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Opinion
3 Ways Rising Inequality Has Weakened US Democracy
The class-based inequalities exacerbated by the Trump bill are not new. Rather, they are part of a 50-year trend linked to social cleavages, political corruption, and a declining belief in the common good.
Jul 14, 2025
America has never been richer. But the gains are so lopsided that the top 10% controls 69% of all wealth in the country, while the bottom half controls just 3%. Meanwhile, surging corporate profits have mostly benefited investors, not the broader public.
This divide is expected to widen after President Donald Trump’s sweeping new spending bill drastically cuts Medicaid and food aid, programs that stabilize the economy and subsidize low-wage employers.
Moreover, the tax cuts at the heart of the bill will deliver tens of billions of dollars in benefits to the wealthiest households while disproportionately burdening low-income households, according to analyses by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. By 2033, the bottom 20% will pay more in taxes while the top 0.1% receive $43 billion in cuts.
I am a sociologist who studies economic inequality, and my research demonstrates that the class-based inequalities exacerbated by the Trump bill are not new. Rather, they are part of a 50-year trend linked to social cleavages, political corruption, and a declining belief in the common good.
The Roots of Class-Based Inequality
The decades following World War II were broadly prosperous, but conditions began changing in the 1970s. Class inequality has increased enormously since then, according to government data, while income inequality has risen for five decades at the expense of workers.
Economists usually gauge a country’s economic health by looking at its gross domestic product as measured through total spending on everything from groceries to patents.
But another way to view GDP is by looking at whether the money goes to workers or business owners. This second method—the income approach—offers a clearer picture of who really benefits from economic growth.
The money that goes to labor’s share of GDP, or workers, is represented by employee compensation, including wages, salaries, and benefits. The money left over for businesses after paying for work and materials is called gross operating surplus, or business surplus.
The share of GDP going to workers rose 12% from 1947 to 1970, then fell 14% between 1970 and 2023. The opposite happened with the business surplus, falling 18% in the early postwar decades before jumping 34% from 1970 to today.
Meanwhile, corporate profits have outpaced economic growth by 193% since 1970. Within profits, shareholder dividends as a share of GDP grew 274%.
As of 2023, labor had lost all of the economic gains made since 1947. Had workers kept their 1970 share of GDP, they would have earned $1.7 trillion more in 2023 alone. And no legislation or federal action since 1970 has reversed this half-century trend.
When more of the economy goes to businesses instead of workers, that poses serious social problems. My research focuses on three that threaten democracy.
1. Fraying Social Bonds and Livelihoods
Not just an issue of income and assets, growing class inequality represents the fraying of American society.
For instance, inequality and the resulting hardship are linked to worse health outcomes. Americans die younger than their peers in other rich countries, and U.S. life expectancy has decreased, especially among the poor.
Moreover, economic struggles contribute to mental health issues, deaths of despair, and profound problems such as addiction, including tobacco, alcohol, and opioid abuse.
Inequality can disrupt families. Kids who experience the stresses of poverty can develop neurological and emotional problems, putting them at risk for drug use as adults. On the other hand, when minimum wages increase and people begin saving wealth, divorce risk falls.
Research shows inequality has many other negative consequences, from reduced social mobility to lower social trust and even higher homicide rates.
Together, these broad social consequences are linked to misery, political discontent, and normlessness.
2. Increasing Corruption in Politics
Inequality is rising in the U.S. largely because business elites are exercising more influence over policy outcomes, research shows. My related work on privatization explains how 50 years of outsourcing public functions—through contracting, disinvestment, and job cuts—threatens democratic accountability.
Research across different countries has repeatedly found that higher income inequality increases political corruption. It does so by undermining trust in government and institutions, and enabling elites to dominate policymaking while weakening public oversight.
Yet democratic decline and inequality are not inevitable.
