Afghanistan’s women fear the worst as Taliban advance sows alarm and terror

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Taliban militants are expected to capture significant territory in Afghanistan, threatening the rights of young women and their families. (AFP)
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Updated 02 August 2021
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Afghanistan’s women fear the worst as Taliban advance sows alarm and terror

  • Since 2001 women have held key positions in institutions, run for the presidency and served as ambassadors
  • Educated women fearful of losing their freedoms and rights as ultraconservative Pashtun group eyes power

KABUL: With US-led forces set to leave Afghanistan by the end of August, the Taliban making rapid territorial gains, and uncertainty over the state of peace talks between the insurgent group and the government in Kabul, a critical question hangs over the fate of Afghan women’s liberties and hard-won rights.

After years of subordination, Afghan women came to enjoy unprecedented freedoms in the years after 2001 when US-led forces toppled the Taliban regime, which had imposed harsh curbs on civil liberties, barring women from education and most occupations outside the home.

In the absence of the Taliban, Afghan women have held key positions in various state institutions, have run for the presidency, and have served as lawmakers, ministers and ambassadors. Governing parties have not opposed such basic principles of democracy as gender equality and free expression.

 

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The imminent departure of the last remaining foreign troops, therefore, is a source of considerable anxiety and tension for the middle class and educated women in Afghanistan’s urban areas, who fear that a return to power by the Taliban would deprive them of the freedoms they currently enjoy.

“Everyone now is afraid. We are all worried about what will happen,” Nargis, 23, manager of the newly opened Aryana fashion store in Kabul, told Arab News.




Nargis left her journalism to work in retail due to the increase in recent targeted attacks on media professionals. (Sayed Salahuddin/Arab News)

“People have witnessed one dark Taliban era. If they come again, certainly they will not allow women to work, and I will not be where I am today.”

Nargis has a degree in journalism, but due to a surge in targeted attacks on media workers in recent years, she decided she could not risk continuing in the profession.

As in any war-torn society, women suffer disproportionately in Afghanistan, which has frequently been ranked the worst place in the world to be a woman. Several female journalists, women’s rights activists, and women serving in the Afghan security forces have been murdered, either by suspected militants or by relatives in so-called honor killings.

Some Afghans who had hoped the Taliban would liberalize their more draconian policies following talks with the US and the Afghan government have been left disappointed by the restrictions the group has imposed in areas it has seized from Afghan forces since the start of the foreign drawdown.

They say the Taliban has ordered women to not venture outdoors without a male family member, to wear the all-enveloping burqa, and have barred men from shaving their beards, reminiscent of the group’s policies when it ruled the country from 1996 to 2001.

“You see in the areas the Taliban is controlling they have imposed forced marriages, sexual slavery, and child marriages are rising,” Shukria Barakzai, a prominent women’s rights activist who served as Afghanistan’s ambassador to Norway, told Arab News.




Afghanis said the Taliban are forcing women to wear a burqa whenever they are outside. (File/AFP)

“They are taking young widows and young girls hostage. This is against the culture of Afghanistan, religion, and all rules of war. War crimes are happening now against the people of Afghanistan and especially against the women of this society.”

Taliban officials have rejected the charges, insisted that they have issued no such orders, and accused critics of trying to tarnish the group’s image.

While women in urban areas oppose constitutional and social changes that would significantly limit their rights obtained during the past two decades, some women, at least in rural areas, are indifferent to the prospect of a Taliban takeover.

These women do not feel connected to women of the urban elite, and would rather speak for themselves. Many of these rural, and even some urban, women consider peace as their main priority, even if it means sacrificing some rights that they are currently unable to exercise in any case.




Women in Afghanistan have enjoyed considerable freedoms in the absence of Taliban after 2001. (Sayed Salahuddin/Arab News)

“The so-called Afghan leaders speak about women’s rights merely to draw the West’s attention to keep them in power and provide them money because we have not seen their sisters and women on TV or with them in public areas,” Nasira Ghafoori, a tailor from Ghazni province, told Arab News.

“Some of them even feel ashamed to mention their daughters, sisters, and wives by name in public. Such leaders and other women who misuse the slogans of women’s rights have no place here. We are only interested in peace and ending the war.”

