Heh, even the extrajudicial imprisonment camps can be outsourced now. Why look bad having your military run Guantanamo when you can do the Uber model it for a cheap price.
Heh, or is a pun on AirBnB the more apt name for it.. "Concrete Floor & Indefinite Detention"?
Reminds me more of the Amazon Delivery Partner model where the way you want to do something implies harming innocent people, so you have a third-party do it to shift blame for the deaths.
It's more efficient because you introduce a middleman and ignore pesky regulations. Thank god we've discovered this important thing that's never existed in history and created so much wealth exploiting this very new technological dynamic.
And what role do you think the us had in destabilizing their country and building violent drug rulings across the world from its regressive anti drug policy?
I remember a time when decreased murder rates was just a lie by the government. But we all know nobody's more trustworthy than the El Salvadorian regime, especially when it results in an influx of cash.
No doubt about it. Even in the U.S. we have a serious slavery problem. If you are incarcerated you do not have the same rights and most certainly can and will be made to labor if you want any hope of getting out.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
If we have indentured slaves in the U.S. then just imagine what they are doing at CECOT. Our judicial system is punitive. They would rather you working for 25 cents an hour cleaning vomit off hospital gowns then they would have you learning to read and write. Cash rules everything around them.
I came across this article[1] the other day, after reading about the US sending people to a prison in El Salvador and wondering what we actually know about the place.
An incongruity that I didn't notice at the time but realized a bit later is that the prison is called "The Center for Terrorism Confinement" and it has a capacity of 40,000 people. Why would El Salvador or any country need a terrorist detention facility that holds 40,000 people?
According to wikipedia, El Salvador has a population of about 6 million.
The United States famously kept people accused of terrorism charges at Guantanamo Bay, and 780 prisoners have been kept there over the last couple decades since GWB established the prison. There are currently 15.
Presumably there are a lot more people who would fit the description "domestic terrorist" being held in jails in mainland US, but certainly not 40,000 of them.
Presumably president Bukele's administration is using it as a detention facility for regular criminals as well, but it wouldn't be surprising if there's a lot of people there that shouldn't be in jail in the first place.
The drug cartels are viewed as terroristic activity, so yes, there are a lot of terrorists in El salvador by that perspective. Shouldn't be too surprising when cartels commit outrageous acts like the Mejicanos massacre
Yeah anyone criticizing the mass incarceration in El Salvador as unjust should really familiarize themselves with the crimes of the gangs down there. The obliteration of a social scourge in a single presidency was nothing short of miraculous. That's why Bukele was re-elected at the highest levels in history - his people genuinely love him for it. The right to a fair trial is great in places that have law and order, but when you witness beheadings, mass executions, torture, etc. daily, you won't miss that right at all.
Until the day the goons break down your door and drag you away. Then you'll wish you had a fair trial. "It'll never happen to me if I keep may head down" will ensure no one will feel safe about publicly opposing the president on any issue.
Your dictator is not special, most of them concentrate their power by claiming to address an issue that's legitimately concerns a lot of citizens; Idi Amin expelled Asians under cover of addressing inequality.
That fails to understand how power in exceptional situations persists: namely that it still must be supported by key stakeholders.
If a leader were to summarily arrest large numbers of random citizens, suddenly they'd lose the support of citizens, one of the key pillars keeping them in power.
Which is why you see empowered and pervasive secret police institutions in societies like this -- you require a credible and effective alternative to popular support.
Exactly, this is analogous to "sensitivity/specificity" of a test, the test is if they can be trusted to live autonomously in society
- most sensitive: arrest everyone you suspect, lots of innocents locked up
- trade-off : some innocents locked up
- most specific: arrest only people you are 100% sure are criminals, lots of them get let off due to lack of evidence / inability to prove
You can frame it as a moral question, lock up 100% of criminals and 1 innocent person, or 0 innocent people and only 50% of criminals.
There is a separate, more subjective argument that knowingly locking up innocents is a slippery slope that will lead to a corrupt state.
From a pure ethics standpoint, this is "fruit from the poisoned tree" i.e. doing something unethical to achieve positive result, in this case, locking up an innocent to cause crime to plummet.
One thing is for sure, if he went back up for election and got in through strong popular support, the society replied and said they support living in such an environment. If more innocents are locked up maybe the feedback would change.
As someone who generally opposes Bukele on an ideological level, I'm not even that mad about the mass sweeps themselves. The way things were going before, it was obvious a drastic solution was needed.
It's the CECOT conditions and the boasting about cruel treatment that I'm unhappy about. At this point it's plain torture, and I believe it's wrong to torture people, even if those people are themselves torturers or worse.
Bukele, who calls himself "the coolest dictator in the world" [0], won his first election in 2019, and his second election in 2024 in landslides. El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world and was basically dominated by brutal cartels. Bukeles solution to this was to use the military to round up everyone who is a suspected gang member. Note that this includes people who simply have too many tattoos or are young male who have relatives related to gangs. They built a mega-prison, aka concentration camp to contain these people, but it seems like it is significantly below capacity, estimated at 16k prisoners while being able to "house" up to 40k people. The conditions in the prison are aweful [1].
It is important to note that his policies seem to be very popular in El Salvador, and other latin american countries are thinking about emulating them. Internal security appears to be much higher now than just a few years ago.
But even if you support extremely harsh and unlawful action against cartels, I would hope that most people see the decision to "rent out" space for foreign "criminals" as a dangerous slippery slope. The government there is now planning to build a similar type of facilities for white collar criminals alleged of corruption, which is a classic in the fascist playbook of wiping out internal opposition. [2]
What El Salvador did is not new.
But they will run into the same problem as every other SA dictatorship that is "tough on crime": the military will become the new cartel.
Did you miss the year of press cycles where this guy took El Salvador from one of the worst crime rates in the Western Hemisphere to one of the best by liberally arresting anyone he thought might be related to crime gangs?
From Wikipedia:
> During his presidency, Bukele enacted tough-on-crime policies that scholars have characterized as successfully reducing gang activity and violent crime at the cost of arbitrary arrest and alleged widespread human rights abuses.
Who, pray tell, publishes the Salvadorian crime rates? Dragnet arresting young men will reduce crime in any country, but that sure is worse than the disease because while that action of arresting innocents is not "illegal" from the regime's perspective, it should be. So "crime" has gone up, and perpetrated by the state against citizens.
I assume in this context "low crime" doesn't refer to shoplifting, but to gang violence, murders, kidnappings, and shootings. If you fear about your life daily, you will probably be more willing to accept extreme measures than someone living in a relative comfort and safety.
According to the voting population of El Salvador, yes.
If society has philosophically nice and clean set of rules that allow brutal gangs to terrorize the citizenry, just how worthwhile are those rules? Maybe the system needs a reboot before they can be worthwhile again.
At this point you have a better chance of being freed from this prison camp being a citizen of any other nation than the US which is sending people there without giving them a chance to prove that they are innocent or a citizen of the United States.
At least another nation will do whatever they can to get you home unlike the US that just doesn't care. "We made a mistake but we don't care. Nothing we can do." Truly abhorrent especially when the US can do so much to get someone if they really want.
In my country top lawyers every once in a while take an interesting case pro bono just because they enjoy having a duel with the State in the courtroom.
But I have been thinking about this. Ultimately our entire judicial system is all just words on paper. What happens when the government ignores a court order?
In the US the government is specifically retaliating against law offices that have done this in ways that Trump doesn't like and those offices are largely caving and offering millions of dollars of pro bono work to Trump.
Leadership within the Democratic party is saying that Trump ignoring court orders is not really a big deal until they ignore an order from the Supreme Court, as if rulings from district and circuit courts somehow don't actually have the force of law.
This already happened with TikTok. The congressional law had very specific terms for a 90day delay. Trump just signed another 75day extension after the last failed .
> Leadership within the Democratic party is saying that Trump ignoring court orders is not really a big deal until they ignore an order from the Supreme Court
If (and likely when) the administration ignores an order from the Supreme Court it's going to be too late.
I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like.
In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes.
In a world without law, the only restriction on what someone with a lot of money or power can do is what they can get away with. We flirted with this territory by subjecting the rich to a very different justice system than the poor, but we are now solidly in the territory of no limits to rich people's power so long as they don't threaten other rich people.
We are now in the realm of having to consider not what is allowed to be done, but what can be done. We can no longer ask what is legal to do, only what is possible to do. It is possible for several men to ambush a person, put them in a car, put them in chains, and send them to a black site without due process. That is a thing that can physically happen in reality. That is a thing that has happened in other countries. Locking political opponents in mental institutions is a thing that can happen. While it seems unlikely that it will happen here, "intellectuals," those with the capability of challenging those in power, have been rounded up and forced to dig their own graves. Babies have been smashed against trees. That is a thing that has happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge at the killing fields. That is a thing that is possible to happen. Forced labor camps are a thing that can and has happened. Mass famine as a result of disastrous government policy is a thing that can and has happened. Extermination of humans based on genetic traits is a thing that can happen.
There is no magical power that prevents these things from happening. These things happen because people make decisions to act or not act. Individuals choose to passively let bad things happen rather than put themselves at risk to say no.
Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?
The constitution is just a piece of paper. Law is just an idea. For it to have any effect on physical reality, it requires someone to take actions on its behalf. Nothing on a piece of paper forces a president to follow a law. Human beings who believe in something enforce, or don't enforce, the law.
What kind of person will you be if the unthinkable starts happening?
I think there is a decent argument that some of the nihilism we see in the population comes from seeing a general unwillingness to jail or proportionately punish wealthy criminals. As we have heard for a long time, if the bill for breaking the law is too small it is just a fee and if you steal from enough people it becomes a statistic.
I'm not optimistic about this. I think removing due process to allow for exporting people without any rights is a terrible idea. The writers of the declaration of independence specifically named these.
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
I would go so far as to say that white collar crime is the root of all evil in our society. Every violent criminal, every death of despair, it all can be tied directly to white collar crime.
White collar crime and the lax punishment of it allows individuals to accrue resources that allow them to lobby the government to change laws or bribe law enforcement to not enforce laws against them which allows to accrue even more resources and a feedback loop forms.
This sucks resources away from the system that could be used to enforce other laws against violent crime or even better prevent violent crime nearly entirely through properly funded social programs that stop people from growing up in the terrible conditions that lead to most violent crime in the first place.
If we took white collar crime as seriously as street crime, we’d see a ripple effect. Funds recovered from fraud and tax evasion could go to schools, healthcare, addiction treatment, and housing. Instead, we live under a system where accountability is only for the poor.
A simple and effective way to begin to mitigate white collar crime would be to scale all fines as a proportion of an individuals net worth. This, combined with a rapid escalation of the fine for re-offenders within a period of time (say 3-5 years) would at least begin to chip away at the ill-gotten gains of some criminals.
But I too am not optimistic about where this is all going. I have a terrible in the pit of my stomach that a lot of people are about to die because of the snow ball effect of unchecked corruption in America, and at this point I don't think there's anything that can stop it.
I just hope that there's enough left over to rebuild a more resilient system and that the world can oppose the authoritarians like China that will attempt to fill the power vacuum.
I think we might also find that who is rich and powerful can easily get flipped upside down over night. Being rich is not actually all that hard when law enforcement exists to uphold private property rights. But without rule of law, everything is quite literally up for grabs and might will make right. I hope our business leaders are mulling this fact over and considering whether they have either the force of personality or the physical strength to keep what they currently have in a new regime.
The crushing of margins crushes the middle class before it crushes the rich, there is no point where the rich cannot afford private security. While they may end up less wealthy in absolute terms they’ll likely end up more wealthy in relative terms.
> Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?
