Trump’s Team Simply Cannot Leave This Man Alone

Donald Trump won the presidency in part on promises to deport immigrants who have criminal records and lack legal status. But his earliest executive orders—trying to undo birthright citizenship, suspending critical refugee programs—made clear he wants to attack immigrants with legal status too. In our series Who Gets to Be American This Week?, we’ll track the Trump administration’s attempts to exclude an ever-growing number of people from the American experiment.

President Donald Trump and his administration are determined to make a statement out of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland husband and father who—by the Department of Justice’s own admission—was deported by mistake in March. The federal government has relentlessly pursued Abrego Garcia’s deportation since he was released from El Salvador’s custody, allowing him just a few days to reunite with his family until they again arrested and detained him this week.

Abrego Garcia’s deportation has become a high-profile test case for the administration’s deportation policy, because of both its (self-admittedly) unlawful nature and because both political parties have elevated it as they make their respective cases to the public. But it’s also part of a massive trend of the administration’s attempts at mass deportation—an effort that includes abuses at detention centers both at home and abroad.

It also includes efforts to punish legal immigrants for speaking out against the administration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is leveraging his power over our immigration system to create a continuous vetting process in which the State Department will analyze every American visa holder for any potential infraction that could be used to revoke their visas.

Here’s the immigration news we’re keeping an eye on this week:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia Is Back in Detention

Three days. That’s how long Abrego Garcia spent with his wife and children after having been separated from them for nearly six months. On Monday, Abrego Garcia was again detained when he appeared for a mandated check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Well aware of his impending detention, as he entered a Baltimore federal building, Abrego Garcia embraced his wife, tears streaming down his face. A short while later, his wife exited the building alone.

A crowd of about 200 supporters rallied outside the federal building for Abrego Garcia, who entered the U.S. without legal status when he was 16 years old in an effort to escape death threats and extortion by an El Salvador gang. “Promise me that you will continue to pray, continue to fight, resist and love, not just for me, but for everybody—continue to demand freedom,” Abrego Garcia said to the crowd in Spanish, translated to English by an interpreter. Everyone in attendance knew that he would more than likely not return from his ICE check-in, because weeks earlier the Trump administration had warned in court that if Abrego Garcia were to be released from pretrial detention, he would promptly be deported.

The 29-year-old father has been battling the Trump administration since March, when he was first mistakenly swept up in rushed deportation flights to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, CECOT, which turned out to be a violation of a judge’s order. Despite the Department of Justice admitting in court that Abrego Garcia was deported in an “administrative error” and the Supreme Court ordering the federal government to “facilitate” his release from El Savador’s custody, Abrego Garcia was not brought back to the U.S. until June. Upon touching U.S. soil, he was immediately placed into pretrial detention, because while he was unlawfully imprisoned in El Salvador, the DOJ whipped up a criminal indictment that alleged Abrego Garcia smuggled migrants across the U.S. in 2022. He pleaded not guilty.

The DOJ presented Abrego Garcia with a plea deal last week: Plead guilty to the human smuggling charge, and after serving time in jail, eventually be removed to Costa Rica—a generally safe, Spanish-speaking country. He rejected their proposal and quickly learned that ICE now intends to remove him to Uganda, a country facing political instability and terrorism threats. Shortly after Abrego Garcia was detained on Monday, his attorney filed an emergency motion seeking asylum in the U.S. and a restraining order to prevent the federal government from immediately deporting his client. U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis ruled the federal government was “absolutely forbidden” from deporting Abrego Garcia through at least early October. On Wednesday, the DOJ agreed in principle not to remove him.

To Elora Mukherjee, clinical law professor at Columbia University and director of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, the administration’s moves in this case suggest a vindictive and selective prosecution. “The administration is punishing Mr. Abrego Garcia for his willingness to speak out about the abuses that he suffered at CECOT,” she told me. “The administration is targeting him because he’s trying to seek justice and hold them accountable for their administrative mistake in sending him to El Salvador.”

The consequences in this case are not confined to Abrego Garcia though, with Mukherjee predicting the administration’s strategy extends to all immigrants nationwide: If you challenge our authority, we will come after you.

Millions of U.S. Visa Holders Face Increased Vetting—and Potential Penalties for Dissent 

The State Department announced a massive new undertaking: It will begin a continuous vetting process for millions of people who currently hold a U.S. visa, from students to tourists to those with work authorization. The effort is meant to identify people who have overstayed their visa or those who the State Department determines are ineligible for permission to enter and stay in the country. Violators could have their visas revoked, which would strip them of legal status and allow ICE to immediately arrest, detain, and deport them, creating yet another source for the president’s mass deportation goals.

