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Next Comes What
Trump's Intolerable Acts
00:32:40
By sending immigrants to a gulag in El Salvador, Trump is trying to seize the power to silence any American he wants. Read the post that inspired this episode: Subscribe to Andrea Pitzer’s Degenerate Art newsletter to support Next...
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- [00:00]
Andrea Pitzer
You're listening to Next comes what from Degenerate Art. This is Andrea Pitzer. Be sure to subscribe@Andrea pitzer.com so this podcast can remain free for everyone. I'd been planning on talking about antisemitism today in the wake of the arsonist who set fire to the governor's mansion in Pennsylvania. And it was only hours after he and his family had been observing Passover Seder there, two days after a fire ripped through the governor's mansion in Harrisburg. There's heartache among Jews in Pittsburgh, including Rabbi Jeffrey Myers and his congregants, who experienced the worst anti Semitic attack in US history at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. It seems even more important to bundle up the many aspects of antisemitism, how it's still affecting lives around the world today and how it's being used as a weapon. Clearly we can see that this is H motivated. Rabbi Meyers doesn't like to use that H word which state police use to describe the suspect's feelings about Governor Shapiro. However, given events of recent days, I want to address head on, something that I've talked about a little before in pieces and is definitely in the news. But it's really becoming extraordinarily urgent and it's something I think we'll have to deal with as a country in very short order if we want to be able to get out of the mess we're in anytime soon. The worsening situation that Trump has created in El Salvador with the enthusiastic help of its current president, Nayib Bukele, is as grave a threat that the country has faced, as grave a threat as has happened in my lifetime so far. Hundreds of men have been sent from the United States to be detained in the SIKOT facility there under nightmare conditions. It's like an industrialized form of prison making right super new built up lights on all the time. But the problem is not only the way in which the prison is constructed, but because of Bukele and basically de facto martial law in El Salvador. When you are put in that prison, you have no due process, you have no visitors. Amy no visitors. Yesterday the two presidents celebrated their project in the White House despite court orders to remedy the error that the government admitted by sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to secot.
- [02:44]
Donald Trump
That's up to El Salvador. If they want to return him, that's not up to us. The Supreme Court ruled President that if as El Salvador wants to return, this is international matters, foreign affairs. If they wanted to return him, we would facilitate it Meaning provide a plane.
- [03:01]
Andrea Pitzer
Abrego Garcia has been a Maryland resident of more than a decade, and by law, the government was specifically not allowed to deport him to El Salvador.
- [03:11]
Donald Trump
By the way, I took my cognitive exam as part of my physical exam, and I got the highest mark. And one of the doctors said, sir, I've never seen anybody get that kind of. That was the highest mark. I hope you're happy with that.
- [03:25]
Andrea Pitzer
They have been sending men there specifically because of the horrific reputation of the facility. And on Monday, Trump briefly referenced a plan to send more homegrown detainees there.
- [03:39]
Donald Trump
Home growns are next. The homegrowns. You got to build about five more places. Yeah, that's big, all right.
- [03:49]
Andrea Pitzer
Meaning US Citizens is at least how most news organizations seem to have interpreted. And today I want to address the clean through line between the Nazi era to tactics from the war on terror and how those techniques have been embraced around the world for use on immigrants today. I'll explore the history of these kinds of international renditions, look at the US Involvement with them, and talk about why this is such a dangerous moment. And as always, at the end, I will make suggestions about what you can do to take action. I'll start with some of the events that I covered in One Long Night, my book about concentration camps around the world. Many people have noted in recent days that Nazi concentration camp systems, particularly in the Final Solution Holocaust stage, when they were creating death camps, factories of execution, have some commonalities with what is going on today.
- [04:53]
Donald Trump
I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive. Kilmar, if you can hear me, stay strong.
