American Desaparecidos: Trump’s War on Immigrants
Protester satirizes Donald Trump during a massive rally in New York City in April denouncing the administration’s anti-immigration policies and massive agency cuts. Photo/Joe Maniscalco
By Steve Wishnia
More than 100 days after he was abducted from Maryland by ICE agents and shipped to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still in jail. After nearly three months of using lies and stalling to evade court orders for his release, the Trump junta brought him back to face highly questionable federal charges of human trafficking.
The Salvadoran immigrant, an apprentice union sheet-metal worker and father/stepfather to three children, is only one of the thousands of immigrants chewed up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s no-due-process detention-and-deportation machine.
There was Jesus Jose Carrera-Marquez, a DoorDash driver and the father of a 5-year-old daughter, seized on May 31 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and disappeared back to Venezuela. ICE agents smashing people’s car windows to drag them out in Spokane, Washington, and New Bedford, Massachusetts. The 76 people arrested in a raid on a meatpacking plant in Omaha, Nebraska on June 10—some deported, and 63 taken to a county jail 280 miles away, where the sheriff said none were violent offenders and some might be eligible to work in the U.S. legally.
Masked agents—or men dressed like agents—abduct people from courthouses. ICE’s favorite tactic is to drop removal proceedings against immigrants seeking asylum and then grab them in the halls.
On May 29, they seized a Honduran mother and her two children after a hearing in Los Angeles. The younger child, a 6-year-old boy with acute leukemia, wet himself when an agent revealed his gun. They were taken to a detention center in Texas.
Of the 238 Venezuelan men shanghaied to the CECOT prison along with Abrego Garcia in March, CBS News reported in April that it could not find criminal records for three-fourths of them. ICE insisted they were all members of the Tren de Aragua gang, but its evidence against many was simply that they had tattoos of crowns, supposedly a gang logo. One, Andry Hernandez Romero, was a gay makeup artist whose ink honored his parents; the other, Jerce Reyes Barrios, was a soccer player sporting the logo of the perennial Spanish champion Real Madrid.
These people have been effectively disappeared. Although they were sent to a prison hired by the U.S. government, Trump’s minions and mouthpieces argue that they are beyond U.S. jurisdiction. They have repeatedly refused to confirm that Hernandez Romero, who had been seeking asylum here, is still alive.
Legal chicanery
Abrego Garcia’s case is the most detailed record of the extremes the regime has gone to, the sadistic racism and brazen dishonesty of its war on immigrants.
When he was seized by ICE agents on March 12 while driving home with his son, he already had a court order that he should not be returned to El Salvador because his life would be in danger from gangs there. He won that order after ICE detained him for several months in 2019, claiming he was a member of the MS-13 gang—because he’d been wearing a Chicago Bulls cap, and a corrupt detective said an informant had told him Abrego Garcia was a gang leader.
Sheet-Metal union apprentice Kilmar Abrego Garcia is still being held in jail.
He was flown to a detention center in Texas and then to El Salvador, in defiance of a stay of deportation his lawyers had won. Trump’s minions and mouthpieces mocked it with ha-ha-too-late contempt. They later defied a Supreme Court ruling that the government should “facilitate” his return, with the ludicrous claim that the U.S. had no power to get El Salvador to release him, and the semantic contortions that “facilitate” did not mean “cause to happen.”
They repeatedly insisted that Abrego Garcia was a violent thug, an MS-13 member. Trump showed a photo of Abrego Garcia’s tattooed fingers amateurishly doctored to add “MS 13” on national TV and claimed it was proof.
Finally, on June 6, he was returned to the U.S. and clapped into jail in Tennessee. The indictment relied on reports that three supposed co-conspirators said he was part of a nine-year scheme to smuggle drugs and immigrants from Texas to Maryland. The sole overt act it mentioned was that he had been stopped by police in central Tennessee in November 2022 while driving a vanload of immigrants who he said were construction workers.
That reeked of jailhouse snitches concocting a story to get their sentences reduced. A June 22 opinion by federal Magistrate Judge Barbara D. Holmes noted that one of the anonymous informants was the “acknowledged ringleader” of the operation, serving a 30-month sentence for human smuggling. He got released early, and his deportation was deferred on “in exchange for his testimony.” The other two, both relatives, were seeking similar deals.
