The Brooklyn Rail

Carceral porn reached a new level of depravity on March 26, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (aka ICE Barbie) channeled Kafka in the penal colony and Lynndie England at Abu Ghraib and shook her ass in front of rows of caged, bare-breasted tattooed prisoners in El Salvador’s CECOT prison. She was wearing a blue cap with a badge and an 18-karat gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch worth about $50,000. Noem has made a cottage industry out of parading around in swat or combat gear in the midst of disasters, with a make-up person and hairstylist in tow. Of the above image, she said, “People need to see that image.”

The Salvadoran President, Nayib Bukele, who has branded himself “the world’s coolest dictator,” is dealing with his country’s gang problem by using mass incarceration. For the last three years, El Salvador has been operating under a state of emergency that suspends fundamental rights and sweeps people up in raids. During this time, 84,000 people have been arrested and jailed, usually without a trial, hearing, or any other due process of law.

CECOT can hold up to 40,000 prisoners, when they’re stacked up like cordwood. Those held there have no visitation rights, no recreation time, no exposure to the outside, no reading material, no bedding, and they will never leave the facility.

The Coolest Dictator offered to include deportees from the US in his prison, and the Trump administration took him up on it, flying 238 men that they allege are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and MS-13 to CECOT. Families of some of the deportees say they are not gang members, but have tattoos related to rock and roll bands and were snatched up because of the tats and what was considered “gang clothing.” Of the 238 men sent to CECOT, only five had been charged with or convicted of a felony, and three had been charged with misdemeanors like petty theft.

“This unprecedented relationship we have with El Salvador is going to be a model for other countries on how they can work with America,” said ICE Barbie, extolling this “Screws for Cash” scheme. The US has paid Bukele $6 million for the first year of US deportee incarceration. This could metastasize into a real growth industry for President Bukele.

Many have argued all along that Trump will begin with deporting migrants without due process, but he will not stop there. He’s talked openly about extending his extra-judicial renditions to US citizens accused of crimes.

When President Bukele visited Trump in the White House on April 14, Trump told him, “you need to build more of these things.” Notorious former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince has come out of the shadows to get into this game, offering to greatly increase the volume of immigrants remanded to prison in El Salvador (the figure of 100,000 has been mentioned), and avoiding legal difficulties by claiming part of the prison complex as American territory in a “Treaty of Cession” order. The facility would then be leased back to El Salvador to run it. They can then argue that bringing a prisoner to this facility would not be an extradition or even a deportation.¹

Erik Prince, a major donor to Trump, has often acted as a back-channel agent on behalf of Trump, in Russia and Venezuela and elsewhere. In September 2007, Prince’s Blackwater mercenaries opened fire in the crowded Nisour Square in Baghdad, killing seventeen Iraqi civilians and seriously wounding twenty more, bringing the role of private contractors in US military operations to light.

As Trump told Bukele in the Oval Office, “The homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”

When Bukele was asked by a reporter if he would comply with the US Supreme Court’s order to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia—who the Trump administration has admitted was deported to El Salvador due to an “administrative error”—to the US, he said “Of course I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous,” while Trump beamed next to him.

The courts cannot enforce their own orders. They rely on the Department of Justice to do that. But the DOJ is now under the control of Trump toady Pam Bondi, as Attorney General. But the Supreme Court could cite Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem for contempt.

The Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution says that “No person [in the US, citizen or not] shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Donald Trump clearly doesn’t know or care what’s in the Constitution, but he should know what’s in the Fifth Amendment, since he’s “pled the Fifth” so many times before courts of law.

There are nearly two million people currently incarcerated in the US. Two hundred thousand of them are in federal prisons, and the rest are in state prisons and local jails. The US has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, and this number was significantly inflated by the War on Drugs. Although Black people comprise only 14% of the US population, they form 42% of the incarcerated population.

Trump’s deportation plans are failing on their own terms. Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s mass deportations, has said he wants to deport a million or more migrants. In the month of March 2025, ICE managed to deport 12,300 migrants. This is fewer than Biden deported last March (12,700). To get anywhere near their one million deportees out of the country will require too much money, too much time, and too much manpower. So they’re going to have to resort to other means. Kristi Noem’s propaganda photo shoot was one: “This is what will happen to you if you come to the US—you will end up in this Hellhole in El Salvador.” Another is the use of the Social Security “Death Master File,” to simply list living migrants as dead, making it virtually impossible for them to live and hopefully forcing them to “self-deport.” Former SSA chief Martin O’Malley has called this “financial murder,” and said that it’s all part of DOGE’s criminal corruption of Social Security data.

Concerning Trump’s tactic of sending American citizens and non-citizens to a foreign penal colony without due process, historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote:

Here’s the thing: Once you give up the idea that we are all equal before the law and have the right to due process, you have given up the whole game. You have admitted the principle that some people have more rights than others. Once you have replaced the principle of equality before the law with the idea that some people have no rights, you have granted your approval to the idea of an authoritarian government. At that point, all you can do is to hope that the dictator and his henchmen overlook you.²