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El Salvador's prison camp, kidnapping citizens, and rethinking everything

We’ve entered a new phase. Trump, in the Oval Office with El Salvador's dictator, openly defied the Supreme Court and repeatedly said he was interested in sending U.S. citizens to Bukele’s mass prison camp. We are in uncharted waters, and there’s no evidence of lifeguards. The President and everyone around him openly mocked the country’s highest court and distorted its 9-0 ruling demanding the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the union worker recently abducted from Maryland and shipped to El Salvador. These fascists pretended the court agreed with them, pretended not to have the power to bring Kilmar home, and pretended he's a terrorist as they terrorize our communities.

Maybe the most jarring moment in the Oval Office was the President of the United States telling his counterpart from El Salvador that “home-growns are next.” He said it again: “The home-growns. You gotta build about five more places [mega-prisons]. It’s not big enough.” The assembled fascists laughed.

We should understand clearly what had this authoritarian cadre chuckling. Here’s a slice of what Human Rights Watch has to say about CECOT, the mega-prison camp in El Salvador:

“People held in CECOT, as well as in other prisons in El Salvador, are denied communication with their relatives and lawyers, and only appear before courts in online hearings, often in groups of several hundred detainees at the same time. The Salvadoran government has described people held in CECOT as ‘terrorists,’ and has said that they ‘will never leave.’ Human Rights Watch is not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison. The government of El Salvador denies human rights groups access to its prisons and has only allowed journalists and social media influencers to visit CECOT under highly controlled circumstances. In videos produced during these visits, Salvadoran authorities are seen saying that prisoners only ‘leave the cell for 30 minutes a day’ and that some are held in solitary confinement cells, which are completely dark.”

We have to rethink everything. The fascists are escalating at a dizzying pace, and our resistance must change. Trump wants to abduct and indefinitely imprison U.S. citizens in a foreign mega-prison camp replete with torture and the total absence of rights, and he’s announcing his desire on TV. He and his accomplices are already doing this to people who are legally in the United States, and there’s no sign of them facing any consequences for their despicable actions from the checks and balances we were raised to believe in. In the face of outright fascism the mechanisms of the United States are simply too weak.

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

We’re up against a beast that is much bigger than MAGA. This is an international, far-right movement that transcends borders. From Hungary to Argentina to the United States and beyond oligarchs have financed fascism, and their investment is bearing fruit. El Salvador is one of their successes, and Bukele understands his client status. He’s eager and willing to do whatever Trump wants, and in exchange he'll profit. What we’re seeing so far is just the beginning, there are already plans being considered that could rapidly lead us down an unbelievably dark path.

The conversation with Bukele isn’t the first time Trump has mentioned removing U.S. citizens from the country. He’s said he would “love” to do that, would be “honored” to, Rolling Stone reports. The outlet also says that behind the scenes members of the administration have been talking about, “attempting to denaturalize American citizens and deport them to other countries, including El Salvador.”

But this isn’t the only option. Erik Prince, the former CEO of Blackwater who oversaw the massacre of civilians in Iraq and has been closely tied to Trump for the past decade, is pitching a scheme where the territory that El Salvador’s mega-prison camp sits on would be ceded to the U.S., getting around many of the legal issues currently being raised. It’s unclear how seriously the White House is taking this proposal, particularly given their willingness to ignore the law. But what is clear is that the decades of exporting and expanding the border apparatus are rapidly catching up to us. Years of telling Latin American countries to detain migrants, of paying them to detain migrants, of setting up and maintaining facilities like Guantanamo across multiple administrations have built to this moment where U.S. citizens may soon be abducted and shipped to El Salvador if nothing is done.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

We need to rethink everything. First, we have to rethink borders. While the far-right, the U.S. government, and the entire ruling class have harped about border security for years, they’ve quietly been realizing the utility of acting as if borders don’t quite exist, for them. As Harsha Walia writes, the ruling class exploits borders ​“to weaken collective bargaining rights and working-class resistance to transnational capital and its austerity measures.”

The super-rich and their money get to flow freely across borders while workers are policed and restricted and undermined so that they can be more easily exploited. This regime of border imperialism and weaponization is the first site we must fully rethink. As long as the border remains a location of violence for the working-class and a tool for the ruling class, we’ll be hyper-vulnerable to subjugation of the sort Trump and his fascist cadre are implementing.

The next lesson is that the law won’t save us. Migration is natural, moral, and ancient. If our guidepost is the legal system we will fail utterly, especially as the system is increasingly weaponized against scapegoated groups and dissidents under fascism. The law won’t save us, and criminality will kill us. All dissidents could soon be labeled criminals who ought to be shipped to prison camps outside the country. We can and should fight back in the legal system, but we should also think far beyond it, be careful not to reify it, and understand the sharp limits of the system’s legitimacy. As Kelly Hayes recently wrote:

“This may be one of the worst moments in history to fetishize the law or the quality of being law-abiding. It’s us and them. It’s the fascists vs. everyone else. If criminalization is all it takes to void our solidarity, then we have already lost, because the enemy holds the power to criminalize whoever they want, whenever they choose.”

On Monday we saw the harsh reality of supposed legal procedures being converted into weapons yet again. Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder and Palestinian student at Columbia, was detained in Vermont. He thought he was walking into a U.S. citizenship interview, and was instead taken out by ICE. The fascists used the promise of safety to lure Mohsen in, before betraying him and betraying the reality that this system cannot be trusted.

We don’t have time to wait for elections in two years, or four years. We need mass resistance now. We need to shut it down now. We need international solidarity and movements that transcend borders, as the far-right does. It’s going to take all of us, it’s going to take actions and organizing that might have seemed unfathomable just months ago. It’s going to take shifting our understanding of the stakes, and of what fighting back looks like. We need to find each other, find organizations that are meaningfully resisting, that are building real power and are ready to truly disrupt business as usual, to really fight fascism. And we need all of it on an accelerated time scale. We don’t have time to half-ass this.

There’s just one quote that meets this moment, and it comes from George Jackson. I’ll leave you with his words: “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”