Since 2010, weakened campaign finance laws driven by monied interests have sharply increased corruption risks. The Supreme Court ruled then in Citizens United to lift campaign finance restrictions, enabling unlimited political spending. It reached an apex in 2024, when Elon Musk spent $200 million to elect Trump before later installing his Starlink equipment onto Federal Aviation Administration systems in a reported takeover of a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon.
Research shows that a large majority of Americans believe that the economy is rigged, suggesting everyday people sense the link between inequality and corruption.
3. Undermining Belief in the Common Good
National aspirations have emphasized the common good since America’s founding. The Declaration of Independence lists the king’s first offense as undermining the “public good” by subverting the rule of law. The Constitution’s preamble commits the government to promoting the general welfare and shared well-being.
But higher inequality historically means the common good goes overlooked, according to research. Meanwhile, work has become more precarious, less unionized, more segmented, and less geographically stable. Artificial intelligence may worsen these trends.
This tends to coincide with a drop in voting and other forms of civic engagement.
The government has fewer mechanisms for protecting community when rising inequality is paired with lower taxes for the wealthy and reduced public resources. My research finds that public sector unions especially bolster civic engagement in this environment.
Given increasing workplace and social isolation, America’s loneliness epidemic is unsurprising, especially for low earners.
All of these factors and their contribution to alienation can foster authoritarian beliefs and individualism. When people become cold and distrustful of one another, the notion of the common good collapses.
Inequality as a Policy Outcome
News coverage of the Trump bill and policy debate have largely centered on immediate gains and losses. But zoomed out, a clearer picture emerges of the long-term dismantling of foundations that once supported broad economic security. That, in turn, has enabled democratic decline.
As labor’s share of the economy declined, so too did the institutional trust and shared social values that underpin democratic life. Among the many consequences are the political discontent and disillusionment shaping our current moment.
Republicans hold both chambers of Congress through 2026, making significant policy changes unlikely in the short term. Democrats opposed the bill but are out of power. And their coalition is divided between a centrist establishment and an insurgent progressive wing with diverging priorities in addressing inequality.
Yet democratic decline and inequality are not inevitable. If restoring broad prosperity and social stability are the goals, they may require revisiting the New Deal-style policies that produced labor’s peak economic share of 59% of GDP in 1970.
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How to Take Advantage of the IRA Tax Credits Before Trump’s GOP Kills Them
The IRA won’t last a decade. Its funding starts running out at the end of September. So here is what individual Americans might want to do over the 165 days.
Jul 14, 2025
You may recall the amount of sweat, anguish, and resolve it took to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. There were the amazing young people of the Sunrise Movement, who channeled the energy of Greta’s worldwide outburst into the offices of Nancy Pelosi, energizing the 2020 primary race and then—in a remarkable display of political maturity—turning that energy into legislative sausage making. There was the steady morphing of the Build Back Better bill into ever-more compromised climate legislation, and then the widespread conviction that even that would not pass. Until at the last minute Joe Manchin agreed, as long as it was larded with yet more gifts for the fossil fuel industry. And with that Congress took its first real action on climate in the 35 years it’s been an issue.
It was supposed to be a steady source of funding that would last a decade, giving this energy transition time to find its feet, and giving the U.S. a foothold in the fight with China to determine the future. But in the course of a few months the White House and the fossil-funded GOP Congress have overturned all that except the extra gifts to the fossil fuel industry. (Antonia Juhasz provides the best account yet of all the excruciating details in Rolling Stone.)
The IRA won’t last a decade. Its funding starts running out at the end of September—if you’re in the market for an electric vehicle, that has to be done now. (And there may be some excellent lease deals). And if you’re even considering getting solar on your home, that needs to happen by the end of the year if you want the tax credit.
Normally we talk about these things as political questions—but today I asked a few experts to share their take on what individual Americans might want to do over the 165 days.
This summer and this fall are the right times to work with a trusted local provider to get your project up. If nothing else, it’s a good way to disappoint the GOP and their fossil fuel friend group.
