BREAKING NEWS: America Is Back in the International Slave Trade

A Trump administration filing in federal court in Maryland may be the most shocking confession any presidential administration has made in generations—as it signals a reinstitution of the slave trade.

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Introduction

During the first Trump administration, Donald Trump signed a ghastly deal—one that President Joe Biden quickly withdrew from—that agreed to send U.S. deportees into the custody of brutal far-right El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, an ally of the Trump family, rather than back to their home countries.

The deal was an example of the 1980s-born, oddly named, much criticized “Safe Third Country” (STC) principle, in which a nation can designate a country that’s not a given deportee’s home country as a safe place for them to seek asylum instead of the country they originally applied to. Historically, the most obviously noxious deployments of this institutionalized fiction at the heart of the international migration framework have come when a nation—in the case of Donald Trump, the United States—chooses to designate as a “safe third country” a country that is obviously unsafe.

Under Bukele, who illegally seized a new term as El Salvador’s president in exactly the way we now know Donald Trump wishes to, and who’s in a highly public bromance with American co-POTUS Elon Musk, crime in the relatively poor Central American nation has gone down and the economy up—at the expense of virtually everything else that makes life worth living, including, most notably, the freedom of El Salvador’s citizens. Despite Musk making clear that he wants Bukele’s brutal authoritarianism to come to the United States as a panacea for everything he dislikes about the nation he apparently illegally became a citizen of in the 1990s, the reality of life under Bukele is best summarized by this investigative report in the New Yorker. It includes harrowing paragraphs like this one:

On a recent night, I was speaking with a woman named [fictitious name used to protect her identity from Bukele], whose husband had been arrested during a work break at a taxi stand in a town near San Salvador. He and his employee were eating pupusas on the street, and, when a cook from the food stall walked over to collect their money, a group of officers converged on the three of them. The charge was “illegal gathering.”

A jealous neighbor may have called in a tip—Karen’s husband had never been arrested, and he was a fixture at their local church. He had also enthusiastically voted for Bukele in 2019.

Baffled, Karen tried everything, including speaking to local reporters to publicize the case, but nothing changed. When she first told me the story, we were hunched over a small table in the food court of a mall, her face teary.

That’s right: the world Musk and now (see infra) Donald Trump want to recreate in North America is one in which anyone can be “disappeared” off the street at any time.

When Trump made his deal with Bukele during his first term, its premise was that the men, women, and children he would be deporting from American soil to the territory of a brutal far-right dictator would be nonviolent migrants seeking political asylum—that is, safety from proven dangers in their home countries—and that El Salvador would, in the spirit of such asylum requests, welcome these migrants with open arms. Indeed, the idea was that the migrants would eventually become eligible to be El Salvadorans.

From the start, the premise was a flawed one, in part because it relied on a tyrant who not only has “suspended civil liberties” in El Salvador but is widely reported to be “secretly negotiating with” the very same murderous gangs he claims to be cleaning up—meaning that he’s a criminal himself, and merely uses disingenuous rhetoric on criminal justice (this will sound familiar to all American voters) as a means to stay in power. Per the New York Times, Nayib Bukele is particularly infamous worldwide for “carrying out mass arrests,” “bypassing due process,” and “ensnaring people who have no gang ties” in his due process-less mass arrests. This hardly makes him a good candidate to take in thousands and thousands of impoverished foreign migrants he hasn’t personally vetted; as CBS News noted (without, oddly, seeing the flashing red lights in its own phrasing) Bukele promised Trump he would “house” (how was not specified) all asylum-seekers deported from the United States, a promise that by 2025 had turned into an acknowledgment by the same news organization that Bukele would be “incarcerating” all persons sent to him by Trump, not just any “criminals” America deported but all “deportees,” a population that includes asylum-seekers who’ve done nothing wrong and are merely fleeing persecution. In fact, yet another CBS report found that of the 238 alleged Venezuelan gang (Tren de Aragua) members recently sent to CECOT for life imprisonment, “most” were merely “migrants” who had “no criminal records”—a fact that didn’t stop Trump from condemning them all to life imprisonment and didn’t stop Bukele from being the executor of that grotesque atrocity.

Even at the time of the First Trump-Bukele Accord in 2019, American media noted that Trump was pushing innocent asylum-seekers into “one of the most dangerous countries in the world,” in fact a nation so unsafe that Trump administration officials privately conceded it didn’t and couldn’t qualify as a proper “safe third country” deal—but only an “asylum cooperation agreement”—due to the unsuitability of El Salvador for any asylum-seeker.

These officials also acknowledged (and even more grotesquely, in retrospect) that they were deporting these innocents to a nation without any asylum system, as the U.S. would need to “help [Bukele] build an asylum system in El Salvador.” This left wide open the question of what the infamously incarceration-happy Bukele would do with a massive influx of unvetted migrants to his carefully controlled authoritarian ecosystem. That question didn’t seem to trouble Donald Trump at all, however, on the longstanding principle—one imagines—of “out of sight, out of mind.”

Yet Trump knew in 2019 that his ally Bukele had long seen migration through the lens of law enforcement rather than humanitarianism, with the New York Times reporting in 2019 that Bukele “has deployed hundreds of security forces and immigration agents to [El Salvador’s] border to help curb the flow of migrants bound for Mexico and the United States.”

Meanwhile, Bukele himself has made clear that he doesn’t want back the 200,000 El Salvadorans currently in America on “TPS” (“Temporary Protected Status”) status, which needless to say would have underscored for Trump in 2019 that the far-right dictator also doesn’t want new non-Salvadoran migrants roaming free in El Salvador.

With all this in mind, one imagines that when President Biden withdrew from this dodgy arrangement it wasn’t just because it was a fake “safe third country” pact; not just because El Salvador is no place for women and children fleeing persecution in their home countries; not just because of Bukele’s horrifying human rights record; but more broadly because Bukele was unwilling to make any representation to the U.S. government that he would meaningfully distinguish between categories of deportees.

Then Donald Trump won reelection last November, and a new vicious circle began.

The Second Trump-Bukele Accord(s)

The Biden-discarded First Trump-Bukele Accord was revived in January 2025, during the first week of the second Trump administration—though now with significant new complexities, in acknowledgment of the fact that it could not be undone for at least four years. (In other words, Trump and Bukele now had all the runway they needed to grievously mishandle not just hundreds of thousands but millions of innocents, letting new layers of conceptual and structural complexity enter their previous negotiations.)

Because a Trump-Bukele accord had existed previously—and was, if one didn’t pay any attention to the details, merely part of a string of such agreements Trump had sought during his first administration with various Central America countries (e.g., Honduras and Guatemala)—the revival of the original Trump-Bukele negotiations deal caused less reflection among major media than might have been expected. It was, after all, at least vaguely reminiscent of the sort of “safe third country” arrangements that have been common in international diplomacy for almost fifty years. That what Trump and Bukele (a would-be dictator and the still fairly newly minted dictator) had agreed to was something else entirely was apparently lost on almost everyone.

