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Notes -
The side-impact is that you have torture-prisons. Torture-prisons are bad. We shouldn't have them because they are unacceptable in and of themselves to anyone with a conscience; not because they wouldn't work, or because they would have unacceptable second-order effects. As with most things in life, there is a classic British comedy sketch about this.
(Although as side-effects on non-criminals go, people who lived under Soviet regimes tend to agree that living with the gnawing fear that you might get thrown in the torture-prison yourself if an apparatchik thinks you gave them a funny look is a pretty heavy toll on any innocent citizen's everyday well-being.)
In any case this isn't meant to be an argument that we absolutely must free Garcia. Just that the oft-repeated "he should be petitioning the Bukele government, not America" thing is delusional at best and bad-faith at worst. If it's not America's responsibility to save some possibly-innocent Salvadoran from being tortured in El Salvador, fine. "There are plenty of other Salvadorans being tortured right now, Garcia should never have been allowed on US soil, once he's been sent back his fate will be the same as any other Salvadoran's and if we don't intervene to save the others we have no reason to intervene to save him; que sera sera" is a coherent position. But let's not pretend he has some other way out. Pleading for American help and hoping the US will bite is the only thing anyone in his situation can do, whether or not he's actually entitled to it.
The previous problem was having literally thousands of people murdered on a yearly basis.
Having literally thousands of people murdered is bad.
And probably worse than torture-prisons, since the people doing the murdering had even less accountability.
Convince me that moving from "unnaccountable warlords murdering innocents" to "warlords and their subordinates [and probably some innocents] getting tortured in a hellish prision" is actually NOT an improvement in pure utilitarian terms.
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