CECOT has no rules. Gitmo might be next.
The architecture of cruelty is on the rebound.
By Brian O’Neill
Disclaimer #1: I’m embarrassed it didn’t occur to me sooner to draw this comparison. The conditions I witnessed at the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay (Gitmo) in 2016 provide a stark lens through which to view the ordeal faced by Kilmar Abrego García. His case reveals not just the cruelty of his imprisonment but also the deliberate indifference of those responsible for putting him there.
Disclaimer #2: This article, including this disclaimer, underwent full review by the CIA’s prepublication process. Nothing herein discloses protected information or underwent Agency revision to adjust tone or fact. What follows is a reflection based entirely on open-source reports and firsthand observations cleared for publication.
We’ve all seen the photos: men shaved bald, dressed in white, heads bowed, arms zip-tied behind them, marched single file through the corridors of El Salvador’s mega-prison, CECOT. The Salvadoran government shared these images eagerly. These weren’t leaks—they were staged displays, intended to showcase control.
Not rule of law. Control.
And in the Trump administration, no one flinched. If anything, they were enamored.
The Trump team has made clear it sees prisons like these not as cautionary tales, but as prototypes. With mass deportation flights underway and legal justifications drawn from the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act—the same statute once used to justify Japanese internment during World War II—individuals such as Kilmar Abrego García, wrongfully deported from Maryland, are being funneled into this system.
El Salvador’s prison facilities, including CECOT, are designed to punish and disappear. Bunks lack mattresses, lights are never dimmed, and temperatures hover around 95 degrees. Inmates are allowed outside their cells for just 30 minutes a day. No visits. No education. No recreation. Since 2022, over 300 detainees have died.
During a recent visit to CECOT, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stood proudly before rows of shaved, shackled men—her expression devoid of concern. The choreography evoked imagery that history should have taught us to repudiate. Instead, it became a political photo op.
Jon Stewart captured the depravity of it best: “They’re fucking enjoying this,” he said, after watching footage of President Donald Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office last week joking about Abrego García’s fate.
To say that the United States has a history of sanctioned abuse is an understatement. From Abu Ghraib to extraordinary renditions, the post-9/11 era saw plenty. But those episodes sparked a reckoning—investigations, calls for resignations, policy shifts. The system, for all its flaws, responded.
The correction wasn’t immediate. But it came.
That’s the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship. Not moral purity. Accountability.
In 2016, I visited Gitmo in my capacity as a senior official at the National Counterterrorism Center. It wasn’t the Four Seasons hotel. It was concrete, steel, and orderly. Constant surveillance. A maximum security prison.
While there, I was shown Camp 7, where high-value detainees were held, including the cell that held Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. He wasn’t there. I was told that he was in the medical center, which gave me pause. I was escorted to the base’s surveillance control room, where I was shown a security monitor.
There he was. The architect of the 9/11 attacks. In a prison uniform. Shackled.
He was receiving a routine dental check.
My reaction was visceral—anger. But the base commander beside me didn’t try to defend it. He simply reminded me, in a low voice: Constitutional protections exist not because someone earns them but because we pledged them.
That moment stayed with me. Not because it made me proud—but because it made things clear.
Even the architect of 9/11 was afforded medical care, legal representation, and access to the court system. There were records. There were lawyers. There were rules.
I also toured the courtroom—a structure the size of a football endzone, built not just to try detainees, but to prove that trials were taking place. Behind a thick glass partition, observers could watch proceedings on a 40-second delay. The system was flawed—pretrial hearings dragged on for years, evidence was redacted—but the process existed. Legal challenges were raised. Civilian judges pushed back. Executive power was constrained.
Gitmo began as a legal vacuum. But pressure forced change. By 2016, it operated with structure, oversight, and law.
That’s what makes this moment so dangerous.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention today echoes Gitmo’s early years—abuse, medical neglect, and the erasure of legal recourse. But unlike Gitmo, it has evolved little.
By law, immigrants in ICE custody are civil detainees, not criminals, and their confinement is not supposed to be punitive. As ICE itself states, “detention is non-punitive.” Yet the system functions as punishment—opaque, prolonged, and structurally hostile to accountability.
This didn’t happen overnight. ICE’s detention system—originally intended for short-term administrative holds—grew steadily more punitive through successive administrations, including during the Biden administration.
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general documented repeated violations: detainees held in solitary confinement for months, spoiled or expired food served without alternatives, and delays or denials of critical medical care.
Deaths in custody are not rare. Since 2003, over 200 people have died in ICE facilities. Some, like Kamyar Samimi, died after ICE refused to provide his prescribed methadone treatment. Others, like Roylan Hernández Díaz, took their own lives after being placed in isolation under degrading conditions. A 2024 report by Physicians for Human Rights found that ICE placed individuals in solitary confinement more than 14,000 times over a five-year period—often for months, sometimes over a year. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has warned that prolonged solitary confinement, as documented in U.S. detention facilities, might constitute “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment” and, in some cases, torture.
Legal access is routinely obstructed. ICE continues to site its facilities in remote jurisdictions—places such as Jena, Louisiana, or Lumpkin, Georgia—hours from legal services, where immigration judges have some of the nation’s lowest asylum grant rates. In some cases, detainees are deported before they can meet with an attorney. In others, they waive legal claims out of desperation and without knowing their rights.
The introduction of video hearings has not mitigated the problem. Attorneys report garbled audio, malfunctioning links, and judges unwilling or unable to discern the emotional or physical condition of the person before them. It turns law into logistics.
What’s more, the expansion of ICE detention has created a revolving door for private prison corporations. Contracts worth billions have been awarded to GEO Group and CoreCivic to operate new or repurposed facilities—often in states with permissive regulatory environments and weak judicial oversight.
The goal isn’t justice. It’s volume.
This is the detention infrastructure Trump plans to scale. His acting ICE director recently stated that the agency should operate “like [Amazon] Prime,” moving human beings globally in 24 hours. The 2025 budget proposal calls for an increase to 100,000 beds. A detention camp at Fort Bliss has already been proposed. In effect, the system is being designed to make resistance—to conditions, to deportation, to error—functionally impossible.
This is not an emergency fix. It’s infrastructure.
And if that system falters—or if foreign partners grow unreliable—Trump has already signaled where he’ll turn: back to Guantánamo.
Only this time, he won’t be inheriting a blank slate. He’ll be inheriting a facility with structure, legal boundaries, and rules.
The threat is not that Gitmo becomes CECOT. The threat is that Gitmo becomes what it once was: a place where executive power silences oversight, and due process becomes optional.
That won’t require tearing anything down. It just requires deciding not to care.
CECOT. Fort Bliss. Jena, Louisiana. Guantánamo. These are not isolated facilities. They’re nodes in a system we’ve used before and seem increasingly eager to use again.
We have a choice. We’ve made mistakes before. We corrected some of them. Now we’re rebuilding the machinery of disappearance, and doing so with our eyes open.
This time, it’s not ignorance. It’s endorsement.
And that’s what makes the acceptance by those in power not just disheartening—but damning. History will ask who let it happen. It should also be able to say: we stopped it.
Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech.
Nazi's at Nuremberg were accorded more due process rights than these immigrants such as the Garcia innocents and the others, what a disgrace.
If we go that route, I will be truly ashamed to call myself an American. I am almost to that point now with what this administration is doing! :-(