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I suppose I'm just not enough of a lawcuck to understand why this is being blown up into such an ordeal. The guy is an El Salvadorean citizen, was not in the US legally, and could have been deported to any country (besides El Salvadore) and then, from there, immediately deported again to El Salvadore and this would have somehow been fine. But because some braindead or politically captured bureaucrat rubber stamped his paperwork where he claimed he'd be in danger if he returned to his own country they granted a targeted stay of deportation, which precipitated this entire clusterfuck.
The guy was married to a US citizen ("Jennifer Vasquez Sura", okay...) who had filed a restraining order against him. Not exactly Elite Human Capital. The wife had two children from a previous relationship who are "disabled". Garcia's own child is also "disabled". This context is supposed to engender some kind of sympathy, I suspect, but as someone who actually interacts with people of this socioeconomic strata I am more inclined to believe they were scamming government benefits, and the wife's current PR blitz is a consequence of her smelling blood in the water chasing a fat legal payout.
I will freely concede that it would be alarming if the Trump administration deployed this "strategy" to consign innocent American citizens to a third world gulag without legal recourse or due process, but I don't think Trump is "based" enough to do that. (No, the off-hand comment he made to Bukele about sending "homegrowns" does not count, as it was clearly about -- legally -- sending convicted criminals to serve out their sentences more cheaply than can be done domestically.) This attempt to force the executive to (presumably, temporarily) return one particular illegal comes across as political theater and legal chicanery. Frankly I'm hoping Trump makes a show of retrieving Garcia on Air Force One, landing in the US for a photo op, then clasping him in chains and loading him back on the plane, to dump him in Argentina or somewhere else -- from where he'll be repatriated straight into El Salvadore's "black site prison", hopefully for life.
There was some minor procedural error, therefore we must make an elaborate show of correcting it, at great expense, to achieve an outcome that will immediately collapse back to the current status quo. This is your brain on legalism.
You see, you do understand. But that's not the only goal. The other goal is to establish the supremacy of the federal judiciary (where the Left is still enjoying a lot of power) over the actions of the federal executive. The strategy is death by the thousand of TROs. If the admin is forced to ask consent of every leftist federal judge for every action, not a lot of actions can be performed - even if SCOTUS works overtime to shut down all the overreaches (which is in no way guaranteed), it will still take time, and if every action that could take a day takes months instead and costs a lot of paperwork and lawyertime, which is limited even for the feds, then doing things becomes much harder. In the first Trump admin, the Left managed to neutralize a lot of his agenda by putting him under the shadow of suspicion of being the Russian agent. Now this does not exist anymore, so they need another leverage. Making everybody in the admin constantly look over the shoulder for a federal judge to intervene in their actions is a good leverage.
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Another Art II bureaucrat would have rubber stamped the dissolution of that order had this government had their shit together enough to even know it existed.
It's not the minor procedural error that stings, it's the not even knowing.
"We don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents." - Bob Ross
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Can you name another time when you've been incensed over a 1-in-100,000 procedural error rate?
Can you name a government process or department with a lower error rate?
I would happily concede this is all fine if the error rate is indeed 1/100K. Will you concede that it's unacceptable to be 1/5k?
And yes, I think the CBP does not incorrectly turn away more than 1/10K people at the border.
Nope. I don't find the actual error in question to be particularly meaningful. This dressing down to ignorant children who didn't do their homework sums up the state of discourse fairly well.
If you're going to say 1/5k is unacceptable, then I hope to see you advocating for burning down the entire government. The error rate for Medicaid payments seems to be something like 1 in 20. The Child Care & Development fund is bouncing between 9 and 13%. Apparently our own government can't even retire employees in a reasonably timely manner because almost 30% of the applications have errors
A majority of states are not processing food assistance applications on time and making too many payment errors, according to the federal government.
The IRS makes mistakes when taxing people less than 1% of the time... which is still 50 times worse than your "unacceptable" rate for "deporting people who were definitely supposed to be deported, but missing a step in the paperwork".
