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Atlantic
2 days ago
- Politics
- Atlantic
What the U.S. Can Learn About Democracy From Latin America
Imagine a couple of bros recording a video podcast in which they get together to swap compliments while casually chatting about vaporizing due process. This is roughly what it felt like to tune in to President Donald Trump's joint press conference with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office in April. First came the mutual praise. 'I want to just say hello to the people of El Salvador and say they have one hell of a president,' Trump started. Bukele expressed delight at meeting 'the leader of the free world.' Later in the conversation, Trump told Bukele, 'You sort of look like a teenager,' playfully slapping his arm. The pair then turned their attention to the extrajudicial transfer of dozens of Venezuelan migrants held in the United States to the notorious Salvadoran mega-prison known as CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo), as well as the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who had been mistakenly deported to El Salvador by U.S. authorities. Asked by a reporter if he would facilitate Abrego Garcia's return, as mandated by the U.S. Supreme Court, Bukele asked coyly, 'How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?' Trump bobbed his head approvingly. (Abrego Garcia was ultimately returned to the U.S. earlier this month.) This confab was the latest brutish two-step in a decades-long political dance between the U.S. and El Salvador. In the 1980s, the U.S. gave billions of dollars to murderous right-wing factions during the Central American nation's civil war, fueling the conflict and destabilizing the country. In the '90s, the Clinton administration began deporting Salvadoran immigrants convicted of crimes in the U.S. back to their homeland, a move that helped propel the rise of powerful gangs in a country that was institutionally weak after years of war. Rising gang violence then led thousands of ordinary Salvadorans to flee to the United States. The chaos laid the groundwork for the rise of Bukele, a man who once described himself as ' the world's coolest dictator. ' And now the U.S. is paying the country to house Venezuelan migrants, including many whose greatest crime seems to have been seeking asylum here. This feels like more of the same, but with an awful new twist. American intervention in Latin America has often been premised on the condescending notion that the U.S. is a forbearing parent, the stable democracy tasked with maintaining order in its hemisphere. But now that our country has deployed the military against its own citizens in Los Angeles, taken a Constitution-shredding approach to deportation, and defied court orders, it might be Latin America's turn to offer guidance. Latin American nations, for all their political convulsions and repressive periods, have a rich history of social movements grounded in collective ideals. As some historians talk about Trump as a strongman in the Latin American mold, perhaps the region has something to teach us about democracy. Trump's regime makes the arrival of the historian Greg Grandin's ambitious new book, America, América: A New History of the New World, incredibly timely. His previous, Pulitzer-winning book, The End of the Myth, incisively explained how U.S. expansionism gave way to the border-wall isolationism of the Trump era. In America, América, he expands the frame. Over 768 pages, Grandin gives us the sweep of history: the bloodshed of colonization, the movements for independence, manifest destiny in the U.S. and caudillo rule in Latin America, a pair of world wars, the Cold War, and the growing polarization of the 21st century. The author is not the first scholar to tackle the history of America—as in the American continent, not just the United States (which keeps trying to hoard the name for itself). The British historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto's 2003 book The Americas: A Hemispheric History covered the shifting fortunes of the continent's Anglo and Latin American nations over five centuries. But that work was more limited in scope, and in the two decades since it was published, a new generation of caudillos has arisen, including Bukele, Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, Argentina's Javier Milei, and Trump. America, América brings us to the present. It also offers a fresh look at the past, primarily focusing on the British and Spanish empires and providing a deep analysis of the ideas upon which both were built and governed (for better and worse). Grandin considers, for example, how both empires contended—or didn't—with the ethics of conquest. And he goes deep on the ways that the Monroe Doctrine shaped U.S.