An 'Administrative Error' Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison | Hacker News Reader

An 'Administrative Error' Sends a Maryland Father to a Salvadoran Prison

theatlantic.com

122 pointsJtsummers39 comments

Well, what did you expect? And what happened to "we're deporting criminals"? Not only are they deporting non-criminals, they're sending them to a prison camp in El Salvador! That's not deportation!

This is exactly why we have the due process this administration is intent on violating. How soon until we start snatching up citizens in the same way?

That's the point, test the will of the people by "accidentally", though completely predictably, sending citizens to El Salvador for literally nothing, then move on to the admin's real enemies if the outcry isn't loud enough.

He isn't a US citizen, he did have protected status and, if ever deported, was not supposed to be deported to El Salvador. He fled it in 2011 to escape gangs.

Citizenship is completely irrelevant. Due process applies to all persons on US soil, full stop. Without due process you are unable to even demonstrate citizenship to a judge, making the ICE member that dislikes you judge, jury, and executioner.

> Citizenship is completely irrelevant.

I was responding to this:

>> test the will of the people by "accidentally", though completely predictably, sending citizens to El Salvador for literally nothing

What's happened here shouldn't have happened, but we should focus on the facts and not add embellishments.

That isn’t an embellishment, it is, I’d say rather obviously, a statement about the next domino to fall.

A domino that has most likely already fallen.

The most terrifying part of the administration's theory is that the president should have unilateral and unchecked authority over who is allowed to be in the country. As tiring as it is to see so much of American politics here, we need to be shouting from the rooftops. This cannot continue. Things have gone entirely too far and Trump is just getting started.

How soon? -2 weeks?

https://www.wbez.org/immigration/2025/03/13/chicago-attorney...

https://www.aclu-il.org/en/press-releases/22-people-arrested...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...

They sent the brown shirts to New Jersey to arrest anyone brown. If you didn't have your papers with you, they arrested you, citizen or not.

If you were white, you were ok obviously.

This guy was an MS13 member: https://x.com/sonofhas/status/1906906503111676278?s=46

You’re an ms-13 member, actually.

United Center has a capacity of 23,500 MS-13 members apparently.

As a foreigner to the US, this gives you real pause about working or even visiting the US, even if you have all your papers in order. I guess that's the point.

100 percent. These stories are good for The Administration. Be fraid. And enjoy the third term.

@dang, hn should seriously consider disabling flagging, the "I'm comfortable with the nazi crowd" is, I'm sure, a minority

You may be much too optimistic about the majority of the people who use this forum, or more importantly to its algorithm, perform the majority of engagement.

> lots of people flag stories about the Trump administration. I didn't flag this one .. but I flag most of the other ones.

> I'm going to keep flagging all of them, because these stories are all activating and attract tons of upvotes and comments, filling the front page with repetitive recapitulations of the same tired arguments. It's not what HN is for. -tptacek

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465123

I'd rather they ban political posters trying to turn the place into another subreddit dump where they can call everyone they dislike Nazis

https://archive.ph/LGs2Z

Gift link,

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/an-admi...

More to the story: a judge in 2019 determined he was an MS13 member:

https://x.com/sonofhas/status/1906906503111676278?s=46

This was covered in the original article. There was no real evidence, he was not convicted of anything, and the court ultimately gave him protection from being returned to El Salvador.

Those are the facts that should have been weighed in a deportation trial, which the government skipped and now say they can’t get him back from his foreign jailer. If Trump’s government can do this to him, they can do it to anyone in the US.

No, he did not. He was detained based on an accusation, but charges were never filed due to lack of evidence and he was determined to have a valid asylum claim. That is not even slightly close to "a judge determined he was MS-13"

That Trump and Musk have not been arrested yet, or at least impeached, for grossly violating the constitution shows that the USA has turned into a fascist state by the congress and the senate.

Unfortunately the general population trusts what Republicans say about immigration. And this seem to give them a carte blanche apparently.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/democrats-cant-hide-from-immigr...

The boring and likely true answer is that the US has always been at least a bit fascistic. As every state. (As every official brings their own biases, which then shows up as errors in the workings of the state, which then leads to injustices, and so on.) There was always a lot of "fuck yeah America" which many times meant fuck anyone else. And initially America only meant white America, right? This doublespeak is not new. (Immigration quotas and disenfranchisement of various ethnic groups is not new. Redlining affected anyone non-white.)

Now as the culture, the zeitgeist, jurisprudence and laws are regressing (to some mean?) the US is becoming a lot more fascistic.

Looking forward to see the next non-Trump administration (not that there will be one while he's alive) send him to an Iranian prison due to an "Administrative Error" due to forgetting his "protected status".

Can you expand on what you mean with this comment? Even if it's joke, I don't understand what's being implied.

"He is asking the court to order the Trump administration to ask for Abrego Garcia’s return and, if necessary, to withhold payment to the Salvadoran government, which says it’s charging the United States $6 million a year to jail U.S. deportees."

$6 MILLION A YEAR?! For how many deportees?

>Abrego Garcia’s family has had no contact with him since he was sent to the megaprison in El Salvador, known as the CECOT. His wife spotted her husband in news photographs released by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on the morning of March 16, after a U.S. District Judge had told the Trump administration to halt the flights.

>“Oopsie,” Bukele wrote on social media, taunting the judge.

The El Salvadoran president sounds more like a dictatorial sociopath..

Why the fuck are jailing deportees in other countries anyways.

Because it's fun.

I'm not joking. This is the real answer.

Cruelty is the point. Cruelty is what the American people want.

The American people are not victims of a dictatorship, they voted for this.

It's the first line in the article:

but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.

The point is if they disappear people quickly enough, they think this argument will fly.

> The El Salvadoran president sounds more like a dictatorial sociopath..

Not his problem. He doesn't have any authority over the US legal system, the only thing he's doing is "renting out" prison cells. It's up to the US fix its legal procedures, it shouldn't be the responsibility of El Salvador to question the legality and morality of who exactly gets sent to prison.

People who laugh at innocents getting punished are exactly the same as those who slice up animals for fun. Bukele pretends to be a savior, but he's a monster.

I think it's easy for us to judge the situation. El Salvador was in absolutely miserable state, so I can really buy the argument that desperate times call for desperate measures. Truth is, most people living there do support his policies.

He knows an innocent man is going into his hell prison but he laughs about it anyway. What does this say about his character?

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