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In recent weeks, Republican officials have taken part in the ghoulish spectacle of posing for photos in front of immigrants being held in El Salvador’s CECOT prison. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem started the trend in late March, shooting photos and videos as part of the administration’s anti-immigrant efforts.
Other Republicans followed in the footsteps of the cosplaying secretary in subsequent weeks, attempting to show the Republican base that they are “tough” on immigration.
“I leave now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland,” Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia wrote after his recent trip.
Journalist Marisa Kabas noted that the trips to the notoriously violent CECOT have become a ritual in Republican circles to demonstrate their MAGA credentials. Their trips do not, however, highlight the deplorable conditions of CECOT, which the State Department under President Joe Biden described in 2023 as “harsh and life threatening.”
The visits to the facility, where Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia is wrongly being detained, are the latest chapter of the right’s love affair with state-sanctioned abuse and torture.
President Donald Trump has often openly expressed his love of abuse. In one disturbing instance in 2017, he laughed as he told a crowd of police officers in New York that they should abuse people as they arrest them.
Discussing the practice of protecting suspects’ heads as they are loaded into police cars, he said, “You can take the hand off.”
Trump used much of his first term to endorse police brutality, particularly of Black people. He lashed out at Black Lives Matters protests and encouraged police officers to attack protesters.
But long before Trump entered politics, this mindset has been mainstream with Republicans.
Under President George W. Bush, one of the key methods used in response to terrorism was torture, which the administration tried to sell to the public as “enhanced interrogation.”
A 2008 ABC News report revealed that senior Bush administration officials were given briefings on how people who were detained would be abused. ABC noted that “some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed—down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.”
The Bush administration faced worldwide condemnation in 2004 after pictures and recordings of torture emerged from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
Despite claims that torture was used to find weapons of mass destruction and 9/11 mastermind Osaba bin Laden, the Bush administration did not find any WMDs in Iraq. Similarly, bin Laden was not found and eventually killed until years later under President Barack Obama.
Right-wing media has of course fulfilled its decades-long role by supporting torture and abuse and defending the use of those techniques by Republican officials. Under the Bush administration, Fox News would often praise the use of torture as a terror-fighting tool, pointing to the fictional television series “24” as proof.
When the stomach-turning Abu Ghraib torture evidence surfaced, now-deceased conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh excused the human rights abuses by comparing it to college fraternity hazing, saying that the torture was done to “blow some steam” while “having a good time.”
But what is the motivation behind this blasé attitude toward human rights abuses and embracing barbaric techniques that are proven to be ineffective in fighting crime and terrorism?
Conservatism is weak.
Problems like immigration, terrorism, and crime are complex. There is no magical button to make the fallout from these issues disappear. These are systemic issues that have to be addressed from multiple angles, which sometimes involves diplomacy, science, study, and reason.
Conservatism would rather tell the public that the bad people will go away as long as they act “tough” instead of addressing root causes, which sometimes can indicate that the United States’ actions created the problem or made the problem worse. The right would rather just back torture and abuse—particularly if the subjects in question have brown skin.
The right loves to use all-hands approaches as evidence of left-wing weakness and disconnection from reality. But while none of these issues has been solved, real progress has been made without violating core international and American principles.
It’s weak to resort to abuse and torture and posing in front of incarcerated people to get clout with the in-crowd. What is stronger is standing up against abuse and championing human rights.
But the right would rather choose the easy path, and we all reap the whirlwind of the blowback.
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