The Trump administration’s massive prisoner swap last week, which saw 10 U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents imprisoned in Venezuela freed in exchange for about 250 Venezuelans deported and detained in El Salvador amid Trump’s immigration crackdown, has been framed as an effort to keep America safe.
But as part of that exchange, Trump freed one man convicted of a grisly murder. Dahud Hanid Ortiz, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Venezuela, was not a political prisoner. Rather, he was convicted of brutally murdering three people at a law office in Spain in 2016, El País reported. Ortiz is exactly the kind of person Trump lies about every immigrant south of the border being, and yet he’s being welcomed back on American soil with open arms and warm smiles.
Ortiz, a former Marine, was convicted and jailed for a triple homicide in which he axed one man in the head, slashed a woman’s throat, and beat another woman to death before lighting the office on fire. Ortiz then fled to Venezuela, where he had dual citizenship and could not be extradited. He was arrested shortly thereafter and last year was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Thanks to Trump, the convicted murderer barely served his sentence. And even if you think the Venezuelan government’s conviction of Ortiz was unreliable, consider that the Spanish government tried to arrest him first.
Ortiz can be seen smiling for a picture on a State Department plane with the nine other freed prisoners, holding an American flag.
The Trump administration rounded up immigrants without due process and sent them to rot in one of the most inhumane prisons in the world, only to use them in a prison swap that freed a convicted murderer. Just as every other action he’s taken has proved, it isn’t actually about keeping violent, dangerous criminals out, it’s about making sure more people of color don’t come in. If the former were true, Ortiz would still be locked up in Venezuela right now.
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