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The crux of the Abrego Garcia controversy is a dispute about who "morally" counts as an American citizen.
The rallying cry of the pro-Abrego Garcia camp is: "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us." In other words, they see no meaningful difference between him and a legal US citizen, and so there is no Schelling Fence that can be drawn between the two. On other hand, the pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories.
The slippery slope argument (e.g. Laurence Tribe yesterday, and Justice Sotomayor's concurrence) is that if the government gets its way with Abrego Garcia, there will be no legal obstacle preventing them from treating citizens in the same way.
But the thing is, this is already the case. The US government's treatment of citizens abroad is already effectively unconstrained by the law. The government can negotiate for the release of a citizen imprisoned by another country, but nobody would argue that the government is legally obligated to do this, and it's absurd to imagine a court compelling them to do so, because that effectively makes diplomacy impossible. (The US government must be able to value the citizen's return at less than infinity, or else they lose all negotiating leverage.) On the other hand, the government can drone-strike a citizen abroad without due process, and while that may stir up political pushback here at home, there are effectively no legal repercussions.
This is because, according to the constitutional separation of powers, foreign affairs are a quintessentially "non-justiciable political question". In common parlance this means: If you don't like what the government is doing, the proper way to fix it is through advocacy and the democratic process, not through the court system.
To which the pro-Abrego Garcia camp will gesture around at the crowd of protesters they've assembled, waving "Free Abrego Garcia!" signs, and say "Great, come join us. Here's your sign!"
But of course the pro-Trump immigration hawks see no need to take it up, because even if these protests have no effect, this does not in any way diminish their confidence that if a citizen were to be treated in the same way, then the backlash would be swift, universal, and sufficient to compel the citizen's return - no court order needed. For them, it is simply obvious that the failure of the Abrego Garcia advocacy has no implications whatsoever for the success of the hypothetical advocacy on behalf of a fellow citizen, and this is no cause for cognitive dissonance because citizens and illegal-immigrant non-citizens are two entirely separate categories.
Prior to anything else in the political life of a nation, there must be near-universal agreement on who constitutes the body politic for whose benefit the government exists and to whom they are accountable. If there is factional dispute over this basic question, then morally speaking there is no nation, but multiple distinct nations that happen to find themselves all mixed up in the same land. But I'm sure this is no great surprise.
There seems to be a big problem in the fact that the only reason that Abrego is in El Salvador is the United States government, of its own accord, sent him there. It’s not a case of him flying to El Salvador for vacation and being picked up in the commission of a crime (which happened to a WNBA player who flew to Russia and had drugs on her person during a custom inspection). It’s also not a case of an American in another country taking up arms against our country. Abrego, had the government not shipped him to El Salvador would be living in Maryland and raising his kids quietly. I’m not sure about the state of tge law here, but at least in the moral sense, if the US government is tge reason he’s in that prison, then there’s a good reason to think a judge can order tge government to provide due process and bring him back to face a judge in America. I’d even find it acceptable to send a judge, prosecutor and defense lawyer to El Salvador to have tge hearing there.
Given he illegally entered the US and is a Salvadoran citizen why shouldn’t the US govt be able to send him back to his native country?
Furthermore why wouldn’t this logic extend to any extradited foreign national who experienced conditions he / she didn’t like once returned to their home country?
Because black letter US law prohibited it. An immigration judge issued a withholding of removal as regarded Abrego Garcia and El Salvador. If the Trump administration wanted to get that withholding removed there is a legal process, that they did not follow, to do that. The regional ICE field director submitted a sworn statement that his removal was unlawful. The government's own lawyer admitted it in a hearing before the judge. Whatever you think ought to be the case as a policy matter, the law straightforwardly forbade the Trump admin's actions.
What law specifically?
8 USC 1231(b)(3)(A). An immigration judge, using the Attorney General's delegated authority, found Abrego Garcia would be threatened if removed to El Salvador and granted a withholding a removal. There is not even an allegation by the government or anyone else that they followed any part of the procedure for revising this decision before they removed him. See also Johnson v. Guzman Chavez.
That's not a law. You're stretching.
You want to sat precedent and a judgment, sure.
This is why things like the Supreme Court exists.
Can you tell me in what sense it is not a law? It was passed by Congress in 1952 as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act. If this isn't a law, what is?
I suspect a confusion between U.S.C and C.F.R.
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