Smiling Before the Iron Bars

In a haunting photograph taken recently, U.S. Representative Jason Smith stands confidently, arms folded, before a cage filled with men, many of whom are masked, anonymous, and voiceless. This isn’t a photo from a war zone, nor a documentary about authoritarian regimes. It’s from a tour of an El Salvadoran mega-prison where the United States, under Trump-era immigration directives, has sent hundreds of detainees, without trial, without counsel, without due process.

The image is sobering. Behind the congressman are rows of imprisoned men, packed tightly, stripped of individuality and dignity. They are not so different from the images in history books; those black-and-white photos of Nazi officers posing outside concentration camps, surrounded by the faces of people stripped of their humanity. These Nazi-era snapshots weren’t just personal trophies; they were grim reminders of dominance over the dehumanized.

Now, America has its own version.

Many Americans may feel uncomfortable with this parallel. So, we tell ourselves it’s different; that these are gang members, that they’re threats to our communities, that we’re exporting danger and preserving peace. But isn’t that the same justification the Nazis used? That Jews were threats to the community, traitors to the nation, evil beyond measure?

As Jason Smith smugly poses before a wall of prisoners for his own grotesque trophy, the rest of us should consider the bloody toll this takes on our nation. For that trophy of horror, we’ve compromised our constitutional and moral foundations. Many of these prisoners were rounded up by ICE agents operating without warrants, detained without access to lawyers, and sent on secretive flights to a foreign prison notorious for its brutality. The Trump Administration took a butcher knife to the Constitution and carved out the parts that protect us all from an overbearing government. With such parts so easily excised from our Constitution, what is left to protect the rest of us?

Can we look the other way, just as ordinary Germans once did while cattle cars filled with Jews rolled past their towns? Can we, in good conscience, raise our glasses while others are loaded into planes, bound for places of torment? Can we truly feel secure while watching passively as our government terrorizes more and more people, hoping they won’t come for us one day? 

When we begin to discard due process in the name of “safety,” when we detain people without trial, ship them to foreign torture chambers, and then applaud ourselves for a job well done, we aren’t solving crime; we’re committing it. Worst of all, we’re committing it to ourselves.

Ronald Reagan once echoed Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount by describing America as a "shining city on a hill," not as a fortress, but as a place where its beacon of light guides freedom-loving people everywhere. But since those virtuous words were spoken, jackbooted thugs stomped out those lights. The principles that once defined us—liberty, justice, dignity—are replaced with surveillance, cruelty, and propaganda. We now have leaders who grin with macabre delight while visiting the walls of suffering; leaders who hunger for power rather than justice; leaders who mistake inhumanity for strength.

This isn’t just a policy failure. This is a moral collapse.

And it stains all of us.

If we are to be that shining city again, we must reclaim our humanity. We must reject cruelty disguised as law and order. We must return to the strength of our Constitution. And we must, above all, remember that the measure of a nation is not how it treats the powerful, but how it treats the powerless.