Luis Alberto Castillo tried to do it the right way. According to an affidavit filed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Castillo, a 29-year-old Venezuelan citizen who had been living in Colombia, arrived at the Paso del Norte Port of Entry in El Paso, Texas, on Jan. 19. He had made an appointment to apply for asylum on CBP One, an official U.S. government app, Castillo’s own affidavit said.
Both U.S. and international law enshrine a right to asylum. But Castillo ran into two hitches. The first was that, as reported by the New York Times, the border agent thought a tattoo on his neck looked suspicious and ordered him temporarily detained. The second was that this happened the day before Donald Trump was inaugurated for his second term as U.S. president—and quickly suspended access to asylum.
Castillo spent two weeks in custody in El Paso. A Times investigation would later find that he had no criminal convictions in Colombia; his family told the newspaper’s reporters that his neck tattoo was a tribute to Michael Jordan. Nonetheless, Castillo found himself shackled and loaded onto a military cargo plane with several other migrants born in Venezuela. Their destination: the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay.
Trump’s signature election promise was to carry out what he calls a “mass deportation” of as many as 20 million people—a plan that will by its nature almost certainly run afoul of international law. Collective expulsions violate a host of protections, including the right to individual assessment of risks and bans against forcing individuals to go back to countries where they face grave human rights abuses.
On the campaign trail, Trump advisor Stephen Miller outlined what these expulsions would look like: roundups of immigrants by the military and federal law enforcement officers, mass detentions, and deportations of immigrant families with U.S. citizen children.
Miller is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, and some of those plans are taking shape. Trump officials have indicated that some federal personnel, including Internal Revenue Service workers and staff of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, have been reassigned from their jobs or asked to volunteer to bolster immigration investigations. Trump has also issued executive orders challenging birthright citizenship—a right enshrined in the plain text of the 14th Amendment—and allowing immigration-related arrests inside hospitals, schools, and places of worship, which were long considered places of sanctuary.
In recent days, the Trump administration has ignored court orders to halt deportation flights under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an archaic authority meant to be used only in wartime. The White House also rebuffed a court order that blocked the expulsion of a Brown University medical professor. The president himself has announced his intention to “find, apprehend, and deport” more pro-Palestine student protesters in the wake of the detentions of two Columbia students and the “self-deportation” of a third. The administration has, without evidence, claimed that both Venezuelan and pro-Palestinian detainees are linked to terrorism.
But the full machinery to conduct mass deportations is not yet in place. On Feb. 12, the Department of Homeland Security issued a request for “immediate assistance” from the Pentagon for the “detention and secure transfer of aliens within the Continental United States,” including the use of El Paso’s Fort Bliss as a staging ground for 10,000 immigrants. This month, the Guardian reported that the base is also “being considered for large-scale detention.”
Dozens of other installations could follow suit, including New Jersey’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst; Hill Air Force Base near Salt Lake City; Homestead Air Reserve Base outside Miami; and Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, the government memo said.
As the Trump administration builds its deportation machine at home, it is also making use of alliances and client states to do so throughout the Americas—fruits of the same imperial interventions that helped trigger the last century of northward migrations. In addition to Guantánamo Bay, these facilities range from hotels in the Panamanian jungle to airstrips in Honduras.
One of the most troubling partnerships is with El Salvador, whose president, Nayib Bukele, calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator.” In 2022, Bukele declared a “state of exception” in his country, allowing the military and police to arrest people on suspicion of gang affiliation—including allegedly suspicious tattoos—without due process. El Salvador quickly achieved the highest incarceration rate in the world.
On a visit to El Salvador’s capital last month, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters that Bukele has offered to house in his prisons immigrants deported from the United States and “dangerous American criminals in custody in our country, including those of U.S. citizenship and legal residents.”
Many are expected to be stuffed into Bukele’s new Terrorism Confinement Center, a prison built to hold 40,000 people. Inmates there are shaved, stripped naked, and given just a pair of thin white boxer shorts to wear. An investigation by the Salvadoran human rights organization Cristosal found that in the prison’s first year, “dozens of inmates died as a result of torture, beatings, mechanical suffocation via strangulation or wounds or were left to die because of lack of medical attention,” according to El País.
Ties between Trump’s circle and Bukele run deep. Donald Trump Jr. and his then-partner, former Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle, attended Bukele’s second, unconstitutional inauguration last June. Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz was there, too, along with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson. “We have the whole team here. We are now in El Salvador. … We are here just promoting those who support freedom around the world,” Donald Trump Jr. said in a video he posted to TikTok.