Now you understand why the Black Panthers arose: the black community realized that it needed to arm itself to protect against the oppressive power of the state. It could be argued that modern infringements on the Second Amendment are largely a reaction of the government in response to a minority community resisting law enforcement tyranny.
I can't even count how many times I've read anti-2A arguments on HN...people laughed at the idea that people should need to arm themselves against their own government. Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.
> Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.
I still don't see how people are today using 2A to defend themselves against the redcaps.
When the state power turns malevolent but many of your neighbors are happy about it, your gun is not going to overthrow the regime (because those neighbors have guns, too).
I think this is really important - 2A is about being able to arm a militia and only has value when a vast majority of the people are willing to put their life on the line against the military. It isn't magically an antidote to authoritarianism and it's a deep negative if too many of your neighbors don't like the look of you and don't believe in rights or the rule of law.
The only thing I see is that having guns everywhere around does nothing to actually stop a country from descending into fascism. Thanks, I'll stay in my region, at least we have no school shootings or violent crime.
>The only thing I see is that having guns everywhere around does nothing to actually stop a country from descending into fascism.
The US is charting new ground here. Almost every other massively-oppressive state apparatus has prioritized restricting private firearms ownership early in their decent into tyranny for a reason.
> Thanks, I'll stay in my region, at least we have no school shootings or violent crime.
The rate of firearms ownership in the US has been on a slow decline for the past 40-50 years (not sure how accurate data is before 1970 or 1980), from roughly 45% to 30%. School shootings have skyrocketed in the past ~30 years, and were pretty rare before Columbine. The two don't appear to be correlated. How do you reconcile this? I suspect that other societal factors are more salient causes.....perhaps the explosion in single-mother parenthood (something like 40% of all families now), combined with the known impacts on poor juvenile behavior in young boys and the explosion in "attention culture" courtesy of social media are the major factors in emotionally unstable teens gunning down their peers?
That said....I live in a country with almost no firearms and also have the peace of mind that nobody is gonna shoot my children. But I'm also in a homogeneous society that has almost no concern or risk level for their government turning tyrannical.
I derive substantial portions of my wealth-building from the military-industrial complex, while living outside of the US insulates me, and my children, from the worst of both America's fractured society AND from the authoritarian overreach that typically disproportionately affects minorities such as myself.
For my family unit, the path through all this chaos of imperial decline involves building up sustainable property ownership and revenue streams in Asia and Africa while winding down our US footprint to a minimum (real estate, social security/military pension/VA benefits).
For me to engage in an insurgency, the government would need to seize our US home, and/or cancel our benefits. Even then I'd need to work out some cost-benefit analysis to determine whether I could maximize my children's wealth by either a) continuing to build wealth outside the US or b) fighting to gain restitution via the new revolutionary government.
I think if you inspect your answer you’ll see why guns are not what is required for overthrowing a government. Citizens willing to risk their lives, property and liberty is the main requirement, usually because the current situation is so intolerable to them.
Most overthrows result from the population refusing to cooperate, going to the seat of power en masse and forcing a change. Guns would be counterproductive in that process and would justify brutal reprisals. An unarmed civilian crowd is far more persuasive for wavering troops ordered to fire on it.
In addition, most armed rebellions bring out the worst characters as leaders and lead to dictatorship.
> I think if you inspect your answer you’ll see why guns are not what is required for overthrowing a government. Citizens willing to risk their lives, property and liberty is the main requirement, usually because the current situation is so intolerable to them.
I don't disagree with that. People have to be invested in the cause first. Weapons are just tools there to both 1) discourage the powerful from attempting tyranny 2) ensure the people at least have access to the final arbiter of power: violence.
> Most overthrows result from the population refusing to cooperate
It would be interesting to see the data on this. Peaceful protests didn't work in Syria or Myanmar, for example. Eventual armed rebellion succeeded in Syria...but still hasn't succeeded in Myanmar despite decades of conflict. Peaceful protests in China got rolled over by tanks in the 1980s (Tianamen). The Arab Spring was shut down pretty fiercely in Bahrain despite being unarmed, but I'm not that familiar with the details.
> going to the seat of power en masse and forcing a change. Guns would be counterproductive in that process
You go to the seat of power, you kill or overpower the security forces, then you take the people inside who think they can oppress you, drag them out into the street, and shoot them. Show trials are optional but recommended. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_execution_of_Nicolae... )
> In addition, most armed rebellions bring out the worst characters as leaders and lead to dictatorship.
"The blade itself incites to deeds of violence." (great book series BTW) In all likelihood the US got really lucky with George Washington and that colors our national mythology, and by extension our perspective on armed rebellion. Because of course a military officer who breaks laws and uses violence against his government will be magnanimous, and not turn into a vicious and brutal druglord ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Guzm%C3%A1n_Decena ).
It is the unholy union of a new unregulated form of communication, social media, and unregulated privatized intelligence companies, such as Palantir and Cambrdige Analytica.
Ironically China implemented the GFW because they correctly predicted this exact scenario being used to destabilize themselves.
You can't subject people who were illiterate subsistence farmers who never left their home town 50 years ago to highly processed foreign propaganda and expect good outcomes.
Funnily this (only its local not foreign propaganda) is kind of what's happening in India. The BJP (party in power) is leaning very heavily on propaganda towards the uneducated masses to boost their image.
The problem with Americans is that they believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires. In its original context we find this a funny if depressing cliche but when applied to our current context I think it explains in a very dark way why no one does anything and collective defense never forms.
That's too simple and unsympathetic which only serves to divide. They don't literally see themselves that way. That's a liberal pejorative of their belief system.
There is (or was) a strong culture of self reliance, which is born out of a concept of freedom being focused around "freedom from" rather than "freedom to."
They see a billionaire's freedom being taken away and worry that if it can happen to someone that powerful, then it can happen to them to. A billionaire being muzzled is a clear statement that there is a power strong enough that everyone must bend to it. Which is a cogent and rational assessment.
What they don't see so easily is that if they don't have money or have to work 2 jobs to support their life, they aren't free. They can't afford to do things, that's not freedom. If they are confined to a bed because they are too poor to afford healthcare, they are not free. Those same billionaires are hoarding wealth and materially damaging people's "freedom to" by paying them the absolute minimum possible. Those same billionaires would enslave them if they could. "Freedom to" is born out of restricting the most rich and powerful.
Unfortunately, the rich and powerful can pay for entire industries that exist to manufacture consent. So they are able to pay for scary content that gets people to focus on other people being dis-empowered, rather than getting them thinking about how to empower themselves.
“Assumed it was settled law”, despite RBG herself at the time saying what amounted to “this is a flimsy interpretation that will likely be overturned, but we’re going to make it anyway and the government should codify it into law rather than relying on us legislating from the bench”.
Spoiler: No democratic president/congress ever bothered to, and it was rightfully (in a legal, not moral sense) overturned just as she predicted.
Please show me when there were 60 senators who would support this. Oh that's right at no point did that exist. Obama barely had 60 for Obamacare and that includes multiple people who would never vote for abortion. So your spoiler is quite divorced from reality
Even if there ever was a coalition of 60 pro-choice senators, it wouldn't matter. Federal abortion protections would need to be passed under the commerce clause and would obviously be challenged and struck down by the 6-3 court. Even EMTALA, which ties federal funding for hospitals to a requirement that hospitals provide abortion care for pregnant people when a pregnancy is a serious threat to their health, is being challenged in court (and successfully blocked in the 5th circuit). The challenge would be even easier for the right if there's no connection to serious threats to the health of the pregnant woman.
All of these "you should have ignored the courts and focused on legislation" arguments aren't based in a lick of reality.
RBG had more power than almost anybody else on the planet to protect Roe by retiring when the dems had the ability to confirm a replacement. She chose not to. Frankly, I don't think she's the best source of wisdom for practical politicking around protecting abortion rights.
Do you really think that federal abortion protections would stand up to this court? They aren't even able to stand behind EMTALA protecting abortions when it is essential for the health of the pregnant woman. There is absolutely no way that federal legislation protecting abortion up to viability would resist conservative challenge in the courts given the supreme court's current makeup.
The fact a Secretary of Defense (second in command of the US military) and a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (highest ranking officer and principle military advisor) have both said he is unfit and doesn't care about the law.
Jim Mattis, a Secretary of Defense, in a letter titled "I cannot remain silent":
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us... We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership... We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.” [1]
Mark Milley, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spent his final days in his position making sure that the military understood that they took an oath to the constitution before president. Mark Milley in his retirement speech said:
No party has had 60 or more votes in the Senate for many many years. Which means nothing can pass under the goals of one party. The game is that one party says the measure being presented is unnecessary and redundant and doesnt vote in favor of that law. Rinse, repeat.
But yes, the culpability is ultimately on Congress.
The filibuster rule is determined by the senate itself, and could have been neutered at any point. The gridlock is a conscious choice of the senate majority.
>I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like.
Maybe not many people in the US have, but people in CCP China are plenty familiar. That is an example of "rule of the people" instead of "rule of law". Remember the melanmine milk scandal? Barely a slap on the wrist for Sanlu (the vendor). Or, did anything happen after the child molestation incident at a Beijing kindergarten?
Where do you get your news from? I cross-checked your comment with Wikipedia. In the Sanlu case, the executives were sent to jail, and they were ordered to destroy their stock because Sanlu was on the brink of bankruptcy. Life imprisonment and the death penalty don’t exactly sound like a slap on the wrist to me.
The school molestation cases began as rumors from two parents, but real abuse was found and the teachers were jailed. The CCP launched a nationwide kindergarten audit—seems like a fair response, especially with so much fake news online.
I am personally conflicted about this because on the one hand it'd be great if everyone could have a whole bunch of legal process and we could be super sure that we're only getting rid of people that shouldn't be here, but on the other hand biden imported millions of third worlders with no vetting through a combination of lack of border enforcement and wide ranging refugee and amnesty efforts. Now that we're enforcing immigration laws again, how can we give every illegal immigrant a trial? Perhaps the blame lies with the people who created this situation in the first place. This seems a lot like hamas putting their bomb factories under schools and then crying when the IDF bombs them. If you believe immigration laws should be enforced, what else can you do?
Citizenship is not some indelible mark on your person. It is likely at best some ink on a piece of paper or line in a database that can be lost, stolen, "forgotten", or denied.
Imagine that I were a police officer, I asked for your papers, and then immediately burnt them. How are you going to prove you are a citizen? What if I accused you of faking those documents? What is your recourse? How are you going to prove your citizenship? Are you going to go to the judge that was appointed by the person in power to plead your case? I already think you faked your documents, why should I let you have due process, I already know you are guilty.
Once you take away the structure of law these ideas that you think give you power, like citizenship, are just power on paper. The only real power you have is your friends and family getting upset and going to a journalist to plead your case to the court of public opinion, but maybe those journalists are employed by a billionaire, too, or they are scared they will fall out a window if they question the governments actions.
You are trusting someone who says if you give them power, they will solve your problems. But what if they don't, what if they start causing you problems? Who takes that power away once they already have it or have consolidated it with loyalists?
> Imagine that I were a police officer, I asked for your papers, and then immediately burnt them.
This isn't hypothetical, either. I know several US citizens whose documents are being confiscated and destroyed, because the current US regime has decided they're fraudulent. (One person had their passport printed, and then immediately destroyed.)
"The situation is bad so all rights can just be completely eliminated" is not actually a tenable position. "We had to do a fascism because of Biden" is not real. It is a choice. One that you need to own.
If the rule is "people we claim are illegal immigrants can be sent to a Salvadoran gulag for the rest of their lives without process and even if we admit we made a mistake with somebody we cannot bring them back" then this means that literally anybody can be sent there. The government just picks me up off the street, claims that I'm an illegal immigrant even though I am a citizen, puts me a on a plane, and then no law or court can save me from spending the rest of my life in hell.