–Latin America relations over two centuries. When President James Monroe declared in 1823 that the Western Hemisphere was off-limits to future European colonial projects, his proclamation was received as a statement of solidarity by newly independent Latin American nations. But it quickly became 'a self-issued warrant for the U.S. to intervene against its southern neighbors,' Grandin writes. Within two years, the U.S. was actively undermining Mexican President Guadalupe Victoria; military incursions in Mexico, Haiti, Cuba, and Puerto Rico followed. By the middle of the 20th century, Cold War paranoias about left-wing movements, spurred by the revolution in Cuba, led to, in Grandin's estimation, 16 U.S.-aided regime changes from 1961 to 1969—including one in El Salvador, which put that country on the slippery slope to civil war. This is a big and unwieldy book—and it could have made for arid reading. But Grandin has a knack for enlivening theory with anecdotes that are both enlightening and appalling. A section detailing the independence movement in Venezuela, for instance, features a novelistic tangent about a royalist caudillo named José Tomás Boves, who attempted to beat the reformers back: He gathered an army to seize the capital of the newly independent nation, brutalizing anyone who stood in his path. In Cumaná, he held Caracas's republican orchestra captive and ordered the musicians to play waltzes as his soldiers danced with the town's widows. 'Blood from the day's killing still moist on their boots turned the dance floor red,' writes Grandin. 'As the orchestra played, Boves took one musician out at a time to be executed.' Although such gory tales push the story along, what makes América, America instructive is Grandin's focus on the way that Latin American thinkers have advocated for important social rights from the very foundation of their republics. For starters, many early independence movements in Latin America were linked to the abolition of slavery—most notably in Haiti. The South American liberation leader Simón Bolívar emancipated the slave laborers who worked on his family's estate—unlike George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Moreover, the constitutions of many Spanish-speaking republics went beyond enshrining individual rights, also offering protection to el bien común de la Sociedad ('the common good of society'). Mexico's constitution was the first in the world to guarantee birthright citizenship. Venezuela's first constitution included nine instances of the word social and 15 of the word society, Grandin writes: 'Neither word appears in the United States Constitution.' Venezuela's remarkable document declared, 'Because governments are constituted for the common good and happiness of men, society must provide aid to the destitute and unfortunate, and education to all citizens.' Certainly, there was a gap between high-minded intentions and the actual application of the law. The abolition of slavery in Latin America didn't immediately eliminate it in practice, and that first Venezuelan constitution was shortly replaced by another. But Latin America's ideals of el bien común have nevertheless helped shape legal codes into the present—including international law. Many of the ideas put forth in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948, emerged from Latin America, including the equal treatment of men and women, the right to marry across racial lines, the right to health care, and the right to leisure time. Grandin's narrative upends the idea of Latin America as perpetual victim, instead chronicling a tradition of leaders who have consistently fought for the social good. One particularly illuminating chapter traces the way that liberation theology, Marxist economic theory, and Latin American literature came together in the 1960s to articulate 'the intangible ways patriarchs, dictators, landlords, and foreign capital maintained their rule.' Grandin argues that this was 'a period of such intense intellectual vitality, it should be considered equal to European Enlightenment.' Particularly poignant in the context of El Salvador is the story of Father Ignacio Ellacuría, a prominent Jesuit clergyman in that country who was part of a wave of Latin American theologians interested in liberating their communities from economic and political peonage. One of Ellacuría's central ideas was that the poor shouldn't be expected to roll over and accept their condition. He wrote that he aimed 'to bring the crucified down from their crosses.' These ideas, along with Ellacuría's attempt to broker a peace treaty between leftist insurgents and the government, were not well received by the military. In 1989, amid the chaos of the civil war, Ellacuría was assassinated as he slept, along with five other Jesuit clergymen and their housekeeper and her daughter. The perpetrators: members of the infamous Atlácatl Battalion, which had been created under the direction of U.S. advisers. The murder of these priests did not stamp out their ideas. Today, the priests are on the road to canonization, and an associate of theirs, Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chávez, is one of Bukele's most outspoken critics. As Grandin notes in his final chapter, the world is now experiencing the rise of a new generation of autocrats—among them Bukele, whom he criticizes for using CECOT as a site of a 'Dantesque display of fascist dehumanization.' But in Latin America's socially minded ideals, the author finds a way forward. 