Politics

The United States is Ripe for Reinternment

The writing is on the wall, but is anyone reading it?

After the unconstitutional detention and deportation of Kilmar Ábrego García, we should all be concerned about where Donald Trump’s administration is heading.

Ábrego García, like 46% of the people currently detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), has never been convicted of a crime in the United States. Like many political commentators, I believe Ábrego García’s deportation was not a clerical error, it was a test case.

According to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, test cases are: “legal actions brought with the intention of challenging or receiving clarification on a present law. The strategy usually involves creating a “controversy” to get into a court that otherwise would not lead to a legal action because courts must have an actual dispute to hear a case.”

If his trial was a test, the administration failed to set a legal precedent, with a Maryland court ruling Ábrego García’s deportation unconstitutional and illegal earlier this month. The administration doesn’t seem to care. Ábrego García remains incarcerated in El Salvador, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says Ábrego García will “never live in the United States of America.”