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