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Sometimes it seems as though nothing ever really ends in this world of ours. As I read Rebecca Gordon's latest grim piece for TomDispatch on the return of torture in the age of Trump, the all-American prison at Guanta'namo Bay, Cuba, the one that, in the years of the Global War on Terror, held so many tortured prisoners offshore of American justice, popped back into my mind. Even though the war on terror did finally end, that prison was never shut down and, to this day, still holds a few prisoners from that era.
It mattered not at all that, on his second day in office, President Barack Obama, who had promised as a candidate to close that offshore site of injustice, issued an executive order to shut it within a year. No such luck. And Donald Trump evidently learned a lesson from him because, in his first term, he actually signed an executive order to keep the prison open. Joe Biden once again promised to close it, but (yes!) once again it didn't happen. And now, it's not only still open (with a mere 15 prisoners), but its grounds are being used (at a staggering price) for some of the Trump administration's detained migrants. (Of course, nothing new there either, since from the mid-1990s the U.S. did indeed run a semi-covert migrant detention center at Guanta'namo.)
Not thousands (yet) but hundreds of migrants have already been sent to the grounds of that prison in the second Trump era before being deported to their own countries (or, of course, random other ones). In fact, in just the first two months of his second term, Trump's administration had already spent $40 million keeping relatively small numbers of migrants there at the price of about $100,000 a day for each of them (and that, mind you, doesn't even count the staggering transportation costs to get them there and later deport them on charter flights that can cost $27,000 an hour to operate).
So, I suppose, it should be no surprise that, in the second Trump era, another grim trait from the war on terror years, the use of torture, is back in the government's playbook. What's new is old and what's old is new, as the saying goes, but let TomDispatch regular Gordon explain. Tom
Everything Old Is New Again
The Trump Administration Revives Institutionalized Torture
I didn't want to write this article.
In fact, I had something relatively uplifting planned: an Independence Day piece about the rich implications for the present moment to be found in the Declaration of Independence. But other excellent writers beat me to that one.
So instead, I reluctantly find myself once again focusing on U.S. torture, a subject I've studied and written about since the autumn of 2001, including in a couple of books. I'd naively hoped never to have to do so again, but here we are.
The Rendition of Kilmar Abrego GarcÃa
This March, the Trump administration illegally sent Kilmar Abrego GarcÃa to a notorious hellhole in El Salvador. That mega-prison is known by the acronym CECOT for Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. (In English, the Terrorism Confinement Center.) There he was beaten and tortured in violation of both this country's immigration and federal laws, as well as the United Nations' Convention against Torture, or CAT, to which the United States is a signatory.
It didn't matter that Abrego GarcÃa was in this country legally and that, as a Justice Department attorney told a federal judge, his deportation was the result of an "administrative error." In fact, the Department of Justice later rewarded its own lawyer's honesty by firing him.
Kilmar Abrego GarcÃa is a citizen of El Salvador who entered the United States "without inspection" (that is, undetected by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) in 2011. He was sixteen-years-old and fleeing his home country where, "[b]eginning around 2006, gang members stalked, hit, and threatened to kidnap and kill him in order to coerce his parents to succumb to their increasing demands for extortion," according to a civil suit filed against various U.S. officials. "He then made his way to the state of Maryland, where his older brother, a U.S. citizen, resided."
Abrego GarcÃa lived in Maryland for years, working as a day laborer. In 2016, he began a relationship with a U.S. citizen, Jennifer Va'squez Sura, and in 2018, they moved in together. They conceived a child and Abrego GarcÃa did construction work to support the family, which included his wife's two children, both U.S. citizens. In March 2019, however, he and three other men were arrested outside a Home Depot by Prince George's County, Maryland police. They turned him over to ICE, claiming on the flimsiest of evidence that he was a member of the Salvadoran gang, MS-13. The "evidence" in question included the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and that a confidential informant had identified him to a detective as a member of an MS-13 group operating out of Long Island, New York, where he had never lived. (The detective was later suspended for unrelated infractions.)
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