As already implied, a key distinction in the second set of Trump-Bukele negotiations was the nature of Bukele’s devolving rule and his intentions for those entering his country. As the Associated Press reports, it’s not merely Bukele’s new “CECOT” maximum security prison—which allows no visitation, recreation, education, media coverage, or prisoner releases (ever)—being draconian to the point of raising human rights concerns, but in fact the “stark, harsh prisons [that are] a trademark” of the man’s tyranny across El Salvador. Indeed, given that El Salvador only has a population the size of Maryland, and given that CECOT can house “40,000” inmates, it’s unclear how many other prisons El Salvador needs or even has. The Conversation reports that there are “110,000” total prisoners in El Salvador, but given that Mr. Bukele oversees a prison system with hundreds of prison murders annually; that CECOT prisoners are never allowed outside and are told in advance that they’ll die in CECOT, contributing to a likely high suicide rate (further enabled by the fact that each CECOT prisoner is projected to eventually receive, once the prison is at maximum capacity, “less than two feet of space in their cells”); and the seeming inevitability that Bukele will soon have the funds, possibly through his dealings with Trump, to build a “CECOT 2,” it seems clear that in relatively short order most or all El Salvadoran prisoners will be in the very same CECOT conditions that would constitute clear civil rights violations in America.

But a second distinction pertains to Bukele’s philosophy of law enforcement, which is discussed in detail in the 2025 Proof Series book Proof of Destruction. In a manner that is representative of the plot of the 2002 dystopian film Minority Report, Bukele appears to believe that crimes that have not yet occurred can be sniffed out in advance. To this end, he gregariously arrests any he believes might commit a crime at some time in the future, doing so without due process and then caging that person for the rest of their natural lives. This psychopathic exercise in institutional sadism is of course a massive human rights violation—even as Elon Musk implies publicly (see Proof of Destruction) that he wants the same system used in America—but on a more banal level it simply indicates a deranged autocrat who thinks not in terms of persons but classes of persons.

In his public comments on criminal justice, Bukele identifies classes of persons who—per dodgy data of uncertain origin or accuracy—are more likely to commit crimes than others, again a delusion that was already a subject for dystopian film in America decades ago. Bukele almost certainly would place unvetted foreign migrants without any money or job prospects, who are entering a nation (again) without any actual asylum system, as being in this “class” of likely criminals. This underscores that every woman, man, and child Donald Trump deports to El Salvador is at risk of entering a CECOT-like form of permanent caging.

{Note: Elon Musk’s public embrace of institutional sadism of the sort described above may be seen as a microcosm of how his friend—and apparent model, at least on the subject of blue-collar law enforcement—Nayib Bukele thinks. At various points over the last few years, as discussed in the Elon Musk section of this publication, the Tesla CEO has implied foreseeable criminality amongst almost every class of American citizen widely known for criticizing him, from members of antifa to anyone involved in the Indivisible nonprofit organizing unit, from Democratic members of Congress to the editors at countless major-media publications, from undocumented persons to urban-dwelling Black Americans, from any Democratic Party voter who attends a public protest to any transgender person. In short, one of many reasons Musk is routinely termed a would-be “fascist” by his critics is that he has strongly implied—repeatedly, on social media and in interviews and in speeches and at rallies—that if he had his druthers a large percentage of the U.S. population would be incarcerated as a preventative measure. In this context, fearing that his pal Bukele would incarcerate nonviolent migrants seems a rather conservative analysis.}

While all the foregoing was already in the water in January 2025, by the end of that month the Musk-Trump Axis still hadn’t formally re-entered into Trump’s first-term deal with Bukele—nor had that deal been extended to include not just nonviolent migrants all ostensibly (but not really) intended to become El Salvadoran citizens somewhere down the line but individuals currently incarcerated in America for violent crimes. The reason for this delay in re-formalizing the First Trump-Bukele Accord was that, consistent with his apparent plan to ramp up the extremism of every one of his failed first-term domestic and foreign policies (e.g., the so-called “Muslim travel ban”), Trump clearly wanted a second Trump-Bukele accord to be much bigger and bolder than the first.

And this is where the meat of our story begins.

The Trump-Bukele Bromance Is Rekindled

By the end of January 2025, Trump had dispatched his Secretary of State Marco Rubio to discuss with President Bukele entering into three simultaneous deals with America—reminiscent, for those who follow the U.S. Congress closely, of Trump’s preference for Congress to pass “one big beautiful bill” encompassing his entire domestic agenda rather than passing that veritable smorgasbord of legislative maneuvers piecemeal.

The problems with this plan—as with Trump’s would-be “beautiful bill”—were many:

1. Mr. Trump does not understand what “asylum” means. As has been repeatedly reported—see here and here and here and here and here and here, for instance—it really does seem that Trump doesn’t understand what “seeking asylum” means, as he conflates it with a term widely used (for what we now call psychiatric wards) when Trump was younger: insane asylums. Indeed, Trump appears to almost never discuss the women, men, and children seeking asylum in the U.S. without falsely, alleging, without any evidence whatsoever, that most of them are either criminals, criminally insane, former mental-hospital patients, or simply persons previously identified by their home governments as undesirables (likely, or so Trump often implies, due to their supposed mental-health issues). While it’s been explained to Trump many times, surely, that all this is false, it’s so politically advantageous for him to accuse foreign countries—particularly majority-minority countries in South America or Central America—of sending dangerously unstable and/or violent persons to the United States as part of an international left-wing plot to unleash non-white violence on conservative white Americans that the president has clearly come to believe his own delusion (as well as applaud the way his co-president, Musk, spends nearly all day drilling down on the vicious slander that migrants commit crimes at higher rates than citizens, rather than far lower ones).

2. Mr. Trump therefore likely cannot distinguish between the three very different types of deals Rubio and Bukele were negotiating in January 2025. Our proof of this is not merely that Trump appears to believe anyone seeking “asylum” is per se dangerous, but also the fact that, like Bukele and Musk, Trump habitually uses disingenuous rhetoric on criminal justice to flatten many necessary distinctions between different classes of persons, and for that matter different variations of crimes and criminals. In the near-daily legally inaccurate words of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, anyone in the U.S. in violation of civil statutes that require documentation is a “criminal”; anyone who’s a member of a gang, with or without a criminal record, is likewise a “criminal”; and, in an echo of Trump’s personal lawyer Pam Bondi—who has the title of “Attorney General” but appears to still be merely a Trump legal adviser and advocate—anyone who commits even petty vandalism against property associated with a high-profile Republican is a “terrorist.” Just as CECOT is designated by Bukele as a prison for “terrorists” but seems to be ready to hold basically anyone who Bukele wants to punish with permanent caging, one of Trump’s first actions in his second term was to falsely declare numerous majority-minority, foreign-born gangs “foreign terrorist organizations” so that anyone even distantly associated with them, even U.S. citizens, could be called a “terrorist.” In practice, this clearly counterfactual declaration meant that in the second Trump era an individual could be deemed a terrorist (a person intent on publicly achieving political ends through violent means) even if (a) they’d done no more than send a single email to a member of an “FTO,” (b) they’d never committed any crimes in the United States, (c) they’d denied being in any FTO but had been identified as a member purely on the basis of potentially innocuous tattoos or garb, or (d) they’d in no way met the definition of an actual “terrorist”—as even an active, self-admitted gang member who’s at some point committed a charged or uncharged violent crime in America as part of the loose, almost entirely disconnected underworld of foreign gangs in the U.S. is in no sense doing so as a political statement or to enact political change. (Indeed, the most common victims of such gang members are other gang members and members of other gangs, not the white American civilians without a gang affiliation the new Trump administration implies he’s protecting.)

