Hundreds of Venezuelan men have been spirited away to a hell outside of the reach of habeas corpus rulings. It is our duty not to look away.
In this handout photo provided by the Salvadoran government, a close view of handcuffs placed on the hands of a newly incarcerated person allegedly linked to criminal organizations at CECOT on March 16, 2025, in Tecoluca, El Salvador.
(Salvadoran Government via Getty Images)
Last week, following Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act against the Tren de Aragua gang, I wrote about the hundreds of Venezuelans sent to El Salvador’s CECOT prison. But I can’t get the nightmarish events out of my head, so I am revisiting the situation again this week. For, as Willy Loman’s despairing wife Linda demanded in Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid.”
The grisly saga of the hundreds of young Venezuelan men seized by US immigration authorities, shackled and bundled onto aircraft, flown to El Salvador, and dumped into a counterterrorism prison—arguably the harshest prison environment on earth—is so antithetical to professed American values, so execrable, that it screams out for redress.
Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, and the others in the administration involved in this monstrous scheme have shrouded the details of this effort in such secrecy that the families of the men who have vanished into the void are reduced to scouring blurry stills from videos of them being shaved, humiliated, and led into CECOT, to see if they can recognize birthmarks, tattoos, or other identifying characteristics. Immigration authorities literally disappeared the men on their websites. Search for their cases online, and the men no longer exist. Their attorneys cannot find them. Immigration rights advocates cannot reach them. They exist now as detached from America and the loved ones they were forcibly, and suddenly, separated from, as were the suspected anarchists and communists summarily deported following the Palmer Raids in the years immediately after the Russian revolution.
These Venezuelan men, these newly minted and anonymous residents of the sprawling CECOT complex in El Salvador, exist now, in reality if not in theory, outside of the bounds and reach of US law. Some may be gang members—ruthless, violent, individuals, as the administration claims—but others seem to have been identified as such only by their tattoos or social media posting, not because they have an actual association with a gang. It’s possible some have been convicted of crimes; we do not know, because the government has released no information. But reporting by The Washington Post and other outlets suggests that at least some of these men, many of whom were in the process of filing asylum claims when they were disappeared, have no criminal records.
They are now ghostly denizens of the outer edge of US jurisprudence—a zone where the presence of due process and the writ of American courts is as ethereal as are the oxygen levels atop Mount Everest. They have been spirited away to a hell beyond the reach of habeas corpus rulings. And in that, they are akin to the men held for years without trial in the supermax facility of Guantánamo Bay, or more contemporaneously to the Israeli hostages kept captive Hamas in Gaza. Their fate is the ghastly reductio ad absurdum of Trump’s viciously dehumanizing anti-immigrant agenda.
There is no disputing that Tren de Aragua is an extremely violent gang whose members have left a trail of bloodshed and fear in their wake. But that doesn’t make it an invading army—the Trump administration’s rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act and summarily deporting hundreds of Venezuelans without even the pretense of due process—any more than the presence of the Mafia in New York or Chicago, Philadelphia or Boston, in the 20th century, or of Irish street gangs in the 19th century made them the spear-tip of invading Italian or Irish armies. Indeed, the crime-and-gang-tracking think tank Insight Crime, which has chronicled Tren de Aragua’s growth, both in Venezuela and overseas, in recent years, reports that “the gang’s reputation appears to have grown more quickly than its actual presence in the United States.”
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As with Tren de Aragua, the mob engaged in people-trafficking, in the distribution of illicit liquor during Prohibition and illicit drugs in the decades following. It prostituted women, rained terror down on the neighborhoods in which it operated, sought to corrupt political and law enforcement figures, and when that didn’t work wasn’t averse to assassinating them. It bombed and mutilated and disfigured and shot its way to infamy. It was eventually somewhat brought to heel not by invoking wartime authorities for a mass deportation campaign but by the methodical, precise, work of law enforcement. Trump’s team, by contrast, has no interest in slow, methodical, accurate, investigations. Rather, it simply wants the instant, cathartic, relief of the spectacle, the climactic humiliation ritual in front of the TV cameras, the public sacrifice on the altar of MAGA.
Of course, such sacrifices can’t be limited only to Tren de Aragua, or suspected Tren de Aragua, members. The lust for punishment, once unleashed, demands constant replenishment.
Witness the case of Yunseo Chung, a lawful permanent resident who has lived in the United States since she was 7 years old. The feds are now seeking to deport the 21-year-old to South Korea because she took part, peacefully, in protests at Columbia University, putting up fliers against the Gaza war, which resulted in her being disciplined by the university for vandalizing property, and then being recently arrested at a demonstration against what participants saw as the harsh punishments meted out by Columbia’s administration against other students involved in previous rounds of protest. She received a desk appearance ticket from the police for “obstruction of governmental administration,” about as low an offense on the criminal totem pole as one could get. For that two-bit expression of moral discomfort, however, the government is seeking to permanently separate her from her family, her university, her country.
You don’t have to be a fan of the Columbia University protests, or many of the other protests around the country in late 2023 and 2024 —I wrote about some of my misgivings (though not specifically about Columbia), because I felt the protesters’ arguments were simplistic and ahistorical—to understand the vastly chilling effect that such deportation efforts will have on free speech in this country. Anyone without a passport will now think twice about exercising their First Amendment rights. And even those with passports will know that the president and his lawless cabinet members are watching them and waiting for them to screw up.
Chung was never accused, let alone convicted, of violent crimes. Neither was Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, whom the government attempted to deport without even waiting for an immigration court hearing—and who is now in the legal fight of his life to remain in the country that he had a green card to live in with his US citizen wife, who is soon to give birth to their child. Theirs are crimes of thought—and thoughts, no matter how one feels about them, are not acts of violence. Yet, in an era of encroaching totalitarianism, the federal government is using every lever of power at its disposal to lock down public discourse and to penalize those who stray from what is increasingly coming to look like an official party line.
But, again, no matter how many sacrificial victims are offered up, in an America now governed by people consumed by a loathing of the outsider, the other, “many” is never enough. This past week, the government announced that it was revoking the “humanitarian parole” status of roughly half a million recent arrivals from Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti—places wracked by political violence, poverty, and gang violence. Those men, women, and children, who had been allowed to come out of the shadows under a policy implemented by Biden, had been given Social Security numbers and allowed to work and to study, to dream of bright futures, and to contribute to American society, were given 30 days to pack up their lives and either return to desperately dangerous home countries or somehow, through some miraculous intervention of the gods of mercy and kindness, find another country willing to offer them safe harbor.
Willy Loman’s wife was right. Attention must be paid.
Donald Trump’s cruel and chaotic second term is just getting started. In his first month back in office, Trump and his lackey Elon Musk (or is it the other way around?) have proven that nothing is safe from sacrifice at the altar of unchecked power and riches.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
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