The world must know what we did to Andry Hernández Romero

Andry Hernández Romero is home in Venezuela, and that's a nightmare for him. But it's still better than the hell he just escaped.
On Friday, July 18th, Andry was released after 125 days from El Salvador's CECOT. That's the torture prison that has become a node in what is now effectively the Trump regime's international concentration camp system—a system that DHS is about to spend more than half a billion dollars to expand.
And what can we do about the horrors that happened to this man who followed the laws of the United States in attempting to seek asylum from persecution, and still found himself essentially abducted and trafficked by this regime?
In the latest NEXT COMES WHAT, Andrea Pitzer artfully uses a film and one of history's most famous death masks to make the point that one power we have in 21st-century America that hasn't existed under most authoritarian regimes is the ability "to monitor and record what the authorities do, to track these moral outrages that unfold daily."
Why must we do this?
"Every person who is run through this harrowing process is a witness to its cruelty," she says. "The more attention we can call to what’s happening in real time, and to amplify the voices of those who can testify as to what’s happening, the lower the body count is likely to be in the end."
In that spirit, I grabbed the statement Andry made when he landed in the country of his birth, which is currently toiling under a regime that refuses to respect either LGBTQ people or dissent, much like our own, but possibly worse or further down the path of authoritarianism.
I'll note that in this statement, Andry includes what are likely overly sunny statements about his home country. He was obviously under at least some duress from that authoritarian regime that sees itself in opposition to Nayib Bukele's fascist regime in El Salvador, and wants to use him and the other detainees who fled Nicolás Maduro's regime in Venezuela as tools in an information war.
Still, I felt the need for Americans to hear his voice and what we did to this man. We illegally sent him to be raped in El Salvador for no other reason but to prove this regime's cruelty and disregard for the rule of law.
Honest Americans will note that we do similar to our own incarcerated, and this behavior absolutely rhymes with what the regime wants to do to trans prisoners.
But we must note, for the record, Andry has never received due process. None. Instead, his attempts to follow the law were used to condemn him to brutal abuse.
Immigrant Defenders Law Center, which has championed Andry's case, has maintained a clear timeline of how the system was used to suck this man into the horrors that the regime used to establish terrifying new norms of utter inhumanity.
We must record this. We must scream about this. And for my sanity, we must imagine a world where there is some justice for this.
Looking into Andry's story, especially this piece from Democracy Now! that featured his mother and a close friend, I've been overwhelmed by the sense of how he's the exact kind of person America should welcome and would benefit from more of his inclusion in the American dream than we could ever help him.
As you don't need to be told, these are bleak times made bleaker by how much more malice, brutality, and incompetence are on the way.
Stephen Miller and JD Vance continue to make arguments about how America cannot be what it has largely been for most of the last century—a beacon for all who wish to breathe free. How can we offer any asylum when there are billions of people who want it? The ideals that drew Miller's family to the beginning of the last century and Vance's wife's family in the second half of that same century must be purposefully narrowed, along with the concept of birthright citizenship that emerged after the slavers' rebellion of 1861-1865.
Why? Because we need fewer people? No, they're screaming about birthrates and making more babies, dedicating all of our state power to force those babies out.
No, they want a definition of America and who's American that's even narrower than the one that existed before we defeated the enslavers. Vance and Miller don't share a religion. Still, they share an ideological vision. That's an America where a right-wing regime sets the beliefs of the people based on a shared parochial vision of what it means to be American. Those beliefs center on privileging whiteness and maleness and a willingness to bow to a eugenic, fundamentalist domination of this country if your appearance doesn't match a white supremacist ideal—kind of like what Vance imagines for his children, I suppose.
It's a vision that dooms anyone who doesn't choose to conform to that provincial narrowness of imagined purity to a fate like the one Andry suffers.
I have a different vision. It's a vision of an immigration system that works like the way most people think it does already, with a path to citizenship, paired with what will become our most important export. We must devote ourselves to extending stability to our hemisphere and as much of the world as possible, knowing that climate shocks and authoritarian regimes that feed off such shocks could send countless people on the journey no one wants to go on—leaving everything they know and love to find a place that will let them and their children live.
In this vision, we welcome Andry back to this country if he wants to come with a "U nonimmigrant visa."
That option is open to those who have "suffered substantial physical or mental abuse as a result of having been a victim of criminal activity." Notably, the requirements note that the crime must have been in the United States or "violated U.S. laws." I'm no lawyer, but this farcical abuse of the immigration system to sex traffic a gay man seeking safety and asylum violates the most fundamental aspects of our Constitution and laws.
Yes, even this would be like the empty redemption the Lord offered Job after destroying Job's family and replacing it with a new one. Such an act could never undo the purposely inflicted trauma that was so unnecessary to begin with. But it would be the best we can do.
And whether that's possible or not, any repair of the horrors we've unwillingly become complicit in must begin with keeping some kind of record.
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