Trump’s Taxpayer-Funded Prison Empire

Trump, Bukele, and MAGA insiders turned human suffering into a profitable export.

Trump’s secret alliance with El Salvador’s dictator is fueling a new era of privatized torture.

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Trump’s Penal Empire, Bukele’s Dungeon, and the Blueprint for American Authoritarianism

A Man Disappears. The Constitution Dies Quietly

In a country that once pretended to value the rule of law, Kilmar Abrego Garcia should have been safe. He should have been at work, welding steel in Maryland. He should have been home at dinner, laughing with his kids, feeling, if not welcome, at least protected by the fragile scaffolding of legal precedent. He wasn’t a fugitive. He wasn’t undocumented. He wasn’t invisible. He was a legal resident of the United States with a standing court order, issued in 2019, explicitly shielding him from deportation.

But legal protections mean nothing when a government decides it no longer has to play by the rules.

In April 2025, ICE agents showed up at Kilmar’s door without notice. No explanation. No court paperwork. No hearing. He was taken. Vanished. Extracted like a threat to national security, when all he had ever done was raise his family and try to survive. Within 24 hours, he was gone, shipped not to a U.S. detention facility, but to El Salvador. Not to an immigration court, but to CECOT, a brutalist mega-prison overseen by an autocratic regime and praised by Donald Trump as a “great model” for U.S. policy.

This was not a clerical error. It was a test. A flex. A calculated act of judicial defiance designed to see how far the machinery of power could bend before it snapped. The Supreme Court tried to intervene. It issued an order: bring Kilmar back. The Trump administration responded with silence. El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, responded with a smirk and a sneer.

“Of course I’m not going to return him,” Bukele said publicly. “How could I smuggle a terrorist into the U.S.?”

Kilmar had never been charged with a crime. There was no evidence, no trial, no indictment. His only offense was existing in the crosshairs of a regime that wanted to prove a point: in Trump’s America, law is just an accessory to power. And sometimes, it’s discarded altogether.

CECOT: Where the Lights Never Go Out and No One Leaves Alive

CECOT, the prison where Kilmar was dumped, isn’t just a facility, it’s a modern-day gulag engineered for authoritarian optics and international fear. Officially named the “Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo,” it was constructed in record time by Nayib Bukele’s government in 2022 as part of a sweeping “war on gangs.” But that war, like all such campaigns, was never about gangs. It was about control. About sending a message.

CECOT was built to house 20,000 people. It now holds over 40,000. Prisoners are jammed into concrete cells like animals, stripped naked, shackled, and forced to sleep on bare steel. Lights remain on 24 hours a day. There are no mattresses, no privacy, no due process. Toilet access is rationed. Food is thrown on the floor. Inmates are denied medical care. Many are tortured, beaten, electroshocked, suffocated. Some are executed. Hundreds have died. Most without names, most without funerals. Families are denied information. Lawyers are barred from entry. Once inside, there is no scheduled release. The only way out is death, or, more commonly, silence.

This is where the United States, under Trump, now sends people.

With full knowledge. With zero oversight. And with the money of every American taxpayer.

A financial agreement signed by the Trump administration provides El Salvador with $20,000 per deportee, per year, effectively turning the prison into a subcontracted arm of U.S. immigration enforcement. CECOT is no longer just Bukele’s iron fist. It’s Trump’s off-site punishment lab, where legal residents like Kilmar are disappeared under the thinnest legal pretenses and warehoused in conditions that violate every international human rights treaty the U.S. claims to respect.

The Fascist Business Model: Export the Bodies, Import the Cash

But make no mistake, this isn’t just cruelty for cruelty’s sake. It’s cruelty with a cashflow statement. The Trump-Bukele arrangement is more than a political partnership. It is a blueprint for for-profit penal colonialism, where entire human beings are treated as revenue-generating units in a global punishment economy.

Inside Trump’s orbit, this model is already attracting investors like flies to a corpse. Surveillance contracts, food supply chains, private security, telecom monitoring, biometric tracking, every logistical component of CECOT is being eyed for profit. Behind the scenes, figures like Jared Kushner, Richard Grenell, and Tom Barrack are linked to investment firms acquiring land near Salvadoran prison zones, funneling capital into the same economic engine that profits from indefinite human confinement.

Stephen Miller, the ideological architect of Trump’s immigration policy, has begun drafting legal frameworks to normalize “criminal relocation agreements” foreign partnerships that would allow the U.S. to outsource its deportation responsibilities in bulk, sending asylum seekers, green card holders, and even American citizens abroad in exchange for security cooperation and cash incentives.

And then there’s Linda McMahon, head of the Department of Education under Trump’s revived cabinet, quietly pushing a plan to digitize “rehabilitation programming” for foreign prison systems, an Orwellian fusion of ed-tech and prison labor that promises to create new “value opportunities” in the correctional space.

This isn’t just a fascist fantasy. It’s a multinational investment strategy, and the only requirement for success is silence from the American people.