Trump's concentration camp

New Republic - On the evening of March 15, 2025, while government lawyers haggled in a D.C. courtroom, three airplanes delivered 238 chained prisoners to the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador. Better known as CECOT, the center is little more than a twenty-first-century concentration camp, where conditions are tantamount to “torture,” in the words of a Salvadoran jurist. According to Kilmar Ábrego García, a U.S. resident who was sent there for three months in early 2025 as the result of an “administrative error,” inmates are subjected to “severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture.”

A grotesque abuse of human rights, the administration’s illegal deportations to CECOT caused a furor across the country. Despite the outrage, however, most elected officials remained silent. Republican lawmakers, perhaps unsurprisingly, either demurred or supported the president. Then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem visited the facility, posing in front of a cage brimming with prisoners while sporting a $50,000 watch.

More surprisingly, Democratic congressmen and senators largely stayed mum in the face of administrative evil. “Democrats cannot say a word, apparently,” ex-Republican Bill Kristol seethed on March 31, “without going through some filter of what pollsters have been telling you.” Of the 47 members of the Senate Democratic caucus, only a handful criticized the deportations (and in April, Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen visited Ábrego García in El Salvador). In May, a group of centrist senators introduced a milquetoast fact-finding bill—while deportees languished in the prison.

Their fecklessness was, unfortunately, not an anomaly. Despite Democrats’ eagerness to point out the economic missteps of Trump’s second term, the party’s leaders and most prominent figures rarely denounce its worst human rights violations (which have primarily targeted immigrants and trans people, two groups that most Democratic politicians avoid talking about like the plague).