3. Mr. Bukele also appears incapable of making, or unwilling to make, the category distinctions that the several arrangements he wants to make with Trump require. A true “safe third country” agreement between the United States and Bukele would require of the latter something he’s never indicated even a modicum of interest in: offering a path to legal residence and even citizenship for foreign migrants he knows nothing about beyond the fact that they sought non-pre-authorized entry to the United States. Bukele isn’t an autocrat avidly seeking to increase his nation’s modest population, but rather to reduce it through both incarceration and fending off American attempts to return 200,000 TPS-eligible El Salvadorans; he’s exhibited no interest in having El Salvador become a melting pot of different migrants’ cultures, but the opposite: he seeks a homogeneous land whose residents conform to his expectations for them (all the way down to, as Proof and others have previously reported, the length of their hair). Bukele’s views of asylum, migration, diversity, and terrorism in this respect match those of Musk and Trump, not a leader interested in providing safe harbor for the suffering.

4. El Salvador is too poor a nation, at present, to handle asylum-seekers humanely. Perhaps in part because it’s a brutal far-right autocracy whose autocratic leader is a murderous sociopath, El Salvador is relatively poor. It ranks 116th worldwide in wealth, putting it on par with nations such as Bhutan, Namibia, and Iraq. There is no evidence whatsoever that it’s in a position to welcome with open arms hundreds of thousands of migrants from America—persons who originally hailed from many different nations, some of them not on friendly terms with El Salvador—nor even, as noted above, that the nation has any asylum system in place at all. The women, men, and children Trump wants to send to Bukele have no jobs or money and in some instances little education or training. The very reason Bukele has become known for CECOT, a horrifying death trap, and not for running a rich South or Central American nation—like, say, Chile, Uruguay, or Costa Rica (nations that rank #66, #67, and #69 in global wealth respectively)—is because he’s not managing a vibrant economy but a tightly controlled prison camp in which the 6.3 million El Salvadorans under his thumb know that if they step out of line they’ll be sent to die in CECOT or an equally deadly prison. Just as Americans wouldn’t even imagine that sending migrants to Iraq makes sense, we shouldn’t think of El Salvador as a sensible safe harbor for anyone. Clearly, President Trump only pretends otherwise because he wants to make a deal with his friend Bukele that at once allows him to send Bukele money and undesirables, elevates Bukele’s reputation on the world stage, augments the status of his relationship with the U.S., and develops a new precedent for how America deals with non-white migrants (not the politically conservative white ones Trump warmly welcomes).

But it gets worse.

And it gets worse because, beyond sending Bukele asylum-seekers and individuals he claims—often falsely—are foreign-born criminals, Donald Trump wants to seal a third type of deal with Bukele. It’s a very different type of deal than the first two (even as the first two are very different from one another), yet in keeping with the analysis above it’s also a deal Trump wrongly treats as identical to the two others already described.

Around the time that Marco Rubio was in El Salvador negotiating with Bukele early in 2025, President Trump revealed that this third type of deal would involve sending to El Salvador imprisoned American citizens for the duration of their incarceration, with the United States paying “a small fee [per prisoner]” (a nod to how the handshake deal involving foreign-born alleged criminals was handled, with the first such reported transfer boasting a miniscule $6 million annual fee for 300 prisoners, or $20,000 per annum per prisoner; by comparison, the U.S. spends well over twice that amount).

While Trump and Rubio are only proposing sending Bukele “a small fee per prisoner,” the fact that just the first “prisoner” shipment to El Salvador involved 300 persons—who, over a presumed 30-year average stay at CECOT before death, would see the U.S. sending $180 million to El Salvador for just those inmates alone—confirms that in its totality the deal Trump seeks with Bukele would involve the transfer of tens of billions of dollars to a far-right autocracy known for civil rights and human rights violations.

Needless to say, the less Bukele spends of this money on prisoners, the more he can keep for himself. And given that the United States spends $43,000 per annum per prisoner to house human beings humanely, do we really think Bukele is spending $20,000 per annum per prisoner to give each prisoner under two feet of living space?

Of course not. That amount of space per prisoner—with the lack of any recreation, education, visitation, outdoor time, or small-occupancy cells—costs considerably less.

So even before anyone considers the Trump-Bukele asylum-seeker deal, or the Trump-Bukele incarcerated-U.S. citizen deal, the “FTO” (“Foreign Terrorist Organization”) deal that the two men have already launched—and are presumably now working on formalizing—will result in billions and billions of dollars in profit for Nayib Bukele.

But added to the FTO deal are, indeed, two other types of deals, with the full slate of three U.S.-El Salvador arrangements itemized below.

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The Second Trump-Bukele Accord(s)

(1) The STC Deal

Affects: Migrant Asylum-Seekers
Are Affected Persons Violent: No
Are Affected Persons Criminals: No
Will They Return to America: No
Who Holds Jurisdiction Over Them Once Deported: El Salvador

(2) The FTO Deal

Affects: Alleged Foreign-Born Gang Members Now in the United States
Are Affected Persons Violent: Maybe
Are Affected Persons Criminals: Maybe
Will They Return to America: No
Who Holds Jurisdiction Over Them Once Deported: El Salvador

(3) The BOP Deal (“Federal Bureau of Prisons”)

Affects: American Citizens
Are Affected Persons Violent: Maybe
Are Affected Persons Criminals: Yes
Will They Return to America: Yes
Who Holds Jurisdiction Over Them Once Deported: United States

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The issues we already see in the data above are these:

1. All persons currently in the United States and under U.S. jurisdiction enjoy the protections of the Eighth Amendment, which means they cannot be sent to any prison Nayib Bukele runs.

2. Donald Trump cannot legally send any U.S. citizens abroad for incarceration.

3. There is no evidence that Trump or Bukele are distinguishing carefully between the terms of these three deals as Proof has just helpfully done above.

All three of these issues—and there are many others to boot—are deal-breakers.

But the second Trump administration not only acknowledges none of these, or any issues at all, but—again—makes no distinction between the three arrangements above.

The Plot Thickens—and Darkens Considerably

If we accept—as should not be difficult—that what we are dealing with in both the U.S. and El Salvador right now are far-right administrations that care so little about any of the classes of people above, and understand (or choose to understand) so little about key legal distinctions between the classes of persons above with respect to both the U.S. immigration system and the U.S. criminal justice system, that the desire or ability of these administrations and president to distinguish between the deals above approaches nil, what atrocities might we expect from such administrations and men?

(1) A blending or “bleeding over” of all persons and categories referenced above.

So, for instance, we would expect to hear the President of the United States repeatedly imply that (1) many non-violent migrants are in fact violent; (2) all gang members are criminals whether they have criminal records or not; (3) some persons who dress like gang members or simply know gang members are in fact gang members when they are not; (4) all gang members are “terrorists,” when by the conventional definition of the latter term almost none are; and (5) Bukele would therefore be in the right to issue life sentences to everyone he receives from the U.S. under the FTO Deal and BOP Deal.

(2) A juxtaposition of the terms physical custody and legal custody.

Anyone who knows anything about family court in the United States is aware that physical custody of a person and legal custody of that person sometimes but not always overlap. For instance, a child removed from a home for the child’s safety has been taken into the physical custody of a governmental body even if the parental rights of the child’s parents haven’t yet been terminated or in any way abridged—meaning that they still have legal custody of the (now-absent) child.

Just so, following a divorce two former spouses may share legal custody of a child of the marriage even if one of them is awarded full physical custody of the child. The latter term relates to who has dominion over a body, and the former to who has a vested legal interest in the body.