> biden imported millions of third worlders with no vetting through a combination of lack of border enforcement and wide ranging refugee and amnesty efforts.
Everyone who told you those mistruths was lying to you hoping against you’d vote against your interests. Biden not only enforced immigration laws, he was doing so at a higher rate.
This is pretty sad as a headline. It's not a warning, it is business as usual.
Civil asset forfeiture started expanding in the 1970s and in the next decade, we got Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Gitmo? 2002. Room 641A is the next year. Black ops sites, aka "we can torture you as long as we're not in the United States" is somewhere around there. Extrajudicial killings, I read 2,400 in just Pakistan, that's Obama-era, right? Stingrays, about 2007 or so. Qualified immunity out the yin-yang; hell, you can just shoot up someone's house for nearly a day trying to capture a shoplifter and the courts will shrug. That's 2015. Even the ACLU has become notably more partisan.
Decades ago, back when I thought people were capable of learning from anything other than a hot stovetop, I used to say that we ought to be careful when making manacles to restrict various liberties and cautious when providing more tools for law enforcement, because you just do not know for a certainty that the manacles you made will not be around your own wrists and that the latest tools of the law will not be aimed at you. "Pretend you will eventually be on the losing side," I said.
We've been going along with this business because it was convenient to believe that these little inches taken will not add up to miles. This will only be used on drug peddlers, pedophiles, terrorists, and money launderers, WINK WINK. We have been building this machine for a long time, and we've been smug as a bug on a landline with a FISA rubberstamp warrant.
Why this headline, now? And also, why this headline, now? Now and this because the people who were very comfortable are finally cottoning on to the fact that the various abilities tacked on to the Executive Branch over the decades might actually be used against them (us? ME? but I am one of the good guys, I only helped construct the machine!) and, while fearful, are still unwilling to engage with their own multi-decade culpability, so they must focus on the latest outrage and nothing before it. To do otherwise would suggest that they have some kind of involvement in this particular outcome and just making noises like "Trump," "Musk," and "fascism" keeps their metaphorical hands clean.
At this point, when I mention this kind of thing online, it's less from a desire to sway opinion (almost no chance of that occurring) and more of an opportunity for me, years down the line, to point and say, "Yup. Called it."
There will always be cynicism, quietism, fear, injustice.
Yet it is possible for people to come together and change the world for the better. This has happened many times before, on a global scale: the spread of democracy, abolition of slavery, decolonization.
Lately I’ve been thinking of this as an existential question. We are thrust into this life, into an unjust world. Each of us chooses how to face it.
I remember an account of a mass execution of some villagers by Nazis in Eastern Europe. I imagine being one of these people facing that time in history, with what feels like too little power.
I believe the best way to face such a thing, if a person can muster it, is courage.
Far... far... worse. The Rwanda exile program at least had some concept of due process in both the UK and Rwanda. The Rwanada exile program was at least stopped when the courts told it to instead of trying to remain secret long enough to avoid the courts having a chance to forbid it, and then outright ignoring the court orders forbidding it when that failed.
Here the program is "ICE picks you up off the street, without telling anybody. Writes in some internal document that you're a foreign national member of a gang, without telling anybody or giving you a chance to challenge that. Ships you off to El Salvador's concentration camp, without telling anybody". To this date even the lawyers challenging the program don't actually know the name of everyone who was shipped to El Salvador.
Maybe somebody finds out, by looking at ICE publicity photos that you happen to be in the background of, maybe not. Maybe you are a member of the gang, maybe you're a US citizen whose never even heard of the gang. Doesn't matter, there was no chance to challenge ICEs decision. You weren't even informed of the decision, you were just put on a plane without being told why. And once you're there, even if somebody figures out that's where you are and challenges the decision on your behalf, the US has no authority to bring you back.
There you get arrested for being a Nazi. In America you get disappeared for not being one. There was a bit of excitement in the 1940s that gives us moral guidance on what to do when Nazis rear their heads.
If the U.S. killed and imprisoned people at the rate of El Salvador, without due process and essentially at the word of mouth of random people in the community, you’d be running to the hills. Crazy that this far into Trumps disaster and people still want right wing fascist dictatorship. You might get what you want, god help us all.
Police in El Salvador start each day with a quota of people to round up and imprison without trial. If they don't meet the quota, they don't get to go home to their families.
I suspect that people like you require the personal experience of having a loved one black-bagged in the middle of the night without recourse to understand OP's position. Every authoritarian regime ever uses the same logic to build up their police state: "for the greater good".
The US has 2.5x the incarceration rate of China, and 1.8x the incarceration rate of Russia. How's that for "authoritarian regime"? Or is this "different" somehow?
While the incarceration rate of the US is atrocious, the prisoners (for the most part) have access to the legal/judicial system and are covered by things like habeas corpus, right to a speedy trial, right to counsel, visitation rights, etc.
Also, for the most part, prisons in the US don’t practice torture and political reprogramming. Nor are there concentration camps with indefinite detention save for a handful of black sites like Guantanamo.
People have gotten years-long prison sentences (which are de facto death sentences with regularity) in Russia for donating a few bucks to Ukraine or speaking out against the war. Nothing comparable happens in the US (for now).
Democracy tends to require a revolution to break free from those authoritarian regimes, to say nothing of thousands (or millions) of deaths along the way. And we're still waiting for Russia, China, Cuba, etc. to reveal their glorious democratic forms. (By your logic, communism must be one of humanity's greatest achievements since it elevated a number of feudal countries to superpower status. Nevermind the millions of dead in famines, gulags, genocides, etc. But hey, at least crime rates were low!)
Many countries transitioned to democracy without a major revolution. And even when they did, virtually all reused the same state infrastructure that was established during the monarchy.
Communism was a failure because it was incompetent. But the authoritarian-capitalist government China has had since the late 1980s was nothing short of a miracle.
In the 1970s, China was as poor per capita as Bangladesh. Today, Bangladesh is still a deeply impoverished country, while China is an advanced middle income economy.
Soviet Russia under its most authoritarian leader rapidly industrialized, defeated Nazi Germany, developed nuclear weapons, dramatically raised the levels of literacy and education across the entire population, and became a global superpower. That sounds like a smashing success to me.
The homicide rate in El Salvador has dropped from 100 per 100,000 to 2.5 per 100,000 in just a decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-.... The El Salvadoran government has literally brought the country to an entirely different level of development, vastly improving the lives of most of the country’s 6 million people. Disorder and dysfunction doesn’t just hurt those who are killed. It’s a tax on the whole country, on the economy, and on kids’ futures. It’s system that beats down builders and cultivators and makes them subservient to the sociopaths.
As someone from a dysfunctional third-world country, the revolution in El Salvador gives me hope that change is actually possible in some of these places. It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country. Your ancestors did the hard things (England punished all felonies by death for centuries) so you have forgotten how your lives became so comfortable in the first place.
Writing from a country with dysfunctional judiciary, I think this is a logical way to overcome crime, at least temporarily. There isn't a "hygienic" alternative when judges are continuously bribed or blackmailed by gang members.
"Neri Alvarado Borges was told by ICE officers that he was arrested in February for his tattoos — one of which is a rainbow-colored autism awareness ribbon with the name of his brother, who is autistic."
"The Trump administration admitted in court documents that 'many' of those sent to El Salvador did not have criminal records. As more information about those deported was unearthed, it became clear that some of the 'evidence' against them was as absurd as a tattoo of a Real Madrid CF logo, or an autism awareness tattoo."
"These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, 'I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.'"
No, they are not violent criminals. The authorities don't even bother to check.
"There is zero probability that a normal innocent US citizen will be sent there."
I'm 99% sure that we'll start seeing US citizens sent there in the coming months for crimes as basic as vandalism of Trump or Tesla properties.
Those quotes are from three different sources. Which of those would you consider “bullshit” and why?
If the Tesla vandals deserve to be in a lunatic asylum or charged with hate speech, fine. Go through the legal process to prove it in court. But to suggest that they deserve to be sent to a foreign black site for a lifetime of torture is simply unhuman.
Yes this was the case for Venezuela, they started taking flights again when the El Salvador news came out.
Refusing to repatriate citizens was part of the argument the Trump admin used to justify use of the Alien Enemies act.
If this holds up in court the strategy going forward is pretty obvious. Any country that refuses to repatriate criminals will get hit with the AEA. This will be very politically painful for any country as they rely heavily on remittances from undocumented immigrants in the US, and will quickly fold.
> England punished all felonies by death for centuries
No.
For less than a century, during peak "Bloody Code" almost all felonies specified a death sentence .. that doesn't in any way mean that all felonies were punished by death.
A large number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century statutes specified death as the penalty for property offences (even minor ones), meaning that the vast majority of the people tried at the Old Bailey could be sentenced to hang.
This body of statutes, which later came to be criticised as a “Bloody Code”, meant that one could be executed for stealing as little as a handkerchief or a sheep. Nevertheless, judicial procedures prevented a blood bath by ensuring that sentences could be mitigated, or the charge redefined as a less serious offence.
[..]
As a result, as documented on the Digital Panopticon website, between 1780 and 1868 less than a fifth of convicts sentenced to death were actually executed.
Interesting, thank you for that clarification. It looks like execution rates were as high as 30 per 100,000 in 1600, dropping to under 5 per 100,000 by 1700: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5955207/
So easily you gloss over millions of Americans who fought to end slavery, who fought for women's right to vote, who fought for desegregation, who fought for labor rights,... The "comfortable life" in America isn't a 300 year old gift of extra judicial killings - it's a continued culture across 10 generations of individuals and communities fighting for ever fairer freedoms under a shared rule of law.
You’re retconning history from a mid-20th century civil rights lens. That lens focuses on increasing access to a civilizational order that has already been built. Its about expanding access to what white males already had. But it’s an inadequate lens for understanding how that order was built in the first place.
The hard part is getting “from 0 to 1.” You need a state, the state needs to impose order and gain control over warlords, you need law and civil institutions, you need a government that is controlled by more than a handful of people, etc.
England or New England in 1800 was already a more developed society than Bangladesh or Somalia or Iraq in 2024, even though slavery still existed and suffrage wasn’t universal. Just getting to that point would be transformational for much of asia, the middle east, and africa.
This is why nation building in the 20th and early 21st century has failed so spectacularly. You can go into Iraq and create a nice constitution with rights and universal suffrage and religious freedom, but you’re just redistributing 0. The “rights lens” doesn’t actually tell you how to get Iraq in 2024 to the point where England was in 1800.
Perhaps we agree that sustaining fair societies is a continual march of institutional and cultural building - not something imposed by a document or stamped by 1800's England. I would never argue that US-Iraq style nation building would succeed, for example. In fact, it is a counter example of violence being sufficient to get from 0 to 1. The US applied extreme violence over a population and failed to establish a persistent democratic order. The basis of civilization, as I read history, is more a consequence of surplus than violence.
I see, in the chaos of Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, as examples, the results of institutions and cultures effectively destroyed by outside violence, in many cases regressing from 1 to 0.
Thank you for sharing your point of view - certainly thought provoking for me.
If you can put any person 12 years and up in jail without a trial, and you don't care about accidentally hurting innocent ones I'm surprised it is 2.5 per 100,000 and not 0 per 100,000.
El Salvador currently has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and its president now is serving second term which is not allowed by their constitution.
It is indeed rather easy to reduce homicide rates through mass violation of rights. We'd have much less crime if the government just shot every male under the age of 30 whose income is lower than some threshold. But that wouldn't exactly be a good system.
So they "solved" gangs and installed a ruthless and illegal dictatorship in their place — which may in fact be secretly conspiring with those same gangs behind the scenes.
