Deportations the action of a lawless regime

Despite having a 2019 court order requiring that Kilmar Abrego Garcia not be deported to El Salvador due to a likelihood of persecution, he was arrested along with hundreds of men and sent to a prison in El Salvador. In this prison, which can hold 41,000 men, up to 70 prisoners are placed into a single cell with two toilets per cell. They receive no visits, and civil rights groups have cited cases of abuse, torture, lack of medical care, and deaths.

No attempt was made to prove these men were gang members or that they had violated any law even though the Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person can be deprived of “life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”

Even though the Trump administration has admitted it was a mistake that Garcia was sent to El Salvador, it has refused to seek his return, arguing that once he was outside the U.S., it had no power to obtain his return. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in this case, “The Government's argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

Arbitrary arrests and deportations to a torture gulag are the actions of a lawless authoritarian regime. America needs to be better than that.

Thomas Hill

Cedar Falls