Trump’s deportation bust Political factions are sowing hatred

When I first visited Peru in 2019, I made the painfully naive decision to enter the country illegally by land. As I made my way back to the Colombian border by riverboat, the Peruvian authorities nearly deported me. “We should take you in like the rest of them”, the border official said scornfully as his colleague arrested the handful of Venezuelans aboard the vessel. “Don’t think we haven’t deported gringos like you”, he added, handing me my US passport.

In the end, the officials graced me with clemency, thanks in part to advocacy by the boat’s captain. “Not long ago, they would have ignored you, but things have changed”, the captain later explained, referring to Venezuela’s ongoing crisis.

The experience showed me first-hand how Latin-American countries enforce their borders when confronted with mass migration — and taught me a valuable lesson about cross-border travel. Had I been deported, however, the penalty would only have been a speedy return to the United States — as opposed to life inside a “Terrorism Confinement Centre” in El Salvador: the fate of hairdressers and landscapers — in addition to hardened criminals — under President Trump.

Many in MAGA World seem to believe that no corrective is too severe, no countermeasure too cruel, in response to the border chaos inherited from Joe Biden. Yet more than 100 days into his second term, Trump’s deportation effort is a failure on its own terms — notwithstanding the shock-and-awe impression.

Make no mistake: the border was in a catastrophic state under the previous administration. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the number of illegal immigrants swelled by approximately 10 million during Biden’s term. The parameters under which irregular visitors could claim asylum were stretched to such a point that the term “refugee” lost all meaning, leading to a backlog of 3.2 million claimants. Industrial-scale smuggling boomed, and vital public services across the United States groaned under the weight of mass migration.

Ordinary Americans, including many Latinos, warned that economic migrants were abusing an overly generous asylum regime — a reality I observed firsthand in 2022 and 2023 as an immigration case worker. Finally, in June 2024, Biden stanched the flow somewhat with an executive, prompting a decline in the numbers. Yet under Team Biden, removals from within the homeland dropped to about half of what they had been in Trump’s first term, about 50,000 a year.

Confronted with this reality, an overwhelming majority of voters expressed support for cutting illegal immigration and ramping up deportations. On the former (cutting the flow), Trump has unquestionably delivered. By March, border crossings fell to just 7,000, a quarter-century low. This has been, by far, the most unambiguous success of an otherwise confused presidency.

Mass deportations, however, are a different story.

Thus far, the pace of total deportations is lower than it was under Biden in 2024. True, this is in part a function of fewer crossings. But there is no question that many of those who entered in recent years are still here. While credible data on interior removals under Trump II have yet to be released, it’s plausible that the deportation figure hovers around 50,000. It’s far more than under Biden, to be sure, but still a far cry from the 120,000 deported at the same point in 2009 by Barack Obama (earning Obama the moniker “Deporter in Chief” from progressives).

Having failed at delivering big numbers, Trump officials have apparently resorted to spectacular stunts and sadism as substitutes.

In March, the administration deported 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans to Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele’s so-called Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a latter-day gulag. Like many others, I gave the White House the benefit of the doubt, assuming that a Department of Justice renowned for prosecuting gang members couldn’t possibly send civilians with no criminal sentences to a prison built for MS13 and Barrio 18’s most hardened members.

Except, the White House continues to withhold the names and purportedly heinous crimes of those deported to Bukele’s CECOT, treating them as state secrets. Most of the inmates were designated as “alien terrorists” and stripped of the ability to contest that designation under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — the White House’s ridiculous theory of the case being that the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang is conducting an “invasion” of the US homeland at the behest of the Caracas regime. Under the terms of the agreement with El Salvador, outsourced detainees are imprisoned indefinitely in the CECOT. No trial, not even proper sentencing.

On 20 March, CBS published the names of the imprisoned Venezuelans from a leaked government document. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times ran all 238 names through public databases in the United States, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, finding serious accusations or convictions for just 32 of the deportees. Another two dozen were accused or found guilty of lower-level offences, such as trespassing and speeding. The remainder had no criminal records in either the United States or abroad; an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official also admitted in a sworn declaration that “many” of those deported had no criminal records. Deported, to be clear, to a gang confinement centre. For life.

In deciding if someone is a member of Tren de Aragua, Trump officials placed inordinate emphasis on tattoos. A separate government document obtained by the Times, titled “Alien Enemy Validation Guide”, uses an eight-point system to identify gang members, with tattoos yielding four points. One such case with no criminal record was that of Arturo Suarez Trejo, a landscaper and urban musician with numerous tattoos who was detained while filming a music video.

Two others with no criminal records — Francisco García Casique, a barber, and Neri Alvarado, a bakery-shop worker — had tattoos of family members’ names, one of which included a ribbon for autism awareness. As Ronna Rísquez, the author of a 2003 book on Tren de Aragua, has noted, the group doesn’t use tattoos as markers of affiliation — in marked contrast to the likes of MS13 and Barrio 18.

