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TRUMP HARVESTS AUTOCRATIC POWERS PLANTED BY BUSH AND CHENEY  
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Rebecca Gordon
April 20, 2025
TomDispatch

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_ Sending people to another country didn't start with Donald Trump,
but with George W. Bush in the War on Terror, called "extraordinary
rendition." “Extraordinary” when it occurs outside of normal legal
strictures, as with Abrego García today. _

President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Chaney and Donald
Rumsfeld, U.S. Defense Secretary, Dec. 15, 2006 picture., Dept. of
Defense photo by Staff Sgt. D. Myles Cullen / Public Domain Media

 

In 2003, the Macedonian police arrested Khaled el-Masri, a German
citizen vacationing in their country. They handed the unfortunate man
over to the CIA, who shipped him off to one of their “black sites
[[link removed]].” For those too young to
remember (or who have quite understandably chosen to forget), “black
sites” was the name given to clandestine CIA detention centers
around the world, where that agency held incommunicado and tortured
men captured in what was then known as the Global War on Terror. The
black site in this case was the notorious Salt Pit in Afghanistan.
There el-Masri was, among other things, beaten, anally raped, and
threatened with a gun held to his head. After four months he was
dumped on a rural road in Albania.

It seems that the CIA had finally realized that they had arrested the
wrong man. They wanted some _other _Khalid el-Masri, thought to be
an al-Qaeda associate, and not, as Amy Davidson wrote
[[link removed]] in
the _New Yorker_, that “car salesman from Bavaria.”

El-Masri was not the only person that representatives of the
administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney mistakenly sent off to another country to be tortured. In an
infamous case of mistaken arrest, a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar
[[link removed]] was detained by the FBI at
JFK Airport in New York while on his way home from a vacation in
Tunisia. He was then held in solitary confinement for two weeks in the
United States, while being denied contact with a lawyer before
ultimately being shipped off to Syria. There, he would be tortured for
almost a year until the Canadian government finally secured his
release.

AN “ADMINISTRATIVE ERROR”

I was reminded of such instances of “extraordinary rendition” in
the Bush-Cheney era when I read about the Trump administration’s
March 2025 deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego García to a grim
prison in El Salvador. Because of threats against him and his family
from Barrio 18, a vicious Salvadoran gang, Abrego García had fled
[[link removed]] that
country as a young teenager. He entered the U.S. without papers in
2011 to join his older brother, already a U.S. citizen.

He was arrested in 2019, while seeking work as a day laborer outside a
Home Depot store and handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE), which accused him of being a member of another
Salvadoran gang, MS-13. This proved a false claim, as the immigration
judge who heard his case agreed. While not granting Abrego García
asylum, the judge assigned him a status — “withholding from
removal” — which kept him safe in this country, because he faced
the possibility of torture or other violence in his homeland. That
status allowed him to work legally here. He married a U.S. citizen and
they have three children who are also U.S. citizens.

Then, on March 12, 2025, on his way home from his job as a sheet-metal
apprentice, he was suddenly stopped by ICE agents and arrested. They
told him his status had been revoked (which wasn’t true) and
promptly shipped him to various detention centers around the country.
Ultimately, he was deported to El Salvador without benefit of legal
assistance or a hearing before an immigration judge. As far as is
known, he is now incarcerated at CECOT
[[link removed]], the
Center for the Confinement of Terrorists, a Salvadoran prison
notorious for the ill treatment and torture of its inmates. While
built for 40,000 prisoners, it now houses many more in perpetually
illuminated cells, each crammed with more than 100 prisoners (leaving
about 6.5 square feet of space for each man. It is considered
[[link removed]] “one
of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere” with
“some of the most inhumane and squalid conditions known in any
carceral system.” Furthermore, among the gangs reported to have a
substantial presence at CECOT is Barrio 18, the very crew Abrego
García fled El Salvador to escape so many years ago.

The Trump Justice Department has now admitted that they made an
“administrative error” in deporting him but have so far refused to
bring him home. Responding to a Supreme Court ruling
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that the government facilitate his return, the Justice Department on
April 12th finally acknowledged
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the D.C. district court that he “is currently being held in the
Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.” Its statement
continued: “He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained
pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.” On
April 14, 2025, in contemptuous defiance of the supreme court,
President Trump and his Salvadoran counterpart Nayib Bukele made it
clear 
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reporters that Abrego García will not be returning to the United
States. 

