No One Is Safe As Trump Gleefully Deports Migrants to El Salvador’s Mega-Guantánamo Without Evidence, Or Even Via An “Administrative Error”

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In the sordid, chaotic, belligerent and openly racist “war on migrants” that Donald Trump declared when he took office on January 20, two particular truths about the administration’s intentions have become increasingly evident, and both of them are profoundly disturbing.

The first is that no immigrant to the US from anywhere in the world — but mostly, to date, from countries in Central or South America — is safe from arbitrary detention and deportation, and, in particular, the threat of being deported, not to their home countries, but to a notorious prison in El Salvador, where prisoners are held indefinitely without charge or trial, dehumanized, half-starved and subjected to relentless violence. The CECOT prison, established under El Salvador’s dictatorial president, Nayib Bukele, is nothing less than a futuristic, turbo-charged version of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay.

The second cause for deep alarm is the Trump administration’s absolute contempt for any legal challenges to what it aggressively claims is its right to detain and deport anyone it feels like detaining and deporting. Primarily, to date, Venezuelans, these men are routinely described as dangerous “high-threat aliens”, gang members and terrorists at war with the US, although the administration has failed to back up its hysterical claims with anything resembling evidence.

Disturbingly, the administration insists that all of its claimed deliberations about who to detain and deport are shielded from any kind of scrutiny or review because of national security concerns, claims that are nothing less than the thinnest of covers for what is actually the the unacceptable and unconstitutional exercise of unfettered executive power.

The road to El Salvador, via Guantánamo

On the first front, Trump declared on the campaign trail that he would undertake the largest deportation operation in US history, aimed at the estimated 11 million-plus undocumented migrants on the US mainland, with the aim of deporting at least one million a year. To provide some context, between 2003 and 2024 the largest number of deportations from the US mainland in a year was around 250,000 in Bush’s last year in office, and Obama’s first, while Trump himself, despite his repeated racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric, deported less than 100,000 migrants from the US mainland in each year of his first presidency, as the graph below shows.

As soon as Trump took office in January, however, he immediately launched his “war on migrants” via a slew of executive orders and “proclamations” (subsequently rebranded as “Presidential Actions”), in which he claimed that there was a “national emergency” at the southern border, and, in “Protecting the American People Against Invasion”, claimed that “millions of illegal aliens” on the US mainland “present significant threats to national security and public safety, committing vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans”, while “others are engaged in hostile activities, including espionage, economic espionage, and preparations for terror-related activities.”

To theatrically publicize his commitment to ridding the US of this almost entirely invented scourge, Trump surprised everyone, on January 29, by ordering the DOD and the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) to expand an existing Migrant Operations Center on the grounds of the naval base at Guantánamo Bay — established in the 1990s to hold migrants intercepted at sea — to hold up to 30,000 migrants.

From February 4 to February 20, as I reported here and here, Trump flew 178 Venezuelan migrants from ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facilities on the US mainland — where they had all been given “final removal” orders, making them eligible to be deported back to Venezuela — to Guantánamo instead, in what appeared to be nothing more than an act of “performative cruelty” for his most rabid supporters.

Tapping into Guantánamo’s history as the site of the “war on terror” prison established under George W. Bush, Trump and his officials declared these men to be “the worst of the worst”, echoing Donald Rumsfeld’s words when the prison first opened in 2002, and then illegally used part of the prison — Camp 6 — to hold the majority of these men, after shunting the three remaining “low-value detainees” held there into a neigboring cell block, Camp 5. This is where the 12 remaining “high-value detainees” are held, and, in the process of doing so, Trump casually broke an 18-year requirement that, in the interests of national security, the “high-value detainees” had to be separated from the “low-value detainees”, as though the future of the US depended on it.

Almost as soon as the men arrived, the claims that they were “the worst of the worst” — all members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang — began to evaporate as family members spoke to the mainstream media, revealing, in account after account, how their loved ones were not members of Tren de Aragua, how they had only been seeking work in the US, and how they had been assessed as being gang members solely because of their tattoos, which were not gang-related.