Here’s Cindy del Rosario-Tapan, from the very experienced Solar United Neighbors (who are sponsoring a webinar later this week to go over the same ground and more)
- The impacts of this new law will be severe. We expect the solar market to shrink significantly and will readjust over time. It’s likely many companies will have layoffs or go out of business in the near-term.
- Our advice to homeowners is to act now:
- If you are a homeowner and planning to pay cash or finance your system through a loan, we highly recommend you go solar in 2025 to benefit from the tax credit and that you do so soon. Homeowners should proceed with caution and consult a tax adviser to determine the extent to which their project is eligible.
- The safest way to ensure your project will qualify for the tax credit is to have it “placed in service” before the end of 2025. “Placed in service” is a gray area, but a conservative interpretation would be when your system is ready to be connected to the grid.
My old 350.org colleague Phil Aroneanu has been hard at work at Climate United trying to protect what they can of the IRA funding. He breaks it down a little further:
If you're hoping to put solar on the roof of your home, and you want to own the system (not lease it), the 30% residential clean energy tax credit (25D) will sunset at the end of 2025, 10 years sooner than what was written into the Inflation Reduction Act.
If you own a business or nonprofit, or work at a school or city government agency and want to install solar OR you want to lease a solar array for your home rather than own it outright, you'll need to get started as soon as possible to qualify for the up to 60% investment tax credit (48E) and bonuses available. Onerous restrictions will kick in by the end of 2025 making it more difficult to claim the tax credits for projects that aren't yet under construction—and the Trump administration just released an Executive Order that will add even more red tape to these tax credits.
If you're hoping to buy and electric vehicle, the tax credits expire on September 30, and if you're planning to install heat pumps, windows, or take other energy efficiency measures, most of those tax credits expire at the end of the year.
And here’s Andrea Karelas from RE-Volv, a group that helps nonprofits go solar. (He’s also the author of the excellent Climate Courage), who analyzes it from the point of view of an average homeowner or project sponsor
So basically, before the big terrible bill, thanks to the IRA, if you went solar in the U.S., you got an Investment Tax Credit for your system worth 30% of the value (for storage as well) as a base amount and that credit would have been in place through 2032. So if your solar system cost $10K, you'll have $3K less taxes to pay next April, so essentially your system is only $7K. Then there are bonus adders that stack based on certain criteria. If your project is in an "energy community" (which basically is a place that has been historically impacted by fossil fuel production, or has many people working in energy production), you get an extra 10%. If you are in a low to moderate income community you are eligible for a 10-20% adder (but those are first come first serve). And if your equipment is made using majority domestic content (which is basically impossible) you'd get another 10%. So the solar ITC for residences (25d) or non-residential (48e) start at a minimum of 30% savings. If someone qualified for all the bonus adders, it would be 70% covered by the ITC. Many of our projects, for example, get 40 or 50% because they are in an energy community and serve an LMI population.
Now, thanks to the big terrible bill, the residential credit (25d) will expire Dec 31 2025. So basically your system price goes up by a minimum of 30% if you don't have it fully installed before January 1 2026. (And you could be missing out on up to 70% of the system cost covered if you qualify for the bonus adders.)
Now, the nonresidential credit (48e) on paper looks like it gets a better deal because you can theoretically get project construction started a year from when the bill was signed (so July 4 2026) or get it completed by the end of 2027. BUT they also added requirements regarding Foreign Entities of Concern to limit the use of Chinese parts or equipment that are so unworkable that it makes the ITC unusable, even with these extended timelines. The FEOC requirements kick in January 1 2026. So in essence, nonresidential projects now also have a December 31 2025 deadline.
All of this would be easier to navigate with devoted help from blue state officials: Here, for instance, is some good advice from NYSFocus on how New York Gov. Kathy Hochul could help, and some excellent analysis along the same lines from Noah Ginsburg. But I think the bottom line is clear—this summer and this fall are the right times to work with a trusted local provider to get your project up. If nothing else, it’s a good way to disappoint the GOP and their fossil fuel friend group.
While you’re doing that, of course, we also need to be standing up for clean energy in general. That’s why we’re hard at work on SunDay.
