As I began writing this, Trump was honoring President Nayib Bukele, who is likely the most popular leader in all of El Salvador. El Salvador has been in the news frequently due to the prison we are operating in collaboration with the Salvadoran government. When I started reading about him, in many ways, I thought I was reading about Trump or at least how Trump wants things to be. Since 2022, he has ruled under emergency powers that suspended key civil liberties, including due process. His security officers can make arrests without warrants, including minors as young as 12, and haul hundreds of suspects into mass trials. One in every 57 Salvadorans is now incarcerated; that is triple the rate of the United States and the highest in the world. Bukele’s allies have fired top judges and packed the courts with loyalists. As I was reading about El Salvador, I realized that there is nothing original about Trump and what he wants to do. He not only wants to be a ruler like Hitler but he also emulates a want-to-be dictator from one of those third world countries that he once called “shit hole countries”.

Before Bukele, the son of a Muslim cleric, went into politics, he was in advertising. He surely knew how to create an image. It has been said that he has branded himself as “the world’s coolest dictator” and a “philosopher king”. In his defense, when he became President, his country had the highest murder rate in the world, and much of it is from the Barrio 18 and the MS-13 gangs that were actually formed in the Los Angeles area by El Salvadoran civil war refugees who were eventually deported back to El Salvador. In El Salvador, the gangs grew in ranks by forcibly conscripting young people. Vast territories were controlled, and extortion and murder were the norm.  When he first became President, he brokered financial agreements with the gangs to keep the homicides down. Those deals were being investigated by the country's Attorney General, whom Bukele had removed. In 2022, his secret truce with the gangs fell apart, and 87 people were murdered in a single weekend.  Bukele’s response was to declare a 30-day “state of exception” restricting free assembly and permitting arrests without warrants and detention without trial. Using the military, they went into gang-controlled areas. Police would barge into homes and strip-search residents.  Suspected gang members were arrested at school, at work, and on the street. They were arresting 1000 people per day, as stated by their Defense Minister, Rene Merino. He used the fear of the gangs to give himself dictator-like power. One out of every ten people who were arrested was innocent.

If you examine what Trump and his administration are doing, you will notice a few similarities. Snatching people off the street without a warrant. No due process for those snatched. Trying to get into schools without a warrant to snatch children. Attacks against the integrity of the courts and defense attorneys who try to stop what I call madness. They have even threatened a sitting congresswoman for giving out advice on how to not allow warrantless searches. They are now openly defying the courts.

They are saying El Salvador will not return Kilmar Albrego Garcia, who was admittedly sent to the notorious maximum-security prison in El Salvador, even though the Supreme Court has ruled he must be returned. It wasn’t even a split decision; it was a unanimous decision with both Conservative and Liberal agreeing that Garcia be returned. That is what the burning of the Constitution looks like. Trump has broken his Oath of Office, and there can be no question of that now. If we truly were the Constitutional Republic that we say we are, Trump would be impeached and removed from office. Too much of Trump's illegal activity is being done with the silence and, in many cases, the approval of the Republican Party.

Trump does not believe in our Constitution, and he doesn’t believe in our Republic. He is not being held accountable by the body that has the authority to hold him accountable, and that is Congress. The only thing that I assume is that the Republicans, for the most part, do not believe in our Constitutional Republic either. If they did, they would not be sitting on the sidelines, letting Trump tear apart our nation and our Constitution. Trump is just a symptom of the Republicans' hate for our Constitution and our law. They are a party that is controlled by billionaires who think because they have the money, they should be the ones with the real power. 100 billionaires spent 2.6 billion dollars, with most of that money going to Republicans. To our founding fathers, nothing was more important than establishing this Constitutional Republic. It was more important than life itself, which probably would have been forfeited if we had lost our revolution. Today, many politicians are too afraid of losing their jobs and that cushy money from billionaires to do what is right.

In Trump's conversations with the El Salvadorian president, he stated that he wanted 5 more maximum prisons to be built in El Salvador. He wants to be able to send US citizens there without due process. What he wants is to be able to have masked officials that are like the Nazi SS troopers be able to abduct people off the streets, throw them on a plane and ship them to a maximum-security prison in a foreign country. We have seen that before in the history of the world, and they were called concentration camps. The prisons are on foreign soil to avoid our laws and our Constitution. Our founding fathers must be rolling over in their graves. This would be something worse than any president has done since the Trail of Tears and our treatment of the Native Americans. The Japanese internment camps were wrong, very wrong, but not as wrong as people being rounded up by masked men and put in concentration camps on foreign soil. These would wind up being death camps for too many.

I am all for deporting people who shouldn’t be here, but I expect our government to be able to treat these people with the basic dignity that any human being deserves. I don’t mind immigrants who commit a crime being arrested and tried just like anyone would expect, and after they serve their punishment, deported. 80 percent of the people who have been sent to El Salvador have no criminal record or have committed no crime. There has been no due process, and in a few cases were here legally. We are now becoming that shit hole third world country that Trump complained about.

 

 

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