They were, beyond a doubt, the “worst of the worst.” Torture, rape, murder — you name it, that’s the sort of thing that an immigrant probably did to deserve being sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s infamous detention center, which up until recently held more than 250 Venezuelans accused of being some of the most violent criminals on planet Earth. They were so bad, it was said, better viewed as an invading army than as individual humans with inalienable rights, that one could skip the whole trial-and-jury thing and jump straight to a sentence of life behind bars in a foreign prison.
“I’ve talked to the highest level at ICE,” U.S. border czar Tom Homan said in April, “and they’ve reassured me several times: Everyone that was removed under the Alien Enemies Act was a gang member and a terrorist.”
The Trump administration had claimed we were at war and that these were the combatants, all ostensibly members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, said to be directed by Venezuela’s anti-American government, a “hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion and predatory incursion into the United States,” as a presidential proclamation put it.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was unequivocal: these men had committed crimes so egregious that none of them should ever be let out.
“We’re confident that that people that are [imprisoned in El Salvador] should be there, and they should stay there for the rest of their lives,” Noem said three months ago, citing “intelligence work by ICE and other agencies, including the State Department.”
And then they just let them go.
In a July 18 post on social media, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced that the Venezuelans held in his country were headed to South America in return for 10 Americans being held by the government in Caracas. In the end, the Trump administration decided to release — by its own logic — some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists, back to the criminal organization that directed their actions, at a 25-to-1 exchange rate.
It’s less confounding when one considers that the Trump administration had access to the same information as the general public. Despite its outward-facing rhetoric, the administration knew that the majority of those sent to CECOT had never been convicted of a crime of any nature, in the U.S. or elsewhere. Many were not even “illegal immigrants,” having entered the country only after scheduling an asylum interview; more than 60 had pending asylum claims at the time they were shoved onto a plane headed to El Salvador, in defiance of a court order. And U.S. intelligence had already determined that the claim of a Venezuelan-directed gang invasion was bogus (Tulsi Gabbard, director of national intelligence, attacked her own analysts as “deep state actors”).
Victims of this propaganda campaign — an effort to parade brown bodies before Fox News’ prime-time audience — included Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay man, hairstylist and asylum-seeker who was determined to be a vicious gang member based solely on a pair of tattoos dedicated to his mother and father. For more than 120 days, his family and attorneys were denied any information about him; they did not know whether he was dead or alive, and they only knew he was ever at CECOT because he was brutalized upon arrival, and that brutalization was captured on video.
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He, like many others, appears to have been chosen for rendition because it was convenient: he was already in detention, awaiting a ruling on his asylum claim.
“We spent four months without any contact with the outside world,” one released detainee, Arturo Suárez, told Venezuelan state media after being released last Friday. “We got a beating for breakfast. We got a beating for lunch. We got a beating for dinner.”
“I practically felt like an animal,” another former detainee, Julio González Jr., told The Washington Post. Like others, he described being regularly beaten with a wooden bat as part of a systematic campaign of dehumanization. “The officials treated us like we were the most dangerous criminals on Earth,” he told the Post. “They shaved our heads, they would insult us, they would take us around like dogs.”
“With time we lost our fear because we were practically dead people living,” said another former inmate, Angel Blanco Marin. “We felt dead.”
In the end, though, the Trump administration decided that those it had left for dead were better off as living pawns in a game of diplomacy. And, in the end, its rendition program, while serving as propaganda for a conservative audience at home, functioned as agitprop for a struggling Venezuelan regime — itself an abuser of human rights, and a $500,000 donor to Donald Trump’s first inauguration — that can now proclaim itself a defender of its citizens in the face of Uncle Sam’s inhumanity.
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It’s a mystery how the Trump administration reconciles describing more than 250 Venezuelans as “terrorists” who should never be free to terrorize again, only to turn around and release them (after telling U.S. courts it had no authority to do so once those prisoners were in a foreign land) to a government it falsely accused of sponsoring them. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLauglin continues to attack the media for reporting on what she describes as “criminal illegal gang members,” but the department did not respond when asked why such people should now walk free.
When due process is suspended, it follows that innocent people will suffer. That’s true even when those imposing the arbitrary sentences have the best of intentions, and it is why societies deemed “civilized” would not allow punishments to be imposed by political appointees seeking the favor of a 79-year-old man with a tenuous commitment to truth and justice.
In a country where the rule of law prevails, people accused of grave crimes are identified, not disappeared, and the evidence of their guilt is presented in a public forum. That is something that members of the present U.S. administration would do well to keep in mind: the inalienable rights they are ignoring today are ones they may come to appreciate themselves.
