Letter to the Editor: Submitted by Thomas Hill

To the Editor:

Americans should be outraged as the Trump administration, once again, violates the Constitution and the rule of law by “disappearing” men to a foreign Gulag. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who fled gang violence in El Salvador in 2011, is married to a U.S. citizen and has U.S.-citizen children. In 2019 he received a court order requiring that he not be deported to El Salvador due to likelihood of persecution.

Despite that, Garcia was arrested along with hundreds of men and sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, in El Salvador. No attempt was made to prove these men were gang members or that they had violated any law despite the Fifth Amendment which guarantees that no person can be deprived of “life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”

In CECOT, which can hold 41,000 men, up to 70 prisoners are placed into a single cell with two toilets per cell. They receive no visits, and civil rights groups have cited cases of abuse, torture, lack of medical care, and deaths.

Even though the Trump administration has admitted it was a mistake that Garcia was sent to El Salvador, it has refused to seek his return, arguing that once he was outside the U.S., it had no power to obtain his return.

Arbitrary arrests and deportations to a torture Gulag are the actions of a lawless authoritarian regime. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a statement accompanying the Supreme Court’s order in this case, “The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”

Our Senators and Representatives need to stand up for the Constitution and the rule of law and demand Garcia’s immediate return.

Thomas Hill
Lansing/Cedar Falls