Photo: Marvin Recinos/AFP/Getty Images
Like Donald Trump, Nayib Bukele ran for president by vowing to use extreme methods to punish those he deems terrorists. Though the murder rate in El Salvador had already fallen by half in the three years before he took office, the country elected Bukele in 2019 to combat the widespread extortion and gang violence that remained. Subsequent decreases in crime may have been due more to the secret deal he reportedly cut with the gangs he denounces as terrorists, such as MS-13, than to his police-state tactics. Nevertheless, in March 2022, he suspended due process by pressing for a monthlong state of emergency, which has since been extended dozens of times by the legislature. Meanwhile, Bukele built something of a monument to his repressive approach.
CECOT, short for the Terrorism Confinement Center, opened in 2023 and is now believed to have a capacity of 40,000 prisoners. Most Americans first learned of it due to the 238 Venezuelan men the U.S. deported there and the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. According to the human-rights organization Cristosal, hundreds of people have died in El Salvadoran prisons under Bukele, who proudly calls himself “the world’s coolest dictator.” Indeed, the punishment of detainees directly furthers his power as a strongman.
In this way, and others, CECOT qualifies not only as a prison but a concentration camp. That might be a shocking allegation given the term’s association with Nazis, but as the author of a global history of concentration camps, I would comfortably count CECOT as one. What’s more, they tend to take on a life of their own.
When most people think of concentration camps, they think of Auschwitz or other death camps of the Holocaust. The Nazis created those extermination camps in the middle of World War II, and their existence — as well as the millions of murders committed in them in pursuit of the Final Solution — remains a singular stain on human history. But outposts of the preexisting Nazi concentration-camp system, such as Dachau, were built as early as 1933 for a different purpose: to intimidate and punish political opponents. Other comparable systems elsewhere around the world, such as the Soviet Gulag, existed prior to the Nazi camps, and it’s these camps from before and after the Holocaust that offer a clearer comparison for what we’re seeing at CECOT.
The defining characteristic of any concentration camp is one that detains civilians en masse without due process on the basis of race, ethnicity, or supposed affiliation, rather than for any crime an individual has committed. Governments use them for political ends, to gather and keep power. Detention is typically open-ended — even where there’s a sentence, it might be honored but can just as easily be extended. Whatever the existing legal system in the country, concentration camps exist as an end run around that structure, allowing a kind of detention to happen that’s otherwise not possible.
CECOT qualifies on each of these counts. Human Rights Watch says prisoners are reported to have no trials or show trials where “groups of several hundred detainees” are sentenced simultaneously. The government suggests detainees “will never leave” and categorizes them as “terrorists.” It was built for Bukele’s purposes, which now align with Trump’s own authoritarian interests. So far, the U.S. has approved $15 million to be spent on detention in El Salvador, with a little less than $5 million already paid out. Along with Venezuelan detainees, Bukele reportedly had a strong interest in the return of specific MS-13 gang members in U.S. custody, including at least one who was due to face trial here and could potentially have revealed details of any clandestine deals.
The new partnership between Trump and Bukele — and CECOT’s new role — is an example of how extrajudicial detention tends to warp over time, as oppressive governments innovate new methods of harm. Auschwitz, in Poland, was a regular part of the Nazi concentration-camp system before the death camp Birkenau rose on its grounds. Guantanamo Bay became a U.S. site of torture and indefinite detention decades after it started as an immigrant detention facility to intercept Haitian and Cuban refugees from getting asylum on Florida’s shores. In the United States, many ICE tactics now shocking the public are simply more brazen or visible versions of those used for years against vulnerable groups, such as officers in balaclavas refusing to identify themselves while kidnapping legal residents off U.S. streets. Detainees have long been taken far from where they live to detention in Louisiana, guaranteeing hearings in an unsympathetic court and reducing attorney access to clients, as recently happened to Mahmoud Khalil. Conditions in these facilities are often inhumane: At Miami’s overcrowded Krome Detention Center, two men, ages 29 and 44, have already died this year.
What’s happening in El Salvador represents a degradation and expansion of prior models of legally questionable U.S. detention. And it’s not just El Salvador. In February, more than 100 asylum seekers from countries to which it would be difficult or illegal to return them were deported from the U.S. to Panama, where they were held in a dilapidated remote camp. Earlier this month, State Department cables published by The Handbasket revealed that a refugee from Iraq became the first person to be officially deported to Rwanda under a new agreement with Washington. More detentions are expected. In the month since the deportation of makeup artist Andry Hernández Romero, no one has been able to contact him — he has been effectively disappeared. When a federal judge in New York extended a temporary restraining order keeping more people from being sent to CECOT, he described the threat of cruel and unusual punishment there, writing, “This is not the Inquisition, it’s not medieval times.”
