Trump asked Bukele to build him 5 more concentration camps

Trump is requesting 5 more torture prisons in El Salvador, this time for U.S. citizens, as he defies a SCOTUS order to return a wrongly deported Maryland dad.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a union apprentice, husband, and Maryland father of three, was erroneously deported to CECOT—the notoriously inhumane mega-prison and forced labor camp in El Salvador from which no one has ever been known to be released. It’s a devastating story: One of his sons is an autistic, nonverbal 5-year-old. His wife is obviously begging for his release. The government admitted that it erroneously deported Garcia by administrative error, though the Justice Department lawyer who copped to that error was fired today for being honest.

Garcia was here legally; he’d migrated into the U.S. without documentation from El Salvador around 2011, but he was granted asylum here in 2019 after a judge found that his life would be in danger if he returned home, because violent gangs had been targeting his family’s pupusa business. It was only after a judge demanded that the government bring Garcia back that the Trump Administration started branding him a “terrorist” and a member of MS-13, producing exactly zero evidence for either claim.

Here’s White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt making things up today about a man we sent to a foreign torture gulag for life for absolutely no reason:

And let’s get a visual, once again, on CECOT, because a few people got their feathers ruffled when I called it a concentration camp a few weeks ago:

The majority of the men we are sending to CECOT have no criminal records at all, and none of them were given due process. Many were chosen to go there because they have random tattoos, despite the fact that Tren de Aragua—the Venezuelan gang that ICE is accusing most of them of being in—does not even use tattoos as signifiers. We made that up.

So now we’ve reached a Constitutional crisis. Trump promised his base mass deportations, and he doesn’t appear to be super interested in the details of whom we are deporting and why, as long as he pumps those numbers up. But last week, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of a lower court order that the government must facilitate Garcia’s return. Trump doesn’t want to bring Garcia back, of course, because A) he’d be able to tell us all how horrific CECOT actually is, and B) Trump is a dictator who doesn’t like to be told what to do. So the DOJ is using woird trickery to defy the Supreme Court, arguing that by using the word “facilitate” instead of the lower court’s “effectuate,” SCOTUS was only saying that the government had to allow Garcia back into the country if El Salvador decides to give him back on their own. (This is bullshit—both the SCOTUS ruling and the lower court ruling clearly meant that the Trump administration had to take all available steps to get him back, which should be easy, considering we paid El Salvador to take him in the first place and are a much more powerful country than El Salvador.)

This brings us to yesterday. Salvadoran president and self-described dictator Nayib Bukele visited the White House for a press conference to promote his new special relationship with Trump, wherein we pay him to imprison plane-loads of men for us and then claim we can’t get them back. And that’s when Trump casually asked Bukele, on camera, to build five more concentration camps, because we intends to start sending U.S. citizens there:

As you can hear in the clip, the room erupts into laugher when Trump requests five more gulags, and I really don’t see what’s funny. Also, Trump is in no way joking: Later in the presser, he makes it official that he’s hoping to send U.S. citizens to Salvadoran gulags instead of using the criminal justice system and the prisons we have here, presumably to get around having to prove that a person did anything wrong to a court.

Meanwhile, this administration has been working to redefine and expand the idea of domestic terrorism to include basic forms of protest that are clearly protected under the First Amendment. Trump’s counterterrorism nominees have floated treating Black Lives Matter protesters as terrorists. The State Department is already revoking the visas of students who support Palestinians, claiming they have terrorist sympathies. Attorney General Pam Bondi referred to the Tesla protests as “domestic terrorism” and said she’s going to start prosecuting it as such.

So here’s the situation we’re in: The government has tipped into full-blown fascism. Plain-clothes men with their faces hidden are disappearing people off the streets and sending them to torture prisons. (And when they realize they’ve grabbed the wrong guy, as in the case of one 19-year-old kid, they say “take him anyway.”) Trump is openly asking for more concentration camps to send actual citizens to, not-so-subtly threatening that anyone who so much as pisses him off could simply be sentenced to a life of torture, hard labor and imprisonment without due process. And the only hope we’re clinging to right now for Garcia is that Judge Xinis, the lower court judge that the Supreme Court kicked his case back to, actually holds members of the Trump administration in contempt of court and throws them the fuck in jail, because these people need to start seeing some actual consequences for their flagrant bucking of democracy.

Chuck Schumer told Chris Hayes a few weeks ago, in defending his inexplicable capitulation to Republicans on the spending bill, that Trump defying the Supreme Court would be the red line for him: “If Trump doesn’t obey the Supreme Court,” he said, that would be “different than anything else. It’s a quantum leap different, because our democracy is then—248 years of American democracy, the Magna Carta is out the window, and we will all have to take extraordinary action.” And now that has happened, and we have yet to hear from Mr. Schumer on what extraordinary action he plans to take beyond saying that Garcia needs to be returned “immediately.”

Sen. Chris van Hollen (D-Md.), Garcia’s own senator, showed a bit more backbone yesterday and threatened to fly to El Salvador himself to try to get Garcia out. A few of his colleagues offered to go with him. And the only silver lining to any of this that I can offer is that for the first time ever, Trump is finally polling underwater on immigration—suggesting that no right-wing propaganda about “criminal illegal aliens” is strong enough to override the injustice that we’re seeing every day with our own eyes.

In short: I am trying not to panic, but to be honest, I’m starting to panic. How are you guys feeling?