When Trump began musing, in January, about sending not just asylum-seekers to El Salvador but also two classes of incarcerated persons—foreign-born inmates and U.S.-born inmates—he not only was creating a constitutional crisis (because both of these conveyances would arguably violate the Eighth Amendment, with the latter also likely violating the Fourth Amendment, Fifth Amendment, and Sixth Amendment) but in very real and immediate terms a custodial crisis.

{Note: The author of this report is a longtime criminal defense attorney and current member in good standing with both the New Hampshire Bar Association and the Federal Bar for the District of New Hampshire. Nothing in this report should be taken as legal advice directed to or for any person or class of persons; if you require an attorney, contact one in your area.}

Because Bukele incarcerates deportees of foreign nations in CECOT, and because he has linked his credibility as a politician with the idea that no one is allowed to leave CECOT alive, anyone he receives as a deportee of a foreign nation must be someone he has both physical custody and legal custody of—with the latter being essential to him, as without it a foreign court could technically claim power over him and could force him to release prisoners who he does not want to release (for political or other reasons). Obviously, no brutal far-right foreign dictator would ever agree to allow a single U.S. judge to have even a second of legal authority over him. It’s unthinkable.

Perhaps, readers, you now see the problem.

While in theory the second Trump administration might be permitted to ship foreign-born deportees to El Salvador to die in El Salvadoran custody if they’re given due process first—assuming that that due process takes into account whether a lifetime in a cage with under two feet of living space is “cruel and unusual punishment” for the offense the U.S. can prove (or has proven) the inmate in question committed, as otherwise no judge could permit deportation into the circumstances Bukele promises inmates in El Salvador—the same cannot be said of the U.S. citizens Trump wants to house in El Salvador.

Even if President Trump could somehow get around the fact that foreign housing of U.S. citizens is per se illegal, the only way he could get around it would be via some heretofore unthinkable international treaty by which Bukele agrees that the U.S. will retain legal custody of all U.S.-born persons jailed in El Salvador. This means, to be very clear, that a U.S. judge could order any plane carrying such a person to Bukele’s country to turn around at any point; that a U.S. judge could order any U.S. citizen in an El Salvadoran prison to be returned to the U.S. immediately (that is, overnight); and that Nayib Bukele’s U.S.-born CECOT prisoners could appeal the circumstances of their incarceration in CECOT in American courts.

Just from this last point, you can probably detect that this is the sort of thing that Nayib Bukele would never agree to—to the point that no Trump negotiator, whether Rubio or Trump himself or another, would even dare seek such an accommodation. Allowing American prisoners at CECOT access to U.S. courts would quickly expose the truth about CECOT to the world at a time when Bukele is strictly controlling media access to the prison precisely to avoid such revelations. He would never allow prisoners to send petitions to U.S. courts (their texts visible to every U.S. journalist) detailing his secret atrocities.

(3) The second Trump administration is using the foregoing misconceptions to further pretend, falsely, that all violent criminals receive life imprisonment and therefore are eligible for CECOT incarceration.

The far right’s utter lack of understanding of the U.S. criminal justice system is so infamous that it can’t possibly be covered in full here. Suffice to say that almost none of the actual, day-to-day operations of that system are understood or even accepted by Trump, Trump agents, or Trump voters: from the fact that very few cases (of any type) result in any incarceration to the fact that even when incarceration occurs it’s often very brief; from the fact that bona fide life imprisonment is vanishingly rare (meaning that almost all inmates will eventually reintegrate with society) to the fact that arrests that aren’t accompanied by convictions can’t be used to assess someone’s supposed dangerousness now or in the future; from the fact that pretrial detention can’t ever be used as a punishment or deterrent—by law—to the fact that bail is in most U.S. states set exclusively on the basis of how much money is required to ensure a defendant will appear for court in the future, as opposed to a person’s perceived dangerousness; from the fact that most violent crimes are, by volume, minor in nature—bar fights, shoving matches, simple assaults with minimal or no injury—to the fact that some exceedingly violent crimes are committed by juveniles or other persons who, for reasons having to do with the particular circumstances of their life or crime or personality, are likely to be allowed to reintegrate into civil society somewhere down the line.

Most MAGAs don’t even understand the difference between the fact-finding and sentencing phases of a criminal case, meaning that they wrongly believe that every person convicted under a given criminal statute will end up with the same sentence.

They also don’t accept the fact—and it’s manifestly a fact—that many white-collar offenses are far more dangerous to civil society than street crimes are; indeed, many Trump voters have no interest in prosecutors doing much to pursue the most common crimes committed by rich people unless those rich people are also political enemies.

With all this in mind, and keeping in mind that the MAGA Republican Party treats the word “criminal” as do Musk and Bukele—that is, to mean someone who must be locked up forever, provided the criminal isn’t the 34-times-over convicted felon now occupying the Oval Office—we can see how, from the moment Mr. Rubio began his meeting with Mr. Bukele in January 2025, there was a real risk that he would blithely commit U.S. persons to life imprisonment in El Salvador who had no business serving even a year in any prison (or perhaps not even serving any prison time at all).

A Shocking Revelation… Or, In These Times, Perhaps Just a Revelation

Giving the foregoing, perhaps it was a fait accompli that Americans would soon learn that Trump and his administration indeed had no interest in making fine distinctions between any of the categories of persons described above or between any of the three very different types of international agreements itemized supra. It’s not even clear that the administration has the ability to draw such distinctions, given how many of the new top attorneys in the federal executive branch are former Trump personal lawyers not known for their adherence to ethics or even a basic understanding of evidence—from Trump personal lawyer Pam Bondi to Trump personal lawyer Emil Bove, from Trump personal lawyer Todd Blanche to Trump personal lawyer Kash Patel, from Trump personal lawyer Alina Habba to former Stop the Steal lawyer Ed Martin, so many of those determining investigative, prosecutorial, and incarceration policies in America are nakedly political Trump agents, not earnest agents of law enforcement.

During the first Trump administration, as many as 70 U.S. citizens were wrongly deported. In the first 75 days of the second Trump administration, the error rate in ICE detentions and deportations appears to have skyrocketed, with deportation or detention scandals that touched U.S. citizens (a child recovering from brain surgery), Canadian tourists (Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney getting held for eleven days), persons on student visas who have committed no offenses (too many cases to name, but see, e.g., here and here and here and here), permanent legal residents (a Columbia graduate deported for peaceful pro-Palestinian activism), asylum-seekers (some who were deliberately deported just before a judge was about to save them), and countless others the Trump administration deems “criminals” on the sole basis that it no longer wants them in the United States. That this latter designation also now applies to many Trump and Musk critics who are most assuredly U.S. citizens should be lost on no one.

But even some seeming “close” cases are, in fact, not that close at all. Among the 300 alleged Venezuelan “terrorists”—Trumpworld slang for members of gangs Trump has falsely declared to be terrorist groups—deported last month were many persons, it turns out, who had no gang affiliations or criminal records at all. This group included gay hairdressers and professional singers, professional soccer players and at least one man who got deported solely due to erroneous ICE copy-pasting between two documents.

Trump’s first deportation of persons into Bukele’s custody was so amateurish that he even sent ten souls Bukele had expressly indicated an unwillingness to take due to their national identity.

