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Josué Aguilar Valle, a Honduran national, recalls the “terrible” conditions at the migrant jails where U.S. immigration authorities imprisoned him last year. In La Salle County, Texas, Aguilar shared a frigid cell with 50 men, sleeping on the concrete floor. “I thought I was going to experience hypothermia,” he explained.

Aguilar’s wife struggled to locate him, as authorities repeatedly shuffled him between facilities in Florida and Texas. Aguilar became a statistic lost inside an impenetrable bureaucracy. “Every time I tried to visit him, they moved him,” his wife recounted. “It’s like they’re trying to wear families down.” Last May, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported Aguilar to Honduras, separating him from his U.S. family.

His experience is not unique. Human rights experts claim that President Donald Trump’s administration has restructured the immigration system to “disappear” people, undermining due process and expediting deportations by abducting civilians, hiding detainees, and deleting their data. Those searching for the vanishing victims of ICE arrests have compared the institution’s clandestine practices to “trafficking people.”

The recent wave of disappearances follows a long and traumatic historical arc. Since the 1970s, the U.S. government and its Latin American allies have frequently disappeared civilians to eliminate dissent and members of marginalized communities, while pursuing law enforcement initiatives that make immigrants vulnerable to human trafficking and state violence. In many ways, Trump’s deportation drive reflects this deeper past, as the legacy of imperialism abroad returns home — threatening both immigrant families and the remnants of U.S. democracy.

With Donroe Doctrine, Trump Threatens to Export His Brand of Authoritarianism

The term “disappearance” entered the global political lexicon after President Richard Nixon’s administration helped Chilean military leaders seize power in 1973, toppling a popular and democratic socialist government. Nixon offered Gen. Augusto Pinochet unflinching support as the archconservative officer executed thousands of leftists and imprisoned tens of thousands more. Reluctant to offend the budding dictatorship, the United States embassy in Santiago even denied protection to Americans seeking refuge from gunfire in the streets. Its indifference allowed Chilean soldiers to disappear two U.S. citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, without pushback.

The legacy of imperialism abroad returns home — threatening both immigrant families and the remnants of U.S. democracy.

The legacy of imperialism abroad returns home — threatening both immigrant families and the remnants of U.S. democracy.

In Chile in Their Hearts, John Dinges demonstrates that the State Department treated their deaths as “an obstacle to be removed,” while refusing to recognize that Pinochet’s regime killed them. Horman and Teruggi became two of the more than 1,400 victims that the junta disappeared. For years afterward, U.S. law enforcement and intelligence assistance helped Chile and neighboring dictatorships undertake Operation Condor, a campaign of state terror that disappeared hundreds of leftists, often shuffling their corpses across borders to thwart investigators.

Following the Nicaraguan Revolution in 1979, forced disappearances skyrocketed in Central America, where President Ronald Reagan financed counterinsurgency operations against leftist movements. El Salvador became the third-largest recipient of U.S. aid; at the time, its leading politician, Roberto D’Aubuisson, announced the names of future death squad victims on television.

The courageous human rights defender Marianella García Villas routinely visited the Salvadoran countryside to photograph the corpses dumped by state forces. “All the women were raped before being murdered,” she emphasized. To stifle her investigations, the U.S.-trained Atlácatl Battalion abducted García Villas in 1983, before executing her the same way. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration harassed and spied on the sanctuary movement, which religious leaders established in the United States to protect Central American refugees. By fostering a climate of intimidation, Washington helped Salvadoran death squads sow terror as far as California.

More than anywhere, Reagan’s support for repression proved to be stomach-churning in Guatemala. Even before his election, two campaign supporters reportedly visited the country to assure officials that “Reagan recognizes … a good deal of dirty work has to be done.” His administration supplied munitions and foreign aid, while the military waged a genocidal offensive against the left and Indigenous population.

Their military instructors and equipment helped President Efraín Ríos Montt undertake a scorched-earth campaign that destroyed more than 400 Indigenous communities. In November 1982, the U.S. embassy relayed reports that state forces slaughtered hundreds of civilians in La Estancia. Survivors described victims “ripped open with machetes,” men arrested to “never [be] seen again,” and grenades shredding women and children.

Shortly afterward, Reagan visited Central America to express his support for Ríos Montt. He called the dictator “a man of great political integrity” and slammed critics for giving him a “bum rap.” The next day, Guatemalan soldiers entered Dos Erres, before commencing a three-day orgy of violence that killed at least 162 people. In 2013, judges concluded that Ríos Montt was guilty of genocide since he intended to “cause the physical destruction of the [Indigenous] Ixil group,” in order to deprive guerrillas of support.

Beyond fomenting forced........

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