Trump Spent Millions To Send People To a Concentration Camp To Be Tortured
Your tax dollars are going to the self-declared "coolest dictator in the world" to commit disgusting human rights abuses.
This is not one of those satirical articles that I’ve written of late, using silly scenarios to try to highlight the absurd actions of the current administration.
This is all true.
And after this new crossed line of authoritarian lawlessness by President Donald John Trump, I don’t foresee many humorous write-ups about him anymore. He has signed a $6 million deal with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele—the self-declared “world’s coolest dictator”—to send people for indefinite imprisonment in the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) mega-prison.
Who is Trump going to send to this 40,000-person facility, which Bukele commissioned and opened in 2023?
It really shouldn’t matter.
Right now, the focus is on Kilmar Abrego Garcia. That's because the administration inadvertently admitted to sending him to CECOT by mistake. The claims of his gang membership collapse under the lightest scrutiny, and Trump has chosen to defy a judge demanding he be sent home.
However, in this situation, it really shouldn’t matter whether Abrego Garcia is an innocent family man, an American citizen, a violent gang member, or a convicted serial killer with a double-digit body count.
No human being should have to endure life in CECOT, which henceforth will be described as a concentration camp, since that is what it really is. A crucial distinction: Prisons are for people convicted of crimes or awaiting trial. And CECOT is filled with people just swept up in Bukele’s authoritarian efforts to bring gang violence under control. He has arrested 84,000 people since 2022, and many with little or no due process.
More importantly, though, CECOT is a human rights atrocity that genuinely does mirror traditional World War II concentration camp photos:
Look at that.
Those men locked in those rooms have two toilets and two basins. They get two light meals a day and rationed water. The lights are on 24 hours a day. They can never go outside or have visits with family members. With far more inmates than beds, who has to stand up and who gets lie down? They have to take turns. There is no recreation or education. Once you're in, you’re never getting out.
And, of course, there are beatings and torture.
The Trump administration is going to the mat to keep Abrego Garcia in CECOT, selecting this as its first moment of outright defiance against a court order - a move which may now lead to potential criminal contempt charges.
Why are they doing this?
If this were one of my satirical articles, then this would be the point where I attribute some outlandish fantasy or sci-fi answer to explain the President’s outrageous behavior.
But in this case, the answer is much more boring, predictable, and even mundane:
Trump is a very stupid person and he has, in turn, attracted and surrounded himself with people who are comparably stupid.
Now that this crew of idiots has attained the power they have fought to regain for years, they face the problem of trying to deliver on their campaign rhetoric and to turn their long-dreamed-of ideological passions to reality.
It was always clear to anyone with a functioning brain and basic understanding of American civics at a seventh grade level why the kinds of “mass deportations” promised by the Trump team couldn’t happen in the real world. Two words: due process. The government can’t just sweep people up like bits of trash and then dump them in a garbage bin on the other side of the border. Deportation is a legal process, and the legal process very intentionally takes its time in making decisions for a simple reason: TO AVOID CATASTROPHIC MISTAKES.
Thus, in order to make “mass deportations” a reality, the administration has to start doing exactly what they’ve done to Abrego Garcia tons of people. They need to make more deals with authoritarian “strongmen” in the third world to house more people indefinitely in concentration camps like CECOT.
So it’s just stupid all around:
Start with the stupid goal of “mass deportations.”
Find the stupid solution of paying $6 million to a Latin-American millennial dictator who will let you stick a few hundred people in his concentration camp.
Stupidly ignore due process and thus make the stupid mistake of sending someone who is clearly a threat to nobody, and has been convicted of no crime
Stupidly lie incessantly about who that person is.
Stupidly ignore the courts’ clear order to bring him back.
End up looking embarrassingly stupid in front of the whole world doing something so obviously illegal that a junior high school student can get it.
This is the man who just kneecapped the global world economy to push a tariff policy that has been universally debunked since the 1930s. You really expect his approach to immigration and criminal justice to make any more sense?
As scary as this moment is in our history, it does also seem a moment for optimism, though.
Trump has really crossed a line now. These efforts are unambiguously unconstitutional on multiple levels, and they're a direct threat to literally anyone and everyone in the country. If this administration can make the “mistake” of sending a man without due process to a concentration camp that packs men onto shelves like boxes in a warehouse, then they can make that “mistake” with anyone, citizen or not.
There is a whole lot in government that Trump can fuck around with and make a huge mess of all over the place. But snatching up people without due process and sending them for life imprisonment in a concentration camp is too much for Americans who just wanted him to fucking lower the price of fucking eggs.
The fight to liberate the hostage Kilmar Abrego Garcia from one of the world’s most brutal concentration camps goes far beyond one man. It’s about protecting not just him, but all of us from our supremely stupid, Idiocracy-authoritarian overlords.
Announcement: Series Restarting
I am very disturbed and disgusted with this point that we’ve reached so quickly with the new administration. Trump has been in office for just three fucking months, and we're already here. I honestly did not expect them to go this far or to be this stupid. I can’t help but remember throughout the day the innocent men—and even the guilty ones, too—trapped in those cages, sitting up on those shelves, echoing Auschwitz.
From June 1, 2024 through Oct. 22, 2024, I wrote 10 posts in the “The Hostage Liberation Journal” series, focusing on the challenges of recovering the humans kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. It was the fourth series on antisemitism that I’d written since starting the first “Antisemitism and Culture” essay series in fall 2022. I’m now going to relaunch this series with a broader, global focus.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is being held hostage by the Trump administration in a concentration camp in El Salvador. There is no real difference here between Hamas snatching up people in Southern Israel to send them to Gaza to be tortured and imprisoned indefinitely and Trump snatching up people in America to be tortured and imprisoned indefinitely. Both are moral atrocities that should turn the stomach of every decent person.
So in the relaunch of this series, I’m going to write about this case in El Salvador and the continued efforts to free the hostages in Gaza. We’ll look more broadly at regimes around the globe which wrongfully hold people without due process. I’m going to try to write pieces on all of them. If anyone has any suggestions for people and places I should write about, then please leave suggestions and links in the comments.
Did you hear about ICE's detainment of an actual U.S. citizen in Florida today?
Great post. A few years ago I went to the Hotel Roosevelt, the main migrant processing center in New York, for a story. I remember talking to these sweet young Venezuelan guys idling on their bikes waiting to do deliveries and I think about guys like them at that place. As for your stupidity thesis, yes, absolutely, but also my more sinister interpretation is that this is a strategic "fuck you" to the judiciary that he plans to abuse on a wide swath of issues including running for a third term.