I feel sorry for El Salvador. It may now have to experience several generations of Soviet-style repression and suffering before a new regime is able to overthrow the current one. Meanwhile, thousands of families will never get to find out what happened to their loved ones in those horrifying concentration camps.
FYI, many of our (Americans') ancestors fled their home countries precisely to escape this sort of state-enacted brutality.
You have no idea what my origins are. And I'm not sure why you're so furiously and emotionally defending this dictator all over this thread. I wonder if you've even read the article? Maybe take a few minutes and see if it changes how you feel.
I’m defending him because I’m realizing how deeply third world countries are suffering from the influence of empathetic individualists like you having so much power in the western world.
>It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country.
Or, you could just acknowledge that it is inherently inhumane, despite the improvements it's making for your country. Of course authoritarian measures bring results and of course in a country like El Salvador, in it's previous state, they might even be warranted - but it is still inhumane. Inhumanity sometimes has to be fought with inhumanity, Americans of all people should acknowledge that. If you want to argue that it is not inhumane, however, then you are wrong. Imprisonment without due process is inherently inhumane.
How do you know that the "overwhelming majority" are "bad people who prey on others" without a functional judicial system to prove it?
As the number of incarcerated grows from 2% to 5% to consolidate Bukele's power, what recourse will anyone have outside the party elite?
The pattern of strongman politicians, indefinite emergency measures, and erosion of liberties to manifest full bore dictatorship has repeated over and over and over again in the 20th and 21st centuries — and you still can't see it happening? You may enjoy it now, but consider this the honeymoon phase: it only gets worse from here on out.
If there are 10,000 murderers out there and you lock up most of them along with 20,000 innocent people, you get the same result. (Bonus points if you happen to snag some annoying journalists, activists, and civil rights leaders in your dragnet, since they can push back on your power play and cast doubt on your stats.)
But you can just read the article if you don't believe me: "While polling consistently shows that Bukele is quite popular in El Salvador, surveys also show a steady increase in fear of public criticism of the government — to degrees that sometimes match the president’s approval rating. 'There’s a sector of the population that feels better, because it’s true that we perceive more security, we’re no longer afraid of the gangs. Now we’re afraid of the regime,' says Ramirez. 'We see soldiers everywhere, police everywhere, patrol cars, and they’re arresting people.'"
So if they lock up, torture (you are a gang member as you looked weird at your neighbour of 20 years who happens to be a friend of a the local police chief) and kill you and your family without any due process that's fine for the greater good? Don't think many people have that idea, probably nor do you; you just think so as it didn't happen to you yet. The overwhelming majority as you say does a lot here; where is the proof and process that it is the overwhelming majority? And that these people are not just people like you and your kids but who do not agree with the regime? According to the process/system, all people in Cambodia were guilty as well. You cannot have read any history and talk like this so I guess you never have.
It will get worse anyway; that 2% will rise and that gov will never go away, killing everyone who opposes them. History shows this every time.
It’s worth a debate, even though in American culture we hold this idea as beyond any consideration.
Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". That's a noble thought, but those 100 criminals can cause suffering of 100s of others. So his assessment isn't necessarily accurate. Every innocent father jailed in El Salvador might save 10 children from losing their own father.
You can use a proper system to do that though to minimise the risk of jailing innocent people. It's all easy talking until you get locked up in an animal case without recourse until you die. Ask those innocent ones how they like taking one for the team.
Note that Franklin was the product of a society that had been executing felons for hundreds of years. The homicide rate in both England and New England in the early 1700s was around 2 per 100,000, lower than any western hemisphere country today.
If the population grew from 100k in 1700 to 300k in 1750, and if the homicide rate was right around 2 per 100k, then that would mean that the total number of homicides in New England, over the 50 years span was less than 300.
Do you really believe that fewer than 300 murders occurred during this time?
The FBI maintains murder statistics for most policing jurisdictions in the US. Many of them are under 2 per 100,000 per year: Sunnyvale, CA; Hercules, CA; Novato, CA, Brookline, MA; the Twin Cities. The rate in Beverly, MA, is 0.946.
Ah YOU are the designated speaker for the disenfranchised while all other Americans don't have the emotional intelligence/historical background needed to possibly understand. You think way too highly of yourself and your wizened worldliness and too poorly of others. You should try stopping pontificating on your inherently superior wisdom and more time conversing/engaging with others.
“The lack of criminal records does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with Tren de Aragua, the lack of specific information about each specific individual actually highlights the risk they pose,
The argument is basically that because the deportees had no due process to be deported that no due process can bring them back. The Trump administration claims that they are gang members, but provided no evidence to support this claim, and then refused to work with any members of the judicial system attempting to provide oversight. In any other administration this would be a scandal that rocks the media for months and ends with the resignation of several top officials. For the Trump administration it was Tuesday.
yeah well on thursday he shit the bed on the economy so i guess we've moved on. stupid tariffs are one thing but the extrajudicial deportation and imprisonment is quite a worse thing if unchecked.
They’re still in court. The judge today set a deadline of April 7 for the specific guy “accidentally” deported to return to the US, and seems like there may even be people held in contempt of court (can’t tell how much that’s wishful thinking on my part).
Comfortably wealthy US citizens aren't personally affected by these extrajudicial disappearances. It's just a headline to them. The stock market, on the other hand...
So essentially - ‘They are super dangerous because we have no evidence they are dangerous, which provides they are the most dangerous threat - the one that we can’t prove exists’
"We don't have any evidence, but we just know they are bad people. Because ... reasons ... that we don't have to share with silly plebians like you."
Perhaps this sounds familiar ...
"While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205." -- Senator Joseph McCarthy
The powers under the Act don't specify a standard of proof required. It just says:
>all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies. The President is authorized in any such event, by his proclamation thereof, or other public act, to direct the conduct to be observed on the part of the United States, toward the aliens who become so liable; the manner and degree of the restraint to which they shall be subject and in what cases, and upon what security their residence shall be permitted, and to provide for the removal of those who, not being permitted to reside within the United States, refuse or neglect to depart therefrom; and to establish any other regulations which are found necessary in the premises and for the public safety.
Nothing there about the President needing to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt. Presumably he would need to prove the particular facts, in habeus corpus proceedings, should they be brought, only on the balance of probabilities?
> Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event
In other words, they are so afraid to publicly vote on whether this “war” should continue that they have to play stupid games with the legislative calendar.
There is clear legislative intent to limit when the president could apply the law. You're suggesting limitations set by congress are meaningless, so long as the president's staff can form some sort of argument by stretching the facts enough.
A quotation from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, if reports are to be believed; but you should really link to a specific source, e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy73gqq64do. (LMGTFY is the most annoying form of link rot.)
It’s unbelievable that anyone is bothering to argue with their pathetic “it’s another country nyah nyah nyah” stance. The correct response is that ok, everyone involved in getting that plane off the ground and everyone involved in sending money to El Salvador to pay for this program is in contempt of court until the whole plane load returns to the US. The court doesn’t need jurisdiction in El Salvador.
I am not sure if you have seen that there's a flagging war going on on HN lately. The commenter probably didn't link on purpose to prevent that.
Just saying that we need a more neutral medium for the HN crowd if that kind of discussions afen't allowed. Turning a blind eye to what's going on is what got us into this mess.
Linking – or better still, quoting – makes me more comfortable vouching for comments. (I vouched here, because the discussion below the comment is worthwhile, but the comment itself is practically unreadable.)
Heh, even the extrajudicial imprisonment camps can be outsourced now. Why look bad having your military run Guantanamo when you can do the Uber model it for a cheap price.
Heh, or is a pun on AirBnB the more apt name for it.. "Concrete Floor & Indefinite Detention"?
Reminds me more of the Amazon Delivery Partner model where the way you want to do something implies harming innocent people, so you have a third-party do it to shift blame for the deaths.
Suffering as a Service
Not to minimize what's going on down there, but that also sounds like an apt backronym for other SaaS products I've tried.
It's more efficient because you introduce a middleman and ignore pesky regulations. Thank god we've discovered this important thing that's never existed in history and created so much wealth exploiting this very new technological dynamic.
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And what role do you think the us had in destabilizing their country and building violent drug rulings across the world from its regressive anti drug policy?
I remember a time when decreased murder rates was just a lie by the government. But we all know nobody's more trustworthy than the El Salvadorian regime, especially when it results in an influx of cash.
Wow really violent gangsters hurt people and are bad? Thanks for your insight!
That’s not relevant to this discussion at all.
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I bet you they subcontract them as slave labour to make a quick buck.
No doubt about it. Even in the U.S. we have a serious slavery problem. If you are incarcerated you do not have the same rights and most certainly can and will be made to labor if you want any hope of getting out.
"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
If we have indentured slaves in the U.S. then just imagine what they are doing at CECOT. Our judicial system is punitive. They would rather you working for 25 cents an hour cleaning vomit off hospital gowns then they would have you learning to read and write. Cash rules everything around them.
if that is a serious slavery problem , what is it thats libya having?
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I came across this article[1] the other day, after reading about the US sending people to a prison in El Salvador and wondering what we actually know about the place.
An incongruity that I didn't notice at the time but realized a bit later is that the prison is called "The Center for Terrorism Confinement" and it has a capacity of 40,000 people. Why would El Salvador or any country need a terrorist detention facility that holds 40,000 people?
According to wikipedia, El Salvador has a population of about 6 million.
The United States famously kept people accused of terrorism charges at Guantanamo Bay, and 780 prisoners have been kept there over the last couple decades since GWB established the prison. There are currently 15.
Presumably there are a lot more people who would fit the description "domestic terrorist" being held in jails in mainland US, but certainly not 40,000 of them.
Presumably president Bukele's administration is using it as a detention facility for regular criminals as well, but it wouldn't be surprising if there's a lot of people there that shouldn't be in jail in the first place.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/17/americas/el-salvador-prison-t...
The drug cartels are viewed as terroristic activity, so yes, there are a lot of terrorists in El salvador by that perspective. Shouldn't be too surprising when cartels commit outrageous acts like the Mejicanos massacre
Yeah anyone criticizing the mass incarceration in El Salvador as unjust should really familiarize themselves with the crimes of the gangs down there. The obliteration of a social scourge in a single presidency was nothing short of miraculous. That's why Bukele was re-elected at the highest levels in history - his people genuinely love him for it. The right to a fair trial is great in places that have law and order, but when you witness beheadings, mass executions, torture, etc. daily, you won't miss that right at all.
> you won't miss that right at all.
Until the day the goons break down your door and drag you away. Then you'll wish you had a fair trial. "It'll never happen to me if I keep may head down" will ensure no one will feel safe about publicly opposing the president on any issue.
Your dictator is not special, most of them concentrate their power by claiming to address an issue that's legitimately concerns a lot of citizens; Idi Amin expelled Asians under cover of addressing inequality.
That fails to understand how power in exceptional situations persists: namely that it still must be supported by key stakeholders.
If a leader were to summarily arrest large numbers of random citizens, suddenly they'd lose the support of citizens, one of the key pillars keeping them in power.
Which is why you see empowered and pervasive secret police institutions in societies like this -- you require a credible and effective alternative to popular support.
Exactly, this is analogous to "sensitivity/specificity" of a test, the test is if they can be trusted to live autonomously in society
- most sensitive: arrest everyone you suspect, lots of innocents locked up - trade-off : some innocents locked up - most specific: arrest only people you are 100% sure are criminals, lots of them get let off due to lack of evidence / inability to prove
You can frame it as a moral question, lock up 100% of criminals and 1 innocent person, or 0 innocent people and only 50% of criminals.
There is a separate, more subjective argument that knowingly locking up innocents is a slippery slope that will lead to a corrupt state.
From a pure ethics standpoint, this is "fruit from the poisoned tree" i.e. doing something unethical to achieve positive result, in this case, locking up an innocent to cause crime to plummet.