Nevertheless, the administration deemed all of these people to be criminals, nearly all of them terrorists, and none of them to be erroneous deportations—even as Trump’s immigration czar Tom Homan refused to identify any specific and explicit basis for deporting any of the 300, and confessed that he had no problem calling even persons without any criminal records “terrorists” (a designation that almost invariably leads to lifetime CECOT imprisonment under the proposed Second Trump-Bukele Accords).

In fact, Homan has made quite clear that he doesn’t care about due process at all, even admitting to being guided by his “gut feelings” on certain matters of criminal justice.

Every Trump official involved with Trump’s deportation scheme has been so adamant in declaring that no deportation mistakes have ever been made by them or anyone in the Trump administration that it has now become clear why this is: because if Trump or anyone in his administration were to admit to sending into the physical and legal custody of Nayib Bukele a person who did not belong in that custody, it would create an international crisis: a situation in which a U.S. court was bound to assert U.S. legal authority over El Salvador’s president in an attempt to compel a dictator to do something.

Not only would Bukele not allow that, but neither would Donald Trump. In a recent Trump administration filing in federal court, Trump officials claimed that Trump can take into account “political damage” to Bukele, and even the possibility that a given U.S. judicial order could “humiliate” Bukele—perhaps by way of revealing atrocities within his regime—in deciding whether to honor a federal judicial ruling. It was a claim almost certainly never made before by any presidential administration: the idea that a U.S. president’s need to please a foreign autocrat could justify violating the United States Constitution is so far beyond the pale as to be instantly nauseating.

Yet the second Trump administration put in writing that it wasn’t going to allow a court to tell it that it had made a deportation mistake if that claim involved a person already in Bukele’s custody, partly to avoid embarrassing Bukele and partly for an even more dire reason discussed below.

A reason that was revealed as soon as something entirely foreseeable happened.

The Abrego Garcia Scandal

CNN sets the scene:

That this deportation was a disaster for Garcia goes without saying; for the rule of law in the U.S., likewise; but it was a particular disaster for the Trump administration not just because a U.S. court was ordering the return of someone in the physical custody of Nayib Bukele—who Bukele also deemed to be in his legal custody—but for a far bigger reason: Abrego Garcia didn’t fall under any of the deals in the second Trump-Bukele Accords.

To wit, Garcia wasn’t a U.S.-born criminal, a foreign-born gang member, or an asylum seeker still awaiting his adjudication—he was caught up in the Second Trump-Bukele Accords entirely by accident. Put another way, while it’s clear that physical custody of Mr. Garcia was transferred to Bukele by accident, legal custody was never transferred at all. Why? Because there is no conceivable basis for the claim that it did (even if we presume, as we shouldn’t, that there’s a legal basis for any transferrals to Bukele in the absence of the Accords’ formalization and given the language of the U.S. Constitution).

So Abrego Garcia belongs in the United States as a matter of law—no matter who has physical custody of him right now.

But this fact alone wouldn’t have caused a scandal, as of course it was imminently in the power of either Donald Trump or Nayib Bukele—or any of their respective agents, e.g. Tom Homan—to acknowledge their mistake and return Mr. Garcia to the United States forthwith.

But if you’ve been following this report from the beginning, and tracking its analyses of not just Trump’s policies but his philosophy, you’ll be unsurprised to learn that what the Trump administration did upon determining it had made one of the very worst mistakes in the history of the U.S. immigration system not to freely admit the error.

After all, it clearly reasoned, was Garcia someone Trump wanted in the United States?

No.

He’s non-white—and therefore, in the usual MAGA calculation, a likely Democrat by inclination—and he’s not a U.S. citizen.

What he is is someone who’s been formally declared by American courts to be a man who would face persecution and possibly death if sent into Nayib Bukele’s arms. In other words, Trump and his agents had every reason to presume that Garcia was a man Bukele wanted to kill—so he’d be exceedingly grateful for Trump deporting him.

But then a strange thing happened.

Someone in Donald Trump’s employ actually did—against all orders—the right thing.

Specifically, a senior DOJ attorney, Erez Reuveni, admitted to a federal court (as the Rules of Professional Conduct promulgated by the American Bar Association required him to do, at the risk of losing his license to practice law if he didn’t) that Abrego Garcia shouldn’t have been deported by the Trump administration. Specifically, Attorney Reuveni said this:

And this:

In sum, Attorney Reuveni admitted that the court would be well within its right to order Nayib Bukele to return a deportee—rather than kill him or imprison him for life, as appears to be the plan Bukele has for most Trump administration deportees—and then he went still further by acknowledging that there was no reason for Garcia to be picked up at all, an admission that had the effect of underscoring (and putting the Trump administration on record as to the premise) that the administration was likely making many such grave errors in its hurry to hustle foreign-born persons out of the country before any federal court could review the deportations.

So what did Trump do to Attorney Reuveni, in response to Attorney Reuveni doing the right thing? A thing Attorney Reuveni was obligated to do by rule of law and his profession’s rules of ethical conduct? He put him on indefinite leave—and accused him of rank insubordination.

But the damage was already done.

Why?

Because by formalizing its unwillingness to accept that any Trump deportation even could be mistaken; by punishing any executive-branch official who admitted such an error; and by refusing to return Abrego Garcia to the United States even though it had admitted he was deported by accident, the second Trump administration had admitted that it couldn’t get Abrego Garcia back because it no longer had legal custody of him.

As CNN reported the second Trump administration told a federal judge in Maryland, “The United States does not have control over Abrego Garcia or the nation of El Salvador.” The first part of this sentence reveals a lack of physical custody; the second part confesses, for the first time in U.S. history in a case of this sort, an admitted lack of legal custody.

The Return of the American Slave Trade

As noted above, the STC Deal, the FTO Deal, and the BOP Deal that comprise the still-unsigned Second Trump-Bukele Accords are wildly different from one another as a matter of both fact and law. Even if we accepted that all of them were and are legal—and in fact, none of them are legal—even an executive-branch attorney working to please Donald Trump and indifferent to U.S. rule of law would have realized that an essential piece of the BOP Deal was establishing that Nayib Bukele would never earn legal custody of any person legally resident in the United States.

Why? Because while foreign nations can acquire legal custody of American residents as or when an American resident commits a crime in that nation, it can never occur that an American resident falls into the legal custody of a foreign nation simply due to a clerical error by America.

Such a person, if the foreign nation holding them refused to return them, would be deemed a “hostage.”

Yet Nayib Bukele will not return anyone sent to him, because he would deem that a “humiliation” that causes him “political damage” as a far-right dictator. No dictator can remain a dictator who agrees to be bound by the authority of foreign courts. Thus the GIF response from Bukele himself when he was ordered to return Garcia:

That’s right—Bukele is here expressing humorous disbelief at the notion that any judge in the United States would deign to tell him what to do. Nor is this the first time he’s done so. Bukele’s contempt for American courts is in fact a dominant feature of his disgraceful Twitter feed (along with the boundless self-delusion we’d expect from a sadistic sociopath, with Bukele dubbing himself a “Philosopher King” in his bio).

And because the Trump administration knew it would never regain custody of any person it sent to Bukele unless—for some unknown reason—Bukele himself willed it, it had to cover up the real terms of the Second Trump-Bukele Accords by punishing Reuveni and telling a court in Maryland that it didn’t want Garcia back even though it had no basis for deporting him in the first instance and therefore by all rights should have wanted him back desperately.

