Due process for illegally deported migrants! Cruelty is the Trump brand

Donald Trump’s Deportation Obsession
Right-wing ideologues have long fantasized about the prospect of mass self-deportation: the Trump Administration is attempting something far more radical. Now all Americans are at risk for deportation at Donald Trump's whim. 

Published in The New Yorker magazine, by Jonathan Blitzer

El Salvador Navib Bukele, president

In 2022, (three years ago), in El Salvador, after the MS-13 gang killed eighty-seven people in a span of seventy-two hours, the country's President Nayib Bukele called on his loyalists in the legislature to declare a “state of exception.” The government could arrest anyone it deemed suspicious, and those taken into custody lost their right to a legal defense. Since then, in a country of six million people, eighty-five thousand have been jailed, many without credible charges; according to the human-rights group Cristosal, three hundred and sixty-eight of them have died. The gangs have been decimated, but the “state of exception” remains in effect, something that has earned Bukele plaudits from the MAGA movement and, last week, an invitation to the White House.

The Trump Administration is now paying El Salvador six million dollars to hold deported immigrants—among them more than a hundred Venezuelans removed under the rarely invoked Alien Enemies Act of 1798—in a supermax prison that Bukele built for his crackdown. He has proudly advertised his services as “outsourcing.” He has also offered to house American citizens convicted of crimes, and Donald Trump appears to be considering it. “Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands,” Bukele told the President and members of his Cabinet in the Oval Office. “I like to say that we actually liberated millions.” “Who gave him that line?” Trump said. “Do you think I can use that?”

Right-wing ideologues have long fantasized about the prospect of mass self-deportation: the idea is that, if the government is sufficiently hostile to immigrants, they will feel that they have no choice but to leave the country. The Trump Administration is attempting something far more radical. In a campaign reminiscent of Bukele’s “state of exception,” it has moved to suspend the rule of law; this is as much an attack on immigrants as it is a fever dream of untrammelled power.

At the White House, Bukele and Trump flaunted their defiance of a unanimous ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Justices  instructed the Administration to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man who has lived in Maryland for nearly fifteen years and was deported last month to Bukele’s prison, owing to what government lawyers admit was an “administrative error.” Trump’s initial response was to say that he was powerless to bring Abrego Garcia back. Before long, top officials started calling him an MS-13 gangster and a terrorist, even though he’s never been convicted of a crime. Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, simply asserted that the Court had ruled in Trump’s favor and that “nobody was mistakenly deported anywhere.” 

On April 18, 2025, after Maryland’s Senator Chris Van Hollen travelled to El Salvador and met with Abrego Garcia, who had been transferred to another facility, El Salvadore's Bukele said, “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honor of staying in El Salvador’s custody.” 

But, the White House tagged Van Hollen on X, saying that Abrego Garcia is “NOT coming back.”

✸So what changed❓ Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been returned to the United States to face criminal charges CNN reports.

Migrants are human being who deserve due process rights provided by the Constitution❗