Lawlessness

The right to due process is central to the rule of law in the United States. Trump continues to ignore Constitutional rights. His administration illegally sent 250 men from the U.S. to a concentration camp in El Salvador. It claimed the men were all dangerous gang members who had committed crimes, but Bloomberg reported that 90% of the men sent had no criminal record. Judge James Boasberg ordered the government not to deport the men and, if they were already in the air, to turn the planes around. Trump ignored the judge.

After the men were landed, dictator Nayib Bukele of El Salvador posted on X, “Oopsie… Too late” with a laughing emoji. Secretary of State Marco Rubio retweeted his post.

29-year-old Abrego Garcia came to the U.S. in 2011 when he was only 16 to escape threats from a gang that was terrorizing his family. He settled in Maryland with his older brother, a U.S. citizen, and lived there until in 2019 he was picked up by police as he waited at a Home Depot to be picked up for work as a day laborer. Police transferred him to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

After a hearing, an immigration judge rejected his claim for asylum but said he could not be sent back to El Salvador, finding it credible that the Barrio 18 gang had been “targeting him and threatening him with death because of his family’s pupusa business.” The Trump Administration did not appeal that order. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security issued him a work permit, and he joined a union, working full time as a sheet metal apprentice. Ever since, Abrego Garcia has checked in annually with ICE as directed. He lives with his wife and their three children, and has never been charged with any crime.

Timeline of Lawlessness 

On March 12, ICE agents pulled Garcia’s car over, told his wife to come pick up their disabled son, and incarcerated Abrego Garcia. They attempted to coerce him into saying he was a member of MS-13. There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.

On March 15 the government rendered Abrego Garcia to the infamous CECOT prison which is a known site of human rights abuses, torture, extrajudicial killings. The U.S. government is paying El Salvador $6 million a year to incarcerate the individuals it sends there.

On March 31 the government admitted that its arrest and rendition of Abrego Garcia happened because of “administrative error” but refused to bring him back. It also accused him of being a member of the MS-13 gang and said that bringing him back to the U.S. would threaten the public. There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.

On April 4, U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than 11:59 pm on April 7. Judge Xinis ordered the administration to “facilitate and effectuate” Abrego Garcia’s return. In her opinion, Judge Xinis wrote that “although the legal basis for the mass removal of hundreds of individuals to El Salvador remains disturbingly unclear, Abrego Garcia’s case is categorically different—there were no legal grounds whatsoever for his arrest, detention, or removal.…. [H]is detention appears wholly lawless.” It is “a clear constitutional violation.” And yet administration officials “cling to the stunning proposition that they can forcibly remove any person—migrant and U.S. citizen alike—to prisons outside the United States, and then baldly assert they have no way to effectuate return because they are no longer the ‘custodian,’ and the Court thus lacks jurisdiction.”

The administration appealed her April 4 order to the Supreme Court, which handed down a 9–0 decision on April 10, requiring the Trump administration “to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador.” The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld Xinis’s order.

On April 14, Trump made it clear he would ignore the Supreme Court. Trump staged a meeting with Bukele to get media coverage for the lie that Abrego Garcia has been found to be a member of the MS-13 gang. As Greg Sargent reported in the New Republic, this story came from a police officer who, just weeks later, was suspended for “providing information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts.” There is still no evidence that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13.

The court ordered the administration to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S., as well as to give updates on what they are doing to make that return happen. To date, Judge Xinis said, “what the record shows is nothing has been done.”

When a reporter asked President Donald Trump if he would move to return Abrego Garcia to the United States, Trump answered: “Well, I’m not involved. You’ll have to speak to the lawyers, the [Department of Justice].”

On April 16, Boasberg issued an opinion saying that the court concluded “that probable cause exists to find the Government in criminal contempt.”

“The Constitution does not tolerate willful disobedience of judicial orders—especially by officials of a coordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” Boasberg wrote. Quoting Chief Justice John Marshall, who laid down the foundations of much of America law, Boasberg wrote: “To permit such officials to freely ‘annul the judgments of the courts of the United States’ would not just ‘destroy the rights acquired under those judgments’; it would make ‘a solemn mockery’ of ‘the constitution itself.’”

The administration appears to have tried to create a fiction whereby the U.S. can kidnap without due process, render them to prison in another country, and then declare it doesn’t have the power to get the person back. But as control over the narrative of their renditions is slipping out of their hands—influential podcaster Joe Rogan has been defending due process on his show—administration officials appear determined to paint Abrego Garcia as a dangerous criminal.

The White House posted on social media an image of a hand that has been very obviously altered by adding “M-S-1-3” over the knuckles. A social media post by Trump is superimposed on the image. It says: “This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such ‘a fine and innocent person.’ They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles, and two Highly Respected Courts found that he was a member of MS-13, beat up his wife, etc. I was elected to take bad people out of the United States, among other things. I must be allowed to do my job. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.” The White House account added: “If he tattoos like MS-13, beats women like MS-13, and tramples the law like MS-13—THEN HE’S PROBABLY MS-13.”

The image is clearly false. No court has found he was a member of MS-13. A prominent scholar of MS-13 Óscar Martínez commented: “I covered MS-13 for over a decade: its history, crimes, symbolism, cruelty, pacts with Salvadoran governments. I wrote a book about it. Never, ever, did any of the hundreds of sources I spoke to say anything that would allow us to believe Trump’s strange interpretation of tattoos.”

Chris Kluwe’s made a good point that “a sitting US President is using falsified evidence to try and deny due process to a man who has committed no crime.” Also, the administration’s insistence that Abrego Garcia will never come back to the U.S. flies in the face of the Supreme Court’s 9–0 decision that it must work to get him back to the U.S.

The Supreme Court also ordered the administration not to deport another group of undocumented Venezuelans under the authority of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.

President Donald J. Trump is claiming dictatorial power to ignore the due process of the law guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, declare someone is a criminal, kidnap them, send them to prison in a third country, and then claim that there is no way to get that person back.

“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter,” he wrote. “But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.” The court noted that if the government is so sure of its position, then it should be confident in presenting its facts to a court of law.