Exporting
Authoritarianism
What starts as a test often ends as a template. In 2025, that test came as deportation flights leaving the United States and landing in the heart of a prison state, El Salvador. To most Americans, it was a news blip. A tough-on-crime president sending “violent illegals” back where they came from. But buried in the story was the reality: the United States, under Donald Trump, had begun outsourcing state violence to a regime that doesn’t pretend to care about justice. It wasn’t about removal. It was about silence. About disappearance. About testing the waters to see just how far the public would let power stretch itself.
This wasn’t random. It wasn’t accidental. And it sure as hell wasn’t just immigration.
Trump’s Deportation Doctrine
The Trump administration’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was the kind of maneuver that flies under the radar because it sounds like legal trivia. But it wasn’t trivia. It was a targeted move to get rid of migrants without a trial, a hearing, or a human face to attach the suffering to. The law was written during a wave of war panic over two centuries ago, when the U.S. feared invasion from France. In 2025, it became the tool to funnel hundreds of Venezuelans into one of the most brutal penal systems in the Western Hemisphere.
This didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened after a federal judge ruled the move unconstitutional. It happened while human rights lawyers begged for access to clients who vanished into the Salvadoran system. And it happened while cameras rolled in CECOT, El Salvador’s concrete hell, showing men stacked in rows, eyes down, ribs out. The message was clear: behave, or this is your destination.
Some of the deportees had no criminal records. Some had pending asylum claims. Their only crime was being in the crosshairs of a government that needed to look brutal on cue. Trump knew the optics. The images weren’t collateral; they were marketing. And he didn’t back down when the Supreme Court ruled against the policy nine to zero. He called it a victory.
This wasn’t policy. It was a theater. And like all authoritarian theater, the goal wasn’t order. It was numbness.
Bukele’s Brutality Is the Model
What happened next is what always happens when you reward cruelty with silence. El Salvador didn’t blink. Bukele doubled down. Already operating under an emergency suspension of constitutional rights, his regime had been sweeping up tens of thousands of citizens and throwing them into cells with no charges, no trials, and no timelines. The numbers ballooned. The cages are filled. The country kept cheering.
CECOT, the Terrorism Confinement Center, is more than a prison. It’s a stage. It was built for propaganda. Its gray walls, stripped uniforms, and rows of shackled inmates are packaged and published like campaign flyers. And the public, sick of decades of gang violence, swallowed it whole. Polls show support for Bukele north of 80 percent. Because when people feel afraid, they’ll trade justice for the illusion of safety in a heartbeat.
But behind those polls is a deeper rot. Families looking for disappeared sons. Corpses returned swollen and unrecognizable. Medical care denied. Guards stole food rations. Children pulled from schools and locked away based on nothing but suspicion. This isn’t reform. It’s state-sponsored terror dressed up in patriotism. And when the U.S. started feeding migrants into that machine, it stopped being someone else’s problem.
We’re not watching El Salvador become authoritarian. We’re watching it demonstrate how easy it is.
America Is Already Rehearsing
What Trump started with deportations is now finding copycats across the political landscape. State governors are talking about executing drug dealers. Senators are calling for military occupations of cities. Public calls to let cops shoot looters on sight. The line between order and obedience is deliberately blurred, and the playbook in San Salvador is being studied here.
It won’t look like a dictator overnight; it never does. It starts by ignoring courts, then the media, then protestors, and then expanding the definition of “enemy” until it includes anyone who questions the state. By the time people realize what’s happened, the prisons are full, the cameras are off, and the chants for justice are drowned out by chants for more blood.
The terrifying truth is not that El Salvador is descending. It’s that we are rising to meet it. Step by step, policy by policy, with a population too exhausted or too entertained to stop it. The cruelty isn’t the byproduct. It’s the brand.
The Next Stage Isn’t El Salvador;
It’s Russia or Worse
If this trend holds, what comes next isn’t a more orderly United States. It’s a country where elections are just formalities, where critics are arrested under the label of national security threats, and where prisons become tools of mass compliance. Russia offers the blueprint. North Korea provides the endgame.
In Russia, political opponents are silenced with charges of extremism or treason. In North Korea, entire families disappear into prison camps for the crime of association. These are regimes that started, just like Bukele’s and just like Trump’s, by weaponizing fear and normalizing exceptions. The logic is always the same: we’re under threat, and only force will save us.
If we let the deportation doctrine stand, if we shrug at American residents being dumped into death zones, we are agreeing to the principle that rights are conditional. And once that principle is accepted, it’s only a matter of who qualifies next.
Final Thought
This isn’t a warning about what might happen. It’s a report on what already is. A former U.S. president used an 18th-century war law to vanish people into foreign prisons. A foreign leader built a torture complex that became a media darling. And millions of people nodded along because the people disappearing weren’t them.
Dictatorships don’t always arrive with tanks. Sometimes they come wrapped in public polls and police budgets. Sometimes they speak in broken English and talk about greatness. Sometimes they look like someone solving the problem.
But look harder. That solution has a body count.
Sources
- The Guardian – El Salvador’s Mega-Prison at the Heart of Trump’s Immigration Crackdown
- PBS – Inside the Infamous El Salvador Prison Where Deported Migrants Are Held
- Amnesty International – El Salvador: A Thousand Days into the State of Emergency
- Reuters – U.S. Lawyer Denied Access to Venezuelan Migrants in El Salvador
- Washington Post – Judge Rules Trump’s Use of Wartime Act for Deportations is Illegal
- Human Rights Watch – US: Trump’s First 100 Days an Assault on Rights
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