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The 'Judicial Black Hole' of El Salvador's Prisons Is a Warning for Americans
- Avshalom 2y agohttps://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=We+suggest+the+Judge+contact+President+Bukele+because+we+are+unaware+of+the+judge+having+jurisdiction+or+authority+over+the+country+of+El+Salvador&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=We+suggest+the+Judge+contac...
- wizzwizz4 2y agoA quotation from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, if reports are to be believed; but you should really link to a specific source, e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy73gqq64do https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwy73gqq64do. (LMGTFY is the most annoying form of link rot.)
- treetalker 2y agoThis appears to be a copy of the judicial order of 2025-04-04 for his return: https://www4.wng.org/Order-for-Return.pdf https://www4.wng.org/Order-for-Return.pdf
- lazyasciiart 2y agoIt’s unbelievable that anyone is bothering to argue with their pathetic “it’s another country nyah nyah nyah” stance. The correct response is that ok, everyone involved in getting that plane off the ground and everyone involved in sending money to El Salvador to pay for this program is in contempt of court until the whole plane load returns to the US. The court doesn’t need jurisdiction in El Salvador.
- cookiengineer 2y agoI am not sure if you have seen that there's a flagging war going on on HN lately. The commenter probably didn't link on purpose to prevent that. Just saying that we need a more neutral medium for the HN crowd if that kind of discussions afen't allowed. Turning a blind eye to what's going on is what got us into this mess.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoLinking – or better still, quoting – makes me more comfortable vouching for comments. (I vouched here, because the discussion below the comment is worthwhile, but the comment itself is practically unreadable.)
- Avshalom 2y ago“The lack of criminal records does not indicate they pose a limited threat. In fact, based upon their association with Tren de Aragua, the lack of specific information about each specific individual actually highlights the risk they pose, https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article302299534.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article30...
- actionfromafar 2y agoThe lack of evidence is evidence. Right. Also, war is peace.
- ForOldHack 2y ago"Arbeit macht frei (Work Sets You Free."
- frankharv 2y ago[flagged]
- lazide 2y agoIt’s even better - the lack of evidence is apparently evidence they are even more dangerous than those who they have evidence on.
- bsder 2y ago"We don't have any evidence, but we just know they are bad people. Because ... reasons ... that we don't have to share with silly plebians like you." Perhaps this sounds familiar ... "While I cannot take the time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring, I have here in my hand a list of 205." -- Senator Joseph McCarthy
- lazyasciiart 2y agoBoy, just think how communist the guys NOT on that list must have been!
- netsharc 2y agoHeh, even the extrajudicial imprisonment camps can be outsourced now. Why look bad having your military run Guantanamo when you can do the Uber model it for a cheap price. Heh, or is a pun on AirBnB the more apt name for it.. "Concrete Floor & Indefinite Detention"?
- labster 2y agoSuffering as a Service
- User23 2y ago[flagged]
- rayiner 2y ago[flagged]
- rafram 2y agoThat’s not relevant to this discussion at all.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoWow really violent gangsters hurt people and are bad? Thanks for your insight!
- trentlott 2y agoI remember a time when decreased murder rates was just a lie by the government. But we all know nobody's more trustworthy than the El Salvadorian regime, especially when it results in an influx of cash.
- sanktanglia 2y agoAnd what role do you think the us had in destabilizing their country and building violent drug rulings across the world from its regressive anti drug policy?
