Anti-LGBTQ+ Fox Host Jesse Watters had no sympathy for a gay immigrant who was wrongly identified as a gang member by the Trump administration and is now trapped in a Salvadoran torture facility.

“It’s just a gay barber,” Watters scoffed when his liberal co-host spoke about the injustice the man has experienced.

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Watters was responding to co-host Jessica Tarlov on Fox’s The Five, who decried the Trump administration’s blatant disregard for due process.

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“Time magazine was there when the gay barber from Venezuela who had a crown tattoo that said ‘mom’ was being processed coming into El Salvador,” she began before Watters interrupted her.

“You’ve been talking about this gay barber from El Salvador with some stupid tattoo for weeks. Weeks, Jessica,” he said. “It’s just a gay barber.”

“He’s an innocent guy who got swept up in a deportation, and hopefully we get it figured out and straightened out. But a lot of people in this country, Jessica, get arrested for things that they didn’t do, get falsely accused, falsely convicted. That doesn’t mean — that doesn’t mean you just stop arresting people.”

“I didn’t say that,” Tarlov replied. “I said just give people their due process.”

“That doesn’t mean you stop arresting criminals because one guy was arrested who was innocent,” Watters continued, speaking over Tarlov. “It just means you just try to do it better the next time.”

He then proceeded to joke about the situation: “And I have nothing against the gay barbers. Gay barbers usually give the best haircuts. So we should bring them back just for that.”

Watters’ flippancy about those detained in El Salvador is especially ruthless considering the experiences that have been reported there and the many people who say they have been wrongly identified as gang members.

In an essay for Time magazine, photojournalist Philip Holsinger said that upon exiting the deportation plane, the transported Venezuelans faced “an ocean of soldiers and police, an entire army assembled to apprehend them.”

Twenty-two buses took the deportees to the Terrorism Confinement Center, an overcrowded “filthy and disease-ridden” prison known for torturing its inmates and denying them access to adequate healthcare and food, according to Human Rights Watch. The prison denies inmates any contact with family members or lawyers, only lets some inmates out of their cells for 30 minutes a day, and keeps some detainees in the complete dark in solitary confinement.

Holsinger wrote that as the deported men were forced into the prison, “One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, ‘I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.’”

“Chained at their ankles and wrists, they stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them. With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shove,” the journalist added. “[Guards] descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste. The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.”

Trump illegally deporting migrants without due process

The president has recently revoked the legal status of 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans who were granted asylum in the U.S. by former President Joe Biden under a program to help them flee countries with war or political instability, The Guardian reported.

These individuals have been targeted for mass deportation under the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law used to deport foreign hostile agents from the U.S. during times of declared conflict without any court hearings. Congress is the only governmental body that can legally declare that the U.S. is in an active conflict, and it has not yet done so in this instance. As such, the revocation of their asylum has already been challenged in federal courts.

The legal challenge to Trump’s deportations is being heard by U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, who said that, even though they’re undocumented immigrants, the deported individuals are still “entitled to individualized hearings to determine whether” they can be deported under the Act. Boasberg has said that the president denied the deportees constitutionally required court hearings before deporting them to a detention center known for torturing its detainees. The president has repeatedly defied the judge’s orders to explain the reasoning behind the deportations.

Boasberg’s conclusion comes directly from the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment which says, “No State shall… deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” The amendment applies to all people, not just documented U.S. citizens. Some Republicans have argued that the amendment shouldn’t apply to people accused of terrorism.

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