Tag: El Salvador

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At Large Opinion

Huddled Masses

Photo: Dhvstockphoto | Dreamstime.com

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

These are the final lines of Emma Lazarus’ poem, “The New Colossus.” They are inscribed on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty. How quaint those words seem now that it’s apparent that those leading this country no longer want anything to do with the poor or homeless or those huddled masses yearning to breathe free. There’s no lamp and no golden door, unless it’s the ones controlled by the for-profit ICE detention centers run by CoreCivic, GEO Group, LaSalle Corrections, and Management & Training Corporation.

That there are big profits being made from immigrant deportation is a feature, not a bug. In 2023, during Joe Biden’s presidency, 90 percent of the 30,000 people then held in ICE detention were housed in private facilities contracted by the agency. In 2022, Biden pledged there would be “no private prisons” used for detention, but he never delivered on that promise, and the number of immigrants in ICE detention centers has almost doubled since then.

Biden did at least keep detained immigrants in the U.S. until their cases could be handled in court. Donald Trump ramped it up to the next level last week by flying 238 Venezuelan immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador without giving them judicial due process. Trump justified the illegal move by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which enables the government to rapidly deport people from countries at war with the United States. Last time I checked, we weren’t at war with Venezuela. 

The deportees are now subject to a “justice system” that relies mostly on the whims of banana republic authoritarian President Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the world’s “coolest dictator.” El Salvador (read Bukele) received $6 million from the U.S. for taking the Venezuelans off our hands. It’s blood money. The prisoners had no opportunity to prove their innocence or challenge their sentences — because they haven’t been sentenced, just imprisoned for however long Bukele decides to keep them. It’s a business deal disguised as justice.

The administration claimed that the men were members of the Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, but no proof was offered in a court of law. Some of these men presumably were gang leaders with criminal records; others may have been low-level members; others, we are now discovering, may not have had any association with the gang or any criminal record at all. They all got the same punishment.

It’s utterly inhumane and flies in the face of any American legal processes. At the very least, the men could have been deported to their country of origin. Using a Salvadoran prison as an American Gulag is a new low, even for Trump. 

And all of this was carried out against the specific orders of federal Judge James Boasberg. It’s perhaps instructive to learn that when Bukele was told about the administration’s lawyers ignoring the judge’s order, he posted, “Oopsie, too late” on X. It was promptly reposted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and President-Select Elon Musk because … well, of course they did.

That exchange makes it increasingly clear that the last line of defense against Trump’s march to authoritarianism will be the judiciary. And the final bulwark of the judiciary is the Supreme Court, which has six right-leaning Republican appointees among its nine members. Trump has already hand-picked a subservient attorney general, Pam Bondi, to lead the Justice Department. If Trump just starts ignoring judicial orders from lower courts, as he has begun to do, will the GOP-linked members of SCOTUS stand up for the rule of law — or cede our democracy to the oligarchs who have taken over their party and our country? Their track record isn’t great.

And even if they do stand up to Trump, what happens if the president just ignores the Supreme Court? Who’s going to stop him? According to the Constitution, the only means available for judges to enforce their court orders are fines and/or arrests carried out by U.S. marshals. So, who controls U.S. federal marshals? Attorney General Pam Bondi. Oopsie. 

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Opinion Viewpoint

The USA: Detention Nation

Sometimes sport and politics clash in Latin America, but last month’s “Central America snub” was particularly revealing. Vice President Joe Biden flew to the region to meet with the presidents of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in the midst of a deepening Central American human rights and refugee crisis. President Juan Orlando Hernández of Honduras was a no-show — too busy watching his national team play soccer in Brazil.

Over the past several months, tens of thousands of women and children, most of them poor and from those three Central American nations named above, have arrived at our southwest border. From October 2013 to May 2014, the United States detained nearly 35,000 unaccompanied minors at the border. This is up from a total of 21,000 for the entire previous year. Meanwhile, the number of women seeking refuge in the U.S. has increased to a point that 240 female detainees were transferred to a prison in Mason, Tennessee, because the detention centers at the border are at capacity.

We’re not solely blaming President Hernández for a migratory crisis, but the leader’s priorities reflect an unfortunate historic reality: The struggles of women and children, particularly poor women and children — are generally secondary to other more compelling national concerns. In this case, World Cup soccer.

Central America is suffering from demoralizing poverty and widespread violence. Honduras currently has the world’s highest murder rate and ranks first in the world in murders per capita. To appreciate the extent of despair there, imagine making the decision to send your 10-year-old daughter on a solitary journey north — for hundreds of miles — in search of refugee status in the U.S. rather than letting her face the dangers at home.