'Latin Americans know that the way to beat fascism now is the same as it was back then,' he writes, comparing our era to the rise of autocracy in the 1930s, 'by welding liberalism to a forceful agenda of social rights, by promising to better the material conditions of people's lives.' To take one example, the electoral rise of the socialist Salvador Allende in Chile didn't come about because the masses were being mindlessly seduced by leftist doctrine; it was a result of the tangible (and very reasonable) reforms that Allende delivered: literacy programs, an expanded education system, increased pensions for widows, free lunches for schoolchildren, and workplace-safety regulations. How might these ideas of el bien commún inform American social movements today? For now, Grandin has no more answers than anyone else. America, América focuses more on big-picture ideology than on the nitty-gritty mechanics of resistance. Unexamined, for example, are the ways in which the Catholic Church in Chile built institutions to resist the depredations of the military regime in the 1970s and '80s, helping set the stage for the liberalization that followed. There is a lot of material left to explore when it comes to overcoming the latest setbacks in the American continents' slow progress toward freedom. Perhaps it would be a fitting topic for Grandin's next book.
Time Magazine
25-06-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
How the U.S. Exports Punishment
In March 2025, the Trump administration rounded up over 250 United States immigrants, mainly Venezuelans, and trafficked them to El Salvador's mega-prison, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT). It was a violent move—made even more destructive by the fact that, just four months after the U.S.'s actions, Ecuadorian and Peruvian officials have, too, announced that they are keen to use this deal as a blueprint for detainees in their respective countries. The U.S. has currently invested 6 million dollars into CECOT, where they are keeping people in cells that confine 65 to 70 bodies at a time. (This week, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light to continue forcibly disappearing migrants to third countries without additional due process.) Read More: What the Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Experienced The U.S.'s contract with CECOT is, in and of itself, unparalleled (and a blatant violation of human rights and dignity). But it reveals a pattern that is certainly not new. The U.S. has a detailed track record of exporting and influencing punishment tactics globally. What we see today in El Salvador is not an exception, but instead the product of precedent since America's inception. The U.S. provided running water for its first penitentiary before the White House; the infrastructure of punishment has always taken priority over that of democracy. Opened in 1829, Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary (ESP) emphasized control and surveillance through its panopticon design, which optimized the ability for a small staff of correctional officers to supervise a large group of incarcerated people. 'It was considered a modern marvel,' shares Baz Dreisinger, the scholar, author, and Executive Director of Incarceration Nations Network. 'There are over 350 prisons modeled after it around the world.' Punishment in this country—the preoccupation with state-sanctioned violence as a means of safety—has never been solely a domestic affair. In Dreisinger's book, Incarceration Nations, she details how, after the establishment of facilities like ESP, 'nineteenth-century European scholars made prison tours a vital stop on their visits across the pond,' from Fredrick William IV of Prussia, among the first tourists, to rulers and commissioners in France, Russia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden. American prisons soon 'weaved their way into the fabric of global culture,' she says. Well into the 20th century, U.S. prisons served as a channel for innovation around punishment. The U.S. continued to implement the concept of solitary living as 'penance,' most notably in segregated units like Alcatraz's 'D-Block.' But it wasn't until the 1960s that the U.S. built its first super-maximum (known as 'supermax') security prison: minimal human contact and recreation, limited natural light, and few to zero educational or work opportunities are some of the defining characteristics of the psychological and physical cruelty that served as a blueprint for others. In 1963, the Federal Bureau of Prisons built its first supermax, USP Marion in Illinois, with a 23-hour-a-day isolation policy. As the influence of the supermax grew domestically—by 1999, there were 57 in 34 states—so too did the model infiltrate punitive aims abroad. Dreisinger cites Brazil's Penitenciária Federal de Catanduvas, built in 2007, as a 'slice of the United States [supermax] plunked down on foreign shores.' (Brazil is one of the highest ranking countries when it comes to incarceration rates). 