Marco Rubio Wants To Send Asylum Seekers, Refugees, And Jailed *US Citizens* To El Salvador

Once again, a Republican administration is looking to partner with a right-wing dictatorship in Latin America, a move that has worked so well in the past. In fact, it made people in those countries love us so much that they all wanted to move here.

Well, either that or because we trained and funded the death squads, torturers, and military juntas that made their lives a living hell.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been in talks with Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador who literally calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator,” to do one of the most unlawful, unconstitutional things anyone in the Trump administration has come up with in the last week — which, frankly, is really saying something.

“In an act of extraordinary friendship to our country [… El Salvador] has agreed to the most unprecedented and extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world,” Rubio said on Monday.

Bukele has reportedly agreed that, in exchange for money, he will accept not only the Salvadoran refugees who fled their country after their homes were destroyed in earthquakes and hurricanes, but refugees and asylum seekers from other countries, as well as incarcerated United States citizens, who would be transferred to CECOT, among the world’s largest prisons, which they just opened in 2022 in order to house all of the people they imprisoned after arbitrarily charging them with crimes they didn’t commit.

Record scratch, US what?

In addition, Bukele “has offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those of US citizenship and legal residents,” Rubio said. […]

“The US is absolutely prohibited from deporting US citizens, whether they are incarcerated or not,” Leti Volpp, a law professor at UC Berkeley who specializes in immigration law and citizenship theory, told CNN over email.

Deporting US citizens would be a real doozy if we still had laws or a Constitution, given the fact that it’s supposed to be illegal to deport United States citizens, and also a massive violation of the incarcerated person’s Fifth Amendment right to due process (El Salvador is not too big on that one!) and their Eighth Amendment rights to not be subject to cruel and unusual torture.

Shockingly enough, El Salvador does not currently have the world’s greatest human rights situation. In fact, they have a very bad human rights situation, as per our own State Department.

Via State.gov (PDF download, because it will probably be gone in a few days):

Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: unlawful or arbitrary killings, forced disappearances; torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by security forces; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy; serious restrictions on free expression and media, including censorship and threats to enforce criminal laws to limit expression; serious government corruption; lack of investigation and accountability for gender-based violence; significant barriers to accessing sexual and reproductive health services; and crimes involving violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex individuals.

Granted, the United States is now fine with most of those things, but at least a few of them are still supposed to be bad.

For further details on this, I recommend checking out the 85-page report Amnesty International has compiled on the nation. Or, if you are short on time, merely considering what it could possibly mean that Amnesty international has an 85-page report on a nation’s human rights violations.

“The deterioration in the guarantee of human rights in El Salvador in recent years that we have documented is extremely alarming. The adoption of a focus on highly repressive security and weakening of the rule of law have led the country into one of its worse crises since the end of the internal armed conflict,” said Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty International.

That internal armed conflict she’s speaking of was the Salvadoran Civil War, which was backed and funded by the United States. Indeed, the United States trained the very death squads that killed over 75,000 civilians (including, quite famously, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her daughter). We trained them right on our own soil, with our very own torture manuals, at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia (now called WHITSEC, now doing the exact same thing under a less notorious name).

That conflict is a very large part of the reason why El Salvador ended up having a gang problem, why they have such incredible income inequality, etc. etc. Like so many other countries in Latin America, we spent actual decades funding the extreme, violent oppression of the people there (because they might be communists!).

Via The Atlantic:

Thee U.S.-fueled war drove tens of thousands of Salvadorans to flee the violence for safety in the United States. In the mid-90s, Clinton allowed their “temporary protected status” to expire. This decision contributed to the gang violence that marks El Salvador today—not long ago, when a day passed without a murder, it was banner news. Thousands of the refugees sent back were young men, who had either deserted from the army or the guerrillas during the war. And when they got back to El Salvador, with little beyond their fighting skills, they formed the nucleus of the gangs.

Whoops.

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So, just to recap, we spent billions and billions of dollars in the ‘80s supporting their military junta during a civil war, training people in how to abuse human rights, which made things so bad that many of them came to the United States to escape, then let their “temporary protected status” expire, sent them back to El Salvador where things continued to be very, very bad and they ended up forming the very gangs that MAGA Americans cite as one of the reasons they are so frightened of immigrants.

Surely though, there’s just no possible way that sending a whole bunch of random people to a country they have never even been to, which just so happens to have an especially terrible human rights situation, could ever possibly come back to bite anyone in the ass. Right? Right?

[CNN]

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