Trump resurrects George W. Bush's rendition regime

Among all the political atrocities committed by the second Trump administration — and there are many — perhaps the most egregious, so far, is the plane loads of Venezuelan men sent to an infamous mega-prison in El Salvador called the Center for Terrorism Confinement (aka Cecot) in direct contravention of a federal judge's order. The men have disappeared into the prison and no one is even sure who all of them are much less if they are actually members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang that President Trump claims has "invaded" the United States. But reports are starting to emerge that this was a sloppy operation that swept up some innocent people. One can only imagine what's happening to them in that dystopian hellhole of a prison.

Over the weekend TIME published a first-person account by photojournalist Philip Holsinger of the Venezuelans' arrival and processing in El Salvador the week before. We had seen the grotesque propaganda video produced by the Salvadoran government (and celebrated by the White House) but this is the first time we've heard about their treatment from someone who was on the ground. It is harrowing, to say the least.

The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster.

The men were pulled from the buses so fast the guards couldn’t keep pace. Chained at their ankles and wrists, they stumbled and fell, some guards falling to the ground with them. With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shove. The guards grabbed necks and pushed bodies into the sides of the buses as they forced the detainees forward. There was no blood, but the violence had rhythm, like a theater of fear. 

Inside the intake room, a sea of trustees descended on the men with electric shavers, stripping heads of hair with haste. The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.

There is good evidence that this young man is who he says, a barber and make-up artist from Texas, not a gang member. How he got caught up in this we have no idea. I cannot even imagine what he's going through in this prison full of hardcore gang members.

It was not entirely unexpected. Trump has reportedly been angry at the pace of deportations and told his henchmen to speed it up. By invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1789, the very rarely used wartime power to remove non-citizens without following the usual immigration laws, Trump was able to finally get the satisfaction he'd been desperate to achieve. The case is currently being heard in federal court, where the judge is beside himself at the government's uncooperative behavior. It will almost certainly end up before the Supreme Court before too long.

It shocks the conscience to see America completely abandoning any semblance of due process to kidnap people and take them to another country to be dealt with by governments that have no respect for human rights. But let's be honest. It's not the first time, and I'm not talking about the Palmer raids in WWI or the Japanese Internment in WWII, both of which were shameful episodes in which the president used this obscure wartime power to detain, imprison and deport people based solely on their ancestry or national origin under the suspicion that they might commit sabotage or espionage. America perpetrated something this ugly in this century, only 20 years ago.

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the U.S. government kidnapped hundreds of people around the world and sent them to black sites in foreign countries where they were tortured by the CIA. They were also sent to countries notorious for their lack of human rights where they were also tortured. It was called "Extraordinary Rendition" and what was so extraordinary about it was that it required no due process.

Rendition has been used since the 1880s to grab suspected criminals on foreign soil to bring them to America to stand trial. Grabbing them to torture them (or what they euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation") in secret prisons in ways that were beyond our imaginations was on a whole other level.

We know what we know about all this from great reporting in the media and some dogged investigations by the U.S. Congress. (They even made a movie about the Senate investigation starring Annette Bening and Adam Driver.) But the country has never seen the full Senate report, only the summary which was pretty damning, because the White House under Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden all refused to release it. I think that says something very disturbing about what must be in it.

The torture regime under the Bush administration was one of the most shameful moments in our history. We've let it go down the memory hole as we do with virtually everything we hate about ourselves. But that cruel, unnecessary and counterproductive set of policies along with Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and all the rest of the gruesome acts of overkill committed in the wake of 9/11 set the table for what Donald Trump is doing today.

However, while the Bush policies were barbaric and un-American, they were in response to an actual attack on the United States. The reaction was insanely excessive and motivated by some longstanding policy goals that had little to do with the attack but the casus belli wasn't conjured up out of thin air.

On the other hand, Trump's rationale for dredging up wartime powers to render foreigners to a foreign prison notorious for its inhumane treatment is completely made up. Crime is down. Illegal immigration is down. To the extent that these Venezuelan gang members are dangerous criminals (assuming they are gang members at all) it's nothing that can't be dealt with through the American justice system.

Trump's immigration crisis is, and always has been, a campaign strategy to scratch the ids of his racist base. They are all too happy to believe it and he and his GOP accomplices are all too happy to take advantage of that to seize more and more power. It's as if Hitler made up the fact that the Reichstag was on fire and his Nazi followers all nodded their heads and insisted they smelled the smoke.

20 years ago the U.S. government completely lost its bearings and began the process of finally destroying our society's belief that while it often fails, America still believed in the ideals set forth in the founding documents. It became a lot harder to accept our "shining city on a hill" myth once we saw how our powerful country discarded its values the minute we faced a serious threat. Now we don't even pretend anymore. The president simply proclaims that we have been invaded without any evidence at all and seizes the powers that come with that, all to give his followers the strongman spectacle he promised.