As legal challenges loomed, Trump bypassed further scrutiny by deporting all but one of the men back to Venezuela, as he could have done in the first place. The remaining man, without explanation, was sent back to ICE detention on the US mainland.

This seemed like a victory of sorts for those opposed to the use of Guantánamo, but it was very short-lived, as, almost immediately, more migrants, from a variety of nations, were sent there — 217 between February 23 and March 29. Some were also subsequently deported, although many were sent back to the US mainland, often almost immediately, their arrival, in several cases, seemingly designed solely to provide a photo opportunity for visiting officials.

The Alien Enemies Act, a one-way trip to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, and resistance in the US courts

On March 15, however, the scandal of using Guantánamo to hold migrants — and even the reports of how badly they were treated — paled into relative insignificance, as, having designated Tren de Aragua and other gangs, including El Salvador’s MS-13, as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs) and Specially Designated Global Terrorists (SDGTs), Trump invoked the long-discredited and little-used Alien Enemies Act of 1798, in a desperate effort to bolster his false claim that the US was at war with migrants, to suggest that Tren de Aragua had infiltrated the Venezuelan government, and to claim that he could engage in the summary deportations of 238 Venezuelans — again, all described as gang members — without any oversight or review, not to Venezuela, but to El Salvador, and, specifically, the notorious CECOT prison.

23 alleged Salvadorian gang members were also on these flights, and Trump administration officials later claimed that they and 114 of the Venezuelans had been deported via the Alien Enemies Act, while the 101 other Venezuelans were removed under regular immigration laws. The Trump administration had reportedly paid Bukele $6 million to hold these men for a year, with no indication of what would happen then — perhaps further payments of $6 million a year to keep them endlessly in the prison from which, as the Salvadorian regime is proud to boast, “they do not expect CECOT’s prisoners to ever be released.”

Everything about this outsourcing of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT prison was abominable, not just because no evidence was provided to demonstrate that these men were indeed dangerous gang members, but also because sending them to El Salvador brought the administration into direct conflict with the US court system.

On the day of the flights, Judge James Boasberg, the Chief Judge of the District Court in Washington, D.C., issued a temporary restraining order stopping the administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport anyone, adding that, if planes were already in the air, they had to be turned around.

His order was, however, ignored, and he was treated with contempt by government officials and lawyers. He subsequently delivered a powerful ruling upholding his temporary restraining order, as did judges in the D.C. Circuit Court, who subsequently took up the case, when, memorably, Judge Patricia Millett observed that “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act than has happened here.”

When the Conservative-dominated Supreme Court got involved, they lifted the temporary restraining order on April 7, by 5 votes to 4, but insisted that anyone subjected to removal under the Alien Enemies Act “must receive notice … that they are subject to removal under the Act”, which “must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs”, adding that the proper venue would be where they were detained, and not in Washington, D.C.

This was actually a blow to the administration, or, at best, only a partial victory, although, on his social media, Trump misinterpreted it as “A GREAT DAY FOR JUSTICE IN AMERICA.”

Meanwhile, eleven days earlier, on March 28, District Judge Brian E. Murphy, in Boston, issued an order preventing the administration from deporting anyone to a third country without them first having the opportunity to contest their deportation in immigration court, although, as with Judge Boasberg’s order, it was deliberately snubbed just three days later, when the administration sent another seven Venezuelans and ten Salvadorians to El Salvador — this time from Guantánamo. 

With reference to Judge Murphy’s ruling, the Washington Post noted that a White House official said that the administration “had complied with the ruling, but did not offer any details on how it had done so”, which suggests that, actually, they had lied, claiming that the men “had been either convicted of or had pending charges ranging from drug possession and theft to child sex abuse and murder”, but providing no information whatsoever to demonstrate how this information was verified.

90% of those sent to El Salvador have no criminal record, and some were deported with pending asylum claims

Alarmingly, as with Guantánamo, numerous stories emerged after the first group of migrants were sent to El Salvador to demonstrate that, yet again, its claims that these men were all dangerous gang members didn’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny.

CBS News ran a “60 Minutes” exposé on April 6, in which they “obtained internal government documents listing their names and any known criminal information”, and “cross referenced that with domestic and international court filings, news reports and arrest records”, stating, “we could not find criminal records for 75% of the Venezuelans — 179 men — now sitting in prison” in El Salvador.