Put simply, the position of the Trump administration is as follows:

1. The Second Trump-Bukele Accords make the United States money by saving America the cost of housing asylum-seekers (the STC Deal), imprisoning non-U.S.-born inmates (the FTO Deal), and imprisoning U.S.-born inmates (the BOP Deal).

2. The Second Trump-Bukele Accords also make the United States money by removing from U.S. soil persons the Trump administration—and most notably, Elon Musk—repeatedly insist are draining huge amounts of public resources from U.S. social-welfare programs (even though, yet again, the opposite is actually true: undocumented persons put more money into the U.S. government than they get back, even as they also often do jobs Americans don’t want and get less pay for the same amount of work or more).

3. Anyone the Trump administration transfers to El Salvador is now fully owned by El Salvador—meaning El Salvador has physical and custody of that person.

4. El Salvador retains irrevocable ownership of the bodies the U.S. has sent to it for financial considerations, even if there was no proper legal basis or authority on the front end for what we must candidly now term a “sale.” While obviously the practice of slavery is never acceptable, there are circumstances in which a man or woman who’s received due process can not only be incarcerated but experience thereafter a significant dilution of their rights (e.g., their right to move freely, their right to privacy, and their right to earn a statutory minimum wage for their labor). We’re not discussing such situations here, however.

5. The U.S. has and seeks no visibility into how Bukele disposes of his property. This despite the fact that the Trump administration does know that Bukele plans to kill, either slowly or over years, anyone it sends into his custody as a deportee.

What is described above is the slave trade.

The moment a Trump agent wrote to a federal court in Maryland that “the United States does not have control over Abrego Garcia or the nation of El Salvador,” it was confirming that it had sold Garcia to El Salvador for financial considerations and that the man was now, in every respect, the property of El Salvador—even as the United States, in the form of the second Trump administration, had no basis or justification or excuse or pretext for that sale other than the financial and in-kind “consideration” (contractual value) it derived from its human trafficking with El Salvador’s dictator.

And Now It Gets Worse

If only that were all. But in fact this is only the beginning.

For if the Trump administration deems bought-and-sold a man who isn’t even part of the Second Trump-Bukele Accords, what will be the fate of those U.S. citizens who get caught up in the BOP Deal? These would be Americans currently incarcerated for violent crimes who—we now know—enter into both the physical and legal custody of Nayib Bukele the second Trump and his agents put them on a plane to El Salvador.

In other words, an American serving a sentence of two years in federal prison for, say, defacing the passenger door of a Tesla could be sent to rot in CECOT in under two feet of “living” space…

…and then what? Bukele isn’t subject to any U.S. court, and has made clear that he will never allow himself to be subject to any U.S. court; and the Trump administration has made clear that it will not demand the return of any deportee once they’re deported, even if they’re wrongly in Bukele’s custody; so why would any federal judge—or, for that matter, any American citizen—think that they’ll ever see again an American inmate transferred to CECOT under the planned BOP Deal? In fact, based on the evidence currently before us, a proper and reasonable expectation would be that Trump, Musk, and the rest of the Trump administration will use the Second Trump-Bukele Accords as a back door to lengthen any existing federal criminal sentence to life imprisonment by default.

But wait—it gets worse.

Because while the above-described situation would be horrifying enough even if it only applied to Americans currently incarcerated for life with no possibility of parole—the implication Trump deliberately left when he first vaguely described the Second Trump-Bukele Accords to Americans—because it’s cruel and unusual punishment and incompatible with the American conscience for any inmate to live as CECOT inmates do, that’s not what either Trump or his administration finally intends here. To wit, we know all of the following:

1. The Trump administration has said that it’s going to upgrade many offenses to acts of “domestic terrorism”;

2. the Trump administration has made clear that it will “judge shop” aggressively to get its cases before federal judges who implicitly deem themselves MAGA—and will even move to impeach those federal judges who do not do Trump’s bidding in civil and criminal cases;

3. the Trump administration has made clear, through the Davis Doctrine, that it doesn’t believe itself bound by federal judicial rulings that relate to these four categories: terrorism, foreign policy, international affairs, and immigration;

4. the Trump administration has made clear that its policy for evading judicial-branch oversight in these four areas is to make warrantless arrests in the middle of the night and then immediately transport arrestees over states lines so that their location is unknown to the courts and jurisdiction cannot properly vest in any court (either on an emergency basis or otherwise); and

5. when caught out in all the foregoing, the position of the Trump administration is that as long as it can get an arrestee or deportee (or, really, anyone at all) in the air before a court order attempting to stop them arrives, they can’t be stopped at all (keeping in mind that it’s impossible for a court order to come down in time if no one knows the person in question has been taken by ICE in the first instance).

This is, in short, a recipe for “disappearing” persons en masse as part of the new U.S. slave trade, with that trade’s first—but likely not last—pipeline running to Bukele and El Salvador. Perhaps the next pipeline will run to Israel? Or Saudi Arabia? The UAE? Argentina? Hungary? Indeed, as Trump begins re-negotiating his fake “reciprocal” tariffs with nations across the world in which the Trump Organization has business—from Vietnam to Qatar, Egypt to Brazil—who’s to say that the Second Trump-Bukele Accords don’t become a special program Trump aims to develop with every nation that he deems beholden to him in some way?

A slave trade—bodies for cash—that for the moment has “only” swept up dozens of people, from Garcia to the aforementioned gay Venezuelan hairdresser, from the aforementioned professional soccer player to the aforementioned professional singer—could in months include many hundreds, and within a year or two perhaps thousands.

Under such a scenario, Nayib Bukele and other far-right autocrats (or would-be ones) Trump and Musk are friends with—perhaps Narendra Modi of India? Even Giorgia Meloni of Italy?—would in view of the federal judicial branch be holding American residents, and perhaps even some American citizens, hostage. Meanwhile, Trump and Musk and their political compatriots would blithely insist that only vile “terrorists” and “violent criminals” had been permanently warehoused abroad without the U.S. retaining even legal custody of such persons. In the past (see the Iran Hostage Crisis of the late 1970s), this sort of thing led to U.S. military operations and confrontations abroad, operations that were fortunately fairly quick—commando strikes whose shape and duration were made possible by the number of hostages being comparatively few, the hostages not being securely held, and the U.S. clearly not wanting to get into a war with a nation with the firepower that Iran had at the time and still.

But El Salvador? Holding hundreds of American residents or citizens securely and—in the view of the federal judicial branch—illegally? At some point in the future when, say, a Democratic president is in office (let us pretend for a moment that the 2028 U.S. presidential election occurx as planned) wouldn’t we presume that POTUS needing to find a way, including via military force, to rescue the hostages-cum-slaves Trump sold to his autocratic friends abroad?

All this is madness. Yet it’s clearly where matters now stand, given that, if the second Trump administration had—as it was supposed to—carefully worked out all custodial arrangements and terms with Bukele prior to shipping any human bodies to him, such arrangements and terms would certainly have stated that (a) accidental transfers will be undone as soon as practicable, (b) the United States retains legal custody over all American residents and/or citizens it sends to El Salvador, and (c) all such detentions are reviewable in U.S. courts.

Of course the whole idea would still be wildly illegal—see supra for why, including a listing of the constitutional provisions violated—but at least such contractual clauses would have indicated that maybe the second Trump administration was not interested in developing new slave-trade routes throughout Central America.

But here we are.

And unfortunately, it gets even worse.

