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How long it will be before the U.S. does not simply “do deals” with Bukele’s El Salvador, but become Bukele’s El Salvador on a much grander scale?
“Immigrants at Florida Detention Facilities Faced Life-Threatening Delays, Report Says,” reports the HuffPost.
“Report Finds ‘Dehumanizing’ Conditions in Florida Immigration Centers,” reports the Miami Herald.
“Migrants at ICE Jail in Miami Made to Kneel to ‘Eat Like Dogs,’ Report Alleges,” reports The Guardian.
Pick your headline from yesterday’s news. The story is the same. Every day, the Trump administration is transforming the U.S. government into more and more of a police state. And Human Rights Watch, a long-respected NGO that monitors the most egregious human rights violations throughout the world, from Darfur to Teheran to Gaza to Florida, has just published a carefully documented and judiciously written 98-page report, ’You Feel Like Your Life Is Over’: Abusive Practices at Three Florida Immigration Detention Centers Since January 2025. The report’s summary is worth quoting:
Between January and June 2025, thousands were held in immigration detention at the Krome North Service Processing Center (Krome), the Broward Transitional Center (BTC), and the Federal Detention Center (FDC), in Florida, under conditions that flagrantly violate international human rights standards and the United States government’s own immigration detention standards. By March, the number of people in immigration detention at Krome had increased 249% from the levels before the January inauguration. At times in March, the facility detained more than three times its operational capacity of inmates. As of June 20, 2025, the number of people in immigration detention at the three facilities was at 111% from the levels before the inauguration.
The change was qualitative as well as quantitative. Detainees in three Florida facilities told Human Rights Watch that ICE detention officers and private contractor guards treated them in a degrading and dehumanizing manner. Some were detained shackled for prolonged periods on buses without food, water, or functioning toilets; there was extreme overcrowding in freezing holding cells where detainees were forced to sleep on cold concrete floors under constant fluorescent lighting; and many were denied access to basic hygiene and medical care.
Based on extensive interviews, the report also draws on a number of other sources, including a 2020 ACLU Report, done in collaboration with HRW and National Immigrant Justice Center, entitled Justice-Free Zones: U.S. Immigration Detention Under the Trump Administration, and an April 2025 report on immigrant detention abuses done by Americans for Immigrant Justice. It notes that two of the three Florida facilities investigated are operated by private contractors under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) supervision; that all three operate under the public radar and without any regular public oversight; and that all three refused to comment on the extensive abuses outlined in the report.
Human Rights Watch, as its website notes, began, in 1978, as “Helsinki Watch.” Originally centered on human rights abuses in the Soviet bloc—whose countries had all signed on to the 1975 Helsinki Accords yet routinely violated its human rights provisions—the NGO eventually extended its remit to document human rights abuses across the globe, establishing “watch” committees in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Does there exist an organized political force capable of resisting the dehumanization and repression that is spreading before our eyes?
I first encountered the organization in connection with its first offshoot “watch” committee, America’s Watch, which was established in 1981 to document the extensive human rights violations by Central and South American regimes that were strongly backed by the Reagan administration. During those years I assiduously read the organization’s reports on Salvadoran and Guatemalan imprisonment and torture of dissidents, and on the police-and-military-linked death squads that regularly assassinated peasants, workers, Catholic nuns and priests, and solidarity workers. A young assistant professor at Fordham University, I taught courses on the human rights violations in Central America and the Caribbean, and on Reagan-administration support for violent rebel groups seeking to overthrow the very new Sandinista government that has just overthrown the repressive Somoza regime in Nicaragua. And together with a handful of other junior colleagues, I helped to organize teach-ins and special lectures on the atrocious human rights violations regularly documented and publicized by America’s Watch.
