Philip Holsinger, a photojournalist from Nashville, Tenn., watched as a young man wept while a guard pushed him to the floor at CECOT, the El Salvadoran prison notorious for human-rights abuses.
“I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber,” said the man, who Holsinger would later write “didn’t look like what I had expected” because “he wasn’t a tattooed monster.” The man was Andry Hernandez Romero, a Venezuelan man who had come to the United States in 2024 in search of asylum.
It was the night of March 15, 2025, and Hernandez Romero was just one of the 238 men U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had captured and, in defiance of a judge’s order, sent to be locked up in the El Salvadoran prison based on unsubstantiated allegations without even a whiff of due process.
In the prison’s intake room, Holsinger watched as trustees took electric shavers to the men’s heads.
“The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell,” the photojournalist wrote in TIME, referring to Hernandez Romero, in a stirring photo essay showing the dystopian hell these men were dropped off into. “He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again.”
Hernandez Romero is just one of the many victims of this inhumanity, carried out by the U.S. government acting in concert with the El Salvadoran government, that ought to awaken the consciences of all decent people, regardless of political party or beliefs.
Since this cruel chapter in American history began unfolding over a month ago, much of the focus has been on one man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, because the Trump administration admitted in court that his deportation was “an administrative error.” His wife has passionately appealed to the press for his release, and U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland even met with him on April 17—proving for the first time since his illegal transfer to CECOT that he is alive.
The Trump administration has thus far defied a U.S. Supreme Court order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, vowing that he is “never coming back” and accusing him of being an MS-13 gang member without proof.
Between Donald Trump and Abrego Garcia, only one man has been charged and convicted of any crimes—and it’s the man in the Oval Office, not the one in an El Salvadoran prison.
That’s because Trump enjoyed due process—so much so that he was able to run out the clock on his various other state and federal criminal charges by getting reelected president, which the U.S. Supreme Court has decided shields him from continued prosecution while in office. Abrego Garcia, on the other hand, did not receive due process.
Nor were the other 237 men, such as Hernandez Romero. And we should be talking about all of them; their senators and congressmembers, no matter their party, should all be advocating for their return to the U.S. where they can have the chance to rebut any allegations in a court of law—whether they appear to be innocent angels or the “tattooed monsters” Holsinger had expected to see exiting the plane.
The standard this country set in the 5th Amendment of its Constitution 235 years ago says that “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” And the 8th Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments”—and what could be more cruel and unusual than shipping human beings off like cargo to a concentration camp in a foreign country?
Yet it’s beyond undeniable that this country has never consistently and fairly upheld the First and Eighth Amendments. Too many nice people in the U.S. have been willing to look away as authorities on every level, from local police to federal agents to presidents, have violated basic rights.
As author Naomi Shulman wrote in 2016: “Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than ‘politics.’”
And so over the decades, nice Americans of all political stripes have averted their eyes as unaccountable police brutalized and murdered their neighbors; as unscrupulous prosecutors railroaded poor people who couldn’t good attorneys into long prison terms; as immigration agents ripped innocent children from their parents and placed them alone in camps; and as the U.S. government across Democratic and Republican administrations used vague allusions to “terrorists,” “gangs” and “national security” to enact horrific violations.
It is far past time to face what is in plain view and to start speaking up for basic rights—if not out of empathy and a sincere belief that civil liberties are for everyone, then at least out of a self-serving sense of self-preservation so it doesn’t happen to you, too.
A government that can disappear 238 men to a nightmarish El Salvadoran prison on flimsy allegations of terrorism and gang membership can do the same to any one of us. “But they can’t do it to me; I’m a U.S. citizen who has never committed any crimes!” is a defense that only works if you get the chance to make it in a court of law.
And lest anyone dismiss those concerns as hyperbolic rhetoric borne of so-called “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” I am far from alone.
In an extra U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruling on April 17 that rejected the Trump administration’s effort to block orders to return Abrego Garcia, Judge James Harvie Wilkinson III—a conservative appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan—expressed his horror that “the government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”
“This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear,” he wrote. “… If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? And what assurance will there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies?”
For their sakes and all of ours, all 238 of those men must be returned to the United States and given the chance in a court of law either to prove their innocence or to be condemned by real evidence. And the U.S. must never again make pacts with self-described dictators who warehouse human beings in foreign prisons known for human-rights abuses—in countries they have never even known.
Nothing less will do if we are to keep any hope for the rest of us in this republic.
This MFP Voices opinion essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