The Twist(s)

Before we arrive at the twist in this narrative, we must confirm that there’s no chance any of the possible defenses for what the Trump administration has done can be made:

• Did it secretly sign a formal contract the courts can review for legality? No.

• Did it retain legal custody rights over any deportees? No.

• Has it agreed to work to undo any errors it makes in its deportations? No.

• Has it agreed to acknowledge any ICE errors in the first instance? No.

• Has it agreed to manage affairs going forward so that all its actions are reviewable by the federal judicial branch? No.

• Has it assured the courts that there will be sufficient communication between ICE and DOJ attorneys that the latter can always answer questions about new deportations to the full satisfaction of the federal judiciary? No.

• Has it used its privileged relationship with Nayib Bukele to beg his aid in fixing any and all of its deportation mistakes? No.

• Has it exhibited an interest in defining as narrowly as possible the classes of persons it can send to CECOT for incarceration? No.

• Has it even accepted the authority of federal courts (besides SCOTUS) to issue TROs—Temporary Restraining Orders—against it? No.

• Has it even admitted to the courts, or to the U.S. public, that its negotiations with Bukele constitute merely a handshake deal it could undo at any time? No.

• Has it exhibited a willingness to present to the courts or public the evidence justifying each deportation, as opposed to terming such evidence (if it even exists at all, which it may well not in many cases) the equivalent of “state secrets”? No.

• Has it even admitted that it has the leverage with Bukele to fix mistakes? No.

• Has it explained, given all the foregoing, how a BOP Deal could ever exist—given that no one sent to El Salvador will ever return from there alive? No.

All of this underscores the need to classify the situation at hand as international slave-trading in the conventional sense of that word.

But the twist here is that Americans now have ample evidence that Trump and Musk don’t merely intend for the Second Trump-Bukele Accords to usher in a second era of transnational U.S. slave-trading, but also…

…an era of political detention and exile.

That’s right: Trump and Musk are making clear that they want to re-classify all their political enemies in such a way, and criminalize the conduct of their political enemies in such a way, that it would make American citizens eligible for the new U.S. slave trade on the basis of any number of them engaging in protected, nonviolent, legal activities.

And Trump and Musk are erecting—and in the open, no less—the very transnational system of transport and detention by which anyone they exile from our shores will not only be exiled permanently but will die in a cage… likely in CECOT in El Salvador.

So beyond the fact that the Trump-Musk Axis can’t allow any deported person back in the United States because the tale they would tell of what happened to them in El Salvador would reveal that Trump deportees are being sent not just to bondage but inhumane forms of torture; beyond the fact that the Trump-Musk Axis can’t allow any deported person back to the United States because all such deportees must be securely held by Nayib Bukele permanently (as otherwise, a freed deportee could simply make the trek back to the United States by land and show up at the Southern border again, embarrassing Trump and Bukele by revealing that their paid-for deportation plan was merely another “catch-and-release” operation that merely delayed migrants arriving in the U.S. by a few months); the Trump-Musk Axis also can’t allow deported persons back in the United States because Team Trump’s “once they’re on the plane, federal courts have no jurisdiction” principle—such as it is—will be essential to disappearing political enemies permanently as America slides from a democracy into an autocracy.

So how do we know Trump and Musk are planning on moving toward disappearing their political enemies as part of this new slave trade? Because they have told us so.

Donald Trump and his team—led by co-president Elon Musk—are now engaged in an aggressive nationwide campaign to “define up” both protected speech and actions in the United States as “terrorism” as a means of bringing exponentially more people into the new U.S.-El Salvador slave trade. Attorney General Pam Bondi has made clear that any vandalism (including misdemeanor or felony property crimes that ordinarily, in state courts, would result in no immediate jail sentence for anyone who lacks a prior record, merely a suspended or deferred prison sentence) will instead now be treated as “acts of domestic terrorism” punishable by exactly the sort of decades-long prison terms that would bring a U.S. resident or citizen squarely into this new slave trade.

Yet not only do such crimes not qualify in any respect as terrorism, in order to make such a wholly novel legal claim Trump agents are now identifying Musk’s personal business interests as protected national security interests any harm against which must be deemed “terrorism.” Moreover, these agents are juxtaposing Musk’s personal business interests with the political beliefs of Trump voters to a degree that miscategorizes a mere hatred of Musk or Tesla as an attempt to violently intimidate 80 million Trump voters through political violence. This idiosyncratic claim has no basis in fact or law, either.

But it’s not merely Bondi’s appearances on Fox News that we can look to for evidence of this new policy, nor even the several investigations and prosecutions (as “terrorism”) mere Tesla vandals now face in federal criminal courts. Many Americans don’t know that, on April 20, an executive order that Donald Trump signed on Inauguration Day will spring: an order that mandates that new Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and new Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—two of Trump’s most ardent sycophants—make a recommendation to the president on whether he should invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 over, in particular, all matters relating to immigration and terrorism (the latter under a bizarre and counterfactual claim that illegal immigration constitutes an “invasion” by “foreign terrorists”).

While this report is not a primer on the Insurrection Act, suffice to say that it has almost never been invoked by a U.S. president outside of wartime; that outside of wartime it has only been applied in the most localized and time-limited ways one could imagine (such as the desegregation of schools in Arkansas by GOP President Dwight Eisenhower at a time potential imminent mass violence accompanied such efforts); that it gives an American president powers consistent with what we know as “martial law”; and that absolutely nothing happening in the United States qualifies as an invasion, a terrorist invasion, or even terrorism at all, such that an invocation of the Act by President Trump this month or this year would be even distantly appropriate.

Yet the terms of Trump’s new slave trade, which is specifically and repeatedly linked to presidential powers concerning immigration and terrorism by Attorney General Pam Bondi and her subordinates at the Department of Justice, are such that if indeed Trump invokes the Insurrection Act (which Hegseth and Gabbard are sure to have been told in advance to recommend he do), it will immediately take what Trump and Bukele are up to to a new level—one well beyond even the systematized sadism and lawlessness this report has already detailed.

In short, a martial law-empowered Donald Trump would be able to make the case to a SCOTUS he largely handpicked that no one can stop him from sending human bodies overseas permanently if he determines they are involved in terrorism or immigration violations; no one can stop him from falsely identifying certain U.S. citizens who are critics of him or Elon Musk or MAGAism generally as terrorists; and even if the Court disagrees with him on any of this the Act gives him the power and (as he’d surely insist) the responsibility to ignore them.

With all this in mind, the new international American slave trade could be effectively “legalized” in the next few weeks or months.

{Note: Keep in mind that even if Trump allows leftist protesters, and/or those who damage his or Musk’s property, to stay in the civilian criminal justice system, Pam Bondi can still pursue charges, theories of these cases, and punishments in these cases that lead to such long prison sentences that these defendants are fed instantly into the meat grinder of Donald Trump’s vile new slave-trade pipeline—specifically, under the BOP Deal that he hasn’t yet fully executed.}

Readers still seeking signs of optimism might now say, “Okay, but surely this is all speculation? Surely there’s no actual indication that Trump and Musk want to arrest U.S. citizens simply for espousing supposedly unpalatable ideas? Surely it’s exclusively proven crimes that they’re looking at?” Alas, no. Consider this recent Elon Musk tweet:

The tweet above is so historically astounding that it needs to be broken down carefully.

Note that in a single post the user Musk is agreeing with and amplifying—and this is, to be clear, one of Elon Musk’s favorite accounts to retweet and amplify—goes from calling peaceful anti-Tesla events “protests” to calling them an “uprising” to calling them “TERROR.”

