What Does the Kilmar Abrego Garcia Deportation to El Salvador Mean for American Citizens?

There is all of this talk about Kilmar Abrego Garcia being sent off to a prison in El Salvador, and despite both liberals and conservatives having vastly different accounts of the background of the case, what is really happening? If you only consume right-wing media, you might hear that he was an illegal immigrant and member of the Los Angeles-originating gang of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) who committed heinous acts of murder and human trafficking, while if you partake in left-wing punditry, you might be convinced that he was an innocent “Maryland dad” mistakenly sent to a concentration camp in a foreign country. Although the answer is probably somewhere in the middle, the purpose of this writing is to focus on the implications of this case and what they can mean for American citizens, because like many things, bad precedents often start with something that many people initially cheer on before turning into something more sinister.

Before getting to my primary argument, it is important to understand some of the background that led to Garcia being deported by the Donald Trump administration and shipped off to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in Tecoluca, El Salvador. At age sixteen (in 2012), Garcia illegally came to the United States (through Texas) to escape persecution from an El Salvadoran gang (Barrio 18) that threatened his family’s business, and he moved to Maryland to live with his brother, who was an American citizen, and ended up marrying Jennifer Vasquez Sura, who was also an American citizen. However, in 2019, he was arrested for loitering in a Home Depot parking lot (looking for work), but since he was standing with an MS-13 member and had clothing (Chicago Bulls hat and a “hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents”) and tattoos that were indicative of Hispanic gang culture, he was suspected of being a gang member himself (a reliable confidential source said that Garcia had the gang name of “Chele”). However, because someone’s attire of choice is not enough to charge someone with a crime and there was not enough credible evidence that he was a member of MS-13, he was not charged with any crimes. Though he was suspected of being tied to a murder case as well, that ended up turning into nothing, however, he was handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation hearings, which brought up his potential gang membership. He was ultimately released with an order for asylum and prevented from being deported for an ongoing period of time.

In 2022, he was pulled over for a routine traffic stop (speeding) in Tennessee and suspected of human trafficking because there were eight individuals in the car, but it was ultimately determined that he was actually driving coworkers between construction sites. ICE was called because of the warning of his potential MS-13 affiliation after running the driver’s license, but the agency told the state police to release him. During this time, Garcia took on an apprenticeship program in sheet metal and did not have a criminal record, fathered three children (two of which were from his wife’s previous marriage), and was granted legal residency with a work permit in the United States. Although his wife did file for a temporary civil protective order against him out of an abundance of caution (due to domestic violence trauma from her previous marriage), she rescinded the order after they got counseling, and she is fighting to get him back from El Salvador (this should cover all of the items that both sides like to use to either smear him or defend him).

Last month, Garcia was then pulled over in an Ikea parking lot (what is it with these department store parking lots?) while driving home from a jobsite in Baltimore with one of his kids in the car, and then, he was handcuffed and taken away to facilities in Maryland, Louisiana, and Texas, before being shipped off to CECOT maximum security prison. The Trump administration admitted that Garcia was sent to El Salvador by mistake, but despite the Supreme Court ruling that he should be sent back (he was protected from deportation, but the Court stopped short of requiring the “facilitating” of the release), it continues to defy the order, claiming that El Salvador is a sovereign country (both leaders recently met and could have easily reached an agreement) and that Garcia is a dangerous gang member (which, as discussed, has not been proven). Of course, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele asserts that he does not have the authority to “smuggle a terrorist into the United States,” so even if these are illegitimate excuses (and they are), there is a legal standstill occurring before our eyes. At this point, if Garcia were to be sent back, he would likely incite a bunch of protests and blow the whistle on his treatment at the Salvadoran prison, despite the staged attempt by Bukele to dress him up and release him from prison for a day to interview with Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen and make people less concerned about what is transpiring there (Van Hollen went to the facility to defend the due process rights of Garcia).

