Why Is Trump So Intent on Sending Illegal Immigrant Noncriminals to Prison Camps in El Salvador? – Article by Alex Nowrasteh
Alex Nowrasteh
The Trump administration is rapidly spending down its political capital and attacking the courts by deporting noncriminals to El Salvador. In its zeal to speed deportations and close the border, it declared MS-13 and Tren de Aragua terrorist organizations, even though the latter is a loosely organized Venezuelan prison gang while the former is a criminal gang. Then, it claimed several Venezuelan and Salvador migrants in the US are members of those gangs on flimsy evidence. Lastly, Trump used the Alien Enemies Act to deport some migrants without due process to Salvadoran supermax prisons when he claimed they were members of those gangs. Some of the deportations likely even violated federal court orders, and around three-quarters of them had no criminal record.
Not even the Bush administration attempted such brazen unconstitutional violations of civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11, which was a real national crisis. Todayâs crisis is fake. Unlike al Qaeda, illegal immigrants in Tren de Aragua or MS-13 didnât commit a terrorist attack. Nobody has ever been murdered in an attack on US soil committed by terrorists who entered as illegal immigrants. If deportees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia were all vicious criminals or terrorists, then their deportations wouldn’t be a political scandal. A legal squabble, a few headlines, perhaps a disturbing court case, and an attack on our institutions, but a sitting US Senator certainly wouldnât have visited him. Moreover, the President of El Salvador wouldnât have staged the photo to make Abrego Garcia look like he was on vacation, and Trump wouldn’t be digging in to keep him there. If Trumpâs deportation dragnet had real MS-13 kingpins to boast about, he wouldnât need to bend the law to toss Abrego GarcĂa â a man with no convictions â into a foreign prison. The fact that a U.S. Senator had to intervene in Abrego GarcĂaâs case speaks volumes: it shows how extraordinary and unjustified this policy is.
Abrego Garcia wasnât the first. Before him, Trump deported Venezuelan asylum-seeker Andry HernĂĄndez Romero to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. Why such a harsh punishment for an asylum-seeker who was a makeup artist? A disgraced former Milwaukee police officer turned prison contractor who lost his job after drunkenly crashing his car into a house claimed that HernĂĄndez Romero was a Tren de Aragua member. Turns out that HernĂĄndez Romero was not a member of that jumbled prison gang, but he hasnât been heard from since arriving in El Salvador. HernĂĄndez Romeroâs case is even more tragic, and it underscores the same point: lacking actual criminals, the administration went after an innocent asylum-seeker â and had to rely on a sketchy ex-copâs tattoo paranoia to do it. Over the dissents of the Supreme Courtâs most conservative judges, the Court temporarily paused the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport people.
This wasnât how Trumpâs mass deportations were supposed to begin. He campaigned on the promise to deport hordes of dangerous illegal immigrant criminals. If theyâre out there, where are they? Why is his administration targeting Abrego Garcia and HernĂĄndez Romero, men with no criminal convictions? Sure, a corrupt police officer who was fired for blackmailing a prostitute claimed Abrego Garcia was MS-13. Another disgraced cop pointed to HernĂĄndez Romeroâs tattoos. But with no convictions, no hearings, and no trials, these deportations arenât about justice. Theyâre about appearances. Why is Trump focusing so much energy attacking Abrego Garcia and keeping HernĂĄndez Romero in El Salvador while ignoring the legions of murderers he and his supporters claim are ravaging our communities?
Those legions of illegal immigrant criminals donât exist. The overwhelming evidence is that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. Texas has the best data on illegal immigrant criminal convictions of any state. The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate in Texas is around half the rate of native-born Americans. Legal immigrants? 58 percent lower. Focusing on homicide, the most serious crime and best one to study here, illegal immigrants are 26 percent less likely to be convicted.
Georgia recently started reporting illegal immigrant incarceration data. In late 2024, when Laken Rileyâs murderer was convicted, illegal immigrants were about 15 percent less likely to be incarcerated than the rest of the stateâs population and 32 percent less likely to be incarcerated for homicide. The incarceration rates are similar in Oklahoma. The three states (all conservative) that track illegal immigrant crime all contradict Trump’s story.
Texas, Georgia, and Oklahoma are probably not outliers, but they could be. Estimates of the illegal immigrant incarceration rate using a residual statistical method to analyze American Community Survey data fill the gap. The illegal immigrant incarceration rate is between 31 percent and 56 percent below that of native-born Americans every year. Similar to the Texas data, the legal immigrant incarceration rate is between 65 percent and 75 percent below that of native-born Americans.
The evidence is overwhelming that illegal immigrants have a low crime rate for any number of reasons. Perhaps the worst are deported after their first arrests so they canât become recidivists â which demolishes the nativist claim that illegal immigrants go relatively unpunished in America. Regardless, the myth of the illegal immigrant crime wave persists in the face of overwhelming evidence. There are several crimes committed by illegal immigrants, and those criminals should be harshly punished, but we can’t confuse the occasional horrible crime with a statistical trend that isn’t there.
The Trump administration is trying to deport illegal immigrant criminals who simply arenât here. Faced with few real threats, it conjures imaginary onesâdeporting noncriminals to dangerous foreign prisons to keep up the fear. He ran further ahead on immigration than any other issue during the 2024 campaign and is still ahead even though his approval is falling. Since there just arenât that many illegal immigrant criminals, the administration must focus on removing people who arenât criminals to keep their deportation promises. Thatâs why ICE is targeting Japanese students who caught too many fish and graduate students who wrote op-eds, even though illegal immigrant criminals are the easiest to deport because they are already in law enforcement custody.
Where are the hordes of terrorists and murderers Trump promised to deport? Unfortunately for Trump, Abrego Garcia is reminding everybody that there just arenât that many illegal immigrant terrorists and criminals. HernĂĄndez Romero doesnât politically matter as much because heâs less likely to legally be returned, but his case is even worse. Both are supposed criminal gangbangers deported to El Salvador, a country lionized by conservatives for reasons both understandable and mythical. The administration is so desperate to make Abrego Garcia a symbol of an illegal immigrant crime wave that never happened that they even tweeted a picture of President Trump holding up a photoshopped image of Abrego Garcia with tattoos that he doesnât possess.
Abrego Garcia probably isnât an angel, even though we don’t really know because he was denied due process before being incarcerated abroad after being illegally deported. HernĂĄndez Romero is an even more tragic case, but his legal ability to return is basically nonexistent, so few people pay attention to him. Trumpâs scandalous deportation of noncriminals to supermax prisons in El Salvador without due process, his unconscionable violation of court orders, and his silly public defenses make more sense when you realize that heâs staked much of his political career on the falsehood that thereâs a massive illegal immigrant crime wave. Immigration law allows most illegal immigrants to be deported, but itâs a political win when they are terrorists or criminals. Trumpâs actions are those of a desperate and committed president, but certainly not those of a president committed to parsing facts, confronting reality, and protecting the Constitution. Trump can’t keep his promise to deport illegal immigrant criminals because there aren’t that many to deport. But that hasn’t stopped him â and it won’t.
Alex Nowrasteh is the Vice-President of economic and social policy studies at the Cato Institute.Â
Originally published at: https://www.alexnowrasteh.com/p/why-is-trump-so-intent-on-sending