- [05:07]
Andrea Pitzer
God hasn't forgotten about you. Just to recap that some 76,000 French Jews, more than 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported from occupied countries eastward to their deaths in the Nazi era. And the list of other countries that also face deportations could go on and on. We were grounded up and taken to the nearest railway crossing. I remember screaming babies and kids crying. My two little sisters being hovered over by my mother. I remember that very vividly. The Nazis also used Hitler's night and fog decree in occupied territories during World War II against those who weren't German citizens. It was a way to intimidate resistance movements. A common question when we're studying about the Holocaust is why the Jews resist. But they did. The real question must be, how was it possible for them to resist? They essentially kidnapped people, often under cover of night, and disappeared them frequently to faraway places, refusing to tell families or anyone else about where they were, leaving families uncertain if their loved ones who vanished were alive or dead. The deportations were a turning point. Those who had managed to survive them had experienced a shattering trauma. Most gradually understood that no one was safe. These disappearances were meant to instill terror, and they were effective. The tactics became a hallmark of several ostensible democracies after World War II. The French were perhaps the first to adopt them wholesale a decade after the Nazis defeat. Not just using the night and fog tactics, but adding a new flourish to them by loading interrogated suspects onto helicopters and dumping their bodies out over open water during death flights. In 2018, France admitted that during the war, France passed laws which allowed forces to detain suspect and systematically torture them. The torture included waterboarding, electrical shocks, being buried alive, being thrown from helicopters and fractional Falten Reik. These disappearances would remain an ongoing method of state terror, with between 7,000 and 20,000 vanishing during the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s. So even after independence, the techniques remained. These measures inspired governments under dictatorship in Chile and Argentina and elsewhere to use similar tactics.
- [07:52]
Unnamed Expert
This was the period of the Cold War. Latin America as a region cell in the sphere of influence of the US and so anyone that was perceived to be part of the Communist Party, even Socialist Party, was then perceived as trying to subvert the socioeconomic models that these countries were adopting.
- [08:15]
Andrea Pitzer
In the collaborative dictatorships among several countries in the Southern cone during what was known as Operation condor in the 70s.
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Unnamed Expert
And 80s, Operation Condor was a system of exchan of information. But it did go beyond to also include joint operations by Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay to physically arrest, imprison, torture and murder some of these political exiles to basically send a clear message to exiles and refugees that wherever you go, you are not going to be safe.
- [08:57]
Andrea Pitzer
Officials might kidnap and torture those who had escaped threats to their life in their home country, or even deport them home for extrajudicial murder.
- [09:06]
Unnamed Expert
There was a broader effect in creating terror, even to people that were bystanders.
- [09:12]
Andrea Pitzer
But we don't have to look back to overseas examples from decades ago to see this same pattern of inflicting terror via rendition and disappearance. We tortured some folks in this century. These tools of state terror have become widely used by governments for two purposes. In fighting what has been called the War on Terror and in dealing with.
- [09:35]
Unnamed Politician
Immigration, we did some things that were contrary to our values.
- [09:44]
Andrea Pitzer
After the first World Trade center bombing attempt in 1993, government targeting of Muslims began in earnest. And after 9 11, these kinds of measures exploded at home in the US and abroad. Under President George W. Bush, we set up black sites around the world for detention, rendition, and torture, including pressuring our allies to create extrajudicial detention and interrogation facilities for us.
- [10:15]
Donald Trump
Cheney wants suspected terrorists, enemies of the.
- [10:18]
Andrea Pitzer
United States, to be held as far.
- [10:21]
Donald Trump
As possible from civilian courts and as far as possible from thick rule books.
- [10:26]
Andrea Pitzer
And precedents under the Uniform Code of military justice. In January 2002, we ourselves most famously launched Gitmo as an offshore site for the same kind of tactics, where we also hoped to hold show trials that would administer rough justice. President Bush has signed an order approving the use of a special military tribunal. It was only the latest of a series of dramatic changes. As I've talked about in prior episodes, it was the mass detention of what were seen as undesirable immigrants fleeing authoritarian or military rule. Andrea Pitzer joins us now from Washington, D.C. andrea, welcome back to Democracy Now. History lesson started as a detention camp for immigrants. Explain. In the early 1990s, there were tens of thousands of people in all of refugees from Haiti and from Cuba that were heading toward Florida. And the US did not want to let them touch down, which would make their asylum claims much stronger. And I'll come back to that in a minute. But meanwhile, the US Example in the War on Terror fostered horrific copycat tactics among countries that had their own histories of extrajudicial detention and rendition. Biryam Muhammad was tortured in Morocco with questions and intelligence provided by the United Kingdom. A prisoner whose codename was Cuckoo was transferred by the CIA to Egypt, where British agency MI5 collaborated in supplying questions for interrogators and in getting reports based on the answers that the detainee gave. During that time, the Bush administration tried to argue that U.S. citizens whom the government named as enemy combatants could be held indefinitely. American citizens being held solely on the order of the president.
