There is more than meets the eye in El Salvador.
You know it's bad when even Maduro thinks the U.S. is acting illegally.
Pacific Ocean beaches, volcanoes, coffee farms, Mayan Ruins. There is more than meets the eye with El Salvador. Human rights violations, U.S. deportations, Venezuelans, "the world's coolest dictator," and an American King. Typically, when you search online for a Central American country, you get a bunch of images of beautiful beaches, jungles, and travel options. Right now, you get a bunch of political news stories about jails in El Salvador and where our self-declared king is threatening to send people. The new relationship between the United States and El Salvador marks a turning point in our history. This isn't just about jails and immigration policies. This is a clear indication of the direction we are headed in. We aren’t sailing into a storm. We're already in one, and we're hanging on for dear life.
Saturday March, 15, 2025 three flights (GlobalX Fights 6143, 6145, and 6122) left Harlingen, Texas and flew over the Gulf of Mexico (or “GuLf Of AmErIcA” if you can stand calling it that) making a brief stop in Honduras before ultimately landing in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. 261 immigrants were deported from the United States to El Salvador. 137 of them were deported by the king’s proclamation and invocation of a 1798 law. The rest were deported under other federal laws. The Washington Post noted that 23 of them were from El Salvador, while the rest were from Venezuela. A federal judge also ordered the planes to turn around or not take off so the court could properly sort out the issues before it. There are too many things going wrong with this situation.
Normally deportees are sent back to their home country. For the 23 Salvadorans sent back to their country of citizenship, that makes sense. For the other 238 deportees on the three flights, not so much. They’re Venezuelans. Even the Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro called bullshit on the Trump administration’s action. Maduro stated that this was “kidnapping” and noted the lack of procedural due process and called the Salvadorian prison a “concentration camp.” Yes, we all see the irony here. The pot is calling the kettle black. Despite that, it doesn’t mean that Maduro is wrong in his assessment. Even non-citizens deserve their due process and if they should be deported, they should be sent back to their home. You know we’ve hit a new low if one dictator is calling us out for getting into bed with another dictator.
Maduro denied that any of his citizens sent to El Salvador were members of the international gang Tren de Aragua. As it turns out, his majesty’s administration has offered little if any evidence that the deportees were criminals or gang members. Evidence is starting to point to the fact that the only thing federal agents relied on was nationality and tattoos. The king and his men make claims that every deportee was a gang member of MS-13 or Tren de Aragua, despite claims and evidence by family that they have never known their deported loved ones to be involved in any gang. The government has turned to labeling immigrants it deports as “terrorists, rapists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and brother-owners.” They offer no evidence, just their word. Truth is not the point. The point is making people believe this action is heroic, it is for “our safety," and we should have no sympathy because these are dangerous men. They don’t want us to question them. They want us to take everything at face value. They want to undermine the entire system our founding fathers created because that system was designed to keep tyrants from taking control.
The deportations raise a larger issue. That storm the ship is sailing through is the constitutional crisis we’re facing right now. We are NOT on the verge of a constitutional crisis. It’s here. It’s now. And so an authoritarian ruler who would rather think of himself as king than elected president. That ship he’s sailing is the United States. The people hanging on for dear life, that’s everyone here. Some people think it’s exciting like a roller coaster. The rest of us want the storm to end and the seas to calm down.
On Saturday March 15 Trump proclaimed that he was invoking the Alien Enemies Act. That was at 4:20 PM. At 5 PM there was an emergency hearing to halt the act. Planes took off, defying the judge’s lawful order. (Click the link for a visual timeline of the events). The government refused to turn them around. The next morning the Salvadoran president posted on Twitter (yeah, yeah, “X.” I’m not calling it that just because an autistic man child has an obsession with a letter of the alphabet) and I quote “Oopsie… Too late.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio had the audacity to report the tweet. President Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” then posted a hype-video of the deported prisoners being rushed off the planes onto buses, driven to the prison, and forced to their knees to have heads shaved and submit to their new overlords. (Click here for a video breakdown by Devin Stone).
This is just the beginning for the dictator duo. Bukele made a popular name for himself in his country by heavy-handedly cracking down on crime and building a mass prison system. His tactics are beyond questionable and he eliminated virtually all protections of the judicial process. He’s wildly popular according his country’s polls and won a second election. Though, like all dictators, we should take the high percentages with a grain of salt as they usually can’t be trusted or verified. His new prison system isn’t cheap. He’s aiming to make it financially sustainable. The United States may help him do that by selling prison space to the United States. That’s right, the U.S. is paying the Salvadorans six-million dollars for the recent deportees and there is evidence the U.S. intends to pay more. The dictator duo can both claim a win. Bukele can make a profit and act as a noble keep of prisoners who deserve to be punished. Trump can claim he is saving money because the prisoners are costing less money than if they were kept in the U.S. Don’t be fooled though. This is all a lie. They are completely sidestepping the due process guaranteed by the constitution and avoiding the question of the least costly option; sending them back to their home country.
Bukele isn’t just a businessman making deals with Trump. Nayib the Notorious is a role model for Despot Don. Bukele is only 43 years old and he’s making moves Trump dreams of. Bukele stands virtually unopposed in everything he does. El Salvador’s constitution previously prevented a president from serving a second term. Bukele didn’t let the pesky law get in his way. Instead, he used his political party’s majority to gerrymander the maps and change the number of legislative seats. This moved them from two-thirds of the legislature to nearly a the whole thing. Then they purged the judiciary of judges who would stand in their way. Bukele was able to secure a second term as president after that. Any of this sound familiar? Maybe it’s because the MAGA party calls for impeaching every judge that opposes their illegal and unconstitutional actions. Maybe it’s because convicted felon and podcaster Steve Bannon keeps insisting that Trump can and should be elected to a third term.
The MAGA crowd is a big fan of Bukele. He posts hype videos on social media, considers himself the coolest of dictators, and is willing to do devilish business deals by selling jail space and forced labor at a price far lower than it would cost inside the United States. Bukele said he’s even willing to take on U.S. citizens in his prisons. Trump is so pumped about his latest business venture that he threatened to send vandals of Tesla cars and dealerships to El Salvador. He “TrUtHeD” this on his Twitter knockoff.
However, the biggest elephant in the room right now is the looming constitutional crisis. The king and his men directly defied a legal court order stopping the deportations. The court order did not rule them illegal but was simply halting them long enough to make sure that Trump’s proclamation and the federal agencies following along were legal. They outright defied the orders and as of right now the legal saga continues. Trump “TrUtHeD” Tuesday morning calling Judge Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator” who “didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!)” Things are so bad right now that Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, made a public statement denouncing the calls for impeachment and stated that the appeals process is the proper and legal channel for disagreements over a court’s decision. Normally, the Supreme Court only speaks on issues before it to stay as neutral and unpolitical as it possibly can be. Breaking that tradition demonstrates the severity of the current situation.
Right now we, the American people, are left wondering whether the Trump administration will comply with court orders, even from the Supreme Court. If they don’t then the rule of law is gone like a bad hairpiece in a hurricane. The only question after that is whether “We the People” will stand for it.
About the Creator
Hayden Searcy
Reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago inspired me to go to law school. It is one of the most devasting books ever written. I don't want to see that kind of authoritarianism rise again. I write to make my voice heard.
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