Masked guards march the captives in, holding their heads pressed down to waist level. They are forced to kneel while guards shout at them and shave their heads before they are stripped down to shorts. Their overcrowded and squalid cells, meant to hold about 80 men, are often crammed with nearly twice as many. Only two toilets per cell, no privacy and no windows. Constant surveillance. No furniture but tiered metal bunks to share. No sheets, pillows or mattresses. Each cell has only one jug of water for drinking and one bucket for washing.

Fluorescent lights stay on at all hours. Captives are allowed outside the cell only a half hour a day for exercise in the hallway or Bible readings. Allowed no books, no cards, no letters or personal items, and no contact with the outside world, that half hour is their only reprieve. They have no contact with their families or a lawyer. They don’t even know if anyone knows where they are.

This place is not a prison, because prisons hold people for punishment after being lawfully convicted of a crime. Rather, it is a concentration camp: a detention facility where people are confined without legal justification or limits. The inmates here are not serving sentences. Tens of thousands have been locked away for good. Some had criminal convictions, but many arrived here without a chance at a legal defense at all.

If this sounds like hell, that’s because it’s supposed to. The whole purpose of El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) is to break men’s spirits and instill fear outside its walls. And this is the hell to which President Donald Trump’s administration has condemned hundreds of U.S. residents.

You may think this is where the “worst of the worst” criminals and terrorists deserve to be. But, if you’re going to condemn someone here for life, you had better be sure they deserve it.

Administration officials have repeatedly claimed that the people they’ve sent here are criminals and terrorists but provided no evidence of this. About 90% had no criminal record at all. Only a few had any record or charge of a violent crime. They were rounded up on whims, based on suspect tattoos or clothing, and given no opportunity to defend against these allegations before being condemned to this hell for life.

The case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is uniquely alarming, since he was legally prohibited from being deported to El Salvador, and the government admitted under oath in court that he was taken there in error. And yet it stubbornly refuses to bring him back, despite court orders that it do so. The U.S. Supreme Court even confirmed that he had been illegally removed and that the U.S. government must facilitate his return. But Trump and several members of his Cabinet mocked the very idea during an Oval Office meeting with El Salvador’s president, as they repeated the lies that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and that the Supreme Court ruled in the administration’s favor.

As the executive branch brazenly flouts the Supreme Court, we have reached the constitutional crisis so many have feared, and its consequences put our most basic freedoms at risk.

If you think you’re safe from this overreach because you haven’t broken the law, neither had most of these men. If you think you’re safe because you’re not an “illegal immigrant,” many of these men weren’t, either. If you think you’re safe because you’re a “homegrown” American citizen, that is cold comfort today, because Trump urged President Nayib Bukele to build more prisons since “ homegrowns are next.” Beware: It’s a common play for authoritarians to hone tools of oppression against unpopular populations before they roll them out against anyone they wish.

This is Trump’s war on due process, which is a fancy legal term for our constitutional right to not be arbitrarily deprived of life, liberty and property. This means we — not just citizens, but everyone in America — are entitled to an opportunity to defend ourselves in a court of law before the government locks us away. If the government can bestow any punishment or fate upon anyone it chooses by simply calling that person a terrorist, it could happen to any of us. If it can disappear that person to captivity in a foreign country and then claim no power or authority to bring that person back, none of us is safe. Only the guarantee of due process gives us an opportunity to defend ourselves. If there is no remedy for Abrego Garcia, with no case made against him to justify that fate, any of us could be next.

Our nation has seen this kind of abuse of power before, and it was such a grave threat that it made the list of grievances in our Declaration of Independence against King George III in 1776: for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretend offenses.

If we hope to remain free, we should treat these offenses against our freedom with no less urgency than our Founding Fathers did.

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Elizabeth Shackelford is senior policy director at Dartmouth College’s Dickey Center for International Understanding and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune. She was previously a U.S. diplomat and is the author of “The Dissent Channel: American Diplomacy in a Dishonest Age.”

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