 

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Previously, the government’s spokesman, Michael G. Kozak, who
identified himself in the filing as a “Senior Bureau Official” in
the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, had
failed to comply with the rest of Judge Paula Xinis’s order: to
identify what steps the administration is (or isn’t) taking to get
him released. The judge has insisted that the department provide daily
updates on its efforts to get him home, which it has failed to do. Its
statement that Abrego García “is detained pursuant to the
sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador” suggests officials
intend to argue that — despite paying the Salvadoran government a
reported six million dollars
[[link removed]] for
its prison services — the United States has no influence over
Salvadoran actions. We can only hope that he really is still alive.
The Trump administration’s truth-telling record is not exactly
encouraging.

EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION

The technical term for such detainee transfers is “extraordinary
rendition.” “Rendition” involves sending a prisoner to another
country to be interrogated, imprisoned, and even possibly tortured.
Rendition becomes “extraordinary” when it occurs outside of normal
legal strictures, as with the cases of el-Masri and Ahar decades ago,,
and Abrego García today. Extraordinary rendition violates the United
Nations Convention Against Torture, which explicitly prohibits sending
someone to another country to be mistreated or tortured. It also
violates U.S. anti-torture laws. As countless
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[[link removed]] Trump
administration acts demonstrate
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however, illegality is no longer a barrier of any sort to whatever its
officials want to do.

Two other flights left for El Salvador on the day Abrego García was
rendered. They contained almost 200 people accused of being members of
a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, and were similarly deported under
the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 without any hearings. Are they actually
gang members? No one knows, although it seems likely that at least
some of them aren’t. Jerce Reyes Barrios
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for example, was a Venezuelan soccer coach who sought asylum in the
U.S. and whose tattoo, celebrating the famous Spanish soccer team
Royal Madrid, was claimed to be evidence enough of his gang membership
and the excuse for his deportation.

Andry José Hernández Romero is another unlikely gang member. He’s
a gay makeup artist
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entered the United States last August to keep a pre-arranged asylum
appointment. Instead, he was arrested and held in detention until the
Tren de Aragua flights in March. The proof of his gang membership? His
“Tres Reyes” or “Three Kings” tattoos that were common in his
hometown in Venezuela.

In fact, all 200 or so deportees on those flights have been illegally
rendered to El Salvador in blatant defiance
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a judge’s court order to stop them or return those already in the
air. None of those men received any sort of due process before being
shipped off to a Salvadoran hellhole. In response, Salvadoran
President Nayib Bukele tweeted
[[link removed]], “Oopsie…
Too late” with a laughing-face emoji.

Even U.S. citizens are at risk of incarceration at CECOT. After
Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with President Bukele, the State
Department’s website praised
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“extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country,” an
offer “to house in his jails dangerous American criminals, including
U.S. citizens and legal residents.” Trump reiterated
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interest in shipping “homegrown criminals” to El Salvador during
his press conference with Bukele. As former federal prosecutor Joyce
Vance has observed
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“If it can happen to Abrego Garcia, it can happen to any of us.”

IT DIDN’T START WITH TRUMP

It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a _sui
generis_ reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s
willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity
didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is
harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President
George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror
years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the
hastily-passed Patriot Act
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government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland
Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one
whose existence we now take for granted.

As I wrote more than a decade ago, after September 11th, torture went
“mainstream
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in the United States. The Bush administration cultivated an
understandable American fear of terrorism to justify abrogating what,
until then, had been a settled consensus in this country: that torture
is both wrong and illegal. In the face of a new enemy, al-Qaeda
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that the requirements for decent treatment of wartime detainees
outlined in the Geneva Conventions had been rendered
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Apparently, wartime rights granted even to Nazi prisoners of war
during World War II were too risky to extend to that new foe.

In those days of “enhanced interrogation
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I was already arguing that accepting such lawless behavior could well
become an American habit. We might gradually learn, I suggested, to
put up with any government measures as long as they theoretically kept
us safe. And that indeed was the Bush administration’s promise: Let
us do whatever we need to, over there on the “dark side
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and in return we promise to always keep you safe. In essence, the
message was: there will be no more terrorist attacks if you allow us
to torture people.

