Michelle Deng
The United States has long prided itself on being a global beacon of liberty and the rule of the law. Yet, within months of a second Trump administration, that commitment has been replaced by authoritarian rule. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, one of the many undocumented migrants who have been shipped to an El Salvadorian super-maximum security prison without due process. His arrest and the administration’s refusal to bring him back is indicative of the direction of the nation under President Donald Trump’s leadership. His fascist impulses are unconstitutional, unethical, and a stark betrayal of the very principle of due process and human rights that the U.S. claims to defend.
Abrego Garcia’s case exemplifies the Trump administration’s transparent display of bureaucratic negligence and executive defiance. On March 31, ICE officials admitted in court that Abrego Garcia had been deported due to what they described as “an administrative error.” This vague phrase, however, does not fully capture the gravity of the situation: A man was removed from U.S. soil and deported to El Salvador without due process to potentially remain in prison for the rest of his life. This so-called “error” was not harmless oversight; it was a failure of the nation’s legal safeguards that are supposed to prevent such injustice.
Recognizing the severity of this constitutional violation, on April 4, a federal judge ordered the administration to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. no later than April 7, but the administration refused to comply. Instead of correcting the mistake, the Department of Justice appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court was strikingly unified in its swift response: a unanimous ruling in favor of returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S. However, its decision was ambiguous because, while the judges endorsed a lower court’s order, they signaled that federal courts may not have the authority to force the executive branch to carry out such an order.
Capitalizing on this uncertainty, the Trump administration openly defied the court’s recommendation to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return. Officials including Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller and Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly defended sending Abrego Garcia to a foreign prison without due process. Miller claimed that the court had “reversed” the lower court’s order and struck down its “main components” in its unanimous decision. That statement was not just misleading — it was outright false.
What Miller offered was not a good-faith interpretation of the court’s language. It was a distortion designed to shield the administration from accountability. His comments manufactured a legal pretext to justify keeping a man who has never been convicted of any crime locked away in a foreign prison beyond the reach of the American judicial system. Yet, the fifth amendment gives every person — regardless of citizenship — the right to due process, making Trump’s disregard for the Constitution blatantly un-American.
Abrego Garcia is not the only one who has been shipped away. Hundreds of migrants have been sent to El Salvador’s supermax prison. Despite those deported being branded as “worst of the worst,” over 90% of them have no criminal record. If the Trump administration truly believes that these undocumented immigrants are dangerous criminals, it has every opportunity to prosecute them in a court of law. But that isn’t the goal. The aim here is not justice — it is disappearance. The goal is removal without trial, without evidence, and without accountability.
Abrego Garcia’s story makes the cruelty of this policy impossible to ignore. At 16, he fled El Salvador, claiming that a local gang threatened to kill his brother and assault his sister. Like so many fleeing gang violence, Abrego Garcia entered the U.S. without papers. He built a life in Maryland, married a U.S. citizen, and is raising three children with her. Abrego Garcia worked in construction, was a part of a local union, and was training for a vocational license at the University of Maryland. In 2019, an immigration judge granted Abrego Garcia a “withholding of removal” status to protect him from being deported to El Salvador, where he was at risk of being physically harmed. Following that court ruling, he would check in with ICE authorities on an annual basis. Despite all of that, the Trump administration still sent him away.
Abrego Garcia’s sentencing to a foreign gulag is not an isolated mistake. It’s a test of what the administration can get away with. It is a test of whether the courts can be ignored, whether executive resistance can override constitutional rights, and whether fear and distortion can replace due process as the foundation of American law.
Trump has already hinted at what comes next. During his Oval Office remarks with El Salvador’s President Nayib Armando Bukele Ortez, he floated the idea of also shipping away U.S. citizens who he claims are “homegrown criminals.” Though exiling U.S. citizens to a foreign country is patently unconstitutional, Trump’s recent incarceration of migrants who haven’t been convicted of a crime to a foreign prison indicates that he might try to sweep up innocent Americans next.
This is not a slippery slope. It is a staircase that Trump is gleefully descending. Trump is testing the boundaries of executive power in real time, and if he succeeds in treating deportation as a tool for vengeance, no one’s rights are safe. When the government can make people disappear without trial, it is not enforcing the law. It is destroying it. This is not law enforcement. This is naked fascism, cloaked in bureaucracy and justified by lies.