Trump thinks this battleground will play to his strengths. Australians will recognise the territory

At a public meeting with a Republican senator in the US state of Iowa this week, a woman introduced herself as a strong Christian who preached at the local church on Sundays and believed in welcoming strangers.

“I think turning away people who have come here for asylum is one of the most shameful things we are doing right now,” she said, to a spattering of applause. “As my elected senator, is there anything you can do so that we can follow international law better, or just the ideals of our country to be a place of hope for others?”

They were words that could have easily been heard in many Australian elections for the past 25 years. And to anyone even vaguely familiar with the politics of immigration in Australia, the past week in the US has had a familiar tinge.

Senator Chuck Grassley faced questions from constituents on immigration policy familiar to Australians.Credit: AP

US President Donald Trump was elected on a wave of dissatisfaction over high prices, out-of-control immigration and a sense that the Democrats were out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans. Trump promised to enact the biggest deportation program in US history, and considers the issue to be one of his core political strengths.

There is no question he has succeeded in slashing illegal border crossings. The deportations have been slower, though, to a degree, they have been frustrated by unco-operative states and legal challenges.

Two court cases cut to the core. They are the chosen battlegrounds for an administration that is determined to fight the judiciary head-on, and they represent Trump’s most direct challenge to the rule of law and separation of powers.

Both arise from a fateful day in March, when the government deported three planeloads of people from Texas to a notorious gang prison in El Salvador – a country led by right-wing, tough-on-crime Trump ally Nayib Bukele, a 43-year-old advertising man turned politician who has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator”.

Some of those people were deported without due process under immigration law using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act – a practically defunct wartime law that legal scholars say has been misused by the Trump administration. That sparked a court case being heard by federal judge James Boasberg.

On board one of the planes was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a 29-year-old Salvadorian immigrant who came to the US claiming asylum and was living in the US state of Maryland with his wife, a US citizen, and three children.

Abrego Garcia was detained in 2019, questioned about a murder and accused of being part of the notorious MS-13 gang. He was subject to immigration proceedings, but a judge gave him “protected status” preventing his deportation to El Salvador and allowing him to work. He has not been charged with, or convicted of, a crime.

His removal to the Salvadorian prison is being challenged in a separate case under Maryland judge Paula Xinis. Lawyers for the Justice Department have conceded his deportation involved an “administrative error”. And the US Supreme Court has ordered the administration to “facilitate” his return to the US.

In the other case, Boasberg said on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) there was probable cause to hold the Trump administration in criminal contempt of court for defying his March 15 order to halt the Alien Enemies Act deportations and turn the planes around.

Boasberg’s colourful written opinion said the deportees had been “spirited out of the US by the government before they could vindicate their due-process rights”, then hurried into the mega-prison.

“The Constitution does not tolerate wilful disobedience of judicial orders – especially by officials of a co-ordinate branch who have sworn an oath to uphold it,” he said.

Both cases are legally fraught. Politically, they are being played extremely hard. The Democrats are accusing Trump of defying the courts – in the Abrego Garcia case, the highest court in the land. That gives rise to a potential constitutional crisis.

Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator for Maryland, meets with  Kilmar Abrego Garcia in prison in El Salvador.Credit: X / @ChrisVanHollen

This week Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator for Maryland and a lawyer, travelled to El Salvador and met the country’s vice president, asking for Abrego Garcia to be released. He unsuccessfully attempted to visit the notorious prison, called the Terrorism Confinement Centre or CECOT.

However, he later managed to meet with Abrego Garcia at a hotel in San Salvador. Van Hollen posted a photo of the meeting on X but didn’t give an update on Abrego Garcia’s status.

El Salvador’s Bukele was less restrained, posting, “Now that he’s been confirmed healthy, he gets the honour of staying in El Salvador’s custody”, the AP reported.

Before the prison visit, Van Hollen promised more Democrats would go to El Salvador to press Abrego Garcia’s case. “The Trump administration is clearly in violation of American court orders,” he said. “This is an unsustainable and unjust moment, so it cannot continue this way.”

On the other side, the White House has been ruthless in accusing the Democrats and media of siding with an alleged gang member. Stephen Miller, Trump’s fast-talking deputy chief of staff and a hard-line immigration specialist, relentlessly targets any news outlet that describes Abrego Garcia as a “Maryland man”.

