Disappearances to contactless hellholes is how dictatorships work

The emergency is here. The crisis is now. It is not six months away. It is not another Supreme Court ruling away from happening. It’s happening now.

Perhaps not to you, not yet. But to others. Real people. We know their names. We know their stories.

Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, speaks to the media during a press conference.Credit: AP

The president of the US is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists. It is a prison where the only way out, in the words of El Salvador’s so-called justice minister, is in a coffin.

On Monday, US President Donald Trump said, sitting next to President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, that he would like to do this to US citizens as well: “If it’s a homegrown criminal, I have no problem. Now, we’re studying the laws right now. [US Attorney-General] Pam [Bondi] is studying. If we can do that, that’s good. And I’m talking about violent people. I’m talking about really bad people. Really bad people. Every bit as bad as the ones coming in.”

He told Bukele he would need to build five more of these prisons because America has so many people Trump wants to send to them.

“Why? Do you think there’s a special category of person? They’re as bad as anybody that comes in. We have bad ones, too. Because we can do things with the president for less money and have great security. ”

Why does the US need El Salvador’s prisons? For the Trump administration, El Salvador’s prisons are the answer to the problem of American law.

The Trump administration holds the view that anyone it sends to El Salvador is beyond the reach of American law — they have been disappeared not only from the US but from its system — and from any protection or process that system affords.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is from El Salvador. His mother, Cecilia, ran a tortilla shop in San Salvador. A gang, Barrio 18, began extorting the business, demanding payments. If the family didn’t pay, Barrio 18 threatened to murder Kilmar’s brother Cesar or to rape their sisters.

Barrio 18 demanded Cesar join their gang, at which point the family sent Cesar to America. Then Barrio 18 demanded the same of Kilmar, and Kilmar, at age 16, was sent to America, too.

This was around 2011. A 16-year-old fleeing the only home he’s known, afraid for his life.

Abrego Garcia’s life in the US seems to have been not an easy one. He lived in Maryland. He worked in construction. He met a woman. Her name is Jennifer, a US citizen. She had two children from a past relationship — one had epilepsy, the other autism. In 2019, they had a child together. That child, now five, is deaf in one ear and also has autism.

Jennifer was pregnant in 2019 on the day Abrego Garcia dropped off one kid at school, dropped off another with the babysitter and drove to Home Depot to find construction work. He was arrested for loitering. Asked if he was a gang member.

He said no. He was put into Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention.

About four hours after Abrego Garcia was picked up — and that appears to be the first contact he had with local police — a detective produced an allegation, citing a confidential informant, that Abrego Garcia was a gang member.

Abrego Garcia has no criminal record — not in the US, not in El Salvador.

He was accused of being part of a gang that operates in New York, a state he never lived in. Whoever produced the allegation was never cross-examined.

When Abrego Garcia’s lawyer later tried to get more information, he was told the detective behind the accusation had been suspended.

Abrego Garcia’s partner, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, said she was “shocked when the government said he should stay detained because Kilmar is an MS-13 gang member. Kilmar is not and has never been a gang member. I’m certain of that.”

In June 2019, while Abrego Garcia was still detained, he and Jennifer got married. Later that year, a judge ruled Abrego Garcia could not be deported back to El Salvador because he might be murdered by Barrio 18 — that his fear was credible. Abrego Garcia was then set free.

Each year since then, he has checked in with immigration authorities. He has been employed as a sheet metal apprentice. He is a member of a union. He was studying for a vocational licence at the University of Maryland. His last check-in with immigration authorities was on January 2. There has been no evidence, anywhere, offered by anyone, that suggests Abrego Garcia poses a threat to anyone in the US.

But on March 12, Abrego Garcia was pulled over while driving, his five-year-old in the back seat. He was told his immigration status had changed. On March 15 , Abrego Garcia was flown to El Salvador and imprisoned at CECOT as a terrorist.

In a photo provided by the US District Court for Maryland, a man identified as Kilmar Abrego Garcia is led through the Terrorism Confinement Centre in Tecoluca, El Salvador.Credit: US District Court for the District of Maryland via AP

The Trump administration, in its own legal filings, has said this was an “administrative error”. It admits it should not have done this, that it was a mistake.

The first sentence of an editorial from The National Review, probably the country’s leading conservative magazine, reads: “No one denies that the government violated the law in deporting him.“

This case has made its way to the Supreme Court. And the Supreme Court ordered that the administration “facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador”.

I feel I do not have the proper words to describe this next part — how grotesque it all is.

The Trump administration does not deny that it deported Abrego Garcia unlawfully. What it denies is that it has the authority to bring him back. That authority, it says, lies with Bukele. But Bukele says he cannot send him back.

That Oval Office meeting between Trump and Bukele was a moment when the mask fully slipped off. I thought satirist Jon Stewart pinpointed part of its horror when he said that the thing that came through so clearly was how much Trump and Bukele were enjoying themselves, each of them declaring that there was nothing they could do for Abrego Garcia — no way to allow him his day in court, no way to allow the American legal system to do its job and assess whether he is a danger. No way to follow the clear order of the Supreme Court.

And from their perspective, maybe they’re right. Because here’s the scary thing that I think sits at least partially beneath their calculus: Politically, they cannot let Abrego Garcia out, nor any of the other people they sent to CECOT without due process.

Because what if he was released? What if he returned to the United States? What if he could tell his own story? What if — as seems likely — he has been brutalised and tortured by Trump’s Salvadoran henchmen? Well, he can’t be allowed to tell the American people that.

To the Trump administration, Abrego Garcia is not a mistake. He is a liability, and he is a test. A test of its power to do this to anyone. A test of whether the loophole it believes it has found — that if it can get you on a plane, it can hustle you beyond US laws and leave you in the grips of the kind of gulags it wishes it had in the US.

The administration is not ashamed of this. It is not denying its desire to do it to more people.

This is how dictatorships work. Trump has always been clear about who he is and the kind of power he wants. Now he is using that power.

If Trump decides that you are to rot in a foreign prison, then that is his right. And you? You have no rights.

We are not even 100 days into this administration, and we are already faced with this horror. And I can feel the desire to look away from it, even within myself. What all of this demands is too inconvenient, too disruptive.

But Trump has said it all plainly and publicly: He intends to send those he hates to foreign prisons beyond the reach of US law. He does not care — he will not even seek to discover — if those he sends into these foreign hells are guilty of what he claims. Because this is not about their guilt — it is about his power.

And if he is capable of that, if he wants that, then what else is he capable of? What else does he want? And if the people who serve him are willing to give him that, to defend his right to do that, what else will they give him? What else will they defend?

This is the emergency. Like it or not, it’s here.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.