Ezra Klein, The New York Times; The Emergency Is Here
"The emergency is here.
The crisis is now. It is not six months away. It is not another Supreme Court ruling away from happening. It’s happening now.
Perhaps not to you, not yet. But to others. Real people. We know their names. We know their stories.
The president of the United States is disappearing people to a Salvadoran prison for terrorists. A prison known by its initials — CECOT. A prison built for disappearance. A prison where there is no education or remediation or recreation, because it is a prison that does not intend to release its inhabitants back out into the world. It is a prison where the only way out, in the words of El Salvador’s so-called justice minister, is a coffin...
The Trump administration holds the view that anyone they send to El Salvador is beyond the reach of American law — they have been disappeared not only from our country but from our system — and from any protection or process that system affords.
In our prisons, prisoners can be reached by our lawyers, by our courts, by our mercy. In El Salvador, they cannot.
Names. Stories. Let me tell you one of their names, one of their stories, as best we know it."
