Like hundreds of thousands of others, Brayan Palencia decided to migrate to the United States to financially support his family. He didn't earn much in Colombia and had a daughter to look after. He crossed the Darien Gap with an injured knee; he paid bribes to cartels in Mexico so that he would be allowed to continue his journey. Even so, he emphasizes, nothing compares to what he experienced at the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the mega-prison in El Salvador built by President Nayib Bukele.
Abrego, a Maryland resident who had never been charged with any crime either in the US or in his native El Salvador, became a symbol of the Trump administration's ambitiously sadistic anti-immigration efforts when he was kidnapped by I agents in March and sent without due process to Cecot, a massive prison in El Salvador from which few detainees are ever released, as a result of what representatives for the Trump immigration authorities called an administrative error.