I understand why Kilmar Abrego Garcia has become the face of Donald Trump’s monstrous policy of sending migrants to a gulag in El Salvador. In a court filing, the administration’s own lawyers initially admitted that his deportation was an “administrative error,” and the White House has been disregarding a Supreme Court ruling to “facilitate” his return. Abrego Garcia’s case was both a human tragedy and an incipient constitutional crisis. His Kafkaesque predicament is a stark illustration of what it means to be stripped of the law’s protection, and thus a warning for us all.
But Abrego Garcia is not alone. America has sent hundreds of people to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, a mega-prison where inmates never have visitors or step outside and the lights are on 24 hours a day. Of all the men we’ve rendered to this hell, the one I can’t get out of my mind is Andry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela, sent to rot in El Salvador because the Trump administration claimed his tattoos link him to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. In photos he is slight, holding makeup brushes or posing with flowers or rainbow balloons. The photojournalist Philip Holsinger captured his arrival in El Salvador, where he sobbed and called out for his mother as guards shaved his head, introducing him to a life of total dehumanization.
This week, four Democratic members of Congress went to El Salvador to try to see Abrego Garcia, and while they were there, they sought proof of life for Hernández Romero. They didn’t get it. “No one has actually heard about Andry at all since the abduction, including his lawyers and family,” said Robert Garcia, a congressman from California. The Democrats obtained a promise from the American Embassy in El Salvador to check on Hernández Romero, but as of this writing, there’s been no update.
Hernández Romero’s case exemplifies the carelessness that has marked the Trump administration’s arrangement with El Salvador from the beginning. And it highlights the rapid transformation of America from a place of refuge for at least some victims of oppression to a place where noncitizens often seem to have no human rights at all.
Hernández Romero, who fled Venezuela in part because of the persecution he’d faced as a gay man, tried to come to America the right way. After making the grueling journey north, he was arrested the first time he attempted to get into the United States and sent back to Mexico. But there, he did what he should have done in the first place, downloading an app from Customs and Border Protection and making an appointment to claim asylum.
He passed a preliminary screening; officials found that he had credible fear of being persecuted if he returned home. During a physical exam, however, an officer flagged the crown tattoos he has on each wrist — one with the word “mom” and the other with the word “dad” — and he was sent to Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, run by the private prison company CoreCivic.
As NBC News has reported, Hernández Romero’s tattoos were inspired by his desire to honor his parents and his love of his town’s annual Three Kings festival. “He would design and sew his own costumes, and he would do the makeup for all the women in the parade,” a childhood friend told NBC, which noted that crown tattoos were a local trend. But two private contractors at Otay Mesa determined that the tattoos marked him as a gang member.
That was apparently enough to consign Hernández Romero indefinitely to a black hole. (Later, USA Today would reveal that one of the two contractors was Charles Cross Jr., a “disgraced former Milwaukee cop with credibility issues” who’d been fired for driving his car into a home while drunk.) “The fact that that is the sole evidence that they have ever produced that landed Andry in that prison cell in El Salvador should shock the conscience of everyone,” said his lawyer, Lindsay Toczylowski of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center. “It’s the reason that due process protections are so important. Because had that evidence gone before an impartial judge, and that was all they produced, and we were given an opportunity to refute it, it would have been so easy to do.”
It’s important to understand that while America’s treatment of Hernández Romero is harrowing, it isn’t unique. As Bloomberg reported, around 90 percent of the migrants sent to CECOT have no criminal records aside from immigration or traffic violations. For weeks, one Venezuelan migrant in U.S. custody seemed to have simply vanished, with no record of where the authorities sent him, though the Department of Homeland Security now says he’s in El Salvador. During the first Trump administration, the authorities took migrant children from their parents without a system to track them or plan to reunite them. They are displaying the same sadistic sloppiness with the lives of those they’re shipping off to CECOT.
And everything Trump is doing to these migrants, he would, if given the chance, do to Americans. Last week he was overheard telling El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, on a hot mic, “Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You got to build about five more places.” Trump officials, Axios reported on Wednesday, “are suggesting their immigration crackdown could expand to include deporting convicted U.S. citizens and charging anyone — not just immigrants — who criticizes Trump’s policies.” Such critics, said Seb Gorka, White House senior director for counterterrorism, might be seen as “aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists.”
Some Democrats think it would be unwise for them to focus on Trump’s abuse of migrants, rather than his failure to lower prices. The border, the thinking goes, is an issue on which Trump polls well, so Democrats shouldn’t raise its salience. This strikes me as strategically absurd. It makes sense to hit Trump where he’s strongest; already, surveys suggest that Americans are souring on Trump’s handling of immigration.
But even if it were politically costly, it’s a moral imperative to try to rescue people like Hernández Romero. Someday, maybe, we’ll remember this moment as one of American shame, like the internment of the Japanese during World War II or the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo. But that’s a best-case scenario. The worst is that stories like Abrego Garcia’s and Hernández Romero’s stop being shocking because they’re so routine.