Not all Afghan women are ready to surrender their freedoms in the interest of peace. Maryam Durrani, a women’s rights activist who runs a gym for women and several education centers in southern Kandahar, the former seat of Taliban power, says she has had to limit her activities and partly close the gym following threats on social media since the Taliban made new inroads into the province.

“They threatened me, saying ‘we will kill you because of your activities.’ Unfortunately, because of that, as a precautionary measure, we have shut down the club to protect the lives of our customers,” Durrani, winner of the International Women of Courage Award 2012, told Arab News.

FASTFACTS

Taliban banned girls from studying and stoned women to death for crimes such as adultery.

Afghanistan’s parliament today has 68 female lawmakers, accounting for about 30 percent of the lower house.

More Afghan women were killed or wounded in the first half of 2021 than in the first 6 months of any year since 2009.

“The issue is not that the Taliban is coming back. It depends on the Taliban’s mentality and ideology. If their ideology has changed, then we may have some of the freedoms that we have now, but if they come with their past ideology, then it is clear women will not have a good time.”

The rise of the Taliban in 1996 had disrupted a long and uneven journey to women’s emancipation through education and empowerment. In the 1920s, Queen Soraya played an active role in the country’s political and social development alongside her husband, King Amanullah Khan. A bold advocate for women’s rights, she introduced modern education for women, one that included sciences, history, and other subjects.

After some setbacks, women in the 1960s helped draft Afghanistan’s first comprehensive constitution, which was ratified in 1964. It recognized the equal rights of men and women as citizens and established democratic elections. In 1965, four women were elected to parliament and several others became government ministers.

Women’s status improved rapidly under Soviet-backed socialist regimes of the late 1970s and 1980s. Parliament strengthened girls’ education and outlawed practices opposed by women. By 1992, despite the political upheavals wracking the country, Afghan women were full participants in public life.




Women demonstrators march toward to the governor office during a peaceful protest to mark International Women's Day in Herat on March 8, 2021. (File/AFP)

With the withdrawal of Western forces, not only is the fate of Afghanistan’s democratic institutions in peril but also the human rights of its women, going by reports streaming in from beleaguered districts.

Asila Ahmadzai, a senior journalist with Afghan news agency Farhat, says educated women in civil society, in the media, in rights groups, and involved in entrepreneurial pursuits have fled their homes in the northern and northeastern provinces that have fallen to the Taliban.

“The situation for women in Afghanistan now is very worrying because the Taliban is gaining ground. Due to the fear of the Taliban, educated women have moved to Kabul from the rural areas,” she told Arab News.

“No female activist, member of civil society, journalist or trader wants to live in Taliban-held areas because the Taliban do not allow them to work. The Taliban only allows girls to go to school up to the age of seven — not beyond that age. If the Taliban takes cities, educated women will then leave the country for good because they cannot afford to live under the group’s restrictions.”

Women such as Barakzai fear that the withdrawal of foreign troops, coupled with the failure to obtain guarantees from the Taliban that they would honor women’s rights as enshrined under the constitution, means that the situation for women and girls will be far worse if the group retakes power.




Taliban militants are expected to capture significant territory in Afghanistan, threatening the rights of young women and their families. (File/AFP)

Some have pinned hopes on the US-sponsored talks between Kabul and the Taliban and believe there will be pressure on the Taliban from outside to reform some of its views, especially from Washington, which has repeatedly reiterated the need to protect the gains made since the Taliban’s removal.

“In this era, there is no place for attempts to limit girls’ access to school or women’s rights in society, the workplace or governance,” Ross Wilson, the US chargé d’affaires to Kabul, tweeted last week in response to worrying reports from areas conquered by the Taliban.

“To the Taliban — welcome to 2021. Women and men have equal rights … halt your efforts to undermine the gains of the past 20 years. Join the 21st century.”

Critics, however, argue that the US has very little leverage over the Taliban’s attitudes and policies since it has failed to compel the Taliban to halt its attacks, which was a key component of the deal it struck with the group in exchange for the withdrawal of foreign troops.

“Whether government negotiators can force the Taliban not to weaken women’s rights and the opportunities of middle and upper-class urban women will largely depend on what happens in the war between the Taliban and the government,” Taj Mohammad, a Kabul-based analyst, told Arab News.

“Long gone are the days when US leaders justified the war and the invasion partly due to human and women’s rights issues.”

