By Emmie Meeks
Elm Staff Writer
On March 15, an apparent administrative error led to the wrongful deportation of a Maryland man with protected legal status, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to an infamous El Salvador prison. The Trump administration is refusing to take action to bring him back because of alleged gang ties. The claims are unfounded and a pitiful excuse for the blatantly racially biased inaction of the Trump administration.
According to the Associated Press, Abrego Garcia was arrested in Baltimore on March 12 after he completed his apprenticeship shift and picked up his son. On March 15, he was on a plane headed for El Salvador with over 200 other migrants.
Abrego Garcia first came to the U.S. in 2011 as an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador seeking safety from gang violence and connected with his older brother, a U.S. citizen and Maryland resident. Since 2006, he had been attempting to evade gang members that had “stalked, hit, and threatened to kidnap and kill him in order to coerce his parents to succumb to their increasing demands for extortion,” according to the Associated Press, quoting a complaint filed by Abrego Garcia’s lawyer.
In 2019 police arrested and questioned Abrego Garcia regarding his alleged status as a gang member, specifically of MS-13. When he denied being a gang member, ICE took over. ICE’s case was unfounded, as their only supposed evidence was a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie. Law enforcement tried to assert that his clothing allegedly associated him with the east coast subdivisions of the gang, according to the Associated Press.
Abrego Garcia’s arrests in 2019 and this year are classic cases of racial profiling executed unabashedly by law enforcement and the Trump administration alike. His nationality placed him squarely in a box that President Trump and his administration have decided to discard.
After Abrego Garcia applied for and was denied asylum in October 2019, ICE released him and did not appeal the judge’s decision to grant him protection from being deported. In other words, ICE had their chance to take legal action against him and instead chose to let him stay in the U.S. under protection.
Therefore, Abrego Garcia should not have been deported in the first place because of his protected status.
The admission of error by Trump officials as high up as Vice President JD Vance and their continued refusal to uphold a Maryland federal judge’s order to bring Abrego Garcia back by any means necessary further reiterated their stance on deportation: Trump will stop at nothing to rid America of who he deems to be dangerous.
President Trump’s immigration policy is continuing to cause a stir around the United States and the world since he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1789 in a recent executive order. This was only the fourth time the act has been invoked in U.S. history; the most recent occurrence was during World War II when the law was used to detain Japanese Americans.
The law does not have an ethically sound history, but then again, neither does President Trump.
According to the Associated Press, the pretenses for invoking the Alien Enemies Act include the president declaring the U.S. to be at war. Given that President Trump has not declared war with Venezuela, his invocation of the act is unlawful.
Under the act, President Trump ordered immigration officials to detain and deport Venezuelan migrants accused of being affiliates of the Tren de Aragua gang to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador.
According to the executive order, Tren de Aragua is “a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization…[that] unlawfully infiltrated the United States and [is] conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States.”
A back-and-forth battle has taken place in federal courts as a federal judge temporarily blocked the use of the law on March 15, the same day Abrego Garcia and 200 others were flown to El Salvador, according to CBS.
However, President Trump’s Salvadoran allies’ only response was “Oopsie…Too late,” as the planes were already in the air, according to the Associated Press.
What is worse, not all the men on board the planes were detained and deported under the Alien Enemies Act; 23 men, including Abrego Garcia, were deported under standard immigration law because of purported gang activity.
As Abrego Garcia’s erroneous deportation begs the question: how many of the other hundreds of migrants with him on March 15 were deported under an unlawful process or error?
By Trump’s standards, any immigrant caught in the wrong place, at the wrong time, wearing the wrong thing, will be sent to endure unimaginable imprisonment.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo Caption: Wrongful deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia shows the Trump administration’s disregard for due process.