Posted by Avshalom 4/4/2025
Heh, or is a pun on AirBnB the more apt name for it.. "Concrete Floor & Indefinite Detention"?
"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.
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...
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.
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.
I was describing how dictators concentrate power to themselves using reasonable-sounding pretexts during the initial stages of self-coups, not how the regimes use the acquired powers to self-sustain.
> ...suddenly they'd lose the support of citizens, one of the key pillars keeping them in power.
Dictators, and political incumbents in general don't need support (in a positive, active sense) to go about the business of exercising political power they already wield.
On the flip side, they need a lack of unified opposition to avoid being voted out/toppled, hence dictators lean on corrupting the courts, use the secret police to disappear opposition, and the like. Autocrats will be very happy with a 0.05% approval/99.9% disapproval ratings, as long as their physical security is not threatened by riotous mobs, and their political power unchallenged.
- 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.
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.
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...
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.
Just not for regular folks that can walk around their city and not get mugged or shot
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 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.
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?
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.
If (and likely when) the administration ignores an order from the Supreme Court it's going to be too late.
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'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:
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.
You are so right. Whatever the benefit of having laws at all is, it evaporates when laws are selectively not applied.
We're seeing the consequencefs of it today, in the "content creation" business and many other. It's a dog eat dog situation. Truth lost any relevance. As the influencer you know very well that whatever you're feeding your audience is empty hope, dreams and fantasy. As long as the check from IG/YT/TikTok is big enough, you don't care. Why care?
They know the answer and that’s why they lined up like show ponies at the inauguration.
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.
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).
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.
Why not?
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.
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 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 ).
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/the-fascism-expert-at-...
Freedom requires solidarity, you cannot have freedom without solidarity.
Ironically China implemented the GFW because they correctly predicted this exact scenario being used to destabilize themselves.
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.
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?
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.)
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.
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...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/11/briefing/us-immigration-s...
The fact that they are not complying with 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...
clarification - its the republicans that used it as a campaign issue. the dems just assumed it was settled law
Spoiler: No democratic president/congress ever bothered to, and it was rightfully (in a legal, not moral sense) overturned just as she predicted.
All of these "you should have ignored the courts and focused on legislation" arguments aren't based in a lick of reality.
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.
But yes, the culpability is ultimately on Congress.
Its also easy to see why it is gridlocked
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?
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
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."
- "What if they shoot you?"
- "Me? what for?!"
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.
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.
They're paying to keep you there, but """can't""" bring you back.
Don't feed the troll.
It is not prison if there is no due process.