Who of us has the right to live without fear? This is the question human rights lawyer Ruth Lopez has asked fearlessly in El Salvador — the country of my birth — for decades.

It’s a question we all need to ask ourselves in the United States as well.

For speaking boldly, Ruth is now in prison. She’s been held without trial since May 18, 2025 — now a year ago — when she was torn from her bed by police and arrested without any investigation or judicial warrant. Ruth has since had minimal contact with her family and lawyers.

Ruth’s crime? She opposed corruption.

When Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele signed a secret agreement with the Trump administration to accept $4.7 million for the illegal transfer of more than 200 U.S. deportees to El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, Ruth spoke up to defend their basic rights. She filed habeas corpus petitions for 76 families who wanted to know where their loved ones had been taken. Soon afterwards, she herself was arrested.

Ruth’s advocacy for democracy spans two decades. She worked for El Salvador’s Supreme Electoral Court to ensure transparency in elections, then for the Social Security Institute, where she fought to expand benefits for Salvadorans living abroad. She has also defended the right of Salvadorans abroad to vote.

As a member of El Salvador’s Superintendency of Competition, she issued more than $8 million in fines to businesses for illegal mergers and anti-competitive practices. After El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as an official currency in 2021, she represented victims of fraud.

Since joining the staff of Cristosal, a regional human rights organization, she has documented the Bukele regime’s use of state resources to spy on critics, make backroom deals with violent gangs, and the misuse of pandemic relief funds. She has continued to investigate corporate corruption, filing criminal complaints with the Attorney General and motions with the Constitutional Court.

For her efforts, Ruth was named one of 100 most influential women in the world by the BBC, and has received numerous awards — including the American Bar Association’s International Human Rights Award, the Magnitsky Human Rights Award, and the OCCRP Anti-Crime & Corruption Hero Award.

More than 500 organizations — including the American Bar Association, the New York City Bar Association, the Organization of American States, Human Rights Watch, Washington Office on Latin America, Human Rights First, the Robert F, and Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center, the Due Process of Law Foundation, Alianza Americas, and the organization I lead, People’s Action — are calling for Ruth’s immediate release.

Amnesty International has named Ruth a prisoner of conscience, and The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has determined she now faces “cruel and inhuman treatment” and the risk of irreparable harm to her life and integrity.

For me, Ruth represents what every Salvadoran — and every American — should want our society to be: a place where we live without fear for ourselves and our loved ones, where our rights are respected, our votes are counted, and the vulnerable have the same protections as the rich and powerful.

Here in the United States, what happened to Ruth is a warning. The Trump administration now looks to El Salvador not only as a destination for those it illegally detains and deports, but also as a model for how any of us can be detained and held indefinitely without charges.

Already, the Trump administration has indefinitely detained thousands upon thousands of immigrants as well as U.S. citizens, often without a warrant. They’ve detained and tried to deport people for writing op-eds, joining demonstrations, reporting on ICE, or otherwise exercising First Amendment rights. And they’ve been relentlessly harassing critics of all kinds with lawsuits, investigations, and trumped-up charges.

That’s why we can’t allow what happened to Ruth to stand.

To help, you can sign the petition to Congress (online at ​​https://ppls.ac/freeruth) demanding Ruth’s immediate release and calling on the U.S. to condition any future support for El Salvador on respecting human rights. You can also post a statement of support on social media with the hashtag #FreeRuth.

It is essential that El Salvador #FreeRuth now.

Sulma Arias is executive director of People’s Action, the nation’s largest network of grassroots power-building groups, with more than a million members in 30 states.

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