A few months later, Elon Musk hosted the Salvadoran dictator in Texas to discuss “the future of humanity.” Their relationship blossomed on Musk’s social media hub, X, with the tech mogul declaring in January that Bukele’s “state of exception” model “needs to happen and will happen in America.”
Last month, as federal judges tried to put limits on Musk’s purge of the federal government, the billionaire retweeted a statement from Bukele: “If you don’t impeach the corrupt judges, you CANNOT fix the country.” Musk replied in a quote tweet: “Unfortunately, as President Bukele eloquently articulates, there is no other option. We must impeach to save democracy.”
The constitutional violations inherent in all of this—imprisoning people who haven’t even been accused of a crime, deporting U.S. citizens to serve sentences in foreign prisons—are too many to detail. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution spring to mind.
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But the Trump administration has already shown a willingness to blow through legal and social red lines, as vividly illustrated by its use of Guantánamo, for the first time, to detain people deported from U.S. territory.
The naval station has long been a symbol of American exception. U.S. Marines, with Cuban help, seized Guantánamo while intervening in the island’s 1898 independence war against Spain; Washington extorted a lease after the conflict in exchange for withdrawing troops from the rest of the island. The land has remained in U.S. hands ever since, even as Fidel Castro’s guerrillas overthrew Cuba’s U.S.-backed dictator in 1959. That strange arrangement—a U.S. base on hostile territory—created a legal gray area where presidents have argued that neither U.S. nor Cuban law applies.
The Clinton administration used Guantánamo to temporarily house tens of thousands of mainly Cuban and Haitian migrants interdicted at sea in the 1990s. In 2002, the Bush administration began using the base to indefinitely house detainees captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Pakistan, pledging to the American people that the prisoners held on the island would be the “worst of the worst.” This was always false: The Bush-era detainees were mainly what the Defense Department admitted were “low-value” enemy combatants; only seven of the 780 prisoners were ever convicted of terror-related offenses, most in pre-trial settlements.
The Trump administration has seized on past injustices and made them worse. As immigrant-rights advocates and lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union said in a federal lawsuit filed this month: “Never before has the federal government moved noncitizens apprehended and detained in the United States on civil immigration charges to Guantánamo. Nor is there any legitimate reason to do so now.”
As they were flying Castillo, the Venezuelan migrant, and other men to Cuba, the Trump administration again slapped on the Bush-era label, calling them—without evidence—the “worst of the worst.” Lawyers for the men said the government denied the detainees access to their attorneys and kept them in the dark about their location.
“Each of us are in a small cell with a thin mattress,” Castillo said in his federal affidavit. “We only get one hour a day outside of the cell. That is the only time we can see the sun, and even then, we are in a small cage in the yard. We are searched every time we use the bathroom. The food is not enough and not edible. I do not understand why we are being treated this way.”
The migrants held a five-day hunger strike. At least one told NPR that he tried to commit suicide. Their families were told nothing. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s online “detainee locator” falsely claimed at least some of the men were being held in a small field office in the evocatively named locale of Plantation, Florida.
It was not until Castillo’s family recognized him in an official photo released by the Trump administration—a shot of him being ushered, head bowed, by a masked and gloved soldier; a smidge of tattoo sticking over the collar of his sweatshirt—that Castillo got representation and learned where he was being held. Organizations led by the Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center quickly filed suit against the departments of homeland security, state, and defense on behalf of Castillo and two other inmates, seeking a court order to allow attorneys to access them and other future detainees at the base in eastern Cuba.
Then, on Feb. 20, without warning, the Trump administration cleared the camp, sending all but one of the inmates to an airstrip in Honduras, where they were to be transferred to another plane taking them to Venezuela. Three days later, another planeload of migrants arrived at Guantánamo Bay. This second cohort was transferred to U.S. facilities shortly thereafter.
Meanwhile, over the weekend, the first planeloads of Venezuelan deportees were flown from the United States to El Salvador under the 1798 act. The flights were carried out in apparent defiance of an order to halt the flight by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who argued that the act “cannot be used here against nationals of a country—Venezuela—with whom the United States is not at war.” He ordered “any plane containing these folks … to be returned to the United States.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the judge’s order was issued after the flights had already left U.S. territory and thus had “no lawful basis.” But Boasberg had said that his order also applied to flights that were already “in the air.”
“Oopsie… Too late,” Bukele tweeted, punctuating his post with a laugh-cry emoji. It was retweeted by Rubio.
