The most defining feature of Donald Trump’s first year back in office has been the brutality of his deportation machine and his administration’s numerous attempts to upend due process. Back in March, the Trump administration wrongly deported Kilmar Ábrego Garcia to a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador. Ábrego Garcia’s legal status protected him from deportation to his home country for fear of persecution.

“I think most Americans are intelligent enough to recognize that everybody deserves due process,” says Ábrego Garcia’s attorney Benjamin Osorio. “There’s a process. They get a jury of their peers. And the same thing in immigration: This guy had a lawful order protecting him from being removed from the United States, and the government violated that.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy speaks to Osorio about Ábrego Garcia’s case. After months of being shipped around detention centers, he is free and fighting deportation orders from home with his family. “I think the courts have probably never seen more immigration habeases in their life.” says Osorio. “In the habeas sense, I would think that Kilmar’s case has had a lot of effect in the immigration practice.”

Ábrego Garcia’s story epitomizes the unlawfulness and cruelty of the Trump administration’s deportation agenda and for that reason his story has become a political flashpoint. But what’s less understood is the scale and scope of fulfilling the administration’s vision of mass deportation.

A new investigative video series from Lawfare and SITU Research called “Deportation, Inc.: The Rise of the Immigration Enforcement Economy,” maps out a vast web of companies that make up the rapidly growing deportation economy, how we got here, and the multibillion-dollar industry driven by profit, political power, and a perverse incentive structure.

“The creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 was a pivotal moment. It was a major restructuring of immigration, and that was also a point at which the framing of immigration went from more of a civil matter to more of a national security concern,” says Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare. “And with that transition, the amount of money and contracts began to flood in.”

Gauri Bahuguna, deputy director of research at SITU, adds, “It was in the Obama administration where the detention bed quota comes in, and that’s really the key unit of measurement that drives this particular part of the immigration enforcement industry, is ‘How much money can you make per detained individual?’”

“Even though the bed quota is gone formally from the law there, it still exists in contracts with companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group,” says Bahuguna. “There is payment for detaining a certain number of people, whether or not the beds are occupied, and then the perverse incentive to keep those facilities filled because there’s an economies of scale.” McBride underscores that the current immigration system is “treating people as these products and units and to maximize profit.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy.

The most defining feature of Donald Trump’s second term so far has been the brutality of his deportation machine, from masked agents tackling people in the streets to shipping people off to prisons in far-flung countries.

The Trump administration wrongly deported Kilmar Ábrego Garcia to a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador back in March. But last week, a judge’s order finally freed him.

Kilmar Ábrego Garcia: [Speaking in Spanish]

Interpreter: I stand here today with my head held up high.

AL: That’s Ábrego Garcia speaking at a press conference after his release, joined by advocates and an interpreter at his side.

KG: [Speaking in Spanish]

Interpreter: Regardless of this administration, I believe this is a country of laws, and I believe this injustice will come to its end.

AL: Ábrego Garcia is now back in Maryland with his family and is continuing to fight deportation orders. His story epitomizes the unlawfulness and cruelty of the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.

Joining me now to update us on Ábrego Garcia’s case is one of his lawyers, Benjamin Osorio.

Benjamin, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Benjamin Osorio: Thank you.

AL: Kilmar Ábrego Garcia was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — custody last Thursday. To start, can you tell us how he’s doing since his release?

Benjamin Osorio: He’s pretty tired. I don’t know if you saw when he went to go check in with ICE that morning, it looked like he hadn’t slept. I think he’s exhausted from the whole process. He’s bounced around from being deported in March to detained at CECOT — obviously, he’s much happier to be out of CECOT and back in the United States. But then, re-detained again, briefly out for a weekend, back in ICE detention, and then now out.

He’s ecstatic to be with his family, but at the same time, I mean, he’s still limited in what he can do and obviously still facing federal charges.

AL: During the press conference when he spoke after his release, during the segment where an advocate and a pastor are speaking, you can see him visibly getting emotional. It seemed like he was tearing up. Has this episode changed him?

Benjamin Osorio: I didn’t know him before, so it’s hard to say whether it’s changed him, but again, somebody having been through what he has been through, I don’t know how it could not. At this point, if I was him, I would just want resolution to everything and not be in detention.

