NDLON Denounces Militarized Deportations to Cuba and Rubio’s Embrace of El Salvador’s Prison Proposal

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 5 — The Trump Administration has started sending immigrant prisoners to the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio welcomed an offer from El Salvador’s autocratic president, Nayib Bukele, to lock up U.S. deportees in his squalid mega prison.

The following is a statement from Pablo Alvarado, Co-Executive Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON):

“We will not remain silent while Trump sends people from the United States to an offshore military concentration camp and tries to work a deal with President Bukele to turn El Salvador into a U.S. penal colony.

“Donald Trump’s embrace of fascist brutality is now plain as day. There’s no defending him, no making excuses, no hiding from the reality – Trump and his accomplices are remaking the United States in his image. They want the country, like the President, to turn its back on laws, democratic values and justice. They want a country that defines citizenship in the same way Trump defines membership in his Mar-a-Lago country club.

“And speaking as a US citizen born in El Salvador: We are deprived of political equality both here in the United States and in El Salvador. We have been vilified and criminalized by a Republican-led government that deprives us of our rights and by Democratic and Latino elites who assume to speak for us, but not with us.

“In El Salvador, Bukele has consolidated power by suppressing human rights and escalating mass incarceration. He is not someone to make any kind of deal with. Here is a historical truth: U.S. imperialism provoked a devastating civil war that killed hundreds of thousands and uprooted many more. Our country was further ravaged by organized crime when the U.S. exported a violent L.A. gang to the streets of El Salvador. And now Trump wants to feed and subsidize Bukele’s mass prison to promote his brand of fascism?

“Enough. Salvadorans and all people of goodwill need to speak up, both here and abroad. El Salvador might be a MAGA laboratory for fascist innovation, but it will also be the site of a bottom-up transnational effort to defend human rights. Our legacy will not be Bukele, gangs or prisons. Our legacy will be our people.

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