During the visit of the president of El Salvador to the US this week, President Trump expressed a desire to depart not only illegal aliens, but also American citizens to El Salvador's notorious prison. Is this Guantanamo "extraordinary rendition" on steroids? Also today, Trump's team is divided on Iran: half want to talk, the other half want war. Who will win?
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Sending Prisoners Abroad
00:14:33
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| Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report. | |
| With us today we have Daniel McAdams, our co-host. | |
| Daniel, welcome to the program. | |
| Good morning, Dr. Paul. | |
| How are you this morning? | |
| Very good. | |
| I'm glad to have you here today because we have a complex issue to deal with. | |
| You know, where do you put bad people in prison where they commit the crime? | |
| Or what happens if you put somebody in prison and they weren't guilty and then they send them across lines to another country? | |
| Something like that. | |
| It gets confusing. | |
| In this age of, you know, if you call it terrorism or whatever, and people commit crimes, and talk about a country and a world now engulfed with tariffs and all kinds of competition and a rearrangement in the world, we find a lot of interest in law enforcement. | |
| It's been around before, you know. | |
| There was the idea of terrorism and who were the terrorists and the definition of terrorism after 9-11. | |
| And that was an episode where people were exported to be punished as far as I'm concerned. | |
| I see that as being exported. | |
| But it looks like it's a little more complicated than that, that the administration and his sort of neocon advisors are talking about expanding it, not just one or two or somebody that might have been mistakenly sent away. | |
| He thinks it might be a pretty good idea. | |
| That's just difficult to believe. | |
| You'd think we'd be smart enough or strong enough that we could imprison some people that are outright or try them here. | |
| But we went a few years where there's a few people that demonstrated in Washington, D.C. on January 6th. | |
| As far as I'm concerned, they didn't receive civil liberties and they were citizens and they had not committed violent acts. | |
| To me, and I mentioned this to you, it's so easy to say, look at the picture. | |
| These guys are really bad actors, and they probably are, but does that mean that you should just pick them up and throw them out and put them in a country? | |
| And the other thing, sending it to another country, say, yeah, we'll take care of them. | |
| You have to pay the bills. | |
| And I keep thinking, I wonder if there's any analogy at all of that to having private prisons in this country where the owners of the prison make a profit. | |
| The incentives all of a sudden changes. | |
| So the incentives are a little bit blurred here, but it's an issue that needs to be looked into, especially when there's hints that they would expand that. | |
| Not just foreigners or visitors or somebody committing crimes, that they're talking about maybe they're so bad, even though they're American, they're so bad. | |
| We don't want to mess up our courts with this kind of stuff. | |
| I think we should send them off and maybe we can teach them a lesson. | |
| Who knows what the motivation is? | |
| But that, of course, right now is in debate. | |
| And I think the general record for most a lot of the politicians in both parties are rather careless on how they deal with this because they're careless with the Constitution. | |
| Yet the Constitution does give us some hints on how some of these problems should resolve. | |
| So this is something I think that we need to keep an eye on and we hint at it that we do have some concerns. | |
| Yeah, I think what we're seeing here is a convergence of two things. | |
| Now the first is what we've seen over the past couple of months, which is the administration, through the person of Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, deporting foreign students in the United States, not accusing them of a crime, although they were first promised, Trump first promised that violent foreign students in the U.S. protesting violently would be sent away. | |
| Most Americans thought, okay, that's probably not a bad idea. | |
| But now the people that actually were sent, they've not committed crimes. | |
| They've not even been accused of committing crimes. | |
| But they are against our policy toward Israel or the administration's policy toward Israel, which is protected speech. | |
| Anyone can be opposed to our policy in the Middle East, American or foreign, and are allowed to express it under our First Amendment. | |
| So you have this on the one hand. | |
| You have deporting students for doing nothing other than expressing themselves politically. | |
| And then you have these deportations of illegals, admittedly illegals here in the U.S., to a prison in El Salvador. | |
| Now, what seems to be happening is that these two things are converging to where President Trump is saying, I like the idea of sending people away, and I want to start doing it with Americans. | |
| And that was a shock because people didn't believe. | |
| They thought he's a joke because he says some pretty outlandish things. | |
| No, when the president of El Salvador was in town this week, he openly raised the issue of sending Americans. | |