A child of the 60s and 70s, during these years I never viewed any aspect of U.S. politics through “rose-colored glasses.” I well understood that the U.S. was plagued by its own forms of injustice. I also understood that much of the U.S. Cold War rhetoric about “human rights” and “defending democracy” was hypocritical, and masked very bad things done both at home and abroad. At the same time, it was clearly abroad—in the American “near abroad,” and well beyond it—that the most egregious human rights abuses were being committed. Groups like Helsinki Watch and its adjuncts, Amnesty International, and others, played an important role in documenting the abuses and in motivating solidarity work intended to end them.
And for Americans, this was primarily a matter of foreign policy.
Obviously, it was never simply a matter of things “foreign.”
Just as obviously, the damage that was done by U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Western Hemisphere, has had enduring effects, for which the U.S. has never assumed responsibility. And the “immigration crisis” at the Southern border is in large part a consequence of the legacies of U.S. foreign policy choices, as millions upon millions of people have fled violent and unjust situations, and headed north, seeking refuge, asylum, and simple opportunity in the U.S. (see the writings of Greg Grandin, especially his 2025 America, America: A New History of the New World; William Connolly has recently underscored the importance of climate change in driving the migration crisis from the South).
And, in a way, what we in the U.S are now experiencing can be viewed as “chickens coming home to roost,” as the awful human rights conditions to our south—the consequence of a combination of U.S. malign intent and benign neglect—are now staring us directly in the face.
And, irony of ironies, the U.S. electorate has responded to this situation by returning to office a man, President Donald Trump, who emulates foreign dictators and is determined to emulate some of the worst forms of human rights abuse such dictators regularly inflict on their populations:
Here are a few of the many recent reports documenting Trump’s repressive measures:
The Trump administration, animated by a White, Christian, ethno-nationalist vision, is currently threatening human rights in every conceivable way.
But at the heart of its authoritarian agenda is the idea that many millions who live among us are “illegals,” rightless individuals whose presence and thus very existence is in question, and that these millions of human beings, and the scores of millions of citizens who offer them sanctuary or support or who merely defend the constitutional rights of all, are under suspicion as “enemies of the people” and haters of “American Greatness.”
How far will this go?
Regarding Trump’s illegal deportation of immigrants to El Salvador, where they have been detained in the country’s maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center, human rights experts recently wrote forThe Guardian that “Trump’s lawlessness is emboldening El Salvador’s brutal regime,” noting that the detention of a leading Salvadoran human rights lawyer “is part of a wave of repression sweeping the country under Nayib Bukele.”
That Trump likes and admires Nayib Bukele, the brutal and autocratic elected president of El Salvador, has long been a matter of grave concern for those who care about human rights and constitutional democracy. That Trump has enthusiastically made “deals” with Bukele to turn El Salvador into an offshore detention facility for “illegals” represents a real synergy of lawlessness that accentuates the concern.
As I read the new Human Rights Watch report about Florida’s ICE facilities, and as I think about Trump’s new “Alligator Alcatraz,” and his so-called “Border Czar’s recent comments on how ICE officers don’t need probable cause to detain people and how he plans to “flood the zone” in “sanctuary cities,” and about the Trump administration’s recent deployment of National Guard troops and active duty Marines to suppress Los Angeles protests, I wonder how long it will be before the U.S. does not simply “do deals” with Bukele’s El Salvador, but become Bukele’s El Salvador on a much grander scale.
Things would of course look and feel very different here in the U.S., given the country’s overall wealth, consumerism, and at least the patina of “democracy.” But how different would it really be, especially in a political sense? Does there exist an organized political force capable of resisting the dehumanization and repression that is spreading before our eyes? Can such a force be mobilized? Will it be mobilized? Or will the U.S. become the El Salvador of the North?
U.S. President Donald Trump's climate denialism produces the refugee drives he publicizes and punishes.
The Big Ugly Trump Bill has received a lot of critical attention, deservedly so. In time, it will curtail Medicaid, cripple essential health research, increase inequality even more, and blow up the debt. Many low-income citizens will suffer while multibillionaires gain another tax break. Delays in its implementation express sinister Republican tactics to hide its worst results from voters until after the 2026 election. This is vintage Trumpism in action.
