Detention Nation: Offshore and Unaccountable
Part III: How the U.S. Is Outsourcing Injustice to One of the World’s Most Notorious Prisons
Part III of our ongoing series on the machinery of mass detention in America, and now, outside of the country.
It started, as these things often do, with a quiet disappearance.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father from Baltimore and an asylum seeker with legal status, was detained, processed, and deported by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. When his attorneys challenged the action, ICE officials admitted it had been a “clerical error.” He never should have been removed from the country. His status had been approved. But now he’s gone, across international borders, unreachable.
And the Trump administration says it can’t bring him back.
This is not an isolated mistake. It is a symptom of an increasingly unjust and unaccountable system, and it is no longer just happening on American soil.
In recent weeks, the U.S. has deported nearly 250 men to El Salvador, designating them as “alleged gang members” with ties to Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua. Most of them were sent to CECOT, a supermax prison internationally condemned for human rights abuses. Many of the men had not been charged with a crime, let alone convicted. Some had asylum claims pending. None were granted due process before they were disappeared across the hemisphere.
And all of this was done despite a federal court order to halt the deportations.
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CECOT: The Place We Send Them
If you haven’t heard of CECOT, that’s by design. Officially, it’s the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo—the Terrorism Confinement Center—in Tecoluca, El Salvador. Unofficially, it’s a state-run propaganda machine, a dystopian mega-prison built not for rehabilitation or justice, but for control, fear, and global shock value.
Capable of holding 40,000 men, CECOT is one of the largest incarceration sites in the Western Hemisphere. It operates under a policy of silence and subjugation: no family visits, no legal access, no daylight. Prisoners are stripped to their boxers, heads shaved, forced to squat for hours in silence, then crammed shoulder-to-shoulder into concrete cells with no beds or windows.
They are held without charges, often based on suspicion alone. Some never make it into a courtroom.
Unlike older Latin American prisons where gangs ran the interior from the inside out, CECOT is run entirely by the state, and that’s the point. There is no gang control here, no self-organized fiefdoms. There is only surveillance, submission, and systemic silence. It is not chaotic. It is meticulously oppressive.
The images are deliberate: long lines of shirtless men, shackled and stacked in rows like livestock, are paraded on government TV. President Nayib Bukele, a self-styled “cool dictator,” has called the prison a symbol of strength. And American politicians like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have echoed the message, staging photo ops on-site as if the U.S. were proud to partner in the spectacle.
But human rights organizations see CECOT differently.
The United Nations, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have all condemned the prison as a clear violation of international law. It violates the U.N. Convention Against Torture. It denies the most basic rights of due process. This is exactly where the United States chose to send hundreds of people.
On purpose.
As we explored in Razing Gaza, the Trump administration’s erosion of international human rights standards isn’t isolated to foreign policy—it’s mirrored in how we treat vulnerable migrants here.
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How We Made It Legal: Alien Enemies and Executive Will
You might be wondering how the United States—ostensibly a democracy governed by laws—can deport people to a foreign prison condemned by the United Nations, even after a federal court told them not to.
The answer lies in a little-known law from 1798: the Alien Enemies Act.
Originally passed during America’s quasi-war with France, the law gives the president the power to apprehend, detain, and deport non-citizens from countries deemed hostile in times of war. It’s vague, sweeping, and largely forgotten until recently.
But in March 2025, the Trump administration revived the Alien Enemies Act to justify the mass deportation of Venezuelan migrants, claiming they posed a national security threat due to suspected gang affiliations, even without proof or trial.
This legal maneuver only works under one condition: war. And so, Trump declared one—not officially, but functionally.
Earlier this year, the administration issued an executive order declaring the situation at the southern border a “state of national war against foreign non-state actors.” It framed immigration not as a civil or humanitarian challenge, but as a battlefield—invoking military language, deploying troops, and describing migrants as “enemy combatants” in a global threat network. That language gave him the justification to unlock wartime powers, including the Alien Enemies Act.
This strategy echoes what we previously documented in Trump’s Migrant Prison Won’t Fix Crime—But It Will Make Millions, where the spectacle of mass detention served both political and profit motives.
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That’s how the administration legally framed the deportation of over 230 Venezuelan men to El Salvador. Not as standard immigration enforcement, but as a wartime security measure. That classification let them bypass standard asylum protections, legal hearings, and court appeals.
The problem? A federal judge in Washington, D.C. blocked the deportations just days before they happened, citing the risk of torture, lack of legal process, and the unconstitutional use of the Alien Enemies Act. The Trump administration did it anyway.
Then came the lawsuits. The ACLU and Democracy Forward filed a class-action case, J.G.G. v. Trump, arguing that the deportations violated constitutional due process and international human rights law. The D.C. Circuit Court upheld the injunction, keeping the block in place.
