The Last Week Tonight host digs into the lists, often biased and inaccurate, used as justification to deport peopleAfter an extended summer holiday, John Oliver returned to his desk at Last Week Tonight to dissect US law enforcement’s overreliance on faulty and unregulated gang databases. Such databases – as Oliver put it, “basically lists the police keep of people they say are involved in gangs” – have been used to justify numerous deportations under the Trump administration, including the deportation and detention of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadorian immigrant from Maryland whom Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) illegally deported due to what they later admitted was an “administrative error”.The deportation stemmed from a wrongful inclusion on a gang database – in 2019, officers apparently observed Ábrego at a Home Depot and filed a report that he belonged to a gang, based on the fact that he wore a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with “rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents” and that they “know such clothing to be indicative of the Hispanic gang culture”. Continue reading...