The Trump administration has an arrangement with El Salvador to place deported undocumented immigrants and even American citizens convicted of crimes in one of the world’s most notorious prisons.
But if the administration is to be believed — a risky proposition under any circumstances — that deal doesn’t allow the U.S. government to get those people back, even if it made a mistake sending them there in the first place.
Welcome to the disappearance of human beings in America, a concept that befouls every ideal this nation is supposed to stand for.
Liberty. Human rights. Due process. A government bound by the rule of law.
Those principles vanished in an instant for Kilmar Abrego-Garcia, who was arrested March 12 and put on a plane three days later bound for El Salvador. There, he is now said to be imprisoned at the Terrorism Confinement Center, a massive, overcrowded facility where prisoners are never allowed outside, and from which El Salvador’s justice minister has said they will never return to their communities.
It turns out, however, that Mr. Abrego-Garcia’s deportation to this hellhole was a mistake.
Mr. Abrego-Garcia came to the U.S. in 2011 from El Salvador at the age of 16, fleeing gang violence there, and was granted protection from deportation by a judge in 2019. He lived in Maryland with his wife, a U.S. citizen, and their 5-year-old son. He had a job and no criminal record in either the U.S. or El Salvador.
But the government nonetheless put him on one of three flights full of deportees to El Salvador, flights that it failed to stop even after a judge ordered it. The roundup and deportations were done under President Donald J. Trump’s dubious invocation of the 18th-century Alien Enemies Act, under which he deemed the presence of members of foreign gangs equivalent to an invasion by another country. It’s a huge stretch that’s been challenged in court.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement now admits it erred in deporting Mr. Abrego-Garcia, even as the White House stands by the allegation that he is a member of the MS-13 gang — even a leader — despite its failure to produce any evidence. His family says it’s simply not true.
The administration claims it has no legal authority to get him back from El Salvador. That assertion may — or may not — be technically true, but practically and morally speaking it’s indefensible. If Secretary of State Marco Rubio can hatch a deal at El Salvador President Nayib Bukele’s lakeside country house to take U.S. deportees and even American citizens into his prisons, it strains credulity to suggest that Mr. Rubio, or Mr. Trump himself, can’t pick up a phone and request one of them back – especially in the case of such an egregious mistake.
This is not the first person the administration has apparently snatched off the street illegally. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University who was legally here on a student visa, was picked up in Sommerville, Mass., on March 25 by masked agents, put in an unmarked van, and eventually transported to Louisiana, despite a judge’s order that she not be removed from Massachusetts. Her offense? Expressing support for Palestinians amid the devastating war between Israel and Hamas.
The courts need to address the disappearance of people on U.S. soil as quickly as possible. Mr. Trump, who is on a crusade to implement the mass deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants, needs to be told clearly that he and everyone under him must operate according to the law and the Constitution, which, when it comes to certain basic rights like due process and free speech, applies not only to citizens but to everyone.
Regardless of whether you support Mr. Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, Americans should be able to agree on this: Letting the government suspend anyone’s rights on a whim is as un-American as it gets. And given Mr. Trump’s vilification of anyone who disagrees with him, we can all too easily see the slippery slope we’ll be on if this lawlessness goes unchecked.