Unforgivable

CECOT is a Slow-Motion Extermination Camp

By now you have probably seen the story that Bari Weiss, new editor in chief of CBS News, canceled a 60 Minutes special on the Venezuelan men deported to the notorious CECOT concentration camp (see footnote #2 below). The segment did play in Canada and is now available on YouTube. This post is an entry in my forthcoming book “The Great Divide: Poems & Politics” due out in February.

Unforgivable

“Human Rights Watch and Cristosal found that the people held in CECOT were subjected to inhumane prison conditions, including prolonged incommunicado detention, inadequate food, denial of basic hygiene and sanitation, limited access to health care and medicine, and lack of recreational or educational activities, in violation of several provisions of the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners.”

“You Have Arrived in Hell”: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador’s Mega Prison, Report from Human Rights Watch and Cristosal, 2025

When Kristi Noem’s ICE crusade deported 255 Venezuelan men to the CECOT¹ prison in El Salvador, assumed guilty with no chance to prove their innocence, they did not just condemn them to a foreign concentration camp². They condemned them to a cruel and unusual death.

When the deportees arrived at CECOT in shackles to be shorn of their hair and their human identities before being crammed into cages not fit for shelter dogs, the prison director told them: “This is hell and you’re never going to get out³.” As Donald Trump and Kristi Noem surely knew, being incarcerated at CECOT is a one-way ticket to an agonizing death.⁴

CECOT is a slow motion extermination camp!

Slaves on a Roman galley ship received more humane treatment than those Venezuelan men that Trump and Noem deported to this manmade hellhole. Trump and Noem did not care that inmates of the CECOT concentration camp were doomed to slowly lose their humanity as they lost their hope…

Hope they will ever again walk free in the sunshine.

Hope they will ever again feel the touch of a loved one.

Hope they will ever again taste the sweetness of a freshly peeled orange.

Trump and Noem did not care that most of the men they condemned to CECOT’s tiger cages did not have criminal records. They did not care that their families would never see them again. They did not see those men as human beings who have a right to life. They cared no more for the lives of the men they shipped away to this hell on earth than Caeser cared for the lives of slaves he sent to die in the Colosseum.

And just as Caeser saw his gladiator slaves as possessions to be traded away at his whim, Trump and Noem used these deported men as bargaining chips to be exchanged for the release of ten Americans being held in Venezuela. Including one who had been convicted of brutally murdering three people (making him, unlike the Venezuelan deportees, among the worst-of-the-worst).

Trump’s mass deportation crusade was never about making America safe. It has always been about inflicting cruelty and humiliation upon the people he and his minions call “vermin” and “garbage” and accuse of “poisoning the blood” of white America.

To Trump and Noem these men are not human beings. They are mere props for Republican prison porn and bargaining chips for the Trumpian version of Game of Thrones.

Do not forgive them Father, for they damn well know what they do.

And yet still they have the temerity to call themselves Christian.

NOTES

1. Terrorism Confinement Center: Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo

2. CECOT inmates are allocated 6 square feet per person, about the same that the Nazis allocated to inmates at the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp.

3. Teo Armus et al: “U.S. deportees, freed from Salvadoran prison, describe ‘horror movie’” The Washington Post, 07-22-2025

4. “The Salvadoran government has described people held in CECOT as ‘terrorists,’ and has said that they ‘will never leave.’ Human Rights Watch is not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison.” - Human Rights Watch declaration on prison conditions in El Salvador for the J.G.G. v. Trump case, March 20, 2025.