The Trump administration’s unlawful removal of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to a prison in El Salvador—and willful defiance of court orders to facilitate his return—are demonstrating a flagrant disregard for due process that puts all U.S. residents in danger. The case has become the biggest test of the rule of law so far in the second Trump administration and illustrates the threats now facing all working people if the administration’s abuses of power are left unchecked.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained Abrego Garcia—a union sheet metal apprentice and father of three from Maryland—on March 12 while he was driving home from work. Despite the fact that Abrego Garcia had a work permit and court-ordered protection from deportation to El Salvador, the Trump administration flew him there and put him in a prison infamous for inhumane conditions and violence—known as CECOT and operated by Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele—in defiance of an initial court order, along with 238 others. Three-fourths of the people on that flight had no criminal record, according to major media investigations. Irrespective of their individual backgrounds, every single person on the flight was illegally removed from the U.S. and imprisoned for life without an opportunity to have their cases heard in court.

The Department of Justice admitted in court that removing Abrego Garcia from the U.S. was unlawful (what attorneys for the U.S. have called an “administrative error”), but the Trump administration has refused to take steps to bring him home. In the Oval Office last week, Trump and Bukele even seemed to gleefully bond over Abrego Garcia’s fate, with Trump announcing his intent to send U.S. citizens to CECOT next.

Abrego Garcia has now become the human face of the Trump administration’s anti-worker weaponization of immigration enforcement to further authoritarian goals of crushing dissent by threatening political enemies with physical violence and disappearance. Allowing ICE to operate without regard for due process, court authority, or internationally recognized human rights is intended to instill fear and sow terror—not only in immigrant communities, but across all U.S. workplaces and institutions. As one of the many statements issued by national union leaders calling for Abrego Garcia’s return put it, “If this can happen to Garcia, it can happen to anyone.” 

Abrego Garcia is a first-year apprentice and member of SMART Local 100 (SMART is the acronym for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers union). As a 29-year-old father starting a new career as a sheet metal worker, Abrego Garcia represents the success of building trades union initiatives to expand access to apprenticeships and connect diverse communities across America to good union construction jobs, while working in partnership with community groups, employers, and state and local governments to meet growing demand for skilled workers. Abrego Garcia’s career path also reflects the construction industry’s longstanding reliance on immigrant workers, who currently make up a 36% share of U.S. construction employment.

Building trades union leaders are forcefully calling for Abrego Garcia’s immediate return not only because he is one of their members in need of protection but also because they are acutely aware of the implications his case has for all workers and workplaces in our country. No one is more familiar with what happens on some non-union construction job sites when unscrupulous contractors (or subcontractors) take advantage of workers who lack an immigration status or only have a temporary or precarious status. The administration’s recent moves to abduct workers on the job or on their way to or from work, to imprison workers despite their protective status (as in the case of Abrego Garcia), and to strip legal status from hundreds of thousands of migrant workers—including many union members—will increase workplace exploitation, make workplaces less safe, and make it harder for employers to recruit and retain the skilled workers they need across the country.

Abrego Garcia fled El Salvador 15 years ago to escape threats and extortion from the violent Barrio 18 gang and sought asylum in the United States. Deeming his life to be in danger if he were to return to his home country, a U.S. immigration judge in 2019 granted him a form of legal protection known as “withholding of removal,” which included eligibility for work authorization. In other words: He went through a process established in U.S. law, sought protection from persecution, and was eventually granted protection from deportation to El Salvador and a work permit. The Trump administration has shown that they have no regard for this legal process covering migrants and asylum-seekers; in fact, they want to do away with it altogether, but they can’t do it legally on their own. That’s why they’ve invoked the Alien Enemies Act—a law last used to authorize putting people of Japanese, German, and Italian nationality and descent into concentration camps during World War II—to try and justify mass deportations without due process.

It’s important to emphasize that Abrego Garcia is one of many workers and students who the Trump administration is illegally detaining or disappearing. We know more about his case because it is the first to have been considered by the Supreme Court, because he is a member of a labor union and a community organization that have pledged to fight for his release while providing support to his family, and because his Senator Chris Van Hollen took the extraordinary step of traveling to El Salvador to meet with him and confirm he is alive. Some reports indicate Abrego Garcia has now been transferred to a lower-security prison in El Salvador, likely because of the attention his case has garnered. But more than 200 others were sent to CECOT on the same plane as Abrego Garcia. We now know that most had no criminal record or only minor infractions, and that at least some had entered the country lawfully and were employed—but it’s doubtful that any of them will ever have their day in court. They have effectively been sentenced to death.

Increasingly, reports detail numerous cases of ICE using extreme and unprecedented tactics such as targeting individuals for exercising free speech rights or rights to advocate for better working conditions, and revoking the immigration status of those who are lawfully in the U.S. and removing them without any due process. This has included the wrongful detention of a growing number of U.S. citizens. Far from targeting “violent criminals,” the administration appears focused on targeting those workers and students who have most dutifully followed laws and procedures for attaining protected status and work authorization, and whose personal information and whereabouts are therefore easiest for ICE to access. These actions are also leading to egregious mistakes, like ICE sending letters to U.S.-born citizens telling them that their immigration status has been canceled and that they need to leave the country.

At this moment of constitutional crisis, it’s worth clarifying that Abrego Garcia and others have been abducted to El Salvador and imprisoned without due process—not “deported.” Deportation is a legal process. It’s when the government brings evidence to prove that someone does not have the right to be in the United States, and if an immigration judge agrees, then ICE removes and releases them in their country of origin (or a safe third country). Being present in the United States without authorization is in many cases not a crime—it’s a civil infraction. And detention in an immigration prison is not supposed to be punitive, at least if you believe what ICE says prominently on its own website, which specifies that detention is intended to be a momentary holding until a judge decides whether evidence shows someone should be removed from the country.

What a deportation should never be, if the U.S. government is following its own laws, is a sentence to prison, torture, and death with absolutely no due process and no hope of ever being released, and with no way to reverse course when a mistake has been made, even one that’s been openly admitted by the government.

The Trump administration could still move to legally deport Abrego Garcia if they believe they have evidence to do so. They would just need to return him to the U.S. and make their case in immigration court to challenge the protection previously granted to him by a judge or find a safe third country for him. Trump and Bukele’s refusal to bring Abrego Garcia back—after admitting that removing him was a mistake—only confirms that they know they lack evidence to deport him legally to El Salvador. Their attempt to consign him and others to life in prison without any hearing is intended to terrorize migrant and native-born workers alike across the United States.

Every member of Congress must insist that the Trump administration bring Abrego Garcia and others home now so they can have their day in court—or else let all U.S. residents know that if they too are snatched by ICE without warning on their way to work, no amount of evidence will protect them against the violent and lawless actions of a White House that no longer upholds the sacred constitutional right to due process.