They added that “at least 22% of the men on the list have criminal records here in the United States or abroad”, although “the vast majority are for non-violent offenses like theft, shoplifting and trespassing.” Only “about a dozen are accused of murder, rape, assault and kidnapping.”

Bloomberg also published a critical analysis on April 9, under the heading, “About 90% of Migrants Sent to Salvador Lacked US Criminal Record”, stating that, after reviewing “hundreds of pages of US legal records and American government statements”, they “found five men charged with or convicted of felony assault or firearms violations”, three others “charged with misdemeanors including harassment and petty theft”, and two others “charged with human smuggling.”

“For the rest of the men”, Bloomberg added, “there was no available information showing they committed any crime other than traffic or immigration violations in the US”, findings that “raise questions about how the Trump administration determined that the migrants sent to El Salvador were violent criminals.”

Andry Hernandez Romero, the gay makeup artist

Of the stories that have emerged to shatter the Trump administration’s patently false claims, one particularly shocking example is that of Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist who came to the United States last year in search of asylum, after being targeted for his homosexuality and for his political views.

His lawyer, Lindsay Toczylowski, explained that he had a strong asylum case, and that immigration officials had recognized this via a “credible fear” interview, finding that the “threats against him were credible and that he had a real probability of winning an asylum claim.”

Nevertheless, although his asylum claim was ongoing, he was taken from the ICE detention facility where he was being held, and flown to El Salvador, missing a court hearing, which was when Toczylowski realized that something was wrong. Photojournalist Philip Holsinger, who was at the CECOT prison to take photos of the men’s arrival and processing photographed Hernandez Romero, and heard him say, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a stylist.” He added that he “cried for his mother as he was slapped and had his head shaved.”

As Toczylowski said, “It’s horrifying to see someone who we’ve met and know as a sweet, funny artist, in the most horrible conditions I could imagine”, adding, “We have grave concerns about whether he can survive.”

The only alleged evidence that the Trump administration presented in immigration court were photos of his tattoos of crowns, which the immigration authorities have suggested indicates membership of Tren de Aragua, but, as Toczylowski explained, the crowns “were on top of the names of his parents”, and therefore “the most plausible explanation for that are that his mom and dad are his king and queen.”

When the interviewer, Cecilia Vega, asked, “Could it be possible that there is something that perhaps the government knows that you don’t?”, Toczylowski replied, “I don’t think that that is possible. But if it was possible that they had some information, they should follow the Constitution, present that information, give us the ability to reply to it.”

Hernandez Romero was not the only man sent to El Salvador while his asylum claim was still being processed, and in all these cases, of course, it is reasonable to expect that the Trump administration ought to be held accountable, and to seek their return.

Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia: the victim of an “administrative error” and court rulings that Trump doesn’t want to acknowledge or obey

As another case shows, however — that of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadorian who was living legally in Maryland with his wife and child, who are both US citizens, under protected status explicitly preventing his deportation to El Salvador — even that is no barrier to being seized and sent on a one-way trip to the CECOT prison.

Challenged in court, the Trump administration admitted that it was an “administrative error”, although they have refused to do anything to bring him back, defying orders to do so that were made by Judge Paula Xinis, a federal judge in Maryland, who called the deportation a “grievous error”, and, on April 4, ordered him to be returned to the US, and appeals court judges in the Fourth Circuit, who, on April 7, denied the government’s motion to stay the order, with Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a Reagan appointee, stating, “There is no question that the government screwed up here,” and adding that it “took the only action which was expressly prohibited.” As he also stated, “one would also expect the government to do what it can to rectify it. Most of us attempt to undo, to the extent that we can, the mistakes that we have made. But, to the best of my knowledge, the government has not made the attempt here.”