| Now let's listen to this first clip. | |
| Here is President Trump bringing it up in his own words, his interest in sending American citizens to foreign prisons, including the notorious prison in El Salvador. | |
| Just a follow-up question on the clarification. | |
| You mentioned that you're open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens, but criminals, to El Salvador. | |
| Does that include potentially U.S. citizens, fully naturalized Americans? | |
| If they're criminals, and if they hit people with baseball bats over the head that happen to be 90 years old, and if they rape 87-year-old women in Coney Island, Brooklyn. | |
| Yeah, yeah, that includes them. | |
| Well, do you think there's a special category of person? | |
| They're as bad as anybody that comes in. | |
| We have bad ones, too. | |
| And I'm all for it. | |
| Because we can do things with the president for less money and have great security. | |
| And we have a huge prison population. | |
| We have a huge number of prisons. | |
| And then we have the private prisons. | |
| And some are operated well, I guess, and some aren't. | |
| But he does a great job with that. | |
| We have others that we're negotiating with, too. | |
| Okay, we can put a call up there. | |
| So you establish that you can send people away for having the wrong views on the Middle East, and then you also establish that he wants to send Americans away. | |
| How long is it before that happens? | |
| You know, this looks like an admission that our country, even with a history of protecting liberty and having a constitution, and the history is pretty good. | |
| But it looks like we're admission, well, you know, these guys, this is controversial, and people have to think this through, and we have to study this, but we can't do it here. | |
| We're not smart enough. | |
| There's one or two of them. | |
| They'll be out of control. | |
| So we've got to get them out of here. | |
| And they do that with disobeying the law themselves. | |
| So they export them. | |
| And it also indicates not only You can't punish people here. | |
| It doesn't look like you can made out the justice. | |
| You know, the justice, really the harm done, who committed the crime? | |
| In this one case, it sounds like there wasn't much of a crime being committed. | |
| And maybe there were some mistakes made that we should have, well, in a way, we admitted up to it, but boy, you might as well ignore it. | |
| Maybe we sent the wrong guy back or something like that. | |
| And I am amazed that they can do this and not assume responsibility. | |
| We can just pick them up and shift them away. | |
| But unfortunately, I see that as domestically already happening to some degree when you see people arrested and held for months, if not years, and American citizens that were never proved, they didn't have their day in court. | |
| They were never proven to have committed a violent crime. | |
| Well, whether we're in El Salvador in a bad looking prison here in this country, it's still pretty vicious penalties. | |
| That's a good point. | |
| I think that's one that Trump supporters are missing. | |
| Yeah, you can still support Trump, but those of us who were, and we were consistently opposed to the treatment of the January 6th protesters, we thought it was terrible that they were sent away without due process. | |
| Well, you have to be consistent. | |
| You have to be concerned about due process in this. | |
| Even if they are bad guys with a lot of bad tattoos, you still have to be concerned about this. | |
| So, anyway, here's the article that we read this morning. | |
| It's by Blue Apples on, and it appears on Zero Hedge today. | |
| If we can put that up, the Trump administration reveals intent to deport U.S. citizens to El Salvador. | |
| And he starts out by saying the wanton abandonment of constitutionality and subsequent assault of civil liberties of Americans that disregard entails is an embodiment of the festering corruption plaguing Washington. | |
| Well, Trump has promised to be a panacea that would rid the U.S. of that disease for the better part of a decade since first being elected. | |
| Many of his actions in the second presidential administration convey that he has become infected himself instead of proving to be any such cure. | |
| Very alarming. | |
| Go to the next one. | |
| Now, this is an interesting part in the article, Dr. Paul, because we saw him saying that he wants to send U.S. citizens. | |
| Now, it makes it sound terrible. | |
| People have beat each other with baseball bats, beat up old ladies. | |
| That's terrible. | |
| But as you say, we have prisons. | |
| So, anyway, the interesting thing about this, and it was a good find for the author here, the unprecedented nature of Trump's aim to deport U.S. citizens is so brazenly unconstitutional on its face that the basis by which it is illegal has not even been contemplated. | |
| Considerations of jurisdiction, due process, the Eighth Amendment of the Bill of Rights that protects against cruel and unusual punishment are just a few of the arguments. | |
| Now, here's the point I want to get to, Dr. Paul. | |
| Trump's premise that U.S. citizens can be deported if found guilty of certain crimes is so absurd that it even would violate legislation he signed into law in 2018. | |