'The moment I laid eyes on it,' Dreisinger shares, 'I almost forgot what country I was in.' The scholar goes on to share that these supermax iterations exist in other countries as well, like how New Zealand's Auckland Prison directly cites USP Marion in its planning documents and the American Correctional Association (ACA) touts its publication 'Supermax Prisons: Beyond the Rock,' as a central resource guide for corrections overseas. In addition to these instances of the U.S. modeling what's possible for carceral practices, the country has also directly invested in broader approaches to criminalization internationally. 'Cops have become frontline U.S. diplomats,' explains Stuart Schrader, a scholar of race and policing, and the author of Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. 'Cop diplomacy fosters cop friendship.' In El Salvador, for instance, one of the six International Law Enforcement Academies (ILEAs) sits as a current policing export. Ten minutes away lies the International Tactical Training Association, founded by a Chicago officer 'after the State Department cut off government assistance to a specialized Salvadoran police unit linked to death squads,' Schrader says. Read More: Searching for Devils at CECOT As for incarceration infrastructure and 'success' abroad, the U.S. exported both the concept of privatization of prisons as well as the accreditation process led by the ACA. There was little resistance to expanding profit-driven privatization on a global scale. As for ACA accreditation, it 'legitimizes' facilities and often justifies requests for additional funding. As ACA accreditation exists abroad, it's consequently plausible that this would increase the likelihood of those countries receiving funding. This process can be costly. The Department of State's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs awarded a $3.6 million contract to the ACA for Mexico. (Since the initial award, the value of the contract has lowered to about $2 million). A 2020 report by Senator Elizabeth Warren revealed that 'accreditation has little to no correlation with detention facility conditions and practices' and is instead 'a rubber-stamping of dangerous facilities.' It also evidenced that ACA fees, paid by the institutions it audits, comprise nearly half of the association's revenue. These ACA certificates are strewn about prisons in Mexico, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Dubai, Colombia, and the UAE—evidence of just how vastly the U.S. has shaped carceral systems abroad. A 2020 report published by the agency boasts that 'there is no doubt' they are 'a global organization with work and influence that has stretched over the years to every major part of the world.' The United States sets the bar for criminalization, often serving as a primary external source of financial support in many countries. This includes everything from the construction and remodeling of prisons and youth detention facilities to plea-bargaining reforms that incentivize bail and pre-trial detention. In 2022 alone, the United States sent $34 million to Haiti, $33 million to Mexico, $28 million to Canada, and more in their efforts to fund criminal justice systems abroad. 'The United States is invested in other countries having solid prison systems and police because we see it as preventing instability at our doorstep,' Dreisinger says. But often these same systems perpetuate harm and the very instability the U.S. is purportedly trying to avoid. 'We're exporting the problem, but we're not exporting thoughtful solutions—and we could be,' Dreisinger adds. It's important to remember that our current moment is not simply a reflection of authoritarian opportunism, but a consequence of years of legislation and financial investment into global prison systems. And yet administrations, past and present, consistently portray violence as isolated or individual—never systemic, never historical. But the centuries-long expansion in punitive tactics at home and abroad has brought us to our brutal present—and it's only going to metastasize further.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
UN Human Rights Chief Rings Alarm Bells On Trump's Use Of Salvadoran Prison
The top human rights official at the United Nations rang alarm bells Tuesday about the Trump administration's use of a Salvadoran megaprison to detain immigrants without due process, potentially for life. U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said in a press release that his office had received information from family members and lawyers 'regarding more than 100 Venezuelans believed to be held in CECOT,' or Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, the Salvadoran megaprison with a reputation for torturous conditions where the Trump administration has sent at least 288 men without charge or trial. 