In a mere three months, the Trump administration has arrested legal residents, stripped them of their status, accused them of being members of transnational gangs, and sent them to a prison labor camp in a foreign country. Upon scrutiny, many of these cases reveal a disturbing pattern: many of those deported have no criminal record, and in some instances, no evidence of gang affiliations.
But President Donald Trump’s ambitions for mass deportation do not end with undocumented migrants or alleged criminals. United States citizens have also been deported, such as four children of undocumented immigrants who, as The Barbed Wire previously reported, were detained in February by Customs and Border Protection agents while traveling with their family to a Houston children’s hospital for emergency medical care for one of the children, who had a brain tumor removed. Such removals are a part of the Trump administration’s desire to end birthright citizenship, which the Supreme Court upheld in a ruling 127 years ago.
Now, Trump is openly considering sending more United States citizens to the Terrorism Confinement Center, also known by the Spanish-language acronym CECOT, a prison in El Salvador that has been accused of systemic human rights violations and described by various experts as a “concentration camp,” “penal colony,” or “permanent prison camp.”
“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns. You’ve got to build about five more places,” Trump said to El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, who has described himself as a dictator.
“Yeah, we’ve got space,” Bukele replied.
The Trump administration has paid Bukele’s government millions of dollars to house immigrants deported from the U.S. at CECOT, a financial arrangement that could violate the Leahy Law, which restricts foreign military assistance to security forces suspected of human rights abuses. In a twisted game of pass-the-buck, Trump, the self-professed master dealmaker, has claimed he is unable to fulfill the unanimous Supreme Court ruling to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia — a Salvadoran immigrant and Maryland resident who was mistakenly deported and imprisoned at CECOT — while Bukele has said he won’t release Garcia. In response, the judge overseeing the case, James Boasberg, has launched proceedings to determine whether Trump administration officials should face criminal contempt of court charges, having found probable cause for such charges.
“The thought that these two governments can work out this deal, but say that we can’t facilitate the return of one person is obviously disingenuous and insane,” Jacqueline Watson, a lawyer in Austin and the second vice president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told The Barbed Wire. “Sometimes people get deported in the appeals process before the appeals are over, and they get brought back when they win.”
But in Garcia’s case, “Their decision flouts the power of the court,” she said.
Critics from across the political spectrum have condemned Trump’s proposal to send U.S. citizens to the notorious maximum security prison in El Salvador.
“It’s obviously unconstitutional, obviously illegal. There’s no authority in any U.S. law to deport U.S. citizens and certainly not to imprison them in a foreign country,” David Bier at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington, D.C. told NPR.
Experts also have also said that the move further erodes the asylum system and flouts international law.
“This is unprecedented,” Watson said. “This is beyond the pale. It’s a complete violation of our international obligations.”
Yet, the sordid proposal is the latest in a series of significant escalations in Trump’s push for mass deportations.
In recent weeks, federal immigration officials have stripped international students of their visa status, and in some cases, arrested and deported them. According to NBC News, the reasons for revocation vary: some for past convictions like DUIs, some for minor infractions such as parking tickets or disputes with roommates, and others for no clearly stated reason at all. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has revoked visas or terminated the legal status of more than 1,000 university students, including more than 300 international students at Texas universities.
Typically, student visas are revoked for failure to maintain status requirements or convictions for serious crimes, and are done in coordination with universities on a case-by-case basis. But these are not normal times.
“I can’t think of a time when this has ever been used, this mass revocation,” Watson told The Barbed Wire.
This coincides with an announcement that the Department of Homeland Security will be screening immigrants’ social media accounts for “anti-semitism.” Several high profile cases of international students who face deporation, such as those of Columbia University students Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, involve individuals who were active in pro-Palestinian activism and protests on university campuses.
“Since the beginning of the last Trump administration, we have seen that the government has started reviewing immigration applicants’ social media history,” Michael Urbanowich, an immigration lawyer in Houston, told The Barbed Wire. “It has previously been used primarily to look for threats, to look for sort of background checks and see if there’s a danger to the community. But it has not been used, at least not to this extent, as a way to try to police free speech.
In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott has declared popular pro-Palestinian protest slogans to be inherently antisemitic, effectively placing a target on the backs of international students for exercising their First Amendment rights.
“This certainly creates a tiered system of justice,” Watson said. “If we don’t give everyone in this country the same rights, regardless of their citizenship, if we all of a sudden want to say we want to have a two-tiered system of enjoyment of constitutional rights, we break down a wall.”
News reports have also shown that the Houston Police Department, the largest police department in the state, has been cooperating with ICE in arrests that could violate constitutional rights.
In the past, law enforcement in Houston have held arrested individuals subject to deportation warrants so that ICE could take them into custody, but only after an arrestee was in lockup and if ICE officials made the request. Now, it’s happening much earlier in the process, with deportation warrants being surfaced to Houston police officers running license plate numbers during routine traffic stops and detaining individuals subject to civil deportation warrants until ICE agents can arrive.
“To me, that raises constitutional questions of whether or not you are under arrest. Because the police are involved, it is a constitutional and criminal question,” Urbanowich told The Barbed Wire. “ICE warrants are not criminal warrants.”
Jennefer Canales-Pelaez, a Texas policy attorney and strategist with the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, told the Houston Chronicle that this new practice could violate constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.
“They’re opening themselves up to a lawsuit for a violation of the Fourth Amendment,” Canales-Pelaez said. “A lot of the reason cited in the documents for the stop is a routine traffic stop. A person can only be detained during those for as long as there exists reasonable suspicion from the reason for the stop.”
The confluence of these new deportation policies and practices, should they remain in place, opens the door to a number of chilling scenarios. The invocation of the Alien Enemies Act has already been used to sidestep due process for visa holders and legal residents. If Trump gets his way, citizens will be arrested, deported, and imprisoned in a foreign labor camp — potentially with the help of their local police departments.
Ultimately, the Constitution only protects citizens and legal residents insofar as the Supreme Court is willing to uphold constitutional rights — and the executive branch is willing to adhere to and enforce Supreme Court rulings. If the Trump administrations’ defiance of the Supreme Court decision demanding Garcia’s return is any indication, we are already in the midst of a constitutional crisis.
“If we’re not going to take a stand against this kind of abuse of power against other people, who’s next?” Watson said. “Maybe us?”
