The only way the Trump administration can sell its cruel immigration policy is to lie about it… a lot!
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Donald Trump tells so many lies that it is impossible to keep track. Of course, not all of them are equal. Some of them are really bad and impactful, like his Big Lie about the 2020 election, which ended up in an attempted coup and a deadly insurrection. Others are simply ridiculous and almost comical, like his childish boasts about crowd sizes, or when he extended the graphic of a hurricane with a Sharpie just so he wouldn’t be wrong about which states it would impact.
One of his blatant fabrications, however, is especially abhorrent. But before we get to that, it’s important to note that, while Trump’s lying used to be a one-person act at the start of his political career, that’s no longer the case.
He has an uncanny ability to drag everybody around him down to his level — even more so this time around.
Perhaps that’s because he has a knack for identifying weak-willed sycophants. Or maybe he has just shown Republicans that they can get away with lying as long as they are shameless enough.
In any case, as we pointed out, everybody in his administration now lies all the time.
While that degree of dishonesty is reprehensible, it is also understandable on a political level because, if Trump and other Republicans told the truth, they wouldn’t win elections.
For example, when the economy tanks because of the Trump tariffs and policies that prioritize billionaires over regular Americans, it is imperative for the right-wing propaganda machine to make voters believe that the grim economic outlook is somehow the previous administration’s fault.
Although that might be the most crucial lie the president and other Republicans have to sell to the public ahead of the 2026 midterm election, it is not the most vile.
That dubious distinction belongs to the avalanche of lies seemingly everybody in this administration is telling about the immigrants it deported to El Salvador, the students being grabbed off the streets and flown out of the reach of local courts, and all of the courageous Americans who are trying to ensure that values like the rule of law and due process are maintained, such as judges, civil rights organizations, lawyers, lawmakers, and news organizations.
Here, too, the stakes are very high because, objectively, what the administration is doing is cruel and anti-American.
That is why the White House, GOP lawmakers, Fox News, and other right-wing influencers are going all out to sell a narrative to the American people that makes its actions somewhat palatable.
And here it is: Immigrants in general are a threat to the safety and prosperity of real Americans; anybody who is deported without due process is a vicious criminal and a terrorist; throwing them in a gulag in El Salvador is fine because they are all guilty; court orders trying to protect them can be ignored; having hooded thugs arrest legal residents in broad daylight for voicing unwanted opinions is essential; anybody who asks questions about any of this is an enemy of the people; and anybody trying to do something about it has thrown their lot in with these animals.
Here is what that looks like in one tweet:
He’s not a “Maryland man.” He’s an illegal alien MS-13 terrorist from El Salvador.
The corporate media wants so badly for our country to be flooded with foreign criminals. https://t.co/7ExGTk6kLR
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) April 14, 2025
And here is what it sounds like in a brief clip of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who has quickly become one of the administration’s most audacious liars, which is quite a feat in light of so much competition.
Convincing Americans of all of the above is a tall order, as recent polling suggests. It shows that, for the first time, they have soured on Trump’s actions on immigration in general and deportations in particular. Women especially are not impressed by the abusive and un-American treatment of immigrants. By a margin of 61-31, they disapprove of the president’s handling of deportations.
It’s impossible to blame them… and it is embarrassing that 42 percent of Americans overall still approve of what is going on.
So, let’s set the record straight, because this is one set of lies that the Trump administration should not get away with.
We have written plenty about the supposed out-of-control criminality of immigrants in general (which is not a thing), and the benefits of immigration for the US economy (which is definitely a thing). So let’s instead focus on the individuals trafficked to a gulag in El Salvador, as well as the students and academics who are losing their visas because their actions have run afoul of the MAGA thought police.
First, there is very little evidence that the individuals who are being sent to El Salvador (against a judge’s orders) are all gang members, super criminals, and “terrorists,” as the Trump administration would have us believe, or “Hamas supporters,” in the case of students whose visas are being revoked.
While White House officials and other Republicans keep saying that, sometimes along with assuring Americans that this evidence exists, they have not provided proof.
Instead, they keep moving the goalposts. While Leavitt initially said that those who are being deported (and presumably every other undocumented immigrant) are all criminals because they crossed the border illegally (which is not even a criminal violation), the Trump administration kept coming up with new, but unsupported, claims of the danger the deportees pose.