One thing is for sure, if he went back up for election and got in through strong popular support, the society replied and said they support living in such an environment. If more innocents are locked up maybe the feedback would change.
As someone who generally opposes Bukele on an ideological level, I'm not even that mad about the mass sweeps themselves. The way things were going before, it was obvious a drastic solution was needed.
It's the CECOT conditions and the boasting about cruel treatment that I'm unhappy about. At this point it's plain torture, and I believe it's wrong to torture people, even if those people are themselves torturers or worse.
I think anyone who is innocent but in jail probably misses the right to a fair trial.
Bukele, who calls himself "the coolest dictator in the world" [0], won his first election in 2019, and his second election in 2024 in landslides. El Salvador had the highest murder rate in the world and was basically dominated by brutal cartels. Bukeles solution to this was to use the military to round up everyone who is a suspected gang member. Note that this includes people who simply have too many tattoos or are young male who have relatives related to gangs. They built a mega-prison, aka concentration camp to contain these people, but it seems like it is significantly below capacity, estimated at 16k prisoners while being able to "house" up to 40k people. The conditions in the prison are aweful [1].
It is important to note that his policies seem to be very popular in El Salvador, and other latin american countries are thinking about emulating them. Internal security appears to be much higher now than just a few years ago.
But even if you support extremely harsh and unlawful action against cartels, I would hope that most people see the decision to "rent out" space for foreign "criminals" as a dangerous slippery slope. The government there is now planning to build a similar type of facilities for white collar criminals alleged of corruption, which is a classic in the fascist playbook of wiping out internal opposition. [2]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/26/naybib-bukele-...
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2025/03/17/americas/el-salvador-pris...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Confinement_Center#I...
What El Salvador did is not new. But they will run into the same problem as every other SA dictatorship that is "tough on crime": the military will become the new cartel.
Did you miss the year of press cycles where this guy took El Salvador from one of the worst crime rates in the Western Hemisphere to one of the best by liberally arresting anyone he thought might be related to crime gangs?
From Wikipedia:
> During his presidency, Bukele enacted tough-on-crime policies that scholars have characterized as successfully reducing gang activity and violent crime at the cost of arbitrary arrest and alleged widespread human rights abuses.
Who, pray tell, publishes the Salvadorian crime rates? Dragnet arresting young men will reduce crime in any country, but that sure is worse than the disease because while that action of arresting innocents is not "illegal" from the regime's perspective, it should be. So "crime" has gone up, and perpetrated by the state against citizens.
>So "crime" has gone up
Just not for regular folks that can walk around their city and not get mugged or shot
So having a low crime rate is more important than keeping innocent people out of jail?
I assume in this context "low crime" doesn't refer to shoplifting, but to gang violence, murders, kidnappings, and shootings. If you fear about your life daily, you will probably be more willing to accept extreme measures than someone living in a relative comfort and safety.
I would bet it depends on the rate of each happening to the average voter.
I didn’t say that, and I even clipped the relevant Wiki article which described the trade-off of law/liberty.
According to the voting population of El Salvador, yes.
If society has philosophically nice and clean set of rules that allow brutal gangs to terrorize the citizenry, just how worthwhile are those rules? Maybe the system needs a reboot before they can be worthwhile again.
Their definition of "terrorists" included drug gangs and such terrorizing people, not so much the political variety
At this point you have a better chance of being freed from this prison camp being a citizen of any other nation than the US which is sending people there without giving them a chance to prove that they are innocent or a citizen of the United States.
At least another nation will do whatever they can to get you home unlike the US that just doesn't care. "We made a mistake but we don't care. Nothing we can do." Truly abhorrent especially when the US can do so much to get someone if they really want.
In my country top lawyers every once in a while take an interesting case pro bono just because they enjoy having a duel with the State in the courtroom.
But I have been thinking about this. Ultimately our entire judicial system is all just words on paper. What happens when the government ignores a court order?
In the US the government is specifically retaliating against law offices that have done this in ways that Trump doesn't like and those offices are largely caving and offering millions of dollars of pro bono work to Trump.
Leadership within the Democratic party is saying that Trump ignoring court orders is not really a big deal until they ignore an order from the Supreme Court, as if rulings from district and circuit courts somehow don't actually have the force of law.
Spineless cowards, everywhere.
This already happened with TikTok. The congressional law had very specific terms for a 90day delay. Trump just signed another 75day extension after the last failed .
> Leadership within the Democratic party is saying that Trump ignoring court orders is not really a big deal until they ignore an order from the Supreme Court
If (and likely when) the administration ignores an order from the Supreme Court it's going to be too late.
I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like.
In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes.
In a world without law, the only restriction on what someone with a lot of money or power can do is what they can get away with. We flirted with this territory by subjecting the rich to a very different justice system than the poor, but we are now solidly in the territory of no limits to rich people's power so long as they don't threaten other rich people.
We are now in the realm of having to consider not what is allowed to be done, but what can be done. We can no longer ask what is legal to do, only what is possible to do. It is possible for several men to ambush a person, put them in a car, put them in chains, and send them to a black site without due process. That is a thing that can physically happen in reality. That is a thing that has happened in other countries. Locking political opponents in mental institutions is a thing that can happen. While it seems unlikely that it will happen here, "intellectuals," those with the capability of challenging those in power, have been rounded up and forced to dig their own graves. Babies have been smashed against trees. That is a thing that has happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge at the killing fields. That is a thing that is possible to happen. Forced labor camps are a thing that can and has happened. Mass famine as a result of disastrous government policy is a thing that can and has happened. Extermination of humans based on genetic traits is a thing that can happen.
There is no magical power that prevents these things from happening. These things happen because people make decisions to act or not act. Individuals choose to passively let bad things happen rather than put themselves at risk to say no.
Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?
The constitution is just a piece of paper. Law is just an idea. For it to have any effect on physical reality, it requires someone to take actions on its behalf. Nothing on a piece of paper forces a president to follow a law. Human beings who believe in something enforce, or don't enforce, the law.
What kind of person will you be if the unthinkable starts happening?
I think there is a decent argument that some of the nihilism we see in the population comes from seeing a general unwillingness to jail or proportionately punish wealthy criminals. As we have heard for a long time, if the bill for breaking the law is too small it is just a fee and if you steal from enough people it becomes a statistic.
I'm not optimistic about this. I think removing due process to allow for exporting people without any rights is a terrible idea. The writers of the declaration of independence specifically named these.
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:
I would go so far as to say that white collar crime is the root of all evil in our society. Every violent criminal, every death of despair, it all can be tied directly to white collar crime.
White collar crime and the lax punishment of it allows individuals to accrue resources that allow them to lobby the government to change laws or bribe law enforcement to not enforce laws against them which allows to accrue even more resources and a feedback loop forms.
This sucks resources away from the system that could be used to enforce other laws against violent crime or even better prevent violent crime nearly entirely through properly funded social programs that stop people from growing up in the terrible conditions that lead to most violent crime in the first place.
If we took white collar crime as seriously as street crime, we’d see a ripple effect. Funds recovered from fraud and tax evasion could go to schools, healthcare, addiction treatment, and housing. Instead, we live under a system where accountability is only for the poor.
A simple and effective way to begin to mitigate white collar crime would be to scale all fines as a proportion of an individuals net worth. This, combined with a rapid escalation of the fine for re-offenders within a period of time (say 3-5 years) would at least begin to chip away at the ill-gotten gains of some criminals.
But I too am not optimistic about where this is all going. I have a terrible in the pit of my stomach that a lot of people are about to die because of the snow ball effect of unchecked corruption in America, and at this point I don't think there's anything that can stop it.
I just hope that there's enough left over to rebuild a more resilient system and that the world can oppose the authoritarians like China that will attempt to fill the power vacuum.
I think we might also find that who is rich and powerful can easily get flipped upside down over night. Being rich is not actually all that hard when law enforcement exists to uphold private property rights. But without rule of law, everything is quite literally up for grabs and might will make right. I hope our business leaders are mulling this fact over and considering whether they have either the force of personality or the physical strength to keep what they currently have in a new regime.
> considering whether they have either the force of personality or the physical strength to keep what they currently have in a new regime.
They know the answer and that’s why they lined up like show ponies at the inauguration.
The crushing of margins crushes the middle class before it crushes the rich, there is no point where the rich cannot afford private security. While they may end up less wealthy in absolute terms they’ll likely end up more wealthy in relative terms.
> Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after?
Now you understand why the Black Panthers arose: the black community realized that it needed to arm itself to protect against the oppressive power of the state. It could be argued that modern infringements on the Second Amendment are largely a reaction of the government in response to a minority community resisting law enforcement tyranny.
I can't even count how many times I've read anti-2A arguments on HN...people laughed at the idea that people should need to arm themselves against their own government. Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.
> Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.
I still don't see how people are today using 2A to defend themselves against the redcaps.
When the state power turns malevolent but many of your neighbors are happy about it, your gun is not going to overthrow the regime (because those neighbors have guns, too).
I think this is really important - 2A is about being able to arm a militia and only has value when a vast majority of the people are willing to put their life on the line against the military. It isn't magically an antidote to authoritarianism and it's a deep negative if too many of your neighbors don't like the look of you and don't believe in rights or the rule of law.
The only thing I see is that having guns everywhere around does nothing to actually stop a country from descending into fascism. Thanks, I'll stay in my region, at least we have no school shootings or violent crime.
>The only thing I see is that having guns everywhere around does nothing to actually stop a country from descending into fascism.
The US is charting new ground here. Almost every other massively-oppressive state apparatus has prioritized restricting private firearms ownership early in their decent into tyranny for a reason.
> Thanks, I'll stay in my region, at least we have no school shootings or violent crime.
The rate of firearms ownership in the US has been on a slow decline for the past 40-50 years (not sure how accurate data is before 1970 or 1980), from roughly 45% to 30%. School shootings have skyrocketed in the past ~30 years, and were pretty rare before Columbine. The two don't appear to be correlated. How do you reconcile this? I suspect that other societal factors are more salient causes.....perhaps the explosion in single-mother parenthood (something like 40% of all families now), combined with the known impacts on poor juvenile behavior in young boys and the explosion in "attention culture" courtesy of social media are the major factors in emotionally unstable teens gunning down their peers?
That said....I live in a country with almost no firearms and also have the peace of mind that nobody is gonna shoot my children. But I'm also in a homogeneous society that has almost no concern or risk level for their government turning tyrannical.
Have you used your gun to overthrow the state?
Why not?
I derive substantial portions of my wealth-building from the military-industrial complex, while living outside of the US insulates me, and my children, from the worst of both America's fractured society AND from the authoritarian overreach that typically disproportionately affects minorities such as myself.
For my family unit, the path through all this chaos of imperial decline involves building up sustainable property ownership and revenue streams in Asia and Africa while winding down our US footprint to a minimum (real estate, social security/military pension/VA benefits).
For me to engage in an insurgency, the government would need to seize our US home, and/or cancel our benefits. Even then I'd need to work out some cost-benefit analysis to determine whether I could maximize my children's wealth by either a) continuing to build wealth outside the US or b) fighting to gain restitution via the new revolutionary government.
I think if you inspect your answer you’ll see why guns are not what is required for overthrowing a government. Citizens willing to risk their lives, property and liberty is the main requirement, usually because the current situation is so intolerable to them.
Most overthrows result from the population refusing to cooperate, going to the seat of power en masse and forcing a change. Guns would be counterproductive in that process and would justify brutal reprisals. An unarmed civilian crowd is far more persuasive for wavering troops ordered to fire on it.
In addition, most armed rebellions bring out the worst characters as leaders and lead to dictatorship.
> I think if you inspect your answer you’ll see why guns are not what is required for overthrowing a government. Citizens willing to risk their lives, property and liberty is the main requirement, usually because the current situation is so intolerable to them.
