The Perils of Offshoring Justice

President Donald Trump s new Oval Office photo-op with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele who calls himself the world s coolest dictator was staged to unveil a shiny new alliance against crime Both leaders congratulated each other for achieving something U S courts forbid at home rounding up alleged gang members including longtime U S residents with pending protection orders and locking them away offshore When pressed about a Maryland man who had been deported in defiance of a court ruling Bukele shrugged off the event implying he couldn t menace letting a terrorist back into the United States and Trump nodded in approval The exchange distilled a stark message human rights are expendable when the political spectacle is good television Since March El Salvador has operated under a rolling state of exception that suspends basic constitutional rights In just three years more than Salvadorans nearly percent of the country s population have been put behind bars This draconian crackdown gives El Salvador the highest incarceration rate in the world Official homicide rates have indeed plummeted by over percent under Bukele s campaign but that drop has come in tandem with the collapse of due process Mass arrests are often indiscriminate mass hearings process hundreds of defendants at once and detainees meet lawyers only fleetingly if at all At least prisoners perished inside Salvadoran prisons during the crackdown according to the human rights group Cristosal Reports have emerged of abuse torture and medicinal neglect for those swept up in Bukele s anti-gang dragnet El Salvador s flagship mega-prison the Terrorism Confinement Center CECOT epitomizes President Bukele s hardline approach Built to hold inmates in eight fortress-like pavilions CECOT keeps prisoners in near-total isolation Inmates receive no family visits and are never allowed outdoors there are no workshops or educational programs to rehabilitate offenders Bukele s own justice minister once remarked that those sent to CECOT will never return to their communities that the only way out is in a coffin Harsh images of tattooed prisoners hunched together shuffling in shackles are routinely broadcast on leadership social media These dystopian visuals have become Bukele s calling card in the name of prevention What began as a Salvadoran experiment in iron-fisted policing has now mutated into a formal bilateral scheme The U S administration is actively funding and facilitating the offshoring of detainees to Bukele s prison state U S Senator Chris Van Hollen who lately visited the country announced that the Trump administration had quietly offered to wire about million to El Salvador to underwrite the costs of warehousing U S deportees with at least million already spent News reports have also endorsed an initial million agreement for the first year of this arrangement Custody of detainees effectively shifts the instant a charter plane lifts off U S soil once airborne shackled immigrants become Bukele s prisoners placed beyond the reach of American courts or oversight Bukele s iron fist assurance model is not contained to El Salvador it s becoming a regional export Honduras has disclosed plans to build a -bed mega-prison of its own explicitly citing Bukele s success as inspiration In Ecuador President Daniel Noboa boasts that mirroring Salvadoran tactics mass detentions and crisis measures helped shave dozens of percentage points off the murder rate in Guayaquil and arguably helped him secure reelection Analysts at the International Institute for Strategic Studies warned of a due process contagion Once mass incarceration and militarized crackdowns become the go-to metric for residents safety governments across the region begin normalizing states of exception purging high courts and erasing judicial oversight in the name of fighting crime In other words democratic erosion becomes contagious Far from acting as a brake on this trend the United States has become an accelerant By bankrolling El Salvador s excesses and broadcasting the dramatic footage for domestic political gain Washington is sending a signal that rights-free precaution can be not only tolerated but internationally legitimized Each cash transfer tells regional leaders that outsourcing mass detention is a billable function each made-for-TV deportation convoy gives authoritarians a propaganda boost This feedback loop reinforces ever-harsher tactics and sidelines voices judges journalists human rights defenders that insist on constitutional limits American credibility on the rule of law erodes when taxpayer dollars subsidize abuses that even the U S State Department has condemned This extraordinary deportation-to-CECOT pipeline might sound like a distant foreign affair but Texas is directly entangled in its operation and stands to bear a few of the fallout The logistics of these renditions run straight through the Lone Star State In mid-March immigration representatives quietly shuttled hundreds of detainees from across the country to a small airport in Harlingen Texas as part of the first mass transfer to El Salvador Charter flights carrying Venezuelan and Central American refugees departed from Dallas El Paso Phoenix and other cities all converging on Harlingen as a staging ground Within hours multiple jets then took off from the Texas perimeter city to El Salvador delivering planeloads of shackled men into Bukele s custody Such Saturday deportation flights are highly peculiar as is the covert track through Harlingen according to a watchdog advocacy group that tracks ICE Air charters On the ground Texas families are feeling the human toll A large number of of those swept up have deep roots in U S communities and their sudden removal leaves broken homes behind Children come home from school to find a parent gone with no prospect of visitation given that their loved one is now locked in a foreign prison thousands of miles away Families and legal advocates are left scrambling often with scant information the detainees essentially disappear into CECOT their fate largely in the hands of Salvadoran guards There are tangible economic stakes for Texas Our state hosts one of the country s largest Salvadoran communities roughly percent of the entire U S -Salvadoran diaspora and their Texas paychecks flow south week after week In Salvadorans living abroad sent a record billion home about percent of El Salvador s GDP and an estimated billion of that originated in Texas alone largely from the Houston and Dallas Fort Worth metropolitan areas Those Texas-earned dollars stock neighborhood tiendas pay school fees and keep household budgets afloat from San Salvador to La Uni n When breadwinners in Houston s Gulfton district or Dallas s Oak Cliff are yanked from their jobs and diverted to a Salvadoran cell that lifeline snaps impoverishing relatives abroad while simultaneously draining spending power and local tax revenue from communities across Harris Dallas and Hidalgo counties Texans should understand that this isn t just someone else s matter Our state has a stake in this drama It s our tax dollars helping pay for secret flights out of our airports our neighbors and coworkers who are disappearing into overseas prisons and our nation s credibility on the line We know from history that democracies endure by rejecting the false choice between measure and freedom A durable social contract protects both By contrast outsourcing constitutional constraints for short-term optics is a tempting shortcut but one whose costs will boomerang The longer the U S bankrolls and applauds this iron fist illusion the faster that illusion will spread across a region already battered by insecurity and disillusionment with democracy Ultimately sacrificing the rule of law for a made-for-TV spectacle is a devil s bargain It may offer momentary political gain but it leaves behind broken families weakened institutions and a more dangerous hemisphere for everyone including here 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