On April 8, 25 Senators, led by Senator Chris Van Hollen, wrote to the administration to demand the immediate return to the US of Abrego Garcia, in which they provided a helpful summary of his back story, stating:

Per court filings, Mr. Abrego Garcia came to the United States in 2011 as a teenager fleeing gang threats in his home country of El Salvador. In 2019, ICE arrested Mr. Abrego Garcia over an unfounded and anonymous allegation that he was involved with MS-13, which placed him in deportation proceedings. The US immigration judge in the case ultimately found that it was in fact Mr. Abrego Garcia who was at risk of being the victim of gang violence. The judge found that Mr. Abrego Garcia and his relatives credibly testified that gang members had been trying to extort his family and recruit him and his brother to join the gang, forcing his family to move multiple times, ultimately compelling both him and his brother to flee to the United States out of fear.

The immigration judge agreed that Mr. Abrego Garcia would likely face persecution if deported back to El Salvador and thus granted him a form of legally mandated protection known as “withholding of removal.” Withholding of removal, which may only be granted by an immigration judge, provided Mr. Abrego Garcia the ability to stay and work in the United States despite being the subject of a deportation order. This ruling was made under the Trump Administration in 2019 and was in fact required by law under section 241(b)(3) of the Immigration and Nationality Act once the immigration judge made the factual determination that Mr. Abrego Garcia faced a likelihood of torture in El Salvador. At the time, the Trump Administration made no effort to appeal the judge’s ruling or pursue Mr. Abrego Garcia’s deportation further. Court filings attest that Mr. Abrego Garcia has complied with regular ICE check-ins, has no criminal charges, and has had no contact with any other law-enforcement agency since his release in 2019.

The Senators also provided the following scathing assessment of the administration’s inaction:

Your unwillingness to immediately rectify this “administrative error” is unacceptable. Under multiple Democratic and Republican administrations, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE followed the rule of law and worked to quickly return people who were wrongfully deported, in the rare instances where such “administrative errors” occurred. The Administration’s mass deportation agenda does not transcend immigration law or the need for due process. And when the Administration makes a mistake as severe as sending an individual with protected status to a foreign prison, it cannot simply shrug off responsibility and allege that there is nothing it can do to reunite him with his wife and child, who are American citizens.

Despite this, administration officials have repeatedly and hysterically distorted the facts, with JD Vance, on X, calling Abrego Garcia a “convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here”, prompting Sen. Van Hollen to state, “The Trump administration is lying. JD Vance lied through his teeth when he said Kilmar had been convicted of a crime in the United States. Absolutely false, and the vice president of the United States should apologize to the family, and he should do it now.”

Vance, however, proceeded to repeat his lies on Fox News, saying, “This was unquestionably an illegal alien. This was unquestionably a person who broke the laws to get into our country. This is unquestionably a person an immigration judge found had zero right to be in the United States of America. We do not ask permission from far-left democrats before we deport illegal immigrants.”

In what is now becoming typical behavior, the Trump administration, after losing in the lower courts, then proceeded to submit an aggressive brief to the Supreme Court (the Respondents’ reply is here), in which they petulantly insisted that Judge Xinis, in the Maryland court, had no right to “seize control over foreign relations, treat the Executive Branch as a subordinate diplomat, and demand that the United States let a member of a foreign terrorist organization into America.”

The government’s lawyers also tried to blame a solitary official, Erez Reuveni, a Justice Department lawyer handling the case (who has now been put on leave — or sacked) for mistakenly admitting to an “administrative error”, even though Robert Cerna, the acting field office director for enforcement and removal operations at ICE, had submitted a sworn declaration in which he admitted that Abrego Garcia’s removal “was an error”, an admission that had also been acknowledged by D. John Sauer, the newly appointed Solicitor General.

As NPR described it, the administration also “continued to push the theory that Abrego Garcia is a member of MS-13, despite an immigration judge finding otherwise in 2019”, and also “argued that because Abrego Garcia is now outside the US, the administration cannot force the government of El Salvador to take any action, let alone to release Abrego Garcia from prison.”

Despite all this, on April 10 the Supreme Court unanimously, by 9 votes to 0, ordered the administration to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return, with the three liberal judges submitting a statement in which they noted that the government’s argument ”implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including US citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

Enraged, Stephen Miller, Trump’s dead-eyed domestic policy adviser, “abruptly changed course”, as the New York Times explained, telling Fox News that Abrego Garcia “had not in fact been wrongfully deported.” As he claimed, in defiance of reality, “He was not mistakenly sent to El Salvador. This was the right person sent to the right place.”