Photo: Laski Diffusion/Getty Images
U.S. partnership with dictators in South America is hardly new. Under the mantle of national security during the Cold War, the Nixon administration promoted right-wing coup attempts, and a group of South American dictatorships collaborated on a project known as Operation Condor with U.S. support that lasted from 1975 into the early 1980s. In some cases, participating countries took dissidents who had escaped their home country, forcibly returning them. In other cases, they disappeared refugees, imprisoning or torturing those deemed “terrorists” for the benefit of one of the partner nations. In El Salvador, the Reagan administration heavily supported the paramilitary death squads and dictatorship that terrorized left-wing political opponents. Young men fleeing the violence wound up forming MS-13 in Los Angeles, later facing deportation back to El Salvador and seeding gang conflict there.
Back then, the U.S. tried to keep its support for death squads and juntas secret. Today, the friendship between the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” and the president who promised he would be “dictator on day one” is very much public.
Any kind of detention can be a dark security theater, a show put on to intimidate one group while reassuring another. This is especially true of concentration camps, which are more flexible, more mysterious, and more dangerous than prisons in terms of their end point, which reinforces the power of the government. To be clear, the U.S. government’s charges of “terrorism” appear to be spurious. Multiple outlets have reported that 75 percent or more of those deported under the Alien Enemies Act have no criminal convictions. In the case of a man identified only as Cristian, a Venezuelan accused of being a gang member and sent to El Salvador, Maryland federal judge Stephanie Gallagher said in late April that the government has “provided no evidence, or even any specific allegations” that would suggest detainees pose any threat to public safety. Tren de Aragua and MS-13 are actual gangs whose crimes need to be addressed in real ways, but that’s not what the administration is doing by outsourcing U.S. migrant detention to CECOT.
One likely reason that Trump’s team has resorted to such high-profile spectacle is because the administration hasn’t yet been able to make progress on the campaign promise that was core to winning the presidency: massive deportations on a previously unimaginable scale. A lack of cooperation from state and local authorities, plus popular education campaigns, have made it harder for ICE to arrest people. Hiring new agents and expanding detention capacity might take years. And despite the campaign rhetoric, the machinery for detention and deportation of immigrants has been chugging along without mercy for decades.
The long American history of exploiting detainees and victims in images, from lynching parties to Afghanistan, is just one part of a global tradition of posing prisoners in humiliating ways. Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem recently went to El Salvador to pose for publicity photos in front of cells filled with detainees, as have Republican politicians. The photo ops enable Trump to cosplay dictatorial power in a new, dramatic way impossible a few months ago. This kind of posturing around detention reinforces the political value of camps, forges loyalty to him, and normalizes authoritarian tactics nationwide. Of course there are prior examples of documenting abuse or abusive conditions: video recordings of interrogations of detainees rendered to black sites around the world for torture during the Bush administration, as well as war-crime-style selfies from Abu Ghraib. But the kind of illicit actions that would previously be secret are now being celebrated joyfully, as public-relations stunts.
Regimes willing to install concentration camps do not typically close them willingly. The bureaucracy of detention has its own institutional momentum and becomes hard to stop, as seen by its persistence for decades in places like North Korea and China. My research has found that extrajudicial detention is stopped by defeat in war, by the death of a demagogue, by independent judges, or by popular uprising — but rarely by the leader who started it.
In the U.S., this kind of detention is eminently stoppable on paper, and public approval for Trump’s handling of immigration turned negative this month. Courts already seem to be hitting back hard on the administration’s extralegal tactics. However, the Venezuelan detainees were flown to El Salvador in March despite Judge James Boasberg’s spoken order to turn the planes around. The Trump administration appears more than willing to defy the courts, if they believe they can get away with it.
It may have been galling to see Bukele and Trump at the White House acting as if there’s nothing they can do to help Kilmar Abrego Garcia, because they obviously have the ability to release him back to his family at any point. But when they pretend that events have been set into motion they can’t control, as if the power of CECOT itself is somehow greater than the power of either man, given the history of concentration camps, they might just be more right than we’d like to imagine.
