When Just Showing Up for Work Could Mean a Life Sentence in El Salvador

Your next pizza delivery driver may be living under the threat of deportation, indefinite confinement, and torture at the hands of our government's contractor

The Wall Street Journal ran an article last night noting that Trump’s so-called “mass deportation” push—his much-publicized campaign to instill fear in immigrant communities—has not actually led to an observable reduction in the undocumented workforce.

That is to say—despite the administration producing glitzy action movie–style videos of deportation raids; despite them posting sinister social media memes depicting ICE agents unloading chains and shackles to detain immigrants, and live-streaming the Secretary of Homeland Security sporting a gold Rolex watch as she stands in front of an overcrowded cell in El Salvador’s horrific “CECOT” prison, and tries to terrorize noncitizens with the message—“leave now or this could happen to you”; despite all this cruelty, in short—undocumented immigrants, as the Journal notes, are still showing up for work in practice.

According to the article, the solution to this seeming paradox turns out to be heartbreakingly mundane and obvious: People, even when they are living under the daily threat of being arrested, disappeared, chained—even beaten or tortured—still need money to live. The Journal article speaks with one undocumented man who showed up to look for work at the parking lot of a Home Depot, where ICE had arrested 10 people just a few days before. When asked why he would take this risk, he noted: “with car insurance, rent and other costs rising fast […] ‘What alternative do we have?’”

This, of course, has been a cruel feature of our economy for decades: a disproportionate number of the people who build our houses, look after our children, mow our lawns, etc., have to do so not only for paltry wages, but under the constant threat of arrest, surveillance, and deportation. That’s the scant thanks they get for filling desperately-needed jobs at the bottom rung of our social order.

But now, we’ve taken the ingratitude and cruelty to a new level. Undocumented immigrants—or even, as we have seen, some immigrants with legal permission to stay in the United States—now have to fear not only deportation to their home countries (with the harassment and extortion from local gangs that often follows deportation from the U.S., since criminal groups assume recent deportees have cash to be stolen). They now also have to fear that the U.S. government might send them into the black hole of a forever-prison in El Salvador, from which they may never get out alive.

And yet, as the Journal article notes, people continue to show up for work despite this looming nightmare. They interview one Venezuelan asylum-seeker who works roughly 15 hours a day driving for Uber Eats. Even though a pending asylum claim should mean that he theoretically has a legal right to stay and work in the U.S. while the immigration court considers his case—he is aware that this offers scant protection in Trump’s America. And indeed, some of the people Trump has already deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison also had pending asylum claims when they were removed.

Of course, people who have swallowed the administration’s line on this will say: “immigrants only have to worry about CECOT if they are ‘criminals’ or ‘gang members.” Well, let’s leave aside for now the question of whether even real-life “gang members” deserve to be deported—without any charge, trial, or conviction—to a fate worse than any sentence we impose in our own country’s prisons. (My answer would be: No!). Even if we ignore that question, I say—the fact is that the 200 people the administration already deported to CECOT appear not to have been “criminals” or “gang members” at all.

Indeed, the New York Times reports that even El Salvador’s dictatorial president expressed surprise and alarm when the people dispatched to his prisons from the U.S. turned out not to have any criminal records or known gang affiliations. (The administration’s first plane-loads even included a group of women and non-Venezuelan nationals, who had to be immediately returned to the United States, since detaining them was outside the scope of the Salvadoran government’s contract with the Trump administration.)

The Times tells some of their stories: most of them appear to have been ordinary Venezuelan asylum-seekers who happened to have tattoos. One of them—a baker’s assistant from Dallas—appears to have been targeted simply because he has a rainbow tattoo that he got to show support for his brother who has autism.

The people who knew this man—including his employer—scoff at the idea he could have had any possible association with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua (TdA). And leading experts on the gang point out—meanwhile—that TdA doesn’t even use tattoos to identify its members.

So, make no mistake: the Venezuelan asylum-seeker—no matter how innocent—who may be delivering your online pizza order tonight—is doing so under the implied threat of deportation and indefinite confinement—at the hands of our own government’s contractor—in one of the worst prisons in the world. That is the price we pay for cheap pizza.

Of course, the administration has tried to obscure this grotesque reality by painting all Venezuelans as presumptively criminal. For months on the campaign trail and in office, Trump and his goons have relentlessly vilified asylum-seekers from Venezuela as “monsters,” “animals,” “Hannibal Lecter,” etc.

It’s an appalling lie.

Most people fleeing Venezuela are doing so to escape a socialist dictatorship—and from organized crime that preys on the vulnerable. They came to the United States in reliance on our good-faith commitment to democratic values and the rule of law, in contrast to the conditions they fled. (Here's one of their stories.) They came here, that is to say, to get away from groups like TdA or the Maduro regime.

They also have disproportionately high rates of educational attainment and professional credentials, compared to U.S. citizens. Yet, they are often willing to work in some of the crummiest, hardest, most poorly-compensated jobs in the economy—just in exchange for the privilege of being allowed to survive for one more day. And then, our government turns around and tries to deny them even that.

It’s apparently not enough to be exiled from home, in flight from persecution, poor, desperate, and struggling to feed oneself and pay the rent in the underbelly of our advanced economy. They also need to be threatened with forced disappearance, permanent incarceration, and torture too. To those that have not, it would seem—as the Bible says—even that little which they have is to be taken away from them.

Venezuelan asylum-seekers not only have to work 15 hours a day behind the wheel to deliver our pizzas. They also have to do so under the constant vilification and harassment of inane, lying, repulsive demagogues, like our current U.S. President and Secretary of Homeland Security.

They have to do it while knowing that these same demagogues are mobilizing vast hordes of armed agents to hunt them down across the face of the country and jail them in Texas or Louisiana, and then send them, if they can, to a forever-prison in El Salvador—barred temporarily from doing so by only the thin shred of a few district court orders.

They have to do it while those same demagogues post “ASMR” or “Studio Ghibli” memes on social media mocking their suffering, recycling long-debunked lies about them, and crowing over their humiliation.

The most terrifying spectacle the world has ever known,

Vast mobilised armies of maddened adolescents

And criminal leaders mouthing the foulest perfidies

Amid roars of loutish laughter and animal applause

—as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid once described the political landscape of Europe in the 1930s. Unfortunately—it would seem—those ugly days of the “maddened adolescents,” “criminal leaders,” and “loutish laughter” have come again.

W.H. Auden wrote of the plight of refugees in that same tragic era. And—to our country’s infinite shame—it turns out that his poem also describes pretty accurately what our country is doing to Venezuelan asylum-seekers (and other refugees) today—as Trump uses his bully pulpit to crudely demonize them and mobilize his army of ICE troops to hound them out of existence:

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said:

“If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”;

He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and

me.

[…]

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;

Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:

Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.