Circle of the Disappeared: El Salvador/United States/El Salvador

Upper: After the U.S.-backed Salvadoran regime bombed their office in 1987 (or 1989), a member of the Mothers of the Disappeared stood beneath a defiant sign: “We condemn the dynamite attack against our office.” (Damage is visible on the left of the stairs.) The women had organized to demand that the death squads return their relatives—or their bodies—after forcibly disappearing them. Each night, members of the women kept watch in shifts at the office, barricaded behind sandbags to guard against further attacks.

It is a terrible irony that El Salvador, once ravaged by thousands of disappearances, now serves as the destination for people the Trump administration seeks to disappear into black-hole prisons—without affording them Constitutionally guaranteed due process or legal recourse.

Lower: Activists gather outside the Vermont prison holding Mohsen Mahdawi, a Columbia University student and co-founder of its Palestinian Student Union. When the Gaza-born Vermont resident reported for what was supposed to be a routine citizenship interview, it turned out to be a trap. Masked agents seized him and drove him to the airport, where he was to be flown to a notorious Louisiana prison. They missed the plane by nine minutes. By then, his legal team had mobilized, blocked his disappearance, and kept him in a Vermont prison, which afforded him access to legal council and a visit from his Congressman.

Above: After multiple demonstrations and two hearings in his case, unambiguously named Donald Trump v. Mahsen Mahdawi, a Vermont judge ordered the activist released from prison. Jubilant, Mahdawi greets hundreds of supporters, who rallied outside the Burlington courthouse. While his immigration case is ongoing, Mahdawi is free for now—able to return to his home in Vermont and to resume his studies at Columbia University.

NOTE: Yesterday, in another Vermont-linked abduction, a court ordered that Rümeysa Öztürk be returned no later than April 14 to Vermont (its jurisdiction owing to a complicated habeas corpus issue) for her immigration hearing. The Tufts University PhD candidate in child development had been disappeared on March 25 in Massachusetts, forced into an unmarked car by masked men, and flown to Louisiana.