The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
By now you may have heard that the Trump administration deported a Salvadoran man “in error.” The administration is refusing to bring him back, and this particular case has extremely dark implications that are going to continue reverberating. JD Vance addressed this on Twitter, and he face-planted in a spectacular way that would have been funny if it weren’t so repulsive. He claimed that the man was a convicted MS-13 member, even though that’s a severe distortion. And the broader story here is that Vance and Trump are perfectly fine with “accidentally removing people” because they want immigrants to be afraid that they’re going to be next. Today, we’re talking about this with one of our favorite observers of immigration issues, longtime veteran advocate Douglas Rivlin. Doug, it’s great to have you on again, man.
Douglas Rivlin: Hey Greg, good to see you.
Sargent: The deported man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is a Salvadoran who was removed to El Salvador along with dozens of others. He was sent to that prison for terrorists that was all over the news recently. He’s the father of an autistic child who lives in Maryland and his wife is a U.S. citizen. The government had tried to remove him to El Salvador in 2019, but he was actually granted a form of status called withholding from removal based on the fact that he’d face serious harm if he were sent back. Doug, can you give us the rundown here?
Rivlin: In 2019, the judge, according to the reporting, said, Don’t deport this guy back to El Salvador. And according to the reporting, that’s what they, in fact, did a week or two ago. He had protection from deportation. He was going through all of his check-ins. He’s got deep ties to his community. And at least according to all the stories that I’ve seen, the ability to define him as an MS-13 operative is very suspect and has never been something that was judged on evidence in court. I think they just decided that this guy is an MS-13 guy and they wanted to deport him.
Sargent: Well, I should add that Nick Miroff of The Atlantic, who originally broke the story, actually reported that the police did not believe that he was an MS-13 member and didn’t characterize him that way.
Rivlin: Yeah. This is an administration that just does a word search or a tattoo search—and they’re looking to fill their quotas. They wanted to fill up this plane and send it to El Salvador, and they had somebody that they thought they could reasonably argue was a gang member, and they got caught. Now they’re spinning lies and webs to try and spin their way out of it, but it’s part of the bigger story. It’s not just that the due process rights of immigrants are being violated—which they are—or that people are being railroaded into a foreign prison for a couple of years of hard labor because they have tattoos from Real Madrid; it’s that they’re really testing the waters. If they can arrest people without any due process or any good cause and put them in jail somewhere and then say, Hey, we put them in jail, sorry, there’s nothing we can do about it, eventually they move beyond immigrants and start doing that to other people. This is a very slippery slope as anybody at the ACLU or anybody who ever went to law school would tell you.
Sargent: Well, I want to bring in Vice President JD Vance here. He responded to podcaster Jon Favreau on this topic. Favreau asked Vance on Twitter for comment on this erroneous deportation when the news broke. Vance then said this, “My comment is that according to the court document you apparently didn’t read, he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here.” Now again, he wasn’t actually convicted in any criminal sense. He was scheduled to be deported in 2019, but the judge, as you point out, reversed that. He did have the right to be here. It’s a very dark thing that Vance did here, which is to just declare him convicted and therefore subject to deportation on that basis.
Rivlin: That’s what they’ve been doing with immigrants, even if you’re here with permission of the government, even if you’re here and protected from deportation because you have a pending asylum case—which our law requires—and even if you are in the process of adjusting your status. You can get deported by this administration because they don’t care about the rule of law. Remember, DeSantis, when he put people on a plane to Martha’s Vineyard a couple of years ago, said, I’m putting illegals on a plane. And those are people who had permission to be in the country from the federal government, which is not what he defines normally as someone in the country illegally. So they’re trying to push the envelope.
The main thing that they’re concerned with is they wanted to have pictures of brown men being treated badly, having their heads shaved, being frog-marched through a maximum security prison by tough-looking guys. That’s what they were hoping for, and that’s what they got. But the details, once you pick it apart, are just a whole lot different than the sales pitch that Trump was giving us—which is not unusual for Trump. And now you’ve had Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and others trying to jump out there and explain away the reality, which is that they rounded up a bunch of usual suspects and put them on a plane and sent them for hard labor to another dictator’s prison and exchanged for millions of dollars to that dictator. That’s the state of American jurisprudence at the moment.
Sargent: I want to pick up on the story again. The government is actually admitting that this guy, Abrego Garcia, was deported in error to El Salvador. But the administration is now arguing that there is nothing it can do to compel his return, that he shouldn’t be returned, and that the court lacks jurisdiction to order it—meaning to order the government to return this guy because he’s no longer in the United States. It’s a circular argument. We removed him in error, the Trump administration says, but precisely because he was removed that U.S. courts no longer have jurisdiction to ensure him due process in the situation, so let him rot in the Salvadoran prison, right?
