Kansas Rep. Ron Estes (second from right) poses with other U.S. representatives during a trip to El Salvador last week. (U.S. Embassy in El Salvador)

We do not elect kings in Kansas or the United States.

We do not dole out justice through lynch mobs or popularity contests either.

Yet there U.S. Rep. Ron Estes stood in a picture from the U.S. embassy in El Salvador, lending tacit approval to a mob that has all but condemned Maryland father Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to death, at the behest of a would-be tyrant in Washington, D.C.

The facts of the case are simple and damning. Abrego Garcia was sent to a gulag without due process of law, and President Donald Trump’s administration has defied a 9-0 Supreme Court order in keeping him there. The White House has attempted to smear the man in absentia, with all the crudeness of those who used to accuse Black boys of taking liberties with white women.

This, apparently, is fine and dandy with Estes.

El #EmbajadorDuncan dio ayer la bienvenida a El Salvador a la delegación encabezada por el Congresista Jason Smith, quien visita el país para fortalecer los lazos bilaterales y dialogar sobre iniciativas que promueven el desarrollo económico y la cooperación mutua. pic.twitter.com/Zj0o8OSiOJ

— Embajada EEUU en ES (@USEmbassySV) April 16, 2025

On Tuesday, Republican Reps. Jason Smith of Missouri and Riley Moore of West Virginia posed proudly in pictures from CECOT — the notorious El Salvadoran mega-prison where the United States has shipped hundreds without hearings. Estes did not post such pictures. However, the 4th District congressman stood in a lineup with Smith and Moore in an image posted Wednesday by the embassy, along with Reps. Kevin Hern of Oklahoma, Mike Kennedy of Utah, Carol Miller of West Virginia and Claudia Tenney of New York.

Credit must go at this point to independent journalist and Kansas Reflector friend Marisa Kabas, who first reported about the Republicans’ visit. She reached out to the lawmakers for comment, hearing back only from Hearn’s office: “We cannot confirm or comment on the Congressman’s location for security purposes.” Tenney subsequently tweeted that she had also toured CECOT.

I reached out via email to Estes spokesman Roman Rodriguez to ask whether the representative had gone to the prison or was concerned about Abrego Garcia’s welfare. He did not respond.

Prison pipeline

We cannot close our eyes to the brutal reality of CECOT or El Salvador’s government.

According to Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty International: “El Salvador is implementing a systematic state policy of massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty. After three years, more than 85,000 individuals remain behind bars without sufficient admissible evidence, the victims of a judicial system now transformed into a tool for collective punishment and widespread repression. Attempts to export this policy to the situation of Venezuelan migrants and refugees in the United States highlights the lack of protection and the risk that hundreds of thousands of people now face of having their human rights violated by not one, not two, but three different states.”

You can’t confuse this gulag with any kind of American facility. In our country, attorneys and law enforcement must still abide by the law. Not in El Salvador. Conditions there go beyond mere cruelty.

Officials have decided to create a concentration camp, one in which prisoners are denied basic rights and tortured.

In the words of Human Rights Watch: “People held in CECOT, as well as in other prisons in El Salvador, are denied communication with their relatives and lawyers, and only appear before courts in online hearings, often in groups of several hundred detainees at the same time. The Salvadoran government has described people held in CECOT as ‘terrorists,’ and has said that they ‘will never leave.’ Human Rights Watch is not aware of any detainees who have been released from that prison.”

Juanita Goebertus Estrada, director of the Americas Division of Human Rights Watch, said that while the mega-prison was built more recently than other facilities in the country, he understands that conditions are similar to other prisons in the country.

“This includes cases of torture, ill-treatment, incommunicado detention, severe violations of due process and inhumane conditions, such as lack of access to adequate healthcare and food,” he said.

Given such damning details, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised El Salvador eventually transferred Abrego Garcia to more humane quarters. The country didn’t want further international scrutiny.