| In 2018, at the behest of Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, he signed the First STEP Act into law that requires the federal government to house federal inmates as close to their homes as possible to allow their families to visit them, even requiring the transfer of prisoners more than 500 miles away. | |
| He signed that bill, which sounds like a pretty good bill, and now he's going to violate it by sending them not far away across the country, but to a different Ford country. | |
| You know, this must be a way of trying to hide people who might talk to reporters and the truth coming out, even though it's done with some people that we don't exactly admire. | |
| But you know, in a way, in a superficial way, it reminds me about what happened after 9-11. | |
| Because we conveniently sent our prisoners, the people we had that were suspects, the terrorists. | |
| Everybody, all you had to do is say terrorists, and they were the most vicious criminals ever. | |
| But they sent them to a foreign country. | |
| What do you mean, a foreign country? | |
| They sent them to Guatemala. | |
| They sent us to Guantanamo. | |
| You mean that's not Cuba anymore? | |
| But anyways, they like a foreign country. | |
| And nobody knows exactly what went on to those places. | |
| That is where the torture was done. | |
| And there's been books written about that. | |
| That's sickening. | |
| And it's hard to believe that we're going back to that, where you would take people, they don't have the due process. | |
| They're maybe not even accused of a crime. | |
| The people that have been expelled to this prison in El Salvador already, none of them had a hearing. | |
| None of them are accused of committing a crime. | |
| Now, they may be people, as you say, that we find distasteful. | |
| But if you're going to stand up for civil liberties, sometimes you have to stand up for them for people who you find very distasteful. | |
| Yeah, and that becomes difficult. | |
| And above all, it becomes political. | |
| Then it can be demagogued. | |
| Politicians are prone to use things like this for political advantage and not for justice. | |
| And that becomes more difficult. | |
| And if we, I'm going to do one more quote from this article. | |
| If we can skip one and go to the one following the launch of an anti-Semitism task force and put that one up if we can. | |
| So this is what I was talking about, about the convergence of these two things, Dr. Paul. | |
| So he writes, following the launch of an anti-Semitism task force that aims to revoke the student visas of critics of Israel who could be deported thereafter, discouraged supporters of Trump's sardonically quipped that it would only be a matter of time before American citizens would be deported for criticizing Israel as well. | |
| While those remarks were made in jest, and I highlight this part, the tremendous latitude offered by the Immigration and Nationalities Act to remove non-medicine aliens from the country who the Secretary of State deems to be problematic to U.S. foreign policy creates a legal framework that could serve as the basis to exile American citizens on the same basis. | |
| And that is the part that is most disturbing. | |
| In a way, we're talking more about the First Amendment than any other amendment, is to be able to speak out and not be punished for it. | |
| And this whole thing that it involves, you know, the colleges that are supposed to be our leaders in education, but they do this with the idea that if they don't obey, they can be punished in other ways too. | |
| It used to be, I would make the comment, well, our empire tells people, you do it our way, we'll give you money. | |
|
Intervention and Influence
00:12:58
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| If you don't do it our way, we'll bomb you. | |
| Well, then right now, more recently, is you do it our way, or we'll take the money away from you that we stole from the people and gave to you. | |
| We steal it from one group and give it to another. | |
| Then we wonder why these giant universities, they have billions and billions of dollars in their savings. | |
| And it comes up where it's absolutely ridiculous because it's a threat. | |
| And it can be used as a hammer. | |
| A bully can do this. | |
| And he can say a lot of things. | |
| He or she can say a lot of things that can be frightening and intimidating. | |
| Nobody knows when these tactics occur, how many people become concerned and reserved. | |
| Because, you know, even we talk about, you know, if we say this, you know who's going to be at our door. | |
| You know, I think we work real hard to get the truth out. | |
| But I can imagine the fact that we even have to think about it. | |
| Say, how is this going to be interpreted by the people who have the money and the guns? | |
| But, you know, this whole idea that the people who are getting free money is used as a weapon, indirectly, there may be a little benefit from that because even though it's for the wrong reason, they're taking the money away they didn't deserve in the first place. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, you know, people will say, well, these are just terrible people in Trump outlined. | |
| They hit old ladies with baseball bats. | |
| That is terrible. | |
| But the fact is the government is incompetent and everyone should know that. | |
| They make mistakes. | |
| In fact, as you pointed out in your opening comments, they admitted that they've already made a mistake in this. | |
