The Revolutionary Column is a radical space for liberatory politics.
I didn’t even want to speak on President Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation policies this time around. As a proud member of the 92 percent of Black women who voted against this administration, I wanted nothing to do with the performative outrage over what we all knew was going to happen. We knew he was going to target the undocumented community for mass deportations because he said he would over and over again on the campaign trail. It was the bedrock of his bid for reelection. At a rally in New York City a week before the election, he promised, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.”
Quite frankly, I’m still annoyed that Trump took home 46 percent of the overall Latinx vote. They failed to organize their own community. Now that they’re under attack, they expect other communities on the Left to mobilize to support their resistance. Now they want to build coalition after the 46 percent voted in favor of a fascist government leader who has never hidden his commitment to white supremacy, to global anti-Blackness, to increased border militarization, to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, and to the forced removal of asylum seeking migrants specifically from Latin America. Better late than never, I guess.
Although Black American descendants of chattel slavery understand the threats of fascism and Democratic backsliding better than most in this country, our previous warnings and invitations to organize against Trump obviously landed on deaf ears. I had resigned to the reality that Trump would show them better than I could tell them. And sure enough, he’s been showing them every day since his second inauguration. He’s even calling himself “the king” on the White House’s official X page.
However, Trump has now made his immigration and deportation policies my Black business. On Feb. 4, while speaking to reporters from his desk inside the Oval Office, Trump announced plans to find legal grounds to deport and jail American citizens convicted of violent crimes in an El Salvador “mega prison.”
G, what the hell is going on? While traveling to several Latin American countries to reinforce Trump’s immigration policies and interests in the region, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio — who was unanimously sworn in as Trump’s first Cabinet member with not even a little resistance from Democrats — announced that El Salvador’s far-right President Nayib Bukele “offered to house in his jails dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those of U.S. citizenship and legal residents.”
This would allow them to deport Black Americans.
Rubio praised the prospect of exiling “dangerous criminals currently in custody and serving their sentences in the United States, even if they’re U.S. citizens or legal residents” to a foreign prison as the most “extraordinary migratory agreement anywhere in the world.”
President Bukele confirmed in a post on X that “in exchange for a fee,” he’s offering the U.S. a chance to outsource part of its prison system. He added that the money they’d make from this would be significant enough to make El Salvador’s “entire prison system sustainable.” Elon Musk also chimed in on X, calling the tentative prison deal a “great idea!”
How much is one American body worth? The Bureau of Prisons reported the average annual cost of incarceration per prisoner in 2022 was $42,672. And the Bureau of Justice Statistics approximates the total annual cost of incarceration is $80.7 billion for public prisons and jails, and an additional $3.9 billion for private prisons and jails.
We spend more to detain prisoners here in the U.S. than El Salvador earns for all their goods and services annually. El Salvador’s total gross domestic product (GDP) was worth $34 billion US dollars in 2023.
So not only does this Trump administration want to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented parents, but they’re also seriously considering revoking the citizenship of natural born and naturalized Americans as punishment for a crime. Speaking earnestly of his desire to make the slave trade great again, Trump said about El Salvador’s offer, “If we had the legal right to do it, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
Referring to “shooters,” or people who engage in gun violence, as animals, Trump told the reporters, “If we had the option to get them out and let them be based in some other country at a fraction of the costs, then frankly they could keep them because these people are never going to be any good.”
This rhetoric creates a stark divide between Americans whom Trump deems good and deserving of constitutional protections and those whom he deems bad and deserving of cruel and unusual punishment. Black America, be wary. We cannot afford to let this man pit us against each other the same way he has divided and conquered the Latinx community.
Black intra-communal violence in Chicago is going to get us all — the guilty, the innocent, the perpetrators, and the victims alike — caught up in some bullshit. Trump specifically said he’d love to send Chicagoans to El Salvador’s Counter-Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
“Look at Chicago,” Trump said with as much disgust for us as we have for him. “The volume of crime they have and the viciousness of the crime. These people are horrible people. And if somebody thinks they’re going to be wonderful citizens someday, they’re wrong. It’s not going to happen.”
He continued,” I’d love to get them the hell out of our country.”
Trump meant every wild ass word he said. I find no comfort in the fact that it’s absolutely illegal and unconstitutional to deport American citizens. It’s also absolutely illegal and unconstitutional for Trump to be president again after having incited an insurrection and attempted a coup. Rule of law is really just a ruse at this point. On Feb. 15, Trump blatantly wrote on Truth Social and X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law.”
It may take some time for him to figure out the whole prisoner exile thing, but Trump is for sure going to send federal agents to terrorize Black Chicago communities. America’s already-reprehensible jail and prison conditions are going to get much worse.
We will never see our people again if they are disappeared to another country
Bukele’s post about his offer included photos of the CECOT and its prisoners. The images struck me as eerily reminiscent of the transatlantic slave trade. Prison guards wearing all black military gear with masks and helmets stand menacingly, towering over congested rows of half naked male prisoners seated defeatedly with their hands intertwined above their bowed heads.
El Salvador’s targeted assault on communities already suffering from economic and educational inequity seems like they studied America’s War on Gangs and decided it failed not because it never addressed the root causes of violence and drug addiction, but because it wasn’t quite inhumane enough — or even systematically and militantly repressive enough.
The government of El Salvador declared a 30-day state of emergency on March 27, 2022, suspending some constitutional protections including due process protections, freedom of assembly or the right to protest and the right to be informed of the reason for arrest. This took place after 87 alleged gang related murders were reported that weekend.