There's too many cites to bother linking them all, but I'm seeing false conviction rates ranging from 1-12%... including a purported 4% rate of executing innocent people that is in a paywalled National Geographic article I can only see a preview of.
Want to talk about drone strike error rates?
So, no. I'm not going to concede that a functionally irrelevant-to-outcome paperwork snafu happening in 1 in 5000 deportations is "unacceptable" in any meaningful way. That's actually wildly better than anything else I expect from our government and everyone who cares so, so, so deeply about processes apparently ought to be worshipping Tom Hooman and begging to put him in charge of other parts of the government, too.
Your link quotes things like
Yeah, if you fill out your documentation wrong, it causes it to be denied. That's hardly the kind of error we're talking about
You mean removing people to a country for which they had a legally binding order withholding removal.
That's not a "step in the paperwork" kind of mistake.
Are you seriously quoting some left wing boogeyman that 1/25 executions being of the innocent? That's absurd enough not to even merit further investigation.
The withholding order was literally a bureaucratic technicality. It should have been removed before deportation as a matter of procedure, but it wasn't. The withholding order was based on threats that no longer exist. If it had been removed first, then the ONLY substantive difference between the present situation and the one where the government didn't make the error is that maybe Garcia's deportation to El Salvador would have been briefly delayed. Somehow I don't think that would satisfy critics. Neither does this error, which was rather peculiar to Garcia's cirumstances, set any kind of dangerous precedent that applies to other people, and certainly not citizens.
The only real argument here is that it the US is essentially outsourcing its prison sentence to El Salvador, and this means they can send people to a prison in another country without charging or convicting them of any crime. While this probably does not violate any law, it is very much against the spirit of the justice system and due process. The Trump administration can wash its hands of responsibility and say that they're just sending these people to El Salvador, and it's all on El Salvador to decide what to do with them from there. However, we all know the actual arrangement; we know they are for all practical purposes being sent to prison by ICE.
All that said, I don't really care, Marge. The treasonous failure to secure the border for almost my entire adult life, the literal conspiracy to import as many people as possible, resulting in millions of illegals and quasi-legals fundamentally warping and perverting the economy and culture of the country, is a far greater wrong. Unfortunately, the scale of this problem is so huge that only swift and aggressive action can possibly address it, and so there will likely be many more edge cases, errors, and happy little accidents. Personally, I'm okay with that. It's priced in. For this, I blame the people who created the problem in the first place, not the people who are now trying to fix it.
Sure. And the only difference between executing Tim McVeigh in 1997 after his conviction instead of 1995 after his arrest was a delay. It's not like there was any chance of him being acquitted.
This claim is probably true, but it doesn't matter because that argument was never actually brought up.
That is not the only real argument.
I think you are going to quickly find that there are between 0-2 votes on the Supreme Court for that, and that the only way to actually tackle the problem is to have a competent and diligent program of enforcement. One that I have consistently been in favor of (which is a nice thing about posting histories) for years before this administration decided to do it in a spectacular incompetent fashion.
What folks like you fail to comprehend is that trying to achieve a goal incompetently is not directionally correct -- by negative association is makes the goal even further away. You are just delaying (if not destroying) any ability to actually reckon with the scale of illegal and temporary immigrants.
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Yeah, it is. There's a process for removing that order based on obviously changed relevant facts. AIUI, it doesn't even require a judge. The basis for his withholding order was no longer valid. Ergo, it's a step in the paperwork.
I mean, the IRS can look at my tax paperwork and begin enforcement proceedings against me. That doesn't require a judge either (until I take them to tax court).
That doesn't imply that they can just freeze my bank accounts while skipping that step. The step is important, even if it wouldn't change the outcome in this specific case.
A better analogy: You are committing tax fraud. The IRS catches you. They apply a totally legal and 100% justified garnishment of your wages, and then afterwards discover that they missed a piece of paperwork they were supposed to sign making sure you didn't have prior mandated child support obligation.... which you don't have.
