Why Is Trump So Intent on Sending Illegal Immigrant Noncriminals to Prison Camps in El Salvador?

https://www.cato.org/blog/why-trump-so-intent-sending-illegal-immigrant-noncriminals-prison-camps-el-salvador


The Trump administration is rapidly spending its political capital and attacking the courts by deporting noncriminals to El Salvador. In its zeal to speed deportations and close the border, it declared MS-13 and Tren de Aragua terrorist organizations, even though the latter is a loosely organized Venezuelan prison gang, while the former is a criminal gang. Then, it claimed several Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants in the United States are members of those gangs on flimsy evidence. Lastly, Trump used the Alien Enemies Act to deport some migrants without due process to Salvadoran supermax prisons when he claimed they were members of those gangs. Some of the deportations likely even violated federal court orders, and around three-quarters of them had no criminal record.

Not even the Bush administration attempted such brazen, unconstitutional violations of civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11, which was a real national crisis. Today’s crisis is fake. Unlike al Qaeda, illegal immigrants in Tren de Aragua or MS-13 didn’t commit a terrorist attack. Nobody has ever been murdered in an attack on US soil committed by terrorists who entered as illegal immigrants. If deportees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia were vicious criminals or terrorists, then their deportations wouldn’t be a political scandal. A legal squabble, a few headlines, perhaps a disturbing court case, and an attack on our institutions, but a sitting US senator certainly wouldn’t have visited him. Moreover, the president of El Salvador wouldn’t have staged the photo to make Abrego Garcia look like he was on vacation, and Trump wouldn’t be digging in to keep him there.

If Trump’s deportation dragnet had real MS-13 kingpins to boast about, he wouldn’t need to bend the law to toss Abrego Garcia—a man with no convictions—into a foreign prison. The fact that a senator had to intervene in Abrego Garcia’s case speaks volumes: It shows how extraordinary and unjustified this policy is.

Abrego Garcia wasn’t the first. Before him, Trump deported Venezuelan asylum-seeker Andry Hernández Romero to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. Why such a harsh punishment for an asylum seeker who was a makeup artist? A disgraced former Milwaukee police officer turned prison contractor who lost his job after drunkenly crashing his car into a house claimed that Hernández Romero was a Tren de Aragua member. Turns out that Hernández Romero was not a member of that jumbled prison gang, but he hasn’t been heard from since arriving in El Salvador. Hernández Romero’s case is even more tragic, and it underscores the same point: lacking actual criminals, the administration went after an innocent asylum-seeker, and had to rely on a sketchy ex-cop’s tattoo paranoia to do it. Over the dissent of the Supreme Court’s most conservative judges, the Court temporarily paused the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport people.

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