I don't disagree with that. People have to be invested in the cause first. Weapons are just tools there to both 1) discourage the powerful from attempting tyranny 2) ensure the people at least have access to the final arbiter of power: violence.
> Most overthrows result from the population refusing to cooperate
It would be interesting to see the data on this. Peaceful protests didn't work in Syria or Myanmar, for example. Eventual armed rebellion succeeded in Syria...but still hasn't succeeded in Myanmar despite decades of conflict. Peaceful protests in China got rolled over by tanks in the 1980s (Tianamen). The Arab Spring was shut down pretty fiercely in Bahrain despite being unarmed, but I'm not that familiar with the details.
> going to the seat of power en masse and forcing a change. Guns would be counterproductive in that process
You go to the seat of power, you kill or overpower the security forces, then you take the people inside who think they can oppress you, drag them out into the street, and shoot them. Show trials are optional but recommended. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_and_execution_of_Nicolae... )
> In addition, most armed rebellions bring out the worst characters as leaders and lead to dictatorship.
"The blade itself incites to deeds of violence." (great book series BTW) In all likelihood the US got really lucky with George Washington and that colors our national mythology, and by extension our perspective on armed rebellion. Because of course a military officer who breaks laws and uses violence against his government will be magnanimous, and not turn into a vicious and brutal druglord ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Guzm%C3%A1n_Decena ).
Thank you for the thoughtful response, it was a pleasure to read.
But that's not the whole playbook. Consider Luigi Mangione as one recent case study/implementation.
Americans, not content with learning from others' mistakes, will now be learning them first hand. The horrors are just beginning.
Historians, particularly ones who study fascism and Russia/Eastern Europe are already fleeing the country.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/the-fascism-expert-at-...
Fuck. That is a bleak assessment.
I would leave too, but I'd have to abandon a couple loved ones
The problem with leaving is that if everyone leaves, there is no where to run to.
Freedom requires solidarity, you cannot have freedom without solidarity.
Europe is also seeing far-right ideology spreading and taking over mainstream politics so this really isn’t an American problem only right now.
It is the unholy union of a new unregulated form of communication, social media, and unregulated privatized intelligence companies, such as Palantir and Cambrdige Analytica.
Ironically China implemented the GFW because they correctly predicted this exact scenario being used to destabilize themselves.
I don’t think that’s why the GFW exists but ok
You can't subject people who were illiterate subsistence farmers who never left their home town 50 years ago to highly processed foreign propaganda and expect good outcomes.
Funnily this (only its local not foreign propaganda) is kind of what's happening in India. The BJP (party in power) is leaning very heavily on propaganda towards the uneducated masses to boost their image.
You think wrong
The problem with Americans is that they believe themselves to be temporarily embarrassed millionaires. In its original context we find this a funny if depressing cliche but when applied to our current context I think it explains in a very dark way why no one does anything and collective defense never forms.
That's too simple and unsympathetic which only serves to divide. They don't literally see themselves that way. That's a liberal pejorative of their belief system.
There is (or was) a strong culture of self reliance, which is born out of a concept of freedom being focused around "freedom from" rather than "freedom to."
They see a billionaire's freedom being taken away and worry that if it can happen to someone that powerful, then it can happen to them to. A billionaire being muzzled is a clear statement that there is a power strong enough that everyone must bend to it. Which is a cogent and rational assessment.
What they don't see so easily is that if they don't have money or have to work 2 jobs to support their life, they aren't free. They can't afford to do things, that's not freedom. If they are confined to a bed because they are too poor to afford healthcare, they are not free. Those same billionaires are hoarding wealth and materially damaging people's "freedom to" by paying them the absolute minimum possible. Those same billionaires would enslave them if they could. "Freedom to" is born out of restricting the most rich and powerful.
Unfortunately, the rich and powerful can pay for entire industries that exist to manufacture consent. So they are able to pay for scary content that gets people to focus on other people being dis-empowered, rather than getting them thinking about how to empower themselves.
What are people proposing as the solutions? If you tax their wealth, they just move the wealth elsewhere, right?
Like they did between 1932 and 1981?
I remember reading comments like these before I was a millionaire.
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> so they could use it as an eternal campaign issue
clarification - its the republicans that used it as a campaign issue. the dems just assumed it was settled law
“Assumed it was settled law”, despite RBG herself at the time saying what amounted to “this is a flimsy interpretation that will likely be overturned, but we’re going to make it anyway and the government should codify it into law rather than relying on us legislating from the bench”.
Spoiler: No democratic president/congress ever bothered to, and it was rightfully (in a legal, not moral sense) overturned just as she predicted.
Please show me when there were 60 senators who would support this. Oh that's right at no point did that exist. Obama barely had 60 for Obamacare and that includes multiple people who would never vote for abortion. So your spoiler is quite divorced from reality
Even if there ever was a coalition of 60 pro-choice senators, it wouldn't matter. Federal abortion protections would need to be passed under the commerce clause and would obviously be challenged and struck down by the 6-3 court. Even EMTALA, which ties federal funding for hospitals to a requirement that hospitals provide abortion care for pregnant people when a pregnancy is a serious threat to their health, is being challenged in court (and successfully blocked in the 5th circuit). The challenge would be even easier for the right if there's no connection to serious threats to the health of the pregnant woman.
All of these "you should have ignored the courts and focused on legislation" arguments aren't based in a lick of reality.
RBG had more power than almost anybody else on the planet to protect Roe by retiring when the dems had the ability to confirm a replacement. She chose not to. Frankly, I don't think she's the best source of wisdom for practical politicking around protecting abortion rights.
Do you really think that federal abortion protections would stand up to this court? They aren't even able to stand behind EMTALA protecting abortions when it is essential for the health of the pregnant woman. There is absolutely no way that federal legislation protecting abortion up to viability would resist conservative challenge in the courts given the supreme court's current makeup.
> What makes you think anyone is operating other than according to law?
The fact that they are not complying with the law.
The fact a Secretary of Defense (second in command of the US military) and a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (highest ranking officer and principle military advisor) have both said he is unfit and doesn't care about the law.
Jim Mattis, a Secretary of Defense, in a letter titled "I cannot remain silent":
“Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us... We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership... We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.” [1]
Mark Milley, a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spent his final days in his position making sure that the military understood that they took an oath to the constitution before president. Mark Milley in his retirement speech said:
We don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator. [2]
[1] https://archive.is/UmFxO -- https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/american-c... [2] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/29/milley-farewell-spe...
No party has had 60 or more votes in the Senate for many many years. Which means nothing can pass under the goals of one party. The game is that one party says the measure being presented is unnecessary and redundant and doesnt vote in favor of that law. Rinse, repeat.
But yes, the culpability is ultimately on Congress.
Its also easy to see why it is gridlocked
The filibuster rule is determined by the senate itself, and could have been neutered at any point. The gridlock is a conscious choice of the senate majority.
>I don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like.
Maybe not many people in the US have, but people in CCP China are plenty familiar. That is an example of "rule of the people" instead of "rule of law". Remember the melanmine milk scandal? Barely a slap on the wrist for Sanlu (the vendor). Or, did anything happen after the child molestation incident at a Beijing kindergarten?
Where do you get your news from? I cross-checked your comment with Wikipedia. In the Sanlu case, the executives were sent to jail, and they were ordered to destroy their stock because Sanlu was on the brink of bankruptcy. Life imprisonment and the death penalty don’t exactly sound like a slap on the wrist to me.
The school molestation cases began as rumors from two parents, but real abuse was found and the teachers were jailed. The CCP launched a nationwide kindergarten audit—seems like a fair response, especially with so much fake news online.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYB_Education
I am personally conflicted about this because on the one hand it'd be great if everyone could have a whole bunch of legal process and we could be super sure that we're only getting rid of people that shouldn't be here, but on the other hand biden imported millions of third worlders with no vetting through a combination of lack of border enforcement and wide ranging refugee and amnesty efforts. Now that we're enforcing immigration laws again, how can we give every illegal immigrant a trial? Perhaps the blame lies with the people who created this situation in the first place. This seems a lot like hamas putting their bomb factories under schools and then crying when the IDF bombs them. If you believe immigration laws should be enforced, what else can you do?
Citizenship is not some indelible mark on your person. It is likely at best some ink on a piece of paper or line in a database that can be lost, stolen, "forgotten", or denied.
Imagine that I were a police officer, I asked for your papers, and then immediately burnt them. How are you going to prove you are a citizen? What if I accused you of faking those documents? What is your recourse? How are you going to prove your citizenship? Are you going to go to the judge that was appointed by the person in power to plead your case? I already think you faked your documents, why should I let you have due process, I already know you are guilty.
Once you take away the structure of law these ideas that you think give you power, like citizenship, are just power on paper. The only real power you have is your friends and family getting upset and going to a journalist to plead your case to the court of public opinion, but maybe those journalists are employed by a billionaire, too, or they are scared they will fall out a window if they question the governments actions.
You are trusting someone who says if you give them power, they will solve your problems. But what if they don't, what if they start causing you problems? Who takes that power away once they already have it or have consolidated it with loyalists?
> Imagine that I were a police officer, I asked for your papers, and then immediately burnt them.
This isn't hypothetical, either. I know several US citizens whose documents are being confiscated and destroyed, because the current US regime has decided they're fraudulent. (One person had their passport printed, and then immediately destroyed.)
I think that you should consider trying to widen your media diet. Everyone can benefit from listening to opposing perspectives.
"The situation is bad so all rights can just be completely eliminated" is not actually a tenable position. "We had to do a fascism because of Biden" is not real. It is a choice. One that you need to own.
If the rule is "people we claim are illegal immigrants can be sent to a Salvadoran gulag for the rest of their lives without process and even if we admit we made a mistake with somebody we cannot bring them back" then this means that literally anybody can be sent there. The government just picks me up off the street, claims that I'm an illegal immigrant even though I am a citizen, puts me a on a plane, and then no law or court can save me from spending the rest of my life in hell.
What a system.
> biden imported millions of third worlders with no vetting through a combination of lack of border enforcement and wide ranging refugee and amnesty efforts.
Everyone who told you those mistruths was lying to you hoping against you’d vote against your interests. Biden not only enforced immigration laws, he was doing so at a higher rate.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-dep...
Only in 2023-2024. Overall, Biden's tenure saw the largest immigration inflow in US history, and about 2/3 of it was illegal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/us-immigration-s...
Immigrants don't worry me, fascists do. I don't stay up at night worried an immigrant might deport me or send me to a prison to be raped
Curious if any downvoters dispute the substance of my comment or the linked article, or if this is just a "yuck" reflex?
Oh please tell me when we suspended immigration laws and opened our borders
And imported third worlds like a commodity! I wonder if there is a tariff on that.
https://archive.ph/too55
This is pretty sad as a headline. It's not a warning, it is business as usual.
Civil asset forfeiture started expanding in the 1970s and in the next decade, we got Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Gitmo? 2002. Room 641A is the next year. Black ops sites, aka "we can torture you as long as we're not in the United States" is somewhere around there. Extrajudicial killings, I read 2,400 in just Pakistan, that's Obama-era, right? Stingrays, about 2007 or so. Qualified immunity out the yin-yang; hell, you can just shoot up someone's house for nearly a day trying to capture a shoplifter and the courts will shrug. That's 2015. Even the ACLU has become notably more partisan.
Decades ago, back when I thought people were capable of learning from anything other than a hot stovetop, I used to say that we ought to be careful when making manacles to restrict various liberties and cautious when providing more tools for law enforcement, because you just do not know for a certainty that the manacles you made will not be around your own wrists and that the latest tools of the law will not be aimed at you. "Pretend you will eventually be on the losing side," I said.