| And in fact, I found a great discussion between two of our good friends, Judge Napolitano and Gerald Salinti, where the judge outlines the outrageousness of this mistake. | |
| Let's listen to, I think, the first minute of this one, if we can, that second audio clip, video clip here. | |
| Let's listen to the judge for a minute on this. | |
| Two days ago, the government admitted. | |
| Now, I got to tell you, the government never admits in court when it has made a mistake. | |
| This time they did because they had no choice. | |
| They deported the wrong guy. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And he's in a hellhole in El Salvador, a prison that couldn't exist under the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment here in the United States, where he's in a cell the size of a coffin. | |
| And the Trump administration, instead of saying, we're sorry about this, we're going to get him back, boasted about it and said he's no choir boy. | |
| Well, it doesn't matter if he's a choir boy or not. | |
| A federal judge heard a hearing six years ago and granted him asylum. | |
| In those six years, he didn't commit a crime. | |
| He hasn't been accused of crime. | |
| He got married. | |
| He has children. | |
| He works productively in Maryland. | |
| One day, masked men just picked him up off the street, threw him in the back of a truck, shipped him to El Salvador with no hearing. | |
| He's not a gang member. | |
| In fact, according to this federal judge, he fled. | |
| So there we have it. | |
| They were already making terrible mistakes and they refused to correct them. | |
| Isn't that interesting? | |
| They never do it. | |
| This one must have been clear. | |
| They made it and it was out there. | |
| They missed one bit. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| What a shock. | |
| Well, it's chilling. | |
| Let's move on now. | |
| This is an interesting article from Barack Ravid in Axios. | |
| Let's do this next one. | |
| And people are talking about this, that there is a real divide on Trump's team with regard to Iran. | |
| Seems about half of his advisors want to have a discussion with Iran, as we saw over the weekend. | |
| And the other half just want to go bombs away right now. | |
| Go to the next one here because President Trump has vowed to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but inside his national security team, there's divide over the best way to do it. | |
| Now, go to the next one, and here's more about the division. | |
| One camp, unofficially led by Vice President Vance, believes diplomatic solution is both preferable and possible, and that the U.S. should be ready to make compromises in order to make it happen. | |
| Vance is highly involved in the Iran policy discussions, the officials said. | |
| This camp, now this is the camp of Let's Talk, also includes Trump's envoy, Steve Wipkoff, who represented the U.S. in the first round of Iran talks on Saturday, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. | |
| I wonder if he really is in that camp, but we'll see. | |
| It also gets outside support from MAGA influencer and Trump whisperer Tucker Carlson. | |
| They're concerned that striking Iran's nuclear facilities will put U.S. soldiers in the region in harm's way when Iran strikes back. | |
| They also argue a new conflict in the region would send oil prices skyrocketing at a sensitive time for the U.S. economy. | |
| Now, I do have a post on X from Tucker Carlson, and here's what Tucker put out a couple of days ago, clearly identifying which camp he's in. | |
| He said, Whatever you think of tariffs, it's clear now it's clear that now is the worst possible time for the United States to participate in a military strike on Iran. | |
| We can't afford it. | |
| Thousands of Americans would die. | |
| We'd lose the war that follows. | |
| Nothing would be more destructive to our country. | |
| And yet we're closer than ever, thanks to unrelenting pressure from neocons. | |
| This is suicidal. | |
| Anyone advocating for conflict with Iran is not an ally of the United States, but an enemy. | |
| Very strong words. | |
| Over 9 million people have used this. | |
| Very strong words. | |
| You know, I see an analogy here in economics. | |
| When you have interventionism, it's vague and broad. | |
| It invites special interest groups to manipulate the system. | |
| But if you had a system of government where you would have debates of all sorts, but you would have a principled group saying, we believe in laissez-faire. | |
| Everything is free choices. | |
| And it's voluntarism. | |
| That is one group. | |
| That's real easy to tell. | |
| Whether it's personal, social, religious, or whatever, you could follow those rules. | |
| But as soon as you invite the intervention part, it can vary. | |
| And that's when people get arbitrary and they start lobbying and using pressure and intuendo and using power to do this. | |
| Well, I think that this works here too. | |
| That when it comes to foreign policy, what if there was a few of us in charge and we had a stated policy, ABC, defended by the Constitution, it is not our business to tell other countries how to live, and we are not going to intervene in the internal affairs of other nations. | |
| And we will follow those. | |
| Where would the debate be? | |
| But the contest here is the politicians and the people really looking for making the dollar, they like something arbitrary like interventionism. | |
