'They Were All Deportable': Rubio Defends Sending Suspected TdA Members To El Salvador Prison

2 days ago

In a press gaggle on Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended the flights of suspected TdA gang members to an El Salvador prison.

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00:00No one's been.

00:04Yeah, but there's I. There's a bunch of that we improve that way. Not even got

00:09waiver, just got restarted and we're doing them. There's others that we suspended because

00:13we didn't think we were getting the return on the investment. That money may be repurposed

00:17to a program that works better for the same cost.

00:19Not just more violent, very well organized. They were able to communicate with each other

00:32at signals, all kinds of. I mean, this is a prison gang, so it doesn't surprise me.

00:36That's how the treatment originates from. So it doesn't surprise me that they're very

00:39effective in that setting. They're also very dangerous to keep in our country.

00:43When you keep prison gangs in your country, they grow, they metastasize.

00:46MS-13 was actually a group that was started by Salvadorian either

00:52Salvadorian refugees and or actually people born in the U.S. and Salvadorian descent

00:57in prisons. MS-13 did not originate in El Salvador. They originated in U.S. prisons,

01:02spread down and back to El Salvador. Prison gangs are very dangerous because they recruit

01:06and then they almost create academies within the prison that then metastasize and spill

01:11out to the general population.

01:16I spoke to one that was in Guantanamo because I know them through a family friend, but I've

01:20also spoken to both Pete Hexeth about this. And I'm not mistaken, Secretary Nome as well.

01:27And they both, when I asked them, is this true? They both confirmed that that's what

01:31their officers and people on the ground were telling them. So I actually heard this from

01:35a personal acquaintance and then I actually had it confirmed to me by two members of the cabinet.

01:40I'm just wondering about that some of the people sent down to El Salvador to the prison

01:44weren't actually gang members, but that, for example, if you think of a tattoo,

01:48that was supporting autism, people with autism, but it looked like a gang tattoo to an immigration

01:54agent in the United States, right? How do you address that?

01:57Well, ultimately, all of that was the work of the Department of Homeland Security. They've

02:02identified them. I have confidence in the assessment that they made. But I can't speak

02:07to any of one of the individual cases because we're not involved in compiling it, but I have

02:11no reason. In fact, I have confidence that they compiled a good list. And if we have

02:15an opportunity to send more, we will. More gang members, MS-13, whatever we can send.

02:26Well, every single one of them was deportable for reasons even beyond the Alien Enemies Act,

02:31the MS-13 as well. They were all deportable. Many of these people had orders of deportation

02:36already and were either in custody or had been recently apprehended. So every single person that

02:42was sent there was deportable. Unfortunately, they're of Venezuelan descent. Up until this

02:46week, the Venezuelans were not picking anybody up. They were not allowing anybody to go back.

02:51They're the only country in the hemisphere that was refusing to accept anyone. They have

02:54restarted those suddenly, and hopefully they'll continue and then we won't have to use El

02:59Salvador. No, I think the expedited nature of it, these gangs were organized. They were

03:14presenting very real and immediate risks to the number of communities in our country.

03:18In an organized fashion, we have reason to believe that they were actually being pushed

03:21towards the United States in large numbers by the regime in Venezuela. You saw just yesterday,

03:28one of them arrived in Venezuela and was greeted on the tarmac as a hero. This is an individual

03:33that was arrested for and caught on video attacking police officers in Times Square,

03:38mocked law enforcement after doing so. So we believe that in many ways the Venezuelan

03:43regime has encouraged that flow of these groups towards the United States to create harm in our

04:20country.

04:40About the AA declaration, that came from the White House. My conversations with President

04:45Bukele were as a follow-up and to finalize in a verbal agreement we had reached in my

04:50visit to El Salvador on my first trip as a secretary. So it was just sort of following

04:54up on that and how we were going to proceed with it. We were ready now to execute at some point,

05:00and we were working through those arrangements for them. And that's what those calls were about,

05:06to finalize what we had agreed on.

05:20I can't speak to the timing of why they released it when they did. I can tell you,

05:24and I think you were on that trip, that the agreement to house criminal aliens was reached

05:29with President Bukele back in February. And so I've spoken to him since then, but obviously

05:36those days that I was there, we did because we had a couple open questions that we wanted

05:40answers to and that he wanted answers to, and we're finalizing that.

'They Were All Deportable': Rubio Defends Sending Suspected TdA Members To El Salvador Prison

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