Imagine: you grow up in a simple neighborhood in El Salvador, working for your family’s pupusería. Suddenly, a dangerous gang is demanding money from your grandmother for protection, or they’ll conscript you into their gang, or worse. Then, on top of the financial burdens from gangs and the threat of violence looming over you, the bank forecloses on your house and you’re forced to move.
Your brother leaves for the United States, and you follow suit soon after. At just 16, you walk for days until you eventually cross the Rio Grande into Texas. From there, you go to Maryland, where you get married and have a child. Then one day, when you’re outside a Home Depot looking for work, the police arrest you for “loitering,” but no charges are filed.
Despite this, ICE is called and you are denoted as a “potential gang member,” because one of the people arrested alongside you was a member of MS-13, an international criminal gang. You are held without bond for fear of gang affiliation, but eventually get released. A judge then grants you a protective order prohibiting your expulsion to El Salvador due to the dangers you would face there.
Fast forward a few years, and ICE stops you, tells you your immigration status has been changed, and ships you off to a prison for terrorists in El Salvador, in direct violation of your protective order. This is the story of Kilmar Armando Ábrego García.
So how does this story relate to the broader issue of the Trump Administration’s treatment of immigrants? Besides the fact that his case is a focal point for international and domestic criticism, it represents something much larger: the power of a lie repeated so often it becomes imbued in the very fabric of public perception.
Donald Trump built his political career on the myth that immigrants (especially those from Latin America) are inherently dangerous. He paints them as criminals, drug traffickers, and threats to “real” Americans, despite decades of research showing immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. Ábrego García’s deportation in violation of a protective order is not simply a bureaucratic mishap, but rather the inevitable outcome of a system shaped by fear, misinformation, and deliberate deception.
The United States government recently returned Ábrego García to the country, but he is now being threatened with deportation to Uganda, a country to which he has no connections. This further reflects the Trump Administration’s obsession with punishing minorities, and stripping them of their dignity.
Ábrego García is not a monster. He is not a rapist. He is not a drug trafficker. And he is not a member of a gang. He, like many immigrants (both documented and not), is just seeking to build a life and make a living. Trump may try to force him into the caricature that he paints at his rallies when he warns of “predators” and “animals,” but it is important to remember that he is a father, a husband, a worker, and above all, a human being. Yet, in the eyes of an administration obsessed with selling the “big lie” about immigration, his humanity was erased.
This erasure is the cornerstone of Trump’s strategy. By stripping immigrants of their dignity in the public imagination, he can justify policies that would otherwise be unthinkable: mass deportations, family separations, and tearing apart entire communities. Ábrego García’s ordeal is not an isolated case. It is evidence of what happens when rhetoric becomes policy, and when myths replace truth in the national discourse.
