Mistaken deportations stoke concerns over Trump’s aggressive immigration push

The Trump administration’s aggressive and fast-paced effort to advance its immigration agenda has exposed existing challenges with a dated system and raised concerns that authorities are flouting due process to ram deportations through.

The Trump administration’s aggressive and fast-paced effort to advance its immigration agenda has exposed existing challenges with a dated system and raised concerns that authorities are flouting due process to ram deportations through. Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his team have taken extraordinary measures to crack down on immigration, including invoking a rarely used wartime authority, known as the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, that has pitted the administration against a federal judge and prompted public backlash. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made multiple missteps in recent weeks, including mistakenly deporting a Salvadoran man whose case will be heard in a federal courtroom on Friday. The errors kept happening despite federal agents assuring they are carefully vetting each person before putting them on flights to a notorious prison in El Salvador. Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has repeatedly maintained that authorities have done due diligence to gather information that the migrants they are deporting should be removed, especially from the Latin American gangs MS-13 or Tren de Aragua. After hundreds of alleged gang members were flown to El Salvador last month in possible violation of a judge’s order, Homan said in an interview with ABC that “every single” migrant was a member of one of the gangs “according to the information” given to him “from the field.” “A lot of gang members don’t have criminal histories, like a lot of terrorists in this world,” Homan said. “We have to count on social media, we have to count on surveillance techniques, we have to count on sworn statements from other gang members.”