El Salvador’s State of Exception - “Inside CECOT”
In late December 2025, renewed media attention turned to Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorism (CECOT), El Salvador’s flagship mega-prison, after CBS news executives postponed a 60 Minutes broadcast of an investigative report about the facility, called “Inside CECOT.” While the media controversy itself is newsworthy, the importance of the investigative report highlights another important reality: CECOT is not an anomaly or a temporary security measure, but a central institution of a state of exception that has now governed El Salvador for nearly four uninterrupted years. On December 22, 2025, American journalist Yashar Ali is among several journalists who claimed to have obtained a video portion of the postponed investigative report, and he subsequently published it on his Substack “The Reset.” His December 22 Substack article, with the attached video portion, can be found here. Yashar Ali’s Substack, and the allegedly postponed 60 Minutes segment, is included here by ISSE for research and informational purposes only.
Additional Context on El Salvador’s State of Exception:
El Salvador’s current state of exception began on March 27, 2022, when the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador approved emergency powers at the request of President Nayib Bukele following a spike in gang-related killings. The declaration suspended multiple constitutional guarantees, including protections related to due process, detention limits, and freedom of association. Although framed as a short-term response to an acute security crisis, the emergency has since been renewed monthly without interruption, transforming what was legally temporary into a continuous governing condition.
CECOT, which officially opened in January 2023, must be understood within this broader legal and political architecture. Constructed at extraordinary speed beginning in mid-2022 and designed to hold tens of thousands of detainees under highly restrictive conditions, the prison represents the materialization of emergency governance. It is not merely a detention facility, but an infrastructure built on the assumption that exceptional powers will persist. In this sense, CECOT marks a shift from emergency as an episodic tool to emergency as an organizing principle of the penal system itself.
What distinguishes El Salvador’s case is not simply the severity of its security measures, but their institutionalization over time. Emergency renewals have become routine legislative acts rather than extraordinary deliberations. Oversight mechanisms remain formally intact, yet the political costs of ending the emergency have grown steadily higher as public security outcomes are attributed to its continuation. The result is a system in which constitutional suspension no longer appears provisional, but instead functions as a baseline condition of governance.
From a state-of-exception perspective, this trajectory illustrates how emergencies can migrate from legal doctrine into physical space. Once facilities like CECOT exist, they exert their own gravitational pull: they require detainees, justify continued emergency powers, and normalize extraordinary practices through repetition. The emergency no longer responds to crisis alone; it begins to produce the conditions that sustain itself.
As international attention intermittently refocuses on El Salvador, whether through journalism, diplomacy, or human rights advocacy, the more pressing question is not how a single story is handled, but how long a democratic system can operate under perpetual exception without redefining its constitutional order altogether. El Salvador’s experience offers a stark case study in how emergency powers, once stabilized, can quietly become permanent.
The U.S. Side of the Equation: Emergency Power Without Emergency Law
Recent litigation arising from the deportation of Venezuelan nationals to El Salvador highlights a defining feature of contemporary emergency governance: exceptional outcomes can be produced without formally invoking emergency law. While El Salvador continues to operate under a declared and uninterrupted state of exception, the United States pursued removals through ordinary immigration statutes, yet in ways that closely resemble emergency power in substance.
Of direct importance on the U.S. side of this equation, the validity of the March 2025 invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is in question, and subject to ongoing litigation. Additionally, no discrete national emergency was declared to justify these specific deportations. Instead, authorities relied on standard removal powers under the Immigration and Nationality Act while adopting emergency logic: categorical threat designation, group-based suspicion, speed, secrecy, and sharply curtailed procedural protections. This produced a form of latent emergency governance, exceptional in effect, but routinized in legal form.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s December 22, 2025, ruling in the case of J.G.G. v. Trump directly engaged this tension, in determining that the U.S. government denied due process to the Venezuelan men it deported, and owed them a right to hearing, whether by bringing them back to the to do so, or by allowing them to pursue legal remedies while outside the U.S. By insisting on meaningful notice, individualized process, and the relevance of post-removal detention, the court rejected the traditional assumption that U.S. constitutional responsibility necessarily ends at physical removal. Where the United States knowingly transferred individuals into a foreign system of detention operating under emergency powers, the court treated the downstream consequences as legally relevant to the upstream U.S. action. The Trump administration indicated it plans to appeal this decision.
See recent articles here, here, and here, for more coverage of the December 22 ruling.
The case reveals a cross-border symmetry worth close attention. In El Salvador, emergency powers are openly declared, routinely renewed, and increasingly institutionalized. In the United States, emergency effects were pursued without emergency declaration, using ordinary administrative law to achieve extraordinary results. One system normalizes the exception through constitutional suspension; the other potentially through procedural camouflage.
For ISSE, the analytic significance lies not only in immigration doctrine, but in what this episode demonstrates about modern states of exception. Emergency power today need not announce itself. It can be exercised through ordinary law, justified by extraordinary rhetoric, and externalized across borders. The U.S. District Court’s ruling, pending results of future appeals, represents an effort to reattach constitutional constraint where emergency logic has outrun emergency law. Whether higher courts sustain this approach will help determine how far democratic systems can go in governing exceptionally without admitting that they are doing so.
Photo by Daniel Bernard on Unsplash.