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Donald Trump
In South Carolina, Jose Padilla.
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Unnamed Politician
In Virginia, Yasser Hamdi.
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Donald Trump
Both were being held in solitary conflict confinement with no access to lawyers.
- [12:30]
Andrea Pitzer
But the Supreme Court ruled against that idea in 2004. Within months of taking office, President Barack Obama put a stop to the renditions and the torture from the prior Bush years. But critically, he himself did not call for and the Department of Justice under him did not prosecute those who had authorized the torture program or the use of black sites in the war on terror.
- [12:59]
Unnamed Politician
I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.
- [13:09]
Andrea Pitzer
Here we come to a pivot point.
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Unnamed Politician
My general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future as opposed to looking.
- [13:22]
Andrea Pitzer
At what we got wrong simultaneously. Obama soon earned the nickname deporter in chief.
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Donald Trump
The Obama administration has deported more than the sum of all the US presidents.
- [13:32]
Andrea Pitzer
Of the 20th century and kept the door open on abusive treatment of immigrants that had happened under his predecessors, both Republican and Democratic presidents.
- [13:42]
Unnamed Politician
So my hope is, is that after the election, when the number one goal is no longer beating me, but hopefully the number one goal is solving the country's problems. If they have seen that people who care about this issue have turned out in strong numbers, that they will rethink it, if not because it's the right thing to do, at least because it's in their political interest to do so.
- [14:08]
Andrea Pitzer
Even as detainees in the war on terror were compensated in Europe for the kidnapping and torture they had faced there, War on terror tactics did not end around the globe as the threat from terrorism faded somewhat. But the number of refugees from a Middle east destabilized by the US War in Iraq and the Syrian civil war, Western nations, and some other ones, too, began to apply the same toolbox in response, as if immigration were somehow equivalent to terrorism. Countries used similar strategies of detaining people and moving them far from where they might have legal recourse, effectively disappearing them into a system, into conditions that were overcrowded and prone to physical and sexual assault. Deportations to third countries who were willing to play along for pay became part of the global approach. And an underlying aspect of all this was made possible, of course, by. By the interaction of domestic culture in each country and international trends. The cruel and omnipresent use of prisons against people of color in America and the local detention tactics and traditions in other countries fused in each case with these global evolutions and development. A more extreme toolkit of war on terror tactics began to be applied to the usual suspects in the US Brown and black people, in the name of policing or of defending national sovereignty against refugees, economic migrants and asylum seekers, as if somehow they were the 911 hijackers flying into buildings since September 11th. Now we have DHS writing grants to police departments across the country to buy yet more equipment in the name of fighting the war on terrorists. And, you know, they're going to places like Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to intercept refugees arriving by sea. In Australia in 2001, the Australian government paid for migrants to be diverted and housed in the Manus Regional Processing center in Papua New guinea. And another center rose up on the island nation of Nauru.
- [16:25]
Donald Trump
The facilities are closely guarded and access is rare, but Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch managed to get into the offshore camps last month and have documented accusations of severe abuse. The report says the Australian government's failure to address serious abuses appears to be a deliberate policy to deter further asylum seekers from arriving.
- [16:46]
Andrea Pitzer
European countries have likewise funded migrant detention in nearly a dozen countries overseas in hopes of keeping refugees from ever arriving on their shores. And there are many examples of war on terror tactics being used around the world in these facilities and in other ones. But I'm focusing mostly on states that have claimed the mantle of democracies for themselves or who have had a key role in the war on terror or international immigration policy. The United States is a country with the most resources in the world, as well as tremendous open space and an economy very much dependent on migrants. It's a country with the capability to navigate the ebbs and flows of sometimes difficult policies required by mass immigration. But we have consistently turned our backs on the possibilities of rational immigration policy discourse. Instead, it's the US that has doubled down on all this punishment centered approach to immigration in the last decade, with a vindictive immigration bill in Congress gaining bipartisan support just last year in 2024. However, as with everything, Donald Trump can take an existing situation and make it worse. Unwilling to have even a draconian bill passed while Biden was still president, and to give him any credit for taking action on Trump's signature issue, then candidate Trump forbade Republicans from supporting the bill.
- [18:23]
Donald Trump
A lot of the senators are trying to say respectfully, they're blaming it on me. I that's okay, Please blame it on me, please.