'This situation raises serious concerns regarding a wide array of rights that are fundamental to both US and international law — rights to due process, to be protected from arbitrary detention, to equality before the law, to be protected from exposure to torture or other irreparable harm in other States, and to an effective remedy,' the human rights commissioner said. Türk said the sense of 'powerlessness' experienced by families of detainees seeing their loved ones treated like terrorists even without trial, as well as the use of shackles and 'demeaning rhetoric' by the Trump administration, have been 'profoundly disturbing.' 'I welcome the essential role that the US judiciary, legal community and civil society are playing to ensure the protection of human rights in this context,' he said. 'I have called on the US Government to take the necessary measures to ensure compliance with due process, to give prompt and full effect to the determinations of its courts, to safeguard the rights of children, and to stop the removal of any individual to any country where there is a real risk of torture or other irreparable harm,' he added. Trump's agreement with the government of El Salvador to detain hundreds of immigrants sent by the United States has raised both domestic and international legal challenges. Last week, human rights groups petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of over a dozen detainees and their families, and hundreds more men believed to be detained in the Salvadoran prison system, seeking emergency measures including the detainees' release. In the United States, courts have insisted that detainees be given the opportunity to contest their removals to so-called 'third countries' — those other than the nations of their citizenship — and judges have paused removals under the Alien Enemies Act, one of the authorities Trump used to send detainees to CECOT. Under that 18th-century law, migrants deemed by immigration authorities to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang were treated as enemy combatants and expelled to CECOT before being able to fully hear or dispute the allegations against them. Neither the United States nor El Salvador have released the names of U.S. detainees in CECOT, leading many human rights experts to classify the detentions as enforced disappearances. 'Given the risk, the fear, of human rights violations being committed, there may well be concerns of enforced disappearance,' Liz Throssell, a spokesperson for the U.N. human rights office, said at a press conference Tuesday. 'And of course that is a really a serious issue under international human rights law.' Lawyers Are Sounding The Alarm About Trump Disappearing People Human Rights Groups File Emergency Petition Over Trump Expulsions To Salvadoran Mega-Prison Historians Are 'Shocked' By What They've Seen Trump Do In Just 100 Days
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Human Rights Groups File Emergency Petition Over Trump Expulsions To Salvadoran Mega-Prison
Human rights groups writing on behalf of over a dozen families filed an emergency petition with an inter-American human rights commission Friday, urging the commission to pursue the immediate release of hundreds of people the United States has sent to an infamous mega-prison in El Salvador without charge or trial. The filing centered on U.S. President Donald Trump's administration sending at least 288 men to El Salvador's Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, since mid-March. The groups called for the release of the detainedVenezuelan and Salvadoran migrants to the United States. Many of the migrants had open U.S. asylum cases and other protections and were not given due process before being condemned by Trump to potential life imprisonment in one of the hemisphere's most notorious prison systems. 'I knew that this kind of thing was happening in Venezuela, sending innocent people to a detention center without a trial,' the partner of one of the CECOT detainees, identified by her initials DCNP, said in a press release accompanying Friday's filing. 'I find it almost unbelievable to see this happening in the United States and in El Salvador with [my partner].' Friday's request sought emergency 'precautionary measures,' and was sent to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of all individuals transferred by the United States to CECOT since mid-March and their families. It listed declarations from family members of 18 individuals who the United States transferred to CECOT. The commission is an independent body within the Washington, D.C.-based Organization of American States. Its seven commissioners may direct that a state adopt precautionary measures with regard to 'serious and urgent situations presenting a risk of irreparable harm to persons or to the subject matter of a pending petition or case before the organs of the inter-American system,' according to commission rules. While the commission lacks serious enforcement powers, ignoring its findings can come with political repercussions. The request was submitted by four U.S.