“He’s not a ‘Maryland man’. He’s an illegal alien MS-13 terrorist from El Salvador,” Miller said. “The corporate media wants so badly for our country to be flooded with foreign criminals.”

At a hastily convened media briefing on Wednesday (Thursday AEST), White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated that framing and then brought Patty Morin to the podium.

Morin’s daughter Rachel was snatched while running on a Maryland trail in 2023, brutally bashed with rocks, raped in a tunnel and strangled to death. An illegal immigrant and fugitive from El Salvador, Victor Martinez-Hernandez, was found guilty on Monday.

Speaking to the nation’s media, Morin’s account of her daughter’s murder was unbearably gruesome. “They showed us pictures of her body against the wall. The blood outlined her body. You could see where the blood ran down around her as he was raping her. And then he threw her down and raped her some more. And then he strangled her.”

Morin was not talking about Abrego Garcia. But her message was universal. “These are the kind of criminals president Trump wants to remove from our country,” she said. “Why should we allow people like this – violent criminals that have no conscience at all – to murder our mothers, our sisters, our daughters? I don’t understand why there’s even any kind of problem with this.”

Patty Morin, whose daughter was murdered by an illegal immigrant, embraces White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt after a press briefing where she told her story and backed up the president’s hard-line deportation policies.Credit: AP

Whatever due process may have been denied to Abrego Garcia, his cause is difficult for Democrats to take up. Especially because his wife accused him of domestic violence in 2021 and sought a protection order. In written testimony, she accused him of throwing her laptop on the floor in a rage, punching her and scratching her eye. Later, he is accused of ripping off her clothes, grabbing her by the arm as she ran away and leaving her bruised.

The wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, ultimately didn’t proceed with the case. She is now one of the prominent voices calling for her husband’s return to the US.

However, the White House seized on the allegations as further ammunition. “Not only are Democrats rushing to defend an illegal criminal foreign terrorist gang member, but also an apparent woman-beater,” Leavitt said.

She went on: “If he ever ends up back in the United States, he would immediately be deported again. Nothing will change the fact that Abrego Garcia will never be a Maryland father. He will never live in the United States of America again.”

Nonetheless, many Democrats believe this is a battle not just worth fighting, but one they must fight. Democratic strategist Mary Anne Walsh says the discourse on immigration in 2025 is the result of 10 years of a “propaganda campaign” by Trump and the Republicans which, until now, has been effective.

“For Democrats, I think this is less about immigration and more about the fact that Donald Trump is using these people to end the democracy of the United States of America and denying people due process,” she told this masthead. “If you do it with one group of people, then everyone is fair game. Nobody is exempt.”

For Walsh, questions about Abrego Garcia’s character are almost irrelevant. “In the US, you’re innocent until you’re proven guilty. You’re entitled to a lawyer, you’re entitled to due process, and none of that was done – not only with him, but apparently with the vast majority of people they put in those facilities and on those planes to El Salvador.”

Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is leading the charge to have him returned to the United States.Credit: AP

Meanwhile, the Abrego Garcia case remains before the courts. On Thursday, as the Easter weekend began, the Court of Appeals denied the Justice Department’s request for an emergency stay, and sent a warning to the Trump administration to back away from its fight with the judiciary at large.

On the merits of the case, Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson said the government was “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order”.

“Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody, that there is nothing that can be done [to return Abrego Garcia to the US]. This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.”

Wilkinson, who has been on the court more than 40 years and ran for Congress in 1970 as a Republican, said Trump’s crusade meant the executive and judicial branches were “grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both”.

“This is a losing proposition all around,” he wrote. “The executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.”

Jean Reisz, an associate professor of law at the University of Southern California, noted that for all the Trump administration’s bluster, there was still a disconnect between what the White House’s spokespeople asserted in public and what the government attorneys actually argued in the courtroom.

That suggested the government was still trying to adhere to the law – or at least what it believed the law said. Nonetheless, Reisz’s view was clear. “The president clearly violated the law and the Constitution in deporting [Abrego Garcia],” she said. “Congress needs to take action to stop the president from violating its laws.”

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