I simply don't believe you are holding this position in good faith. If the sacred processes are so important to you, then go up thread at rip the NY governor a new asshole.
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Do you not believe the woman he married is a "US citizen"? What basis do you have for that?
You seem to have strange assumptions about people's state of mind when the first thing you think of when someone engages in PR to help return a family member from a notoriously violent prison to the country they were illegally deported from is that they are "chasing a fat legal payout" instead of maybe wanting to help out their family member who had an injustice done to them. Of course her children having quoted "disabilities" is further evidence for this somehow, alright.
This attempt by the executive to pay to imprison a man in a foreign country after making an administrative error that they now refuse to admit is what actually comes across as theater and (il)legal chicanery.
Apparently it is "my brain on legalism" to demand due process and rule-following from the authority that governs everyone's lives and controls untold power. The founders would be seizing in their graves.
Did you miss the details where the wife in question filed a restraining order against him for repeatedly beating her to the point of injury? That seems to have ended in dismissal when she didn't show for the final hearing, so maybe she was just playing games.
"Brain on legalism" is a nice way to say "I think a lot of people are full of self-serving shit". Are you one of the three genuinely principled civil libertarians who is also routinely incensed at, e.g., Democrat governors blatantly ignoring court orders regarding the 2nd Amendment?
I didn't miss it. And your pointing out that she didn't go through with the full process, I don't see how this is supposed to update my view. Perhaps she recanted her view of the domestic situation, perhaps she cares too much about him, perhaps it was too much hassle, perhaps it was a fake complaint in the first place. Perhaps she was threatened. Only the last would suggest more strongly to me that her concern about him is fake.
I am not routinely incensed at that because I don't see it come across my feed, which I am sure can be taken as evidence that I'm being a hypocrite, but if you'd like to point to an example I'd be more than happy to call it out if it seems like an egregious abuse/neglect of the system to me. I do get routinely incensed at whatever trampling of civil process I see exercised by those in power, of course mediated by the channels I follow.
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In defense of those you would call unprincipled hypocrites, one of the main reasons people care about protecting civil liberties is that these prevent loopholes that in the long run would allow the government to become tyrannical. People just don't find the "take guns away -> tyranny that the populace otherwise would have been able to violently oppose" story that compelling.
On the other hand, they might find the slippery slope of "disappear without due process illegal immigrants/terrorists -> disappear without due process anyone the administration claims is illegal/a terrorist -> disappear without due process anyone the administration thinks should have their citizenship stripped -> disappear without due process anyone who opposes the administration" dramatically more plausible, especially given the administration's comments on denaturalization. You are of course free to try to convince them otherwise on the factual point, but you can't really call them a hypocrite until you do.
Relatedly, you would find much more consistency if you were checking for people being incensed about debanking.
The guy wasn't "disappeared", he had multiple days in court, this whole thing is about accidnetally missing a page of paperwork that would have had no material impact on the sequence of events.
By comparison, we crossed the "murder American children by drones with no due process" threshold over a decade ago.
Yeah, that would have been a decent example for anyone in this thread to bring up as an example of the non-partisan civil libertarian bonefides.
Instead of what they've actually provided.
Which is literally nothing.
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There are two more?!?!?! tears of joy
Then you recognize that we have not in fact been operating under "rule of law" previously?
Do you believe that enforcing "rule of law" here will increase its enforcement elsewhere? If so, why do you believe that?
If you do not believe that, why is one form of selective "rule of law" preferable to another?
Violations of the rule of law don't cancel each other out - us "three genuinely principled civil libertarians" don't "tap the sign.*
Law is a social construct, and as a social construct it depends on consensus and common knowledge for its function. It works if people believe it works, that "rule of law" actually functions in some reliable fashion.
Undermine that belief sufficiently, and people stop believing in it, and "rule of law" stops functioning in specifically the way that you are now observing: people stop honoring appeals to the rules, because they've seen those rules bent or broken in too many other cases and so no longer trust them.
