Nick Miroff

At each stage in the political and legal fight over Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation, the Trump administration has pushed back harder and dug in deeper.
The administration first called Abrego Garcia’s deportation an “administrative error,” then a “clerical error.” The words trivialized the decision to send a man to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador without legal proceedings and in direct violation of a judge’s protective order.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
The Trump administration is working hard to convince the public that its mass-deportation campaign is fully under way. Over the past several weeks, federal agents have seized foreign students off the streets, raided worksites, and shipped detainees to a supermax prison in El Salvador using wartime powers adopted under the John Adams administration.

The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The Trump administration’s plan to dust off the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was in the works long before March 15. But the precise timing was hazy. Immigration attorneys went to federal court that morning to try to block the government from using the extraordinary wartime authority, which allows deportations without due process. There were few signs that the White House was about to use the law to send planeloads of Venezuelans to a prison complex in El Salvador.

During the first Trump administration, when Stephen Miller’s immigration policy proposals hit obstacles in federal court, rumors would circulate about his plans to dust off arcane presidential powers. Government lawyers were wary of overreach; officials in the West Wing and at the Department of Homeland Security would sometimes snicker.
LOL Stephen, they’d say, amused by his creative zealotry.
No one is laughing now.

As the details of Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest by U.S. immigration agents first emerged this week, attorneys I spoke with were so astonished that they wondered if the government had made a mistake. President Donald Trump and other administration officials had been threatening to punish protesters by taking away student visas, but Khalil was a legal permanent resident with a U.S.-citizen spouse. The Palestinian activist and former Columbia University student hadn’t been charged with a crime.

The opening salvo of President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign has made immigrants across the United States fear that simply going to work, school, or the supermarket might result in a life-altering arrest.
Sightings of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, real and imagined, are everywhere on social media. Teachers say students are panicked that ICE will take their parents while they’re in class.