This Is How Authoritarianism Begins: One Illegal Deportation at a Time

The next time, it won’t be an immigrant. It’ll be someone who said the wrong thing, or looked the wrong way. Read your history. Then read it again.

Something in America has snapped.

The President of El Salvador "Oopsie"

A federal court said Kilmar Ábrego García couldn’t be deported. The government deported him anyway. No trial. No charges. No contact with his family. Now he’s rotting in a Salvadoran mega-prison while U.S. officials shrug like the law is just a suggestion.

This wasn’t a clerical error. It was a repeated act of contempt—contempt for the courts, for due process, and for the basic idea that brown, foreign-born people count as human beings. And once a government stops seeing people as human, it stops caring what happens to them. From there, it’s a short slide to not caring what happens to you.

“The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” -- John Adams

Kilmar fled El Salvador at 16 to escape gang violence. In Maryland, he built a life: married a U.S. citizen, raised three kids with special needs, worked in construction, paid taxes, held legal work authorization.

Playing By The Rules

He wasn’t hiding in the shadows. He played by the rules. And the rules, for once, worked: in 2019, a judge reviewed his case and ruled that deporting him would be a death sentence. The law was clear.

But on March 15, 2025, Kilmar was quietly placed on a deportation flight—despite an active court order blocking his removal. That was just the first in a litany of arrogant, contemptuous acts by the government.

A federal judge tried to intervene mid-air, ordering the plane turned around. The administration was practically laughing when it replied that the order had come too late—the aircraft had already left U.S. airspace. "Oopsie," tweeted El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele.

Oopsie?! Like this was some child's game?

Caged And Cut-Off

Later, they called his inclusion an “administrative error.” But they didn’t bring him back. The damage was done.

Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or Terrorism Confinement Center 

Now he’s locked inside CECOT, El Salvador’s hellscape of a mega-prison: lights never off, food without utensils, no phone calls, no visitors, no hearings. It’s not incarceration. It’s erasure.

And while Kilmar sits in a concrete tomb—a cell crammed shoulder-to-shoulder with other men, stripped to their boxers, heads bowed, bodies pressed like cordwood in the now-infamous photo Kristi Noem proudly snapped—the U.S. government refuses to bring him home. Even after the Supreme Court ruled his deportation was flatly illegal. Even after we all saw what that place really is.

Why? The story changes by the day. First, they said it was too late to stop the flight. Then they claimed courts have no authority once someone leaves U.S. soil—as if constitutional rights expire at 30,000 feet.

Next came the smear: unproven gang ties based on a confidential informant and a Chicago Bulls hat. Now? Now it’s just too “complicated” to fix. As if this were a misdelivered Amazon package—not a human life unlawfully exiled.

Defiance and Arrogance

And here’s the part that should make your skin crawl: Trump sat next to El Salvador’s president at a press conference and grinned as he refused to send Kilmar back. No protest. No negotiation. Just two men smirking like court orders are optional and human rights are a punchline.

The president of the United States didn’t give a damn about the laws of the United States.

Attorney General Pam Bondi has since declared Kilmar will “never” return. Senator Marco Rubio jumped in to claim courts can’t interfere with foreign policy—as if this is a geopolitical chess match, not a routine deportation gone rogue.

This isn’t diplomacy. This is cruelty cloaked in defiance. A solid middle finger to the courts. This is lawlessness—just as surely as if mobsters grabbed someone off the streets.

And we’ve seen it before.

Federal agents seize Elian to return him to Cuba. Credit: Associated Press

In 2000, the U.S. government faced a brutal custody battle over Elián González. His mother died fleeing Cuba. His father wanted him back. The country split in half.

But Attorney General Janet Reno followed the law. She got court approval, honored a legal custody claim, and returned the boy—even when it wasn’t politically popular. When federal agents took Elián, they did so under court order.

The Clinton administration took heat from all sides—but there was still a functioning pipeline between legal precedent and executive action. Government mistakes were still seen as shameful. Correctable. Newsworthy.

Young Marco Rubio—then a Florida legislator, still years away from his Trumpist nosedive—threw a fit at the time. But he seems to remember it differently now.

“To most other Americans,” he wrote in his memoir, “reuniting a motherless child with his father was obviously the right decision.”

Back then, the rule of law still meant something. Because back then, even political leaders understood that people—regardless of their birthplace—deserve dignity.

Now? The government breaks the law in broad daylight. And it threatens anybody that blinks.

Yes, we’ve seen wrongful deportations before— Pedro Guzman (2007) and Mark Daniel Lyttle (2008). Both U.S. citizens. Both thrown out of their own country by mistake. But even those cases were eventually acknowledged by a Republican administration. Apologized for. Settled.

We the Expendable

Kilmar’s case is different. This wasn’t a mistake. It was a malevolent choice. The court said no. The executive said you’re gone. That’s not democracy. That’s authoritarianism.

If a court can be ignored once, it can be ignored again. And again. Until ignoring it becomes standard. Until “We the People” becomes “We, the expendable.”

This isn’t about immigration. It’s about whether law still binds power. Whether courts still matter. Whether people are still people.

Because if Kilmar Ábrego García can be illegally deported and indefinitely disappeared without consequence, then no one is safe. Not the immigrant. Not the citizen. Not you.

We’ve been warned. The alarm is blaring. And if we don’t answer it now, we lose the right to feign surprise when the knock comes for someone else.

This isn’t about El Salvador.

This is about us.

Because when the law stops protecting them, it’s only a matter of time before it stops protecting you.