I do not accept your appeals to the rules, because I have long since observed that my appeals to the rules are systematically ignored. I do not expect the rules to protect me when I need them to, so I have no incentive to expend effort or value to ensure the rules protect you when you need them to. I too used to make appeals to "rule of law"; I did so for many years. Now I don't do that any more, even when the law is purportedly on my side, because I understand that it is pointless.
Enforcing the law is costly. People bear the cost willingly when they believe that all bear it equally. When they no longer believe this, they generally stop being willing to bear the cost.
Hence violations not cancelling each other out.
Is "you" in reference to me, specifically, or a rhetorical device?
The claim is not that violations cancel each other out. The claim is that sufficient violations invalidate the construct, by destroying the trust necessary for it to operate. "but it's the rules, you have to follow the rules" is not a workable answer to "no one else is following the rules, why should I?"
It's a reference to the arguments you're presenting here, irrespective of any personal details or history of yours beyond these arguments in particular. You specifically are arguing in support of our existing social systems. I am pointing out that the actual history of how those social systems actually operate seems to badly undermine your arguments.
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Surely the only way to increase the enforcement of the rule of law is to... increase the enforcement of the rule of law? I very much understand and support advocating for the full rule of law in all spheres of life, but if you want to do that, you should, well, do that. Which would include advocating for it here. It's not hard.
No, this just ends up with rule of law being selectively used to constrain those who accept this argument, while not constraining actions against them. That's what I mean by "chump".
So I understand "they defected so we have to defect". That's what you have to do if you're stuck in a Prisoner's Dilemma with a repeat defector.
But the question then is - how do we get out of this mutual defection spiral?
I think the usual solution among actual prisoners is referred to as a shanking.
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In so much that there are no coherent parties, then the people want to escape the defection spiral clearly and credibly signal their separation from those still interested, including the breaking of political alliances, even if it leads to their own political disempowerment as a faction.
In so much that there are coherent parties involved, the party that started the defection spiral signals credible intent via no longer pursuing a defection strategy, upto and including accepting rollback of previous gains at personal cost.
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What makes you think there is a way out?
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I certainly am. I feel politically homeless because neither party seems particularly interested in protecting civil liberties they find inconvenient. Meanwhile, the libertarian party is run by pants-on-head crazy people. The whole situation makes one want to scream into the void.
Oy! You got a license for that void?!
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Ah. My sympathies. I've been there. If anything, I think you're understating the magnitude of the problem.
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I don't agree with much of meduka's perspective, but if it's true that the wife had "filed a restraining order against him" as claimed, then it's easier to see why you might not want to take her concern about Garcia's well-being at face value.
I think it's reasonable to take this as evidence that their personal relationship maybe isn't the greatest, that they have significant problems, etc. What I don't think is reasonable is a) taking this as evidence that her concern about him is definitely performative or fake. It's quite common, even in situations where domestic abuse of some significance has occured, that the people involved still have strong feelings for each other, care about each other, and likely would not want that partner deported illegally to a violent prison. This might seem contradictory but I think it's actually more the norm than the exception, and blithely assuming that abuse victims don't care about their abusers (married with children, especially) is a bit of a miss in my opinion.
And b) denigrating a person who has been accused of this as "not elite human capital" and therefore not worth caring about. First of all, the procedure was never finished, so this is tantamount to assuming guilt before innocence in legal proceedings. Secondly, assuming he had done the violent things he had been accused of, it would make not one whit of difference as to whether his deportation was valid or not, and the government should not be able to waive correct processing because someone is sufficiently 'bad'.
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A quote of the ruling in the comment you replied to:
What's unclear about it?
The answer is that there is no such assurance from the legal system and never has been, and that it's the "lawcucks" who have fooled themselves into believing their fortresses of sand were ever strong enough to stem the tide.
Then let's have the DOJ say that in open court.
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This is the load-bearing part. The latter has already happened, and the former is carefully ignoring that deporting obvious ancestral Americans comes with massive political consequences that deporting an illegal, already-slated-for-deportation immigrant from El Salvador does not.
