Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a 32-year-old Venezuelan immigrant legally residing in the United States, has apparently been disappeared to El Salvador’s notorious Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) after mistakenly turning onto the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, Michigan.

The bridge, one of North America’s busiest international crossings, links Detroit with Windsor, Ontario. Due to the complexity of nearby highways, even local residents occasionally take the wrong ramp. For Prada, this innocent mistake led to arrest, imprisonment, and deportation—culminating in his disappearance into a foreign prison.

  • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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    11 hours ago

    Which is why if i were a foreign tourist, i would avoid America completely.

    I suspect we’ll still see some foreign tourists this summer, because they’ve already bought tickets and made reservations, and every place else is booked now, and it will be difficult to make last minute changes.

    There will still be a drop in foreign visitors this summer, but next summer? Foreign tourists will be almost non-existent. All we will get are those wierdos who specifically seek out dangerous places to visit, as if we are war zone.

    Who knows? Maybe by next summer we will be.

    • MyNameIsIgglePiggle@sh.itjust.works
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      4 hours ago

      I’m Australian and there NO way I would be going anywhere near the states any time soon.

      My prediction is trump is going to mobilise Maga as a militia and you guys are headed for a full blown civil war

    • BenjiRenji@feddit.org
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      9 hours ago

      There already has been a significant drop in tourists just in the last months. If things escalate, I bet your prediction becomes entirely true.

      • barneypiccolo@lemm.ee
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        11 hours ago

        I’m getting pretty old now, and throughout my life, whenever ive met people who were immigrants, I’ve asked them about their immigration story. Why did they come here? Some were escaping a bad place, a bad government, war, etc. Others were chasing a dream. Some were just trying to make enough money to keep their family alive back home.

        The main reason ive asked, is because i could never be that motivated to leave America I might visit other places, but not only could i not summon the kind of courage it would take to go live in a foreign place, i wouldnt want to. Ive loved America, and it’s history, even with all of its ugly chapters.

        But now that’s changed profoundly. My family has been having serious talks about leaving. My wife has been seriously researching potential countries to move to.

        Frankly, i doubt anyone would take us. There will soon be a flood of Americans begging to get into any other country who will take them, and countries will be cherry-picking the most useful, and tossing back the rest. I have a small business that i could easily transfer to anywhere in the world, but we aren’t rich, and we don’t have special skills that are in demand. We probably wouldn’t make the cut.

        And if we could get to another country, we’d likely be treated by their citizens the way immigrants are treated here - discriminated against, taken advantage of, abused by the authorities, employers, landlords, etc.

        Might as well just stay here, and ride it out. At my age, I’ve been wrapping my head around the idea that my story is going to have a twist ending, and is going to go down a path I never expected. I can be passive, and let the MAGA Nazis choose my path, or i can be proactive, and choose a path that defies them.

        If I’m going down, I’m going down swinging.