There is actually evidence that Garcia was a gang member and an illegal immigrant, but at the same time, he has not been charged with any crimes. So, where does that leave us? As mentioned, the Supreme Court ruled that Garcia was illegally deported, and the United States Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit said that it does not matter if the president arbitrarily determines that Garcia is a terrorist or gang member because “he is still entitled to due process.” If the president is confident enough to make these claims, he should be confident enough to be able to bring legal proceedings before a judge and jury, but as we are starting to see more and more, the Trump administration lacks respect for the federal courts and the checks and balances that the United States Constitution lays out. The president would prefer to bypass the legislative and judicial branches and dictate through executive fiat.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (in the Bill of Rights) specifically states that no person shall be searched or seized (away to a detention camp) without a judicially-issued and specific warrant and probable cause of a crime having been committed; while the Fifth Amendment makes it clear that no person shall be imprisoned without due process of law, which leads to the Sixth Amendment’s right to a trial by an impartial jury in the district where the crime occurred (not in El Salvador or Louisiana). Article I Section 9 Clause 2 of the Constitution also specifically emphasizes the Writ of Habeas Corpus (“you shall have the body” in English), which allows someone who has been unjustly or illegally arrested to challenge his or her detention. The idea of habeas corpus dates back to Clause 39 of the Magna Carta of 1215, and it has been an integral part of English common law since the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. It is clear that the founding fathers regarded this right as a necessity, or they would never have included it in the Constitution. As I discussed previously in my article regarding the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, John Adams and the Federalists did not live up to constitutional principles, and Thomas Jefferson and the Democratic-Republican Party challenged detentions and infringements on free speech. Throughout American history, from Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus during the American Civil War to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to George W. Bush’s torture at Guantanamo Bay, the right to challenge one’s detention has been violated, and now, President Trump gets to join that club.

Some will argue that illegal immigrants or legal residents are not citizens, and therefore, they are not entitled to trials or due process. However, there are two responses to this: one philosophical and one legal. First of all, our founding fathers articulated the idea that “all men” are created equal and granted rights by God. If that is the case, citizenship status does not actually matter since people from every country would be considered a human being, regardless of where they happened to have been born or continue to live. Either God gives us our rights and they exist outside of government, or the government grants rights through citizenship. If you fall into the latter camp, you must concede that people have government-granted privileges and not rights.

The second argument is based on constitutional law and Supreme Court rulings. U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark of 1898 settled the issue by stating that Chinese non-citizen laborers were included under the protections of the Fifth Amendment, and thus, the term “person” meant exactly what it said in the Constitution and did not simply mean “citizen.” The Refugee Act of 1980 also defined that “person” meant any refugee who fears persecution at home, and Boumediene v. Bush of 2008 maintained that habeas corpus protections included non-citizens held on foreign territory (referring to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba). You can freely follow Trump down the wrong constitutional path, but just remember that history does not look favorably on those who violate basic human rights.

If you are still not convinced that all humans have the God-given right to challenge their detention, perhaps the next step will do it for you. During his meeting with Salvadoran President Bukele, President Trump requested that the Central American nation build five new detention centers to “make room” for more deportees, including, as Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt alluded to, repeat offenders who are American citizens. President Trump seemed to go even further by implying that any American citizen who is convicted of a violent crime (such as rape, hitting people with baseball bats, and pushing people into subways) should be transported to El Salvador, and he has officially directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to research “legal pathways” to do this.

In the end, this could all be bluster, and he may not go any further than rounding up illegal immigrants and legal residents sent there by mistake, but what is to say that the next president would not take that precedent further and target dissidents (perhaps a Democratic president could send Republican citizens who criticize the administration to foreign countries to eliminate them)? Do we really want a system in place that will allow the federal government to arrest Americans for speaking their minds? You could say that that is farfetched, but thirteen years ago, could you imagine that the federal government would be collecting data on and surveilling all Americans, or just six years ago, would you think that the state governments would be shutting down businesses and assemblies or forcing a needle in your arm because of a virus? If you cannot even try to imagine how the Trump administration would abuse its power more than it already is and send innocent Americans to El Salvador, you are not critically thinking. Remember that King George III and the British Parliament allowed for American colonists charged with rioting or capital crimes to be sent to another colony or overseas to face trials (this was one of the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence).

Why would we allow President Trump to behave like King George III and send Americans to El Salvador? Did we not secede from that type of monarchical system? One thing that we can be sure of is that many Trump supporters will be cheering this on the entire time, until that same type of policy is used against them. How quickly have conservatives forgotten that January 6^th protesters were held without trial (sometimes in solitary confinement) by the Joe Biden administration? Now that they have the power, they feel as if they are entitled to display the same type of gross disregard for the Constitution. If we allow this to continue, who knows what will happen.

Thank you for reading, and please check out my book, The Global Bully, and website.