Together, White House officials kept adding charges to the imaginary rap sheets of the (largely) Venezuelans who were sent to El Salvador to become slave laborers in a notoriously inhumane prison camp.
If all of them really were gang members or violent criminals, certainly the administration would have been eager to present proof of these crimes… especially after evidence mounted that some, or perhaps a majority, of the men who were deported either had no criminal record or were swept up in this deportation effort based solely because they had the wrong kind of tattoos.
A great example of how the administration operates is the case of Henry Josue Villatoro Santos, who was arrested mid-March with great fanfare. Back then, Attorney General Pam Bondi said he was one of the top three leaders of the dangerous MS-13 gang.
Knowing how much of a liar she is, we immediately questioned the White House narrative — and were proven right a couple of weeks later when the administration sought to drop the lone gun charge it brought against this supposed gang leader. In addition, instead of providing evidence that the 24-year-old was a top gang leader, investigators merely stated that they found “indicia of MS-13 association” in his home.
The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia is even more troubling.
Although Vice President JD Vance and others made him sound like a convicted criminal and gang member when it became known that he had been sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), the administration was forced to admit that he was deported to El Salvador in error, because there was actually a court order in effect saying that he could not be sent to his native country where he might face harm from local gangs that had terrorized his family.
And it never produced evidence that he was convicted of anything.
Instead, after the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the administration must take steps to bring him back, the White House began smearing him again and inventing new charges.
Just on Monday, Trump called Abrego Garcia “an MS-13 Gang Member and Foreign Terrorist from El Salvador.”
In addition, as we predicted, the administration is defying the Supreme Court order because it has absolutely no interest in facilitating his return to the US, where he would not only have access to his family but also to lawyers and the media.
The lack of effort on the part of the White House to get him back would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic because, of course, it would only take one phone call to compel El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to send Abrego Garcia on his way.
Instead, Trump and Bukele were yucking it up in the Oval Office on Monday as though this is all just one big joke.
Bukele: I don't have the power to return him to the United States. pic.twitter.com/TJIYJFrRm5
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 14, 2025
But the American people are not laughing.
The more they hear about the individuals who were apparently sent to that gulag “in error,” the more appalled they are.
Trump may be able to get away with a lot of stuff, but not this level of cruelty, because it is as fundamentally un-American as detaining a student whose “crime” it was to write an op-ed.
Free speech, liberty, due process… these cases involve the foundations on which the country was built. Maybe Trump could have gotten away with some of these actions further down on his path toward authoritarianism, but not now.
It is also imperative that maligning the people who stand up for these bedrock American values also must not work.
Administration officials make it sound as though there is a binary choice: Allow “illegal immigrants,” including those who have committed no crime on US soil (or elsewhere) or whose deportations were unlawful to rot in prison in El Salvador — or release these supposedly vicious criminals back onto American streets.
But that’s not how the system works.
They can be returned to the United States and tried here — if the administration ever gets around to producing the evidence it claims to have that goes beyond “they had tattoos and Michael Jordan jerseys.”
A great example of how the White House tries to make this a false binary choice and confuse Americans about what is really going on came on Tuesday, when it sent out a list of 18 men that ICE had recently arrested.
“If Democrats and the legacy media had their way, these sick criminals would still be roaming free,” the email stated.
Let’s break down that sentence. We already noted that this is not an “either-or” proposition. Furthermore, all of the 18 individuals were convicted of crimes. This means that they already were granted due process and the system worked.
That is the direct opposite of what Trump wants to accomplish by shipping immigrants who have no criminal record to El Salvador as slave labor, with no way of contesting their deportations and no way of coming back no matter how unjust those deportations were.
The true American patriots standing up for the deportees who are being held in hellish conditions or for the college students apprehended for having unpopular opinions are not pro-gangs or pro-terrorists or pro-Hamas; they are pro-due process, pro-free speech, pro-Constitution, and pro-America.
And that is precisely why this is a set of lies that Trump and his enablers must not be allowed to get away with. Because unless they are stopped here and now, then the fundamental principles that have buttressed our democratic system for some 250 years will mean nothing anymore.