Through the secretary of state, the federal government has the unilateral authority to revoke a visa, something the Trump administration focused on international students who protested Israel’s war in Gaza. Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was one of the first international students to face such a consequence for his activism, despite holding a U.S. green card. In expanding this strategy, the Trump administration would need to investigate nearly 48 million immigrants living in the U.S. as of 2023, according to an estimate by the Migration Policy Institute. Of those, nearly three-quarters were naturalized U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents—known as green-card holders—or temporary visa recipients.

“We review all available information as part of our vetting, including law enforcement or immigration records or any other information that comes to light after visa issuance indicating a potential ineligibility,” the State Department told the Associated Press, suggesting that the U.S. government is actively watching and looking for potential reasons to penalize legally present immigrants. Secretary of State Marco Rubio could decide to immediately revoke a visa even based on minor crimes like loitering or a speeding ticket.

This expanded vetting strategy comes shortly after Rubio announced on social media that effective immediately, the U.S. would no longer issue worker visas for commercial truck drivers. Citing an increased number of immigrants who are driving large tractor-trailer trucks, Rubio suggested they are endangering American lives and undercutting the livelihoods of American truckers. And earlier this month, the State Department began a bond pilot program that will impose bonds up to $15,000 on nationals from countries who have a high visa overstay rate in the U.S. So far, Malawi and Zambia are on the list, and nationals of those countries will not know how much their bond will be until their visa interview. The State Department told Fox News that approximately 40,000 visas have been revoked in 2025 so far. Under the Biden administration, only 16,000 were revoked under a similar time frame.

The Administration Is Hell-Bent on Making College Unaffordable for Young Immigrants

This summer, the Justice Department has sued at least four different states that have long offered in-state college tuition rates to young people who are state residents but lack legal status. Nearly half of the country offers this benefit, recognizing the positive impact it has on high school dropout rates, tax contributions, and economic activity. Yet the Trump administration has sued Texas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, and Kentucky over their tuition equity laws or policies, a result of the president’s executive order calling to protect American communities “from criminal aliens.”

Texas was one of the first states to be sued and the fastest to settle with the federal government. Once the DOJ filed its lawsuit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton joined the federal government in gutting his own state’s Dream Act, established more than two decades ago to allow students without legal status to pay in-state college tuition rates. Within six hours, a federal judge ruled the law was unconstitutional. Kentucky was up next, with the DOJ filing a similar lawsuit challenging its college tuition policy for students without legal status. The state’s Council on Postsecondary Education filed a joint motion, according to Bloomberg Law, that asks a judge to declare Kentucky’s policy unlawful.

Oklahoma followed a nearly identical path, with its Republican Attorney General Gentner Drummond siding with the DOJ’s lawsuit, arguing it’s “discriminatory and unlawful” to offer students without legal status in-state college tuition. The DOJ’s lawsuit against Minnesota’s policy is still ongoing, and more states could face similar attacks to their tuition policies. The federal government is relying on a federal law that bans states from offering any postsecondary education benefit to a person not lawfully present in the U.S. within their borders, unless the same benefit is also offered to U.S. citizens without regard to where they live. However, most states that offer in-state tuition to students without legal status are basing the benefit on where the student graduated from high school—an in-state school—not where they live.

Most states received bipartisan support when initially passing their tuition policies, respecting the fact that many immigrants were brought to the U.S. at a young age and go through America’s public school system. If students without legal status wish to continue on to higher education, they are often ineligible for federal financial aid or private loans, putting college out of reach. An in-state tuition rate can incentivize students to continue their education, and according to the National Immigration Law Center, about 62 percent of the country’s foreign-born population lives in states that have some type of tuition equity laws or policies in place.

To put this into perspective, consider the University of Texas at Austin, which enrolls around 52,000 students annually. For the 2025–2026 school year, a full-time undergraduate student who qualifies for in-state tuition would have to pay about $13,000 per semester in tuition, while a nonresident student would owe around $46,000. As college students embark on a new year, administrators have been tasked with figuring out which students do not have legal status and adjusting thousands of tuition accounts accordingly.

“I don’t know what the purpose of these policies are, other than to incite fear and cruelty,” Dr. Ali Asgar Alibhai, assistant professor of art history at the University of Texas at Dallas, told me. “It’s definitely not educating our youth.” Alibhai has already seen other Trump administration immigration policies drive his foreign-born students away, including one Ph.D. student who was forced to abruptly leave the country just as he was finishing up his final thesis. This latest policy shift on college tuition will inevitably cause Texas, and other states, to lose out on valuable talent.

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