Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. At some point, probably around middle school, I got tired of explaining where El Salvador was. “It’s a tiny country in Central America, along the Pacific Ocean,” I’d say. “If you fly from LAX, you can be there in four hours.” This week, El Salvador is back in the news, and I miss the days when Americans knew little about our pulgarcito. On March 15, the Trump administration unconstitutionally deported Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to a megaprison in El Salvador. The Justice Department admitted the removal was an “administrative error,” and despite a court order to do anything possible to get him back, Trump administration officials claim their hands are tied. Abrego Garcia is a Salvadoran national, their logic goes, and cannot be retrieved. That’s not true. El Salvador is a close ally, and all too eager to do Donald Trump’s bidding. All it’d take is a diplomatic phone call. Instead, the administration doubled down, insisting that Abrego Garcia is part of MS-13, despite having no evidence and being ordered by the Supreme Court to “facilitate” his return. When Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele visited the Oval Office on Monday, he parroted the claim: “How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” To be clear: Abrego Garcia has not been convicted of a crime. He had a legal right to be in the United States. Critics are rightly worried about the constitutional and legal crisis at hand, but legality is only part of the story. A rhetorical battle is also unfolding, one that has shaped the American immigration system for decades. At its center, as its most consistent victims, are ordinary immigrants like Abrego Garcia. Debates about whether someone deserves to stay in the United States or not often hinge on their criminal status. Even well-meaning liberals have fallen into that trap. Barack Obama infamously defended his immigration policies as targeting “felons, not families” and “criminals, not children,” which sounds good, but obscures the wide range of infractions within these labels. Since the 1980s, legislation has expanded what counts as a criminal—and thus deportable—offense. As scholars have pointed out, policies enacted in the 2000s have “cast an increasingly wider net which continually re-determined who could be classified as a ‘criminal alien,’ such that the term is now a mostly incoherent grab bag” that can include traffic violations or minor drug offenses. Abrego Garcia is neither a felon nor a criminal. Even if he was, it doesn’t automatically mean he deserves to be deported. A family shouldn’t be torn apart over a speeding ticket. Then, there’s the question of “terrorism.” Bukele chose the word carefully. A Trump executive order designated MS-13 as a foreign terrorist organization, which hides the fact that the gang originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s. Their members largely join out of economic need, self-defense, or social pressure—not ideology. By framing alleged gang members as terrorists, Bukele is able to justify the inhumane, ever-expanding prison system he’s built in El Salvador, claiming it’s a catch-all solution to violence in the country, despite the incarceration of thousands of innocent people and doubts around its effectiveness. The playbook is classic strongman: Exploit a citizenry’s fears, then consolidate power. Not coincidentally, it’s the same rhetoric that Ronald Reagan and the authoritarian Salvadoran government used throughout the 1980s to demonize and target leftist organizers, calling them “Communist terrorists.” Throughout the Salvadoran Civil War, thousands of innocent people were disappeared or murdered, extrajudicially, for nothing more than alleged sympathies with leftist ideology. Priests, students, educators, and union organizers were prime targets. Wielding the threat of “terrorism” allowed the state to excuse its own violence and disregard for citizens’ rights, a strategy Bukele has repurposed for the 21st century. Under a state of exception passed in 2022, constitutional guarantees have been rolled back. Anyone in El Salvador can be detained without being told the reason, denied legal representation, and held indefinitely in prisons where torture and excessive force are common. Americans are scared of a future where they could be jailed or deported without due process. In El Salvador, that future has arrived. Salvadorans live through it every day. That’s what made the images of Trump and Bukele laughing in the Oval Office so chilling. Trump seems eager to bring a Bukele-style authoritarianism stateside. Fearmongering is a powerful political tool. A government hellbent on stripping its constituents of their constitutional rights will begin with the most liminal and marginalized among us. If immigrants can be shunned as “criminals” or “terrorists,” anyone can. It’s already happening: International students are having their visas and First Amendment rights stripped under accusations of sympathizing with terrorists. But we cannot just advocate for those with legal status. Legality is a false flag, and it will not always protect us. We must be unflinching: Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia was illegally deported and must be returned. We must also demand more: a humane and holistic immigration system, a functional asylum process, and a discourse that doesn’t demonize “criminals” or “felons.” Let’s fight for those who have a legal right to be in the United States, and for those who have no other choice.