The state of emergency has been extended every month for nearly three years. Mass arbitrary arrests of anyone suspected of being in or connected to a gang worsened already poor prison conditions and extreme overcrowding. It led to the construction of CECOT, which reportedly has a maximum capacity of 40,000 detainees. It opened in January 2023.
A July 2024 submission by Human Rights Watch to the Universal Periodic Review — a process through which each United Nations Member State undergoes a peer review of its human rights record every four and a half years — reported that police and soldiers in El Salvador had arrested more than 80,000 people, including nearly 3,000 children from low-income neighborhoods since March 2022. The submission contends that “many detainees have no apparent connections to gang related violence. Arrests often appear to be based on appearance and anonymous complaints, rather than evidence.”
Even more disturbing, the submission highlights that cruel and unusual punishments aren’t at all unusual for El Salvador’s prisoners. “Cases of torture, including of children, have involved beatings, waterboarding, burnings, suffocations, and mock executions,” the submission reads.
Actual executions are common practice as well. According to a July 2024 report by Cristosal, a Central American human rights organization, at least 265 people had died in state custody two years into the state of emergency.
We will never see our people again if they are disappeared to CECOT in El Salvador, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, or the numerous other countries Trump claims have offered to take American prisoners. Anyone who agrees with Elon Musk that it’s a great idea to deport American prisoners is just as vicious and wicked as the people they’d like to see eradicated. One cannot feign moral superiority because their preferred violence is sanctioned by the state instead of by the streets. As long as violence is considered agreeable and permissible for some, we are all in danger.
We already know how this will play out. Systemic oppression and mass incarceration of Black low-income communities, under the guise of public safety, is the American way. It’s imperative that we learn from our past and present failures.
When then-Sen. Joe Biden wrote the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act and the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, not only was there large bipartisan support in Congress, but the punitive and racially charged measures were also largely supported by Black community members who were then suffering and seeking relief from a crack epidemic-induced surge in violent crimes. Just as a refresher, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act created a 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine, and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act created funding incentives for states and cities to hire more police, arrest more people, build more prisons, and impose longer sentences.
Biden said on the campaign trail in 2020 that his role as an architect of racially disparate mass criminalization and incarceration was a mistake. Yet, he still waited until the last days of his presidency to grant clemency to people convicted of nonviolent drug crimes who were harmed by his mistake. It was political theater. Not a true effort by the Democratic Party to right the wrongs of the War on Drugs.
On Day One, Trump issued sweeping pardons for the January 6 rioters who he believes were victims of a war on MAGA. According to Trump, those are the good Americans deserving of protection. To him, when they stormed the Capitol with guns and other weapons and attacked Capitol police officers in a violent attempt to steal the 2020 election, they exemplified patriotism, not barbarism. The message sent by their pardons was loud and clear: loyalty over legality. Trump and his Party value violent criminality as long as it’s on their behalf, at their behest or benefits their agenda.
We cannot afford to be at war with each other
The violence we’re bound to see this summer in predominantly low-income Black communities does indeed benefit Trump’s white supremacist agenda. As soon as there’s a surge in shootings in Chicago, Trump will use it to justify suspending our constitutional rights here and commencing his extreme deportation plan.
Black Chicagoans will not be pardoned for their violence; instead, their violence will be used to pardon Trump for his. Ain’t nobody got time for that!
During a Jan. 31 background briefing with senior state department officials discussing Secretary Rubio’s trip to Latin America, Trump’s Special Envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone praised the President of El Salvador as “one of the most consequential leaders” on security for the “extraordinary measures” he’s taken to manage the country’s gang problem. He called President Bukele’s human rights abuses of known and suspected gang members “the envy of a lot of countries throughout the Western Hemisphere.”
Ten years ago, El Salvador, which has a population size smaller than New York City by about 2 million people, had the highest murder rate in the world. More than 6,650 homicides were reported in 2015. Now it has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and there were only 154 homicides recorded in 2023.
Mind you, MS-13, one of El Salvador’s biggest gangs, was formed in Los Angeles in the 1980s by migrants who had fled the country’s civil war and needed to protect themselves from other gangs and racial prejudice in America. After the war, thousands were deported back to their home country and took the gang culture they learned in America back with them.
The Trump administration is learning from President Bukele, and we can expect to see a major crack down on gangs this summer. During the 2024 Republican presidential primary debate, Trump announced that part of his plan to stop crime is to deploy U.S. soldiers to Democratic-run states and cities under the 1792 Insurrection Act, which allows the president to use unchecked power to deploy the military on American streets.
When they come for Chicago’s alleged gang members who are always blamed for the spike in summer gun violence, you won’t hear the same conversations the city’s Leftist community is having now about protecting undocumented migrants.
When Black youth accused of terrorizing their own communities become federal targets for mass arrests, you won’t hear people on the Left compelling each other to put their bodies on the line — or consider which laws they’re willing to break — in order to intervene.
When our children are separated from their parents, we will — per usual — be on our own.
We are our first and last line of defense. I don’t want to hear Black Chicagoans calling for more police and longer prison sentences this summer. We tried that 40 years ago and have been doing it ever since. That approach has never served us.
This administration will dehumanize, detain and disappear our entire culture. We cannot afford to be at war with each other while our real opps are preparing for war against us all. I need us to be even more unified going forward than we were on Election Day. It’s a matter of self preservation.
