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Roll out the red carpet, El Salvador: The Democrats are coming. Ever since the Trump administration mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a notorious Salvadoran detention center and refused to lift a finger after a Supreme Court order to “facilitate” his return, Democrats have sounded the alarm. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen visited El Salvador on Wednesday, and other Democrats intend to follow suit. The issue is lighting up phones in Democratic offices the way Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency blitz did in the first couple months of the Trump administration. It is the biggest story of the week.
The focus on this issue—as with any other development in American politics—is a source of anxiety and hand-wringing from some Democrats. Scar tissue from the 2024 election has them worried that Donald Trump is laying a trap, and they’re walking right into it. It’s only been a couple of weeks since Trump pressed a series of buttons that could well blow up the economy and America’s standing at the center of it, a cascading crisis leaving a meaningful dent in his support. Instead, the thinking goes, Democrats are allowing Trump to turn attention to one of his strongest issues—immigration—while feeding the cultural impression that Democrats are more concerned with foreigners than American citizens.
“Rather than talking about the tariff policy and the economy,” as one anonymous, centrist House Democrat told Axios, “the thing where his numbers are tanking, we’re going to go take the bait for one hairdresser.” (This lawmaker is referring to a separate ludicrous case of someone being abducted and sent to a terrorist detention center in El Salvador, not Abrego Garcia’s.)
We don’t know whether the Trump administration thinks it has cunningly set a trap for Democrats, or is tweeting through a scandal that reflects poorly on it. But tweeting they have been, trying to draw the very wedge that has some Democrats fretting.
“America has two parties: One for illegals. And one for Americans,” White House policy chief Stephen Miller, using the Alien Enemies Act to paint his Mona Lisa, wrote in an indicative post. And on Tuesday, Vice President J.D. Vance pooh-poohed Democrats’ arguments about respecting “due process” (his scare quotes), arguing that it’s a ruse “to accomplish through fake legal process what they failed to accomplish politically: The ratification of Biden’s illegal migrant invasion.” All of these missives are laden with blunt-force language intended to frighten the reader from asking follow-up questions. Vance describes Abrego Garcia as an “MS-13 gang member” to justify his extralegal international schlepping, something that is far from established fact; Miller prefers to link together strings of words like “illegal alien terrorist” to describe him. They’ve done someone wrong, and see Democrats—not to mention a fair share of conservative voices—raising a stink about it. Their M.O. is to do him worse, and then link Democrats to the caricature.
I get that Nov. 5, 2024, was a long day for the Democratic Party. But Democrats don’t need to overthink, or self-censor, their rightful reaction to this heinous episode and the obligation they have to air it out.
To begin with, is this really good political turf for Trump? Sure, immigration is a stronger issue for Trump, and he did earn a mandate from the American public to secure the border and ramp up deportations to an extent. That does not mean, however, that he’s immune to overreach on the subject, or that it’s broadly popular among the electorate to abduct and deport people by error, stiff-arm court orders to remedy the situation, or claim that they have no means of compelling El Salvador—whose president would fly to D.C. to pick up Trump’s McDonald’s order, if he was asked—to return him for proper, legal removal proceedings. If the electorate was so naturally on Vance and Miller’s side on the merits, you wouldn’t see them flooding social media and cable interviews with such grim and often fictional spins of the merits.
And then there are the opportunity costs: Devoting attention to this that could otherwise be devoted to the Trump-initiated economic crisis. But taking a little break from April 12 to, say, April 19, 2025, to emphasize a potential constitutional crisis need not be cause for alarm. Sticking an economic crisis to the incumbent party is not something that requires deft, minute-by-minute “messaging” from the minority. People have an uncanny habit of noticing when they’re getting poorer. They notice when they can’t buy what they used to be able to buy, when they can’t fix their roof because of supply shortages, when they can’t preorder the Nintendo Switch 2, when they lose their job, or when their business goes bankrupt. They don’t need Chris Van Hollen to tell them about this on Wednesday instead of checking in on someone who’s been picked up in his state and sent to a foreign gulag.
This is not just a symbolic fight to wage, or one that only serves to satisfy liberals’ desire to feel morally righteous. The stakes are real. Letting the Trump administration do what it has done in this case without pushback would not be a practical option. Consider where the House Democrat speaking to Axios thinks the line should be drawn: “Only if Trump tries to deport U.S. citizens, the lawmaker argued, will Democrats need to ‘draw a line in the sand’ and ‘shut down the House.’ ”
Letting the Abrego Garcia case slide makes that day much more likely, and less likely that anyone will be able to do anything about it. Trump is setting a precedent that the administration can take someone into custody, put them on a plane to a foreign prison, say they’re unable to return them, and argue it’s not in the courts’ purview to intervene. That process knows not the difference between citizen and not citizen—nor does this president’s personal definition of what constitutes a “terrorist.” He’s already musing about sending “home grown criminals” to El Salvador next. Of course he is. And that’s much more likely if he’s allow to slide on this.
It’s worth the fuss.
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