-based human rights legal groups: the Boston University School of Law International Human Rights Clinic, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, the Global Strategic Litigation Council and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. 'This is a moral and legal failure of two governments — and a human rights emergency demanding global attention,' Bella Mosselmans, director of the Global Strategic Litigation Council, said in a statement included in Friday's announcement. 'The U.S. and El Salvador have colluded to strip hundreds of people — including many individuals with pending asylum claims in the U.S. — of their rights and freedom. These individuals have been ripped from their families, vanished without a trace and abandoned in a prison widely condemned by the international community. This is state-sanctioned enforced disappearance and must end now.' The filing, a copy of which HuffPost reviewed, stresses the urgency of the detainees' situation: They have been held incommunicado for months in a facility known for overcrowding, abusive practices and torture. Family members of the detainees have faced a grave 'psychological and emotional toll' having not heard from them for all that time, the release said. 'Conditions in CECOT and other detention facilities in El Salvador are beyond appalling,' Isabel Carlota Roby, a senior staff attorney at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights who unsuccessfully tried to access the prison in person recently, said in a statement. 'Detainees are held in inhumane conditions, without charges, without representation and without hope. This is arbitrary detention on a mass scale.' The request urged the commission to issue a series of measures against El Salvador, including the immediate release of the U.S. CECOT detainees, the ability to resolve habeas corpus petitions, facilitation of communication with family members and legal counsel, confirmation of detainees' identities and any alleged legal basis for their detention, independent monitoring of detention conditions, and a refrain from any transfer of the detainees to any other country where they might be deprived of their human rights. The Trump administration's decision to make a multimillion-dollar agreement with El Salvador's president, self-proclaimed 'coolest dictator in the world' Nayib Bukele, to indefinitely detain hundreds of people transferred from the United States without due process marks yet another step away from democratic norms by the Trump administration. Since 2022, El Salvador's president has ruled over a 'state of exception' involving sweeping consolidation of executive power and degradation of due process, with tens of thousands of people being detained without the ability to exercise their legal rights. According to public reporting and legal filings, U.S. immigration agents told several detained migrants that they were being sent to CECOT simply due to common tattoos like clocks and crowns. The vast majority don't have any criminal record, in anycountry. The Trump administration has not released a list of names of the people it has sent to CECOT, and has only acknowledged a handful of the U.S. detainees by name in interviews or legal filings. As a result, many legal scholars consider Trump's expulsions to CECOT to be 'enforced disappearances,' a violation of international law in which people are detained and deprived of their rights without any official acknowledgement, outside of the rule of law. Friday's filing used the same term. The Trump administration has labeled roughly half of the people it's sent to CECOT as 'alien enemies,' using an 18th century law to deny them due process by arguing not only that they are members of the Tren de Aragua gang but also that they are working with the Venezuelan government and are akin to an invading army. Others were sent to El Salvador after receiving standard deportation orders from an immigration judge. Immigration proceedings are civil processes, not criminal ones, and Trump's use of an infamous prison as a destination for otherwise-standard deportees is unprecedented. Several U.S. courts have, for now, essentially paused ongoing transfers of U.S. detainees to CECOT. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month lifted a lower court's pause on sending noncitizens to CECOT under the Alien Enemies Act — but the court also required that future detainees have some ability to make a case against their removal in court. Separately, a federal judge in Boston ruled that the United States must give any deportee to a 'third country' — other than their country of origin — a chance to express a fear of removal to that country and reopen immigration proceedings. Other federaljudges around the country have paused Alien Enemies Act removals for anyone in their specific judicial districts. Still, the administration has demonstrated it is willing to openly defy court orders — as with its continued defiance of the Supreme Court, which found that the United States must facilitate the return of one CECOT detainee, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent to El Salvador despite an immigration judge previously granting him protection from deportation to that country specifically. