The visit
Human rights organizations on Thursday denounced the visit by the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, to the notorious prison in El Salvador that is holding hundreds of Venezuelans deported from the US earlier this month without a hearing, calling her actions “political theater”.
Critics condemned Noem’s visit as just the latest example of the Trump administration’s aim to spread fear among immigrant communities, as the cabinet member stood in a baseball hat in front of a line of caged men bare from the waist up.
Noem visited the so-called Cecot, or Terrorism Confinement Center, an infamous maximum-security prison. The prison, built in 2022 during a brutal government crackdown on organized crime, is where nearly 300 migrants, previously in US custody, were recently expelled and are currently detained.
Trying to immigrate without permission is not organized crime and it’s not brutal crime either. Most white Americans, in fact, are Americans because their great-grandparents immigrated without permission. Nobody sent engraved invitations to Ireland and Italy and Poland, but people made the trip anyway. On the other hand America violently abducted thousands of people to “immigrate” here in a condition of enslavement. We don’t have the moral high ground on this issue.
Noem’s visit to the prison “was a typical gross and cruel display of political theater that we have come to expect from the Trump administration,” Vicki Gass said. Gass is the executive director of the Latin America Working Group (LAWG), a human rights organization based in Washington DC. “That the Trump administration is flouting judicial orders and denying due process to people within the US borders is outrageous and frightening.”
Earlier this month, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime provision that allows the executive to detain and deport people coming from an “enemy” nation. Despite a federal judge blocking the invocation of the act, shortly after, planes from the US landed in El Salvador, filled with men and women in immigration custody. More than 250 men, mostly from Venezuela, were quickly and forcibly shuffled into the Cecot, where officials shaved their heads and placed them in cells.
Trump and his administration have repeatedly claimed that the men were members of transnational gangs. When invoking the Alien Enemies Act, Trump – without proof – accused the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua of having “infiltrated” the US at the behest of the Venezuelan government. US intelligence agencies contradict Trump’s claims about ties between the gang and the Venezuelan government, the New York Times has reported, and the Venezuelan government has also denied it is connected.
Well if the Venezuelan government did have such ties I don’t suppose it would say so, but one has to wonder why it would want a criminal gang to “infiltrate” the US in the first place. Step one, get criminals to infilatrate; step two…….uh……..
“I also want everybody to know, if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you can face,” Noem said in a video posted on X from the Cecot prison. “Know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.”
The use of another country’s vast, maximum-security prison to detain immigrants from a third country is unprecedented, especially considering the grave allegations of abuses at this and other Salvadorian prisons.
“Amnesty International has extensively documented the inhumane conditions within detentions centers in El Salvador, including the Cecot, where those removed are now being held,” the organization said in a statement on Wednesday. “Reports indicate extreme overcrowding, lack of access to adequate medical care, and widespread ill-treatment amounting to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.”
In other words the US is violating human rights on a massive scale. Right now.
In service of enabling a nuanced understanding of history, I should point out that American slavers personally kidnapped almost no one. That service was provided by African enslaving states; and the slave traders bought their slaves. This is not to diminish the vicious greed that characterized American slavery, or to deny that American slave mongers empowered the African enslavers in the same way that dope addicts empower the drug cartels.
So “America violently abducted thousands of people to “immigrate” here in a condition of enslavement” is not strictly accurate – fair point. I could claim I was thinking of laws that make knowing beneficiaries of crime liable for the crime, but in reality I wasn’t.
Morally speaking though, being an eager recipient of the stolen lives = being an instigator.
There are generally two types of people who make assertions such as Rick’s above – those who wish to sanitise American history and those who wish to denigrate Muslims. There may be a third, but I am yet to meet one.
I advise RS to read some actual history of European meddling in Africa to secure slaves, which resulted in the degeneration of certain African states into economic dependence on the slave-trade. There are rather more nuances than he supposes.
I do seem to recall the Songhai Empire selling war prisoners to buy horses towards the end because they didn’t have any domesticateable stock (bloody flies) locally. Most of the hand-wringing over the “peculiar institution” was specifically about the transatlantic slave trade; the people in question thought it was needlessly cruel and a violation of national sovereignty. They had no problems with the “kinder” domestic institution (as they saw it); it was utterly self-serving.
I said ‘European’, by the way, since it is not only Americans who do not have the moral high ground on this issue. The fundamental difference between the USA and other nations in the continental Americas on the one hand, and Europe on the other, is that those enslaved by Europeans were tucked away nicely out of sight on Caribbean islands and elsewhere, so that Europeans living in Europe were able to turn their eyes away from the institution (unless they lived in the slaving ports), as others didn’t, It was not until the late 18th century that, in Britain at least, voices began to be raised against trading in slaves or keeping them.
Colonel John Hallett (d. 1699) was one of my great[7]grandfathers, possibly the one I’m the least proud of, and was said to have operated a business between Lyme Regis and Barbados. When I read that my first thought was to wonder what on earth kind of business could one run between Lyme Regis and Barbados. When I thought about it, the answer was only too obvious.
In most cultures throughout history slavery has been taken for granted.
There seems to have been an attitude in early modern European countries that slavery was not OK in the European country but was OK in the colonies.
A few somewhat related claims I have seen:
Slavery in Europe became rare to non-existent during late medieval times.
Enslaving a Christian was bad. Enslaving a non-Christian was acceptable
Being a serf was a step up from being a slave.
Make of those claims what you will.