Part of that work involves the solar industry reinventing itself for the world past subsidies—which is not impossible. Its old model won’t work without federal support, but that’s not necessarily the end: Solar flourishes without much in the way of subsidy elsewhere, in places like Australia, because they’ve evolved a lower-cost business plan. Permitting reform is key (and a key focus of SunDay), as Ryan Kennedy makes clear in this piece from PV Magazine just yesterday:
Permit applications can cause delays of two to six weeks or more, causing a poor customer experience and higher project cancellation rates. Permitting also drives up costs. In New Jersey, for example, permit approvals and related barriers add an estimated $3,800 to $4,500 to average project costs. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) said the cost could be in excess of $6,000 to $7,000 for an average project.
New Jersey regulators, among other states, recently passed legislation to require automated permitting for residential solar, cutting timelines and costs. Tools like the Department of Energy’s (DOE) SolarApp+ can facilitate permitting in your jurisdiction, and DOE provides technical assistance for implementing the tool.
Birch estimates an average U.S. installation could shed $0.98 per W from automated permitting fixes alone.
Since that hasn’t happened yet, it doesn’t make the immediate blow any easier. As Aroneanu says:
Multiple recent analyses of the budget bill estimated that cutting clean energy and manufacturing tax credits will scale back solar and other renewable generation capacity by up to 72% in the next decade, raise household electricity prices up to $290, trigger the closure or cancellation of 331 solar and storage factories, and erase $286 billion in local investment in American communities, killing 760,000 jobs in the process.
Make no mistake: The Trump administration is doing everything in its power to try to kill clean energy.
Still, it seems impossible that American ingenuity won’t start to figure out some ways, especially since the rest of the world is surging confidently ahead. (Here, somewhat randomly, are updates from Turkey, Africa, and of course China). As Karelas says:
We know solar is the cheapest form of electrons ever created. Last year 90% of new generation built in the U.S. was clean energy, 78% of it solar. (No wonder they're coming after it this hard.) There are some in the residential space who are trying to make the most of the situation by saying, “Look, the industry had a nice cushion with these tax credits for many years.” Tax credits also made project financing more complicated—there's a world where the solar industry bounces back from this after cutting costs, streamlining various processes, and will be stronger than ever… So, light at the end of the tunnel, but definitely a terrible blow.
Our job is to magnify that (sun)light, shorten that tunnel, and not fall any further behind the rest of the world than we have to. So, to work on all fronts!
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The Global South’s AI Moment
If the Global South acts now, it can help build a future where algorithms bridge divides instead of deepening them—where they enable peace, not war.
Jul 14, 2025
The world stands on the brink of a transformation whose full scope remains elusive. Just as steam engines, electricity, and the internet each sparked previous industrial revolutions, artificial intelligence is now shaping what has been dubbed the Fourth Industrial Revolution. What sets this new era apart is the unprecedented speed and scale with which AI is being deployed—particularly in the realms of security and warfare, where technological advancement rarely keeps pace with ethics or regulation.
As the United States and its Western allies pour billions into autonomous drones, AI-driven command systems, and surveillance platforms, a critical question arises: Is this arms race making the world safer—or opening the door to geopolitical instability and even humanitarian catastrophe?
The reality is that the West’s focus on achieving military superiority—especially in the digital domain—has sidelined global conversations about the shared future of AI. The United Nations has warned in recent years that the absence of binding legal frameworks for lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) could lead to irreversible consequences. Yet the major powers have largely ignored these warnings, favoring strategic autonomy in developing digital deterrence over any multilateral constraints. The nuclear experience of the 20th century showed how a deterrence-first logic brought humanity to the edge of catastrophe; now, imagine algorithms that can decide to kill in milliseconds, unleashed without transparent global commitments.
