In an ominous episode that is still being treated as "Trump being Trump" by some portion of the corporate media, Downmarket Mussolini has once again floated the idea of transferring American citizens to a slave labor torture prison in El Salvador:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-el-salvador
Trump Backs 'Blatantly Unconstitutional' Proposal to Send US Citizen Inmates to El Salvador Prisons
"With a deadline looming for the Trump administration to return a Maryland resident to the U.S. after expelling him along with hundreds of other people to an El Salvador detention center under a shadowy deal with the Central American country, U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday stunned observers by expressing a desire to send U.S. citizens into El Salvador's prison system.
In a press briefing aboard Air Force One Sunday evening, Trump was asked by a reporter about an offer made by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to accept prisoners sent by the U.S. from its federal prison population.
"I love that," Trump said. "If we could take some of our 20-time wise guys that push people into subways and hit people over the back of the head and purposely run people over in cars, if he would take them, I would be honored to give them."
"I don't know what the law says on that," he added. "I have suggested that, why should we stop at people who cross the border illegally?"
I know I'm not the only person working in this space that's getting sick of hanging on Der Führer's ever word, musing, and threat, but as we've discussed many times, part of the way this regime operates is by transforming Trump's ravings into presumed consent to act on its worst fascist impulses and plans, in a system of "enforced unreality." When the president says, multiple times, he wants to send US citizens to a gulag in El Salvador, he's being dead serious about the regime's intentions; whether that's legal, or anyone in a position to stop him will do so, is another matter entirely - but this guy isn't just talking to hear himself talk, no matter how hard that may be to believe for people who know how profoundly ignorant and unstable Trump actually is. Given that reality then, the regime's continued quest to manufacture consent for rendering US citizens to a foreign maximum security torture prison, brings up 4 important issues:
1) We literally have no idea what Trump's deal with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele says, and the arrangement is extra-judicial at best.
"As Trump expressed interest in expelling U.S. citizens to a foreign prison system, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council pointed out that the details of the White House's deal with Bukele have not been publicly disclosed.
"We literally know nothing about it, other than we're paying them $6 million," said Reichlin-Melnick. "No law in the United States authorizes us to pay another country to imprison people. And yet! They're doing it."
2) At the same time Der Führer is advocating for the wonders of rendering US citizens to the carceral "care" of an authoritarian foreign government aligned with the Trump regime, the US government is also arguing in court that once they send someone to CECOT, they no longer have the ability to bring them back because they don't have custody of the prisoner and El Salvador is outside of US jurisdiction. Taken together then, this means that the President of the United States is currently advocating for the wisdom of, and his right to, permanently disappear US citizens. I don't care how much of a trav-sham-mockery you think Trump is, that's arguably the most terrifying news to emerge from the entire Trump 2.0 era.
3) While Trump's current rhetoric is focused on "dangerous criminals" and the examples he gives are mostly made up violent crime stories, the reality is that this regime has been arguing that folks protesting its fascist agenda, boycotting Elon Musk, or acting to oppose a US-backed genocide by Israel in Gaza, are literally domestic terrorists and an active threat to US national security. Furthermore it requires no conjecture to connect these facts to the regime's gulag fantasies because the Attorney General has already indicated support for sending "domestic terrorist" anti-Tesla protestors to CECOT. If they want to disappear you into a gulag for depressing Elon's profit margins, you can bet they're fine with doing so for protesting a genocide, or even just opposing Trumpism in the streets.
4) While all of this sounds horrifying and impossible, the reality is that our anti-terrorism policies under the Bush administration after 9/11 have already established a precedent for the US govt shipping people to legal black holes and claiming they hold no responsibility for protecting their rights as part of the extraordinary rendition policy. As many warned at the time, the War on Terror was always destined to return home, and it seems that under Trump, it has done precisely that.
*not* rectify them.
.