- mitchbob 2y agohttps://archive.ph/too55 https://archive.ph/too55
- hayst4ck 2y agoI don't think many people have actually contemplated what absence of law, defined as rules that apply to rich and powerful people too, is like. In a world with law, there are restriction on what society's most powerful can and can't do, because there are police officers, detectives, lawyers, and judges, who all work together to make sure there are consequences for crimes. In a world without law, the only restriction on what someone with a lot of money or power can do is what they can get away with. We flirted with this territory by subjecting the rich to a very different justice system than the poor, but we are now solidly in the territory of no limits to rich people's power so long as they don't threaten other rich people. We are now in the realm of having to consider not what is allowed to be done, but what can be done. We can no longer ask what is legal to do, only what is possible to do. It is possible for several men to ambush a person, put them in a car, put them in chains, and send them to a black site without due process. That is a thing that can physically happen in reality. That is a thing that has happened in other countries. Locking political opponents in mental institutions is a thing that can happen. While it seems unlikely that it will happen here, "intellectuals," those with the capability of challenging those in power, have been rounded up and forced to dig their own graves. Babies have been smashed against trees. That is a thing that has happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge at the killing fields. That is a thing that is possible to happen. Forced labor camps are a thing that can and has happened. Mass famine as a result of disastrous government policy is a thing that can and has happened. Extermination of humans based on genetic traits is a thing that can happen. There is no magical power that prevents these things from happening. These things happen because people make decisions to act or not act. Individuals choose to passively let bad things happen rather than put themselves at risk to say no. Who would stop that abduction from happening with force? What if the men doing that are police officers? What if they go after your family the day after? The constitution is just a piece of paper. Law is just an idea. For it to have any effect on physical reality, it requires someone to take actions on its behalf. Nothing on a piece of paper forces a president to follow a law. Human beings who believe in something enforce, or don't enforce, the law. What kind of person will you be if the unthinkable starts happening?
- milesrout 2y ago[flagged]
- lenerdenator 2y agoIt's like the UK Rwandan exile program, but somehow worse.
- gpm 2y agoFar... far... worse. The Rwanda exile program at least had some concept of due process in both the UK and Rwanda. The Rwanada exile program was at least stopped when the courts told it to instead of trying to remain secret long enough to avoid the courts having a chance to forbid it, and then outright ignoring the court orders forbidding it when that failed. Here the program is "ICE picks you up off the street, without telling anybody. Writes in some internal document that you're a foreign national member of a gang, without telling anybody or giving you a chance to challenge that. Ships you off to El Salvador's concentration camp, without telling anybody". To this date even the lawyers challenging the program don't actually know the name of everyone who was shipped to El Salvador. Maybe somebody finds out, by looking at ICE publicity photos that you happen to be in the background of, maybe not. Maybe you are a member of the gang, maybe you're a US citizen whose never even heard of the gang. Doesn't matter, there was no chance to challenge ICEs decision. You weren't even informed of the decision, you were just put on a plane without being told why. And once you're there, even if somebody figures out that's where you are and challenges the decision on your behalf, the US has no authority to bring you back.
- antifa 2y ago> the US has no authority to bring you back. They're paying to keep you there, but """can't""" bring you back.
- ein0p 2y ago[flagged]
- defrost 2y agoErrr, what works? No longer engaging in war with gangs? The El Salvador President’s Informal Pact with Gangs (2020) https://insightcrime.org/news/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-gangs/ https://insightcrime.org/news/el-salvador-nayib-bukele-gangs... There's more to the dramatic drop in homicide rates than simple analysis might reveal .. is it an actual drop or simply a drop in recording, etc.
- femiagbabiaka 2y agoIf the U.S. killed and imprisoned people at the rate of El Salvador, without due process and essentially at the word of mouth of random people in the community, you’d be running to the hills. Crazy that this far into Trumps disaster and people still want right wing fascist dictatorship. You might get what you want, god help us all.
- tdeck 2y agoPolice in El Salvador start each day with a quota of people to round up and imprison without trial. If they don't meet the quota, they don't get to go home to their families. https://apnews.com/article/nayib-bukele-san-salvador-el-arrests-526a1ad197d79ac9cc40e24c51d077d3 https://apnews.com/article/nayib-bukele-san-salvador-el-arre... https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/12/07/we-can-arrest-anyone-we-want/widespread-human-rights-violations-under-el https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/12/07/we-can-arrest-anyone-w... Frankly it's shocking every time I see people praise Bukele on Hacker News.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- giraffe_lady 2y agoHey is it still too early to call it fascism you guys.
- lazyasciiart 2y agoIt’s always too early, until you’ll be disappeared for saying it.
- pyronik19 2y agoLike in the UK for spicy social media posts?