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Thursday there was 'no scenario' in which Abrego Garcia would step foot in the United States again, despite him having a wife and children in the country, the backing of the Supreme Court and having been afforded no due process for his Salvadoran detention. Even after Trump himself acknowledged that he could bring Abrego Garcia home with a phone call, a Trump administration lawyer said in federal court Thursday that 'influence does not equate to constructive custody,' arguing that the fate of U.S. detainees in CECOT is really up to Bukele, not Trump. There's some hope that pressure from the Inter-American Commission could move the needle. Earlier this year, the United States banished several hundred deportees from around the world to Panama, where some were sent back to their home countries, but others were held in custody without trial, first in a hotel and then in a jungle camp. (A parallel situation is ongoing in Costa Rica.) The Global Strategic Litigation Council sought IACHR precautionary measures, urging the deportees' release from the camp and a pause on their deportations. Panama took those steps, offering over 100 migrants temporary humanitarian permits. Still, their future, like the detainees in El Salvador, is uncertain. Lawyers Are Sounding The Alarm About Trump Disappearing People ACLU Makes A Big Ask To Court In Battle Against Trump Administration Historians Are 'Shocked' By What They've Seen Trump Do In Just 100 Days
Business Mayor
09-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Mayor
The desperate search for a father disappeared by Trump to El Salvador: ‘We don't know anything'
The last time Joregelis Barrios heard from her brother Jerce, the call had lasted just one minute. Immigration officials had moved Jerce from the detention center in southern California where he had been for six months to another one in Texas. He sounded worried, as if he had been crying. He told his sister he might be transferred somewhere else soon. No one has heard from him since. Within hours of that call, Jerce was forced on a plane to El Salvador and booked into the country's most notorious prison: the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Cecot). He was one of more than 260 men that Donald Trump's administration had accused of terrorism and gang membership. His sister thought she recognized him in the videos shared by the Salvadorian government, among the crowd of deportees with shaved heads and white prison uniforms, being frogmarched to their cells by guards in ski masks. Then CBS News published a leaked list of the deportees' names, confirming her worst worries. 'It was a shock,' said Joregelis. 'Jerce has always avoided trouble.' Jerce, a 36-year-old professional soccer player and father of two, had come to the US last year to seek asylum, after fleeing political violence and repression in Venezuela. An immigration hearing to review his case was scheduled for 17 April, just weeks after he was abruptly exiled to El Salvador. 'He was so optimistic, up till the last day we spoke,' said Mariyin Araujo, Jerce's ex-partner and the co-parent of his two daughters, Isabella and six-year-old Carla. 'He believed the laws there in the US were the best, that it would all work out soon,' she said. 'How far did that get him?' B arrios was flown to Cecot on 15 March. For the past two months, his family has been obsessively scanning news updates and social media posts for any sign that he is still alive and healthy. They have been closely monitoring the court cases challenging Trump's invocation of the wartime powers of the Alien Enemies Act against the Venezuela-based gang known as Tren de Aragua, to exile immigrants – most of whom have no criminal history – to one of the most notorious prisons in the world. And they have been wondering what, if anything, they can do for Jerce. In Machiques, a small town near Venezuela's border with Colombia, locals have painted a mural in Jerce's honor. His old soccer club, Perijaneros FC, started a campaign demanding his release – and children from the local soccer school held a prayer circle for him. 'We have created TikToks about him, we have organized protests, we held vigils,' said Araujo. 'We have looked for so many ways to be his voice at this moment, when he is unable to speak,' she said. But as the weeks pass, she said, she is increasingly unsure what more she can do. The Trump administration has doubled down on its right to send immigrants to Cecot, despite a federal judge's order barring it from doing so. To justify these extraordinary deportations, both Trump and El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, have publicly insisted that the men sent to Cecot are the worst of the worst gang members. To mark Trump's first 100 days in office, his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a list of 'Noteworthy individuals deported or prevented from entering the US' – and characterized Jerce as 'a member of the vicious Tren de Aragua gang' who 'has tattoos that are consistent with those indicating membership' in the gang. Jerce's family and lawyer say the only evidence DHS has shared so far is that he has a tattoo on his arm of a soccer ball with a crown on top – a tribute to his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid. His other tattoos include the names of his parents, siblings and daughters. 