No one should go to such a facility. Not even the most notorious criminals, of any country or any citizenship status. No one.

Trump temper tantrum

Regardless of pushback from courts at every level, President Donald Trump has persisted in his quest to send immigrants out of this country and to the most brutal and dehumanizing conditions.

No matter their ideology or party, our elected officials must step up and speak out against such authoritarian violence. Estes, during his visit to El Salvador, had every opportunity to do so. He could have joined Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen in meeting with Abrego Garcia and urging his immediate release from detention. He could have spoken up for the rule of law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as codified by the United Nations.

Instead, he posed for the picture and made no public comment. He lent his silent assent to a governmental lynching.

Abrego Garcia may have been a gang member. He may have beaten his wife. He may have leaked the COVID-19 virus from a lab and caused Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis to bomb at the box office. Any or all of these stories may be true. But he has been convicted of none of them. If the Trump administration actually believes such accusations against Abrego Garcia, bring him back and criminally charge him.

Due process of law means due process for everyone, citizens and noncitizens alike. Respect for the rule of law means respecting all court decisions, even those with which you disagree. Without following these precepts, our democratic society crumbles. You support the ruthless mob, willing to hang a man on mere suspicion.

Estes might be OK with that. On his website, he touts support for a bill that would strip power from judges. The same figures tasked with defending the rights of everyone.

Perhaps he has decided to declare fealty to a king rather than support a mere president.

Update at 11:56 a.m.: Estes did tour the prison, according to a Substack post from historian Heather Cox Richardson and an photo shared on Smith’s Facebook account.

Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

There’s a certain predictable pattern when unqualified MAGA political appointees get put in charge of highly technical government operations. First, they demonstrate their complete misunderstanding of the systems they’re supposed to oversee. Then, they make a series of increasingly dangerous mistakes. Finally, they try to distract from those mistakes by focusing on culture war issues.

For Pete Hegseth, this pattern has revealed itself pretty quickly.

Last month, when it was revealed that the top echelon of the Trump administration’s national security team were sharing attack plans over an insecure Signal group chat in which The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added, it seemed obvious that this couldn’t be the only such chat. Indeed, a week later it was reported that there were at least twenty similar Signal group chats set up by National Security Advisor Mike Waltz for each crisis he was dealing with.

Not surprisingly, it wasn’t just Waltz who was terribly insecure with national security information. Last night, the NY Times revealed that our least qualified Secretary of Defense ever had also set up a similar Signal chat, in which he also shared extremely sensitive Yemen attack information… with his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.

If this sounds incredibly stupid and dangerous, that’s because it is. But it’s also a perfect example of what happens when you put someone who fundamentally doesn’t understand security in charge of… security. The kind of person who thinks “well, Signal is secure, so I can share whatever I want with whoever I want” is exactly the kind of person who shouldn’t be making decisions about military operations.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth shared detailed information about forthcoming strikes in Yemen on March 15 in a private Signal group chat that included his wife, brother and personal lawyer, according to four people with knowledge of the chat.

Some of those people said that the information Mr. Hegseth shared on the Signal chat included the flight schedules for the F/A-18 Hornets targeting the Houthis in Yemen — essentially the same attack plans that he shared on a separate Signal chat the same day that mistakenly included the editor of The Atlantic.

Mr. Hegseth’s wife, Jennifer, a former Fox News producer, is not a Defense Department employee, but she has traveled with him overseas and drawn criticism for accompanying her husband to sensitive meetings with foreign leaders.

Mr. Hegseth’s brother Phil and Tim Parlatore, who continues to serve as his personal lawyer, both have jobs in the Pentagon, but it is not clear why either would need to know about upcoming military strikes aimed at the Houthis in Yemen.

This is a stunning level of operational security failure that goes beyond mere incompetence — it’s a pattern revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of how secure communications should work.

