Trump administration stonewalls Congress on questions about immigration crackdown on US citizens and green-card holders
A U.S. citizen who voted for Donald Trump was detained by armed immigration agents during a stop in Virginia in March. A toddler, his mother, and his grandmother, all U.S. citizens from Puerto Rico, were detained while speaking Spanish while shopping in Milwaukee. U.S. citizen members of the Navajo Nation were stopped and questioned in Arizona and New Mexico.
These are just some of the immigration-related incidents that have raised alarm among members of Congress and prompted them to reach out to the Trump administration for more information.
But more than a dozen representatives, all of them Democrats, told ProPublica they haven’t received any response, even as long as months after seeking information, prompting fears as the administration has pursued a breakneck pace of deportations.
“That is a big concern on a level beyond what ICE is doing,” Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico told the outlet.
The fear has been heightened in the wake of the mistaken deportation of Maryland father Kilmar Abrega Garcia to a notorious El Salvador prison and the deportation of others who were simply snatched from their homes or off the streets and put on a plane to the same foreign prison without any court process.
Not only are Trump officials apparently defying court orders, “this administration does not seem to recognize the power and authority and responsibility” of members of Congress, added Leger Fernández.
A White House spokesperson insisted that the administration is “working with Congress,” and pointed to passage of the continuing resolution that kept the government open and of of the Laken Riley Act that allows Homeland Security to detain illegal immigrants who have committed a crime.
Members of Congress have long been frustrated with laggard administration responses to their immigration questions; during the Biden administration, for instance, members of the House had to subpoena Homeland Security for more information about a mass immigration parole program.
Immigration officials’ reported indifference now, however, has taking on a new urgency as the Trump administration has consistently pushed the boundaries on migration policy. Trump’s all-out campaign has already involved major oversights and controversies.
The administration has admitted to wrongly deporting Abrego Garcia back to his home country, despite a court order barring him from being sent there.
Since then, despite a Supreme Court ruling that the administration must “facilitate” his return, the administration has insisted it has neither the obligation nor the power to free him from the CECOT prison, a facility human rights observers have called a “tropical gulag” for its inhumane conditions and statements from Salvadoran officials that inmates inside will never be released.
During a White House visit on Monday, Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele also insisted the lacked the power to free Abrego Garcia, even though the Trump administration is paying for the imprisonment of its deportees, calling a question about the possibility “preposterous.”
The Trump administration is now also floating the unprecedented and highly controversial notion of jailing non-immigrant Americans in the foreign prison as well. Trump, told Bukele on Monday he’s “all for” putting “home growns” in El Salvador’s prisons.
In addition to those mistakenly caught up in the deportation net, the administration has sought to deport legal permanent U.S. residents over their roles in pro-Palestine campus activism, which critics argue violates bedrock protections for free speech and activism in the First Amendment.
