Crimmigration in the Time of Fascism

Sept 3, 2025

by Ben Brooks

Originally published in the September 2025 issue of LACarolina Newsletter.

Background: In 2019, Kilmar Abrego Garcia won protection from deportation to El Salvador, but in March 2025 the Trump administration wrongly sent him there anyway. After his wife sued, federal courts (including SCOTUS) ordered his return, and by June 2025 he was back in the U.S., facing human-smuggling charges in Tennessee.

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In the still-unfolding case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the U.S. justice and immigration systems again find themselves in direct collision. Abrego Garcia, released pending criminal trial in Tennessee, was taken back into custody by ICE, which now signals its intent to deport him to Uganda. The situation dramatizes one of the more persistent tensions in American governance: the uneasy coexistence of criminal law, which promises procedural constitutional safeguards, and immigration law, which often functions outside those guarantees as a part of the administrative law apparatus (meaning: mainly operating under the president, not the judicial system).

This case is not an anomaly but a window into a larger problem. On one side, the criminal system insists (for the most part) on its loyalty to constitutional protections. No matter the charges, the accused is presumed innocent, given representation (again, for the most part), and retains the right to confront evidence in open court. On the other side, the immigration system operates as a function of civil law, where SCOTUS has labeled deportation an “administrative penalty” rather than a “criminal punishment.” In practice, though, deportation routinely erases the procedural rights often secured by the criminal process. For Abrego Garcia, the release granted by a Tennessee court meant nothing when ICE was ready to intervene almost immediately. ICE asserted its own authority, effectively making the criminal process a sideshow to its own administrative priorities.

The Abrego Garcia case highlights what scholars call the “crimmigration” nexus, where criminal and immigration law blur in ways that erode the promises of both. Under the American regime, deportation is framed as a regulatory action. When deportation happens after criminal charges are filed but before a conviction, it becomes less a civil measure and more a punishment without trial, imposed by agency power rather than jury verdict. The Abrego Garcia case makes clear how thin the line between criminal and civil law really is. Deportation may be labeled civil, but its consequences (loss of liberty, permanent separation from family, and forced displacement) can be harsher than many routine criminal sentences. The result of the collapsed criminal-civil line is a hybrid system that offers the accused the safeguards of neither, but the penalties of both.

The decision to deport Abrego Garcia to Uganda raises an entirely separate problem. Deportation is not simply a logistical act of moving one body from one country to another; it is an act of banishment. The United States, by deporting Abrego Garcia, decides not only that it will not adjudicate his case fully within its own system, but also that it can displace “unwanted people” onto another sovereign nation sans consequences. In this way, deportation is a kind of geopolitical middle finger that shifts social, economic, and moral responsibility from one state to another. Uganda becomes the involuntary host of a Salvadoran man carrying an open American criminal case (and who’s also personally hated by the Salvadoran and American Presidents?). In this sense, his case becomes emblematic of how different states interact with one another on migration issues, often at the expense of the individuals whose fates are supposedly the center of the whole process.

At the same time, deportation isn’t just an international middle finger, but a domestic one to migrants at large as well. Deportation is never just paperwork — it sends a message. It signals that non-citizens live on borrowed ground, their status never permanent, and their rights never secure. For immigrants watching the Abrego Garcia case unfold on live TV, the takeaway is stark: the line between belonging and removal is paper-thin. Abrego Garcia’s fate is not just his own but a reminder of the precarity of millions.

The release that was not a release, the Tennessee trial that may never be tried, and the deportation that functions as punishment without verdict, are all an interesting story to go through for a newsletter, sure. But this is less about the particulars of Abrego Garcia’s case and movements through custody, and much more about what his case shines a light on: a structure that systematically undermines its own commitments. If due process means anything, it must mean that no administrative agency can short-circuit the guarantees of the Constitution. Until that principle is upheld, “updates” like this one will keep arriving, each one a reminder that the law is less a coherent system and more a set of competing interests with vulnerable people left hanging on for dear life in between them.