The Faraway Prison: Why Cecot Matters

My world these days is divided into two. When I am with other immigrants or others who are Black or Brown or Muslim, we speak in hushed, quiet tones about what is happening all around us-the deportations, the evisceration of due process, the prospect of visa revocations, of losing green cards, being suddenly whisked away to some faraway prison. We are all legally present in this country, many of us US citizens but with the rules rendered arbitrary our presence seems precarious.

The other world is the world of white Americans. Here, most things seem to be going on as usual. Some are attending protests, some are expressing their anger on social media but their everyday concerns are unchanged and for most the mess in Washington is at best in their peripheral vision. These are not people who know others whose visas may be revoked, who may suddenly be apprehended or disappeared for days. There is still talk of children’s antics, of cooking and recipes, of celebrity scandals and gossip, of all of life still in its regular rhythms, with political anger set to the side.

Like all writers and poets I feel compelled with whatever puny might I can muster to bridge this gap because its widening length and breadth is the measure of the strength of the Trump Administration. It is this gap between the two worlds that is, in my view, the very goal of the political theater unfolding around us. When ordinary white Americans can live their lives and not see what is being done to everyone else the battle is nearly won. The maintenance of the semblance of order and normality for white Americans is essential to the logic that justifies everyone else’s vulnerability to deportation and detention. The people who are being taken away this logic commands have all done something wrong; even if that “something wrong “ is unknown and unspecified. The logic normalizes the premise that the immunity of a ordinary white man or woman to being suddenly taken away, without explanation to an unknown prison is something they have “earned”

Secret and unseen prisons are essential to the maintenance of these two worlds. The Salvadoran prison where 200 Venezuelans were deported under the Alien Enemies Act is called “Cecot” Its walls are 11 meters high and there is no cell service in its environs. Inside, inmates sleep on multi-level metal bunks without blankets pillows or mattresses. To wash themselves they have a trough of water and there are 90 men to each bathroom. This prison is also where Kilmar Abrego Garcia-the man who is at the center of the Supreme Court challenge filed by the ACLU. Unlike the narrative peddled by the Trump Administration, Garcia is neither Venezuelan nor a gang member but a lawful permanent resident in the United States, married to a US citizen and the father of three special needs children. While the Trump Administration continued to call him a “foreign terrorist” they have not provided any evidence that substantiates this claim.

The Administration is undertaking a clever gamble. According to Stephen Miller immigration is an 80-20 issue…which means that those that inhabit white America are unlikely to be terribly concerned about the deportation of men who are alleged to be criminals ( and are visibly brown and immigrants) This is why when the first challenge to the deportation of the 200 migrants was filed and Judge Boasberg of the D.C District Court ordered the deportations stopped-the Administration went ahead with them anyway. The “80” it believed simply would not see this issue as a matter of the rule of law. In Trump’s own words why would anyone care about “someone who is out of sight and out of mind in El Salvador”

This past Friday, the Administration tried to do the same thing a second time. Around 50 Venezuelans were given papers indicating that were about to be imminently deported from the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas. The ACLU learned of this and filed lawsuits in Texas, New Orleans, Washington D.C and the Supreme Court to prevent the deportations while the legal basis for them: the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is being reviewed. According to some news reports, the detainees were quite literally being loaded up into buses when the Supreme Court issued a rate midnight order halting the deportations. The decision was 7-2 with only Justices Alito and Thomas dissenting.

Cecot is central to all of this. Secret prisons are never an accidental tool. As Trump has already joked to the Salvadoran President so eager to make Trump’s flouting of due process possible-he would like to send “homegrowns” or U.S citizen criminals to the prison as well. Away from American eyes and minds, these “unwanted” people could be treated just like everyone else in Cecot-like they were not human beings at all. There is a reason why people have started to call it a “camp” It stands for the normalization of the idea that society contains undesirables and that it is permissible even desirable to deport them to some faraway place. Auschwitz-it may be useful to remember is not located in Germany but in Poland.

It is not as if conditions in ICE facilities in the United States are much better. These facilities too are in remote places like the tiny town of Jena, Louisiana or Anson in Texas or other similar places almost always far away from the places where the detainees have been apprehended. In cases like that of Rumeysa Ozturk, the 30 year old Tufts University student who was here on a student visa, neither lawyers nor family had any idea where she had been taken until days later. This was despite the fact that a judge had asked the Trump Administration to share that information and the judge had issued an order asking the Administration to keep her in the state of Massachusetts.

Recent reports of conditions in the ICE facilities even in the United States reflect the same effort to treat immigrants like herds of animals “You are stripped of your humanity” one woman who had been arrested during a traffic stop managed to tell reporters. Held at the Prairieland Detention Center in Texas, she was deported to Mexico from where she had fled 20 years ago to escape her abusive father. In Prarieland, women have been sleeping on the floor, in others there are no chairs forcing everyone to stand or sit on the floor, sanitation and toilet facilities regularly fail from overcrowding. The cumulative psychological uncertainty of what is happening to them plus the squalid and punishing conditions all serve to traumatize those who are suffering but also those few Americans-the 20 percent who are watching what is happening.

It is worse if you (like me) know the law and can guess what is coming and what is possible. Today I am writing an article for The Nation about “denaturalization” or the process through which US citizens who are not born in this country can be stripped of citizenship. Wading through the legal precedents and statutory and other provisions is like slipping deeper and deeper into a Poe-esque twilight zone. Again and again I am left with the same thought-unless white America chooses to care millions will be doomed and perhaps they already are.