from the stripping-people-of-their-humanity dept
Anyone with the tiniest bit of humanity would have found a better way to mass deportations, if they even felt compelled to do it all. Under Trump, the extra layers of cruelty are an essential part of the package — something that piles the deliberate infliction of misery on top of the thick crust of bigotry that serves as the GOP’s platform.
No one in the administration cares about what they’re doing to the people they’re dehumanizing, much less what damage they’re doing to the reputation of the United States. True, this nation has never been perfect, but it has at least occasionally striven to subdue the worst impulses of its leaders and their constituents.
Now, we’re just another shitty nation with a deliberately broken moral compass. Trump could have made an effort to return deported people to their home countries or countries willing to take them if it was truly too dangerous for them to return to their homelands. Instead, it deliberately chose some of the worst places on earth to send people, backing this mass ejection with the perhaps too on-the-nose citation of the Alien Enemies Act and paying authoritarians handsomely for subjecting hundreds of deportees to torture.
Trump — the self-proclaimed artist of the deal — is selling the nation’s soul and demanding nothing in return but sadism-by-proxy. As Venezuelans falsely portrayed as Tren de Aragua gang members are finally being returned to their actual home countries, if not back to the United States to finally avail themselves of the due process rights they’ve always had, they’re letting everyone know the backdrop for DHS sadist-in-chief Kristi Noem’s photo ops is every bit as horrible as even our own State Department has been saying for years.
Another victim of this administration’s deliberate cruelty and dehumanization has spoken out following his release from El Salvador’s torture prison, CECOT. Reyes Barrios — like so many others — was labeled a gang member by DHS/ICE simply because he had a couple of tattoos. (And despite intel from actual law enforcement experts who have repeatedly made it clear in guidance ICE is now deliberately ignoring that Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua doesn’t have the rich history of self-identification via tattoo that, say, El Salvadoran gang MS-13 does.)
While it would be dangerous enough to simply be housed with actual foreign gang members who have been arrested locally, the people who appear to be most interested in harming deportees aren’t foreign gang members. Well, at least not the ones in tattoos. Instead, the real threat is the gang that roams more freely through CECOT than even the most powerful MS-13 members.
“The only thing I can say is human rights don’t exist there,” Reyes Barrios told HuffPost on Tuesday. There were “beatings all the time,” he said. “If you didn’t eat, they would hit you. If you took a shower when it wasn’t time, they would beat you. If you spoke roughly to them, they would beat you.”
[…]
Reyes Barrios’ time in CECOT was marked by psychological abuse and “countless” beatings from guards, who hit, kicked, and used police batons on detainees while their hands were cuffed behind their backs, he said.
Once, after he showered at the incorrect time, guards punished Reyes Barrios by sending him to “the Island,” a 2-by-1-meter cell with a cement bed and a toilet, he said. He spent about four or five hours there, alone in the darkness.
Barrios was, unbelievably, more fortunate than others dumped into CECOT by a gloating Trump and the equally abhorrent leader of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, who refers to himself as the “world’s coolest dictator.” You can see why Trump admires Bukele. And you can see how both men truly enjoy the ongoing abuse of hundreds of people who made the apparent mistake of trying to escape the horrors of their homelands and/or scrape out a life worth living in a nation that has attempted to position itself as just such a beacon of hope. Making America great again apparently means destroying every worthwhile thing this nation has ever stood for. And because it’s happening to people too many people in power (and too many people who insist on voting for them) don’t consider to be actual human beings, the people who enact, aid, and abet this cruelty can’t be convinced they’re actually part of the problem.
Filed Under: cecot, dhs, gang database, kristi noem, mass deportation, tda, trump administration
