Don’t Let Bukele Export His Brand of Authoritarianism to the United States
On March 14, President Donald Trump hosted Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” at the White House for a mutual admiration fest of grotesque proportions.
The Trump administration has made a show of deporting detained immigrants from the United States to El Salvador’s so-called “Terrorism Confinement Center”—Bukele’s brutal mega-prison, which confines inmates in horrific conditions for de facto life sentences.
Many of these migrants’ only crime has been to sport a tattoo. But the Trump administration has attempted to wash their hands of the matter by saying they’re in Salvadoran custody.
One of those detainees is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran immigrant and Maryland father of three children with special needs. Garcia hasn’t been charged or convicted of a crime in either the United States or El Salvador. An immigration judge had previously barred Garcia from deportation for fear of his persecution in El Salvador.
In a blatant disregard for due process and a unanimous ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court ordering the Trump administration to “facilitate” Garcia’s release, the two presidents each refused to lift a finger—despite Trump officials’ own admission that Garcia’s deportation was an “administrative error.”
With the illegal deportation of Garcia and several other immigrants (including U.S. permanent residents) snatched from universities, Trump is weaponizing his extreme take on national security to repress civil liberties at home. By arguing that Garcia is a “terrorist” (as Bukele called him in the White House meeting), despite clear evidence that Garcia is innocent, the two presidents are expressing their extreme disregard of the law, let alone human decency.
People should make no mistake about who Bukele is. We’ve carried out research in El Salvador since 2009, and we’ve followed Bukele for years as he’s hollowed out El Salvador’s hard-won democracy under the guise of fighting crime.
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Originally in Newsweek.