So far, it is the nations of the Global South that have borne the heaviest cost of this regulatory vacuum. From Yemen to the Sahel, AI-powered drones have enabled attacks where the line between military and civilian targets has all but disappeared. Human rights organizations report a troubling rise in civilian casualties from drone strikes over the past decade, with no clear mechanisms for compensation or legal accountability. In other words, the Global South is not only absent from decision-making but has become the unintended testing ground for emerging military technologies—technologies often shielded from public scrutiny under the guise of national security.
Ultimately, the central question facing humanity is this: Do we want AI to replicate the militaristic logic of the 20th century—or do we want it to help us confront shared global challenges, from climate change to future pandemics?
But this status quo is not inevitable. The Global South—from Latin America and Africa to West and South Asia—is not merely a collection of potential victims. It holds critical assets that can reshape the rules of the game. First, these countries have youthful, educated populations capable of steering AI innovation toward civilian and development-oriented goals, such as smart agriculture, early disease detection, climate crisis management, and universal education. For instance, multilateral projects involving Indian specialists in the fight against malaria using artificial intelligence.
Second, the South possesses a collective historical memory of colonialism and technological subjugation, making it more attuned to the geopolitical dangers of AI monopolies and thus a natural advocate for a more just global order. Third, emerging coalitions—like BRICS+ and the African Union’s digital initiatives—demonstrate that South-South cooperation can facilitate investment and knowledge exchange independently of Western actors.
Still, international political history reminds us that missed opportunities can easily turn into looming threats. If the Global South remains passive during this critical moment, the risk grows that Western dominance over AI standards will solidify into a new form of technological hegemony. This would not merely deepen technical inequality—it would redraw the geopolitical map and exacerbate the global North-South divide. In a world where a handful of governments and corporations control data, write algorithms, and set regulatory norms, non-Western states may find themselves forced to spend their limited development budgets on software licenses and smart weapon imports just to preserve their sovereignty. This siphoning of resources away from health, education, and infrastructure—the cornerstones of sustainable development—would create a vicious cycle of insecurity and underdevelopment.
Breaking out of this trajectory requires proactive leadership by the Global South on three fronts. First, leading nations—such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and South Africa—should establish a ”Friends of AI Regulation” group at the U.N. General Assembly and propose a draft convention banning fully autonomous weapons. The international success of the landmine treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention shows that even in the face of resistance from great powers, the formation of “soft norms” can pave the way toward binding treaties and increase the political cost of defection.
Second, these countries should create a joint innovation fund to support AI projects in healthcare, agriculture, and renewable energy—fields where benefits are tangible for citizens and where visible success can generate the social capital needed for broader international goals. Third, aligning with Western academics and civil society is vital. The combined pressure of researchers, human rights advocates, and Southern policymakers on Western legislatures and public opinion can help curb the influence of military-industrial lobbies and create political space for international cooperation.
In addition, the Global South must invest in developing its own ethical standards for data use and algorithmic governance to prevent the uncritical adoption of Western models that may worsen cultural risks and privacy violations. Brazil’s 2021 AI ethics framework illustrates that local values can be harmonized with global principles like transparency and algorithmic fairness. Adapting such initiatives at the regional level—through bodies like the African Union or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization—would be a major step toward establishing a multipolar regime in global digital governance.
Of course, this path is not without obstacles. Western powers possess vast economic, political, and media tools to slow such efforts. But history shows that transformative breakthroughs often emerge from resistance to dominant systems. Just as the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s expanded the Global South’s agency during the Cold War, today, it can spearhead AI regulation to reshape the power-technology equation in favor of a fairer world order.
Ultimately, the central question facing humanity is this: Do we want AI to replicate the militaristic logic of the 20th century—or do we want it to help us confront shared global challenges, from climate change to future pandemics? The answer depends on the political will and bold leadership of countries that hold the world’s majority population and the greatest potential for growth. If the Global South acts now, it can help build a future where algorithms bridge divides instead of deepening them—where they enable peace, not war.
The time for action is now. Silence means ceding the future to entrenched powers. Coordinated engagement, on the other hand, could move AI from a minefield of geopolitical interests to a shared highway of cooperation and human development. This is the mission the Global South must undertake—not just for itself, but for all of humanity.
