Extraordinarily Renditioned Migrants Report Back From El Salvador’s Maximum Security Hellhole
from the we're-all-just-hourly-workers-on-the-US-Death-Star dept
President Trump wanted a war on Latin Americans and found an obliging partner in El Salvador, currently headed by President Nayib Bukele. Bukele has managed to bring down El Salvador’s homicide rate since he became president, but it’s more due to routine rights violations than any social programs Bukele managed to squeeze in between sieges of major cities. (Then there’s the fact that Bukele did the Donald Trump thing and fired prosecutors and investigators digging into allegations of corruption…)
President Bukele is tough on crime (that doesn’t directly serve his purposes), which is probably why Trump likes him so much and asked him to serve as a primary offloading ramp for the migrants Trump and his administration hate with a passion that’s only surpassed by their ineptitude.
Consequently, plenty of people wrongfully (or ignorantly) determined to be “foreign gang members” by the Trump administration and its extremely happy (to the point of near-orgasm) private prison contractors have been sent to what’s commonly known as CECOT in El Salvador.
CECOT stands for “Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo,” which — as any person with a half-assed grasp on Spanish could guess — would indicate it’s a maximum security prison meant to hold convicted terrorists. But it’s obviously not limited to terrorists. As of this time last year, the prison held more than 14,000 inmates. Those numbers have swelled now that the Leader of the Free World is sending as many Latino-looking people as possible to CECOT, utilizing a super-charged ICE (and super-charged funding) and an extremely dangerous, dubious invocation of the Alien Enemies Act.
CECOT has been a human rights hellhole for years. Before Trump’s subversion of the State Department with the installation of bootlicker/doormat Marco Rubio as the nominal Head of State, it had this to say about El Salvador and its most notorious prison, a report that notably follows President Bukele’s elevation to the top spot in El Salvador’s government:
Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, forced disappearances; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including censorship and threats to enforce criminal laws to limit expression; serious government corruption; lack of investigation and accountability for gender-based violence; significant barriers to accessing sexual and reproductive health services; and crimes involving violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals.
Given that, there’s no reason to disbelieve the personal accounts of the extremely small number of people who managed to secure their release from this third-party hellhole, one that now currently serves as the destination of choice for ICE-enabled deportations. Yes, the “Land of the Free” is aiding and abetting extrajudicial deportations that subject people only suspected of violating US civil law to all of this:
Dozens of migrants were forced onto a bus and driven to a massive gray complex. They were ordered to kneel there with their foreheads pressed against the ground as guards pointed guns directly at them.
“Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of b—–s,”a hooded figure told them, González recalled. They had arrived at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT.
Humiliation and dehumanization at scale… followed by more of the same once they arrived at CECOT:
In the four months they spent there, the detainees said, they were beaten repeatedly with wooden bats. González was robbed of thousands of dollars, he said, and denied access to lawyers or a chance to call his family. Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar.
And that’s just the stuff El Salvador government employees did to these detainees. And somehow, these prison guards managed to seem more threatening and violent than the thousands of alleged “terrorists” and MS-13 gang members these deportees were forced to share space with.
Of course, the DHS could not possibly give less of a fuck about what happens to brown people targeted by this administration’s racist policies. Instead, the diarrheatic mouthpiece of the DHS, Kristi Noem’s second-in-command, insists this is nothing more than another Trump administration success story every American should be proud to post to their own X accounts, like the DHS does when it wants to go full Lebensraum:
Asked to respond to some of the allegations in the accounts, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security said the U.S. had deported “nearly 300 Tren de Aragua and MS-13 terrorists” to CECOT, “where they no longer pose a threat to the American people.”
“Once again the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
To be sure, the Trump administration doesn’t actually care about crime victims. That’s why it has pardoned pro-Trump criminals and enabled multiple states to force victims of incest and rape to bring the offspring of their assailants to term. That’s why it has cut social services funding, even though it’s been demonstrated time and time again that a social safety net does more to reduce crime than throwing more money at cops. And that’s why ICE has just seen its funding quadrupled, despite most Americans (including Trump voters) actually being opposed to this regime’s mass deportation programs.