One item that has received less attention is the legislation's wholesale attack on efforts to curtail climate wreckage during a critical world historical moment, through cuts in subsidies for electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, along with new fossil fuel extraction in previously exempt zones. Some little attention has been paid to how this new regime will both create more climate wreckage and leave us with fewer resources to address it—think of cuts to weather forecasting amid the new and more devastating storms spawned by human induced climate wreckage.
But an even more dramatic result has so far escaped widespread attention. The American return to fossil fuels exacerbates the very refugee streams from south to north that U.S. President Donald Trump campaigns so viciously against. We have seen how he has captured and dehumanized refugees, breaking laws with impunity as he does so; commentators have also tried to show, with so far limited success, how this stream of refugees is not the source of low wages for the American working class. American corporations leaving the country and weakened labor unions better help to explain that.
Trump campaigns to make workers hate migrants while hiding his contributions to the migrations they have come to hate.
Today, it is essential to expose how the very immigrant drives Trump castigates and uses to mobilize his base are in fact increasingly a product of the climate priorities and policies he enacts. What's more, the stream of refugees he deploys to incite the working class will reach yet higher levels in the near future because of the energy policies he so belligerently enacts today. Trump is the architect of the immigrant problem he purports to cure, with his fascist policies of cruel refugee exportations and internal concentration camps. Those forcibly cowed heads marched off by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents you see on TV are designed to infuse migrant dehumanization into your psyche.
As the United States now returns with new fervor to fossil fuels, higher levels of carbon dioxide and methane accumulate in the air. As these new concentrations trap more atmospheric heat, a series of impersonal, planetary amplifiers and distributors are also set into motion; the latter both increase the heating effects beyond the level created by the emission triggers alone and distribute many of the worst, initial effects to tropical and semitropical zones, the very zones from which migrant flows originate. One simple but powerful planetary amplifier, for instance, emerges when higher CO2 atmospheric concentrations melt more water on glaciers. Since the absorption rate of the sun's heat by water greatly exceeds that of hard ice, a self-propelling spiral is now set into motion: More water absorbs more heat, creating more melts. The planetary effect greatly exceeds the emission triggers that launched it.
A similar process erupts in the Gulf of Mexico. American fossil fuel emissions increase the surface temperature of Gulf waters, which in turn provides more fuel to intensify and lengthen hurricanes after they form. These more intense hurricanes, joined to a corollary slow down of trade winds, now distribute more severe and longer lasting damage to Caribbean islands, northern Central American States, Mexico, and the Bible Belt of the U.S. Coffee, banana, and sugar corps in states such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras now become severely damaged, facing residents with new pressures to join the difficult trek north through the dangerous Darien Gap toward the U.S. border. Countries that create low levels of planetary emission thus suffer disproportionate damage from those who emit higher levels, once these impersonal planetary forces are set into motion by enhanced U.S. fossil fuel extraction. As temperate zone state climate emissions increase—the U.S. being a growing emitter again under Trump—the severity and duration of El Niños in the Pacific grows. Severe El Niños through prevailing winds then distribute dry conditions to northern tier Central American States, exacerbating dry conditions already there. Once again, new pressures unfold for disrupted residents to join the long migration trek from south to north.
He acts very much like a man who wants to get his now before the regime over which he presides falters big time.
So, as these planetary effects become concentrated in northern tier Central American regimes—Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras—crop failures there combine with other forces such as political instability and gang violence to foment desperate refugee drives north. Similar effects unfold in some Caribbean islands, such as Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Refugee numbers grow. But the combination of Trump's vitriolic rhetoric, focus on concentration camps, and denial of climate wreckage encourages his MAGA base at home to ignore the domestic sources of the demonized constituencies they condemn.
