Alex Nowrasteh
The Trump administration is rapidly spending its political capital and attacking the courts by deporting noncriminals to El Salvador. In its zeal to speed deportations and close the border, it declared MS-13 and Tren de Aragua terrorist organizations, even though the latter is a loosely organized Venezuelan prison gang, while the former is a criminal gang. Then, it claimed several Venezuelan and Salvadoran migrants in the US are members of those gangs on flimsy evidence. Lastly, Trump used the Alien Enemies Act to deport some migrants without due process to Salvadoran supermax prisons when he claimed they were members of those gangs. Some of the deportations likely even violated federal court orders, and around three-quarters of them had no criminal record.
Not even the Bush administration attempted such brazen, unconstitutional violations of civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11, which was a real national crisis. Today’s crisis is fake. Unlike al Qaeda, illegal immigrants in Tren de Aragua or MS-13 didn’t commit a terrorist attack. Nobody has ever been murdered in an attack on US soil committed by terrorists who entered as illegal immigrants. If deportees like Kilmar Abrego Garcia were vicious criminals or terrorists, then their deportations wouldn’t be a political scandal. A legal squabble, a few headlines, perhaps a disturbing court case, and an attack on our institutions, but a sitting US senator certainly wouldn’t have visited him. Moreover, the president of El Salvador wouldn’t have staged the photo to make Garcia look like he was on vacation, and Trump wouldn’t be digging in to keep him there.
If Trump’s deportation dragnet had real MS-13 kingpins to boast about, he wouldn’t need to bend the law to toss García—a man with no convictions—into a foreign prison. The fact that a senator had to intervene in García’s case speaks volumes: it shows how extraordinary and unjustified this policy is.
Garcia wasn’t the first. Before him, Trump deported Venezuelan asylum-seeker Andry Hernández Romero to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act. Why such a harsh punishment for an asylum seeker who was a makeup artist? A disgraced former Milwaukee police officer turned prison contractor who lost his job after drunkenly crashing his car into a house claimed that Romero was a Tren de Aragua member. Turns out that Romero was not a member of that jumbled prison gang, but he hasn’t been heard from since arriving in El Salvador. Romero’s case is even more tragic, and it underscores the same point: lacking actual criminals, the administration went after an innocent asylum-seeker, and had to rely on a sketchy ex-cop’s tattoo paranoia to do it. Over the dissent of the Supreme Court’s most conservative judges, the Court temporarily paused the use of the Alien Enemies Act to deport people.
This wasn’t how Trump’s mass deportations were supposed to begin. He campaigned on the promise to deport hordes of dangerous illegal immigrant criminals. If they’re out there, where are they? Why is his administration targeting Garcia and Romero, men with no criminal convictions? Sure, a corrupt police officer who was fired for blackmailing a prostitute claimed Garcia was MS-13. Another disgraced cop pointed to Romero’s tattoos. But with no convictions, no hearings, and no trials, these deportations aren’t about justice. They’re about appearances. Why is Trump focusing so much energy on attacking Garcia and keeping Romero in El Salvador while ignoring the legions of murderers he and his supporters claim are ravaging our communities?
Those legions of illegal immigrant criminals don’t exist. The overwhelming evidence is that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. Texas has the best data on illegal immigrant criminal convictions of any state. The illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate in Texas is around half the rate of native-born Americans. Legal immigrants? 58 percent lower. Focusing on homicide, the most serious crime and best one to study here, illegal immigrants are 26 percent less likely to be convicted.
Georgia recently started reporting illegal immigrant incarceration data. In late 2024, when Laken Riley’s murderer was convicted, illegal immigrants were about 15 percent less likely to be incarcerated than the rest of the state’s population and 32 percent less likely to be incarcerated for homicide. The incarceration rates are similar in Oklahoma. The three states (all conservative) that track illegal immigrant crime all contradict Trump’s story.
Texas, Georgia, and Oklahoma are probably not outliers, but they could be. Estimates of the illegal immigrant incarceration rate using a residual statistical method to analyze American Community Survey data fill the gap. The illegal immigrant incarceration rate is between 31 percent and 56 percent below that of native-born Americans every year. Similar to the Texas data, the legal immigrant incarceration rate is between 65 percent and 75 percent below that of native-born Americans.
The evidence is overwhelming that illegal immigrants have a low crime rate for any number of reasons. Perhaps the worst are deported after their first arrests so they can’t become recidivists, which demolishes the nativist claim that illegal immigrants go relatively unpunished in America. Regardless, the myth of the illegal immigrant crime wave persists in the face of overwhelming evidence. There are several crimes committed by illegal immigrants, and those criminals should be harshly punished, but we can’t confuse the occasional horrible crime with a statistical trend that isn’t there.
The Trump administration is trying to deport illegal immigrant criminals who simply aren’t here. Faced with few real threats, it conjures imaginary ones and deports noncriminals to dangerous foreign prisons to keep up the fear. Trump ran further ahead on immigration than on any other issue during the 2024 campaign and is still ahead, even though his approval is falling. Since there aren’t that many illegal immigrant criminals, the administration must focus on removing people who aren’t criminals to keep their deportation promises. That’s why ICE is targeting Japanese students who caught too many fish and graduate students who wrote op-eds, even though illegal immigrant criminals are the easiest to deport because they are already in law enforcement custody.
Where are the hordes of terrorists and murderers that Trump promised to deport? Unfortunately for Trump, Garcia is reminding everybody that there just aren’t that many illegal immigrant terrorists and criminals. Romero doesn’t politically matter as much because he’s less likely to legally be returned, but his case is even worse. Both are supposed criminal gangbangers deported to El Salvador, a country lionized by conservatives for reasons both understandable and mythical. The administration is so desperate to make Garcia a symbol of an illegal immigrant crime wave that never happened that they even tweeted a picture of President Trump holding up a photoshopped image of Garcia with tattoos that he doesn’t possess.
Garcia probably isn’t an angel, even though we don’t know because he was denied due process before being incarcerated abroad after being illegally deported. Romero is a more tragic case, but his legal ability to return is basically nonexistent, so few people pay attention to him. Trump’s scandalous deportation of noncriminals to supermax prisons in El Salvador without due process, his unconscionable violation of court orders, and his silly public defenses make more sense when you realize that he’s staked much of his political career on the falsehood that there’s a massive illegal immigrant crime wave. Immigration law allows most illegal immigrants to be deported, but it’s a political win when they are terrorists or criminals.
Trump’s actions are those of a desperate and committed president, but certainly not those of a president committed to parsing facts, confronting reality, and protecting the Constitution. Trump can’t keep his promise to deport illegal immigrant criminals because there aren’t that many to deport. But that hasn’t stopped him—and it won’t.