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Twitter: @sayedsalahuddin


Putin attends Orthodox Easter service after declaring ceasefire in Ukraine

Updated 57 min 29 sec ago
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Putin attends Orthodox Easter service after declaring ceasefire in Ukraine

  • The traditionally sung service starts late on a Saturday and lasts into the early hours of Sunday

President Vladimir Putin and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin joined other worshippers for an Easter service led by the head of Russia’s Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, a faithful backer of the Russian leader and an advocate for the war in Ukraine.
Hours after declaring a unilateral Easter ceasefire that Kyiv said was just words as fighting continued, Putin and Sobyanin stood in Moscow’s main church, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, while Kirill led a procession, video of the service showed.
Holding a lit thin red candle and donning a dark suit, white shirt and a red tie as in years past, the Russian leader crossed himself several times when Kirill announced “Christ is risen.”
The traditionally sung service starts late on a Saturday and lasts into the early hours of Sunday.
For Putin, the Orthodox faith is central to his world view and he always attends services during major church holidays. For Orthodox Russians, Easter is the most important religious holiday.
At the service, Krill called for “lasting and just peace can be established in the vast expanses of historical Rus,” RIA state news agency reported, in what was a reference to a medieval territory that encompassed parts of what is now Ukraine, Belarus and Russia. “How wonderfully it was said, do not do evil to another and do not treat others as you would not want them to treat you,” TASS agency cited Kirill as saying.
“If people adhered to this holiday commandment, then life would be completely different: family and social life and — let me say this — inter-governmental.”
Kirill has strongly backed the war in Ukraine, now in its fourth year. Thousands have been killed, the vast majority of them Ukrainians, and millions driven from their homes since Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.


Zelensky says Ukraine will observe Putin’s Easter truce but claims violations

Updated 20 April 2025
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Zelensky says Ukraine will observe Putin’s Easter truce but claims violations

  • The order to halt all combat over the Easter weekend came after months of efforts by US President Donald Trump to get Moscow and Kyiv to agree a ceasefire

KRAMATORSK, Ukraine: Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday his forces would observe a surprise Easter truce announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin set to last until midnight on Sunday, even as air-raid sirens sounded in Kyiv.
The 30-hour truce would be the most significant pause in the fighting throughout the three-year conflict.
But just hours after the order was meant to have come into effect, air-raid sirens sounded in the Ukrainian capital and Zelensky accused Russia of having maintained its artillery fire and assaults on the frontline.
Also on Saturday, Russia and Ukraine held a large exchange of prisoners, each side saying they had handed back more than 240 captured fighters.
The order to halt all combat over the Easter weekend came after months of efforts by US President Donald Trump to get Moscow and Kyiv to agree a ceasefire. On Friday, Washington even threatened to withdraw from talks if no progress was made.
“Today from 1800 (1500 GMT Saturday) to midnight Sunday (2100 GMT Sunday), the Russian side announces an Easter truce,” Putin said in televised comments during a meeting with the Russian chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov.
Zelensky responded by saying Ukraine would follow suit, and proposed extending the truce beyond Sunday. But the Ukrainian leader also accused Russia of having already broken its promises.

Air-raid sirens sounded in Kyiv and several other regions on Saturday evening.
“Russian assault operations continue on several frontline sectors, and Russian artillery fire has not subsided,” Zelensky said.
Putin had said the truce for the Easter holiday celebrated on Sunday was motivated by “humanitarian reasons.”
While he expected Ukraine to comply, he said that Russian troops “must be ready to resist possible breaches of the truce and provocations by the enemy.”
Zelensky in a social media post wrote: “If Russia is now suddenly ready to truly engage in a format of full and unconditional silence, Ukraine will act accordingly — mirroring Russia’s actions.”
He added: “If a complete ceasefire truly takes hold, Ukraine proposes extending it beyond the Easter day of April 20.”
He proposed that “30 days could give peace a chance,” while pointing out that Putin had earlier rejected a proposed 30-day full and unconditional ceasefire.

“The fighting is ongoing, and Russian attacks continue,” Ukraine’s military command, the Chief of Staff, reported Saturday evening.
“In some areas on the frontline, Russian artillery continues to be heard, despite the promise of silence from the Russian leader. Russian drones are being used. It is quieter in some areas.”
Soldiers in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk close to the front line earlier greeted the truce announcement with skepticism.
Putin “might do it to give some hope or to show his humanity,” said Dmitry, a 40-year-old soldier. “But either way, of course, we don’t trust (Russia).”
Putin said the latest truce proposal would show “how sincere is the Kyiv’s regime’s readiness, its desire and ability to observe agreements and participate in a process of peace talks.”
Russia launched its full-scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine in February 2022.
Previous attempts at holding ceasefires for Easter in April 2022 and Orthodox Christmas in January 2023 were not implemented after both sides failed to agree on them.