Rivlin: And let him be in photo ops with the secretary of Homeland Security or whoever else was in the backdrop, right? This is an ongoing public relations effort by the Trump administration to sell what they’re doing as being tough and protecting us from crime and gangs. This was never about crime and gangs. This was never about public safety. This was always about trying to scare immigrants into leaving the country and keeping their heads down. It was about trying to convince their MAGA base that they’re getting tough on brown and Black people, whether there’s evidence to do that or not.
They’re making up their own rules. They’re defining people who come from Latin America and the Caribbean as here illegally, regardless of the circumstances of them being here, and they want them rounded up and sent to another country, any other country. And Bukele in El Salvador was willing to do it for bargain prices. It’s disgusting, and it matters for people who are not immigrants. We’re the canaries in the coal mine in the immigration world, we like to say, and a lot of the experimentation that they do with taking away people’s rights and due process starts in the immigration arena—and then they see how far they can go. The rights of people who are in detention and at the border are lower than the average citizen, but they’re still violating even that level. So it seems like they are really trying to push the envelope in how they can treat people cruelly for the show of it without paying any consequences.
And this is getting the attention of Democrats. People have been complaining a lot about the Democrats. You had Cory Booker go to the floor, and you’ve had Murphy and a bunch of other members. This is getting under their skin more than anything else so far, and you’re hearing a lot of people speaking out about it, which is great. We need to have more people jumping up and down and saying, Hey, you’re violating the laws of the U.S. and you should be able to go get this guy out of the prison hellhole that you sent him and make things right. We also need action from Democrats, and we need action that’s going to put some pressure on the Republicans—and that’s a much tougher scenario to figure out. People have said, Let’s drag our feet on everything that goes through the Senate, which is not hard to do as the Republicans have always showed us, or, Let’s stop everything in the House, let’s try and bring the government to a screeching halt until we force the president to address the fact that he’s in violation of the law.
Sargent: Well, I have long thought that Democrats should adopt that approach as well. I want to bring in what Abrego Garcia’s lawyer Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg told me. He said the following, “If nobody can do anything to bring him back once he’s been deported, then the order preventing his deportation in the first place is meaningless.” In other words, if a judge ordered him not deported and the government goes ahead and deports him, and the government won’t or can’t, according to itself, do anything to bring him back, then what’s the point of the judge’s order in the first place?
Rivlin: That’s exactly the right diagnosis. There’s some laws they don’t like and they’re not going to follow them, and they’re going to stick their fingers in their ears and go on Fox News and say whatever they have to say to try and obfuscate or turn the attention away. From their point of view, they’re trying to do symbolic politics and be tough on people, but the reality underneath it has always been very shaky. We’re not at war with Venezuela. We’re not at war with El Salvador. So deporting people under a wartime act from 1798, on its face, is silly. But that’s the start of the lies that they have been telling and spinning, which are starting to blow up in their angry little faces. This is getting much more difficult for them. The press secretary at the White House briefing ... It’s not easy to tell these lies. She was obviously uncomfortable with it. But they’re making up stuff until they run out of stuff to make up.
Sargent: I want to clarify for listeners that you were referring to the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. That’s the statute that the administration invoked to deport dozens of people to this prison in El Salvador, most of them Venezuelans. This guy was swept up in that. Apparently, he’s Salvadoran. The whole thing is completely ridiculous because we’re not at war with or under invasion from a hostile foreign power, and that’s what’s needed for the statute to be invoked in the first place.
Rivlin: And even if we were, concentration camps and sending people to foreign prisons is a bad idea. We’ve tried it before, and it’s been a bad idea. Trump likes those kinds of bad ideas. Part of the diagnosis here is that talking about this stuff means a lot less time spent talking about egg prices or the stock market tanking or Medicare and Social Security cuts. They want to desperately change the subject from those kinds of things, which they are not addressing and, in fact, are making a lot worse. They would rather be talking about, Is this guy a gang member or not a gang member? Is he convicted of ...? As far as they’re concerned, that’s the conversation they’d love to be having because it reinforces in their followers minds that if you’ve got a tattoo and you’re Latino, you’re probably here illegally and should have been deported long ago. It’s just not true. But that’s really what they’re trying to do, to change the topic from the actual cost of all of these policies.
