one side wants to take away people's rights and views entire groups of people as less than plus wants to see those groups suffer...I don't see how coming together is possible
Ain't nobody coming together. They've won (the government, corporations, people in power ). The revolutionary spirit of Americans has been dead.
Newly freed NC man on El Salvador prison: ‘What they did there was torture us’ Charlotte Observer By Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias Mother Jones August 11, 2025 5:09 AM After a few hours in the air, Neri Alvarado Borges and the other Venezuelans on a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation flight landed in Honduras. Alvarado was hopeful. He had been detained by ICE in Texas in early February. Told he could face years in detention, he agreed to be deported. It was March 15, and Alvarado assumed he would soon be home. During the brief stopover in Honduras, Alvarado recalls officials giving him and the other Venezuelans boxes of pizza. “Eat,” they said, “because later on we have another surprise for you.” When the plane landed a second time, an ICE agent told the men, “this is the surprise.” Opening the windows, the men realized they had been sent to El Salvador. Confused, Alvarado asked why they were not in Venezuela. “Those are orders from the President,” the agent replied. The ICE officer told Alvarado to get off the plane quietly because the guards in El Salvador were different. “They are not like us,” he said. “They are going to treat you badly.” The Trump administration had shipped Alvarado and more than 230 other Venezuelans deprived of due process to a notorious megaprison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT. In exchange for roughly $5 million, the Salvadoran government agreed to hold the men, who had been accused with scant or nonexistent evidence of being members of the transnational gang Tren de Aragua. In March, our reporting showed that Alvarado and others had been targeted because of benign tattoos that had no connection to the criminal group. One of Alvarado’s tattoos is an autism awareness ribbon with the name of his younger brother, Neryelson. Alvarado’s story became emblematic of the cruelty of the Trump administration’s decision to disappear Venezuelan migrants to a foreign gulag, where they were held incommunicado for four months. In his first media interview since the men were released from CECOT on July 18 as part of a prisoner swap deal, Alvarado described to Mother Jones the nightmare he and the others lived through from the first moment they arrived. Alvarado, 25, said when the plane landed, Salvadoran police officers dragged him off in shackles and violently pushed him onto a bus as if he were a “trash bag.” As he tried to get his bearings, the officers hit him in the head; they cursed, yelling at him to keep his face down. The men were driven around for about half an hour before arriving at CECOT. “Welcome to El Salvador,” the police said. As they entered the maximum-security prison, Alvarado remembers being thrown to the floor on his knees. He saw hair everywhere. All around him, guards shaved the men’s heads. (The process was recorded and shared as propaganda by the administration of President Nayib Bukele on social media.) “They grab me by the sweater and they were practically choking me,” Alvarado recalled. “It felt like they were choking me for about 15 to 20 seconds, which were the longest 20 seconds of my life because I felt like I couldn’t breathe.” The guards gave them five seconds to change into the white prison t-shirt and shorts. If detainees took longer, they were beaten. The Venezuelans were then taken to Module 8, a warehouse-like wing of the prison with 32 cells. On the way, Alvarado said a guard asked him who he was and where he was coming from. “From Dallas,” Alvarado said. “What gang are you in?” the guard asked. Alvarado told him he was not a gang member. “But if you’re not a gang member, what are you doing here?” Alvarado wondered the same thing. In the prison, he recalled seeing blood all over the floor. “They’re going to kill me here,” Alvarado thought. “If I survive, I’ll be locked up my entire life.” Horrific conditions in El Salvador Alvarado and two other Venezuelan men sent to CECOT spoke with Mother Jones about the horrific conditions they were held in. Their stories corroborate reports from others flown to El Salvador, who described CECOT as a place where detainees feared death and torture. Some men contemplated suicide. “I’d rather die or kill myself than to keep living through this experience,” Juan José Ramos Ramos told ProPublica. Guards in the prison enacted a “perverse form of humiliation,” Marco Jesús Basulto Salinas told the Washington Post: “The doctor would watch us get beaten and then ask us, ‘How are you feeling?’ with a smile.” Wuilliam Lozada Sánchez, 27, told Mother Jones that he and other men were beaten with batons upon arriving at the Salvadoran prison. “They knocked out one of my teeth,” he said. “They messed up my knees. They messed up my ribs.” Before leaving for the United States in 2023, Lozada worked at a factory that made jeans in Colombia. His goal was to save enough money to open a pants factory in his home state of Táchira. Instead, he ended up spending more than a year in US detention before being taken to CECOT in March. Lozada said they experienced a form of torture in the prison. While being processed, the men were made to line up in a row and kneel. Then, according to Alvarado and other Venezuelans, the prison’s director told the men: “Welcome to hell.” “He told us that we were not going to leave anymore and that he was going to make sure that we never again ate meat or chicken,” Julio Zambrano Perez told Mother Jones. The only way out of that place, the director said, was in a black bag. On a video call from Venezuela, Zambrano showed a cut on his left eyebrow that he said was from beatings he endured right after arriving in El Salvador. That first night at CECOT, Zambrano couldn’t sleep as he thought about how his life had been ripped away from him. In Davidson, outside Charlotte, Zambrano, who, like Alvarado, turned 25 while at CECOT, worked shifts at a hotel and a restaurant to provide for his wife, Luz, and their two daughters, one of whom was born while he was in ICE detention. The family had applied for asylum in the United States. Continued
I actually remember the video of his arrest where he was saying “I’m an American bro” being posted on here months ago a lot of these tap dancing pick-me MFers came over to this country long after the fight for civil rights so they think sh*t is sweet over here…then they have their wake up call and want to act all shocked and butthurt dummies think they’re in the club, then start crying once they get denied at the door…you’re brown, wake tf up