We've been going along with this business because it was convenient to believe that these little inches taken will not add up to miles. This will only be used on drug peddlers, pedophiles, terrorists, and money launderers, WINK WINK. We have been building this machine for a long time, and we've been smug as a bug on a landline with a FISA rubberstamp warrant.
Why this headline, now? And also, why this headline, now? Now and this because the people who were very comfortable are finally cottoning on to the fact that the various abilities tacked on to the Executive Branch over the decades might actually be used against them (us? ME? but I am one of the good guys, I only helped construct the machine!) and, while fearful, are still unwilling to engage with their own multi-decade culpability, so they must focus on the latest outrage and nothing before it. To do otherwise would suggest that they have some kind of involvement in this particular outcome and just making noises like "Trump," "Musk," and "fascism" keeps their metaphorical hands clean.
At this point, when I mention this kind of thing online, it's less from a desire to sway opinion (almost no chance of that occurring) and more of an opportunity for me, years down the line, to point and say, "Yup. Called it."
- "I'm going to war to shoot some [baddies]"
- "What if they shoot you?"
- "Me? what for?!"
There will always be cynicism, quietism, fear, injustice.
Yet it is possible for people to come together and change the world for the better. This has happened many times before, on a global scale: the spread of democracy, abolition of slavery, decolonization.
Lately I’ve been thinking of this as an existential question. We are thrust into this life, into an unjust world. Each of us chooses how to face it.
I remember an account of a mass execution of some villagers by Nazis in Eastern Europe. I imagine being one of these people facing that time in history, with what feels like too little power.
I believe the best way to face such a thing, if a person can muster it, is courage.
The pandemic showed me that people just hunger for authoritarianism, especially when it’s used against a group they view as bad for society
It's like the UK Rwandan exile program, but somehow worse.
Far... far... worse. The Rwanda exile program at least had some concept of due process in both the UK and Rwanda. The Rwanada exile program was at least stopped when the courts told it to instead of trying to remain secret long enough to avoid the courts having a chance to forbid it, and then outright ignoring the court orders forbidding it when that failed.
Here the program is "ICE picks you up off the street, without telling anybody. Writes in some internal document that you're a foreign national member of a gang, without telling anybody or giving you a chance to challenge that. Ships you off to El Salvador's concentration camp, without telling anybody". To this date even the lawyers challenging the program don't actually know the name of everyone who was shipped to El Salvador.
Maybe somebody finds out, by looking at ICE publicity photos that you happen to be in the background of, maybe not. Maybe you are a member of the gang, maybe you're a US citizen whose never even heard of the gang. Doesn't matter, there was no chance to challenge ICEs decision. You weren't even informed of the decision, you were just put on a plane without being told why. And once you're there, even if somebody figures out that's where you are and challenges the decision on your behalf, the US has no authority to bring you back.
> the US has no authority to bring you back.
They're paying to keep you there, but """can't""" bring you back.
Hey is it still too early to call it fascism you guys.
It’s always too early, until you’ll be disappeared for saying it.
Like in the UK for spicy social media posts?
Refresh my memory, who was sent to an extrajudicial prison in a foreign country without so much as a trail for a spicy social media post in the UK?
Just flag the comment and move on.
Don't feed the troll.
There you get arrested for being a Nazi. In America you get disappeared for not being one. There was a bit of excitement in the 1940s that gives us moral guidance on what to do when Nazis rear their heads.
No, but people will be waking up at different times.
Honestly at this point, MAGA folks are genuinely bad people.
the problem is that when you get to call it for sure its too late to do something about it
A concentration camp for people of a certain race. Blocked by judiciary but proceeded anyway. Nope need more evidence.
It is not prison if there is no due process.
At least stocks are up /s
but they're not?
Responsibility laundering
This is just the outsourcing of something the US has been doing for a long time.
This is absolutely new, happening to law-abiding residents, and seemingly immune from judicial review.
The only comparable situation is the Japanese internment camps from WWII.
“It can’t happen here”
"...because of the Second Amendment."
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Fun fact: you can solve all crime this way! Just make everything down to the smallest misdemeanor a capital offense. Perfect society, right?
> carrying water for MS13 and Tren de Aragua
Cruel and offensive words.
If the U.S. killed and imprisoned people at the rate of El Salvador, without due process and essentially at the word of mouth of random people in the community, you’d be running to the hills. Crazy that this far into Trumps disaster and people still want right wing fascist dictatorship. You might get what you want, god help us all.
Police in El Salvador start each day with a quota of people to round up and imprison without trial. If they don't meet the quota, they don't get to go home to their families.
https://apnews.com/article/nayib-bukele-san-salvador-el-arre...
https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/12/07/we-can-arrest-anyone-w...
Frankly it's shocking every time I see people praise Bukele on Hacker News.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1264586/approval-salvado...
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I suspect that people like you require the personal experience of having a loved one black-bagged in the middle of the night without recourse to understand OP's position. Every authoritarian regime ever uses the same logic to build up their police state: "for the greater good".
The US has 2.5x the incarceration rate of China, and 1.8x the incarceration rate of Russia. How's that for "authoritarian regime"? Or is this "different" somehow?
While the incarceration rate of the US is atrocious, the prisoners (for the most part) have access to the legal/judicial system and are covered by things like habeas corpus, right to a speedy trial, right to counsel, visitation rights, etc.
Also, for the most part, prisons in the US don’t practice torture and political reprogramming. Nor are there concentration camps with indefinite detention save for a handful of black sites like Guantanamo.
People have gotten years-long prison sentences (which are de facto death sentences with regularity) in Russia for donating a few bucks to Ukraine or speaking out against the war. Nothing comparable happens in the US (for now).
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Democracy tends to require a revolution to break free from those authoritarian regimes, to say nothing of thousands (or millions) of deaths along the way. And we're still waiting for Russia, China, Cuba, etc. to reveal their glorious democratic forms. (By your logic, communism must be one of humanity's greatest achievements since it elevated a number of feudal countries to superpower status. Nevermind the millions of dead in famines, gulags, genocides, etc. But hey, at least crime rates were low!)
Many countries transitioned to democracy without a major revolution. And even when they did, virtually all reused the same state infrastructure that was established during the monarchy.
Communism was a failure because it was incompetent. But the authoritarian-capitalist government China has had since the late 1980s was nothing short of a miracle.
In the 1970s, China was as poor per capita as Bangladesh. Today, Bangladesh is still a deeply impoverished country, while China is an advanced middle income economy.
Soviet Russia under its most authoritarian leader rapidly industrialized, defeated Nazi Germany, developed nuclear weapons, dramatically raised the levels of literacy and education across the entire population, and became a global superpower. That sounds like a smashing success to me.
Errr, what works? No longer engaging in war with gangs?
The El Salvador President’s Informal Pact with Gangs (2020)
https://insightcrime.org/news/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-gangs...
There's more to the dramatic drop in homicide rates than simple analysis might reveal .. is it an actual drop or simply a drop in recording, etc.
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The homicide rate in El Salvador has dropped from 100 per 100,000 to 2.5 per 100,000 in just a decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-.... The El Salvadoran government has literally brought the country to an entirely different level of development, vastly improving the lives of most of the country’s 6 million people. Disorder and dysfunction doesn’t just hurt those who are killed. It’s a tax on the whole country, on the economy, and on kids’ futures. It’s system that beats down builders and cultivators and makes them subservient to the sociopaths.
As someone from a dysfunctional third-world country, the revolution in El Salvador gives me hope that change is actually possible in some of these places. It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country. Your ancestors did the hard things (England punished all felonies by death for centuries) so you have forgotten how your lives became so comfortable in the first place.
Sending people there and then saying you don't have jurisdiction over them anymore is dysfunctional by any reasonable measure.
Writing from a country with dysfunctional judiciary, I think this is a logical way to overcome crime, at least temporarily. There isn't a "hygienic" alternative when judges are continuously bribed or blackmailed by gang members.
> There isn't a "hygienic" alternative when judges are continuously bribed or blackmailed by gang members.
None of this is applicable to the United States. It is a problem in some other countries but wasn’t the case here.
Not in the US, it's not.
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"Neri Alvarado Borges was told by ICE officers that he was arrested in February for his tattoos — one of which is a rainbow-colored autism awareness ribbon with the name of his brother, who is autistic."
"The Trump administration admitted in court documents that 'many' of those sent to El Salvador did not have criminal records. As more information about those deported was unearthed, it became clear that some of the 'evidence' against them was as absurd as a tattoo of a Real Madrid CF logo, or an autism awareness tattoo."
"These men—human beings with names, histories, dreams—were marched through a gauntlet of armed guards, beaten, stripped naked, shaved, and thrown into overcrowded cells. A photojournalist on the scene described watching men age a decade in two hours. He watched as one young man sobbed, 'I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.'"
No, they are not violent criminals. The authorities don't even bother to check.
"There is zero probability that a normal innocent US citizen will be sent there."
I'm 99% sure that we'll start seeing US citizens sent there in the coming months for crimes as basic as vandalism of Trump or Tesla properties.
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Those quotes are from three different sources. Which of those would you consider “bullshit” and why?
If the Tesla vandals deserve to be in a lunatic asylum or charged with hate speech, fine. Go through the legal process to prove it in court. But to suggest that they deserve to be sent to a foreign black site for a lifetime of torture is simply unhuman.
Note that this often happens because countries won’t repatriate their own criminal citizens: https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/23/politics/trump-visa-sanctions...
Yes this was the case for Venezuela, they started taking flights again when the El Salvador news came out.
Refusing to repatriate citizens was part of the argument the Trump admin used to justify use of the Alien Enemies act.
If this holds up in court the strategy going forward is pretty obvious. Any country that refuses to repatriate criminals will get hit with the AEA. This will be very politically painful for any country as they rely heavily on remittances from undocumented immigrants in the US, and will quickly fold.
> England punished all felonies by death for centuries
No.
For less than a century, during peak "Bloody Code" almost all felonies specified a death sentence .. that doesn't in any way mean that all felonies were punished by death.
Take it from the Old Bailey: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/punishmentInteresting, thank you for that clarification. It looks like execution rates were as high as 30 per 100,000 in 1600, dropping to under 5 per 100,000 by 1700: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5955207/
The US in 1700 was about 1 per 100,000: https://www.cato.org/blog/despite-federal-return-capital-pun...
The number of executions in the US annually today is only 0.008 per 100,000.
So easily you gloss over millions of Americans who fought to end slavery, who fought for women's right to vote, who fought for desegregation, who fought for labor rights,... The "comfortable life" in America isn't a 300 year old gift of extra judicial killings - it's a continued culture across 10 generations of individuals and communities fighting for ever fairer freedoms under a shared rule of law.
You’re retconning history from a mid-20th century civil rights lens. That lens focuses on increasing access to a civilizational order that has already been built. Its about expanding access to what white males already had. But it’s an inadequate lens for understanding how that order was built in the first place.
The hard part is getting “from 0 to 1.” You need a state, the state needs to impose order and gain control over warlords, you need law and civil institutions, you need a government that is controlled by more than a handful of people, etc.
England or New England in 1800 was already a more developed society than Bangladesh or Somalia or Iraq in 2024, even though slavery still existed and suffrage wasn’t universal. Just getting to that point would be transformational for much of asia, the middle east, and africa.
This is why nation building in the 20th and early 21st century has failed so spectacularly. You can go into Iraq and create a nice constitution with rights and universal suffrage and religious freedom, but you’re just redistributing 0. The “rights lens” doesn’t actually tell you how to get Iraq in 2024 to the point where England was in 1800.
Perhaps we agree that sustaining fair societies is a continual march of institutional and cultural building - not something imposed by a document or stamped by 1800's England. I would never argue that US-Iraq style nation building would succeed, for example. In fact, it is a counter example of violence being sufficient to get from 0 to 1. The US applied extreme violence over a population and failed to establish a persistent democratic order. The basis of civilization, as I read history, is more a consequence of surplus than violence.