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Andrea Pitzer
In his first administration, Trump used family separations to terrify immigrants crossing the border. The Trump administration's zero tolerance policy led to the separation of up to 5,500 children from their parents, mostly from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, as they sought asylum at the U. S. Mexico border. To this day, over a thousand children are still separated from their families. Just three months into this, his second administration, Trump is mainlining more openly violent tactics and strategies designed to do more and more direct harm. He has pushed agreements with third countries to accept deported immigrants and has now weaponized those agreements to allow for the indefinite detention in gulag conditions of those deported, claiming they're criminals. Though reporting from more than one source shows that as many as 70 to 90% of those sent appear to have no criminal record, he is defying the US Court system to inflict these extrajudicial punishments. And as many people have noted this week, these issues are the very basis of most legal traditions in the United States. They go back to the very founding of the country, due process. You may be familiar with the term, since it's an integral part of American judicial philosophy, not to mention the Bill of Rights. In fact, it's the only command in the Constitution stated twice and a key grievance that US Colonists had against the king when they wrote the Declaration of Independence. The king they admonished for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.
- [20:16]
Donald Trump
Hey, excuse me, Senator Grassley. On that same subject, the Constitution, the framers of the Constitution, said that every person, not citizen, every person within the jurisdiction of the United States has due process. And we would like to know what you, as the people, the Congress, who are supposed to reign in this dictator, what are you going to do about these people have been sentenced to life imprisonment in a foreign country with no due process.
- [21:00]
Andrea Pitzer
The American Revolution was fought over these matters, but that didn't keep the United States from taking similar actions, whether it be condemning whole indigenous peoples to misery and exile or passing the Fugitive Slave act, requiring states to support the capture and return of enslaved people who'd managed to escape to the North. Trump's actions as president may have consequences on the same scale that tore the country apart in the 19th century with the Civil war. They are certainly just as grave. The detainees he sent to El Salvador were people already in the US who had constitutional protections for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses from the Declaration of Independence implies that even with an invented offense, some real charge existed, as well as a penalty that might be judged at trial. But with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration has taken a US Resident accused of no concrete crime, just some piece of discredited hearsay. It has skipped any actual charge and eliminated any requirement whatsoever for trial before confinement. The current administration is also checking several concentration camp boxes with this kind of detention.
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Donald Trump
Pitzer writes, quote, while writing a book.
- [22:33]
Andrea Pitzer
On camp history, I defined concentration camps as the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, national origin, citizenship, or political party, rather than anything a given individual has done. One they're working, as camp systems always do, outside the established legal system.
- [22:55]
Donald Trump
Due process is a pillar that this country was one of the pillars this country was founded on. It's actually one of the things that does actually make America great. Our union is founded on due process. We want our brother Kilmar to come back and get his due process Secondly.
- [23:16]
Andrea Pitzer
Trump's allies are also removing people from society arbitrarily, often on the basis of race or ethnicity. The original Korematsu case from World War II, when Japanese Americans were interned, it was done on just the same basis. The judges argued at the time it was not solely because of race, but in retrospect, of course, it was obvious that it was. In the case of El Salvador, more than 100 of the detainees are Venezuelan. Thirdly, the very nature of the detention is indefinite. Fourth, it combines concentration camp style detention with exile.
- [23:53]
Donald Trump
Can anyone here tell me what would happen to the illegal alien from El Salvador if you came back to the United States? Does anyone here know? Does anyone want to guess anything? He could be with his family. What did any of you know the answer to the question legally, what would happen if he came back here? Does any of you know anything? Do you really believe the Supreme Court. I'm talking. Do you really believe the Supreme Court. I'm talking now. Doesn't think he should be determined? Why was it unanimous? You're done.
- [24:17]
Andrea Pitzer
This kind of detention has no ending. It is applied at the whim of the party or the leader. It can be extended arbitrarily. Bukele and Trump seemed like their unwillingness to obey the Supreme Court was somehow cute.
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Donald Trump
How can I return him to the United States? Like I smuggle him into the United States or whether I do, of course I'm not going to do it. It's like, I mean, the question is.
- [24:47]
Andrea Pitzer
Preposterous and made it clear that they intend that. Though the government has admitted its mistake in sending someone with legal protections to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia will not be coming back or ever leaving detention.
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Donald Trump
I don't have the power to return him to the United States. Yeah, but I'm not releasing.
