Beyond seas

I’d been planning on writing about antisemitism today. In the wake of an arsonist setting fire to the governor’s mansion in Pennsylvania—only hours after Josh Shapiro’s family and community members had held their Passover seder there—it seems even more important to bundle up the many aspects of antisemitism, how it’s still affecting lives and how it’s being used as a weapon.

However, given events from recent days, I want to address head-on something that’s becoming more and more urgent, something I think we have to deal with as a country in short order if we want to be able to get out of this mess.

The worsening situation that President Trump has created in El Salvador, with the enthusiastic help of its current president, Nayib Bukele, is as grave a threat the the country as has happened in my lifetime. So far, more than 270 men have been sent from the United States to detention in the CECOT facility there, under nightmare conditions.

On Monday, the two presidents celebrated their detention partnership in the White House, despite court orders to fix the error the government admitted to after sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia back to his native land. Abrego Garcia has been a Maryland resident for more than a decade, and by law, the government was specifically barred from deporting him to El Salvador.

Trump has been deporting people to CECOT while reveling in the horrific reputation of the facility. And on Monday, he briefly referenced a plan to send more “homegrown” people there, meaning U.S. citizens.

A clean through-line exists from Nazi tactics to those from the war on terror, which link up to how those techniques have been embraced around the world for use on immigrants today. I’ll explore a little of the history of these kinds of international renditions, look at U.S. involvement with them, and talk about why this is such a dangerous moment. And, as always, at the end, I’ll make suggestions about what you can do.

Night and fog

I’ll start with some of the events covered in ONE LONG NIGHT, my book about concentration camps around the world. Many people have noted in recent days how our deportations parallel some aspects of the Nazi concentration camp system, particularly in the “Final Solution” stage when they created death camps—literal factories of execution, which were the endpoints of deportation centers. Some 76,000 French Jews were sent from occupied countries eastward to their deaths, as were some 440,000 Hungarian Jews. The list of countries could go on an on.

The Nazis also used Hitler’s Night and Fog decree in occupied territories during WWII against those who weren't German citizens, as a way to intimidate resistance movements. They essentially kidnapped people, often under cover of night, and disappeared them, often to faraway places, refusing to tell families or anyone else about where they were, leaving families uncertain if their loved ones who vanished were alive or dead.

These disappearances were meant to instill terror, and they were effective. These same tactics became a hallmark of many ostensible democracies after World War II. The French were perhaps the first to adopt them a decade after the Nazis’ defeat, not just using “night and fog” disappearances against those fighting for an independent Algeria in the 1950s and 1960s, but expanding on their lethality by loading bodies of interrogated suspects onto helicopters and dumping their bodies out over open water during death flights.

And just as the French had borrowed from the Nazis, disappearances in Algeria would continue as a method of state terror even after independence. Between 7,000 and 20,000 people vanished during the civil war there in the 1990s.

Dictators in Chile and Argentina likewise followed the earlier French example, using death flights to eliminate any evidence of disappeared dissidents. And in the collaborative dictatorships among several countries on the continent during what was known as Operation Condor, officials in a second country might kidnap and torture refugees who had escaped threats to their life in their home country, or even deport them back for extrajudicial murder.

But we don’t have to search for overseas examples from decades ago to see this same pattern of inflicting terror via rendition and disappearance. In this century, these tools of state terror have become widely used by governments for two purposes: in fighting what has been called the war on terror and in dealing with immigration.

War on terror

After 9/11, these measures exploded abroad. Under President George W. Bush, the U.S. set up black sites for rendition and torture, including pressuring our allies to create extrajudicial detention and interrogation facilities for us.

In January 2002, America launched Gitmo as an offshore site for the same tactics, where we also hoped to hold show trials that would administer rough justice. As I’ve talked about in prior posts, the mass detention of what were seen as undesirable immigrants fleeing authoritarian or military rule in Haiti and Cuba at Guantanamo set the stage for detention on the island during the war on terror.

Meanwhile, the U.S. example fostered horrific copycat tactics among countries that had their own histories of extrajudicial detention and rendition. Binyam Mohamed was tortured in Morocco, with questions and intelligence provided by the U.K. A prisoner whose code name was Cuckoo was transferred by the CIA to Egypt, where British agency MI5 collaborated in supplying questions for interrogators and getting reports based on answers the detainee gave.

