Borders don't require torture

The price of losing on immigration is human suffering. Are liberals ready to do what it takes to win on it?

Andy Perozo, Mervin Yamarte, and Ringo Rincon —Venezuelan migrants repatriated from El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT — attend a Christian evangelical service in Los Pescadores neighborhood in Maracaibo, Venezuela, on July 23, 2025. The Trump administration paid El Salvador’s government $6 million to keep the Venezuelans behind bars. All 252 detainees were freed on July 18 in a prisoner exchange deal. (Photo by FEDERICO PARRA/AFP via Getty Images)

I was supposed to write about something else for today, but I really can’t bring myself to think about anything other than the over-the-weekend revelations of systematic torture and rape of the 252 people we sent to El Salvadore’s torture prison, CECOT.

The New York Times interviewed 40 former prisoners as well as a group of independent forensic experts to determine what happened. The picture that emerges is horrific: violent, regular abuse.

“When such ‘identical methods of abuse’ are described by multiple people, the experts wrote in their assessment, it ‘often indicates the existence of an institutional policy and practice of torture,’” the Times explained.

I do not believe that Trump voters want this to happen. I do not believe that they voted to send a gay makeup artist to get raped in a Salvadoran prison. Nor do I believe this is just the price that has to be paid in order to deport unwanted immigrants. In this, I seem to have a higher opinion of Trump voters than the administration does:

“President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public,” a Trump spokesperson told the Times.

Nothing in this statement explains why deporting violent criminals requires sending people to a torture prison in El Salvador. Times reporting indicates that just 13% of the men sent to CECOT “seemed to have a serious criminal accusation or conviction in some part of the world.”¹

But paying $4.76 million to house 252 people in a foreign torture prison without even confirming that they are gang members isn’t about public safety. If the Trump administration were truly concerned about deporting criminals it would be increasing, not decreasing the number of immigration judges, speeding adjudications, and detaining actual threats after individualized review. What we’re seeing isn’t enforcement so much as performance — a series of costly signals that tell voters exactly whose side the administration is on.

Whose side are you on?

It has been a lifetime since this Discourse^TM, but in January, Vice President JD Vance courted theological controversy by arguing in favor of the idea that people should rank the love they have for humanity on the basis of proximity: There is “a Christian concept that you love your family and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens, and then after that, prioritize the rest of the world,” he said.

For my non-Christian readers, the concept of loving your neighbor is one of the most central and radical parts of Christianity and is repeated multiple times throughout the Bible. In the Gospel of Mark, “Love your neighbor as yourself” is second only to loving God himself. Usually this commandment is interpreted to mean that Christians should treat others as we would like to be treated and strive to do this even for those with whom we have no pre-existing relationship.

Now, I’m a Protestant, so I don’t need anyone to mediate my relationship to God, but then-head Catholic himself said Vance is wrong, so I believe that’s checkmate in Catholic world².

From Protestant world, I’ll just offer this short passage from Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard’s personal diary:

“Love Thy neighbor as Thyself,” say the Philistine bourgeois whereby these well-raised children and now useful members of the state … mean, partly, that if someone asks for a pair of snuffers³, even though they be quite far from that person, they shall say “certainly,” get up, and hand the snuffers to the person assuring same that “it is a pleasure”; partly, that one must remember to pay the obligatory calls of condolence.

But they have never known what it means that the whole world turns its back on them, as of course, the shoal of society-herring among which they live will never permit such a contingency to arise, and when a time comes when serious help is required from them, common sense of course will tell them that the person who needs them sorely, but presumably never will be in a position to help them in return, is not their “neighbor.”

Far be it from me to impugn the religious commitments of a recent Catholic convert who seems to primarily use his faith as a political weapon, but I don’t think Vance cares about the theological debate. Rather, it’s more useful to understand Vance as the king of costly signals.

I’ve mostly seen the costly signal concept applied in the realm of international relations, but it clearly has applicability in domestic politics and all sorts of strategy questions. The core problem for voters (and journalists) is that politicians have an incentive to deceive voters in order to win power. So in order to determine whether someone is really telling the truth, we look for costly signals of private information.

Vance correctly recognizes that the most important political question is “Is this person on my side?” and so he courts controversy in order to prove whose side he is on. He does these things because — not in spite of the fact that — it offends the majority of people or puts him in conflict with the head of his church.

So what is a liberal to do?