Since President Donald Trump took office, the U.S. has expelled hundreds of immigrants and asylum seekers to El Salvador without due process to be detained at the supermax mega-prison complex known as CECOT, with many of them accused of belonging to gangs largely on the basis of having tattoos. The Trump administration recently admitted in a court filing that a Salvadoran father with protected status was among those sent to El Salvador. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia lived in Maryland with his family and had been granted protected status in 2019, blocking the federal government from removing him. Despite admitting to an “administrative error,” the Trump administration says it will not seek to return Abrego Garcia to his family. “Every single day now, news stories are coming out showing that they made a lot of mistakes,” says Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. “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.”
