As of the early months of President Donald Trump’s term in office, he has begun making significant progress in his agendas. The biggest of these successes being his plan for the mass deportation of illegal immigrants, a policy he’s been advocating for since his first campaign in 2016. As of April 2025, the Trump Administration has claimed that they’ve deported nearly 140,000 illegal migrants, mostly from Venezuela. And although other estimates say the true number is only half of that, it is still a significant increase for only the first few months of his presidency. And although the topic of these deportation plans have had shaky criticism from moderate Republicans, as they see them as a way of removing dangerous criminals from the country since they didn’t enter legally, there have been some examples of completely harmless migrants being detained for overstaying their visas. Some of whom are even legal citizens.

In accordance with the new executive orders from the administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has adopted an aggressive new policy in immediately detaining any suspected illegal migrants, many of whom are deported shortly thereafter, sometimes without trial to defend their citizenship. As a result, according to AP News and the Washington Post, several US Citizens were mistakenly identified as illegal migrants, and then deported to an El Salvador prison, despite a large number of them not even being from El Salvador. One of these people, named Kilmar Abrego Garcia, had originally entered the country illegally to escape gang activity in El Salvador, but later obtained legal citizenship. He lived in the US for 14 years, and in 2019 was accused of being a member of the MS-13 gang in El Salvador. He denied the claims and was never charged with a crime, but the Trump Administration used this accusation against him, along with dozens of other El Salvador migrants, as evidence to deport them under the precedent of the Alien Enemies Act. Despite evidence showing that Garcia was innocent of the accusations and that he was deported by mistake, the administration insisted that he actually was a gang member and refused to bring him back into the country, ignoring a court order to return the wrongfully deported migrants.

This is a terrible precedent to create, and that goes without saying. The current administration not only enacted a widespread mass deportation plan without little regard for accidental wrongful detentions, they actively doubled-down on deporting them and ignored orders from federal courts to bring them back home, releasing them to their fate in whatever country they’re dumped in, and not even to the country they originally migrated from. There are now potentially thousands of Venezuelan people, taken from their homes by forces and shipped on planes and deported to a land they aren’t even from, all so that the Trump Administration can make their numbers look better for their constituents. And this is only the first couple of months of Trump’s presidency. If the other branches of government don’t do something now to keep his power in check, he’ll only strip more power from them and give it all to the Executive, giving himself even more room to deport as many people as he pleases.