section_path: Reactions/Media commentators
section_name: Media commentators
paragraph_text: Media commentators
  
  In the April 14 segment of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart commented on Bukele's visit with Trump earlier in the day, where the presidents had spoken about Abrego Garcia remaining at CECOT rather than being returned to the US:
  
  Can I honestly tell you? Like, they're fucking enjoying this, like the two of them: our president, their president,, "I can't do it. I guess we'll just have to let him rot in fucking prison, even though he didn't deserve to be there." I know don't care about this guy but somebody else cares about this person, and you just randomly, with no evidence that you'll show anybody, call him a terrorist.
  
  Andrea Pitzer, journalist and author of a history of concentration camps, wrote on New York magazine's Intelligencer website that CECOT is a concentration camp, akin to the Soviet Gulag and the early Nazi concentration camps (as distinct from the extermination camps). Her criteria were detaining civilians en masse without due process on basis of race, ethnicity, or supposed affiliation, as opposed to crimes; political ends to gather and keep power; typically open-ended detention so that a prison sentence, if any, may be honored or it may not; and an end run around the legal system, allowing detention not otherwise possible. Pitzer argued that Bukele's, and now Trump's, use of CECOT in their security theater met all of these criteria. She warned that those who open concentration camps seldom close them willingly; instead, extrajudicial detention can linger for decades and tends to expand its role, just as Auschwitz was a regular concentration camp for years before Birkenau was built, and Guantanamo Bay was an immigration detention facility to prevent refugees from getting asylum on American soil decades before it became a site for torture and indefinite detention.
  
  In an opinion column for the Chicago Tribune, Elizabeth Shackelford similarly wrote that CECOT is not a prison but a concentration camp, since prisons hold people lawfully convicted of crimes and serving sentences, whereas concentration camps are intended to confine people "without legal justification or limits" and "to break men's spirits and instill fear outside its walls." She pointed out that authoritarians often "hone tools of oppression against unpopular populations" before using them against whoever they want, and argued that Trump's attack on due process is a threat that the Foundering Fathers recognized, analogizing the case to one of the items they listed as a grievance against King George III in the US Declaration of Independence: "transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences".
  
  After Trump agreed in an interview that he could call Bukele and ask him to release Abrego Garcia, Greg Sargent, an opinion columnist for The New Republic, wrote that the statement "destroys" the Trump administration's argument that it cannot "compel Bukele to release him because it would intrude on Salvadoran sovereignty to dictate that country's treatment of one of its own", in that a request would not intrude on sovereignty. Sargent also commented on Trump's response to a question about why he was not acting in accordance with the Supreme Court's April 10 order that the administration facilitate Abrego Garcia's return: "I'm not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don't want to do this." Sargent said that this implies Trump is either "knowingly violating the Supreme Court and hiding behind his lawyers to do so", or the DOJ is "deceiving him about what the high court has ordered—revealing he's weak and subject to manipulation."
  
  Podcaster Joe Rogan stated in an April 17 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience that "rounding up gang members and shipping them to El Salvador with no due process" was "dangerous" and that "e gotta be careful that we don't become monsters while we're fighting monsters."
  
  Media Matters for America argued that "right-wing media personalities" and news sources have often downplayed or rejected Abrego Garcia's due process rights.
  
  In the April 14 segment of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart commented on Bukele's visit with Trump earlier in the day, where the presidents had spoken about Abrego Garcia remaining at CECOT rather than being returned to the US:
  
  Can I honestly tell you? Like, they're fucking enjoying this, like the two of them: our president, their president,, "I can't do it. I guess we'll just have to let him rot in fucking prison, even though he didn't deserve to be there." I know don't care about this guy but somebody else cares about this person, and you just randomly, with no evidence that you'll show anybody, call him a terrorist.
  
  Andrea Pitzer, journalist and author of a history of concentration camps, wrote on New York magazine's Intelligencer website that CECOT is a concentration camp, akin to the Soviet Gulag and the early Nazi concentration camps (as distinct from the extermination camps). Her criteria were detaining civilians en masse without due process on basis of race, ethnicity, or supposed affiliation, as opposed to crimes; political ends to gather and keep power; typically open-ended detention so that a prison sentence, if any, may be honored or it may not; and an end run around the legal system, allowing detention not otherwise possible. Pitzer argued that Bukele's, and now Trump's, use of CECOT in their security theater met all of these criteria. She warned that those who open concentration camps seldom close them willingly; instead, extrajudicial detention can linger for decades and tends to expand its role, just as Auschwitz was a regular concentration camp for years before Birkenau was built, and Guantanamo Bay was an immigration detention facility to prevent refugees from getting asylum on American soil decades before it became a site for torture and indefinite detention.
  
  In an opinion column for the Chicago Tribune, Elizabeth Shackelford similarly wrote that CECOT is not a prison but a concentration camp, since prisons hold people lawfully convicted of crimes and serving sentences, whereas concentration camps are intended to confine people "without legal justification or limits" and "to break men's spirits and instill fear outside its walls." She pointed out that authoritarians often "hone tools of oppression against unpopular populations" before using them against whoever they want, and argued that Trump's attack on due process is a threat that the Foundering Fathers recognized, analogizing the case to one of the items they listed as a grievance against King George III in the US Declaration of Independence: "transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences".
  
  After Trump agreed in an interview that he could call Bukele and ask him to release Abrego Garcia, Greg Sargent, an opinion columnist for The New Republic, wrote that the statement "destroys" the Trump administration's argument that it cannot "compel Bukele to release him because it would intrude on Salvadoran sovereignty to dictate that country's treatment of one of its own", in that a request would not intrude on sovereignty. Sargent also commented on Trump's response to a question about why he was not acting in accordance with the Supreme Court's April 10 order that the administration facilitate Abrego Garcia's return: "I'm not the one making this decision. We have lawyers that don't want to do this." Sargent said that this implies Trump is either "knowingly violating the Supreme Court and hiding behind his lawyers to do so", or the DOJ is "deceiving him about what the high court has ordered—revealing he's weak and subject to manipulation."
  
  Podcaster Joe Rogan stated in an April 17 episode of The Joe Rogan Experience that "rounding up gang members and shipping them to El Salvador with no due process" was "dangerous" and that "e gotta be careful that we don't become monsters while we're fighting monsters."
  
  Media Matters for America argued that "right-wing media personalities" and news sources have often downplayed or rejected Abrego Garcia's due process rights.