Trump is clear about wanting to try sending Americans to El Salvador. At what point should we ask if they'll be returned?
When evidence exists of efforts to try and send them.
Until such time that Trump attempts to deport American citizens without due process, claims or insinuations that he's about to if everyone doesn't oppose him over [news cycle of the week] can be appropriately dismissed as cries of wolf.
The question was about the problem of returning them:
You can't ask a surgeon about possible complications, after the anesthesia's kicked in.
And the answer remains the same: it can start being considered a relevant concern when there is evidence that it is a relevant concern.
This would be an excellent reason to establish that there is condition justifying surgery before demanding that someone be placed under anesthesia on a table before a surgeon.
Demanding the surgery be carried out, just because an eager surgeon has already started applying anesthesia in anticipation despite the lack of present condition, is mere malpractice.
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That's fair, which is why I think it's good to look at what the seasoned legal system is doing to get an idea at what is important and why. In this case, there's a reason the Supreme Court went 9-0 (with a reminder three of them were appointed by Trump himself), there's a reason why the appeals here was 3-0, there's a reason why the Trump admin keeps getting ruled against so much on this case in general.
These are experienced judges, many of whom have deep histories of conservative sided judicial idealogy.
Maybe it will just collapse back to the status quo, doesn't really matter. That's not the concern of the courts anyway. The court system doesn't really need to care what happens as long as it's not unconstitutional or against a constitutionally valid law, it does care how it happens if it breaks those though.
Edit: As was written after all
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Honestly, why the cruelty? I confess, I don't understand it. If some guy, at the age of 16, invaded my very own home and lived in my basement for decades without my knowing, siphoning my electricity and water or whatever, I would not wish this on him.
If you think that prison is cruelty, you are just propagandized. Most people housed in that, or US prisons actually, would historically have already have been executed.
As an excuse for torture, "well, at least we haven't killed them" is not any kind of gotcha. Unless you think torture is never 'cruel' because at least it's not murder, it's a meaningless argument.
Most of the people in that prison deserve a worse fate if half the accusations against them are true.
"Worse" is a confusing term in this context. There is a sense in which being killed is "a worse fate" than being tortured - but torturing someone is a worse thing to do, and a worse thing for a society to condone. I can respect someone who's killed a man, even if I didn't approve of his actions. I couldn't really, fundamentally respect a torturer even if he'd committed torture as part of some trolley-problem with a terrorist and a ticking time-bomb with which I could find no logical fault. By the same logic, I do not want to be part of a society, or indeed, if at all possible, species, which condones torture as punishment, ever, for any reason.
I do not think it wise to empower the state to torture people, but that's not because nobody deserves to be tortured.
My post was intended to be agnostic on the question of whether some people abstractly 'deserve' to be tortured. What I am sayng, what feel in my gut, is that the act of torturing is wrong. Not just "a power we shouldn't give to the state" - wrong. Torture is depraved, an act which stains anyone who commits it. "This sinner deserves Hell", even if it's true, is no excuse to become the Devil yourself.
(I am also against the death penalty for the same reason. But my moral sentiment that killing is wrong is nothing next to my burning certainty than torture is wrong, wrong, WRONG.)
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I think people underestimate the badness of US prisons in comparison to El Salvedoran prisons.
US prisons were and probably still are horrendous: https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/prison/report.html
In other countries prison is bad because the guards are bad and don't care about the prisoners.
In the U.S. the prisons are bad because they are filled with American prisoners. Somehow this is often worse. Additionally in the U.S. guards are frequently prevented from "managing" the prison which can cause unnecessary problems.
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And what if your parents spent your entire childhood making it extremely clear that they love the random basement hobo more than you, because frankly, they hate your guts? And then they change their will so that he gets the house, and tell you that they hope you end up on the street in a cardboard box because that’s what you deserve. How would you feel about the basement hobo then?