Bukele’s visit to the White House, and the ongoing battle in court

The most profound depths of the administration’s complete contempt for the law, and for any notion that they should be held accountable for something as mundane as a mistake, came on April 14, when Nayib Bukele, dazzling Trump with his dictatorial power, visited the White House, the day after another ten Venezuelan and Salvadorian alleged gang members had been sent to El Salvador, in what was clearly both another gesture of contempt towards the courts, and a timely piece of PR for Trump and his hardcore supporters.

Both Bukele and Trump, flanked by Trump’s thugs and dimwits JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, went through a horrendous charade in which, as the government’s brief to the Supreme Court had promised, they pretended they had no ability to order Abrego Garcia’s return, while Bukele told a a reporter who asked if he would return him, “I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States. The question is preposterous.”

Abrego Garcia’s legal struggle is not over yet. Back in the Maryland District Court, on April 15, Judge Paula Xinis met with Justice Department lawyers, and Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, to discuss the next steps in the case, at a meeting in which she “scolded the Trump administration” for “dragging its feet” in complying with the Supreme Court order to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release. “To date nothing has been done,” she told the Justice Department’s lead lawyer, Drew Ensign. “Nothing.”

Judge Xinis was paving the way for an anticipated two weeks of discovery in the case, in which, as the New York Times reported, she signaled that she was “going to order the government to provide discovery information on what it has done — or has not done — to free Abrego Garcia”, adding that this information would “help her determine if the administration has been acting in good faith.”

“Cancel vacation”, she told Ensign. “Cancel other appointments. I’m usually pretty good about this in my courtroom, but not this time.”

Judge Xinis’s impatience with the government had probably been sharpened by having had to just put up with a late submission from Joseph Mazzara, the acting general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, who stated, preposterously, that “Abrego Garcia is being held in the sovereign, domestic custody of the independent nation of El Salvador. DHS does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.”

Mazzara also stated that, even if Abrego Garcia were to be returned to the US, “the Trump administration would take him into custody and deport him to a country other than El Salvador” or seek to amend a court order that, they claim, “should not have barred his removal to El Salvador in the first place.”

This appears to be a purely vindictive position for the government, but then this is a purely vindictive government, revelling in its cruelty, indifferent about whether or not those it is describing as “terrorists” are guilty of anything at all, and revelling in its recreation of the lawless horrors of the “war on terror” on an epic scale, involving millions of migrants, and an unconscionably vile prison located in another country to which the monsters in the White House and the Trump administration hope to send as many people as they possibly can — all, they hope, beyond the reach of the US courts, just as the Bush administration intended at Guantánamo 23 years ago.

As Adam Serwer stated in an article for The Atlantic on April 14:

The administration is maintaining that it has the power to send armed agents of the state to grab someone off the street and then, without a shred of due process, deport them to a Gulag in a foreign country and leave them there forever. The crucial point here is that the administration’s logic means that it could do the same to American citizens — after all, if deporting someone under a protective order to a Gulag without so much as a hearing is a “foreign policy” matter with which no court may interfere, then the citizenship of the condemned person doesn’t matter.

Trump is already contemplating the possibility of deporting citizens. Aside from numerous public statements to that effect, Trump told Bukele, in an exchange posted on Bukele’s X feed, “Homegrowns are next. The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places.” Loud laughter filled the Oval Office.

The thugs are in charge, and, as the respected law professors Erwin Chemerinsky and Laurence H. Tribe explained in an op-ed for the New York Times on April 9, “We Should All Be Very, Very Afraid.”

If the courts don’t prevail, and if the majority of the Justices in the Conservative-dominated Supreme Court don’t firmly grasp the enormity of how they are being snubbed and sidelined, and thoroughly assert their authority, the US will be entering truly perilous and lawless territory, in which no one — or, at least, no one who isn’t, essentially, a powerful white supremacist — will be safe.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s new Substack account, set up in November 2024, where he’ll be sending out a weekly newsletter, or his RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and the full military commissions list.

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