US Authoritarianism

On March 15, three planes touched down in El Salvador. They carried 261 men deported from the United States. Most were Venezuelans—people who fled one nightmare only to be thrust into another. They were designated as “gang members” by the current administration and deported with little or no due process. No trials. No evidence presented. Just labeled, processed, and removed.

What happened next should shatter any comfortable notions of what American values mean in practice.

These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” This man was slapped for his tears, beaten for his vulnerability.

No phone calls. No visitors. No books. No talking. Just exile to a place “so cold and far from home they may as well have been sent into space, nameless and forgotten.”

And all of this—every slap, every sob, every stolen dignity—stamped with American approval. Coordinated with American officials. Executed with American efficiency.

Full text on Tech Dirt (who would have thought).