The informants claimed that Abrego Garcia had made the trip from Maryland to Houston—more than 1,400 miles each way—three or four times a week. And on a photographed list the government used to argue that he should not be released on bail because one of the passengers in the van in 2022 was a minor, the alleged 15-year-old’s birthdate appears to have been altered from “2001” to “2007.”
But if Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin were a talking doll, the phrase she’d utter would be “he will never go free on American soil.”
The racism is the point
All this is coming from the regime of a president whose entry into national politics came from claiming that Barack Obama was not born in the United States, despite his birth announcement being printed in the Honolulu Advertiser on August 13, 1961. Who last year insisted that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing people’s cats and dogs and eating them. (Vice President JD Vance said that even if that was a lie, it got people’s attention about immigration.) And whose loyalty-oath falsehood is that he won the 2020 election.
Trump and his minions and mouthpieces incessantly insist that they’re deporting “murderers, rapists, and other violent criminals,” hoodlums hauling hundredweights of fentanyl across the Rio Grande, aliens too despicable to deserve due process.
Meanwhile, Trump has pardoned Ross Ulbricht, serving a life sentence for running the Silk Road dark-web marketplace for heroin and more, and commuted the sentence of Larry Hoover, leader of the notorious Chicago gang the Gangster Disciples. Hoover was serving multiple life sentences for running the gang’s cocaine and heroin operation out of his state prison cell, where he was serving 150-200 years for a 1973 murder.
The racism is blatant. The Trump administration is ending temporary legal status for refugees from war-ravaged Afghanistan and Haiti, while rolling out the red carpet for white South Africans, claiming they were refugees from “genocide.” In June, Trump-movement influencers Charlie Kirk, Matt Walsh, and pedophile-pizzeria fantasist Jack Posobiec posted identical “ban all Third World immigration, legal and illegal” messages on X.
Protester carries sign calling for Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s release.
In a wee-hours screed on X June 25, White House anti-immigrant czar Stephen Miller wrote that democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim of Indo-Ugandan ancestry, winning the New York Democratic mayoral primary was “the clearest warning yet of what happens to a society when it fails to control migration…. A government must not sanction the migration of anyone who rejects the nation’s values.”
This is nothing new. The history of the American anti-immigrant movement is one of bigotry against successive ethnicities, beginning with the Irish in the 1840s. Virtually all Chinese immigration was banned in 1882, and the national-quota system enacted in 1924 was designed to exclude Italians, Jews, Asians, and Eastern Europeans. The 1965 Immigration Act ended the quota system, but still left the door closed for people without special skills or relatives here.
By today’s standards, Ireland in 1847, the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement in 1903, and Italy’s Calabria region in 1907 were all “Third World,” home to impoverished subsistence farmers with no electricity.
The deportation of Palestinian-rights activists for alleged anti-Semitism is also rank hypocrisy, coming from an administration where Vance and special guest agency-wrecker Elon Musk both endorsed Germany’s neo-Nazi party last year. Neo-Nazi Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, before he was pardoned for his role in the January 2021 Capitol attack, was given an award at Trump’s New Jersey golf course last August. Edward Martin, now head of the Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group, called him an “extraordinary leader.”
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has overruled lower federal courts’ actions ordering the government to provide due process. On June 23, without any explanation, it stayed injunctions against shipping immigrants to random countries such as South Sudan and Libya without giving them a chance to contest it.
On June 27, by a 6-3 vote, it denied three injunctions against a Trump executive order that carved out an exception to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The order denied citizenship to children born here if their mother was unlawfully or temporarily present and their father was neither a citizen nor a legal permanent resident.
The decision was based on legal technicalities, on whether lower courts had the power to issue nationwide “universal injunctions.” But its practical effect is that it will enable the Trump regime to deny a fundamental right for years—a right enshrined in the Constitution in 1868 to put a stake through the heart of the Dred Scott decision—until multiple class-action suits wend their way through the system and succeed.