“For millions of Ukrainians, Easter is one of the most important holidays. And millions of Ukrainians will go to church,” said Zelensky in his evening address.
“Over the years of this full-scale war, Russian attacks have destroyed or damaged more than 600 churches, prayer houses and places of worship.”
In Kramatorsk, one soldier, Vladislav, 22, said: “I feel like it’s going to start again after a while, and it’s going to go on and on.”
On the streets of Moscow, Yevgeny Pavlov, 58, said he did not think Russia should give Ukraine a breather.
“There is no need to give them respite. If we press, it means we should press to the end,” he told AFP.
Earlier Saturday, Ukraine and Russia said they had each returned 246 soldiers being held as prisoners of war in a swap mediated by the United Arab Emirates.
Zelensky said the total number of returned POWs now stood at 4,552.
The UAE’s foreign ministry said 31 wounded Ukrainians and 15 wounded Russians were also exchanged.
The UAE said it was committed to “finding a peaceful solution” to the conflict and “mitigating the humanitarian impacts.”
Russia said it had retaken the penultimate village still under Ukrainian control in its Kursk frontier region.
Kyiv had hoped to use its hold on the region as a bargaining chip in the talks.


Three Hegseth aides ousted in leak investigation decry ‘baseless attacks’

Updated 20 April 2025
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Three Hegseth aides ousted in leak investigation decry ‘baseless attacks’

  • Former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot also announced he was resigning this week

WASHINGTON: Three former senior advisers to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth decried on Saturday what they called “baseless attacks” after each was escorted from the Pentagon in an expanding probe on information leaks.
Dan Caldwell, a Hegseth aide; Colin Carroll, chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg; and Darin Selnick, Hegseth’s deputy chief of staff were among four officials in Hegseth’s inner circle who were ousted this past week.
While the three initially had been placed on leave pending the investigation, a joint statement shared by Caldwell on X said the three were “incredibly disappointed by the manner in which our service at the Department of Defense ended. Unnamed Pentagon officials have slandered our character with baseless attacks on our way out the door.”
“At this time, we still have not been told what exactly we were investigated for, if there is still an active investigation, or if there was even a real investigation of ‘leaks’ to begin with,” the post said.
Former Pentagon spokesman John Ullyot also announced he was resigning this week. The Pentagon said, however, that Ullyot was asked to resign.
The upheaval comes less than 100 days into the Trump administration where the Pentagon has found itself frequently in the epicenter of controversial moves — from firings of senior military and civilian staff to broad edicts to purge content that promoted diversity, equity or inclusion. That led to images or other online content of heroes like the Tuskegee Airmen and Jackie Robinson being temporarily removed from the military’s websites, causing public uproar.
Last month, Hegseth announced that the Pentagon’s intelligence and law enforcement arms were investigating what it says are leaks of national security information following reports that Elon Musk was set to receive a classified briefing on potential war plans with China.
In the announcement by Hegseth’s chief of staff, Joe Kasper, the office warned that Defense Department personnel could face polygraphs in the probe.
The departures also follow the firings of senior military officers, including Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. CQ Brown; Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti; National Security Agency and US Cyber Command director Gen. Tim Haugh; and Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, the US military representative to the NATO Military Committee.

 


250 years after America went to war for independence, a divided nation battles over its legacy

Updated 20 April 2025
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250 years after America went to war for independence, a divided nation battles over its legacy

  • Historians can confidently tell us that hundreds of British troops marched from Boston in the early morning of April 19, 1775, and gathered about 14 miles (23 kilometers) northwest, on Lexington’s town green

