far back that sort of chain is defense versus offense, right? So, shooting down the Japanese planes over Pearl Harbor, defense, right? Shooting down the planes after they've launched from the aircraft carriers on their way to Pearl Harbor, defense. Attacking the aircraft carriers on December 6th, harder, right? ....where's the defense offense line?
That's been a matter of debate. That's not an issue here. We are not under attack by any of these nalleged drug cartels. Congress has not authorized military force against any of these alleged drug cartels. And so we have sort of on the one hand a body of law and precedent that has gotten far murkier with regard to the outer bounds of what a president can do. And then we have this which is still so far beyond even the murkiest understanding of what those outer bounds are.
The other piece of this is you hear very sort of loose efforts by the folks who are speaking about this for the administration to tie this to the fact that these are quote designated terrorist organizations DTO. Um so first DTOS are not a thing. That's not a thing.
Federal law has a category called foreign terrorist organizations or FTO's. The DTO thing is trying to blur the distinction between foreign and domestic and that's a whole separate So this is just a made-up designation.
I mean, so at least some of these drug cartels have been designated um to my mind, not entirely obviously like correctly, as foreign terrorist organizations by Secretary Rubio. And there is a very detailed statutory procedure that Congress has, you know, provided since 1996 for the Secretary of State to say, "Hey, this foreign group is a terrorist organization."
(The person who's allowed to make that designation is the Secretary of State.) Yes. And he does that on his own. There's no kind of checking to publish it in the Federal Register and then it can be challenged, right?
There's like notice and process right to contest, the but this is where things get really wild which is let's assume that these are validly designated FTO's foreign terrorist organizations I think there's a debate about that but let's just assume they are okay it doesn't matter the FTO designation process is not a gateway to military force the FTO designation process is a gateway to economic sanctions and civil and criminal penalties um right providing material support to a foreign terrorist organization is actually a critically important federal criminal statute that had become for some time after 9/11
The most common charge in counterterrorism cases and that's why we use like we use economic sanctions against terrorist organizations like Hamas for example - and so even if you accept the predicate that these drug cartels are foreign terrorist organizations that still doesn't get you anywhere close to legal authority to use military force, right?
That they're they're trying to blur and sort of collapse the distinction between two regimes. We have, right, we have this regime for using military force against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, and we have this separate regime for leveling civil and criminal penalties against all designated foreign terrorist organizations. But those two are distinct. One's about military force, one's about everything else.
So what's happening in the Caribbean and also now apparently in the Pacific um really does not seem to have any Eastern Pacific. Yesterday it was a vessel in the Eastern Pacific that Hegseth said was carrying illegal drugs and they killed four people on and so there's one and so let me just throw in one more one more problem.
I mean, so my Georgetown colleague Marty Lerman has been, you know, I think quite vocal about this on social media. There's one other problem, which is even the most of there's also the the pesky little matter of something called the War Powers Resolution.
So the War Powers Resolution is a 1973 statute Congress passed that is supposed to rein in sort of unilateral presidential warming, whether it is offensive or defensive, by basically imposing a 60-day clock on how long the president's allowed to use force and how long he's allowed to introduce military forces into scenarios in which hostilities are likely.
Um, and it's 60 days. Um, that 60-day clock started on September 2nd. Um it is today October 30th. Um I know math is hard but like the 60 days are up and who challenges this now then - who has standing to come and say so? This is the rub and the problem is that there is historically not a lot of judicial accountability for military force.
watch:
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