It begins, as these things often do under Trump, with a lie. Not a grotesque, gilded one, but something quieter, more procedural. Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland resident with Temporary Protected Status, was deported in March to El Salvador and locked up in the mega-prison at Tecoluca. ICE called it an “administrative error.” The term has a bureaucratic blandness to it, the kind of phrase that gets people killed without anyone having to sign their name in ink. He had no criminal record. He’d lived in the US for decades. The Supreme Court said he should be returned. But there he sits, shackled, in a prison built for optics and televised cruelty.
Stephen Miller called it a “triumph.” He said Abrego García had been “sent to the right place.” He said that bringing him back now would amount to kidnapping a foreign national, never mind that the man was removed unlawfully. That’s the Miller line: make the crime the justice, and make any effort at restitution look like an overreach. It’s legal nihilism with a bureaucratic face, cruelty embedded in legalese. The Supreme Court said facilitate his return; the administration said, “Sure—we won’t stop it,” and then sat on its hands.
Trump, for his part, has gone further. He says he wants to send others, “hundreds,” maybe “thousands” to the same prison. He says El Salvador has “the right idea.” This is no longer deportation as border management; it’s deportation as penal outsourcing. The carceral state offshored. And like any subcontracted violence, it’s done with enough distance to deflect responsibility while remaining close enough to serve as warning. This is the global police state in motion: the merger of high-tech surveillance, militarised borders, and transnational repression, operated under the flag of security but built to discipline surplus populations.
The liberal press, as usual, misunderstands the point. It talks about failure: of diplomacy, of process, of oversight. But the deportation wasn’t a failure. It was a signal. This is how state violence functions when it’s unmoored from law but still dressed in its robes. Stephen Miller remains the ideologue-in-chief of the second Trump presidency, crafting the policies that define this era. Vice President JD Vance, once a critic of Trump, now actively promotes and defends these policies, lending his voice and influence to the administration’s agenda. Trump identifies the applause lines; Miller writes the script; Vance ensures the message resonates.
There’s no accident in who was deported or where he was sent. Bukele’s CECOT prison is fascist theatre: shaved heads, ankle chains, rows of meat for the camera. It’s not a prison, it’s a set. This is fascism: authoritarianism curated for virality, a flex of sovereign muscle that flatters the voyeur and reassures the base. As discussed in Thirst Trap Fascism, this kind of carceral pageantry is not just for internal discipline, but global signalling. The prison is both punishment and post. Trump gets it. When he called CECOT a “model,” he didn’t just mean for El Salvador. He meant for Texas. For Arizona. For Newark. For anyone watching on TikTok.
“There’s no accident in who was deported or where he was sent. Bukele’s CECOT prison is a sort of fascist theatre: shaved heads, bodies chained at the ankle, concrete rows of submission.”
Bukele, for his part, is playing along. His refusal to release Abrego García is couched in the usual strongman deflections, he claims the man is a terrorist, though no evidence has surfaced. In the language of Trumpworld, accusation is enough. The charge makes the man. It doesn’t matter that ICE admitted the mistake. Or that courts have said he should come home. Once you’re out, you’re out.
The disturbing thing is how quickly that logic takes hold. Rights become conditional. Citizenship becomes performative. A legal resident can become a non-person with a tap on a keyboard. One moment you’re a dad dropping your kid at school; the next you’re in a concrete hellhole two thousand miles away, and the government that put you there says you belong.
The same logic is now being turned inward. On Monday, immigration agents arrested Mohsen Mahdawi, a legal permanent resident and Columbia University student, not at a protest but at what he believed was a citizenship interview in Vermont. Instead, ICE officers, some reportedly masked—handcuffed him on the spot. Mahdawi, who has lived in the US for over a decade, has not been charged with any crime. His real offence, it seems, is that he helped organise pro-Palestinian demonstrations and co-founded a student society to celebrate Palestinian identity. He had already stepped back from activism last year, citing concerns about his immigration status. It made no difference. His detention, like those of other pro Palestinian activists, appears to be part of a dragnet justified on vague claims of national security risk. No evidence has been presented. Just a movement to disappear the politically inconvenient under the cover of visa law.
That’s the new normal under Trump-Vance. Not chaos. Not incompetence. Discipline. Precision. The state functioning exactly as intended. Miller’s fingerprints are on everything: from the selective enforcement of asylum laws to the amplification of Bukele’s carceral porn. This isn’t policy. It’s ideology made manifest in barbed wire and concrete.
“Miller’s fingerprints are on everything: from the selective enforcement of asylum laws to the amplification of Bukele’s carceral porn.”
And it scales. That’s the terrifying part. The prison doesn’t just punish, it instructs. It tells the world what happens to the surplus, to the unassimilated, to the merely unlucky. There’s no need to build new supermaxes in Georgia when you can outsource them to a strongman abroad. No need to risk domestic litigation when you can disappear people internationally. The cruelty becomes more efficient; the spectacle, more exportable.
“No need to risk domestic litigation when you can disappear people internationally. The cruelty becomes more efficient; the spectacle, more exportable.”
AOC and Bernie are leading the fightback, dragging the issue into the spotlight with a string of rallies now branded the Fighting Oligarchy tour. From Los Angeles to Salt Lake City, they’re naming names, drawing lines, and forcing the question: whose side are you on? But it’s trench warfare. They’re not winning new ground—they’re slowly recovering territory Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats surrendered years ago in the name of border compromise and bipartisan civility. The question now is whether the rest of the Democratic Party has the stomach to use this moment, to rally behind the push, or squander it in another round of procedural dithering and donor-class triangulation.
There’s a term that’s been floating around for years—the spectacle of sovereignty. Abrego García’s case is what that looks like in practice. Sovereignty as show. Law as theatre. The state doesn’t just punish, it stages punishment. It broadcasts it. It builds concrete temples to its own impunity. The prison is the altar. The deported man is the offering.
What’s frightening isn’t just that it happened. It’s that they’ll do it again, and again. That’s the subtext in Miller’s grin. That’s what Vance means when he says the courts can’t stop us. That’s what Trump’s rallies are training people to cheer for: the transformation of the legal system into a conveyor belt of exile, an industrialised unmaking of personhood.
“What’s frightening isn’t just that it happened. It’s that they’ll do it again, and again. That’s the subtext in Miller’s grin.”
And Abrego García? Still in prison. No charges. No trial. No crime. Just the wrong name on the wrong form, at the wrong time, in a country where that’s enough to disappear you. The administration calls it resolved. “We’ve done our part.” The Salvadorans call him theirs now. And so he sits, waiting, while the machine hums on.
There is no mistake here. Only precedent. And the infrastructure to scale it globally.
Book Review (47) Books (51) Britain (15) Capitalism (9) Conservative Government (35) Creeping Fascism (12) diary (11) Donald J Trump (33) Elon Musk (8) Europe (8) Film (10) France (13) History (8) Imperialism (13) Israel (9) Labour Government (17) Labour Party (8) Marxist Theory (10) Migrants (11) Palestine (9) Protest (13) Russia (10) Suella Braverman (8) Television (7) Ukraine (8) United States of America (62) Verso Books (7) War (15) Work (7) Working Class (8)
