By Maxine Lowy
Late at night there’s a knock on the door. When the door is opened, men in civilian clothes descend upon a man, handcuff him and take him away. Elsewhere, a young woman on the sidewalk near her house is surrounded by masked men who handcuff her and force her into a vehicle without explaining why or where they are taking her. During the same week, a woman and her two small children are stopped in their car and confined in a windowless room.
These sound like scenes from the 1970s and 1980s in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Guatemala when dictatorships routinely carried out arbitrary detentions. But, this happened in several regions of the
United States, during the month of March 2025.
Contrary to the practice common to Latin American authoritarian regimes, so far, such arrests have not resulted in endless disappearances. Pro-Palestine activist and student at Columbia University in New York City, Mahmoud Kahlil, a lawful permanent resident, whose March 8 arrest was the first to be disclosed, reappeared at a detention center in Louisiana. Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University near Boston, Massachusetts, reappeared at another Louisiana detention center. A year earlier, she and other students published a opinion piece in the college newspaper calling for the university to denounce the massacre in Gaza. Guatemalan Sarahi and her children reappeared after almost a week incommunicado in a building next to the bridge in Michigan where she was detained.
Subsequently, it has been known that a dozen families have been arrested at the same place in similar circumstances.
Also during March, the U.S. government took 245 Venezuelan migrants and 33 Salvadorans detained in Texas and put them on a plane to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador.
Without any elements of proof, the Trump administration labeled the Venezuelans as members of the Tren de Aragua and the Salvadorans as MS-13. Officials justified the mass deportation on the basis of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which gives the president the power to expel citizens of a hostile country in times of war or threat of invasion. The argument did not convince the court that ordered the plane to be returned, which was ignored. This week Trump mentioned that deportees might be sent farther away, to Rwanda, Libya and Liberia. The Liberian government denied that talks are under way with its U.S. counterpart on the matter.
An immigrant rights advocacy attorney who has worked 35 years in a southern state of the U.S. indicates several anomalies in the current deportation procedure. First, in the past, the arrests were made by clearly identified uniformed agents. Today migrants are being detained individually or in raids by plainclothes agents, their faces concealed by masks. The agents do not always identify themselves, and it is unclear whether they are actually authorized to carry out such arrests. Second, the lawyer points out, once detained, previously they were generally not held incommunicado, and were allowed to communicate with families and lawyers and outside the detention center. Immigration officials always make it difficult for lawyers to see their clients, but today there is outright hostility toward those who defend immigrants.
The lawyer also says that in recent days fellow lawyers, who are United States citizens but born abroad, have received letters warning them to "self-deport." She also stresses that the 139,000 people deported since President Trump’s inaugural day, when he promised to carry out the largest deportation in the history of the country, included mothers and fathers with children born in the United States, none of them criminals. Also, a family was detained when they were heard speaking in Spanish; they turned out to be from Puerto Rico.
“We are living in unimaginable times”, says the lawyer, who is reluctant to identify herself by name despite being a naturalized citizen of 50 years. “The law and due process are worthless when it comes to migrants”, she adds.
Photo Prensa Latina
Arrests and enemies on suspicion
Civil rights advocates in the United States are concerned that the arbitrary detentions of immigrants in various regions of the country could signal the beginning of an authoritarian policy that compromises the constitutional state and the fundamental rights of all. On April 30, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) convened Latin American human rights defenders for a virtual forum to seek lessons applicable to the situation experienced in the United States.
Analyst Kate Doyle of the National Security Archives, who moderated the forum, told the 400 online attendees that “Trump’s assault on migrants has left us confused and dismayed […] It is impossible to view the actions of U.S. government agents who grab men, women, and children to detain and deport them without due process [only] from the prism of immigration policies. […] We can connect the actions of Trump’s security forces to a long history in the Americas of the use of enforced disappearance to punish people perceived as dissidents”.
Mercedes Doretti, executive director and co-founder of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, pointed out that, according to the United Nations definition, enforced disappearance is configured when state agents or groups acting on behalf of the state deprive of liberty and refuse to recognize the detention and whereabouts of the detainees. In addition, it was common for detainees to be moved from one place to another to make it difficult for them to be located, to hinder access to a lawyer and obstruct judges from issuing habeas corpus writs. Such characteristics of the repressive practice exercised in Argentina from 1975-1984 have been observed in the detentions of migrants that have taken place today in the United States.
Lawyer Juan Méndez, a political prisoner during 18 months in Argentina, was Latin America director of Human Rights Watch and a United Nations human rights rapporteur. He warns that the repressive practices in his country began long before the coup d’état of March 1976, when Argentina was governed by an elected government that became increasingly authoritarian. Méndez explains that, according to Argentine human rights advocates, forced disappearance can be permanent or temporary. What Méndez finds most alarming is that senior U.S. government officials “insult the courts and call for their orders to be ignored. It could be the beginning of the breakdown of the constitutional state, as happened to us in the southern hemisphere”.
WOLA says the case of migrants dispatched to El Salvador, whose names were removed from official databases, without identifying them or notifying their families, could constitute a new form of mass enforced disappearance. In Chile, however, human rights defenders caution against calling these immigrant detainees “disappeared” since it is known that they are still alive, although in an existential limbo. In an article published on May 1 in El Faro, WOLA president Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, stated, “We have to confront what this represents: the arbitrary use of power and a direct threat to democracy. The more unchecked the power exercised by a government, the more fragile democracy becomes”.
In Latin America and especially in Chile, where the term “disappeared detainee” was coined by staff of the Vicariate of Solidarity (1976-1992), the practice was justified by the National Security Doctrine.
Under this concept that the United States instilled in the continent’s military at the School of the Americas, which operated in Panama until 1984, there were “internal enemies” that threatened
“internal wars” that had to be eliminated at all costs. During the rise of the dictatorships that took over Latin American countries, that internal enemy was the left.
The internal enemies of the current U.S. government seem to be immigrants, despite having depended heavily on their labor to sustain many segments of the economy, such as agriculture, construction, transportation, and service trades. However, it is not the first time that the country has called an entire immigrant group its enemy. Japanese Americans do not forget that the same Alien Enemies Act was invoked in 1942, during World War II, to detain thousands of their family members who were legal residents and citizens of the United States, and transfer them to prison camps. Leaders of the Japanese-American communities have repudiated the new invocation of this law and called for its repeal.
A discourse that stigmatizes migrants intensified during the first Trump administration, influencing the immigration policies of Latin American countries such as Chile, which began to emulate it.
Later it remerged as a strategy of his second electoral campaign.
Today undocumented migrants are branded as “some of the worst, most dangerous people on earth” (NBC interview, May 2, 2025, with President Donald Trump) who deserve extreme treatment.
Asked in the same interview if both U.S. citizens and non-citizens deserve due process, the president replied, “I don’t know”. To the journalist’s insistence regarding whether a president has to uphold the Constitution, he answered again, “I don’t know.”
