WASHINGTON D.C. - President Donald Trump on Monday said that he would try to deport “as many as possible” immigrants or criminals to El Salvador. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele met with Trump at the White House to discuss the ongoing deportations of MS-13 and Tren de Aragua gang members to El Salvador’s notorious Center for Terrorism Confinement (CETOC).
Trump has now deported 238 individuals to El Salvador under the 1879 Alien Enemies Act without notice or due process of law. President Bukele has agreed to help Trump with his deportation goals and received $6 million from the White House to continue these efforts.
Among the deportees is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a father from Maryland, who was wrongfully deported on March 15 due to an “administrative error,” said the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 31 in court. The government alleges he is part of the MS-13 gang. Garcia came to the U.S. illegally, and his wife filed a restraining order against him in 2021, according to the Department of Homeland Security. However, in 2019, a judge granted him protection from deportation.
On April 10, the Supreme Court judged Garcia’s deportation illegal and ordered Donald Trump to “facilitate” his return to the United States.
“I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” said the Salvadoran president. Bukele expressed that he does not want to release potentially dangerous prisoners. Furthermore, on April 12, Trump posted on Truth Social, “President Bukele has graciously accepted into his nation’s custody some of the most violent alien enemies of the World and, in particular, the United States. These barbarians are now in the sole custody of El Salvador, a proud and sovereign Nation, and their future is up to President B and his Government.”
Bukele’s visit and Trump’s collaboration with him on deportations highlight the president’s willingness to partner with authoritarian and far-right heads of state when he can use them to help fulfill his aggressive agenda on everything from deporting immigrants to setting tariffs.
“El Salvador’s cooperation with the United States has become a model for others to work with this administration,” said Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
El Salvador’s CETOC prison has been highlighted for its human rights abuses, systematic torture, and lack of due process. Since President Bukele was elected in 2019, he initiated a state of emergency to combat the increased gang activity in the country. Since then, 85,000 individuals have been detained, and only 1,000 have been convicted of a crime, according to Human Rights Watch.
Garcia has now been kept in the Salvadoran prison for 30 days and counting.
“Under President Bukele, human rights, democratic norms, and the rule of law have all but disappeared in El Salvador,” said Amanda Strayer, Senior Counsel for Accountability at Human Rights First, in a statement. “The United States should be holding Bukele’s government accountable for these serious violations, but instead the Trump administration is cozying up to and copying Bukele’s authoritarian playbook – rounding up people with no evidence, denying them any due process, and disappearing them in abusive Salvadoran prisons indefinitely.”
On April 9, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus sent a letter to the president demanding Garcia’s return. It states, “We find your administration’s actions to be wholly unacceptable. Your administration has not only disrupted the lives of his American wife and children, but also undermines the very foundations of our nation’s commitment to justice and due process.”
Before the Salvadoran president’s visit, the State Department changed El Salvador’s travel advisory from Level 2 to Level 1, signifying it's safe for travel and encouraging Americans to spend their tourist dollars in the country. This means that El Salvador is now considered safer for Americans than some European countries, including France and the United Kingdom.
Since the November election, Donald Trump and Elon Musk have both publicly supported other heads of state involved in human rights or criminal cases.
Trump called France’s far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen's conviction for embezzling $4.1 million out of the European Union a “witch hunt.”
As Le Pen led the polls for the next election, she was found guilty of using European funds to pay her assistants and other employees working for her party in France, the National Front. Under French law, Le Pen was sentenced to ineligibility to participate in the 2027 presidential campaign and up to four years in prison.
Along with the U.S. government’s support, the Kremlin also denounced her conviction, saying Europe was “trampling on democratic norms.”
Another far-right leader, Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, is also set to visit the White House on Thursday and will be negotiating tariffs with Donald Trump. She was the only European leader who attended Trump’s inauguration in January, and Trump has called Meloni one of his favorite European leaders.
Similar to Trump, Meloni has opted for the deportation of undocumented immigrants from Italy to Albania. In November 2024, Rome signed a $200 million treaty with Albania to create bigger and more secure immigration camps. Italian courts have challenged the legality of Meloni’s plan. The camps are now being used as a holding post for people whose asylum demands have been denied. Meloni’s far-right coalition remains hopeful that a decision by the European Union’s Court of Justice could pave the way for this policy to be implemented.
More recently, Meloni passed her controversial security bill by decree. The new bill would limit rights to freely assemble and provide protections for law enforcement accused of police brutality. In December 2024, when the bill arrived in the Italian Senate for a vote, the Council of Europe Commissioner of Human Rights denounced this bill and warned of potential human rights abuses.
In another instance of European political involvement, Elon Musk in January urged German voters to vote for the extreme right party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). The party has been accused of being anti-immigrant, Islamophobic, and homophobic.
One of its largest campaign promises is what they call “remigration,” the mass expulsion of immigrants. The AfD has advocated for the expulsion of German citizens who do not have German ancestry. As a result, German courts have ruled that a significant portion of the AfD is suspected of being an extremist organization. The AfD came in second place in the February elections.
Among other controversial leaders, Javier Milei of Argentina has also become Trump’s “favorite president.” He was the first world leader to visit Mar-a-Lago after the November election. Milei is highly admiring of Trump and agrees with the president on various measures.
When Mileil ascended to the presidency in 2023, he implemented an austerity plan that reduced government spending, resulting in a significant increase in poverty nationwide. Milei has also attacked the LGBTQ community, restricted freedom of assembly, and has severely increased law enforcement’s ability to use lethal force against suspected gang members.
In a parallel with Trump, Milei has opted out of the World Health Organization, refused to condemn Russia for its illegal invasion of Ukraine, and has continuously fought against “wokeness.”
Amalia Huot-Marchand is a graduate student at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.