El Salvador’s Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) is a mega-prison with a capacity of 40,000 inmates. It has become the biggest symbol in El Salvadore’s crackdown on crime, as it detains the country’s worst criminals, but today it may end becoming a concentration camp for US deportees.
Although the Salvadorians are content with the crackdown on criminals since it has made the country safer, the El Salvadorian Government and its president, Nayib Bukele, have, in how it runs Cecot, violated people’s rights. Cecot is notorious for its abhorrent conditions. Each cell holds approximately 80 inmates where the incarcerated members spend 23.5 hours a day, their 30-minute respite spent in the corridor of the prison. A metal bed, with no sheets, pillows or mattresses, an open toilet, a cement basin, a plastic bucket for washing, and a large jug of water are what the prisons hold. With lights on all the time and no privacy, the inmates face an inhumane ordeal.
On April 1st, Trump’s administration deported 238 Venezuelans to Cecot, in a third country, El Salvador, for allegedly lacking legal status or having gang affiliations. The deportees got a glimpse of the hardships awaiting them at Cecot when the prison officers held their heads down to waist-level, shaved their heads, and led them in shackles.
Trump’s administration has boasted about its ability to incarcerate those who don’t abide by the law. During a visit to Cecot, as detainees lined and watched through prison bars, Kristi Noem, Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, threatened, “First of all, do not come to our country illegally. You will be removed, and you will be prosecuted, but know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”
It didn’t stop there. The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has raised quite a storm in the media and amongst ordinary Americans. Garcia, a Salvadoran with no affiliation to any gang, was deported and detained at Cecot as the Trump administration downplayed his ordeal calling it, “an administrative error.”
However, the White House also decided that Garcia would become the scapegoat by which it can threaten anyone going against its will. Playing a cat and mouse game with the life of an innocent man, the White House ignored the US Supreme Court call to facilitate Garcia’s return, and White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt bluntly said, “Kilmar Abrego Garcia will never live in the US again.”
The anguish Garcia’s deportation created is felt amongst US citizens across the board, for by deporting Garcia, normal human rights fell by the wayside. Also, the White House did not follow due process and disregarded the Supreme Court’s call to expedite Garcia’s return.
But it goes further. President Trump said he would be willing to deport criminally charged “homegrown US citizens” to overseas prisons. Addressing the El Salvadorian president, Nayeb Bukele, in the White House, Trump said, "The homegrowns are next… You've got to build about five more places." To which Bukele responded, “Yeah, we've got space.”
President Trump is testing the US law, the judges he had appointed, and the Supreme Court as his proposal to send US citizens to prisons overseas encroaches on the civil liberties of US citizens. Legal experts say the idea is unconstitutional. “There is no provision under US law that would allow the government to kick citizens out of the country,” the University of Notre Dame professor Erin Corcoran, an immigration law expert, said. “It is pretty obviously illegal and unconstitutional,” Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, told NBC News.
But Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, worded it succinctly. "Any of us is vulnerable to basically being kidnapped," and "It would be a moral and legal travesty for the US government to subject anyone to such conditions."
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University professor, offered a similar warning. "What that means is that literally any of us, whether we are from Venezuela or were born in the United States, whether we are immigrants or not, whether we are citizens or not, any of us is vulnerable to basically being kidnapped by masked agents of the United States government who don't tell us why they're picking us up, perhaps never to be seen again because we're located somewhere in a dungeon, a prison cell, rotting away, whether it's in El Salvador or anywhere else in the world."
Though I doubt if many countries have resorted to sending their citizens to concentration camps in a third country, the US has utilized similar tactics before: the 80,000 Japanese Americans it chose to incarcerate during World War II, and the detainees, held without charge, at Guantanamo Bay Prison on the coast of Cuba. The facility was established to hold suspects, after September 11. Over the years, it has detained over 780 persons from 48 countries. Fifteen remain.
The consequences are damaging to the US’s image as citizens, immigrants, Green Card holders, international students, and even visitors worry about what may happen to them. Hence, detentions and deportations have caused travel to the US to fall with some countries tightening travel advisories to the US. Next-door neighbours, the Canadians, have opted not to cross the border with many cancelling reservations or making fewer travel bookings. Canadian CBC says, “900,000 fewer people went to the US in March.” The reason is obvious: fear for one’s safety.
And now French President Macron tells scientists and researchers that France and Europe are more welcoming, “Choose Europe…Here in France, research is a priority, innovation a culture, science a limitless horizon. Researchers from all over the world, choose France, choose Europe!"
An alien, disturbingly foreign US is emerging.