Was Kilmar Abrigo Garcia a MS-13 gang guy? Yes, allegedly.
Was he here illegally? Yes.
Did two judges rule the evidence showed he was a member of MS-13 and should be deported? Yes. Has President Donald Trump ruled that MS-13 is a terrorist organization? Yes.
Then adios, Mr. Garcia. You win a free flight to a terrible prison in El Salvador, your native country. You were lucky you were able to live here illegally for 14 years.
I’m not against immigrants – legal ones. I’m all for due process and fair trials for even the most heinous criminals. But I don’t think illegal migrants are entitled to the protections of the Constitution the second they step on U.S. soil. And I don’t want illegal immigrants living in the U.S. like Garcia who are members of gangs that kill and mutilate people.
Garcia was deported to El Salvador by mistake a month ago. But I don’t care how many disabled kids he has, or how many construction jobs he supposedly worked, he deserved it.
The deportation of Garcia was the biggest story of the week in the liberal media for one reason only – Trump is the president.
Trump and his people were portrayed, as usual, and without historical context, to be uniquely cruel for the cold and unconstitutional way they treated Garcia.
Yet presidents Clinton, Obama, Trump and Biden each deported illegal immigrants during their reigns – by the millions.
One of them – guess who – was so enthusiastic about deportations the ACLU dubbed him “Deporter-in-chief.”
Most of the illegal immigrants were quietly deported by the pre-Trump presidents with minimal or no due process – that means no judges or hearings or media were involved. In 2013 the ACLU “reported that 83% of deportations (363,279) were ordered by immigration officers, not judges, denying individuals a chance to present evidence or access legal counsel.”
The immigration policies of our former “Deporter-in-chief,” aka Obama, sound familiar. While Obama’s focus was on “felons, not families,” his administration was criticized because “even long-term residents and parents of U.S. citizens were sometimes deported without adequate hearings, especially in border zones.”
One of those deportees was Nydia. She was “a transgender woman with asylum status who was deported twice without proper review” and her case “highlighted systemic failures in screening for legal protections.”
Poor Nydia. I’ll never forget the national media’s nonstop concern over her plight at the hands of the Nazi-like immigration officials working for the “Deporter-in-Chief.” Of course, that media attention never happened.
This week Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen made a big deal of his solo trip to El Salvador to try to spring his “constituent” Garcia from a scary gang prison.
The media covered it like he was a Navy Seal going to Gaza to single-handedly rescue our hostages from Hamas.
Van Hollen said his main goal was to meet Garcia to make sure he was in good health, which he did. But he ended up looking like a fool when it turned out that the innocent “Maryland father” was a two-time wife beater and an MS-13 member in good standing.
Democrats want the courts to force Garcia’s return so he gets due process, but the Trump administration claims it can’t bring him back, so stay tuned.
The hysteria over the “unjust” deporting of an “alleged” MS-13 member shows how desperate the Democrats are to find an issue they can use against Trump.
The real trouble for Democrats is that they have no leaders in Congress and almost no voter support. All they have are a pair of raving socialists — ancient Bernie Sanders and his young sidekick Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The New York Times claims Bernie and AOC are energizing the corpse of the Democrat Party with their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour.
Maybe. But they may have wasted their time when they crashed the Coachella music festival in the California desert last weekend and ranted onstage about social justice to an elite crowd that had paid $600 a ticket to get in.
Everyone was so stoned or drunk on $22 drinks, I bet they don’t remember a word the pair said about how hard they’re fighting for poor people.
Michael Reagan, the son of President Ronald Reagan, is an author, speaker and president of the Reagan Legacy Foundation.