AL: Back in March, Ábrego Garcia was detained by ICE in Baltimore, as you’ve mentioned, and then within a few days he was sent to CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador. What can you tell us about his experience in CECOT?

Benjamin Osorio: Well, it’s been reported, so this isn’t anything confidential or of that nature. But he was taken off the plane and beaten — that’s sort of their welcome greeting — was beaten as he was taken off the plane. And then their heads were shaved.

They were basically beaten on a daily basis, from what it sounds like. They were put on their knees for long periods of time, and if you passed out, you were beaten. They were not allowed to go to the bathroom — many of them urinating on themselves, defecating on themselves.

He would talk about, in the middle of the night, you would hear people screaming out for help and nobody doing anything. The lights on 24/7 — blinding lights. Sleeping on all metal beds: no sheets, no pillows, no nothing like that. So it doesn’t sound like a pleasant experience.

AL: How did that compare to his experience at the ICE detention facilities that he was shuffled around to?

BO: He’s been segregated from everybody else, so not the same group housing that you would typically find in ICE. But being in solitary and only interacting with other individuals for certain hours of the day also has a detrimental effect on your morale and psyche.

AL: Of course, yeah.

BO: ICE conditions aren’t good, but again, better than CECOT.

AL: Can you remind us, for people who might not know the full story, from the beginning of this ordeal, what happened to him? What was the process? Why was he moved to these different centers, and what happened there?

BO: Since he’s been back in the United States, he was paroled back in when he was brought back in. He’s been shuffled back and forth between both immigration and criminal custody. So that’s been one of the reasons that he’s been moved back and forth. He was taken out to Tennessee, staying in a Putnam County Jail there, while they were arraigning him on the federal charges and then figuring out whether he was going to be released on bond.

Once he was released on bond, he was then re-detained by Baltimore [Enforcement and Removal Operations] and then taken down to Farmville [in Virginia]. The judge in the federal district court case had ordered him to be kept within 200 miles, and then they transferred him from Farmville to Moshannon detention center [in Pennsyvlania]. And that’s where he was released from recently.

AL: Can you talk a little bit about the legal strategy of these dueling, federal attacks against him — both on the immigration front and the criminal front — and how that complicated his situation?

Benjamin Osorio: I guess, let’s talk about the three-front war, right? So he’s got an immigration case, which is pending before the immigration court.

He then also has the habeas case, which — even though he’s out now — continues because of some of the things that have happened in the immigration case that’s taking place in the federal district court in Maryland. And then he’s got the criminal case taking place in federal district court in Tennessee. So he’s got a criminal defense team working on the criminal case.

He also has us, who are partnered with Quinn Emanuel working on the district court litigation. And then he has us just working on the immigration court litigation.

“Typically before the Trump second administration, you were not seeing these third-country removals that you’re seeing now.”

So it’s kind of messy, but what he was granted before is called withholding of removal. Typically before the Trump second administration, you were not seeing these third-country removals that you’re seeing now.

So if you won withholding of removal, they can’t remove you to your home country, but they can remove you to a third country. So let’s say that he has this protection from El Salvador, they were not supposed to have been able to send him to El Salvador, but they could send him to Mexico, to Honduras, to Guatemala as part of these third-country agreements. They could do that.

He would be a very visible candidate for them to try to go after to do that. We feel that we also were fighting the immigration case to try to normalize his status, get that back reopened, and adjust his status. Now when they paroled him back into the United States, they also created some new immigration options for him as well, potentially applying for asylum because he’s back within one year of having entered the United States, but also he’s married to a U.S. citizen.

So now that he has a lawful entry back into the United States, he could potentially adjust status through her. So it’s messy. And obviously, the government has put the full force of DOJ and DHS behind it to try to make an example of him.

“The government has put the full force of DOJ and DHS behind it to try to make an example of him.”

AL: You mentioned like his particular circumstances made him the perfect target for this administration and what they’re trying to do.

I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that and how his case became a flashpoint in this administration’s immigration policies. This was the case that finally pushed Democratic senators to say, “We’re going to go and visit these detainees,” people who have been removed. Why did that happen?

BO: I think most Americans are intelligent enough to recognize that everybody deserves due process, right? There’s a reason that if somebody that we all know goes and commits a murder, they still get a trial. We don’t summarily execute them unless they’re a danger to the police officers arresting them or anything else like that. There’s a process. They get a jury of their peers.