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Kilmar Abrego García and the Trump Torture Regime
In the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land).
Jul 14, 2025
I didn’t want to write this article.
In fact, I had something relatively uplifting planned: an Independence Day piece about the rich implications for the present moment to be found in the Declaration of Independence. But other excellent writers beat me to that one.
So instead, I reluctantly find myself once again focusing on U.S. torture, a subject I’ve studied and written about since the autumn of 2001, including in a couple of books. I’d naively hoped never to have to do so again, but here we are.
The Rendition of Kilmar Abrego García
This March, the Trump administration illegally sent Kilmar Abrego García to a notorious hellhole in El Salvador. That mega-prison is known by the acronym CECOT for Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. (In English, the Terrorism Confinement Center.) There he was beaten and tortured in violation of both this country’s immigration and federal laws, as well as the United Nations’ Convention against Torture, or CAT, to which the United States is a signatory.
It didn’t matter that Abrego García was in this country legally and that, as a Justice Department attorney told a federal judge, his deportation was the result of an “administrative error.” In fact, the Department of Justice later rewarded its own lawyer’s honesty by firing him.
Kilmar Abrego García is a citizen of El Salvador who entered the United States “without inspection” (that is, undetected by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) in 2011. He was 16-years-old and fleeing his home country where, “[b]eginning around 2006, gang members stalked, hit, and threatened to kidnap and kill him in order to coerce his parents to succumb to their increasing demands for extortion,” according to a civil suit filed against various U.S. officials. “He then made his way to the state of Maryland, where his older brother, a U.S. citizen, resided.”
There’s another expression to describe what happened to Abrego García, one that will be familiar to anyone who followed the news during the first decade and a half of this century: extraordinary rendition.
Abrego García lived in Maryland for years, working as a day laborer. In 2016, he began a relationship with a U.S. citizen, Jennifer Vásquez Sura, and in 2018, they moved in together. They conceived a child and Abrego García did construction work to support the family, which included his wife’s two children, both U.S. citizens. In March 2019, however, he and three other men were arrested outside a Home Depot by Prince George’s County, Maryland police. They turned him over to ICE, claiming on the flimsiest of evidence that he was a member of the Salvadoran gang, MS-13. The “evidence” in question included the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie and that a confidential informant had identified him to a detective as a member of an MS-13 group operating out of Long Island, New York, where he had never lived. (The detective was later suspended for unrelated infractions.)
After almost six months in detention, during which time his son was born, an immigration court granted Abrego García a “withholding of removal.” That meant he would be allowed to remain in the United States and could legally work here, because he was believed to face genuine danger were he to be deported to El Salvador. He was required to check in annually with ICE, which he did, most recently in early January 2025.
Things were going relatively well. He had become a union member and was employed full time as a first-year sheet metal apprentice on a trajectory toward a rewarding career in the building trades. On March 12, 2025, however, everything changed. He was driving home from his jobsite after picking up his son (who is deaf in one ear, has intellectual disabilities, and does not speak) when ICE officers pulled his car over and arrested him. Officers gave his wife just 10 minutes to arrive and get their child, threatening to turn him over to Child Protective Services if she missed that deadline.
After being shuttled from state to state, Abrego García ended up at a Louisiana detention center, from which he was indeed deported to El Salvador along with several other men late on the evening of March 15. The people detaining him kept saying he would have a chance to speak to a judge about his legal status, but that was a blatant lie. As his court filing recounts:
He repeatedly requested judicial review. Officials consistently responded with false assurances that he would see a judge, deliberately misleading Plaintiff Abrego Garcia to prevent him from taking actions to assert his legal rights. Plaintiff Abrego Garcia only realized the true nature of his dire situation upon arrival at the airport in El Salvador, at which point it was too late to challenge the unlawful deportation.
