Guantanamo is indeed a horrible authoritarian injustice but it is not the same. Gitmo is operated by the US government and people detained there can still have access to legal representation to challenge their detainment.
What is happening here is the US government sending people to a gulag operated by a foreign nation and then insisting that that's the end of it. There can be no meaningful challenge of your unlawful detainment. With CECOT your only opportunity to vindicate your rights is at the literal moment that you are grabbed off the street.
Guantanamo was Bush's attempt to circumvent habeas corpus by imprisoning people outside the country. The Supreme Court didn't let him get away with that. The El Salvador strategy is the logical next step to avoid habeas corpus, by using a prison that is foreign-operated not just located in a foreign country.
> Since its founding in 2002, Guantánamo Bay military prison has held 780 adults and minors from around fifty different countries, all of whom are Muslim. As of 2022, 732 of them (or 94 percent) have been released without ever having been formally charged. Nine men have died in custody, seven by apparent suicide and two due to illness. Of the thirty-nine remaining, thirteen have been recommended for release but remain imprisoned. Twelve out of the original 780 (or 1.5 percent) have been charged with or convicted of crimes and remain in Guantánamo. The remaining fourteen individuals continue to be held without trial in indefinite detention.
No, most of CECOT is prisoners arrested within El Salvador. Only a small section is previously US domiciled persons. The US only funded 300 of the available 40,000 slots. Most of them were from domestic gang round-ups, though I'm sure that process was highly imperfect.
So Mr. Garcia will be surrounded by a gigantic cohort of legitimate, full body 'MS-13' tattood, hard hitting gang members. If he wasn't in a gang before he likely is now, or getting the living shit beat out of him because he lacks gang protection.
I don’t believe there was any claim of asylum, rather he was ruled to be deported in around 2019, and held to be deportable on appeal, and then he failed to deport and was once again apprehended in 2025. His status changed when MS13 was designated a terrorist group (he was adjudicated to belong to MS13 during the deportation proceedings) which did away with his special request to not be sent to El Salvador.
He claimed asylum but it was denied because it was too late. After the deportation order there was an order of withholding from deportation, after which it appears he was granted some form of work authorization and parole with annual check ins.
Nevertheless I strongly believe if the US had just dumped him in a village in El Salvador none of this would be news. They have done that to US citizens and hardly anyone noticed. The real story is he was sent into an experimental contract foreign prison at the behest of the government and the violation of the withholding order provides the wedge to challenge it and eventually wedge to make it easier to challenge more happenings at CECOT. Even if he is an MS13 member, the government never used due process to withdraw the withholding of removal order that they are claiming should no longer exist.
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In March 2019, Prince George's County, Maryland, police arrested Abrego Garcia and three other men in a Home Depot parking lot, where they were seeking work as day laborers.[2][19] One of the men claimed Abrego Garcia was a "gang member," but The Atlantic reported that, according to court filings, the man offered no proof and police said they did not believe him.[19] Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime in connection to his arrest.[20]
Police handed custody of Abrego Garcia over to ICE for deportation proceedings. In those proceedings, the government claimed that he was a member of the MS-13 criminal gang because "he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie" and a confidential informant claimed that he was active with an MS-13 group based in New York,[2] where he has never lived.[16] ICE relied on information from a form that was filled out by a local police officer who was suspended not long after for "giving confidential information about a case to a sex worker", and thus was unavailable when Abrego Garcia's lawyer sought more information.[21] Roger Parloff of Lawfare notes that since neither the officer nor the informant were cross-examined, the accusation went through two layers of hearsay to reach the immigration court. An immigration judge determined that the informant's claim[22] was sufficient evidence for the purpose of denying Abrego Garcia's bond request; another judge upheld that ruling on appeal, saying the claim was not clearly wrong.[18] However, no court has ever made a "full adjudication" of this issue.[18]
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The evidence of him being a member of MS13 is dubious at best, and suspicious since he and his brother had fled to the US to escape gangs in El Salvador.
He didn't fail to deport, he applied for asylum and withholding of removal during the process. Asylum wasn't possible because it needed to be applied for within a year of arriving, but he was granted withholding of removal, which he'd maintained by checking in yearly with ICE since 2019.
Gitmo is a US naval base, thus considered American soil by US authorities. That's the difference.
Well . . . a difference. Something like 95% of Gitmo detainees were eventually determined not to be terrorists and were freed. I expect No Salvador to be a bit worse.
Yes, but Guantanamo should have been closed (Obama promised to do this! he didn't do it!) and the people who masterminded it should have been thrown in jail. But, no, we had to "look forward" and not punish the war criminals in our immediate past.
Obama did sign EO 13492 requiring Guantanamo to be closed, in fairness, with a deadline and everything.
He could have and should have done more, but the blame for that one mostly falls on Congress (at the time firmly controlled by Democrats) blocking said EO
"Close our terrible and unnecessary human rights black hole" was, sadly, too far "left" for a bunch of Democrats, and of course Republicans love that kind of stuff, so they weren't going to help.
At least the government didn’t pretend they can’t they just don’t want to