LEXINGTON, Mass.: Tens of thousands of people came to Lexington, Massachusetts, just before dawn on Saturday to witness a reenactment of how the American Revolution began 250 years ago, with the blast of gunshot and a trail of colonial flair.
Starting with Saturday’s anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the country will look back to its war of independence and ask where its legacy stands today. Just after dawn on the Lexington Battle Green, militiamen, muskets in hand, took on a much larger contingent of British regulars. The battle ended with eight Americans killed and 10 wounded — the dead scattered on the grounds as the British marched off.
The regulars would head to Concord but not before a horseman, Dr. Samuel Prescott, rode toward the North Bridge and warned communities along the way that the British were coming. A lone horseman reenacted that ride Saturday, followed by a parade through town and a ceremony at the bridge.
The day offers an opportunity to reflect on this seminal moment in history but also consider what this fight means today. Organizers estimated that over 100,000 came out for events in the two towns Saturday.
“It’s truly momentous,” said Richard Howell, who portrayed Lexington Minute Man Samuel Tidd in the battle.
“This is one of the most sacred pieces of ground in the country, if not the world, because of what it represents,” he said. “To represent what went on that day, how a small town of Lexington was a vortex of so much.”
Among those watching the Lexington reenactment was Brandon Mace, a lieutenant colonel with the Army Reserve whose ancestor Moses Stone was in the Lexington militia.
He said watching the reenactment was “a little emotional.”
“He made the choice just like I made and my brother made, and my son is in the Army as well,” Mace said. .”.. He did not know we would be celebrating him today. He did not know that he was participating in the birth of the nation. He just knew his friends and family were in danger.”
The 250th anniversary comes with President Donald Trump, scholars and others divided over whether to have a yearlong party leading up to July 4, 2026, as Trump has called for, or to balance any celebrations with questions about women, the enslaved and Indigenous people and what their stories reveal.
What happened at Lexington and Concord?
Historians can confidently tell us that hundreds of British troops marched from Boston in the early morning of April 19, 1775, and gathered about 14 miles (23 kilometers) northwest, on Lexington’s town green.
Witnesses remembered some British officers yelled, “Throw down your arms, ye villains, ye rebels!” and that a shot was heard amid the chaos, followed by “scattered fire” from the British. The battle turned so fierce that the area reeked of burning powder. By day’s end, the fighting had moved to about 7 miles (11 kilometers) west to Concord and some 250 British and 95 colonizts were killed or wounded.
But no one knows who fired first, or why. And the revolt itself was initially less a revolution than a demand for better terms.
Woody Holton, a professor of early American history at the University of South Carolina, said most scholars agree that the rebels of April 1775 weren’t looking to leave the empire, but to repair their relationship with King George III and go back to the days before the Stamp Act, the Tea Act and other disputes of the previous decade.
“The colonizts only wanted to turn back the clock to 1763,” he said.
Stacy Schiff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose books include biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Adams, said Lexington and Concord “galvanized opinion precisely as the Massachusetts men hoped it would, though still it would be a long road to a vote for independence, which Adams felt should have been declared on 20 April 1775.”
But at the time, Schiff added, “It did not seem possible that a mother country and her colony had actually come to blows.”
A fight for the ages
The rebels already believed their cause was bigger than a disagreement between subjects and rulers. Well before the turning points of 1776 — before the Declaration of Independence or Thomas Paine’s boast that “We have it in our power to begin the world over again” — they cast themselves in a drama for the ages.
The so-called Suffolk Resolves of 1774, drafted by civic leaders of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, prayed for a life “unfettered by power, unclogged with shackles,” a fight that would determine the “fate of this new world, and of unborn millions.”
The revolution was an ongoing story of surprise and improvization. Military historian Rick Atkinson, whose book “The Fate of the Day” is the second of a planned trilogy on the war, called Lexington and Concord “a clear win for the home team,” if only because the British hadn’t expected such impassioned resistance from the colony’s militia.
The British, ever underestimating those whom King George regarded as a “deluded and unhappy multitude,” would be knocked back again when the rebels promptly framed and transmitted a narrative blaming the royal forces.
“Once shots were fired in Lexington, Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren did all in their power to collect statements from witnesses and to circulate them quickly; it was essential that the colonies, and the world, understand who had fired first,” Schiff said. “Adams was convinced that the Lexington skirmish would be ‘famed in the history of this country.’ He knocked himself out to make clear who the aggressors had been.”
A country still in progress
Neither side imagined a war lasting eight years, or had confidence in what kind of country would be born out of it. The founders united in their quest for self-government but differed how to actually govern, and whether self-government could even last.
Americans have never stopped debating the balance of powers, the rules of enfranchisement or how widely to apply the exhortation, “All men are created equal.”
That debate was very much on display Saturday — though mostly on the fringes and with anti-Trump protesters far outnumbered by flag-waving tourists, locals and history buffs. Many protesters carried signs inspired by the American Revolution including, “Resist Like Its 1775,” and one even brought a puppet featuring an orange-faced Trump.
“It’s a very appropriate place and date to make it clear that, as Americans, we want to take a stand against what we think is an encroaching autocracy,” Glenn Stark, a retired physics professor who was holding a “No Kings” sign and watching the ceremony at the North Bridge.
Massachusetts’ Democratic governor, Maura Healey, who spoke at the North Bridge ceremony, also used the event to remind the cheering crowd that many of the ideals fought for during the Revolutionary War are again at risk.
“We see things that would be familiar to our Revolutionary predecessors — the silencing of critics, the disappearing people from our streets, demands for unquestioned fealty,” she said. “Due process is a foundational right. if it can be discarded for one, it can be lost for all.”
 


