Bukele's Hostage Photo

Trump's "man in San Salvador" borrows a tactic from other terrorist kidnappers past. Don't be taken in.

Today, after first denying U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen the chance to visit a kidnapped U.S. resident, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, in the gruesome black site prison where he is being confined, President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador seemed to shift course. He decided to stage a meeting after all between his hostage, Mr. Abrego Garcia, and the visiting senator—but on Bukele’s own preferred terms.

Don’t be fooled by the photo-op that resulted. By putting his victim in civilian clothes for the occasion and giving him a baseball cap, Bukele no doubt hoped to pull off a PR coup that took the wind out of his critics. It’s a classic tactic in hostage scenarios. Bukele is no different in this regard from any other kidnapper.

I say that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is Bukele’s hostage. But he is really Trump’s hostage too. The Trump administration deported Mr. Abrego Garcia without any legal authority to do so. A U.S. immigration judge had granted him “withholding of removal” status, which bars his removal to El Salvador. (“Withholding of removal” is often used in cases in which a person does not qualify for asylum—a separate status that puts someone on a path to a green card—but removing them to their home country would nonetheless violate U.S. treaty obligations, such as the UN Convention Against Torture—which the United States has signed and incorporated into federal law.)

Trump’s deportation of Mr. Abrego Garcia was therefore not only lacking in legal authority. It was flatly contrary to law. Indeed, all of the administration’s deportations to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison have been carried out in contravention of multiple statutes, not least the Convention Against Torture provisions.

After all, the administration put seemingly innocent people on planes to send them to this nightmarish dungeon, without any trial or formal allegation or chance to face their accusers in court. They never gave them an opportunity to present grounds for relief or argue the risk of persecution and torture that they might face, and which would entitle them to protection under our laws.

And if the administration has their way, now that these men are in the CECOT prison, they will never get out. The U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, openly said—upon touring the facility where they are being confined—that the intent is for them to “stay” in this prison “for the rest of their lives.”

The administration is more than passively complicit in Bukele’s human rights abuses against these prisoners. They are also funding them—to the tune of $6 million, in Bukele’s telling. That’s right: our U.S. tax dollars are going to confine innocent people, without charge or trial or due process—with the explicit goal of ensuring that they never again see the light of day—in a prison that international observers have described as a kind of gulag.

As Justice Sotomayor has summarized conditions in this facility, in her dissenting opinion in the recent Supreme Court case regarding the El Salvador deportations:

El Salvador has boasted that inmates in CECOT “‘will never leave,’” […] ibid., and plaintiffs present evidence that “inmates are rarely allowed to leave their cells, have no regular access to drinking water or adequate food, sleep standing up because of overcrowding, and are held in cells where they do not see sunlight for days."

In recent days, a chorus of outrage about these kidnappings has been growing in the United States—from courts, from the press, and most of all from ordinary citizens, including in parts of the country not otherwise known for progressive activism, and which are far removed from the Maryland community from which Mr. Abrego Garcia was abducted.

The Trump administration has used every trick they know to try to quell the uproar. J.D. Vance whined on X (his usual strategy) about how the U.S. government can’t be bothered to have a “trial” for every single person it wants to deport to a Salvadoran gulag—because if they did, how would they be able to deport 20 million more of them? (Vance, despite his law degree, doesn’t seem to understand how immigration adjudications work—let alone the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.)

Meanwhile, the Press Secretary said, in effect—why are you all so worried about the due process rights of one measly immigrant, when you could be talking about U.S. citizen crime victims? It was a classic fallacy of irrelevance—and one moreover that tells us everything we need to know about this administration’s understanding of basic constitutional and moral principles—such as the right of each individual to be judged on the basis of their own actions—rather than on stereotypes ascribed to their membership in a stigmatized group—and the equality of all people before the law.

None of the administration’s tactics, however, appeared to be working. No one was convinced. J.D. Vance had written multiple posts on X in his usual tone of wounded self-pity and aggrieved self-righteousness; the administration had tried misdirecting the conversation every way they could with irrelevant reports of horrific crimes that had nothing to do with Mr. Abrego Garcia; they even tried to pull off a post hoc character assassination of their kidnapping victim—and still the American people seemed to actually care about due process, liberty, and the Bill of Rights.

And so, Bukele tried a new gambit: what if, in the midst of all this outcry and concern, he stage-managed a reappearance of Mr. Abrego Garcia in the public eye? What if he plucked him out of the hole for a day—put a baseball cap on his shaved head; allowed him to change into his personal clothes instead of the white uniforms they otherwise make them wear in the prison, and put a few margarita glasses on the table in front of him while he was meeting with the Senator? Wouldn’t that make all of those bleeding hearts complaining about his captivity suddenly look rather silly?

It’s easy to guess what happened next. Bukele posted the photo of the meeting on social media, and then wrote as a caption: “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’ […] now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!”

I’m reminded of how Hamas stage-managed videos of the hostages they had taken on October 7, to try to present themselves as “humane” captors. Indeed, this is a classic strategy of kidnappers and terrorists the world over: force hostages (under threat of death or torture) to say on camera that they are doing just fine; that they are being treated well; that their captors are righteous people who have justice on their side.

Bukele is simply treating his hostage the way kidnappers always treat their victims.

Except, this time, our own government is the kidnapper. Our own government—with the help of their hireling in San Salvador—is the hostage-taker and the terrorist.

We don’t yet know what Mr. Abrego Garcia told Senator Van Hollen at that table, by the way. At least he was able to confirm that he was alive. At least they were able to get a photo to the public, so that his family would know that he had not died already in Bukele’s gulag.

But we know that Mr. Abrego Garcia was immediately passed back into the custody of his Salvadoran captors. One therefore cannot imagine that he was able to speak his mind freely without fear of retaliation. Whatever information Senator Van Hollen gleaned under the circumstances is therefore scarcely reliable.

Reassuring Abrego Garcia’s family that he is still in one piece surely made the whole spectacle worth it. But reading any more into it than that would be playing into Bukele’s hands. Don’t believe the hostage-taker. Don’t be taken in. Do keep fighting until the day Mr. Abrego Garcia actually walks free.