One direct quote from a victim of the bigoted evil now d/b/a “Donald Trump 2024-???” sums it up for all of us, even those lucky enough to be the fortunate(?) sons of the United States of America:
“This is hell,” Suárez recalled the prison director saying, “and you’re never going to get out.”
That’s the reality here on the home front. This administration has undone so much good and instituted so much evil (all the while being directly or indirectly supported by the top court in the land) that any successor to the Resolute Desk is going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy undoing this damage before they can even get to the very important business of improving life for all Americans, not just the white guys with bad hairdos, nonexistent jawlines, and the insane belief that the problem with America is its intricate blend of nationalities, rather than the extremely shitty people that inevitably manage to stumble into positions of power.
Filed Under: bigotry, cecot, dhs, donald trump, due process, el salvador, evil, ice, kristi noem, marco rubio, mass deportation, trump administration
Comments on “Extraordinarily Renditioned Migrants Report Back From El Salvador’s Maximum Security Hellhole”
I guess that for this administration, “illegal” means that the law doesn’t apply.
But “inhuman” should be the proper word since any basic human right doesn’t apply.
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basic human right
What is that? What right do you have that is not granted by someone else?
Re: Re: Cant tell if /s but...
There are two ways that basic human rights are enforced.
One is generally, by the implacable encroachment of nature. Hot climes, cold climes, predators, plagues, parasites, the need for food, the unstoppable march of time and age, all stab at the human tribe, killing us one by one to extinction as it has done to over 90% of all species that exist. Cooperation is our superpower, and morality (id est basic human rights ) are the mutual agreement (often unsaid), the terms by which we cooperate with each other. This teamwork serves as a powerful force multiplier against the elements. Work together, and we may effectively compete for the world’s resources. Don’t, and we all will die off. The societies that unify more people are the ones that define culture for the rest of us.
The other is the civil unrest that accumulates against tyrants who don’t allow for basic human rights and human want. The rise of governments other than monarchy (or feudal lord and vassals) has come from the matter of hereditary selection yields a lot of tyrants. It is difficult to build a legacy of good governance or far-reaching conquest before a Joffrey Baratheon inherits the throne and loses it all. Nations and kings still strive for the thousand-year rule, and few societies — if any — have survived so long without their history fragmented by a period of unrest, civil war and regime change by force).
Our scholars still guess at the models that preserve a long-lasting stable society, but all of them tend towards establishing permanent civil rights that protect everyone, with the list of such rights becoming longer by the iteration. Defining rights seems to figure largely into the formulas that work better.
I suppose, a dictator can simply massacre all the dissidents, but that’s an action that makes new dissidents of the onlookers, lather, rinse repeat until you don’t have enough people to make a modern society. The iron hand, tempting as it is, just doesn’t work as well.
A lot is still speculation, much like the the Fourth International Posadists, who assert that a communal state (one that escapes capitalism) is necessary before space travel and colonization can proceed in earnest. Historians only hypothesize how to create a long lasting stable state.
We can see plainly, however, the mass accumulation of political wealth and power, allows a small demographic to capture government and subvert it to serve them rather than the public. And this keeps at bay some basic advancements of universal quality of life, such as shorter work-weeks enough that the common population can parent and pay attention to civic duties.
We may be not far from a global post scarcity society, if weren’t for the sickness of billionaires who are determined to accumulate even more wealth for themselves, if not all the wealth in the world, to no rational end. But these plutocrats will bring all their wealth and power to anyone who dares try to unseat them, or even defy their efforts to reshape the world as they like it, so we’ve yet to find a cure for what is essentially parasitic capture of national bodies.
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There are two ways that basic human rights are enforced
Don’t recall asking that but, ok, I disagree.
Now, back to the original question, what is a basic human right? What right do you have that is not granted by someone else?
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-pay-el-salvador-jail-300-alleged-gang-members-ap-reports-2025-03-15/
COST, basic. Is $20,000 Per person. And if allowed by our system.
HOW MANY CAN TAKE THIS TO THE INTERNATIONAL COURT??
And thats only the First 200 on a single Jet. Wait till we get the Bill from South Africa and sending Persons OVER THERE, INSTED OF HOME, or Just kicking them OUT with a Airplane ticket HOME.
No Justice, No recompense, As these folks PAID into the system and MAny of them for YEARS. Not even counting those here and Admitted LEGALLY.
