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Cory Booker to visit El Salvador in effort to return wrongly deported man to US
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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They need to stop this 1 at a time thing. Get like 40 members of Congress, Senators and Representatives. Show up at CECOT with cameras live streaming and demand to be admitted. When they refuse, force your way in.
I don't believe anyone in El Salvador, including Bukele and the goons staffing the prison, want to have a live stream of them assaulting/arresting a bunch of US members of Congress. And if they do, maybe that'll help wake some Republican voters up to the fascism.
What a strange, absurdly bad idea.
The Rs would celebrate the Ds getting detained in El Salvadore. Everyone going together would be risky as F. If they all get detained, there are no Ds to push back against this shit.
Uh.... how exactly are any of them pushing back on anything right now?
Excellent argument. We have no constituents to begin with. Time to increase protests.
Protests? We're less than a week from martial law. The time for beliefs of peaceful protest is done.
Peaceful demonstrations have ALWAYS played a part in every successful social movement. They shouldn't be the ONLY thing people are doing. They should be paired with more radical strategic actions. But solely relying on violence is also a losing strategy. We should embrace a diversity of tactics, not shout down people who are out there trying to do something.
That's a bad move.
I disagree.
Bukele is an authoritarian asshole who is friendly with Trump. You want the entire Democrat rep crew to get held on bogus charges in a foreign country because Trump sees an opportunity?
Think.
I want somebody to do something more than a photo op. Yes, Bukele is an authoritarian just like Trump. But Trump relies on a large amount of his base thinking that he's in the right. I don't believe he nor Bukele want the optics of concentration camp guards assaulting a bunch of members of the US Congress. And I don't believe that a bunch of concentration camp guards would be willing to assault them on livestream to the entire world.
Show up with bodyguards. They don't need to be armed, but be physically intimidating and insist that they're going to enter and find the Americans who are being wrongfully detained.
All the Democrats, or really anyone in opposition to Trump, have been doing is playing it safe. If nobody is willing to take risks then the fascists will never feel threatened. If they had the balls to try what I suggested, one of two things will happen. They guards could get violent and assault, arrest, or even kill some members of the US Congress. That would spark outrage in the US. The opposition to Trump would grow and there would be even more motivation to stop him from sending people to foreign gulags.
More likely, IMO, the guards would back down and the members of Congress would prove that Bukele and Trump aren't as all powerful as they want to seem. They'd also get live video inside CECOT to show the world exactly how horrendous it is.
That's not really the point though. The reality is that Trump's psychos find loopholes, and they have one now.
We can either deal with the illegal nature of what happened to get innocent people kidnapped to El Salvador in the first place (Boasberg is working on that), or we can deal with the actual political influence of the Democrats, which isn't much but a whisper and bet at this point.
Bukele isn't going to budge because he feels safe with Trump. Make him less safe, and he will cave.
This:
Directly contradicts this:
The fascists aren't going to bow down and accept defeat just because a judge orders them to or Democrats vote really hard in Congress. They don't play by the rules. If/when Boasberg finds them in contempt and orders they send someone to El Salvador to bring people back, they'll ignore him and probably find a way to get him out of office. Democrats have already shown all their political "power" is completely impotent. It's not that it "isn’t much but a whisper and bet," it's non-existent. There is NOTHING we can do to help these people just by sticking to the rules of how politics are normally done.
I am talking about making Bukele feel less safe. You do that by directly challenging the base of his power. The base of his power is fear of getting sent to CECOT. Challenge that. Prove that people can go there and get people out of it. All they've been doing so far is political theater.
Your entire mindset is weak and simple about the problems at hand. You aren't think multiple steps out.
You seem to want violence without consequences. You also just seem to want everything on a platter. It doesn't work that way.
Your entire methodology is like this:
Wow, are you so incredibly far off.
Just 1 single Senator was enough to scare them into backtracking on their previous denial and grant a face-to-face meeting with Abrego Garcia. He's been locked back up now, but, as far as I'm aware, this was the first time anyone locked up in CECOT has ever been let out even on a short-term basis to meet with someone outside the concentration camp.
And that's what just 1 Senator was able to accomplish. The bad PR of denying him was enough to scare them into it. So my question is, what could 40 manage to accomplish?
It will manage an international incident, and Trump arranging arrests of "accidents". In the world we live in now, it's not a good idea.
That didn't happen when just 1 Senator went and didn't live stream his visit. If they really wanted to, they could have claimed he did something violent or something. There'd have been no way to prove otherwise. And he was able to get them to crack just by holding a press conference. The bad PR from 1 guy getting denied scared them so much that they let him meet Abrego Garcia.
So why do you think they'd do that if there was a large group and the entire thing was being live streamed?