During that time, the Bush administration tried to argue that U.S. citizens whom the government named as enemy combatants could be held indefinitely. But in 2004, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of due process for U.S. citizens, even enemy combatants.

The flawed Obama answer

Within months of being elected to office, President Barack Obama put a stop to U.S. renditions and torture overseas. But critically, he himself didn’t call for accountability, and the Department of Justice under him did not prosecute those who had authorized the torture program or the use of black sites in the war on terror. And thus we came to a pivot point: Obama earned the nickname “Deporter-in-Chief” and kept the door open on abusive treatment of immigrants that had happened under his predecessors, both Republican and Democratic. Current border czar Tom Hohman was awarded a Presidential Rank Award for his work on deportations during the second Obama administration.

Even as detainees in the war on terror were awarded compensation in Europe for the kidnapping and torture they faced, war-on-terror tactics did not end around the globe. The immediate threat from mass-casualty international terrorism faded, but the number of refugees from a Middle East destabilized by the US war in Iraq, ISIS, and the Syrian Civil War increased. In response, Western nations (and some other ones, too) began to apply a parallel threat matrix, as if immigration were equivalent to terrorism.

Countries used similar strategies of detaining people and removing them to places far from those where they might have legal recourse, sometimes disappearing them into conditions that were overcrowded and rife with physical and sexual assault. Deportations to third countries willing to play along for pay became part of the global approach.

An underlying aspect of all this was made possible by a combination of international trends interacting on the ground with domestic culture in each country. Tactics and equipment originally intended to fight terrorism often exacerbated violence against groups deemed suspect locally, such as the extreme policing measures against people of color in America.

Outsourcing detention

In this way, a more extreme toolkit of war-on-terror gear and tactics were turned inward and applied to brown and black people in the U.S., in the name of policing crime or immigration. And governments abroad took their own horrific actions in the name of defending national sovereignty against refugees, economic migrants, and asylum seekers, as if immigrants worldwide were equivalent to the 9/11 hijackers.

To intercept refugees arriving by sea from in Australia in 2001, the Australian government paid for migrants to be diverted and housed in the Manus Regional Processing Centre in Papau New Guinea and another center on Nauru, an island nation more than a thousand miles of the coast of Australia. European countries have likewise funded migrant detention in nearly a dozen countries overseas, in hopes of keeping refugees from arriving on their own shores.

There are other examples of similar war-on-terror tactics being used around the world, but I’m focusing today on a handful of states that have claimed the mantle of democracies for themselves or who have had a key role in the war on terror or international immigration policy.

The American model

The United States is the country with the most resources in the world, as well as a tremendous amount of open space and an economy very much dependent on migrants. It’s a nation with the capability to navigate issues which can be challenging to address when immigration ebbs and flows. But through many administrations, we’ve consistently turned our back on the possibilities of rational immigration policy. Instead, the U.S. has doubled down on a punishment-centered approach in last decade, with a vindictive immigration bill in Congress gaining bipartisan support just last year.

As with everything else, President Trump has demonstrated how to take an existing situation and make it worse. In his first administration, he used family separations to terrify immigrants crossing the border. After he lost his bid for reelection, he was unwilling to allow even a draconian bill to pass while Biden was still president. To keep Biden from getting any credit for taking action on Trump’s signature issue, then-candidate Trump forbade Republicans from supporting the bill.

Just three months into his second administration, Trump is mainlining more openly violent tactics and strategies designed to do more direct harm. He’s pushed agreements with third countries to accept deported immigrants from other nations, and has now weaponized those agreements. He appears to be promoting the indefinite detention in gulag conditions for those deported, claiming they are criminals—though reporting shows as many as 75 to 90% have no criminal record, and many appear to have been deported without due process. Trump is defying the US court system to inflict these extrajudicial punishments.

As others have noted this week, guarantees of due process and protections from indefinite detention are the basis of countless legal traditions. In the U.S., they go back to the very founding of the country and a key grievance the Colonists listed in the Declaration of Independence from King George III, whom they admonished “for transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences.”

The American Revolution was fought over these matters. But that didn’t keep the United States from taking similar actions, whether it be condemning whole indigenous peoples to misery and exile from their homelands, or passing the Fugitive Slave Act requiring states to support the capture and return of enslaved people who had managed to escape to the North.

