In an article titled “How Trump could finally kick Tren de Aragua out of the US after Biden admin stopped deporting Venezuelans” the New York Post reports that on day one, literally right after he leaves the inauguration at the Capitol, a newly re-empowered President Trump will strap on body armor, load a high capacity mag into an XM7 6.8×51mm assault rifle, jump into the driver’s seat of the first in a convoy of armored assault vehicles, blast on “Ride of the Valkyries” thought the loudspeakers to get all the America First ICE and CBP SWAT agents in the operation pumped up, and smash through the metal shutters of Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua’s world headquarters, hidden in a warehouse on the edge of a rail yard in a grimy industrial section of Baltimore.

“Mierda! Esta Presidente Trump!” one of the goons will scream as the new 47th president steps out of the vehicle and begins blasting them, rivulets of blood mixed with $100 bills, tiny rainbow fentanyl candies, and photos of white sorority girls on Tren’s list of sex trafficking kidnap targets – all spiraling through the air in slow motion as their table is upended in the hail of bullets. One of the younger members of the gang, who dove down a staircase when the armored vehicle plowed in, will pull out a small handgun and fire at Trump, one of the rounds clipping the 47th president’s ear, causing him to kneel down in pain and drop his rifle. But before the Tren initiate can even adjust his aim, Trump will spin around and plant a throwing knife in his eye socket from 15 feet away, saying slyly “You should’ve googled what happened to the last punk-ass kid who did that to my ear.”

Well actually the New York Post’s article doesn’t say any of that, nor does it detail the climactic final battle between the gang’s leader Loco Luis on top of the “tren” as it speeds down the tracks on fire towards DC’s Union Station, loaded with fentanyl powder and if Trump can’t defeat Luis and somehow stop the train from crashing into the station just blocks away from the Capitol the explosion would send up a mushroom cloud of fentanyl dust, killing hundreds of thousands.

Security cam footage of Tren de Aragua super-soldiers taking over America one studio apartment at a time.

If anything the Post seems to be thinking it’s all a little more easier said than done, writing “More than 800,000 Venezuelan migrants have poured into the US in the last four years, including hundreds of members of the brutal prison gang Tren de Aragua. But, the Biden administration gave up trying to deport the criminals and gangbangers in January after the Venezuelan government stopped accepting deportation flights from the US. It’s a problem President-elect Donald Trump will have to solve in order to make good on his promise of mass deportations,” in the lede, for some reason acknowledging the logistical realities involved rather than just saying Trump will figure it out.

There’s of course plenty of Biden-blaming in it, giving MAGA an out if the Orange God Emperor can’t make it happen, with the Post mentioning that Joe gave Venezuelans asylum claimants temporary protected status, which gave Tren de Aragua the opportunity to exploit it and establish themselves in the US, and that the Maduro Regime stopped accepting flights of deportees in January in response to sanctions from Biden. The Post mentions more sanctions as an option to force the Venezuelans to accept more, or trying to dump them in another country like neighboring Colombia.

The article quotes from Daniel DiMartino, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, who says that, if all other means of deporting Tren de Aragua members fail, the Trump Administration could end up just dumping them on the beaches of Venezuela because it worked one other time. “In at least one occasion when this happened with Haiti, the US Coast Guard forcefully sent people back to the coast of Haiti without the consent of the Haitian government,” said DiMartino.

The New York Post relives the horror of when Tren de Aragua members got drunk and punched each other in Texas.

Never mind that this “think tanker” isn’t think tanking hard enough to consider that maybe that caper only worked out because Haiti is in a state of anarchy and their military was not at all able to respond – while it’s quite easy to imagine that Maduro’s troops be just looking for an excuse to fire on US vessels approaching the shore intent on off-loading hundreds of gangbangers, there’s a more interesting wrinkle here: The Post mentions that DiMartino himself is a “Venezuelan dissident.”

His bio page on the Manhattan Institute’s website says he’s “a PhD candidate in Economics at Columbia University and a graduate fellow at the Manhattan Institute – where he focuses on high-skill immigration policy. Born and raised in Venezuela, DiMartino experienced the terrible consequences of socialism firsthand. After leaving Venezuela for the US in 2016, he dedicated himself to explaining how socialism destroyed his homeland, advocating for its freedom, and stopping this ideology from ever being implemented in America and elsewhere.” Huh. Now to his credit one of the op-eds linked in DiMartino’s bio is a July 2023 piece in the Hill in which he praised Biden’s TPS orders as “the most remarkable immigration policy success story we’ve witnessed in decades: the parole process for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans (CHNV).”

We don’t know DiMartino’s immigration status or history. He could’ve married an American and gotten his citizenship the fast(er) way. He could be on a student visa though Columbia or a work visa through the Manhattan Institute. Whatever it was, it was probably pretty white collar and not him walking thousands of miles through Central America and Mexico before arriving at a Texas border checkpoint and being processed by CBP as an asylum claimant. In fact it doesn’t seem like he’s had any sort of “asylum” at all, and it was the New York Post who made the editorial decision to cast him as a “dissident,” as though he’s a marked man like Alexei Navalny or Jamaal Kashoggi.

The specifics of DiMartino’s story matter less than the overall incongruence here and going forward with how the new Trump Reich is going to handle itself with the “victims of communism.” A very vocal and often wealthy component of its power base is from the Miami-area’s Cuban community, it was already conservative in reflexive opposition to the Castro regime’s repressions before accelerating into full-on extremist far right in the MAGA era. Add in the whole Shen Yun-Epoch Times cult of Chinese refugees, the Moonies from South Korea, and so on, and there’s this identity of “Communism ruined my homeland, therefore I am going to put on a red hat and swear allegiance to an autocratic leader who appeals to the common laborers to achieve his power.”

And if you’re some dirt poor Venezuelan who had no future back home because your country was ruined by a brutal and grossly incompetent socialist regime? Will you, Señor or Señorita Refugee who wants nothing to do with Tren de Aragua and is always on your best behavior, be allowed to work hard and achieve the American dream just like all those Chinese and Cuban folks did?

The answer, at this point at least, appears to be you have no money and can’t vote Republican, so fuck you. The whole “Tren de Aragua” circlejerk, just like the Haitians “eating the dogs, eating the cats, eating the pets” circlejerk, seems simply aimed at creating the pretext for revoking the parole for millions of people. It’s what white MAGA voters demanded and it’s what they’ll get. As for the actual deportations we’ll see. What you can count on is right wing Cubans not giving a shit about Venezuelans being denied the opportunity to integrate the Cubans were given in the second half of the 20th century, the Epoch Times not blasting the parole revocations in an op-ed, and the “peace through strength” president getting pushed into bombing Caracas after US Coast Guard personnel were killed trying to dump Tren de Aragua members on a beach in Venezuela.