"Whether you're tuned in to MSNBC or Newsmax, you've heard the same tough-on-crime soundbites-the urgent warnings about "dangerous migrants" being deported to protect American values. But that's not the full story. In fact, it's far from it.

The United States has quietly deported hundreds of Venezuelan men to El Salvador's notorious CECOT prison, a facility so brutal it makes Guantanamo look like a Carnival Cruise. Officials tout it as a solution for "criminal migrants," but here's what they don't tell you.

Inside CECOT, prisoners are locked in 24/7 solitary confinement, denied sunlight and human contact for years at a time. Since 2022, over 150 deaths have been reported-some due to torture, others to sheer medical neglect. Inmates sleep on concrete floors in overcrowded, rat-infested cells with no sanitation. Families must pay bribes just to confirm their loved ones are still alive. Even El Salvador's own government has called it a "laboratory for punishment," not for rehabilitation.

And who are these men being sent there? Seventy-five percent had no criminal record. Among them: Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist who fled Venezuela to escape persecution, and Jerce Reyes Barrios, a soccer player deported simply because an officer misinterpreted his tattoo. Of those who did have a record-just 22 percent-the majority were charged with petty offenses like trespassing or minor theft. Only a handful were accused of violence.

Then there's the heartbreaking case of Kilmar Abrego, a father from Maryland. He was deported despite having a court order that should have protected him from removal. ICE later admitted the error, but it was too late-Kilmar remains stranded in Venezuela, still separated from his U.S.-citizen children.

And through it all, the hypocrisy is staggering.

We're outsourcing human rights abuses that our country once condemned-or at least claimed to. President Biden rightly called out China's Uyghur camps as crimes against humanity. Yet under Trump's administration, we sent non-criminals to one of the most hellish prisons on earth. And we did it without blinking.

What's criminal is not the people we deported. It's the system that sent a gay man to a living nightmare over a tattoo. The system that condemned hundreds of people with no criminal history to what amounts to a death camp.

And to those who still stand on their pulpits and proclaim, "This is a Christian nation," I ask: Where is your compassion? Where is your outrage? On Judgment Day, when Jesus asks you why-why you turned your back on the innocent-what will you say?