Imprisoning Immigrants and US Citizens in El Salvador’s Mega-Prison
At the beginning of February, and amongst a whirlwind of Executive Orders and unprecedented declarations, the Trump Administration struck up a deal with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele to deport illegal migrants and potentially U.S. citizens and legal residents to be held in in El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison.
The mega-prison, named the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), has been central to President Bukele’s extreme crime crackdown. A “state of emergency” declaration in 2022 has given the police and military the power to arrest suspected gang members while suspending due process and evidence requirements, leading to more than 80,000 imprisonments. Around 3,000 children have also been arrested in the course of these crackdowns.
Human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch have sounded the alarm on the situation, pointing to cases that amount, “under international law, to an enforced disappearance” and incidents of torture including “beating, waterboarding, burnings, suffocations, and mock executions.” Children have similarly suffered these violations according to reports.
Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the Trump Administration has agreed to deport and incarcerate supposedly “violent illegal immigrants including members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, but also criminal illegal migrants from any country” as well as “dangerous American criminals, including U.S. citizens and legal residents” to this mega-prison or similar, according to the U.S. Department of State press release on the matter.
Taking to the social platform X, formerly Twitter, President Bukele stated “We have offered the United States of America the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system. We are willing to take in only convicted criminals (including convicted U.S. citizens) into our mega-prison (CECOT) in exchange for a fee. The fee would be relatively low for the U.S. but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.”
The deportation of criminal foreign nationals to a country other than the one they are from is often understood as a “safe third country” plan; yet, this plan takes this concept a step further, bringing U.S. nationals into the fold of potential deportees.
Regardless of the population that the agreement would cover, this plan signals a much deeper issue: the penal attitude towards immigration and the way criminality is understood in the United States broadly.
Setting aside the legality of deporting U.S. citizens (which, when questioned about it, President Trump stated “If we had the legal right to do it, I would do it in a heartbeat”) or the technicalities of how such a deal would function, the language around the agreement is an extrapolation of the degrading ways incarcerated people are understood in the States.
In Trump’s own words: “We’re looking at [the legality of deporting citizens] right now, but we could make deals where we’d get these animals out of our country.”
The U.S. prison system has long been criticised by prison abolitionists for its degradation of human rights, its disproportionate criminalisation of people of color (particularly Black and Latino communities), and its overall concept of punitive justice.
The Trump administration’s plan of deportation represents these issues astonishingly. As many critics of U.S. incarceration point out, “[t]he explicit function of prison is to separate people from society.”
What could be a further isolation than a complete removal from not only society, but from the country? And not only removal from the country, but removal to a prison complex where “the prison’s director affirms no prisoner there will ever step outside”?
In this agreement, the dual issues of American punitive response and the growing desire on the part of the American populace to “keep out” immigrants have made exile the seeming solution. This plan indicates how fully immigrants have been subsumed into the American view of criminality, with those convicted of crimes being indistinguishable from illegal immigrants. The ability of the Trump administration and the general public to even consider this plan indicates that the incarcerated and immigrants have become seen as unworthy of basic human rights.
This trend is deeply dangerous for American society. Attempting to use an extreme strategy of exile to deal with crime and immigration (as the two increasingly become synonymous in the Administration's vernacular) lends itself to strategies used by authoritarian and rights-violating countries, such as El Salvador.
Making immigrants and the incarcerated inaccessible from society allows the criminal system to operate with an impunity that has proven deadly in many scenarios.
In the U.S., data from 2001-2018 reveals the number of deaths in state prisons increased 44 per cent with suicide accounting for 6 per cent and homicide 2 per cent of state deaths during that time period (note: homicide data includes homicides committed by other prisoners, incidental to the use of force by staff, or resulting from injuries sustained prior to incarceration). The amount of violence and psychological distress in prisons is worsening, arguably indicative of an environment where a lack of outsider scrutiny leads to degrading conditions including increased illness, license for prison guards to use force against prisoners, and inadequate mental health services.
In the words of Angela Davis, “Are we willing to relegate ever larger numbers of people from racially oppressed communities to an isolated existence marked by authoritarian regimes, violence, disease, and technologies of seclusion that produce severe mental instability?”
By deporting individuals to El Salvador, the Trump Administration makes an already untenable human rights scenario within American borders more serious, placing those—regardless of national affiliation—in a fully isolated environment with a 148 per cent overcrowding rate, no contact with the outside world, and no provisions for rehabilitation. Such a move implies an abandonment of potential reintegration into society for incarcerated individuals and a xenophobic denial of any contributions immigrants could make to the American economy or society.
Ana Piquer, the Americas director at Amnesty International stated, of the criminal crackdown in El Salvador, “Reducing gang violence by replacing it with state violence cannot be a success.” I would echo, reducing immigration with (exported) state violence also cannot be a success.
Image courtesy of Thiago Dezan via Flickr, ©2019. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
