Dear John,
The Trump administration’s creation of a network of secretive foreign prisons — where U.S. detainees are sent beyond the protection of our Constitution — is a chilling and unlawful betrayal of American values. Immigrants, many with no criminal record, are being handed over to governments known for torture, indefinite detention, and state-sanctioned killings.
This is not immigration enforcement. When masked agents in unmarked vehicles abduct people from our streets without due process and send them to brutal prisons in places like El Salvador, Uzbekistan, Angola, and South Sudan, it is nothing less than state-sponsored human trafficking.
These facilities lie completely outside U.S. legal oversight. Detainees, many of whom have never lived in the countries they’ve been deported to, are left to languish indefinitely — cut off from family, lawyers, and the chance of a fair trial. The Salvadoran Justice Minister even bragged that the only way out of El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison is “in a coffin.”
That’s not justice. That’s a death sentence without charges, trial, or appeal.
This system is a grotesque violation of human rights. It tears up the constitutional promise that every person — citizen or not — is protected from cruel and unusual punishment, and entitled to due process under the law. The United States once stood for these principles. We cannot allow them to be eradicated.
No American-sponsored gulags: Demand Congress stop ICE from trafficking detainees to foreign prisons where they may be tortured or killed. We must reclaim our values, uphold the Constitution, and stop this before more lives are destroyed.
This threat extends beyond immigrants. Donald Trump has openly stated his intent and desire to deport U.S. citizens as well. If Congress does not act, the machinery being built to traffic non-citizens into foreign gulags could one day be turned against Americans, too.
Over 70% of current ICE detainees have no criminal conviction. Yet many are being sent into the darkest corners of a global prison system, where many will never be heard from again. Only one person – Kilmar Armando Ábrego García – has been released from El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison, and that only after direct intervention by Senator Chris Van Hollen. Thousands remain in danger.
Congress cannot stand idly by.
We must put the pressure on them to hold public hearings. Investigate ICE’s unlawful trafficking operations. Expose the contracts, the abuses, the cover-ups. And most importantly, shut this system down and bring home every person wrongly detained abroad.
Demand an end to America’s global gulags. No one — citizen or non-citizen — should be sent to a foreign prison to be tortured or killed.
Thank you for insisting we reclaim the human rights and values that the United States purports to hold dear.
Robert Reich
Inequality Media Civic Action