Trump campaigns to make workers hate migrants while hiding his contributions to the migrations they have come to hate. Trump then blames the increase migrant flow both on the regimes themselves and former President Joe Biden's policies, veiling how his own demands to increase fossil fuel extraction help to fuel the desperate migration marches he purports to hold singularly responsible for the decline of American greatness. The same Trumpian policies also splash back on the U.S., especially in the Bible Belt. This cruel strategy is thus good for his fascist agenda but very bad for the border states he campaigns so actively to capture. We can take the recent Texas flood—ill predicted because of Trump meteorological budget cuts—that killed over 130 children and adults, to serve as an indicator of how this double game works.
Does Trump—or some of his advisers—grasp at least the vague outlines of this complex process, even as his policies accelerate it? A few signs suggest this may be so. He regularly pretends in public that human induced climate wreckage is "crap," for instance, even as he seeks new mining rights in Greenland and extends mining into previous Alaskan reserves. But those rights will be much more valuable if and as the Greenland glaciers melt and the Alaskan fields do too—even as the people living there will suffer immensely. He ignores and deflates long-term investments in the infrastructure of the United States, even as he uses every legal and illegal weapon at his disposal to magnify his own wealth while in office. And he aggressively interrupts, diverts, or attacks anyone who tries to inform him about the rudiments of climate wreckage, doing so before they can get any key facts out. To invoke climate after the Texas deluge, he says, is "evil."
The very character of his aggressive climate denialism may thus suggest he knows better. He acts very much like a man who wants to get his now before the regime over which he presides falters big time. An agent of public collapse and rich private escapes.
Either way, it is time to inform domestic workers and other citizens about the truth: Trump's climate policies help to foment the refugee drives from south to north upon which his recipe to introduce a fascist regime into the United States depends.
But perhaps the above description applies better to his ambivalent hi-tech bros than to Trump himself. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, for instance, focus intently on both augmenting their vast wealth fast and ignoring the civilizational effects of climate wreckage. Musk, when Tesla was his main concern, professed to be worried about climate change. Today, though, he says it proceeds very slowly, while it actually accelerates at a breakneck pace. He now seems more focused on organizing an escape to Mars than coping with climate wreckage on Planet Earth.
So maybe Trump's rich benefactors know the truth while he—much less intelligent than they—continues to wander in the desert of his own corrupt grievances. It is obvious to those who watch him, for instance, that the famous Weave—where he wanders from one topic to another in public speeches only to return later with dramatic effect—has now become reduced to the Cruel Meander.
The Cruel Meander is a wandering speech, replete with innumerable imagined grievances and retribution themes; it wanders aimlessly rather than returning to the point from which it started. Soooo, maybe Trump is innocent of what he is doing—namely, producing the refugees he condemns, while these very cruel climate policies keep feeding him campaign fodder. Maybe his recent cognitive decline combines with an astounding absence of empathy to make him an even more dangerous force today than before.
Either way, it is time to inform domestic workers and other citizens about the truth: Trump's climate policies help to foment the refugee drives from south to north upon which his recipe to introduce a fascist regime into the United States depends. They also foment wreckage in Bible Belt states.
By focusing on these connections, we may encourage more Americans to respond more actively to two issues at the same time: the manufactured "immigrant crisis" and an astounding acceleration of climate wreckage that places civilization at risk.
Chip Roy and his colleagues have done the equivalent of firing the lifeguards and pulling in the buoy ropes that mark the safe place to swim, while declaring the buddy system to be socialism.
Sending your kid off to sleepaway camp is a milestone no less for parents than for kids—it’s often the first time you’ve really let go of them. I clearly remember the pleasure of getting a postcard from our 9-year-old daughter a few days into her first year of camp: On the front it said, “Dear Mom and Dad, I miss you.” When you flipped it over, in huge letters on the back, it added “NOT.” We breathed a sigh of relief—she was fine (and we felt like successful parents, too).
