Trump Sends Hundreds of Immigrants to Brutal Salvadoran Prison as Mass Deportations Expand

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We look now at how the Trump administration has transferred another group of immigrants to a supermax mega-prison complex in El Salvador. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday 17 immigrants from Venezuela and El Salvador accused of being gang members have been sent to the Salvadoran mega-prison Sunday, after previously being detained at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

Since Trump took office, the U.S. has expelled hundreds of immigrants and asylum seekers to El Salvador without due process, accusing many of belonging to gangs largely on the basis of having tattoos. One Venezuelan asylum seeker now held in the Salvadoran prison was removed for tattoos on each forearm that read “mom” and “dad.”

This week, the U.S. admitted in a court filing that a Salvadoran dad with protected status was also among the hundreds of immigrants who were transferred to El Salvador. He was living with his family in Maryland. Kilmar Armando Abrego had been granted protected status in 2019, blocking the federal government from sending him back to El Salvador after he fled gang violence there. The Trump administration said Garcia was removed, quote, “because of an administrative error,” and that, though, it could not bring him back, because it’s now in custody of — he’s in custody of El Salvador.

Conservatives, like MAGA podcaster Joe Rogan, are also joining in speaking out against the removal of a professional makeup artist accused of being a gang member, calling the case “horrific.”

JOE ROGAN: You’ve got to get scared that people who are not criminals are getting, like, lassoed up and deported and sent to, like, El Salvador prisons. … This is kind of crazy that that could be possible. That’s horrific. And that’s — again, that’s bad for the cause. Like, the cause is let’s get the gang members out. Everybody agrees. But let’s not innocent gay hairdressers get lumped up with the gangs. And then, like, how long before that guy can get out? Like, can we — can we figure out how to get him out?

AMY GOODMAN: This comes as U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to end deportation relief and work permits for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants with temporary protected status.

For more, we go to Washington, D.C., where we’re joined by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council.

Aaron, thanks so much for being with us again. Can you explain what is happening right now? Talk about the Maryland dad from El Salvador who was just deported to this human rights-abusing mega-prison. The administration is paying Bukele, the president of El Salvador, millions to hold these immigrants and asylum seekers.

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Yeah. So, on March 15th, the Trump administration sent three planes full of people to El Salvador, with people they claimed were members of MS-13 or the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. The problem is, every single day now new stories are coming out showing they made a lot of mistakes. And over the weekend, we found out for the first time that they made a mistake that they are admitting. And that was the deportation of a Maryland dad, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was sent there despite the fact that an immigration judge in 2019 ruled that he had protection from being deported to El Salvador. It was illegal to send him to El Salvador. And so, now the Trump administration has had to admit they made a mistake there.

But more and more evidence suggests this was a rushed operation where they shoved as many people onto those planes as they could that had been entered in a database somewhere as Tren de Aragua, and they never really bothered to check whether or not that was true. They just looked at people’s tattoos and said, “Well, you know, we have an intelligence report that says people from Tren de Aragua have tattoos with crowns on them, so any person who has a crown on their body that’s tattooed is a Tren de Aragua member. We don’t need to go any further than that.” And that’s basically the level of due process people got.

They weren’t even told that they were being sent there, though. New stories coming out today confirms every person who was sent there was lied to and told that they were going to be deported to Venezuela, and they didn’t find out ’til they landed in El Salvador what had actually happened.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Aaron, even after the admission of the administration, in terms of Abrego Garcia’s case, Vice President JD Vance posted on the social media platform X that, quote, “he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here.” Could you comment on that?

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Yeah, that’s just simply false. And I’ll take each one of those in turn. Convicted: He’s not been convicted of anything. Mr. Abrego Garcia arrived here in 2011 as a 16-year-old fleeing the gangs himself, who had threatened to kill him if he didn’t join them. He, like many thousands of youth that left El Salvador in that period, came to the United States seeking safety, and for the last 14 years has not gotten into any serious trouble with the law at all. He’s been convicted of nothing.

