Donald Trump and Nayib Bukele are undeniable allies, but in addition to sending several hundreds of accused Venezuelan migrants to their maximum security prison, with hardly any evidence of being gang members of the Aragua train, the American is reflected in the authoritarian mirror of the Salvadoran when he displays his machinery to fulfill the promise of the greatest deportation of the story. Both in El Salvador and now in the United States, respect for rights goes to the background when “results” must be shown.
Trump was barely three days away in the White House when the first complaint of an irregular detention came to light. On the afternoon of January 23, in a raid in a Newark fishing store (New Jersey) migratory agents arrested a Latin American citizen suspecting that it was an illegal immigrant: the officers did not believe in the authenticity of their official identification as veteran of the Armed Forces. The man was quickly released, but in the following months the cases of detentions and irregular or illegal deportations have been multiplying and have copied holders while climbing in court.
The president came to speak in campaign to expel up to 20 million people – although the official number of undocumented in the country is about 11 million. Once in power, although the figures have decreased, the message has not changed too much. After a few weeks in which the numbers of arrests and deportations were not fulfilling the expectations of the White House, Trump and the officers of their administration now speak almost obsessively of deporting one million people in a year, according to various reports. The pressure to meet that goal resulted in the allocation of a daily quota of arrests. According to Washington Posteach office of the Immigration and Customs Control (ICE) has the order to make 75 daily arrests and the heads of each office would be directly responsible if they are not fulfilled. At the national level, this is equivalent to about 1,500 arrests every day.
For observers, such as Juan Pappier, deputy director of the Division of the Americas of Human Rights Watch (HRW), the situation is very familiar. “It is a dangerous policy, there are plenty of global examples that these quota policies without safeguards can produce ‘errors’ that have a huge human cost, such as arbitrary detentions or deportations that do not follow the due process. It is similar to what has been seen in other countries of the region, as in Colombia with the false positives, where the soldiers were rewarded and the units and the units and the units already report More recently, in El Salvador, where there are quotas that establish the number of people who must arrest the police per week, ”says Pappier, who emphasizes that this generates a culture in which to achieve the quantitative objectives for which they are being evaluated becomes the priority of the agents and erodes respect for rights.
Parallelism with El Salvador is the clearest. After the statement of the state of exception on March 27, 2022 and 38 consecutive extensions that keep it in force to date, the Bukele government has arrested more than 80,000 people, according to their own figures.
The detainees – a little more than 1% of the country’s total population – are supposed to be gang members, but in the allegations of arbitrary and erroneous arrests that include minors or people with disabilities, some of whom have died in custody, as well as opponents accused of being criminals, more than 6,000 instances of violations of human rights are estimated. These numerous accusations by NGOs, movements of victims or regional and international mechanisms face a wall of “silence, indifference and opacity” that consolidates “a model of repression and impunity”, according to an International Amnesty report published when a thousand days of state of exception were completed.
In the United States, Donald Trump declared the state of national emergency at the border with Mexico on his second first day as president. This enlarged his abilities to act, by releasing defense funds and the army to fulfill some migratory tasks. In addition, together with the first law approved by the Congress of the current cycle, it decreased the rights of detainees in the framework of the migratory emergency declared and extended the crimes by which a migrant can be deported if trial, which now includes even minor traffic failures. In the three and a half months since then, the US government has said, without showing clear evidence, which has arrested more than 100,000 migrants accused of being, under the new criteria, undocumented immigrants criminals.
However, as in El Salvador, complaints and demands have not been waiting. In cuts throughout the country, civil rights groups and victims have filed demands to stop the mass arrests they have caught, according to accusations, innocent people, protected refugees, US citizens, and even minors with cancer. Given the judicial avalanche, the government has challenged orders from judges of minor cuts, and has threatened to do the same in front of the Supreme Court if it is pronounced against its measures. In case of unraveling the highest court in the nation, a constitutional crisis would be unleashed and put at risk the institutional order of the most powerful democracy in the world.
For Noah Bullock, executive director of the Salvadoran Organization for Chrystosal Human Rights Defense, the basis of these authoritarian parallels is in the dialectical level. “The main axis is the installation of the narrative and the idea of an internal enemy: that there is a society and, within it, groups that are threats and should not be protected by laws. That has been the legal and philosophical framework of the exception regime in El Salvador based in El Salvador.
In practice, this has resulted in daily detention fees, which in turn jeopardize respect for the laws and fundamental rights of people. Bullock paints it as a slippery path. “In El Salvador we have seen the numbers expanding. First there were 10,000 that should be arrested, then 20,000 and now the government says that they are 85,000, but suddenly a minister says that he still has to capture about 7,000 more. Then the issue of quotas is more emotional, to generate that idea of groups of enemies that threaten. I think that is the classical logic in scenarios of mass violations of human rights: first It expands more and more people. ”
In the case of the United States it is still early to talk about this type of expansion, although the arrests and revocations of visas of foreign university students could be seen as a first expansion of the objectives of the repressive apparatus. For now, the question is the repeated and systematic violation of rights promoted by very high numerical objectives. “The evaluation criteria cannot only be a number. If it is, the message that is sent to the officials is that the only thing that matters is to stop people and no matter who they are or if they are arrested properly,” she concludes with caution Pappier, despite being aware of what the route is usually when this is the first step.
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