So watching the horror still unfolding in the Texas hill country is almost unbearable. I can’t bring myself to imagine what it must have felt like for the girls swept away in the night by water rising an inch every 25 seconds, or to be a counselor trying to figure out how to cope with this kind of emergency—I’ve been literally shutting the images out of my mind as they form. But I can all too easily imagine, with a leaden feeling in my stomach, what it must have felt like to be a parent waiting for news. We mock the “thoughts and prayers” response to disaster (and rightly so, if that’s all that our leaders offer), but thoughts and prayers are heartfelt today, as they are after school shootings and every other such tragedy. It must be simply unbearable, realizing that you won’t be going to parents day at camp, or meeting the bus that brings the campers back home in August.
A well-run camp strikes me as a reasonable analogue for a well-run society, in that it attempts to maximize opportunity while minimizing risk. Those things are always in a certain amount of tension, and balancing that tension is a big reason why we form governments and adopt rules.
No honest person can deny there’s real danger from a heating climate, and real opportunity from clean, cheap renewable power.
So, for example, going for a swim is a slightly perilous thing—we’re not really water-evolved creatures, and drowning is surprisingly easy. But swimming and sailing and waterskiing are great fun, and so we’ve figured out ways to lower the risk: We teach kids how to swim, we assign them swim buddies, we have lifeguards. As we learn more, we change those rules—my mother, for instance, was a devout believer in the conventional wisdom that required waiting half an hour (not a second less) after eating before you could jump in the pool, but it turns out that actual data shows that’s unnecessary. On the other hand, we understand a lot more about why you shouldn’t go in a lake with blue-green algae, and so we both close down beaches and try to clean up the pollution that causes it.
Camp’s not a perfect analogy for society, of course. Most of us are adults, and at least theoretically better equipped to make our own decisions, and the thing we’re most bent on maximizing is not fun but wealth (probably a mistake, but there it is). Still, unless we’re true libertarians we acknowledge the need to address risk and opportunity in some sensible fashion. Which we’re not doing at the moment. The huge budget bill that finally passed last week is a perfect example.
The Republicans who passed it—and this was an entirely Republican operation, stem to stern—clearly wanted to maximize the wealth of rich people: the most affluent 1% of families will receive a trillion dollars in new income. (This is the camp equivalent of giving almost all the s’mores to one or two kids). In return they were willing to embrace a wide variety of risks: not just the risks posed by a higher deficit in a time when we’re not at war or in recession, but the risk that comes from $930 billion in cuts to Medicaid. That will cause rural hospitals to close, for instance, making healthcare much harder to access and in the process surely endangering large numbers of lives. Or the 20% reduction in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program funding for food assistance, which will clearly raise the risk of people going hungry.
The only risk they really seemed to care about was violent crime by immigrants—that was the justification for tripling the Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget so we can have a quantum increase in the number of guys with neck gaiters shoving people into vans. This is not just immoral, it’s statistically dumb, the equivalent of waiting half an hour to swim: Immigrants are highly unlikely to be violent criminals compared with native-born Americans. If violent crime was your concern, you’d be better off deporting lots and lots of Americans and filling the returning planes with generally more peaceable immigrants. (But let’s don’t do that either).
And of course they’ve chosen to ignore one huge category of risk entirely—the risk (really at this point more a guarantee) that we’re going to damage in extraordinary ways the climate that sustains us. Consider Chip Roy, the congressman whose district was so damaged in the floods. He has been vehement in his opposition to subsidies or mandates or anything else that might help clean energy, and he has voted for everything that might help the fossil fuel industry. Let’s assume he’s acting in good faith, and not responding to the more than $671,788 in campaign contributions from the hydrocarbon industry. (Not perhaps a wise assumption, but it’s a day for acting in good faith). He’s expressed himself on this exact question of comparative risk, in a 2018 article in the San Antonio paper when he made his first run for Congress.
He explained that, in essence, he wanted to maximize the wealth and fun that came with hydrocarbons:
What I know is that our lives are made so immeasurably better by the availability of affordable, abundant energy.
And he said that he thought the risk was low, at least relative to the benefits of fossil fuels.