- [25:07]
Andrea Pitzer
But the most important parallel for how this kind of detention relates to those of concentration camps is in that it is done primarily to instill terror in the regime's opponents as a way to consolidate power.
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Donald Trump
They'd love to have a criminal, you know. They would love it. Yeah, they're sick. These are sick people.
- [25:32]
Andrea Pitzer
Trump is making a move to lock down authoritarian power by defying any independence in US Courts. He is daring Congress to act or the Supreme Court to try to enforce any attempts to right a clear wrong. Trump is trying to assert infinite power.
- [25:51]
Donald Trump
I hope it was. Is going to go down as one of the most important days in the history of our country. November 5th.
- [25:58]
Andrea Pitzer
If this arrangement for third party detention is not stopped, the path back to democracy for the United States will become a much longer and much more hazardous one. Trump has already made clear he wishes to expand enormously his ability to inflict arbitrary detention. The recent kidnapping of green card holders and legal residents detained and threatened with deportation for writing political opinion pieces or attending a demonstration reveal that. And he mentioned in his White House appearance to Bukele that he hopes to soon send, quote, homegrown Americans to prison there, suggesting that it will be necessary to expand the facility wildly, far beyond its current capacity.
- [26:48]
Donald Trump
They're great facilities, very strong facilities, and they don't play games. I'd like to go a step further. I mean, I say I said it to Pam. I don't know what the laws are. We always have to obey the laws, but we also have homegrown criminals that are absolute monsters. I'd like to include them in a group of people to get them out of the country.
- [27:10]
Andrea Pitzer
One thing to remember is that concentration camps are not just one thing. They evolved across history, often taking on some elements of prior camp systems while innovating and devolving into worse situations. We need to keep in mind, how do you get from regular democracy and regular life into something like the death camps? And the truth is, it takes several years of propaganda, of manipulation of the public, of bending the courts, of weakening legislatures. This step with El Salvador obviously has roots in deeper past things. But for the US to undertake it as an expanding and ongoing, absolutely unapologetic, absolutely not secret policy and approach to political opponents and those it deems criminal could easily move us into a harmful approach that will open doors that have not been opened before. So what do we do in response? Trump's playbook is familiar. However, the speed and aggressiveness are far beyond that used by many current authoritarians who felt constrained to go more slowly. Trump's aggressiveness is bad news here in the US but it actually offers some advantage. There is no subtlety to where he's going and what he's doing. And even in an America that has become accustomed to abuse against immigrants, people are reacting with horror to Trump's actions in recent weeks. Disapproval over his handling of deportations is shifting quickly. And just as importantly, he has gotten way out over his skis by taking actions this severe, this soon. He has not eliminated critical press coverage sufficiently, though he has started down that path. He has yet to thoroughly cow American universities, though he is trying. But most importantly, unlike almost all the places I've covered that have fallen to authoritarianism, there is a large and growing opposition movement that is still free to act. That's you and me, Even Republicans are squeamish and vulnerable at this point. What do you have to say to people who are afraid or who represent people who are afraid? We are all afraid. So I'm saying Trump's wild economic policies, in combination with such clear defiance of the constitutional limits on his power, make even those Republicans good targets for pressure. I'm oftentimes very anxious myself about about using my voice, because retaliation is real and that's not right. But that's what you've asked me to do, and so I'm going to use my voice to the best of my ability. So our playbook is the same as I've been discussing in prior episodes, because building an organized movement is the most important part of what Americans can do right now. Get out and demonstrate. Do it often enough that it becomes normal and a part of your routine. Encourage others to come with you. That's vital, whether you are part of an immigrant community or not. Speak to others about your worries over what's happening. Call your national representatives about Abrego Garcia and about the tariff policies undermining the national economy. Talk to your city officials and your governor's office as well about what they are doing in the face of these things. You can support legal organizations defending people against arbitrary detentions and deportations. You can use your time or your money there. You can organize immigrant support groups at your local library, or your church, or your book group or your gaming group. I have said these things before, but we really do need to act. The gift of time is still with us. We are still, for the most part, free to act, but the urgency is increasing pretty dramatically and no one is going to act in your place. So find that place and fill the spot that you choose. Because the world that Trump wants to build will be hard to undo. And the further along that we let him get, the more damage he will inflict before we can even begin to rebuild. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with anyone who's looking for ways to help each other survive this mess. To support this podcast, Please subscribe@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.