Meanwhile, his wife had been desperately trying to find him by checking ICE’s online Detainee Locator System and calling detention centers around the country. Days after he’d already been shipped to El Salvador, the Locator System continued to say that he was at the East Hidalgo Detention Center in La Villa, Texas.
In fact, Kilmar Abrego García had been disappeared. His wife might never have found him if it weren’t for a photo someone sent her from an article about more than 200 Venezuelan immigrants dispatched to CECOT in El Salvador at the same time. His face wasn’t visible, but she recognized him from two scars on his shaved head and some of his personal (but not gang-related) tattoos. She was well aware of CECOT’s reputation as a brutal mega-prison, a site of organized physical and psychological torture.
Once she knew where her husband was, efforts to get him back began. In April, a federal district judge ordered his return, a decision later affirmed by the Supreme Court (which has in these months rarely sided against U.S. President Donald Trump). But the government dragged its feet, refusing to abide by either court’s ruling. Eventually, after maintaining for months that Abrego García was beyond its reach, the Department of Justice reversed itself and brought him back to the United States to face charges of human smuggling in Tennessee, where he remains in federal prison today. Those charges, based on a 2016 Tennessee traffic stop, appear flimsy at best.
Echoes of the “War on Terror”
There’s another expression to describe what happened to Abrego García, one that will be familiar to anyone who followed the news during the first decade and a half of this century: extraordinary rendition. That U.S. government practice of shipping detainees to torture sites around the world was a feature of the “Global War on Terror” (declared by the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks). As early as 2002, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Barton Gellman quoted a U.S. official in Afghanistan, who told them: “We don’t kick the shit out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the shit out of them.”
Ordinary rendition involves sending someone to another country after a formal request for extradition. Extraordinary rendition bypasses all the legal niceties and sends a prisoner to another country without any due process whatsoever. It’s important to call things by their proper names. Extraordinary rendition is what happened to Abrego García. During the “war on terror,” and once again today, such an act carries the risk of torture with it. As Human Rights Watch reported in 2011:
Detainees were… unlawfully rendered [transferred] to countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, where they were likely to be tortured.... Evidence suggests that torture in such cases was not a regrettable consequence of rendition; it may have been the purpose.
Abrego García was unlawfully rendered to El Salvador where, according to his suit, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, beatings, and psychological torture. Specifically,
Upon arrival at CECOT, the detainees were greeted by a prison official who stated, “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave.” Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was then forced to strip, issued prison clothing, and subjected to physical abuse including being kicked in the legs with boots and struck on his head and arms to make him change clothes faster. His head was shaved with a zero razor, and he was frog-marched to cell 15, being struck with wooden batons along the way. By the following day, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia had visible bruises and lumps all over his body.
In Cell 15, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia and 20 other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 pm to 6:00 am, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. During this time, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied bathroom access and soiled himself. The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation.
Note that extraordinary rendition is illegal, both under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, where it is identified by the term “refoulement,” and under the U.S. Foreign Affairs Act of 1998, which states, “It shall be the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.” That last clause relates to a practice known as “chain refoulement,” in which someone is first sent to a third country where the risk of torture is less, only to be sent on to the original prohibited destination. In the unlikely event that, in the future, district federal courts and then the Supreme Court prohibit the Trump administration from shipping detainees off to countries with well-known torture risks, its officials are likely to resort to paying off other, non-torturing nations to serve as trans-shipment sites.
Not the Only Victim
Kilmar Abrego García may turn out to be the most fortunate of the hundreds of migrants shipped from the U.S. to El Salvador in March. An intervention by Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen pried him out of CECOT and got him transferred to a different Salvadoran prison. (It’s unclear why the Trump administration finally decided to bring him back to the United States.) Although he remains in federal custody, at least for the moment, he isn’t languishing incommunicado in El Salvador.
