The News: The CECOT Archipelago

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

When the mainstream media isn’t just flatly ignoring what’s happening right now, despite many actions being more or less out in the open, a lot of journalists and pundits are falling back on “Trump and his people are just trolling, they’re just trying to shock-and-awe, they’re just trying to get liberals and progressives so mad that they lose control” with the underlying thought being “Of course they’re not really going to do that crazy thing.”

This bit of mythology not only flies in the face of the last decade of American right-wing politics, but 20th Century authoritarian politics at a global scale. Again and again, observers have peered into situations where extremists have taken power and said, “Well, they’re not really going to go that far.” That’s delayed responses to episodes of genocide and ethnic cleansing (or perhaps just served as an alibi in cases where powerful nations were perfectly well aware that a genocide was underway and just preferred not to acknowledge the reality). But it’s also just a basic problem with the status quo forms of political reason that derive out of liberalism. Even when mainstream sensible commenters don’t subscribe to anything as formal as “rational choice” as an orthodoxy, they still tend to think that there is some form of more-or-less reasonable calculation underlying what governments and political leaders actually do, even if they frequently say things that seem ill-informed, unwise or impossible.

There is some irony here in that this assumption itself is both ill-informed and unwise, and plainly falsified by the political history of many nations and communities over the last two centuries. Politics is bound up in culture, in belief, in the pursuit of legitimacy, and this frequently drives actions towards ends that serve no one’s interests and have no coherent or comprehensive vision of instrumental purpose.

More importantly, however, modern states frequently operate at such large scales of resources and capacities that when they make deals, create departments, name task forces, deploy troops, announce policy directives, and so on, they create a reality that persists even if it was just done for symbolic purposes or as a feint. That is in some way what an extreme cost-cutter is arguing when they start slashing through an operational budget, that there is waste there in the form of obsolete or marginal commitments made by previous administrations that were just articulated as experiments or short-term stopgaps. It’s why some fiscally conservative planners insist on putting a sunset date on a new initiative, or force a regular review of whether the new program is working as intended.

In this sense, it doesn’t matter if Trump and his people actually are intent on making a 30,000 person detention camp in Guantanamo Bay or whether they actually plan to send prisoners to El Salvador or whether those are just florid attempts to convince the public that they’re fucking serious about getting tough on immigration and crime. It doesn’t matter if Trump knows in some functioning corner of his chaotic mind that an American-controlled resort enclave in Gaza created after the U.S. has cleared the territory of two million people isn’t materially or pragmatically possible. Things will happen once you start talking that way.

If the United States government signs an agreement with El Salvador to reserve prison beds, the United States government is going to use those beds someday. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but someday. If Marco Rubio is going to talk about that idea within an administration that is determined to show that it is completely unworried about the blatant illegality of its actions, it becomes more likely that agreement gets signed.

And here we have to think about what happens if the talk leads to the agreement leads to the use of those beds. The United States already has a lot of prisons and prisoners. More per capita than any nation on Earth, a fact that many Americans seem completely unable to process. There are already non-citizens held in privately-managed American prisons who have been convicted of crimes here. If ICE wants to move undocumented criminals out of the U.S., they’ve got thousands in private prisons they can move without any judicial hassles. They aren’t doing that because prisoners in private prisons are profitable to the ownership—it’s more or less the same way K-12 school funding works in a lot of states. You get money per student, indexed against their attendance. You get money per prisoner. Those prisons don’t want deportations, any more than Iowa dairy producers or California farms want deportations.

So you talk the talk and sign the agreement and there’s a prison in El Salvador that isn’t getting paid by the prisoner, just a flat fee. You’re not going to deport El Salvadoreans there who were illegally in the United States. You’re not going to deport people who’ve committed federal crimes there, because we’ve got enough capacity for them here in the United States as it stands. What prisoners do you want to just go away, to be forgotten, to die or suffer in an overcrowded hellhole maintained by a friendly neighborhood dictator?

Whether it’s in the talk, or in the agreement, whether it’s part of the plan, if that agreement gets signed, someday and in some way, it’s going to be where an American government sends its dissidents, its political prisoners, the people it wants to forget and be forgotten. It’s very likely cheaper than a thousand helicopter flights intended to disappear someone by dropping them out the side door.

This is what the “it’s all trolling and hyperbole” crowd just doesn’t get. It doesn’t have to be an actual concrete plan right this minute (though you will find people in this administration or close to it who have argued for both the helicopter-drop and imprison-in-hellhole options in an apparently serious way). It’s just that it’s a short distance between the talk, the agreement, and the reality. The first step in this kind of direction makes the last act depressingly inevitable unless people react to the first step as if it were the last act. Don’t let that gun go up on the mantlepiece, ever. Believe that they will do what they say, because even if they aren’t actually intending to do it, saying it makes it more likely they will.

Image credit: Aerial view of the Terrorism Containment Center, El Salvador, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Confinement_Center#/media/File:Aerial_view_of_CECOT.png