Again, this rhetorical slippage occurs in just one tweet.

No attempt whatsoever is made, in this tweet agreed with and amplified by Musk, to distinguish between (a) a protest; (b) an event—like, say, the Trump-incited January 6 attack—that could be deemed an illicit, possibly violent mass political “uprising”; and (c) a discrete act of terrorism that can be prosecuted not just as a series of assaults or acts of vandalism (as January 6 mostly was) but a felony resulting in life imprisonment.

Moreover, this tweet makes no distinction between those who commit an act (be it peaceful protest, a January 6-style event, or an act of domestic terrorism) and those who use their First Amendment rights to indirectly fund a person who then ends up engaging in such an act. Why does this matter? Because funding a peaceful protest is wholly legal, and even funding a day of events that turns into an uprising like January 6 is, if recent history is precedent, not illegal, as while Trump megadonor Julie Fancelli—who provided much of the money for the D.C. events held on January 6, 2021—did plead the Fifth Amendment before the House January 6 Committee, she was never charged with crimes by the Trump administration’s or Biden administration’s DOJ.

Indeed, even providing funding for a terror attack could end up being something other than illegal if there’s no evidence the funder knew or should’ve known that the funds donated would be used for that purpose. Yet here we have Musk and a pal referring to the funding of peaceful “protests” as a criminal act of “terror.” It manifestly is not.

But wait—the tweet gets worse. Because in fact there’s not even any evidence that the group in question “funded” these particular protests at all, let alone that the funding caused or incited any specific act, let alone that the protests at issue here involved any crimes, let alone that even if they had involved crimes and had been funded by a group in a way that did directly cause a crime that those crimes could therefore be assessed to be the “foreseeable” result of such funding.

Despite all this, Musk and his associate go directly to the opposite end of the spectrum, legally speaking, presuming—without evidence—that the sort of event that arguably occurred here is in fact the only sort of “event funding” one would ever expect to result in a prosecution: a terror attack that was funded by a discrete entity that knew that that attack was going to take place and be the direct result of its donations.

Their harrowing leaps in logic notwithstanding, the two Twitter users don’t merely imagine the need for an investigation of what’s going on with Tesla protests, but rather take comfort in one of them, Musk—who’s been co-president for three months now—promising that those involved in left-leaning nonprofit groups “will” be “held legally accountable” for protests against his companies, meaning that these persons will be incarcerated.

More than this, Musk makes his promise in response to a comment describing such actions as “TERROR”—meaning that what he’s actually promising is that Democratic activists who exert their First Amendment rights will be imprisoned for terrorism (AG Bondi having confirmed that any crimes whose victim is Tesla will be treated by the DOJ as domestic terrorism). And do you know who the biggest public cheerleader for Donald Trump’s plan to imprison American “terrorists” in El Salvador is? Elon Musk.

Do you know who the biggest public cheerleader is for Nayib Bukele’s theory that one needs to find potential troublemakers before they commit crimes and lock them up for the rest of their lives? If you guessed Elon Musk, you’re right again.

Do you know who’s doing more to fund the GOP—at all levels, in all contests—than any single individual has in the history of American politics, indeed by a factor of ten, such that beyond spending most days talking with Donald Trump face-to-face he has more sway over what the entire Republican Party will do (and accept) going forward than any U.S. political donor who’s ever lived? Yet again we’re speaking of Elon Musk.

In other words, Musk has made clear what he wants, and he has purchased—to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars—the political influence required to get what he wants.

And what he wants, by his own admission, is the felony arrest of anyone who has ever been involving in funding—remembering here that under the Citizens United SCOTUS ruling the spending of money by institutions for political purposes is “free speech”—any group that’s later connected to any conduct he deems to have had an effect on his finances. And if he ever doubted, even for a moment, that this goal is within his reach, Bondi has reassured him by going on television near-nightly (and even issuing DOJ press releases) to breathlessly describe the conduct Musk is decrying as “terrorism.”

This is, in short, an end-around on the First Amendment that can instantly turn any progressive donor into a potential future slave in a Central American gulag run by a close friend of both Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

Conclusion

So what’s the goal here? Well, the worst-case scenario is that Trump and Musk are laying the groundwork for selling their political enemies into slavery. But even the best-case scenario is that they plan to so scare their political opponents’ donors that money for Musk and Trump opponents dries up entirely during the 2026 midterms and the regrettably still entirely hypothetical 2028 U.S. presidential election.

Proof ends this report with perhaps the most shocking revelation of all—which is sure saying something, given that this is a report that indicates that Donald Trump is now overseeing a massive transnational Human Trafficking ring.

So what’s the shocking thing?

That this isn’t the first time Donald Trump has been accused of Human Trafficking.

Those are words we couldn’t even imagine saying of any other U.S. politician, but here we are, looking at the many years Trump spent atop Trump Models—years outlined in detail in the Proof Series book from 2024, Proof of Cruelty—and seeing in those years evidence that Donald Trump is extremely willing to orchestrate the movement of human bodies across national borders in a state akin to slavery.

So if you’re wondering if we have any evidence that Donald Trump is already inclined toward precisely the unimaginable crimes described in this Proof report, yes—we do.

Which leaves us only to review the uncontested facts on the ground, which confirm that what Trump is doing is indeed slaving, and the President of the United States is indeed, therefore, a willing slaver. The proof for this resides in hard facts no one can contest, because they’re both public and manifestly not the subject of any dispute:

(1) Donald Trump asserts the right to seize certain people off the street and take physical custody of them without due process.

(2) He asserts this right even with respect to certain people in the U.S. legally.

(3) He asserts the right to send these seized persons abroad, to the custody and the jurisdiction of a foreign slaver known to treat his slaves—people he cages without them having committed any offenses—beyond inhumanely.

(4) He asserts the right to send these seized persons abroad without any right of return, or even with an ability on the part the United States—either the judicial branch or the executive branch thereof—to undo such permanent transactions.

(5) He says, openly—indeed, he boasts of it—that this process profits the United States both materially and non-materially, meaning that he admits he is engaged in a money-making scheme.

(6) He’s now confirmed, via the Abrego Garcia Scandal, that this process is absolute, meaning that it doesn’t merely apply to certain categories of persons—i.e., meaning that it can be undone if it is applied wrongly to a person—but by definition applies to any person to whom it’s applied. (On its face this seems a tautology, but it simply means the sale of all persons by Trump to Bukele is final, and that there’s no room in the contract of sale for any buyer’s remorse, no matter how urgent and/or warranted.)

(7) He seeks to imminently expand his trafficking of humans across national borders via the awesome powers invested in him by any invocation of the Insurrection Act.

This is slavery.

This is slavery by any definition.

So a mere 75 days into his presidency, Donald Trump has recreated the transnational U.S. slave trade with a foreign far-right dictator who’s a personal friend of his—and also a friend of his co-president, Elon Musk—via which slave trade any person can be exiled into permanent slavery in El Salvador without any chance of them returning to America or freedom unless their owner, Nayib Bukele, wills that it should happen.

Which of course he won’t—unless he’s been told backchannel by Trump (or a Trump agent) that they dearly will it, which they most certainly won’t if the exiled now-slave is a political enemy of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or a person who’s in favor with either.

God help us.

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Coda

Published—respectively—on CNN and Twitter shortly after this report was released:

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