NGL I'd still hate the "parents" more, in the "if I only had two bullets, I'd shoot the traitor twice" sense. I don't really get being angry at illegals unless they're a major drain on society.
Think a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment is rightists taking out their anger at blacks, Jews, feminists, and white liberals on illegal immigrants because the latter are a more socially acceptable target.
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I think this has gone a bit beyond what one could claim with a straight face to be a good analogy for the American illegal immigration situation. And even so, I would not wish the basement hobo were sent to a harsh, overcrowded prison for life. I would resent him and my parents for sure, I'll give you that.
I think you’re failing to decouple two separate penalties here.
They are being deported for being illegal; they are being sent to prison in El Salvador for being a member of MS13.
Yes, I agree that it is cruel to imprison an individual in harsh conditions for entering a country illegally, but it is probably both reasonable and necessary, by some measure, to do so if they are a violent gang member.
Yeah, if they are a violent gang member. He hasn't been convicted in a court of law. Innocent until proven guilty and all that. The US shouldn't have sent him straight to a foreign gulag without a conviction.
Actually he was determined by two court rulings to be ms-13
Not true.
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I would expect gang member conviction to carry a higher burden of proof than asylum proceedings, personally...
That is a problem for El Salvador to deal with. If they disagree, they can release him.
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Deporting him is one thing, but sending him straight to the gangster's prison for the worst people imaginable because he wore a chicago bulls hat is a bit much. They should at least ask Bukele to let him out.
The guy is a wifebeater and a gangster himself.
You need to actually back up assertions like this, or why you believe it. Not just drop one liners as rebuttals.
Two different judges deemed him part of MS13, the court papers also clearly state he is a wife beater.
https://theworldwatch.com/videos/1629701/dem-senator-denied-meeting-with-ms-13-member-after-flying-to-el-salvado-wife-beater/
Cool. When we tell people not to make low effort assertions without evidence, we are not saying "I don't believe you; prove it to me. We are saying that when you assert things with low effort one liners, proactively provide the evidence.
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Pics or it didn't happen.
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Also, he got stopped doing what looked rather like human trafficking in 2022, but the Biden FBI told the locals to let him go.
Very likely a criminal.
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"Human trafficking" in this case being a scare term meaning "He was an illegal alien driving around a van with other illegal aliens".
Transporting 8 illegal aliens from Texas to Maryland in a way that seems suggestive of organization and planning. I think coyotes hiding people in the frames of vehicles to sneak them across the border is a reasonable use case of the term. Carpooling to the Home Depot parking lot, OTOH, is very much not. This case seems somewhere in the middle, probably a bit closer to the former.
Is there a better term you'd suggest instead?
To meet the definition of trafficking, the people being trafficked have to be being forced in some way. There's no evidence of that here; these people could be illegal aliens who paid to get across the border, workers on a traveling contsruction crew, gang members coming back from a gang meeting, or any number of other things without it being "trafficking".
I don’t think traffic implies forced. Coyotes traffic people across the border because the people want to get across the border.
Trafficking does imply forced. Coyotes are involved in human smuggling, but not necessarily human trafficking.
Debt peonage counts, so if the coyotes are taking people across and requiring them to work off the cost of their passage, that's "human trafficking". But if they just pay to get across, it is not.
Human smuggling seems to be the better terminology. I'll use that one to describe this instead.
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In a city in which he has never lived?
Source?
I'm not sure the inter-national criminal gang is super strict about territoriality. But sure, adjust in a slightly less probable direction.
Here
Sounds a fair bit like international-criminal gang coyote type work. So maybe re-adjust in a more probable direction.
Re-adjust a bit, but not too far given that the source is The Daily Caller.
It was the first result when I searched. The incident is being reported elsewhere as well. If it's verified, are you going to adjust in favor of the Daily Caller being more reliable, and many other media sources engaging in deception by omission?
Yes, actually, I will.
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Oh, lovely. I'll "readjust a bit" about the guy even existing, given that the source is the modern media.
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