Two Cases That Demonstrate the Incoherence of Trump's Immigration Policy
The Trump administration cut a deal with Venezuela to return a triple murderer to American shores while it tries to deport someone accused of much less.
Much of President Donald Trump's second term has been characterized by a hard line on immigration: deporting the undocumented as quickly and recklessly as possible to protect the American homeland from dangerous criminal aliens.
As it turns out, a couple of cases recently in the news complicate this narrative and show that the administration seems to care much less about someone's actual criminality than their citizenship status.
Earlier this month, the U.S. released 252 migrants back to Venezuela in exchange for 10 American citizens and permanent residents being held in that country. The Venezuelans had been arrested and deported under Trump's invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act and were being held in El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a maximum security prison.
"Today, thanks to President Trump's leadership and commitment to the American people, the United States welcomes home ten Americans who were detained in Venezuela," Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on July 18. "It is unacceptable that Venezuelan regime representatives arrested and jailed U.S. nationals under highly questionable circumstances and without proper due process. Every wrongfully detained American in Venezuela is now free and back in our homeland."
As it turns out, one of those 10 detainees was Dahud Hanid Ortiz, a Venezuelan-born U.S. citizen who served in the U.S. Army for nearly two decades and earned a Purple Heart in Iraq. But in 2016, while Hanid Ortiz lived in Germany, authorities say he traveled to Spain and brutally murdered three people in an attorney's office before setting it on fire to hide the evidence. Spanish officials say he suspected his ex-wife was romantically involved with the lawyer, but the three people he killed were unrelated bystanders.
Hanid Ortiz fled to Venezuela, where he was detained in 2018. While the country's constitution forbids the extradition of Venezuelan-born citizens, it allows for them to be tried for crimes committed overseas. In January 2024, Hanid Ortiz was convicted of triple murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
And yet he was included as one of the 10 Americans who were, in Rubio's words, "wrongfully detained" and repatriated to U.S. soil. The Washington Post reported on July 24 that Hanid Ortiz has not been seen since his return and "the Trump administration has refused to disclose his whereabouts," though an official speaking on the condition of anonymity confirmed that he "was in the United States and not being detained."
"The State Department is not commenting on why a man convicted of murdering three people in Madrid was among the 10 U.S. citizens Venezuela released last week as part of a prisoner exchange," NBC News added.
"The United States had the opportunity to secure the release of all Americans detained in Venezuela, many of whom reported being subjected to torture and other harsh conditions," a department spokesperson told The Guardian. "For privacy reasons, I won't get into the details of any specific case."
But this doesn't quite square with the Trump administration's other most high-profile deportation case, in which officials are all too happy to speak about a deportee they want out of the country.
In March, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an undocumented Salvadoran man living in Maryland, and deported him three days later to CECOT. It later became clear Abrego Garcia had already been through multiple hearings in immigration court and was granted "withholding of removal to El Salvador" over fears of being targeted by gangs in that country.
Trump responded by claiming that Abrego Garcia was a member of the violent Venezuelan gang MS-13, using vague accusations and creative interpretations of his tattoos as evidence. The administration insisted, even in the face of a unanimous Supreme Court decision, that it had no obligation to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S., that it couldn't even if it wanted to, and that regardless, he was never coming back anyway.
"He is not coming back to our country," Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News. "That's the end of the story." In a social media post, the White House's X account referred to Abrego Garcia as an "MS-13 illegal alien…who's never coming back."
That all fell apart in June, when Abrego Garcia was suddenly returned to the U.S. to appear in federal court. A federal grand jury indictment alleges he conspired to transport "undocumented aliens and narcotics" and "firearms" into the U.S., as "a member and associate" of "MS-13." NOTUS quoted a Trump official saying in court that at the conclusion of a trial, "Our plan is that he will be taken into ICE custody" and deported to a country other than El Salvador. (The White House later called this report "fake news.")
Earlier this month, federal judges in Tennessee and Maryland ruled that Abrego Garcia must be released on bail and cannot be immediately deported again. As Reason's Liz Wolfe noted at the time, this did not sit well with the Trump administration: "The fact this unhinged judge is trying to tell ICE they can't arrest someone who is subject to immigration arrest under federal law is insane," Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told Politico.
At this point, it's worth noting who the Trump administration feels is worth keeping in the U.S., and who it feels should be deported, imprisoned, or both.
Abrego Garcia is accused of some unsavory actions—apart from the vague allegations of trafficking and gang membership, his wife filed for a temporary order of protection against him in 2021, which she later withdrew.
But importantly, he was never convicted of any of these things; before he was deported to a maximum security prison in Central America, he had not been charged with them, either.
Hanid Ortiz, meanwhile, was arrested, tried, and convicted of three murders, and yet the Trump administration used hundreds of people as bargaining chips, in part, to get him released and back on American streets. Trump seems to care much more about someone's immigration status than the actual danger they pose.