This crisis did not materialize overnight, as suggested in the mainstream U.S. media, nor is it an indictment of President Obama’s immigration policy; a feckless, unfocused Congress has refused to even consider the moderate immigration reform passed by the Senate last summer and supported by Obama.

No, this crisis is decades in the making, and until the U.S. adopts mature, reasonable immigration reform and sensible partnerships within Central America, we’ll continue to cycle through these crises.   

U.S. policy in Central America has hardly helped that region’s poor. From the 1970s through the early 1990s, the U.S. pursued three wars in the region. At times, it became difficult to separate our allies from our adversaries. One thing was clear: The U.S. supported, with tens of millions of dollars in military aid and direct CIA intervention, anyone in the region who fought Marxism. We blindly backed the Contras in Nicaragua and the pre-modern militaries in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. The Guatemalan military, during the 1980s, even committed genocide. To this day, that nation’s Nobel Lauriat in Peace, Rigoberta Menchú, travels with a 12-man security detail. What kind of a nation would want to kill a Nobel Peace Prize winner? 

Our policies under President Obama have not pointed any closer to peace or security in the region. In 2009, for example, despite unanimous opposition from the Organization of American States, the U.S. — after briefly protesting — acceded to a coup in Honduras against a leftist regime. In Honduras, young, idealistic Americans (including one of the authors of this op-ed) once served in the U.S. Peace Corps, but the organization pulled out a few years ago, citing legitimate safety concerns for its volunteers.

The recent Free Trade Agreement frenzy, pushed by the U.S., the World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, has not generated prosperity in the region: Some 65 percent of Hondurans live in poverty, and Honduras and Guatemala are the most unequal nations (in terms of overall distribution of goods and income) in Latin America. Almost 20 years ago, the bipartisan “Washington consensus” assured us that free trade agreements between the U.S. and Latin America would create more wealth, income, and prosperity for all in the Americas — and would have the added benefit of reducing migration into the U.S.  

Our wars, our trade policies, and now our inability to lead on immigration reform, combined with low levels of enlightened leadership in Central America are the true causes of the current humanitarian/refugee crisis in our region. We could help by passing a clear national reform to our outdated immigration laws, but Congress won’t act.  

The president has decided to act unilaterally, where he can. On June 30th, he announced that by late summer, he’ll move on some areas of reform that do not require congressional approval. But women and children fleeing Central American poverty and governments with a genocidal history can’t wait.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter From the Editor: Living Like a Refugee

Most days I get up around sunrise. The house is quiet, the sky is pale, the Carolina wrens are singing. And the summer air is cool, or at least cooler than it will be for the rest of the day. I make coffee, get the paper, and sit down at the kitchen table to read the news.

For the past couple of weeks, the next sound I’ve heard is that of my wife on the phone, speaking Spanish. She’s talking to a husband in Texas or a brother in Michigan or a mother in Alabama. She’s talking to them about their wife, their sister, their daughter.

My wife is an attorney who handles a lot of immigration cases, and lately there has been a flood of women seeking her help. It’s a little-known fact that for the past few weeks, the U.S. government has been sending a number of Hispanic women who are seeking asylum in this country to the federal detention facility in Mason, Tennessee. There are around 240 of them there now, almost all of them from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Most of them are fleeing a murder epidemic against women that’s so pronounced it’s gotten its own moniker: femicide — murdering females because of their gender. They are victims of a machismo society that puts women on a pedestal but has little respect for them as individuals, and sees them as disposable. Years of civil wars and government corruption make the murders easy to get away with, since reporting a crime often results in the revenge murder of the accuser.

Less than 2 percent of femicides were even investigated in Honduras and Guatemala last year. Men are literally getting away with murder by the hundreds. Guatemalan human rights groups cite 731 women murdered in that country in 2012. It’s as bad in Honduras, and even worse in El Salvador. I suggest you google “femicide in Central America” and be prepared to be shocked.

And so the women flee, walking and hopping trains thousands of miles across Mexico to the U.S. border, where they are stopped and sent to prison in Mason. They are warehoused, sometimes for months. And unless they can find an attorney to help them and someone to help them pay for it — usually, someone in their family already in the U.S. — they are almost always quietly sent back to their home countries.

The politican furor over “illegal immigrants” in the U.S. has made their plight doubly difficult. No politician, from President Obama on down, wants to be seen as “soft on immigration,” these days. But these women are refugees, fleeing for their lives. We need to get beyond politics and find our humanity. We’re better than this.

Or we should be.