Kristi Noem, newly installed as Secretary of Homeland Security in Trump’s second administration, posed this week in front of a cage of shirtless, tattooed men in El Salvador’s sprawling mega-prison, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. The image is striking in its theatricality. Noem, crisp and composed, wears a navy DHS cap and a look of steady resolve. Behind her, the prisoners stand packed shoulder to shoulder, heads shaven, torsos bare, expressions blank. The framing is deliberate. The message is unmistakable.
These are not Salvadoran nationals. Many are Venezuelan, allegedly members of gangs tied to criminal syndicates operating in the United States. They were detained without charge on US soil and deported under the Alien Enemies Act, a relic of 18th-century wartime legislation now repurposed by the Trump administration as legal cover for extrajudicial removals. Their transfer to CECOT, under a classified agreement with the Bukele regime, marks the beginning of an unprecedented policy of offshoring incarceration: detaining non-citizens not merely outside the law, but outside the country itself. There is no statute authorising this. No court has ruled on its legality. And yet, it is happening.
Noem’s visit, then, is not a diplomatic exercise. It is a performance of sovereignty in an age of simulacra. Baudrillard wrote of the third-order simulation, where the sign no longer refers to reality but to other signs: the prison becomes not a site of incarceration, but a symbol of order. The image stands in for policy, the photo-op for governance. Noem wore a tight white long-sleeved top, the sort of calculated casualness that American politicians adopt when staging proximity to the people while still radiating command. The fabric clung closely across her chest, the outline of a push-up bra visible beneath, an aesthetic decision that should not be dismissed as incidental. In a media ecology where the image precedes the message, where politics operates through feeling before fact, the visual grammar of femininity is repurposed for sovereign effect. This is not the demure costuming of Cold War conservatism. It is something else: an appeal to soft power layered over hard punishment. Noem’s body, like the prison behind her, becomes part of the mise-en-scène of authoritarian realism, designed to compel not just obedience, but attention. As with Trump’s phantom border wall, partially built, wholly mythologised, the offshored prison becomes real through repetition. Noem does not need to convince a court. She only needs to dominate the feed.
Foucault’s account of discipline still lingers in the frame. The modern prison, he argued, does not simply punish; it trains. Power operates through surveillance, not spectacle. But CECOT is a return to the theatre of the scaffold: the state makes an example, not by hiding its violence but by displaying it. The prisoners are stripped not just of clothing, but of identity. Their bodies become symbolic, tokens of chaos subdued, brownness neutralised. Noem, by contrast, plays the sovereign. A white American woman standing before a mass of Latin American men in captivity is not an accidental composition. It is the visual rhetoric of empire.
The policy is not merely punitive. It is imperial. The United States has long exported its wars, Vietnam, Iraq, the War on Drugs. What it exports now is incarceration. The border is no longer a line on a map but a floating zone of exception, stretching from the Rio Grande to the prison yards of Central America. What is being built is not just a carceral regime, but a transnational infrastructure of authoritarianism. Bukele supplies the jailers. Trump supplies the detainees. Noem supplies the image.
British observers might be tempted to dismiss all this as a peculiarly American spectacle, the latest iteration of lawless frontier justice in a country that has never resolved the contradictions of its settler colonial origins. But the grammar of this authoritarian realism, its aesthetics, its effect, its disdain for legality, has long since crossed the Atlantic. Suella Braverman, speaking as then Tory Home Secretary, described deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda as her “dream” and her “obsession”. Labour’s current leadership, if less flamboyant, is no less committed to the architecture of deterrence. Starmer has floated his own offshoring proposal, reviving the same language of displacement, this time not Rwanda, but the Balkans. The new Labour government, elected on promises of competence and control, now finds it must be seen to be as hard as Trump’s people—or else find Farage and Reform UK waiting in the wings.
What’s at stake here is not border control in the literal sense, but the performance of control: the ritualised assertion of the state’s power to decide who belongs, who deserves protection, who may be punished. As in the United States, the spectacle of enforcement takes precedence over any coherent policy outcome. Deportation becomes a kind of theatre; incarceration, a form of branding. The function of these performances is not to solve the crisis of migration, which is global, structural, and tied to the very logics of capital that both parties refuse to confront, but to shape its perception. To manage the optics of sovereignty. To secure popular consent for the exercise of force in an age when force is increasingly all the state has left to offer.
The Marxist in us should recognise the deeper structure. The offshored prison is not merely a spectacle of state power. It is a mechanism for the management of surplus populations, those rendered economically redundant, socially disposable, politically threatening. These are not criminals in any meaningful sense. They are workers without wages, migrants without papers, men without futures. The state has no place for them except the cell. And even that, increasingly, can be subcontracted.
The question is not whether this policy is legal. It manifestly isn’t. The question is whether it works—as ideology, as spectacle, as theatre of cruelty. And in that, it has already succeeded. This is Guns & Ammo politics, softcore authoritarianism for the MAGA male gaze: bikini-clad women with M16s, governors in push-up bras before locked cages. It’s Noem, poised and photogenic, standing before brown bodies arranged for maximum submission. A thirst trap for empire. The cage is real. The men are real. But what Noem has constructed is something else: a fantasy of control for a declining order, projected from behind bars.
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