A new ‘war on terror’

On February 20, a few weeks before ICE agents apprehended Kilmar Ábrego García and deported him to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, Marco Rubio signed the paperwork that would designate him a terrorist.

Donald Trump started his presidency by declaring an emergency to fight Central American gangs and cartels, which “threaten[ed] the stability of the international order.” The State Department, citing an executive order from the days after 9/11, designated eight gangs and cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations,” including MS-13. The case against Ábrego, made at every level of the new government, was that he had been credibly accused of MS-13 membership. And when Democrats began to protest Ábrego’s deportation, the administration knew what to say.

“He’s part of a foreign terrorist organization,” Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi told Fox News. “Aiding and abetting criminals and terrorists is a crime in federal statute,” said Sebastian Gorka, the White House’s counter-terrorism director, on Newsmax. On Thursday night, after Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen met with Ábrego, the spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security accused him of “sipping margaritas with a terrorist.”

The prisoner had never actually been accused of terrorism — just alleged membership in a gang that became “terrorist” a few weeks ago. The cherry-garnished “margaritas,” according to reporters covering Van Hollen, were put on the table mid-meeting to embarrass the senator. But there was a story, and the presidents of the United States and El Salvador were sticking to it.

One of the Trump-led GOP’s strengths was a rejection of the old Bush-led GOP, particularly its “war on terror” and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. But when they were riding high, Bush’s Republicans got a lot of mileage from accusing political opponents of being objectively pro-terrorism if they defied them — if they opposed creating a Department of Homeland Security, if they doubted that Saddam Hussein was trying to enrich uranium.

Democrats have stumbled toward a new and more restrictionist position on immigration, abandoning ideas like a deportation moratorium and providing enough votes to pass the Laken Riley Act. “I have no reservations whatsoever weighing into that debate,” Colorado Rep. Jason Crow told me at a roundtable last week. Democrats could support “border security and targeted enforcement against violent offenders,” which wasn’t their universal position in Trump’s first term, while opposing chaotic deportations that didn’t seem to make anyone safer. Democrats who talked about “abolishing” ICE in 2018 don’t even mention it anymore.

The administration is demanding more from the opposition party. There’s a new war on terror; critics of how it’s conducted, or who it ensnares, are part of a new fifth column. Democrats haven’t acted particularly worried about this during the Ábrego saga; the administration hasn’t convinced skeptics that MS-13 is as dangerous now as ISIS was 10 years ago, or al-Qaeda was after 9/11. But you can read ahead in the script.