Escalating intolerable acts

Trump’s actions as president may, in time, have consequences on the same scale as those that tore the country apart in the nineteenth century. They are certainly as ominous a defiance of the constitutional order. The detainees he has sent to El Salvador were people already in the U.S. who had constitutional protections here that were deliberately ignored.

“Transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences” implies that, even with an invented offense, some real charge exists, as well as a penalty that might be judged at trial. But with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration has taken action against a U.S. resident accused of no concrete offense (instead, tagged with a piece of discredited hearsay from an officer relieved of his duties soon afterward).

The current administration is also checking several concentration-camp boxes with this kind of detention. First, they’re working, as camp systems always do, outside the established legal system. Second, Trump’s allies are also removing people from society arbitrarily, often on the basis of race or ethnicity. In the case of El Salvador, the bulk of the deportees to CECOT are Venezuelan, condemned as a class without regard for their individual actions. Third, the very nature of the detention is indefinite. Fourth, it combines concentration camp-style detention with exile.

This kind of detention has no ending. It is applied arbitrarily, and can be extended arbitrarily. Bukele and Trump seemed to find their mutual unwillingness to obey the Supreme Court cute. And they made it clear that, though the government has admitted its mistake in sending someone with legal protections to El Salvador, they do not intend for Abrego Garcia to come back or ever leave detention.

But the most important parallel for how this kind of detention parallels that of concentration camps, is that it is adopted primarily to instill terror in the regime’s opponents, and to do so for political gain. Trump is making a move to lock down authoritarian power by defying any independence in U.S. courts. He's daring Congress to act or the Supreme Court to try to enforce any attempt to right a clear wrong. Trump is trying to assert unlimited power.

If this arrangement for third-party detention is not stopped, the path back to democracy for the United States will become a much longer and more harrowing one. Trump has already made clear he wishes to expand enormously on his ability to to inflict arbitrary detention. The recent kidnappings of green-card holders and legal residents detained and threatened with deportation for writing political opinion pieces or attending a demonstration reveal that this is a broader effort on his part. And he mentioned in the White House to Bukele that he hopes to soon send “homegrown” Americans, to prison there, suggesting that it will be necessary to expand the facility far beyond its current capacity.

How to fight back

The administration’s playbook is familiar—in fact, the speed and aggressiveness is far beyond that used by many current authoritarians in power around the world, who felt constrained to move more slowly. Trump’s aggressiveness is bad news here in the US, but it actually offers one advantage. There is no subtlety to what he’s doing, and even in an America that’s become accustomed to abuse against immigrants, people are reacting with horror to Trump’s actions in recent weeks. Disapproval over his handling of deportations appears to be increasing quickly.

And just as importantly, he has gotten out over his skis by taking actions this severe this soon. He has not eliminated critical press coverage, though he’s started down that path. He has yet to thoroughly cow American universities, though he’s trying. But most importantly, unlike almost all the places I’ve covered that have fallen to authoritarianism, a large and growing opposition movement in America is still free to act. Courts still have some independence. Individual members of Congress are speaking out. Even Republicans are squeamish and vulnerable. Trump’s wild economic policies in combination with such clear defiance of the constitutional limits on his power make them good targets for pressure.

The playbook for those who want to oppose Trump is much the same as I’ve listed in previous weeks, because building an organized movement is the most important part of what Americans can do right now. An engaged and active populace is at the heart of any path to solving this crisis. Get out and demonstrate, often enough that it becomes normal and part of your routine.

Encourage others to come with you. Whether you’re part of an immigrant community or not, discuss your worries over what’s happening with others, especially those who don’t get any real news. Call your representatives about Abrego Garcia and about the tariff policies undermining the national economy. Support the legal organizations defending people against arbitrary deportations and detentions—either your time or your money will be useful there. Organize immigrant support at your local library or church or book group—these actions may do more to change attitudes on the ground than anything else does.

And remember that the gift of time remains with us for now. We’re still, for the most part, free to act. But no one is going to act in your place. Find that place, fill that spot that you choose. Because the world that Trump wants to build will be hard to undo, and the further along we let him get, the more damage he will inflict before we can begin to rebuild.

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