Those that were LEGALLY in the USA and Shipped out? Can take this to CIVIL and FEDERAL court and get a HELL of a lot of maney THEN complain to the International court.
AND still, other things arnt being spoke. the News is about the MEN, where are the Females? and the Children? Or has TRUMP done Another TRUMP as he did LAST TIME?
"A maximum security prison meant to hold convicted terrorists"
Once again,
a) Even terrorists (or serial killers, or child predators) deserve better treatment than this. This is the kind of prison an evil lord from an Edgar Allen Poe novel might build. It’s right up there with immurement.
b) No state should be torturing and rendering people (or for that matter, killing them). The whole notion of retributive justice fails at all levels (it doesn’t reduce crime as a deterrence and it only increases recidivism for those who survive their sentence), but also our systems of due process are just not certain enough or fair enough to justify cruel treatment or execution.
If we must have prisons at all, they should contain and be centers where actual rehabilitation is possible. Instead, at least in the US, they are the product of an industrial complex that profits from warm-bodies in dungeon cells.
CECOT itself is being used as an oubliette (a place of forgetting) to dispose of political prisoners, and while the US has recovered some folk from the compound, those who remain incarcerated there still are a humanitarian matter, regardless of any allegations of what they might have done, or who they might be.
CECOT should not exist, and every day it is operational is heinous.
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What!?!? you mean a criminal justice system aimed at justice AND improving civilization, both the convicted and the innocent? A system that exists to benefit society as a whole and just torture people believe to be “bad”!?!? That sounds suspiciously sane.
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What!?!? You mean a criminal justice system aimed at justice and improving civilization for both the convicted and everybody else? A system that exists to benefit society as a whole and only imprison (without torture) people believed to be bad!?!? That sounds suspiciously reasonable.
And to add.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/07/27/ice-student-deportations-trump-school-communities/84190533007/
Several students who attended K-12 schools in the United States last year won’t return this fall after ICE deported them to other countries.
Trump recently signed the House- and Senate-backed “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which increases ICE funding by $75 billion to use to enforce immigration policy and arrest, detain and deport immigrants who are illegally in the United States.
(from adding to the System, Immegrants, NOW COST the system?? If this like removing a Body part While it was still Functioning? Then getting a Doctors bill)
Parents can choose to leave their kids behind if they are arrested, detained and deported from the United States, she said.
Some advocates for immigrants in the United States dispute that claim. National Immigration Project Executive Director Sirine Shebaya said she’s aware of undocumented immigrant parents were not given the choice to leave their children behind or an opportunity to arrange for them to stay in the United States.
https://www.newsnationnow.com/us-news/immigration/border-coverage/unaccompanied-migrant-minors-located-hhs/
More than 13,000 migrant children who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border unaccompanied by an adult have now been located, a Department of Health and Human Services official confirmed to NewsNation.
President Donald Trump had pledged both before and after the 2024 election that his administration would locate the hundreds of thousands of minors who entered the country illegally without adults during the Biden administration.
Under the Biden administration, 320,000 unaccompanied children crossed the border,
(Strange to allow Children into the nation Without a Location for them to Go? I thought they were required to have SOMEONE to goto for a Place to live or Work??)
“The safety of children and ensuring they are reunited with their parents or safe guardian is (the) top priority of the Trump Administration, which stands in stark contrast to the nearly 300,000 migrant children that were lost under the Biden Administration,” Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement in response to the CNN report.
In addition to the 13,061 migrant minors that have now been accounted for, a HHS source told NewsNation this week that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested 422 sponsors who are accused of abusing the minors in their care or of other crimes.
(The games being played. I cant even figure the Scores anymore, as playing Poker/Monopoly/Chess as a single game is not covered in the Olympics.)
“Once again the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members,” Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement.
Yeah, that’s great for you, Trish, but what about the human beings you keep disappearing, and the rest of us?
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She’ll get round to sending us to CECOT eventually.
“That’s the reality here on the home front. This administration has undone so much good and instituted so much evil (all the while being directly or indirectly supported by the top court in the land) that any successor to the Resolute Desk is going to have to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy undoing this damage”
And the regime is just getting started. It has been in power for six months.