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John Oliver took a deep dive through the Trump administration’s brutal and bewildering campaign of deportations on Sunday evening, starting with the White House’s “nauseating social media posts”. Posts to the official White House Instagram account include a video of shackled people led on to a plane soundtracked to the song Closing Time by Semisonic, along with the caption “you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”
The track “obviously isn’t the right song choice”, the Last Week Tonight host said. “The right song choice would be no song at all, because deportation Instagram reel is a combination of words that should never exist, like ‘Oscar winner Mr Beast’ or ‘Stephen Miller nudes’ or ‘Bill Belichick speaks about his relationship with 24-year-old girlfriend.’” (Semisonic has denounced the choice of the song.)
The video underscored one of Oliver’s key points: “For all this administration’s talk of prioritizing hardened criminals, in practice it seems to value speed, volume and spectacle over all else.”
Though Trump’s administration has claimed to focus on “violent criminals”, CBS 60 Minutes was unable to find criminal records for over 75% of 238 migrants sent to a Salvadorian prison, and the government even conceded that one man, Kilmar Ábrego García, was sent there due to an “administrative error”.
“For weeks now, it has been scrambling to come up with reasons why it was OK to send that man to a foreign prison,” said Oliver, “which has been hard for them to do, given that it had a court order protecting him from deportation to El Salvador and no criminal record.”
So Trump posted an image on social media of a photo of Ábrego García’s hand with markups attempting to show that his tattoos indicated that he was a member of the gang MS-13. And in an interview with the ABC News correspondent Terry Moran pegged to his first 100 days in office, Trump tried to argue that the clearly superimposed text of “MS-13” were actually tattooed on Ábrego García’s hand.
Oliver played the “absolutely incredible” 90-second clip in full before responding himself: “Terry, Terry, Terry, you’re in hell, Terry. Terry, this is hell right now. I’m genuinely shocked Trump doesn’t drink alcohol because that is the most ‘drunk at an Ihop’ conversation I think I’ve ever heard.
“And no disrespect to Terry, but maybe don’t move on from that,” he continued. “I know you’ve got other questions to get to, but if the president of the United States is trying to tell you that this amateur-hour Photoshop is real, let him go get the picture and make him say it again. Point to that Helvetica-looking ‘M’, and make the president say, ‘Yes, I believe that artless M that’s weirdly clearer and darker than all the other tattoos is real.’ Make him say I believe that man went to a tattoo parlor and said, ‘The skull’s pretty spooky, but what I’d really like is a neatly aligned ‘3’ directly on the bone of my knuckle, and can you please make it so that it doesn’t stretch or bend with the natural curves of the human hand and also make it look like a typewriter did it?’
“Because, Terry, sometimes when Trump’s doing his normal racist blue sky, you do need to cut him off to slow the flow of hatred into the world,” he added. “But if he wants to tell America that this laughably doctored picture is evidence of a major threat to American safety, you have an obligation to let the man cook.
“And for what it’s worth, if Trump’s going to hash out those claims, he probably should be doing that in court, not on TV, and after he’s already shipped someone off to a foreign prison,” he continued. “But Ábrego García is just one of many horrifying stories surrounding immigration right now,” as the administration has embarked on a fear-based crackdown with blatant disregard for the rule of law. In the first 100 days of his term, Trump’s administration undertook 181 immigration-specific executive actions – a sixfold increase over that same period in his first term.
To do so, it has bent arcane laws and scoured databases to absurd ends. Oliver pointed to the case of Suguru Onda, a PhD student at Brigham Young University in Utah, who had his legal status revoked after appearing on a criminal records database by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). Onda, who is from Japan, had no criminal charges, just two speeding tickets and a citation for catching one too many fish. “That is ridiculous,” Oliver fumed. “If you can be flagged for deportation for catching one too many fish, then I truly fear for Henry Winkler. We could be just days away from seeing him in an El Salvador prison, which I’m sure the White House will then justify by badly Photoshopping an MS-13 tattoo on to his neck.”
Ice later reversed the decision on Onda’s legal status, “but this all feels like the inevitable result of a campaign that fearmongered about an epidemic of so-called migrant crime which, as we’ve discussed before, was wildly overblown”, Oliver explained. “But having promised mass deportations and even printed signs for people to wave around demanding them, they’re now scrambling to deliver.”
According to multiple reports, the administration has instructed Ice officials to ramp up arrests to 1,200-1,500 people a day, and no longer target the supposed “worst offenders” first. “What the administration is doing is sometimes targeted, sometimes arbitrary, usually blatantly racist and always cruel,” said Oliver, such as deporting a child back to Honduras without his medication for stage four cancer.
The cruelty is “the heart of all of this”, Oliver detailed, “which is Trump loudly selling his supporters the lie that he’ll protect them from existential threats, only to further government overreach and state violence while deporting makeup artists, unlucky soccer fans and four-year-olds with cancer”.
The host called for pressure on elected officials to try to stop Trump’s illegal overreach. “To their credit, a number of prominent Democrats have gone to El Salvador to call attention to this,” he said. “Which is definitely preferable to the approach others have taken.” He cited anonymous House Democrats quoted as asking, “Should it be the big issue for Democrats? Probably not,” and “complaining that rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy, we’re going to go take the bait for one hairdresser?
“Which is absolutely enraging,” he continued, “especially as many voters do seem to get the clear problem with deporting people without due process to a prison for life, even in red states.”
Oliver urged viewers to call their representatives and make them aware of public opinion. “It can make a difference,” he said, pointing to the former supreme court chief justice William Rehnquist’s assertion that, “no honorable judge would ever cast his vote because he thought the majority of the public wanted him to vote that way but that in certain cases, judges are undeniably influenced by the great tides of public opinion.”
“I would argue the moment we’re in right now isn’t just worthy of a great tide,” Oliver concluded. “It is worthy of a fucking tsunami because this is an absolute outrage and it is one where it is important to remind our elected leaders that all people are worthy of safety, protection and due process.”
