By Douglas John Imbrogno | WestVirginiaVille.com | april19.2025
Well, dang it. U.S. Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia went down to El Salvador’s notorious prison/CECOT concentration camp, and so did West Virginia’s other representative to Congress, Carol Miller. But Riley’s thumbs-up selfie posted to his official congressional X/Twitter account is what went viral. You would hardly know that not one, but two, of West Virginia’s Trumpublicans—let’s call them what they are as Eisenhower Republicans are long gone—had an adventure at a gulag called “the world’s worst prison.” Let’s remedy that loss for Carol Miller with a highly obvious and notated photoshopped image, depicting her in front of the mega-prison that made Riley Moore a widely-mocked meme. She was there, after all, a full-on adult making a full-on juvenile and soulless decision.
How bad is CECOT, which stands for the Center for the Confinement of Terrorism, where prisoners never see the actual light of day and ‘inmates never leave‘? The prison is where Donald Trump and his subservient factotums falsely sent Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a father of three who has never been charged with any crime and as CNN notes: “has become a political pawn in the Trump administration’s quest to dramatically expand the power of the presidency over immigration matters as President Donald Trump pursues a deportation campaign.”
NPR fills in the details of the sort of hellhole Trump has no compulsion to ship human beings off to, even on wrong and false pretenses, violating their due process and ignoring and contravening direct judges’ orders:
The prison can hold up to 40,000 inmates … Each cell can fit 65 to 70 prisoners … CECOT prisoners do not receive visits and are never allowed outdoors … The prison does not offer workshops or educational programs to prepare them to return to society after their sentences … The prison’s dining halls, break rooms, gym and board games are for guards.
~ NPR: ‘What to know about CECOT, El Salvador’s mega-prison for gang members‘
A USA Today graphic explainer fills in other details, noting that utensils for eating are not available “and inmates eat with their hands,” while their heads are shaved every five days and they sleep on stacked metal bunks without mattresses or sheets and with artificial lighting glaring 24 hours a day.
This, then, is what Riley Moore celebrated—who, by then, had cleansed his forehead from his post-church Ash Wednesday photo posted to Facebook— with his double thumbs-up in front of CECOT. The gesture was a fanboy shout-out to Donald Trump, who is hailed almost every other post on Moore’s Facebook page. Carol Miller, too, found it fundamentally worth clearing her busy congressional schedule to make the jaunt to a gulag.
As for fundamentals, the real question for such servile and obsequious politicians is what if, as countless news stories appear to indicate, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, is flat-out innocent? And what about the so-far unnamed innocents, possibly numbering in the hundreds, whose families and children are in agony now, with not a mention in the media of their disappeared loved ones?
And what about one of you or yours, or of me or mine, ending up drop-shipped in the dark of the night, into the cattle pen of what surely has more of the hallmarks of a concentration camp than a prison?
After all, even as the president of the United States refuses to pressure Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele to bring Abrego Garcia home, instead promising to pay Bukele $15 million to stash folks his cracked psyche deems deportable, Trump — being the rabidly vicious person he is — encouraged his strongman best bud down south to build more mega-prison gulags since “homegrowns are next.”
Check out the links above for more on what Riley Moore and Carol Miller are spending down their political capital to support. Given Moore’s overtly ‘LOOK at how religious I am!!!’ posts from his ‘MooreForWV’ Facebook timeline, you have to wonder what someone from the truest heart of the Christian community and tradition right here in West Virginia might have to say about what happens when a government goes off the rails and heads far off the reservation from anything and everything Christ ever taught?
Let’s also hear what state delegate Mike Pushkin, head of the West Virginia Democratic Party, has to say about ‘Riley and Carol’s Excellent Adventure to a Trump-hired Hellhole’:
“At least one person from that prison—Mr Garcia, from Maryland —was never convicted of any crime. Instead of a fact-checking mission or doing their best bring back Mr. Garcia, Congressman Moore and the rest of his crew down there chose to pose for selfies.”
~ Del. Mike Pushkin
Moore did not respond to WSAZ in response to Pushkin’s remarks. Yet, borrowing a thumb from his guy Trump—always double down when things go south—Moore tweeted back at his social media firestorm, saying that he is: “Now even more determined to support President Trump’s efforts to secure our homeland.”
One longs to live in a state with politicians of the caliber and moral mettle of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-MD. He used the power and influence of his post to smoke out the fact that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was indeed still alive and to meet with him in person at CECOT:
Unlike, that is to say, the self-aggrandizing and cruelty-endorsing selfies of a Riley Moore. Or the silent acquiescence of a Carol Miller, who had enough mojo, perhaps she thought, to go to the gulag. But was just not as ballsy—or quite as Trump toady-ish—as Riley to post a grinning snap to the web in front of the America’s new overnight shipping concentration camp.
How does an individual, how does a spiritual institution like the Christian Church, how does anyone who invokes the name of Jesus, respond to a state bent on enforcing its will via violence and subjugation? Here is a pointed sermon by a West Virginia reverend for the times that we are living out all across America. | READ ON
