ICE Is Also Relying On A Defunct Gang Database To Send Migrants To Foreign Concentration Camps
Gang databases are just handy racism. They're a way for cops to harass, arrest, or otherwise make minorities' lives more miserable. Very little in the way of logic or evidence is required to allow officers to add people to these databases. That's why victims of gang violence and the occasional infant have been labelled gang members" by deliberately broken processes and systems.
So, it's no surprise the same faulty logic and any minority existing in public" attitude is being applied to the mass, forcible exodus of minorities from this country. Invoking the Alien Enemies Act made it clear this was about exiling foreigners, rather than protecting this nation from foreign enemies, because the last time it was used, the US government sent thousands of legal US residents to internment camps.
This time, we're sending residents and undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons. El Salvador is our new best friend, willing to (inhumanely) house whoever we eject, whether it's hardened criminals with violent histories or just people who happen to have been born in another country. Trump's latest hallucination is that the Venezuelan government has sent thousands of Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members to the US for the sole purpose of harming America and Americans in, I guess, a warlike fashion.
The mass ejection is so big it can no longer be handled by the DHS and its components. Since his re-arrival in DC, agencies from the FBI to the IRS to private prison companies have been deputized to assist in multiple unlawful acts that make the US look more like WWII Germany than the alleged 2025 Leader of the Free World.
Private prison companies and the disgraced ex-cops they're all too willing to hire have helped send possibly innocent people to El Salvador, where they'll be stacked like cordwood right next to vicious killers with lifelong MS-13 affiliations.
It takes a fucking village to burn this nation down. The all-hands-on-deck approach to cruelty also involves gang databases so toxic, even the cops who created them aren't allowed to use them anymore. Kilmar Abrego Garcia - a person this administration first admitted was wrongly deported but now claims is actually a violent criminal - was the victim of this gang database, one once relied on by multiple law enforcement agencies.
Here's the latest on this despicable twist from the Washington Post.
The path to Kilmar Abrego Garcia's deportation to a notorious megaprison in El Salvador began six years ago, when a suburban Maryland police detective typed a critical allegation into a Gang Interview Field Sheet.
An active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique," wrote the detective in 2019, after detaining Abrego Garcia at a Home Depot in Prince George's County while he stood in the parking lot looking for construction work.His evidence: an unnamed confidential informant and Abrego Garcia's Chicago Bulls cap, which the officer wrote in his report was indicative of the Hispanic gang culture."
In other words, any Hispanic" with a sports team's hat on is probably in a gang. And any Black person as well, for that matter.
More unbelievably, the this guy is gang member" narrative composed by the so-called investigator" also made these claims in support of his MS-13 fantasies:
Abrego Garcia, Mendez wrote, had been identified by an unnamed confidential informant as an active member" of MS-13's Western clique in Upstate New York - a place he has never lived. Mendez cited Abrego Garcia's clothes as further proof, including a hooded sweatshirt that featured green bands covering the eyes, ears and mouth of Benjamin Franklin's face as printed on the $100 bill. His wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, would later say she bought him the sweatshirt -for sale on FashionNova- because she liked the design.
In other words, only whites are allowed to support sports teams in public. And only white people are allowed to reference fiat currency via outwear. Everyone else is a gang member. That's not hyperbole. That's the only honest conclusion that can be drawn from the gang database run by Prince George's County PD's gang unit."
The gang unit in Prince George's County, whose residents are majority Black and Latino, stopped using the Gang Field Interview Sheet as a source of intelligence gathering about three years ago, amid a civil lawsuit that alleged young men of color were disproportionately represented in it.
The justifications for nominating" gang members were so weak and the targeting so prevalent, federal officials in the area decommissioned this database voluntarily during this litigation. One reason for doing so? Hardly anyone was added to the database once courts and plaintiffs started asking questions about the processes used to determine who was or wasn't a suspected gang member.
In this particular case, a dirty cop dirtied the database with his foregone conclusions about Hispanics" and their possibly un-gang-related support of the Chicago Bulls. Ivan Mendez - since suspended from the Prince George's County PD for tipping off a sex worker about an investigation into the brothel she allegedly ran - was one of several members of the PD's gang unit, a number of which were criminally indicted for charges ranging from gross misconduct to conspiracy to commit criminal acts.
This questionable database, run by and contributed to by even more questionable law enforcement officers, is Donald Trump's sole basis for the baseless gang member" accusations he's been hurling at Abrego Garcia ever since this whole thing blew up in federal court.
To date, the only evidence federal authorities have produced in court to support such allegations is the Maryland police detective's 2019 gang sheet.
Well, that and a photo of someone's hand that someone else has Photoshopped to pretend four different images on four fingers adds up to MS-13.
The administration has an obviously faulty report and a hazy image that isn't the Zapruder freeze frame it seems to think it is. Instead, it's carrying about the odious byproduct of gang unit officers so inherently untrustworthy, neither they nor their database are still in operation today.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President's star witnesses!
From 2004 to 2009, the department was placed under federal oversight after the agency was investigated for canine unit brutality andshooting more peoplethan any other police department in the country. A group of Black and Latino officerssued the department in 2018, alleging police leaders discriminated against officers of color and enabled racist behaviors that harmed residents.
Last year, the departmentwas sued againover the gang unit and its use of the GangNET database after community members repeatedly complained that officers were racially profiling young Latino men and incorrectly labeling them as gang members.
On one hand, you want to be shocked that federal officers would use a defunct database and disgraced officers to justify extrajudicial ejections of people from this country. On the other hand, you can see who's running the country and understand it doesn't really matter to them whether or not they even possess the shittiest, weakest evidence" to support deportations. They're just going to keep doing it because they can.