We still have allies we can call on as long as we get rid of the orange. THAT is where the problem comes. We have to deal with this shit on our own. Nobody is coming to help Americans regardless of sides. China has no interest in helping us and they have us by the balls. They know that American manufacturing is weak and we have literally nothing to counter it.
The cynic in me knows that since it would be only D's going down there, the fascists would use their absence to cram some shit through. The smart play would be to send only congresspeople and keep the senators here to make sure that nothing Mike LovesJohnson slides up can pass filibuster and get to the Diet Coke Desk.
That's not really a concern at all. They haven't been using Congress to pass anything thus far. They've just been doing it all through Executive Orders, so it doesn't really matter what Congress can or can't pass.
Plus, that's not how Congress works, either. Republicans hold a majority in both houses. In the House, if all Republicans vote together there's literally nothing Democrats can do (within the normal rules of how Congress functions) to stop them. It doesn't matter if every single Democrat is there or none of them are. They have the same power. And the only difference in the Senate is the existence of the filibuster, but they don't need any Democrats there to use it. They just threaten to filibuster any given piece of legislation and it requires 60 votes to pass (technically, for cloture, then 50+1 to pass, but the effect is 60 to pass). Again, it doesn't matter if all Democrats are present or none are. Their power is exactly the same.
Such a dumb, American-centric idea. No Central American banana-republic dictator is going to care that they are Senators/ Reps, they'll just mow them down with machine guns. The fact that it is livestreamed only demonstrates how powerful they are to the entire world.
Their ONLY fear would be retaliation from the US military, but HitlerPig won't do that. He already greenlit the torture murder of Adnan Khashoggi so that it wouldnt derail his arms talks with Saudi Arabia. Not only will he not respond to killing a bunch of elected Democrats, he'd publicly praise it.
I don't think you have a very strong grasp on international politics.
Said the guy who just wrote a delusional fan fiction. Looking for a TV win instead of a policy win. I'm not sure you understand much of anything outside of creative writing.
Van Hollen on his own going down there was enough to cajole them into giving him a face-to-face meeting with Abrego Garcia. Two days ago half the people on the internet were convinced Abrego Garcia was already dead, but just 1 Senator was able to disprove that. The government of El Salvador was so afraid of the optics of denying just a single Senator that they backed down from their initial refusal and completely capitulated.
And you think it's fantasy that a larger number could accomplish more? You are clearly not paying the slightest bit of attention.
Honestly, I'm done trying to work with Republicans.
Oh, I don't think a single Republican would join in on this, and I wouldn't want those fascists to take part anyways.
They are too busy whining that they are scared of the monster they created.
Nah. They like what Trump is doing. They are all 100% complicit in it.
https://www.mediaite.com/tv/we-are-all-afraid-republican-senator-admits-colleagues-are-terrified-of-being-punished-for-criticizing-trump/
Fear is not an excuse for complicity. They all have the option to resign in protest if they're really that principled about it. But they're not. They care more about keeping a position of power.
Yeah, that's kinda my point.
You can't force your way into a foriegn country, or prison, or force a president to do anything.
60 members of the senate can stay at home, in their office and pass a law to prevent this. What the fuck is this real world OZ TV braint rot shit i just read.
The Republicans control the Senate and they want this to happen. There are not 60 Senators, let alone a majority, who are opposed to sending people to concentration camps.
Playing by the normal rules of politics is how we got here. Staying in their offices and just voting in the Senate is what they've been doing for the past decade to oppose Trump, and the fascists have only gotten stronger. What the fuck do you think that's going to accomplish?
Van Hollen on his own went down there and was able to cajole them into giving him a face-to-face meeting with Abrego Garcia. They were so afraid of the optics of just a single Senator getting denied an face-to-face meeting that they went back on their previous denial and granted it. I'd love to see what a whole crowd could accomplish.
Well then risking our Democratic senators lives for a picture. Doesn’t seem like a great idea. Does it seems like we should be pressuring those Republican Congress people to resign because they’re in violation of their oaths. How’s that for a fucking message?
I'm not talking about just getting a picture. And you think Republicans will resign because....why? Because we asked them to? Why would they? This is all exactly what they want.
Excuse me for not being realistic enough for your fantasy, I’m sure saudis will take our political dissidents. You understand my point that feeing one person does not stop more people form encountering the same fate
I never said it would stop anything. But it's a hell of a lot more than sitting at home writing legislation that will never get a vote and pretending like politics as usual is how anything works anymore.
Well to my point it sounds like they around rounding up more people and sending them to El Salvador today. Maybe they can talk to all of them when they’re down there and get a picture of each one. Or the next 200 that they send on Easter or the next 200 they send the day after that