US Supreme Court intervenes to block Trump deportations

Updated 20 April 2025
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US Supreme Court intervenes to block Trump deportations

  • Trump justifies summary expulsions — and the detention of people in El Salvador — by insisting that he is cracking down on violent Venezuelan criminal gangs now classified by the US government as terrorists

WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court, in a dramatic nighttime intervention Saturday, blocked President Donald Trump’s unprecedented use of an obscure law to deport Venezuelan migrants without due process.
The emergency ruling noted that two of the most conservative justices on the nine-member panel had dissented.
The order temporarily prevents the government from continuing to expel migrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — last used to round up Japanese-American citizens during World War II.
Trump invoked the law last month to deport Venezuelans to a notorious prison in El Salvador that holds thousands of that country’s gangsters.
The court decision was triggered by imminent plans late Friday to expel dozens more Venezuelans under the act, meaning they would have been deported with next to no ability to hear evidence or challenge their cases.
The court said “the government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order.”
Trump justifies summary expulsions — and the detention of people in El Salvador — by insisting that he is cracking down on violent Venezuelan criminal gangs now classified by the US government as terrorists.
But the policy is fueling opposition concerns that the Republican is ignoring the US constitution in a broader bid to amass power.
The row over the Alien Enemies Act comes amid muscular assaults by the administration against big law firms, Harvard and other universities, and major independent media outlets.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which took the lead in seeking to halt Friday’s planned deportations, welcomed the Supreme Court ruling.
“These men were in imminent danger of spending their lives in a horrific foreign prison without ever having had a chance to go to court,” attorney Lee Gelernt said.
On Saturday the government filed a motion with the Supreme Court arguing that it should not be prevented from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport people it says are terrorists.
The government also asserted that even if it is blocked, the court should state that such deportations can go ahead using other laws.
Trump won the White House election last November in large part on promises to combat what he repeatedly claimed is an invasion of criminal migrants.
Trump’s rhetoric about rapists and murderers descending on suburban homes resonated with swaths of voters concerned about high levels of illegal immigration.
Trump has sent troops to the Mexican border, imposed tariffs on Mexico and Canada for allegedly not doing enough to stop illegal crossings, and designated gangs like Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as terrorist groups.
A right-wing influencer who meets often with Trump, Laura Loomer, said Saturday that the president was “gracious” for flying out people who entered the country illegally, rather than having them “shot to death” at the border.
Democrats and civil rights groups have expressed alarm at an erosion of constitutional rights.
Under Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act — previously seen only during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II — migrants have been accused of gang membership and sent to El Salvador without going before a judge or being charged with a crime.
Trump has also repeatedly said he would be open to sending American citizens convicted of violent crimes to the notorious El Salvador prison, CECOT, outside San Salvador.
Attorneys for several of the Venezuelans already deported have said their clients were targeted largely on the basis of their tattoos.
In the most publicized case to date, Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported last month to CECOT before the Trump administration admitted he was sent there due to an “administrative error.”
Even after a court ruled that the Trump administration must facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, Trump has doubled down and insisted he is a gang member — including posting an apparently doctored photo on social media Friday that showed MS-13 on his knuckles.
As court challenges pile up, the president and his allies have repeatedly attacked what they call “activist” judges.
Another right-wing influencer with a large social media following, Jesse Kelly, responded to the overnight order freezing deportations by posting: “Ignore the Supreme Court.”