We’ve seen this playbook before: when national security becomes a justification for dismantling civil liberties. Our previous report on CBP’s border seizures and deportations of visa-holding academics explored this same legal creep in The U.S. Is Using National Security to Silence Dissent.
But the administration has appealed to the Supreme Court. It continues to argue that it has broad authority to remove anyone it deems a “security risk,” even if they’ve committed no crime, and even if the law says otherwise.
The administration had constructed not just a legal framework but a visual one; one that could justify mass removals with the language of war and then sell it to the public with a photo op.
Kristi Noem Went to the Prison. But She Didn’t Go for the Truth.
Just days after the deportations, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrived in El Salvador, not to protest the detentions or negotiate human rights protections, but to tour CECOT like it was a showroom.
Flanked by Salvadoran officials, Noem walked the halls of the world’s most notorious prison, smiled for cameras, and declared the visit a “powerful message” to would-be migrants: commit crimes in America, and this is where you’ll go.
Noem’s photo op wasn’t an accident. It was political theater, staged for the MAGA base and international headlines. But what it wasn’t—was oversight.
She did not meet with any deported individuals, review conditions, or speak with lawyers or human rights officials. Her visit was a media campaign, not a fact-finding mission. And it came at a time when multiple federal courts were actively questioning the legality of the very deportations she was there to celebrate.
This is the contradiction at the heart of the administration’s approach: they want to disappear people quietly, but they also want credit for being tough. So they put a spotlight on cruelty, as long as it’s dressed in uniforms and euphemism.
Noem’s visit also helped obscure another headline breaking that same week: the administration’s admission that it had “accidentally” deported a father with asylum status from Baltimore and couldn’t get him back.
The Mistake That Wasn’t an Outlier
By the time news of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation reached the public, it felt like a separate incident, one tragic misstep in an otherwise targeted crackdown. But that illusion collapses under scrutiny.
Garcia was deported on the same day as over 200 other Venezuelan migrants labeled gang-affiliated. He was swept up in the same dragnet, processed by the same bureaucracy, and removed under the same wartime legal logic. The only difference is that someone noticed.
ICE called it a “clerical error.” But if a man with legal asylum status, an address in Maryland, and access to a lawyer can be mistakenly deported—how many others didn’t have those protections?
And how many were misidentified by the thinnest pretext?
Families of the deported have come forward to say their sons and brothers were targeted because of tattoos—not gang insignias, but generic designs like skulls, stars, or Roman numerals. Tattoos that dozens of white men in any rural American town might have. Tattoos that, in another context, would mean “freedom,” not “felony.”
This wasn’t intelligence. It was profiling amplified by algorithm, fear, and political pressure to produce “results.”
And then there’s the cruelest irony of all:
While Kristi Noem preened for cameras inside CECOT, standing proudly in the world’s most notorious mega-prison, Kilmar Abrego Garcia could have been there too. Just behind the steel doors. Just beyond the flashbulbs.
She could have reviewed the list. She could have found him.
She could have brought him home.
She didn’t.
And that’s not just a failure. It’s the plan.
UPDATE (April 7, 2025, 2am):
A federal judge ruled that the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was “wholly lawless” and ordered the Trump administration to return him to the U.S. by April 7. The administration is resisting the order, arguing that the court lacks authority to compel negotiations with a foreign government. Meanwhile, the Justice Department suspended attorney Erez Reuveni—who had admitted in court that Garcia’s deportation was a mistake—for “failing to zealously advocate” for the administration’s position.
This deepens the legal and moral crisis surrounding the use of CECOT and highlights the administration’s willingness to flout judicial orders and punish those who acknowledge the truth.
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Bibliography:
United Nations. "Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment." December 10, 1984.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "2019 National Detention Standards for Non-Dedicated Facilities." December 2019.
Shull, Tina, and Elliott Young. "Detention Nation: US Empire and Immigrant Prisons." The Abusable Past, July 2024.
Tejkl, Lauren, et al. "Evaluation of the US Detention Standards to Protect the Health and Dignity of Migrants: A Systematic Review of National Health Standards." BMJ Open, April 2023.
U.S. Congress. "The Law of Immigration Detention: A Brief Introduction." Congressional Research Service, September 1, 2022.
Dreisinger, Baz. Incarceration Nations: A Journey to Justice in Prisons Around the World. Other Press, 2016.
Ryo, Emily. "Detention Nation." Knowable Magazine, 2020.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "Detention Management." April 2025.
Finley, Ben. "An 'administrative error' sent a Maryland man to an El Salvador prison, ICE says." Associated Press, March 31, 2025.
Miroff, Nick. "An 'Administrative Error' Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison." The Atlantic, March 31, 2025.
Olivares, José. "Human rights groups rebuke Kristi Noem's visit to El Salvador prison: 'political theater'." The Guardian, March 27, 2025.