To say this is bad is an understatement. To say this puts an exclamation point on how ridiculously unqualified Hegseth is would be somewhat more accurate, though it is difficult to describe just how fucked up this truly is. It absolutely suggests that Hegseth has a horrifically bad understanding of what his job is and how to keep important information secret.

He shouldn’t be sharing attack plans outside of a secure communications channel. He shouldn’t be sharing attack plans with those not within the National Security realm. He certainly shouldn’t be sharing attack plans with his wife who is not even in the government and whose experience is as a TV news producer.

With Goldberg, the administration tried to misleadingly brush it off as “well, we all accidentally text someone we shouldn’t.” That’s not a good excuse, of course, because this isn’t about accidentally texting someone, it was about sharing sensitive, classified info, on an unsecure channel.

But this is even worse. Because rather than “accidentally” adding someone who shouldn’t be in the chat, here, Hegseth appears to have deliberately added these people. Indeed, it sounds like there were even more people “from his personal circle” in the chat… and it was on his personal phone, not a government one, meaning it is almost certainly a compromised device.

Unlike the chat in which The Atlantic was mistakenly included, the newly revealed one was created by Mr. Hegseth. It included his wife and about a dozen other people from his personal and professional inner circle in January, before his confirmation as defense secretary, and was named “Defense | Team Huddle,” the people familiar with the chat said. He used his private phone, rather than his government one, to access the Signal chat.

Among those included in the chat… two of the folks from Hegseth’s inner circle who were fired just last week for leaking:

The chat also included two senior advisers to Mr. Hegseth — Dan Caldwell and Darin Selnick — who were accused of leaking unauthorized information last week and were fired.

Seems super secure.

The Times article also notes that Hegseth had been warned “a day or two before the Yemen strikes not to discuss such sensitive operational details in his Signal group chat.” Of course, that suggests that a ton of people who worked with Hegseth knew full well that he had a habit of regularly sharing information he shouldn’t be sharing in Signal chats. Otherwise why warn him that he shouldn’t share details of the Yemen strike plan?

The story gets even dumber. Remember John Ullyot? One of Hegseth’s first hires at the Defense Department, the guy who proudly led the charge in “removing DEI” and managed to bungle that so badly they ended up accidentally erasing Jackie Robinson from military history? Well, he just quit as Pentagon spokesman and published a tell-all in Politico about how fucked up everything is there.

Upon leaving the Defense Department, he told Newsweek: “I remain one of the secretary’s strongest supporters going forward.”

If that quote makes you raise an eyebrow, well, just wait until you see what “one of the secretary’s strongest supporters” actually wrote. His Politico piece basically screams “Trump needs to fire this guy”:

President Donald Trump has a strong record of holding his top officials to account. Given that, it’s hard to see Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth remaining in his role for much longer.

Then we get a month-by-month catalog of incompetence… from, he claims, one of Hegseth’s “strongest supporters”:

First there was Signalgate, where the secretary shared detailed operational plans, including timelines and specifics, about an impending military strike on the Houthis in Yemen over an unclassified Signal chat group that happened to include a member of the news media.

Once the Signalgate story broke, Hegseth followed horrible crisis-communications advice from his new public affairs team, who somehow convinced him to try to debunk the reporting through a vague, Clinton-esque non-denial denial that “nobody was texting war plans.” This was a violation of PR rule number one — get the bad news out right away.

His nebulous disavowal prompted the reporter, Jeffrey Goldberg, to release Hegseth’s full chat string with the detailed operational plans two days later, turning an already-big story into a multi-week embarrassment for the president’s national security team. Hegseth now faces an inspector general investigation into a possible leak of classified information and violation of records retention protocols.

That was just the beginning of the Month from Hell. The Wall Street Journal and other outlets reported that Hegseth “brought his wife, a former Fox News producer, to two meetings with foreign military counterparts where sensitive information was discussed.”

Next, the Pentagon set up a top-secret briefing by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on China for Elon Musk, who still has extensive business interests in China. After learning about it, the White House canceled that meeting.

