We are less than five months into the regime and extermination camps have begun.
It is my wish to utilize my writing to report Good News to our community, but these days the urgency of the threatening news to our collective survival makes it challenging to prioritize such moments of light. I will still aim to as much as my ability and conscience allows.
Here is what I wish to share today;
There will be no trumpet to announce it. No red banner unfurled across the sky. No bullet-pointed memo from the State Department. But we must make no mistake: The United States empire has entered a new era of its neo-Nazi, techno-fascism. And history, if it survives us, will only remember our actions or our silence.
Last week, 60 Minutes aired a story that should have brought the nation to a standstill: The U.S. government has begun trafficking legal American residents—a vast majority with no criminal records—into the hands of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s tech-savvy dictator, and his futuristic extermination camp, bureaucratically branded the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
The name itself functions as propaganda, insinuating that everyone inside is a “terrorist” and inviting journalists to parrot the lie. We must refuse that framing: this is not a prison in any legal sense, nor a site for extremists; it is an extermination warehouse where ordinary people are killed en masse outside the tiniest shred of due process.
And what began as unmarked American federal agents in plain hoodies has now escalated into a horror with no disguise. People are being snatched off the streets at random—no charges, no names—grabbed through smashed windows or seized from sidewalks, then trafficked across borders into industrial-scale torture chambers.
These are not arrests; they are abductions.
These are not prisons; they are slave and extermination camps.
And once inside, there is no clock, no courtroom, no end—only endless concrete, endless pain. The people disappeared into these cages are tortured around the clock, erased from public memory, and sentenced not to years or decades, but to a perpetual state of suffering—an eternity of state-sanctioned hell.
Inside CECOT: Hell on Earth
Inside CECOT, cruelty is carved into concrete. Fluorescent flood‑lights blaze twenty‑four hours a day; there is no window, no night—only an endless migraine of white glare.
“An analysis of the center using satellite footage showed that if the extermination camp were to reach its full supposed capacity of 40,000, each prisoner would have less than 2 feet of space in their cells,” one report reads.
Currently, the temperature often climbs past 95 °F (35 °C) with the only “ventilation” being a perforated metal ceiling that drips hot air. Prisoners spend 23 ½ hours a day in these garages, forbidden books, letters, even conversation, allowed a single half‑hour shuffle in chains for “exercise” or a group Bible reading.
They sleep on bare steel bunks stacked four stories high—no mattresses, no bedding—so the light stabs directly into their eyes, a design human‑rights monitors call architectural torture.
Food is rationed to the brink of starvation, medical care is almost nonexistent, and at least 261 people have already died from beatings, malnutrition, or untreated illness since the state of emergency began.
Every inch of the facility, from the steel slabs to the cameras welded above each latrine, is engineered to erase circadian rhythm, dignity, and eventually memory itself.
And to be clear, despite what the right-wing propagadists and Trump regime fascists deceivingly declare, this extermination camp is not limited to so-called “criminals.”
For example, in the most visible case at this moment of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident who “in 2019, a judge issued an order prohibiting the government from deporting Kilmar to El Salvador based on the risk of persecution Kilmar would confront if returned to El Salvador,” wrote the Central American Solidarity Association of Maryland. “That order still stands. Yet, in an act that they now refer to as an ‘administrative error,’ ICE ignored that court order…Kilmar joined three planeloads of deportees; many of whom – like Kilmar – have never been charged with a crime.”
First, they come for those they can most easily demonize (so-called “undocumented immigrants”), but that is only to normalize the terror. What we are seeing now is the next logical step of their fascistic ambition: expanding the definition of “undesirable” until it swallows everyone who does not fit their vision of obedience. Anyone who is Black or Brown. Anyone who is queer, trans, poor, houseless, disabled. Anyone who posts the “wrong” thing. Anyone who so much as criticizes Trump in passing.
The machinery is being built to erase all boundaries of who can be targeted. And yes—even if you are none of these things. By the precedent being carved into the present right now, you too can be taken—without warning, without evidence, without recourse.
Because fascism does not draw lines. It erases them. Until everyone is a target, and no one is safe.
“Nazis gave more due process than what has happened here,” D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Patricia Millett said.
Trump dispensed with the dog whistle and blared his intentions: standing shoulder‑to‑shoulder with Bukele in the Oval Office, he vowed, “The homegrowns are next—homegrowns,” before instructing the Salvadoran strongman to “build about five more places” for American citizens.
What we are witnessing is a beta test of a new era of international carceral outsourcing. A privatized extermination camp archipelago with Apple Watch aesthetics. A transnational experiment in mass incarceration without constitutional constraint, accountability, or oversight.
And again, we should make clear with our language that these men are not being deported, and this is not a “prison.” They are being kidnapped and trafficked into state-run extermination camps. They will never see a courtroom, a lawyer, or their children again. “They leave the prison,” one official told 60 Minutes, “in a coffin.”
There is no exaggeration left. This is extermination logic.
Perhaps it’s my own naivete that makes me stunned by the speed with which this has arrived—or perhaps it’s because, in my lifetime, I’ve known the United States to at least pretend to cloak its violence behind the language of “law and order,” and “border security.” But now, the mask has been ripped off entirely.
We are now seeing the opening act of a rapidly escalating ethnic cleansing and the groundwork being laid for genocidal policy.
Bukele’s extermination camp, with its hyper-militarized optics and silence-is-safety doctrine, is the logical endpoint of America’s carceral fantasies. What was tested on the bodies of Black and brown people abroad has been sharpened and will now be turned inward—against Black and brown folks, political dissidents, queer folks, the unhoused, and every so-called “undesirable” that capitalism has discarded.
Just as the Nazis perfected their Final Solution by watching American Jim Crow, the American empire now mirrors back that horror—but digitized, privatized, and globalized.
Their aims are techno-imperial fascism in its final form.
Yet, and I cannot be any more clear about this, the answer is not a phone‑bank to your junior senator, as the liberal democrats would have you believe. The answer is a neighborhood‑wide jailbreak of the imagination: join a radical community organization, build garden plots, basement assemblies, encrypted groupchats, rooftop signal lanterns. Revolutionary mutual aid that outlives the sirens. Defense networks that smuggle each other to tomorrow.
A comrade reminded me: “This is not a time to be afraid; it is a time to be prepared.” Readiness is a discipline of love.
I write these words not to frighten you—because fear itself is a tool of the empire, an imperial contagion meant to incapacitate us. Instead, I write it to cast a harsh beam of clarity. Only under that light can we sculpt the tools we need: abolition, resistance, revolution, and a future where our children read of camps only in museums we build over the rubble.
The trumpet has not sounded, so we must become the siren.