- SauciestGNU 2y agoThere you get arrested for being a Nazi. In America you get disappeared for not being one. There was a bit of excitement in the 1940s that gives us moral guidance on what to do when Nazis rear their heads.
- Volundr 2y agoRefresh my memory, who was sent to an extrajudicial prison in a foreign country without so much as a trail for a spicy social media post in the UK?
- Teever 2y agoJust flag the comment and move on. Don't feed the troll.
- arkis22 2y agothe problem is that when you get to call it for sure its too late to do something about it
- hackable_sand 2y agoNo, but people will be waking up at different times.
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- bufferoverflow 2y ago[flagged]
- rayiner 2y agoThe homicide rate in El Salvador has dropped from 100 per 100,000 to 2.5 per 100,000 in just a decade: https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-el-salvador https://www.statista.com/statistics/696152/homicide-rate-in-.... The El Salvadoran government has literally brought the country to an entirely different level of development, vastly improving the lives of most of the country’s 6 million people. Disorder and dysfunction doesn’t just hurt those who are killed. It’s a tax on the whole country, on the economy, and on kids’ futures. It’s system that beats down builders and cultivators and makes them subservient to the sociopaths. As someone from a dysfunctional third-world country, the revolution in El Salvador gives me hope that change is actually possible in some of these places. It’s such a slap in the face to see that the only news coverage of this is from privileged Americans who can’t possibly understand what this means for the standard of living in that country. Your ancestors did the hard things (England punished all felonies by death for centuries) so you have forgotten how your lives became so comfortable in the first place.
- maxerickson 2y agoSending people there and then saying you don't have jurisdiction over them anymore is dysfunctional by any reasonable measure.
- voidspark 2y ago[flagged]
- rayiner 2y agoNote that this often happens because countries won’t repatriate their own criminal citizens: https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/23/politics/trump-visa-sanctions-immigration/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/23/politics/trump-visa-sanctions...
- cavisne 2y agoYes this was the case for Venezuela, they started taking flights again when the El Salvador news came out. Refusing to repatriate citizens was part of the argument the Trump admin used to justify use of the Alien Enemies act. If this holds up in court the strategy going forward is pretty obvious. Any country that refuses to repatriate criminals will get hit with the AEA. This will be very politically painful for any country as they rely heavily on remittances from undocumented immigrants in the US, and will quickly fold.
- oalgo 2y ago[dead]
- ixtli 2y agoThis is just the outsourcing of something the US has been doing for a long time.
- smt88 2y agoThis is absolutely new, happening to law-abiding residents, and seemingly immune from judicial review. The only comparable situation is the Japanese internment camps from WWII.
- at_a_remove 2y agoThis is pretty sad as a headline. It's not a warning, it is business as usual. Civil asset forfeiture started expanding in the 1970s and in the next decade, we got Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984. Gitmo? 2002. Room 641A is the next year. Black ops sites, aka "we can torture you as long as we're not in the United States" is somewhere around there. Extrajudicial killings, I read 2,400 in just Pakistan, that's Obama-era, right? Stingrays, about 2007 or so. Qualified immunity out the yin-yang; hell, you can just shoot up someone's house for nearly a day trying to capture a shoplifter and the courts will shrug. That's 2015. Even the ACLU has become notably more partisan. Decades ago, back when I thought people were capable of learning from anything other than a hot stovetop, I used to say that we ought to be careful when making manacles to restrict various liberties and cautious when providing more tools for law enforcement, because you just do not know for a certainty that the manacles you made will not be around your own wrists and that the latest tools of the law will not be aimed at you. "Pretend you will eventually be on the losing side," I said. We've been going along with this business because it was convenient to believe that these little inches taken will not add up to miles. This will only be used on drug peddlers, pedophiles, terrorists, and money launderers, WINK WINK. We have been building this machine for a long time, and we've been smug as a bug on a landline with a FISA rubberstamp warrant. Why this headline, now? And also, why this headline, now? Now and this because the people who were very comfortable are finally cottoning on to the fact that the various abilities tacked on to the Executive Branch over the decades might actually be used against them (us? ME? but I am one of the good guys, I only helped construct the machine!) and, while fearful, are still unwilling to engage with their own multi-decade culpability, so they must focus on the latest outrage and nothing before it. To do otherwise would suggest that they have some kind of involvement in this particular outcome and just making noises like "Trump," "Musk," and "fascism" keeps their metaphorical hands clean. At this point, when I mention this kind of thing online, it's less from a desire to sway opinion (almost no chance of that occurring) and more of an opportunity for me, years down the line, to point and say, "Yup. Called it."