He also claims that the firings last week weren’t actually over leaks, but over other reasons, and bemoans: “Unfortunately, Hegseth’s team has developed a habit of spreading flat-out, easily debunked falsehoods anonymously about their colleagues on their way out the door.”

Which is a fascinating accusation coming from someone who just went out the door.

And just to put a cherry on top of this chaos sundae, Ullyot warns that there are “even bigger bombshell stories coming this week.” Because of course there are. When your Defense Secretary is sharing military strike plans with his wife over Signal, there’s always another shoe waiting to drop.

This is what happens when you place unqualified loyalists in positions requiring technical competence and security expertise. The problems go far beyond just operational security — they extend to a fundamental misunderstanding of how technology works, how information should be protected, and the proper channels for sensitive communications.

Hegseth, for his part, is trying to tweet through it, attempting (and failing) to turn the story of his gross incompetence and putting the American military at risk into one about DEI:

Of course, as law reporter Chris Geidner notes, this tweet alone appears to be Hegseth admitting that he’s violating a court order from last month, which blocked Hegseth’s ban on trans people serving in the military. And literally on Friday, just two days before Hegseth tweeted that trans people were banned from the military, the Ninth Circuit upheld the injunction against the ban.

Even worse, the DOJ in arguing that case had said directly to the court that Hegseth’s policy did “not discriminate against transgender people,” but rather only a subset, which the DOD defines as those “who have or have had gender dysphoria.” Indeed, the DOJ harped on the claim that the policy “scrupulously avoids using the word ‘transgender.’”

So, for him to now just tweet out that “trans” people are no longer allowed at DoD not only appears to violate the court order (upheld by an appeals court) blocking such a policy, but it undermines the (already laughable) claim that it wasn’t a “trans” ban in the first place.

This morning, Hegseth blamed the whole thing on the media (naturally) and “disgruntled former employees.” Trump echoed that claim, saying “I guess it sounds like disgruntled employees. You know, he was put there to get rid of a lot of bad people.”

Of course, this leaves out that the “bad people” Hegseth got rid of in the last few weeks were all in his inner circle of close advisors and were people he, himself, had hired.

The pattern here is unmistakable: an administration that simultaneously doesn’t understand technology while using it recklessly, doesn’t respect legal constraints, and attempts to distract from its failures by focusing on culture war issues. This is government incompetence taken to a dangerous new level.

In short, Hegseth is beyond incompetent and unqualified. He has put everyone in danger. His own “strongest supporters” are calling for him to be removed, his inner circle are being removed from the Pentagon for unclear reasons, he’s sharing attack plans with his wife and others on his personal phone using unsecured communications channels.

And his response is to tweet in a manner that not only shows he’s violating a court order, but undermines the argument he made in court.

This isn’t about policy disagreements. This is about just basic competence — or lack thereof. Hegseth never should have been nominated for the job, and every second he remains in it puts American national security in greater and greater peril.

Habitat for InHumanity

Speaking of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, animator Chuck Jones and his team were said to follow these simple rules when creating the cartoons:

1. The Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going “meep, meep.”
2. No outside force can harm the Coyote — only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products. Trains and trucks were the exception from time to time.
3. The Coyote could stop anytime — if he were not a fanatic.
4. No dialogue ever, except “meep, meep” and yowling in pain.
5. The Road Runner must stay on the road — for no other reason than that he’s a roadrunner.
6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters — the southwest American desert.
7. All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote’s greatest enemy.
9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
10. The audience’s sympathy must remain with the Coyote.
11. The Coyote is not allowed to catch or eat the Road Runner.

The rules are made only slightly less interesting by their fiction; according to Wikipedia, long-time Jones collaborator Michael Maltese said he’d never heard of the rules.

[This is a vintage post originally from Mar 2012.]

Tags: cartoons · Chuck Jones · lists · timeless posts