El Salvador’s Prisons are Our Prisons

The case of the deported Venezuelan immigrants

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BACKGROUND

UPDATE

1)Le Monde avec AFP, “Migrants expulsés des Etats-Unis : quatre organisations américaines saisissent la CIDH contre la détention massive au Salvador; Donald Trump avait utilisé une loi de 1798 pour expulser vers le Salvador des personnes soupçonnées d’appartenir à des gangs. Par ailleurs, une délégation du Congrès américain a visité sur place, vendredi, une prison de haute sécurité et rencontré le président salvadorien, Nayib Bukele,” Le Monde, le 10 mai 2025 (modifié le 10 mai 2025 modifié à07h52).

2)Le Monde with AFP, “Migrants expelled from the United States: four American organizations seize the IACHR against mass detention in El Salvador; Donald Trump had used a law of 1798 to expel people suspected of belonging to gangs to El Salvador. In addition, a delegation from the U.S. Congress visited a high-security prison on Friday and met Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, Le Monde, May 10, 2025 (updated at 7:52 am),

Background sources in original article

See,

1) Will Bunch, “The frog of democracy is nearly boiled. We can still jump out of the pot; The slow, seemingly piecemeal march of American dictatorship is trampling colleges and law firms and coming for the rest of us,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 23, 2025 (12:42 pm ET);

2) “Statement: Human Rights Watch declaration on prison conditions in El Salvador for the J.G.G. v. Trump,” Human Rights Watch, March 20, 202 5(4:00PM EDT);

3) Mneesha Gellman(Emerson College),”Beatings, overcrowding and food deprivation: US deportees face distressing human rights conditions in El Salvador’s mega-prison,” Houston Chronicle, March 17, 2025

Trump’s police state is here, in its early stages. The useful (if untrue) metaphor of the frog in a boiling pot describes our current situation.

Will Bunch’s column is required reading for all those who wish to understand what is going on in the country.

Cowed Journalists on Washington Week

On Washington Week on PBS on Friday, March 21, 2025, leading American journalists debated in fine detail whether the United States faces a “constitutional crisis”.

What the f***!

Even leading American journalists have been so cowed by Trump that they can’t say the obvious words directly. They have become incapable of reporting the equivalent of the cause of a nuclear explosion being a nuclear bomb.

The coverage in the Washington Post, in particular, has become so anodyne as to be almost meaningless. Think of the investigative journalism the old Washington Post might be conducting.

Is there a constitutional crisis?

The president is engaged in an unconstitutional dismantlement of federal agencies and programs established by Congress.

The president is whisking people away in the middle of the night and deporting them to El Salador and its infamous prisons–with no due process as guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. He is detaining individuals in the middle of the night with no charges, with no Miranda warnings, denying them access to lawyers in violation of the Sixth Amendment, and asserting he has the right to deport anyone under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

Could this be a constitutional crisis?

Do you think?

El Salvador’s prisons are, as regards deportees, our prisons

Think about this for a minute.

The United States cannot escape its moral and legal obligations, under either domestic or international law, by simply deporting individuals to a foreign country that does not respect such obligations.

Were it otherwise, the U.S. could simply deport an individual to a country where he would be tortured, or murdered. Or forced to live in prison conditions prohibited by U.S. and international law.

As we examine the legal arguments advanced by the Trump administration, we must bear in mind that the Trump administration is engaged across the board in bad faith government based on lies and distortions of the truth.

A central tenet of all legal systems is the obligation of all parties to act in good faith. In judicial proceedings, this obligation is particularly important.

The Trump administration violates this good faith requirement every day, stretching the clear meaning of statutes far beyond any good faith interpretation.

Read their legal arguments carefully.

Do they seem to you to be made in good faith?

***

James Rowles is a former Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and professor of international law at other universities.

He studied the history of Nazi Germany at Stanford, and has studied and worked on human rights, judicial reform, and access to justice projects in many countries in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and in Afghanistan and Russia. At Harvard Law School, he taught a course on “Law, Human Rights, and the Struggle for Democracy in Latin America”.

At the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the OAS, he worked on human rights cases involving forced disappearances, executions, and torture in a number of authoritarian countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Recent Books by the Author

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