Elite Press Ignores Protest Against Trump's Tropical Gulag for Migrants
Our fourth dispatch from the White House by Nicolae Butler.
WASHINGTON — Yesterday morning, the sun came up like a switchblade through a loaf of day-old bread. I was on the North Lawn of the White House, the kind of place where the grass looks spray-painted and the air hums with the nervous buzz of aides trying not to screw up.
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The big meeting went down yesterday: Donald Trump, back in his favorite chair, met with Nayib Bukele, the slick-haired strongman of El Salvador. On the agenda? A prison plan that sounds like it was scribbled on a cocktail napkin in Mar-a-Lago: deporting undocumented immigrants to Bukele’s infamous mega-prisons. Not convicted criminals—just people without papers. A fantasy of outsourcing American detention to Central America. Guantánamo, but tropical.
Across from the White House, in Lafayette Square, a protest formed like a low-pressure front—small but insistent. One woman stood there for hours. Her sign said, “Return Garcia.” Later, I learned her name: Maria. Her voice was soft, her eyes hard. Not from tears, but from standing still too long in a city that doesn’t look back. “I don’t know,” she whispered when I asked what she made of the Garcia case. That’s all she said. And that’s all it took.
Inside the White House, it was a strange sort of calm. No pomp. No presser. No red carpet for Bukele—just tight lips and cold stares. The El Salvadoran press corps arrived suited and silent, steel-spined, smelling faintly of cologne and mistrust. They didn’t want to talk, especially not to a scruffy reporter in a hoodie and a White House lanyard. “No speak English,” one said with a look that told me not to push. I didn’t.
There was no press conference. No chance to ask about Garcia or the idea of mass deportations to a penal colony. The pool report came over the loudspeaker like a ghost story. Trump, from the Oval, spit fire at CNN. “Nobody watches,” he said. “Slanted.” In the White House briefing room, a veteran network journalist shook his head and laughed at CNN’s flaccid question.
Back in the Oval, Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi flanked Trump, parroting lines about executive power and the sanctity of borders. Marco Rubio nodded like a bobblehead in the back. Bukele? Uninspired by the pleas for Garcia. “I can’t smuggle people into America,” he said later, sidestepping like a man walking around a live wire.
Then Trump drifted into his favorite monologue: himself. His health, his genius, his legacy. The reporters in the Briefing Room looked like overcooked pasta. Eyes glazed. One doodled. Another scrolled. It was vintage Trump: a one-man band playing the same song he’s been playing since 2015.
When the press pool returned, they looked spooked. Caitlin Collins looked like she’d been hit with a rake. The El Salvadorans? Stoic. One reporter, Wendy, took a selfie at the podium, trying to bottle a little hope. It was her first time in the White House.
Later, outside, I got into it with an old reporter who covered the Elián González saga. We argued about deportations, precedent, politics. “This ain’t new,” she said with hands that had typed through Bush, Obama, Trump. She’s right. But it still feels cruel.
And Maria? She was still there, holding that sign like a lighthouse in fog. Unmoving. Unrelenting. I thought about her as I left, as the sun set behind the dome, casting long shadows over shorter men. Maria didn’t need answers. She was the question.