But what happened is, in 2019, he was looking for day labor outside of a Home Depot in Maryland, and local cops arrested him and three other men there. Those local cops interrogated him, demanded to know whether he was connected to a gang. He denied it continuously. And then a local police detective wrote on a gang worksheet that a confidential informant had allegedly claimed that this guy was a member of a gang, a part of MS-13 that operated in Long Island. Mr. Abrego Garcia has never lived in Long Island, and he said, “This is ridiculous.” And when his lawyers, in 2019, tried to reach back out to the police to talk to the detective and say, “Hey, why did you put this down here?” they found out that the detective had been suspended, and the local police didn’t even have a record of his arrest. So, that is the only — only — evidence that the government has ever offered that he is connected to MS-13. And despite that arrest, which did not lead to charges, he has never been charged or convicted of a crime once in his life.

He also did win protection. In 2019, that arrest led to him being sent to ICE detention. He was locked in ICE detention for almost a year. And at the end, a judge granted him a protection known as “withholding of removal,” that said, “You are more likely than not to be persecuted if sent to El Salvador, so the one thing the government cannot do is deport you to El Salvador.” And that’s exactly what happened on March 15th.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, you recently testified in front of the Committee on Homeland Security, the Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement, that Trump’s diversion of thousands of law enforcement officers to mass deportation is actually creating a greater national security risk. Could you explain that?

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Yeah, so, the most important thing that people need to know about what the Trump administration is doing — well, one of the most important things — is that they have turned the entire U.S. federal law enforcement apparatus into an immigration enforcement apparatus. President Trump has diverted thousands of federal law enforcement officers away from their normal duties and told them to go carry out immigration arrests instead. One in four DEA agents, that normally are out there tracking down drug rings, are now involved in immigration enforcement instead. Eighty percent of ATF investigators are now doing immigration enforcement. They’ve taken people from the IRS who are specialized in investigating financial crimes, and they’re doing immigration enforcement. And even troublingly, they’re taking the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and making them do immigration enforcement. And Homeland Security Investigations, where investigators have the job of protecting children from sexual predators online, those people have been taken off of their duties of going after pedophiles and have been told that they have to do immigration enforcement instead. None of that is making the country safer. It’s just transforming the entire country into a dragnet for immigrants, while letting a lot of other people doing some pretty bad things off the hook.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about the U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco temporarily blocking the Trump administration’s efforts to end deportation relief and work permits for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants in TPS — with TPS. Some, what, a third of a million have TPS. They could face mass deportation. In his ruling, the judge said that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s move to terminate TPS for Venezuelans will, quote, “inflict irreparable harm on hundreds of thousands of persons whose lives, families, and livelihoods will be severely disrupted, cost the [U.S.] billions in economic activity, and injure public health and safety in communities throughout the United States.” The significance of this, in this minute we have left, Aaron?

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: It’s enormous. There are potentially 350,000 people who are going to lose their job on April 7th, and another 300,000 in September, and then potentially 500,000 Haitians coming up this fall, as well. And what Judge Chen ruled is, if you want to terminate TPS, you’ve got to go through the right procedures, and you can’t do it based on false claims that hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans are all Tren de Aragua and criminals, when the status is only available to people with no criminal record.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and what do you think in terms of the numbers that the Trump administration is claiming, more than 100,000 people deported so far in his administration?

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Yeah, those numbers seem likely incorrect. They don’t fit the — the Trump administration said yesterday they had also done 110,000 arrests already. That suggests they did 70,000 arrests in the last two weeks. I think somebody in the administration made a mistake.

But what we know is, these are the numbers they want. Their goal is to ramp up deportations and arrests as quickly as they can, and if that leads to a bunch of innocent people getting swept up alongside, the message that the White House is sending is they don’t care. As long as they hit their numbers, who cares who is on those planes? They just want to get them out of the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Federal judge has — 

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Due process be damned.

AMY GOODMAN: A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore funds to programs that provide legal services to unaccompanied minors, to children, in immigration proceedings. Ten seconds.

AARON REICHLIN–MELNICK: Great news. Children need lawyers. No child should have to face deportation in court alone. And the Trump administration wanted to strip away federally funded lawyers that Congress set aside money for.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to leave it there. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, for another edition of Democracy Now!