- grafmax 2y agoThere will always be cynicism, quietism, fear, injustice. Yet it is possible for people to come together and change the world for the better. This has happened many times before, on a global scale: the spread of democracy, abolition of slavery, decolonization. Lately I’ve been thinking of this as an existential question. We are thrust into this life, into an unjust world. Each of us chooses how to face it. I remember an account of a mass execution of some villagers by Nazis in Eastern Europe. I imagine being one of these people facing that time in history, with what feels like too little power. I believe the best way to face such a thing, if a person can muster it, is courage.
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- elihu 2y agoI came across this article[1] the other day, after reading about the US sending people to a prison in El Salvador and wondering what we actually know about the place. An incongruity that I didn't notice at the time but realized a bit later is that the prison is called "The Center for Terrorism Confinement" and it has a capacity of 40,000 people. Why would El Salvador or any country need a terrorist detention facility that holds 40,000 people? According to wikipedia, El Salvador has a population of about 6 million. The United States famously kept people accused of terrorism charges at Guantanamo Bay, and 780 prisoners have been kept there over the last couple decades since GWB established the prison. There are currently 15. Presumably there are a lot more people who would fit the description "domestic terrorist" being held in jails in mainland US, but certainly not 40,000 of them. Presumably president Bukele's administration is using it as a detention facility for regular criminals as well, but it wouldn't be surprising if there's a lot of people there that shouldn't be in jail in the first place. [1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/17/americas/el-salvador-prison-trump-deportations-gangs-intl-latam/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/17/americas/el-salvador-prison-t...
- thephyber 2y agoDid you miss the year of press cycles where this guy took El Salvador from one of the worst crime rates in the Western Hemisphere to one of the best by liberally arresting anyone he thought might be related to crime gangs? From Wikipedia: > During his presidency, Bukele enacted tough-on-crime policies that scholars have characterized as successfully reducing gang activity and violent crime at the cost of arbitrary arrest and alleged widespread human rights abuses.
- TheCleric 2y agoSo having a low crime rate is more important than keeping innocent people out of jail?
- tartuffe78 2y agoI would bet it depends on the rate of each happening to the average voter.
- sschueller 2y agoAt this point you have a better chance of being freed from this prison camp being a citizen of any other nation than the US which is sending people there without giving them a chance to prove that they are innocent or a citizen of the United States. At least another nation will do whatever they can to get you home unlike the US that just doesn't care. "We made a mistake but we don't care. Nothing we can do." Truly abhorrent especially when the US can do so much to get someone if they really want.
- Yeul 2y agoIn my country top lawyers every once in a while take an interesting case pro bono just because they enjoy having a duel with the State in the courtroom. But I have been thinking about this. Ultimately our entire judicial system is all just words on paper. What happens when the government ignores a court order?
- UncleMeat 2y agoIn the US the government is specifically retaliating against law offices that have done this in ways that Trump doesn't like and those offices are largely caving and offering millions of dollars of pro bono work to Trump. Leadership within the Democratic party is saying that Trump ignoring court orders is not really a big deal until they ignore an order from the Supreme Court, as if rulings from district and circuit courts somehow don't actually have the force of law. Spineless cowards, everywhere.
- UncleOxidant 2y ago> Leadership within the Democratic party is saying that Trump ignoring court orders is not really a big deal until they ignore an order from the Supreme Court If (and likely when) the administration ignores an order from the Supreme Court it's going to be too late.
- zelda420 2y agoThis already happened with TikTok. The congressional law had very specific terms for a 90day delay. Trump just signed another 75day extension after the last failed .
- geekraver 2y ago“It can’t happen here”
- Viliam1234 2y ago"...because of the Second Amendment."
- sjs382 2y agoResponsibility laundering