Given that ICE arrested 976 gang members in February, it’s fair to describe the vetting process behind the Salvadoran deportations as incompetent, and that’s being generous. A charter flight even arrived with eight women — a surprise that proved too extreme for even Bukele, who harangued his American counterparts for violating the terms of their agreement. The women were ultimately returned to the United States, with many claiming that officials asked passengers to sign affidavits confessing membership in Tren de Aragua.

Beyond Trumpian chaos, the GOP’s characteristic incoherence appears to have contributed to the Salvadoran debacle. Days into Trump’s presidency, Venezuela’s Maduro regime acquiesced to deportation flights in exchange for the renewal of Chevron’s oil license in the country. Furious, Miami hawks in Congress threatened to withhold their votes from the slim GOP majority. The White House immediately caved, leading to an abrupt end to Venezuelan repatriations and the subsequent invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. The plight of CECOT deportees has since been a propaganda boon for Maduro, as thousands have poured onto Venezuelan streets to protest against Washington’s forced disappearances to El Salvador.

The Trump administration also wrongfully deported the Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego García, though his case is a complicated one. Kilmar’s family business was allegedly extorted by Barrio 18 in his home country. Had he solicited asylum when he first traveled to the United States, he could have claimed a credible fear of persecution. Instead, ICE nearly deported him in 2019. By that point, Kilmar wasn’t eligible for asylum, but a judge granted him “withholding of removal” on the grounds that his life was still at risk in El Salvador.

Kilmar’s alleged ties to MS13 remain unproved, and he complied with yearly check-ins at ICE. Yet the reality is that the case is uncomfortable for both sides of the debate. It’s reasonable to question Abrego García’s current immigration status; by 2019, his family business was defunct and the threat of Barrio 18 diminished. At the same time, he should have been eligible for residency through his marriage to a US citizen. Ironically, recipients of withheld removal like him are ineligible for permanent residence but can receive work permits.

None of this excuses the Trump administration’s denial of due process to Kilmar Abrego, let alone hundreds of apparently nonviolent offenders condemned to life in a foreign gulag. Surprising as it may be to MAGA, the Fifth Amendment entitles noncitizens to due process. Considering that the president is floating sending US citizens to the CECOT, and is attempting to deport legal residents over anti-Israel op-eds — it’s fair to wonder if Trump is bent on importing Maduro’s and Bukele’s governance model, even as he deports their citizens.

Instead of governing by decree like Maduro or Bukele, the White House could pursue long-term, durable reform in the legislature. A reasonable compromise with Democrats could be to close the loophole in the Immigration and Nationality Act which allowed virtually any border-crosser to apply for asylum under Biden. In exchange, Republicans could acquiesce to the regularisation of spouses of US citizens, a move which would help accelerate deportations by annulling the ongoing issue of custody for the children of illegal spouses.

Unfortunately, much of the GOP is currently committed to ending asylum outright. It’s similarly telling that Christian conservatives justify imprisoning the fathers of US citizens in CECOT. The fact that immigration enforcement was more or less abrogated during most of Biden’s term doesn’t justify violating constitutional amendments. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s once-vaunted approval on immigration is in free fall, particularly among Latinos, a key segment of the Republicans’ new base.

Contrary to much of the party’s narrative about serving a “multiracial working class”, the GOP appears bent on alienating previously die-hard supporters, such as Venezuelan-Americans. Unlike MAGA partisans, the broader working class has little interest in terrorising migrants for the sake of likes on the X app.

For their part, Democrats would do well to acknowledge that popular support for restrictionism is an inevitable consequence of mass illegal immigration. The fact that migrants’ own countries of origin have experienced the same trend — as I learned on my trip to Peru — suggests that more is at play than Left-of-centre parties “accepting conservative frames on immigration”, as progressives worry. Even in Left-wing Mexico, 55 percent oppose allowing entry to foreign migrants.

For Left and Right, the Obama administration’s common-sense mix of pathways to citizenship and overwhelming enforcement was a key source of its appeal with Latino and working-class voters. It should, moreover, give Democrats pause that Biden’s — and Hillary Clinton’s — abandoning of Obama’s winning formula subsequently enabled both of Trump’s ballot-box victories. In their Fox News-distorted reality, Republicans also fail to recognise that the “Kenyan-born” Obama respected due process, even as he deported almost 3 million in his first term.

The mistake of MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats alike is that they each fail to understand that their priorities are comparably unpalatable to most Americans. So long as both factions remain beholden to the preferences of nativist incels and cosmopolitan elitists, respectively, they will continue to sow maximal cruelty, exploitation, and sectarian hatred among the very people they claim to represent.

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Juan David Rojas is a columnist at Compact covering Latin America.

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