'My brother is not a criminal,' Joregelis said. 'They took him away without any proof. They took him because he's Venezuelan, because he had tattoos, and because he is Black.' She's still haunted by the strange sense of finality in his last call. He had asked after his daughters, and whether his Isabella had been eating well. 'I told him she had just had some plátano,' Jorgelis said. 'And then he said to me: 'I love you.' He said to tell our mom to take care.' A raujo has struggled to explain to her daughters why their father hasn't been calling them regularly. She lives in Mexico City with Carla, her six-year-old. Isabella, three, is in Venezuela with Jorgelis. Carla, especially, has started asking a lot of questions. 'Recently, she said to me: 'Mom, Dad hasn't called me, Mom. Could it be that he no longer loves me?'' Araujo said. 'So I had to tell her a little bit about what had happened.' Now Carla cries constantly, Araujo said. She misses her father, she misses his scrambled eggs, she misses watching him play soccer. She keeps asking if he is being treated well in detention, if he is eating well. 'It's too difficult,' Araujo said. 'From a young age, kids learn that if you do something bad, you go to jail. And now she keeps asking how come her dad is in jail, he's not a bad person. And I don't know how to explain. I don't know how to tell her there is no logical explanation.' Jerce had been in detention of some sort ever since he set foot inside the US. Last year, he had used the now defunct CBP One app to request an appointment with immigration officials at the border. After more than four months of waiting in Mexico, agents determined that he had a credible case for asylum – but decided to detain him in a maximum-security detention center in San Ysidro, California, while he awaited his hearing. 'Jerce didn't tell us much about what it was like there, because he didn't want us to worry,' said Jorgelis. 'The only thing he did say was, why did he have to be Black? I believe he faced a lot of racism there.' When he first arrived at the border, immigration officials had alleged he might be a gang member based on his tattoos and on social media posts in which he was making the hand gesture commonly used to signify 'I love you' in sign language, or 'rock and roll'. His lawyer, Linette Tobin, submitted evidence proving that he had no criminal record in Venezuela, and that his hand gesture was benign. She also obtained a declaration from his tattoo artists affirming that his ink was a tribute to the Spanish soccer team and not to a gang. Officials agreed to move him out of maximum security shortly thereafter, in the fall of last year. 'I thought that was a tacit admission, an acknowledgement that he's not a gang member,' Tobin said. When officials moved him to a detention center in Texas, Tobin worried that transfer would complicate his asylum proceedings. Since she is based in California, she wasn't sure whether she'd be able to continue to represent him in Texas. Jerce had been worried when Tobin last spoke to him on the phone, in March, but she had reassured him that he still had a strong case for asylum. Now, the US government has petitioned to dismiss Jerce's asylum case, she said, 'on the basis that – would you believe it – he's not here in the US'. 'I mean, he'd love to be here if he could!' she said. Other than ensuring that his case remains open, Tobin said she's not sure what more she can do for her client. After the ACLU sued Donald Trump over his unilateral use of the Alien Enemies Act to remove alleged members from the US without legal process, the supreme court ruled that detainees subject to deportation must be given an opportunity to challenge their removals. But the highest court's ruling leaves uncertain what people like Jerce, who are already stuck in Salvadorian prison, are supposed to do now. As that case moves forward, Tobin hopes the ACLU will be able to successfully challenge all the deportations. But in a separate case over the expulsion of Kilmar Ábrego García, whom the administration admitted was sent to Cecot in error, the supreme court asked the administration to facilitate Ábrego García's return to the US – and the administration said it couldn't, and wouldn't. In his last calls with his family, Jerce told them he'd be out of detention soon – that it would all be better soon. Once he was granted asylum, he said, he would try to join a soccer league in the US and start earning some money. He had promised Carla he'd buy her a TV soon. Now, Araujo said: 'I don't even know if he is alive. We don't know anything. The last thing we saw was a video of them, and after that video many speculations, but nothing is certain.'
