I understand why Kilmar Abrego Garcia has become the face of Donald Trump’s monstrous policy of sending migrants to a gulag in El Salvador. In a court filing, the administration’s own lawyers initially admitted that his deportation was an “administrative error,” and the White House has been disregarding a Supreme Court ruling to “facilitate” his return. Abrego Garcia’s case was both a human tragedy and an incipient constitutional crisis. His Kafkaesque predicament is a stark illustration of what it means to be stripped of the law’s protection, and thus a warning for us all.
But Abrego Garcia is not alone. America has sent hundreds of people to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, a mega-prison where inmates never have visitors or step outside and the lights are on 24 hours a day. Of all the men we’ve rendered to this hell, the one I can’t get out of my mind is Andry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela, sent to rot in El Salvador because the Trump administration claimed his tattoos link him to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. In photos he is slight, holding makeup brushes or posing with flowers or rainbow balloons. The photojournalist Philip Holsinger captured his arrival in El Salvador, where he sobbed and called out for his mother as guards shaved his head, introducing him to a life of total dehumanization.
This week, four Democratic members of Congress went to El Salvador to try to see Abrego Garcia, and while they were there, they sought proof of life for Hernández Romero. They didn’t get it. “No one has actually heard about Andry at all since the abduction, including his lawyers and family,” said Robert Garcia, a congressman from California. The Democrats obtained a promise from the American Embassy in El Salvador to check on Hernández Romero, but as of this writing, there’s been no update.
Hernández Romero’s case exemplifies the carelessness that has marked the Trump administration’s arrangement with El Salvador from the beginning. And it highlights the rapid transformation of America from a place of refuge for at least some victims of oppression to a place where noncitizens often seem to have no human rights at all.
Hernández Romero, who fled Venezuela in part because of the persecution he’d faced as a gay man, tried to come to America the right way. After making the grueling journey north, he was arrested the first time he attempted to get into the United States and sent back to Mexico. But there, he did what he should have done in the first place, downloading an app from Customs and Border Protection and making an appointment to claim asylum.
He passed a preliminary screening; officials found that he had credible fear of being persecuted if he returned home. During a physical exam, however, an officer flagged the crown tattoos he has on each wrist — one with the word “mom” and the other with the word “dad” — and he was sent to Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, run by the private prison company CoreCivic.
