The immorality of Trump’s position on Salvadoran prisoner and Supreme Court

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Now that the Trump administration is nearer to openly defying the US Supreme Court, it’s worth noting a point made by The Atlantic magazine.

Though President Andrew Jackson, approvingly cited by Donald Trump during his first term, is supposed to have taken on the Supreme Court and defied it, he actually did not.

The Atlantic says that in the 1832 standoff Jackson “is apocryphally supposed to have said that Chief Justice John Marshall ‘has made his decision; now let him enforce it!’ The quote is famous but fictional; less well known is the fact that Jackson did, ultimately, comply with the Court. So have all of his successors. Trump is on the brink of breaking that precedent. If he succeeds, he will have broken the bonds of the Constitution as well.”

That’s exactly where America stands in mid-April 2025.

Mr Trump’s administration is refusing to do very much to enforce the Supreme Court’s order to “facilitate” the return to the US of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran man living in Maryland with protected legal status.

This, despite the US government admitting that the deportation to El Salvador was “an administrative error”.

Everyone can see what the Trump administration is doing. Mr Trump’s attorney general Pam Bondi has inaccurately claimed Mr Abrego Garcia “was illegally in our country” and insisted that it is now El Salvador “if they want to return him”. She would provide a plane if they did want to send him to the US, she added.

The administration is alleging, without evidence, that Mr Abrego Garcia is member of a terrorist gang.

And Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president and braggart who calls himself the world’s “coolest dictator”, is claiming he is unable to remove from prison a man who has been sent there in error.

Mr Bukele said on April 14, after visiting Mr Trump in the White House, that it is a “preposterous” question to even ask him to “smuggle a terrorist into the United States”.

But the point is Mr Abrego Garcia isn’t a terrorist. The Trump administration admits it despatched him to El Salvador in “error”.

It’s obvious that Mr Trump does not care about the life and liberty of a man who should not be in the Salvadoran prison Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT).

Is there anything more immoral?

Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com