I see, in the chaos of Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, as examples, the results of institutions and cultures effectively destroyed by outside violence, in many cases regressing from 1 to 0.
Thank you for sharing your point of view - certainly thought provoking for me.
If you can put any person 12 years and up in jail without a trial, and you don't care about accidentally hurting innocent ones I'm surprised it is 2.5 per 100,000 and not 0 per 100,000.
El Salvador currently has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and its president now is serving second term which is not allowed by their constitution.
It is indeed rather easy to reduce homicide rates through mass violation of rights. We'd have much less crime if the government just shot every male under the age of 30 whose income is lower than some threshold. But that wouldn't exactly be a good system.
So they "solved" gangs and installed a ruthless and illegal dictatorship in their place — which may in fact be secretly conspiring with those same gangs behind the scenes.
I feel sorry for El Salvador. It may now have to experience several generations of Soviet-style repression and suffering before a new regime is able to overthrow the current one. Meanwhile, thousands of families will never get to find out what happened to their loved ones in those horrifying concentration camps.
FYI, many of our (Americans') ancestors fled their home countries precisely to escape this sort of state-enacted brutality.
Nearly 25% of El Salvador is in America, although they fled gang violence not Bukele.
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You have no idea what my origins are. And I'm not sure why you're so furiously and emotionally defending this dictator all over this thread. I wonder if you've even read the article? Maybe take a few minutes and see if it changes how you feel.
I’m defending him because I’m realizing how deeply third world countries are suffering from the influence of empathetic individualists like you having so much power in the western world.
>It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country.
Or, you could just acknowledge that it is inherently inhumane, despite the improvements it's making for your country. Of course authoritarian measures bring results and of course in a country like El Salvador, in it's previous state, they might even be warranted - but it is still inhumane. Inhumanity sometimes has to be fought with inhumanity, Americans of all people should acknowledge that. If you want to argue that it is not inhumane, however, then you are wrong. Imprisonment without due process is inherently inhumane.
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How do you know that the "overwhelming majority" are "bad people who prey on others" without a functional judicial system to prove it?
As the number of incarcerated grows from 2% to 5% to consolidate Bukele's power, what recourse will anyone have outside the party elite?
The pattern of strongman politicians, indefinite emergency measures, and erosion of liberties to manifest full bore dictatorship has repeated over and over and over again in the 20th and 21st centuries — and you still can't see it happening? You may enjoy it now, but consider this the honeymoon phase: it only gets worse from here on out.
> How do you know that the "overwhelming majority" are "bad people who prey on others" without a functional judicial system to prove it?
You think the murder rate went down by two orders of magnitude by locking up good, innocent people?
If there are 10,000 murderers out there and you lock up most of them along with 20,000 innocent people, you get the same result. (Bonus points if you happen to snag some annoying journalists, activists, and civil rights leaders in your dragnet, since they can push back on your power play and cast doubt on your stats.)
But you can just read the article if you don't believe me: "While polling consistently shows that Bukele is quite popular in El Salvador, surveys also show a steady increase in fear of public criticism of the government — to degrees that sometimes match the president’s approval rating. 'There’s a sector of the population that feels better, because it’s true that we perceive more security, we’re no longer afraid of the gangs. Now we’re afraid of the regime,' says Ramirez. 'We see soldiers everywhere, police everywhere, patrol cars, and they’re arresting people.'"
So if they lock up, torture (you are a gang member as you looked weird at your neighbour of 20 years who happens to be a friend of a the local police chief) and kill you and your family without any due process that's fine for the greater good? Don't think many people have that idea, probably nor do you; you just think so as it didn't happen to you yet. The overwhelming majority as you say does a lot here; where is the proof and process that it is the overwhelming majority? And that these people are not just people like you and your kids but who do not agree with the regime? According to the process/system, all people in Cambodia were guilty as well. You cannot have read any history and talk like this so I guess you never have.
It will get worse anyway; that 2% will rise and that gov will never go away, killing everyone who opposes them. History shows this every time.
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It’s worth a debate, even though in American culture we hold this idea as beyond any consideration.
Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying "it is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer". That's a noble thought, but those 100 criminals can cause suffering of 100s of others. So his assessment isn't necessarily accurate. Every innocent father jailed in El Salvador might save 10 children from losing their own father.
You can use a proper system to do that though to minimise the risk of jailing innocent people. It's all easy talking until you get locked up in an animal case without recourse until you die. Ask those innocent ones how they like taking one for the team.
Note that Franklin was the product of a society that had been executing felons for hundreds of years. The homicide rate in both England and New England in the early 1700s was around 2 per 100,000, lower than any western hemisphere country today.
Canada's is less than 2 per 100k
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=351000...
I also have to doubt the accuracy of such data collected in the 1700s.
Where did you get that figure from?
There are many sources online that agree, so I won’t bother to link them, that the population of New England was ~100k in 1700 and ~300k in 1750.
The claim that that actual rate of murder in all of New England was 2-6 per year is not believable.
https://images.app.goo.gl/ZomfSetCVGTWj1bS9
https://www.cold-takes.com/unraveling-the-evidence-about-vio...
If the population grew from 100k in 1700 to 300k in 1750, and if the homicide rate was right around 2 per 100k, then that would mean that the total number of homicides in New England, over the 50 years span was less than 300.
Do you really believe that fewer than 300 murders occurred during this time?
300 murders per year.
The FBI maintains murder statistics for most policing jurisdictions in the US. Many of them are under 2 per 100,000 per year: Sunnyvale, CA; Hercules, CA; Novato, CA, Brookline, MA; the Twin Cities. The rate in Beverly, MA, is 0.946.
Japan's rate is 0.4.
No, 300 murders total.
The population reached ~300k in 1750. A murder rate of 2 per 100k times 300k people equals 6 murders. Multiply that by 50 years to get 300 murders.
OK. Thanks for the correction. I aspire to make sure I understand a thread before I add to it, but I fell short of my aspiration this time.
This doesn't affect my 2nd and 3rd paragraphs though.
In my country homicide rate per 100k is less than 1. Why is 2 unbelievable? Or do I understand something wrong?
He's making a claim about 1700s America. Not modern day countries.
It was a violent time.
Just one 'dataset': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_No...
2 per 100,000 is not lower than any western hemisphere country. Where did you get this from?
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Ah YOU are the designated speaker for the disenfranchised while all other Americans don't have the emotional intelligence/historical background needed to possibly understand. You think way too highly of yourself and your wizened worldliness and too poorly of others. You should try stopping pontificating on your inherently superior wisdom and more time conversing/engaging with others.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=We+suggest+the+Judge+contac...
“The lack of criminal records does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with Tren de Aragua, the lack of specific information about each specific individual actually highlights the risk they pose,
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article30...
The argument is basically that because the deportees had no due process to be deported that no due process can bring them back. The Trump administration claims that they are gang members, but provided no evidence to support this claim, and then refused to work with any members of the judicial system attempting to provide oversight. In any other administration this would be a scandal that rocks the media for months and ends with the resignation of several top officials. For the Trump administration it was Tuesday.
yeah well on thursday he shit the bed on the economy so i guess we've moved on. stupid tariffs are one thing but the extrajudicial deportation and imprisonment is quite a worse thing if unchecked.
They’re still in court. The judge today set a deadline of April 7 for the specific guy “accidentally” deported to return to the US, and seems like there may even be people held in contempt of court (can’t tell how much that’s wishful thinking on my part).
https://apnews.com/article/trump-deportations-el-salvador-ju...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
Doesn’t fix everyone else who is there, but ugh.
Comfortably wealthy US citizens aren't personally affected by these extrajudicial disappearances. It's just a headline to them. The stock market, on the other hand...
It’s classic narcissist behavior - get caught with their pants down somewhere? Set somewhere else on fire so you get distracted.
So essentially - ‘They are super dangerous because we have no evidence they are dangerous, which provides they are the most dangerous threat - the one that we can’t prove exists’
The lack of evidence is evidence. Right.
Also, war is peace.
It’s even better - the lack of evidence is apparently evidence they are even more dangerous than those who they have evidence on.
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"Arbeit macht frei (Work Sets You Free."
"We don't have any evidence, but we just know they are bad people. Because ... reasons ... that we don't have to share with silly plebians like you."
Perhaps this sounds familiar ...
"While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205." -- Senator Joseph McCarthy
Boy, just think how communist the guys NOT on that list must have been!
The powers under the Act don't specify a standard of proof required. It just says:
>all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies. The President is authorized in any such event, by his proclamation thereof, or other public act, to direct the conduct to be observed on the part of the United States, toward the aliens who become so liable; the manner and degree of the restraint to which they shall be subject and in what cases, and upon what security their residence shall be permitted, and to provide for the removal of those who, not being permitted to reside within the United States, refuse or neglect to depart therefrom; and to establish any other regulations which are found necessary in the premises and for the public safety.
Nothing there about the President needing to prove anything beyond a reasonable doubt. Presumably he would need to prove the particular facts, in habeus corpus proceedings, should they be brought, only on the balance of probabilities?
You skipped the bit at the front:
> Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/21
Which nation is invading us? All of them? It's extremely obvious ordinary crime wasn't what this was intended for.
And who declared war? Because of course that is reserved to Congress.
Don’t worry congress up and abdicated their responsibility to provide oversight on this “war”.
https://www.congress.gov/119/bills/hres211/BILLS-119hres211r... - page 4
In other words, they are so afraid to publicly vote on whether this “war” should continue that they have to play stupid games with the legislative calendar.
Tren de aragua is, according to the government, a terror group, and the Venezuelan government alleges they receive state sponsorship from Columbia.
IF those things can be demonstrated as true, then prevent from prior supreme Court rulings cover this scenario pretty well.
If they can't demonstrate that, then the deportations are clearly outside of the scope of the law and judicial interpretation.
There are a lot of “ors” and commas in that law, but it’s not hard to parse unless you’re being willfully obtuse.
((Declared war OR (invasion OR predatory incursion)) IS (perpetrated OR attempted OR threatened)) BY (foreign nation OR foreign government).
The law was drafted in the early 18th century when nation was more of an ethnographic term than a political one.
So "a predatory invasion threatened by Venezuelans" would satisfy that definition.
There is clear legislative intent to limit when the president could apply the law. You're suggesting limitations set by congress are meaningless, so long as the president's staff can form some sort of argument by stretching the facts enough.
Edit: typo
I think it’s hilarious and pathetic that you, and our government, advocating for the Alien and Sedition Acts in 2025.
You should read about the obvious problems with a circa 1798 law that was as odious and abusive then as it is today.
A quotation from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, if reports are to be believed; but you should really link to a specific source, e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy73gqq64do. (LMGTFY is the most annoying form of link rot.)
This appears to be a copy of the judicial order of 2025-04-04 for his return:
https://www4.wng.org/Order-for-Return.pdf
It’s unbelievable that anyone is bothering to argue with their pathetic “it’s another country nyah nyah nyah” stance. The correct response is that ok, everyone involved in getting that plane off the ground and everyone involved in sending money to El Salvador to pay for this program is in contempt of court until the whole plane load returns to the US. The court doesn’t need jurisdiction in El Salvador.
I am not sure if you have seen that there's a flagging war going on on HN lately. The commenter probably didn't link on purpose to prevent that.
Just saying that we need a more neutral medium for the HN crowd if that kind of discussions afen't allowed. Turning a blind eye to what's going on is what got us into this mess.
Linking – or better still, quoting – makes me more comfortable vouching for comments. (I vouched here, because the discussion below the comment is worthwhile, but the comment itself is practically unreadable.)