| Interventionism to make the world safe for democracy gives it an arbitrariness and it opens up the door to all kinds of mischief. | |
| And they go and they do this and the dictators have to, they are in competition. | |
| So you have the dictatorship against the non-the laissez-faire, the free market people. | |
| And the arguments go on and on and on and they vary and they sneak it and they use power and back and forth. | |
| That's why I have a lot more respect for somebody who stated their principles and this is what we believe. | |
| In a way, we believe in controlling people. | |
| And there have been leaders that outrightly believe, and sometimes you hear it sneaking into our own debates here, that it is our job to do this to make sure that people behave and make sure they don't take the wrong side in major debates on which country is right and how are we going to solve this problem. | |
| Who are we going to give the money to? | |
| You know, which country deserves it? | |
| Oh, why don't you just divide it up? | |
| Well, we do a lot of that too. | |
| But guess what? | |
| They don't divide up the penalties. | |
| The people who suffer from the policy and they don't make it fair and clear-cut who gets the taxes paid. | |
| It's usually the most innocent that aren't getting one nickel or benefit from all this intervention. | |
| So I think a pitch for our foreign policy of non-intervention, whether it's in economics or foreign policy, would remove all this stuff. | |
| It just opens up the door to mischief. | |
| But, you know, just like we talked about yesterday about the neocons, the neocons are in the other camp. | |
| Now, we saw the one camp that want to talk first. | |
| Now, here's the other side from the same article. | |
| If you put that last one up, the other camp, which includes National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is highly suspicious of Iran and extremely skeptical of the chances of a deal that significantly rolls back Iran's nuclear program. | |
| Also, senators close to Trump like Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton hold that view. | |
| Now here's the part. | |
| I highlighted this because this is exactly what they said about Iraq. | |
| This camp believes Iran is weaker than ever and therefore the U.S. should not compromise but insist Tehran fully dismantle its nuclear program and should either strike Iran directly or support an Israeli strike if they don't. | |
| Iran hawks like Mark Dubowitz, CEO of Foundation for Defensive Democracies, are lobbying hard for that approach. | |
| Here's a quote from Dubowitz. | |
| The president once called the 2015 Obama deal fatally flawed. | |
| The question now is whether he still believes it. | |
| So he is exactly who Tucker must be referring to when he talks about the relentless, relentless pushing by the neocons for this war. | |
| They never give up. | |
| They want it now. | |
| You know, your point is great about misanalyzing the strength of your enemy. | |
| It'll be a cakewalk. | |
| Kickwalk, yeah. | |
| Cakewalk. | |
| Remember, well, you know, that nonsense started in Vietnam. | |
| True. | |
| You know, just think, I think that's where it was. | |
| 68,000 Americans died, and we walked away with our tail between our legs. | |
| And ICA always argued all that war and killing and spending that went on and there were no real benefit. | |
| So we lose, we walk away, and the Vietnamese more or less take over what they're doing, and all of a sudden we're trading with them. | |
| So it's just so useless. | |
| But, you know, it was misanalysis of Vietnam. | |
| They're not capable of taking on side. | |
| I always look on who sees themselves as the home team, who's the home defender. | |
| And the best example of that, that has a long history, would be Afghanistan. | |
| They always survive because they're defending the homeland. | |
| And that's something that our government does not understand. | |
| Yeah, and the Mark Dubowitzes of the world and the Levins of the world, he did a post yesterday saying we need to go to war with Iran. | |
| They're not going to be fighting these wars. | |
| They're going to send other people to fight the wars. | |
| And it wasn't a cakewalk. | |
| A lot of people died. | |
| Oh, well, we were wrong. | |
| Remember what they said about Iraq? | |
| We were heroes in error. | |
| Yeah, right. | |
| The only thing left is when the money runs out. | |
| They run out of our soldiers willing to go over there. | |
| But where was it? | |
| I think it was Ukraine that just started, decided to draft the women to. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| That's terrible. | |
| So that's going to solve their problems. | |
| Well, thank everyone for watching the show today. | |
| And please don't forget to hit that thumbs up or like button, which I'm about to do right now. | |
| I'm going to like our show for us. | |
| And we appreciate you viewing. | |
| Over to you, Dr. Paul. | |
| Very well, thank you. | |
| And I want to once again thank our viewers for tuning in and simplify my beliefs and our beliefs and our promotion. | |
| There's a big difference between non-intervention and volunteerism as well as authoritarianism. | |
| Of course, we vote for the side of non-intervention and volunteerism and defending the principles of personal liberty. | |
| I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report. | |