The very fact that they were willing to torture prisoners was proof
that those people must deserve it — even though, as we now know,
many of them had nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda
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the September 11th attacks. (And even if they had been involved, no
one, not even a terrorist, deserves to be tortured.)

If you’re too young to remember (or have been lucky enough to
forget), you can click here
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or here
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or here
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the grisly details of what the war on terror did to its victims.

The constant thrill of what some have called security theater
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for new enemies and so set the stage for the second set of Trump years
that we now find ourselves in. We still encounter this theater of the
absurd every time we stand in line at an airport, unpacking our
computers, removing our shoes
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our liquids into quart-sized baggies — all to reinforce the idea
that we are in terrible danger and that the government will indeed
protect us.

Sadly, all too many of us became inured to the idea that prisoners
could be sent to that infamous offshore prison of injustice
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Cuba, perhaps never to be released. (Indeed, as of January 2025, of
the hundreds of people incarcerated there over the years, 15 war on
terror prisoners still remain
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should perhaps be no surprise, then, that the second time around,
Donald Trump seized on Guantánamo
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a possible place to house the immigrants he sought to deport from this
country. After all, so many of us were already used to thinking of
anybody sent there as the worst of the worst
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human.

Dehumanizing the targets
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institutionalized mistreatment and torture proved to be both the
pretext for and a product of the process. Every torture regime
develops a dehumanizing language for those it identifies as legitimate
targets. For example, the torturers employed by the followers of
Augusto Pinochet, who led Chile’s 1973 military coup, typically
called their targets “humanoids” (to distinguish them from actual
human beings).

For the same reason, the Israel Defense Forces now refer to just about
anyone they kill in Gaza or on the West Bank as a “terrorist.” And
the successful conflation of “Palestinian” with “terrorist”
was all it took for some Americans to embrace Donald
Trump’s suggestion
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Gaza should be cleared of its people and turned into the “Riviera of
the Middle East” for Israelis, Americans, and foreign tourists.

Trump’s representatives have used the same kind of language to
describe people they are sending to that prison in El Salvador. His
press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, referred to them
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“heinous monsters,” which is in keeping with Trump’s own
description of his political opponents as inhuman “vermin.” At a
rally in New Hampshire in 2023, Trump told
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crowd, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists,
Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin
within the confines of our country.” Here he was talking not only
about immigrants, but about U.S. citizens as well.

After years of security theater, all too many Americans seem ready to
accept Trump’s pledge to root out the vermin.

IT CAN HAPPEN TO YOU

One difference between the Bush-Cheney years and the Trump ones is
that the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented a genuine and
horrific emergency. Trump’s version of such an emergency, on the
other hand, is entirely Trumped-up. He posits nothing short of an
immigration “invasion” — in effect, a permanent 9/11 — that
“has caused widespread chaos and suffering in our country over the
last 4 years.” Or so his executive order “Declaring a National
Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States” insists
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To justify illegally deporting alleged members of Tren de Aragua and,
in the future (if he has his way), many others, he has invented a
totally imaginary war so that he can invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies
Act
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which was last used during World War II to justify the otherwise
unjustifiable internment of another group of dehumanized people in
this country: Japanese-Americans.

Donald Trump has his very own “black site” now. Remember that El
Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is perfectly willing to receive U.S.
citizens, too, as prisoners in his country. Supreme Court Justice
Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Jackson,
made that point in a statement that accompanied that court’s recent
order requiring the Trump administration to facilitate Kilmar Abrego
García’s return to the United States. They wrote
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“The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport
and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal
consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

As the justices remind us, it _can_ happen here. It _can _happen
to you.

_[REBECCA GORDON, a TomDispatch regular
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taught for many years in the philosophy department at the University
of San Francisco. Now, semi-retired from teaching, she continues to be
an activist in her faculty union. She is the author of Mainstreaming
Torture
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and American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for
Post-9/11 War Crimes
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_Copyright 2025 Rebecca Gordon._

_Cross-posted with permission. May not be reprinted without permission
from TomDispatch [[link removed]]._

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* Abrego Garcia
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* Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia
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* Torture
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* Torture Crimes
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* rendition
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* War on Terror
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* George W. Bush
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* Dick Chaney
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* Donald Rumsfeld
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* extraordinary rendition
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* United Nations Convention Against Torture
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* administrative error
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* rule of law
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* El Salvador
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* Black sites
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* Immigrants
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* immigration rights
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