The 238 Venezuelan detainees sent to CECOT at the same time haven’t been that lucky. Like Abrego García, they were labeled terrorists and deported without benefit of due process. Trump and his aides called them “rapists,” “savages,” “monsters,” and “the worst of the worst.” But as the investigative journalism organization ProPublica revealed, the administration knew all along that those allegations were false. As the data they reviewed indicates:
The government knew that only six of the immigrants were convicted of violent crimes: four for assault, one for kidnapping, and one for a weapons offense. And it shows that officials were aware that more than half, or 130, of the deportees were not labeled as having any criminal convictions or pending charges; they were labeled as only having violated immigration laws.
Yet it seems likely that, without any judicial proceedings whatsoever, those men have received life sentences in a Salvadoran hellhole for the crime of seeking a better life in the United States.
It Could Happen to You
Most of the discussion in the press and in legal and philosophical circles about the U.S. use of torture during the war on terror assumed the legitimacy of torture’s main pretext: the need to extract lifesaving information from unwilling detainees. At the time, some arguments against it focused on torture’s efficacy: did torturing people truly produce “actionable intelligence”? Others took that effectiveness for granted, while questioning its ethics: Could the torture of a few be justified to save the many? The apotheosis of that false conundrum was the “ticking time bomb” problem.
I say “false conundrum” because such gathering of information is almost always a pretext for a program of institutionalized state torture. Its real political purpose is to maintain the power of the torturing regime by generating fear in anyone who might oppose it. This has been proven repeatedly in studies of torture regimes from Latin America to the Philippines and was no less true, in an oblique way, for the well-documented U.S. torture program of those “war on terror” years.
Anything we do today to maintain human connections—that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters—is also an act of solidarity in such grim times.
Most torture regimes directly target members of their own societies, hoping to frighten them into compliance through the knowledge that opponents of the regime are being tortured and that they could be next. The Bush-Cheney administration, however, used torture more indirectly to remind Americans that they were in mortal danger from the country’s enemies and that only the administration could protect them from that. The proof of that danger was the very fact that a self-evidently good government nonetheless was forced to commit such terrible acts at CIA “black sites” globally and elsewhere.
Today, in the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is indeed willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land). Every torture regime will identify a group or groups of people as “legitimate” targets. In the United States today, immigrants form just such a group, characterized by the Trump administration as either superhuman (“terrorists,” “monsters”) or subhuman (“vermin”). Super- or sub-, they are deemed unworthy of ordinary human rights.
But the fear generated by such threats of torture penetrates beyond those most immediately threatened, encouraging everyone else to comply with and bow down before the regime. Trump has indeed claimed that “the homegrowns are next.”
Building Solidarity
Institutionalized state torture destroys social solidarity by sowing distrust. Writing about Uruguay’s 1973-1985 dictatorship, Lawrence Weschler described how that government assigned every citizen a letter “grade” of A, B, or C. A’s were deemed good citizens and eligible for state employment; B’s were suspect and eligible only for private employment; C’s lost all their rights and posed a danger to anyone who hired or associated with them. “And,” wrote Weschler, “the point was that anyone at any time could suddenly find himself reclassified as a ‘C’—because, after all, they knew everything.” (And how much more do “they” know about us today, now that federal data about each one of us is rapidly being centralized and consolidated?)
One effect of Uruguay’s torture regime was a profound social isolation. As one respondent told Weschler:
Fear exterminated all social life in the public realm. Nobody spoke in the streets for fear of being heard… One tried not to make new friends, for fear of being held responsible for their unknown pasts. One suspected immediately those who were more open or less afraid, of being “agents provocateurs” of the intelligence services. Rumors about torture, arrests, mistreatments were so magnified by our terror as to take on epic proportions.
Those of us living in the United States of 2025 are already being called on to resist the centrifugal forces of isolation and mistreatment in the age of Trump. In this time of torture redux, small efforts to maintain social connections become real acts of resistance. We have already seen whole neighborhoods spontaneously resist ICE raids by pouring into the streets. That is one crucial kind of solidarity. I’d argue that anything we do today to maintain human connections—that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters—is also an act of solidarity in such grim times. We will need them all in the days to come.
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