New York Times:

Shortly after the Trump administration deported hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador this weekend, the Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, posted a three-minute video on social media. It featured shackled men being marched off a plane over a dramatic electronic soundtrack and into prison, where they were shaved bald….Many of the 85,000 Salvadorans apprehended have disappeared into the prison system, held for years without trial and without their families knowing if they are alive….Mr. Bukele said the deportees would be held for at least a year and made to perform labor and attend workshops under a program called “Zero Idleness.”

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death:

There is one form of identification that deserves special attention, since it is found in the great majority of slaveholding societies: this is the shorn or partly shorn head….It is not unreasonable to conclude that the shorn head of the slave was one aspect of a stark symbolic statement: the man who was enslaved was in a permanent condition of liminality and must forever mourn his own social death.