My belief is that the net positive impact of energy production relative to whatever the question-mark impact is on CO2 (carbon dioxide), to me, comes out very much on the positive.
Again, let’s take him in good faith. So—since 2018 two things have changed.
One is that it’s become ever more clear exactly how dangerous climate change is: Just in the past few days we’ve had a new report from the United Nations on how drought is devastating unprecedented swaths of the planet (“this is not a dry spell. This is a slow-moving global catastrophe, the worst I’ve ever seen,” one of its authors explained), had new data from the Antarctic on how rising salinity in the Southern Ocean is melting yet more polar ice (“we may have passed a tipping point and entered a new state defined by persistent sea ice decline, sustained by a newly discovered feedback loop”), and had firsthand accounts of life in the broiling European heatwave (“like swimming in soup.”)
The second thing that’s changed is that it is now far cheaper to use renewable energy than fossil fuels—the price of solar and wind has dropped almost 90% since that 2018 interview, and batteries that make them round-the-clock fuels are now cheap too. You know who realizes this? Energy regulators in Texas, where renewables are growing faster than anywhere in the country.
The famously developer-friendly Lone Star State has struggled to add new gas power plants lately, even after offering up billions of taxpayer dollars for a dedicated loan program to private gas developers. Solar and battery additions since last March average about 1 gigawatt per month, based on ERCOT’s figures, Texas energy analyst Doug Lewin said. In 2024, Texas produced almost twice as much wind and solar electricity as California.
When weather conditions align, the state’s abundant clean-energy resources come alive—and those conditions aligned last week amid sunny, windy, warm weather. On March 2 at 2:40 pm CST, renewables collectively met a record 76% of ERCOT demand.
Then, on Wednesday evening, solar production started to dip with the setting sun. More than 23,000 megawatts of thermal power plants were missing in action. Most of those were offline for scheduled repairs, but ERCOT data show that nearly half of all recent outages have been “forced,” meaning unscheduled.
At 6:15 pm CST, batteries jumped in and delivered more than 10% of ERCOT’s electricity demand—the first time they’ve ever crossed that threshold in the state.
“Batteries just don’t need the kind of maintenance windows that thermal plants do,” said Lewin, who authors The Texas Energy and Power Newsletter. “The fleet of thermal plants is pretty rickety and old at this point, so having the batteries on there, it’s not just a summertime thing or winter morning peak, they can bail us out in the spring, too.”
In other words, right there in Texas renewable power is the cheapest and most reliable way to have what Roy calls the “affordable, abundant energy” that makes our “lives so immeasurably better.” For me, these sets of facts should be enough. No honest person can deny there’s real danger from a heating climate, and real opportunity from clean, cheap renewable power (the rest of the world has clearly figured this out).
But either Roy hasn’t been paying attention to the new landscape, or those campaign contributions are too sweet, or the grip of ideology too strong. Roy not only voted to end all support for what he called, in a press release, the “Green New scam,” he also voted to close down the various programs of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service that even try to monitor the effects of climate change and warn us about emergencies like the weekend’s floods. (A good Times story reiterated something we talked about a few weeks ago in this newsletter: Many of the necessary posts at the relevant NWS offices were vacant). In summer camp terms, he and his colleagues fired the lifeguards and pulled in the buoy ropes that mark the safe place to swim, while declaring the buddy system to be socialism. Sink or swim on your own—even after the floods he called for “fewer bureaucrats” as the best response to the nightmare.
If an experience like this close to home won’t open his eyes, then we have to organize to make sure that people like him aren’t returned to office—both in an effort to help slow global warming, and, at this point, in an effort to help us survive what we can no longer avoid—an effort that will require solidarity, not the selfish solipsism that is the mark of MAGA.
Earth Day in 1970 turned into a (highly successful) drive six months later to defeat a ‘dirty dozen’ Congressmen. Hopefully the energy that comes out of SunDay in September will have something of the same effect. Our new poster came out today. Join in the effort at sunday.earth