I recently watched the meeting between President Trump and El Salvador's President Bukele with a heaviness in my heart that felt all too familiar. In exchange for generous payment, Bukele offered Trump a commitment to hold undocumented immigrants and other prisoners in a vast and ugly gulag. As I listened to Trump adding that he would like to send American citizens to Bukele's concentration camps — huge gulags with torture and no return to freedom — I felt the weight of historical patterns repeating themselves, stirring deep echoes of intergenerational trauma.
Trump came into power at the end of January 2025. Now, just three months later, the Salvadorean detention facility is in use. The facility is supposedly there only to hold criminals, but it is already used to stash gays and other people without criminal records. The definition of what Trump calls "really bad people" could expand quickly, leaving countless vulnerable human beings in its wake. This troubling development does more than remind me of my family's history — it awakens a profound sorrow and urgency that connects past suffering with present danger.
My grandfather was an upright Catholic high school teacher of history and Greek. He loved his family, God, and his country, Germany. In 1933, he was ambushed and beaten by Hitler's stormtroopers and taken to the police quarters for interrogation. A student had informed authorities that my grandfather, Dr. Paul Baumgart, had spoken critically about the Nazi Party. I can still feel the ripples of fear that must have coursed through my family when, from that point on, my grandparents faced frequent home searches, Paul was forbidden to teach, and a few years later, he was sent to a detention camp for dissidents. This ruthless behavior by the Nazi government was made possible through a combination of emergency decrees, legal manipulations, and the broader erosion of the rule of law — a gradual dismantling of human dignity that began with small compromises.