Bulwark Takes - APPALLING Allegations of Trump Admin Abuse in El Salvador

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Tim Miller takes on the shocking allegations of abuse contained in Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s new lawsuit against the Trump administration. The disturbing claims include torture, severe beatings, and psychological abuse. Has Trump’s administration knowingly sent innocent people into unimaginable conditions? What does this say about America’s moral culpability?

Hey, Alton Miller from The Bulwark. A shocking and alarming lawsuit has been filed by Kilmar Abrego-Garcia against the Department of Homeland Security, where he details what he says happened to him and the El Salvador prison, Sokote, that he was taken to wrongfully by the United States. This is really the first time he's kind of laid out in detail what he experienced there. laid out in detail what he experienced there. I should say this is all just based on Abrego Garcia's testimony, so it's alleged. It hasn't been verified yet, much of it. And I'll kind of talk about the implications of that on the back side, but I want to just lay out what he alleges here. He says that he faced psychological torture and severe beatings. That was included but not limited to severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and

other really horrifying examples of the treatment. I want to go through a couple of them here. When again, he's taken Del Salvador wrongly, he's pushed on a bus, he's fitted with a second set of chains and handcuffs. He's repeatedly struck by officers when he attempted to raise his head. He says that he observed an ICE agent on the bus communicating with Salvadoran officials to confirm the identities of Salvadoran nationals. So ISIS officials are seeing this level of treatment of the prisoners. He said that upon arrival, a prison official greeted them saying, welcome to Sikote, whoever enters here doesn't leave. Abreu Garcia was then forced to strip and subjected to physical abuse, including being

kicked in the legs with boots and struck on the head and arms to make him change his clothes faster. His head was shaved with a zero razor frog bunch to cell 15, and he was struck with wooden batons along the way. By the following day, he said he had visible bruises and lumps all over his body. He says in his cell, I guess he was placed with the Salvadorans. I don't, maybe this has been reported before, I hadn't seen it. They're alleging that there's about, of the people that we sent to Saco, about 230 are Venezuelans, and then a couple dozen are Salvadorans, which is more than we thought.

And also, again, belies this argument that all of these guys are Tren de Aragua, which was a Venezuelan gang. So anyway, Br. Garcia says him and 20 of the other Salvadorans were forced to kneel from 9 p.m. until 6 a.m., so nine hours, with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion. He said that he was denied bathroom access and soiled himself during that period. He says the detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained

on 24 hours a day and minimal access to sanitation. He also said that while there, prison officials told him that the gang members in the prison would tear him apart if he stepped out of line and he suffered a significant deterioration physically. He has fed very little nutrients and lost about 30 pounds over the course of just a couple of weeks. He said on April 9th, he was transferred to a different module where they did photograph him with mattresses and better food photos that he suspected were staged to document better conditions than the reality. So there are the allegations. Again, I just want to say this clearly. We can't know for sure what happened to Kilmar- Brega Garcia. It's possible some of this is fabricated.

I mean, it is an illegal filing. But, you know, people make accusations sometimes against the government when they're trying to advance their position. So that's the best case scenario that he's lying and that we just wrongly sent him to some horrific detention camp in El Salvador and that the conditions are just normal bad instead of the atrocities that he is alleging. That's the best case scenario. In the scenario that he lays out, what we have done is submit people to torture without due process. I just, I don't know how How to say this anymore directly? christy gnome Stephen Miller Marco Rubio Donald Trump JD Vance have kidnapped people and sent them to be tortured

in a foreign prison camp If this is true I mean the kidnapping part I guess is true. I mean, the kidnapping part, I guess, is true, regardless of what happens. We know that those people have kidnapped hundreds of migrants with varying, you know, life stories. Who knows? Some of them might be criminals. Others of them seem clearly to not be.

Certainly not all of them are gang members. And so we've kidnapped these people. We sent them to a be. Certainly not all of them are gang members. And so we've kidnapped these people, we've sent them to a prison and according to Kilmar Braggar Garcia's testimony, we've sent them there to be tortured, to be, to sit on their knees and be beaten and be forced to shit themselves and pee themselves and be threatened with gang violence and gang rape. That's that's what we've done. We've done so without any consideration that seems like about whether these people are guilty of what they're alleged of. There is no remorse.

There seems to be no interest or reflection by anyone in the administration about by anyone in the administration about whether they've made errors, whether they have a moral obligation, whether they have a Christian moral obligation to remedy this, to ensure that no one has been wrongly kidnapped and tortured in a foreign country But they don't care about that. They don't care about that. They've dehumanized these people. These are not humans to them and If you were not and according to the new America first agenda if you are not born in America

Then you can be taken away Stripped of your humanity had your have head shaved, be beaten, and be tortured. So watch out, Melania. I don't really know what else to say about this, except what anybody who's been following this channel for a while knows what's going through my head. And that is, it is unimaginable for me that Andres Hernandez Romero is still there. There is a man that was a makeup artist, was gay, tried to come to the country legally use the CB1P1 app and has been sent to a place where he will have no access to nutrition, where he will be treated by sadists in the worst way imaginable, where he'll be forced to kneel and beg while they beat him.

That is what our government has done to him. And it fills me with just an unquenchable rage, an unquenchable rage. And I just hope, I hope that additional information can continue to shake this loose and that I don't have any expectations that better angels will prevail, but that political expediency will prevail either for Bukele or for our government. So I guess I would say this, I guess I would leave you with this. For folks who voted for Trump out there, for folks who know the voter for Trump out there, for Christians, for people that do not believe that the government is perfect, and that the government should get to use the force of the state to imprison and torment and torture people without due process or evidence being presented.

For those of you who have people in your lives that fit that bill or who know somebody, I would just ask them to read through this description of what happened there. Whatever you think about Kilmar and Braco Garcia, maybe he is one of the bad ones. Maybe he is. Maybe he was doing child trafficking. I can't know for sure, right? He's going to have his day in court. There are 238 some odd Venezuelans in El Salvador, including Andrea Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist with no gang ties, uh, that are going through this type of treatment, this kind of psychological warfare, um, the severe beatings, the malnutrition. It is, I mean, what, what can you say about it? Like, it is from, you know, the worst stories

of Japanese internment and like in this country, like what we're doing right now. And we need the evidence to come forth. People need to know the truth. People need to know the truth about this. And if you're a person of good faith who wants gang members to be sent to El Salvador and you think that's a good policy, okay, well, let's get the facts. Could the administration just please show the facts? Present the evidence that they have that the people they've sent there are gang members. Present the evidence that they have about how they're being treated. there are gang members, present the evidence that they have about how they're being treated. We are paying for this. We are the sponsors of this. We are the people that have asked El Salvador to take on these people. I just think that there are enough people that are not for this out there,

if the information is in front of them. So I'm asking everybody to, again, not pick a fight with somebody that you don't think can listen to it, but share it with people in your life that you think might be open to hearing it, because this is unimaginable, what we've done. So more on this, obviously, as news develops, again, this is just the allegations being made by Kilmar Bergogarcia. It's worth noting that it's in line, maybe that's exactly all the specifics,

but it's in line with other reporting from what we've seen about it from even the perpetrators. So it's not crazy to imagine that it's true. And if it is true, and we subjected even one innocent person to this torture, that is a deep shame. And that's something that must be remedied. So I'll leave it there. Subscribe to the feed. We will be back.

I won't be back. Well, I've got one more podcast for everybody before I'm on break, but the rest of the board, folks, will be here. So keep checking us out. Tell your friends. We'll be seeing you soon.