We know the cost in terms of the rule of law. We know the cost in terms of the money that we’re paying to El Salvador and the money that it takes to detain people and round them up. And they’re cutting corners; they’re going for the easy folks who are coming in for their check-ins and putting them in the list of people who going to be on the plane. All of this is costing us a great deal, but the damage to the economy of removing so many people, of creating fear, of making children scared to go to school will add up. And it’s not what the American people bargained for. They want someone to be tough on immigration, but it’s to the exclusion of actually following the law, and it’s to the exclusion of actually helping the country and helping the economy. That doesn’t make any sense.
Sargent: I want to highlight a specific thing about the administration’s position that’s really ludicrous. It’s essentially declaring the power to remove people outside the law in error without bearing subsequent responsibility to rectify that error.
Rivlin: Yeah, they hate oversight because the more scrutiny they get on anything, the more ridiculous their initial story sounds. They get caught in these loops of saying, Hey, we did it, but we can’t fix it. That’s why they got rid of the inspectors general. That’s why they’re attacking law firms. That’s why they are trying to make any grain of oversight of what they do much more difficult. And they’re attacking institutions like The Atlantic and your institution and the whole press. They want to be able to get away with what they want to be able to get away with without anybody questioning it. And now that somebody has been questioning it, it turns out, Hey, this guy wasn’t really a gang member and was sent to El Salvador when a judge said, Don’t do that.
Sargent: Exactly. I want to try to step back and take stock of where we are in a broader sense. Where do you think public opinion is right now? I think for people like you and me, the sobering truth is that some polls show approval of Trump on immigration. Now, I don’t take too much from that because a lot of the questions are worded in a way that stacks the deck. The pollsters will say things like, Do you support the removal of illegal immigrants, yes or no? and they don’t offer respondents the choice of deportations versus a path to legalization. When you offer them that path to legalization option, majorities actually choose that instead. Additionally, when the polls get into some nuance and say things like, Do you support the removal of people who haven’t been convicted of any other crime aside from entering the country illegally? then all of a sudden the numbers shift dramatically against removing the people who are longtime residents. So it’s complicated. Public opinion is really in flux. It’s confused and self-contradictory, but I would like to see more public disapproval of things like what we’re seeing now, wouldn’t you?
Rivlin: Yeah. Polls can move a lot in a short period of time, and this is the kind of story that’s going to move them. Most people have just a fundamental misunderstanding of our immigration system in that they think people could have come legally with a visa if they had just waited till Thursday or next Tuesday, when in fact most people can’t come legally ever. And if you can come legally, it’s a years and years and years and years’ process. And if a gang is extorting you now, you may not have years and years and years. The asylum system is perfectly legal, so those people that JD Vance is defining as here illegally aren’t. They’re here legally with our permission; they’re going through a court process in a U.S. court.
I saw a story about a couple that lived in Orange County in California for 30 plus years, and they were deported back to Colombia. And the comments on social media was, Well, if they were here for 30 years, how come them they didn’t get legal status? How come they didn’t go down to the post office and fill out that form? If you think that you could be here legally but you’re choosing not to, that changes your attitude toward undocumented immigrants. The reality is undocumented immigrants are locked into their status. And it’s a conscious decision. The Republicans along the way made it their decision that anybody who’s here illegally can never be here legally so that they can be deported. That’s what the Republican Judiciary Committee has been pushing for all along, and that’s why blocking immigration reform for 30 years has worked as a strategy.
But the realities of it is if someone has lived here for 30 years and they’ve raised two generations of American families, they should have an opportunity to earn legal status through a process. And even for someone who’s been here since 2019, which is still six years ago, they should have a way, a process to go through where they could either earn legal status or go through the process that Mr. Abrego Garcia did, which is to determine that actually deporting him to El Salvador would be in contrary to the interests of the U.S.
Sargent: Look, Doug, let’s wrap this up. You’ve been fighting on these issues for a very long time, I think listeners can probably tell that. How are you feeling about things generally?
Rivlin: We’re in a new era where it’s not just enough for the ACLU to be in court suing on our behalf, on behalf of the rule of law for all Americans. We have to take some action. We have to insist that Democrats not treat this as business as usual and that they take extraordinary measures. Peaceful and nonviolent measures, of course, but they’ve got to make Trump pay a price with his own voters and with his own wallet in order to stop him from violating the law. And he sees that as a badge of honor, as we know.
The American people see violating our laws, especially when they catchup good people in a bad system, as really something to fight against, and I hope more and more people do. I think in the long run, there’s an ability to turn the tide on these issues. But we’ve got to start standing up now. We’ve got to be able to fight for the rule of law and for American justice system that works for everyone. Otherwise, it’s going to work for no one, including whoever is hearing my voice right now.
Sargent: Very well said, Douglas Rivlin. Always a pleasure to talk to you, man. Thanks for coming on.
Rivlin: All right, Greg.
Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.